Divine Cause, and Humean Conceivability

There are two interesting posts at "Desert Landscapes" on an argument for God's nonexistence and on conceivability/possibility in Hume & Descartes. I have some minor things to say about both.

-->First, as to the argument about God's existence. The argument is something like this. The 'canonical explanandum' is not a single event or fact, but a contrastive phenomenon, i.e., the purpose of an explanation is not to explain why q is there so much as to explain why q is there rather than not-q. We can then assume that some such explanations are causal. Now, the argument goes, appeal to God is explanatorily impotent, because there is no possible state of affairs he is unable to bring about; for any q and not-q, God could as easily cause one as the other. Thus, for any q or not-q, citing God as an explanation is just as good an explanation for q as for not-q. Thus "God caused q rather than not-q" is never a good explanation.

I'm inclined to think that this tactic irremediably fails. It is not in doubt that q happened rather than not-q (or vice versa): in explanation we already know that one of the options is/was actual, because it is its being actual that we are trying to explain. Since God, by the admission of the argument, is able to bring about any possible state of affairs, He is able to bring about q (or not-q). Therefore he is a possible cause adequate to explain the effect, and, indeed, adequate to explain why q happened (rather than not-q). The fact that he is omnipotent is just an issue about the full range of possible states of affairs his causal capability could cover; except in the sense that any causal explanation must appeal to a cause capable of producing the effect being explained, it is not actually relevant to the question of explanation itself; the actual thing that explains is exercise of causal power. And having cleared away that God's causal power is capable of being exercised to cause q (rather than not-q), we have ipso facto conceded that God's causal power is capable of being an explanation of q (rather than not-q).

Now, the author does consider this issue, somewhat, in recognizing that the argument as stated doesn't cover the question of whether God would cause q (rather than not-q). So he suggests a patch to the argument: it is not the appeal to God that does the explanatory work in a first-cause argument, but the appeal to God's reasons, which can't exist unless God exists. Thus, "What we are still missing is an explanatory context in which God might be introduced into our ontology in the first place." He then says that sometimes he thinks this is a decent reply, and sometimes a lame one.

I think it limps. First, while the issue of whether God would cause q (rather than not-q) is of some importance, it really is not the chief issue. The chief issue is the causal argument to which this would have to be a counter: that the existence of q (rather than not-q) requires the existence of a cause capable of making there to be q (rather than not-q), and that certain such cases will require a cause that can reasonably be called 'divine'. This is all any sort of causal argument for the existence of God requires, and the proposed counterargument affects neither of these. Second, the basic appeal in causal explanation is to the actual disposition of a cause; now, some sorts of states of affairs might, for all the arguments tell us, require appeal to the sort of actual disposition that would be what some would call 'divine reasons' or 'divine intentions'. In this case the introduction of God as the cause with divine intentions would be very reasonable; and the proposed patch doesn't seem actually to present anything that would prevent this sort of move - i.e., it doesn't actually present anything that would lead us to believe that there could be no appeal to divine intentions. The patch is intended to show this; but it seems, as far as I can see, to simply assume it. So I think this basic strategy is a complete dead-end.

(It's worth noting, incidentally, that the proposed argument could only show that we have no causal reason to think that God exists; if there is some other sort of argument that went through which was not based on causal explanation, the argument wouldn't touch it. --> Also, see the parable below for clarification of my point about omnipotence above.)

--> The other post has to do with Descartes and Hume on the link between conceivability and possibility. This is an interesting issue, and I'm not sure how to phrase Hume's actual view. It would be something like this:

1. There are two sorts of perceptions, ideas and impressions.
2. Ideas (a.k.a. thoughts) are copies (and rearrangments of copies, and copies of copies, etc.) of impressions.
3. When we think of something as possible, we are thinking of it as having a unified idea, i.e., one without confusion or contradiction. This is just what it means for us to say something is possible - it's where we get the whole notion of possibility in the first place.

I don't see anything quite like this in the author's suggestions; Hume's linkage of the two is that we can't say things are possible of which we cannot coherently think, and what we mean when we say we know something is possible is that we can coherently think of it (in a sense of thinking that goes with (1) and (2) above). (Imaginability and conceivability, by the way, are synonyms for Hume; 'imagination' is just his word for the standard and natural operations of the mind.)


Update: I realized that there was some obscurity in my response re the divine cause thing. Here is a parable to clarify.

Two philosophers are on an island currently inhabited only by themselves, and not known to be previously inhabited. They come across some curious markings neither of them had seen before.

A: What curious markings! What could be their explanation?

B: I think they were made by human beings.

A: That's not an explanation.

B: I don't understand. Of course it's an explanation!

A: To be a causal explanation of p, you must explain why p rather than not-p. But your supposed explanation does not explain that.

B: But it does: that a human being made these markings explains why these markings are here, rather than not here.

A: Ah, but a human being is capable of also not making the markings. For instance, you will agree that a human being can make a statue instead of making markings.

B: Yes, but...

A: So it follows that appeal to a human being doesn't explain why there are markings here rather than something else, because a human being could make things other than markings.

B: But a human being is an intelligent cause, and an intelligent cause is the sort of thing that can be disposed or oriented so as to make markings. The existence of such an intelligent cause would explain these markings.

A: But then what is really doing the explanatory work is the disposition or orientation, the reasons why the intelligent cause would make those markings.

B: But what would that change?

A: Ah, it makes all the difference. Because for there to be such reasons we would have to presuppose that there is an intelligent cause that could have them. So, you see, my friend, your attempt to explain these markings by appeal to a human being is secretly an appeal to reasons. But we can't do that without assuming that there was already a human being on this island capable of making these markings. But what we are still missing is an explanatory context in which we might make the appeal to a human being in the first place....

(This parable could, of course, be modified, e.g., scifi it by placing it on a newly discovered planet and make it about whether the markings are signs of alien intelligence. It shows, I think, that there is something wrong with the argument; for appeal to a human being could be a quite reasonable explanation, and can't be ruled out merely because human beings can cause all sorts of things. So there doesn't seem to be any way God, as cause, could be ruled out as cause merely because He can cause all sorts of things - which seems to be the move the argument makes. Perhaps I'm missing something.)

What Kind of Euripides Fan Am I?

I just realized that I completely forgot to go to a performance of Euripides' The Trojan Women last night (which was the last night it was playing), and I am very angry at myself.

I was really eager to see how they would do Cassandra, too.

I will have to find some way of adequately compensating....

Toward a Possible Scholastic Answer to Malebranche's Infinity Challenge

I recently posted on Malebranche's infinity challenge. In essence this challenge is this: Find an account of our idea of infinity that does not require that we perceive it in infinite being (i.e., God), and that does not illegitimately smuggle in the idea of infinity. It turns out to be very difficult to do; and, indeed, I think it is likely to be impossible for a number of very popular views of the mind today.

Now, Malebranche's vision-in-God thesis, the idea that all our ideas are divine ideas seen in God, was rejected, under the name 'ontologism' by the Catholic Church. Or, to be more exact, it was determined by Rome that Malebranche's thesis came dangerously close to a thesis that had already been condemned at the Council of Vienne (1311-1312), and this led to more specific condemnations in 1862. (Rather interestingly, the Council of Vienne gave Cartesians a great deal of trouble on other grounds as well; e.g., it asserts that the rational soul is the form of the body, and this was difficult to accommodate under a Cartesian view -- although not for lack of trying.) I haven't been able to find a text of the 1862 condemnations on-line, but John Paul II briefly mentions them, in a clear and lucid way, in section 52 of Fides et Ratio (although the note to that section gives the date as 1861; this is the only place I've seen that lists 1861 rather than 1862 - is this a typo in the encyclical, or is it the right date?).

So this brings up the interesting question: is there a way a Catholic (or anyone who agrees with the Catholic rejection of ontologism) could meet Malebranche's infinity challenge without accepting Malebranche's own solution?

I think there might be. A key premise in the argument is that we are finite substances. Now, this seems undeniable; but it would be possible to argue, I think, and on a scholastic view there would be good sense in arguing, that human beings are not finite in the relevant way, i.e., in the way required by the argument. Here is my thought. Most of the strength of Malebranche's argument comes from the fact that we can recognize mathematical infinites. Now, if, as scholastics hold, the rational soul is in itself immaterial, although fitted for a body, then it would follow that the soul is not finite relative to extension, i.e., not quantitatively finite. If the soul, however, is infinite in one aspect (it is not bounded by quantitative limits in some way), then this would seem to get around a great deal of Malebranche's argument. It still leaves some things unanswered, e.g., how we know the infinity of God - but there are scholastic answers to this. So there may be a scholastic answer to Malebranche. I can't think of any other account of the mind that would be able to provide such an answer: given that we can recognize potentially infinite things as infinite, either the intellect must in some sense be infinite or it must perceive something actually infinite - otherwise we have no explanation available to us of our situation.

Endeavor and Power

It may be pretended, that the resistance which we meet with in bodies, obliging us frequently to exert our force, and call up all our power, this gives us the idea of roce nd power. It is this nisus, or strong endeavour, of which we are conscious, that is the original impression from which this idea is copied. But, first, we attribute power to a vast number of objects, where we never can suppose this resistance or exertion of force to take place, to the Supreme Being, who never meets with any resistance; to the mind in its command over its ideas and limbs, in common thinking and motion, where the effect follows immediately upon th will, without any exertion or summoning up of force, to inanimate matter, which is not capable of this sentiment. Secondly, This sentiment of an endeavour to overcome resistance has no known connexion with any event: What follows it we know by experience; but could not know it a priori. It must, however, be confessed that the animal nisus, which we experience though it can afford no accurate precise idea of power, enters very much into that vulgar, inaccurate idea, which is formed of it.

This is from Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Chapter VII.

It seems to me that Hume has underestimated the real challenge provided to his theory by the sentiment of nisus or endeavor. Some of my thoughts on why:

1) Can we actually make any sense of our feeling this overcoming-of-resistance without thinking of it in terms of exercise of power (both of endeavor and of resistance to it)? To be sure, we can't, a priori, determine whether this endeavor will have an effect - but it seems that any sentiment of endeavor is very plausibly characterized as the sentiment of one's own exercise of power resisted by something else's exercise of power. Hume always thinks of 'power' or 'agency' as something that has an effect; but isn't this a bit odd? Isn't it a part of our idea of power or agency that usually it can be exercised but fail (if certain conditions are met).

2) It is true that we attribute power to things to which our sentiment of endeavor can't be attributed. But (a) this doesn't prevent the sentiment of endeavor from really being a sentiment of (one kind of) power; (b) the reason we don't attribute to endeavor to God is that there is no adequate resisting power - but our sentiment of endeavor seems to be an impression of exercising-power-against-a-resisting-exercise-of-power. This resistance can be greater or less; we can take endeavor as an idea of the exercise of power, and let the power of resistance approach to zero, and we have an effortless exercise of power. Hume might consider this effortless endeavor to be a fiction or even a straightforward error; but in the Treatise he does similar sorts of things (e.g., with regard to geometry or to the coherence of our perceptions), so it's hard to say why it would be completely ruled out; (c) we don't attribute our sentiment of endeavor to inanimate matter, but we don't attribute our sentiment of extension to inanimate matter, either. We still can say that inanimate matter is extended; the only reasons that could be proposed for denying parallel treatment to endeavor are that endeavor isn't something really sensed in the sensation of endeavor, or that it is essentially conscious in nature. These would need to be argued.

3. Hume needs to say _why_ it enters into the vulgar idea of power, if it has nothing to do with power. Why would such a confusion be possible?

I suspect Hume could present a coherent response to the endeavor theory; but his dismissing it in a footnote doesn't really do justice to it.

Malebranche's Infinity Challenge

The following is the section of my thesis I previously said I would put up. Let me know what you think. Is there anything that could be made clear? Any philosophical response I haven't considered properly?

Abbreviations: "LO" indicates the Lennon-Olscamp translation of The Search after Truth; "JS" indicates the Jolley-Scott edition of Dialogues on Metaphysics and on Religion; "OC" indicates not a county in California but the Oeuvres Completes. Footnotes are indicated by bracketed numbers.

Digression on Infinity and Ideas

At this point we are only halfway through the eliminative argument. However, given that our primary interest is not the argument itself but showing that Malebranche’s theory of ideas is part of an attempt to build a theory of Reason, it is worth our time to stop a moment to consider the issue of infinity more closely. As we shall see, Malebranche’s thoughts on the infinite show quite clearly that theory of ideas subserves this greater project of formulating a theory of Reason.

A good place to start, when considering Malebranche’s view of the infinite, is geometry. We have, one could say, an idea of extension, which has no limits; it is an infinite idea. Our minds cannot exhaust it. It cannot be a modification of our minds, since we are finite substances and therefore incapable of having the infinite as a modification of our substances. Our thought cannot, as it were, ‘stretch’ to measure out this infinite idea. Should we then say that we cannot really have such an idea? It might well seem tempting at this point to deny that we, as finite substances, conceive the infinite at all. [1] There is reason to think this too easy, however, and Malebranche provides a powerful little argument along these lines, which we can call the world traveler argument.

Suppose a man falls from the clouds to the earth. He has no prior experience of the earth, so he brings with him no preconceptions about it. He begins to walk in a straight line along one of the earth’s great circles. We will suppose as well that no features of the earth, e.g., mountain ranges or oceans, impede him. After he has been doing this for several days, he still has not found the end of his journey. If he is wise, he will not thereby assume the surface of the earth to be infinite; and, in fact, he is right, for if he walks long enough, he will eventually return to his starting point. The earth is finite. The idea of extension, however, is different; this idea is inexhaustible, and, says Malebranche, this is “because [the mind] sees it as actually infinite, because it knows very well it will never exhaust it” (JS 15).

The force of this argument can easily be missed, so it may perhaps be useful to look at it more closely. [2] Suppose our world traveler moves successively through points A, B, C, D, and E on the earth’s surface. In describing the whole journey he expects to make, he might write in his journal:

<A, B, C, D, E, …> ,

that is, “First A, then B, then C, then D, then E, and so on.” Let us then contrast this with movement along the x-axis of a Cartesian grid. We might describe this as:

<0, 1, 2, 3, 4, …>,

that is, “First 0, then 1, then 2, then 3, then 4, and so on.” Now we have an interesting contrast. In both descriptions we have used the ellipsis or “and so on” to gesture to a continuation of the series. The two gestures however, are almost palpably different. The “and so on” of the first series is not the same as the “and so on” of the second series. We might put the difference by describing the former as ‘indefinite’ and the latter as ‘infinite’. The infinite is not merely a group of finite things combined with a gesture toward their continuation; it is something that can be recognized on its own without running through the series. We do not need to journey the entire x-axis to see that it has no end. We cannot adequately explain the infinite by taking a series of finite things and recognizing that it continues; it must continue in a particular way, namely, an infinite way. The infinite series does not just continue; it continues infinitely. This argument serves to show us that, finite though we may be, we do in some way perceive the infinite. Malebranche supports this claim with a further consideration. Geometry clearly deals with infinites (infinite lines, infinite divisibility, and so forth). The claims made by geometers, however, are not tentative judgments based on trial and error or analogy. Once you understand the mathematics, it is not necessary to test it out against the finite things we find in the world around us. In mathematics there seems to be some sense in which we simply ‘see’ that something is infinite. [3] The claim that we, though finite, really do in some way perceive the infinite, is a well-founded one.

Infinity is not a solitary case. Our conclusions about infinity imply conclusions about the universality or generality of our ideas. Malebranche, in fact, barely separates the two. If we take, for instance, the idea of a circle in general, “the idea of the general circle represents infinite circles and applies to them all” (JS 27). Such an idea has to apply not merely to the circles we have actually experienced, but to every possible circle. If you claim to have an idea of a circle insofar as it is a circle, but cannot apply it to every possible circle, then, properly speaking, you do not have the idea you claim to have. Malebranche uses this to develop an argument about universality parallel to that about infinity. Someone might hold that general ideas like that of a circle are either a confused assemblage of particular ideas or something formed out of such an assemblage. Let us suppose we have encountered five circles, one, two, three, four and five units in diameter, respectively. The fact that we need to it to be applicable to infinite possible circles means that, for the reasons given above, this assemblage of circles cannot be our idea of circle in general. Any such assemblage will be finite, no matter how confused we made it, applying only to the region of all possible circles from which we have gathered our particular circles. Such an assemblage, intended to indicate circles universally, could not be distinguished from the same assemblage intended to refer only to this region of possible circles, without already having a universal idea.

The view that we form the idea of circle in general from the circles we have actually experienced fares somewhat better, although it, too, is rejected:

It is false in the sense that there is sufficient reality in the idea of five or six circles to form the idea of a circle in general from them. But it is true in the sense that, having recognized that the size of circles does not change their properties, you have perhaps stopped considering them one after the other according to their determinate size., in order to consider them in general according to an indeterminate size. Thus, you have, as it were, formed the idea of circle in general, by spreading the idea of generality over the confused ideas of circles you imagined. (JS 27)

In other words, the cardinal difficulty with this attempt is one of explanation. While this view purports to explain how we get our idea of circle in general, the explanans is not adequate to the explanandum. In a more subtle way it runs into exactly the same problem the previous view did, since the assemblage of circles in itself does not provide what is needed in order to have an idea of circle in general rather than just of some circles. This is a problem analogous to the one we saw with infinity. Just as we cannot shift from indefinite continuation to infinite continuation without already appealing to the infinite, so we cannot shift from a confused composite to a general idea without appealing to generality itself; and, as Malebranche has Theodore say, “I maintain you could form general ideas only because you find enough reality in the idea of the infinite to give the idea of generality to your ideas” (JS 27). We cannot explain our having ideas of infinite possible application without allowing something recognizably infinite from the very beginning, and the same is true of universality. Nor are these two properties the only problematic ones. Considerations like these will continue to cascade into cases, like necessity, that are closely connected to issues of infinity and generality. If naturalizing something means reducing it to, or explaining it in terms of, something more manageably finite, our ideas cannot be naturalized.

I wish to insist on the strength of the position just discussed. Malebranche’s arguments do not, I think, admit of any easy evasion. One cannot evade the argument, for instance, by making a distinction in ideas between perceptions and objects and arguing that our ideas are formally finite while objectively infinite. If the ‘objectively infinite’ aspect of the idea is part of the ‘formally finite’ aspect, i.e., if the object is in any sense part of the perception, then it is not clear that the distinction has evaded the problem at all. If the ‘objectively infinite’ is completely different from the ‘formally finite,’ then it is unclear why this is not conceding the whole argument. In fact, it is unclear what would distinguish this from Malebranche’s own solution; while it is not Malebranche’s preferred way of describing his position, it is a fairly accurate characterization of it. [4]

This returns us to our original puzzle about the origin of these infinite (general, necessary, etc.) ideas. Since we cannot resolve the matter by explaining it away as any sort of illusion, confusion, or extrapolation, given that we clearly do perceive the infinite in some way, we need another solution. Malebranche provides one in his thesis about the vision in God. The basic elements of the argument for this solution are the following:

1. We perceive ideas that are infinite.
2. We are finite.
3. Nothing that is finite can represent the infinite.
4. Therefore there is an infinite something other than ourselves in which we perceive ideas, i.e., God. [5]

At this point it is a good idea to stop and ask ourselves where Malebranche intends to go with this line of thought, which is often called the ‘argument from properties’. [6] It is easy to think that the point of this is just to establish a particular theory of ideas, namely, the vision in God thesis. There is good reason, however, to think that Malebranche has more in view. In all the cases in which Malebranche gives or alludes to his infinite ideas argument, he makes or has made some link between it and universal Reason. This is least obvious in the discussion of Descartes’s argument in Search 4.11, where the mentions are brief and oblique: one reference to divine self-knowledge and another to the eternal model in God’s essence. On their own they could easily be interpreted in ways having nothing to do with Malebranche’s frequent mentions of sovereign Reason, the interior Teacher, and the like. The thing we need to keep in mind, however, is that The Search after Truth is an unwise place to make an argument from silence, or even simplicity of interpretation. The Search, although it is a rich lode of Malebranche’s thought, is not devoted to expounding that thought in a systematic form. Instead, it is concerned with teaching how to avoid error in inquiry. Because of this, Malebranche’s substantial views are presented in a disjointed way, often as mere examples or asides to illustrate or qualify the more methodological concerns of the text. The discussion of Descartes’s argument is a good example of this; it occurs as an illustrative example in a discussion of how love of sensible pleasure can prejudice people against the truth. To see the proper context of Malebranche’s thought, we must look elsewhere; and what we seem to find is that the infinite ideas argument is generally used to contribute to a theory of Reason. The entire Dialogues, for instance, presents itself a discussion presupposing the centrality of universal Reason. The very first speech given to Theodore, Malebranche’s primary spokeseman in the Dialogues, shows this clearly:

Let us attempt to have nothing prevent us each from consulting our common master, universal Reason. For it is inner truth that must govern our discussion. This is what must dictate to me what I should tell you and what you are to learn through me. (JS 3)

The actual discussion of the infinite ideas argument we have just considered is for the express purpose of clarifying the nature of universal Reason. Thus Theodore asks Aristes, his interlocutor, “Do you now know what that Reason is, about which so much is said in this material and terrestrial world, but of which so little is known there?” and Aristes responds with a summary of the infinite ideas argument. The same theme occurs, somewhat less obviously, in the Tenth Elucidation to the Search, on the nature of ideas. The discussion of the nature of ideas there places ideas entirely within the context of universal Reason. The properties of ideas are not distinguished form those of universal Reason itself, because the argument that universal Reason is infinite, necessary, immutable, and therefore divine, is at the same time an argument that ideas are so. In other words, Malebranche considers the infinite ideas argument for God’s existence to be an argument that Reason itself, being infinite, is divine. The theory of ideas is one aspect of a theory of Reason. To one who knows what to look for, this is true even in the Search, since it is elsewhere quite clear that the eternal model in the divine substance, known through divine self-knowledge, is Reason. [7]

Footnotes

[1] There is another possible response, namely, to try to find a way around the argument by distinguishing formal from objective infinity. This will be considered more fully below.

[2] This account should be compared to Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, § 208, on the ‘and so on’ that is, and the ‘and so on’ that is not, an abbreviated notation.

[3] Note that to reject this supplementary argument requires more than an appeal to the possibility of a finitistic mathematics; it requires the stronger and more controversial claim that mathematics can only be finitistic. All Malebranche needs for his argument is the conclusion that mathematical use of infinites can make sense; if this is so, then when we think of the infinite, we really are thinking of the infinite rather than something else (e.g., a confusion, or indefiniteness).

[4] For hints toward an argument like the one I am suggesting here, see Malebranche’s discussion of Arnauld and Descartes on the objective reality of ideas in Trois Lettres, I, Rem. III (OC 6:214-218). See also OC 6:58, to which he refers in this passage.

[5] Identifying this something other than ourselves in which we perceive ideas as God is not as much of a leap as it may seem. It does presuppose the Cartesian view that God is infinite being, but nothing more than that, and can largely be considered simply a verbal issue. Also, it should be kept in mind that, while I only list infinity here, there are other properties closely related to infinity that also are in play because they follow patterns similar to infinity: universality, necessity, and so forth.

[6] See Nadler, Malebranche and Ideas, 92-97; Pyle, Malebranche, 57-61.

[7] For an excellent summary of these aspects of Malebranche’s theory of Reason, with the relevant references, see Reid, “Malebranche on Intelligible Extension,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy (November 2003) 587-589.

The Amazing Race 5

For a bit of the entirely non-academic:

The only reality TV show I like is The Amazing Race, which this summer is my non-negotiable TV show - i.e., it automatically gets its place on my schedule, and everything else on Tuesday nights (when it shows on CTV here) has to work around it. In the past I've been a fairly good judge of teams: the teams I've rooted for (I always root for two) have always done fairly well: one always makes it into the top three (usually second place). This year my number one pick is Charla and Mirna, who are just plain amazing; followed by Brandon and Nicole, because I always root for Texans. (Colin and Christie are also Texan, and might very well win, since they consistently do well; but Brandon and Nicole work better together. C & C would be my third pick,if I had one.) Part of the reason I like Charla and Mirna is that the harder the other teams try to outmaneuver them, the more easily they beat them; they're also very funny - they have some acquaintance with a large selection of languages, but not fluency in most of them, so they've managed to get by so far with the most extraordinarily comical Franco-Italo-Spanglish.

Christian Carnival (July 28)

The Christian Carnival is up at Jeremiah Lewis's "Fringe" weblog. The organization of the posts by places in Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was an excellent idea - it works wonderfully well. I have a small contribution (my first) here. It's nothing impressive; I didn't actually have much available to submit. Some of the posts I found especially interesting:

* charity at "Doc Rampage": on the moral dilemma we face when people beg for money on the streets

* Organized Religion and the Church at "Parableman"

* Legislating Morality at "Exultate Justi": on the intersection of faith and politics

* Razzle Dazzle at "Wanderings of a postModern Pilgrim": on the problems of flashy worship services

* Exercise in Clear Thinking at "The Dawn Treader"

* Reasons For Our Hope at "reasons why": on apologetics

As I said, these are the ones that struck me as most interesting; but there are lots of others worth reading.

Female-Friendliness in Ranking Departments

Julia C. Van Camp has an interesting article on the issue of women in philosophy, looking at some questions raised by Leiter's The Philosophical Gourmet Report. (Thanks to Ektopos for the link.) It is an important issue. It occurred to me recently that a great deal, and perhaps even a strong majority, of philosophical work being done at present that I find especially interesting and worthwhile is being done by women: Margaret Atherton, Anne Jaap Jacobsen, Martha Nussbaum, Onora O'Neill, Eleonore Stump, Marleen Rozemond, etc. And yet there does seem to be a tendency in which either the best departments are getting away for some reason with not hiring many women, or (this would be even worse, and, unfortunately, there is at least anecdotal evidence that this is so) departments are considered the best departments because they are more male. As with everything for which we have only anecdotal evidence one way or another, it's hard to know what's really going on. I didn't pick graduate schools on the basis of any sort of ranking - I mostly just applied to any schools I knew of that had large departments (because I wanted a bit of freedom of intellectual movement) and a decent reputation for good history-of-philosophy work. But students who do use rankings in picking grad schools should certainly follow Van Camp's proposal and look at female-friendliness as part of their assessment. I think in particular the following questions mentioned in the paper are important:

1. Does the department show an openness to hiring female faculty members for tenure-track positions?

2. Are female faculty hired mainly for temporary, visiting, or adjunct positions?

5. Does the department have an established policy on faculty-student dating, and is it enforced? (I think this is a very important issue, but it needs to be approached carefully. The University of Toronto, for instance, has an obscure and, if I may say so, weasely policy - it's hard to find and it doesn't say much. But the philosophy grad students here are exceptionally professional in their approach to students, so the practice is exactly what one could hope.)

7. Does the department include a reasonable proportion of women among its invited guest speakers at department events and conferences?

Van Camp is right that these sorts of questions are important for women who are looking for non-hostile departments. But they are also, I think, of interest to male students, because they are usually at least moderately good indications of the quality of thought in the air in the department.

Cartesian Meditations

I just came across this poem I had written some time ago and completely forgotten. It summarizes the philosophical argument of Rene Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy. It's very uneven, but if I may say so myself, the first stanza is completely awesome.


Cartesian Meditations
A poetical summary of Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy

Meditation One

Doubts beset on every side.
Nor all my effort nor my pride
Shall save me ere I err.
And if, and at what mighty cost,
In wanderlust I wander, lost--
How wretched am I there!

Meditation Two

I am, and in this am I caught
By, most certain of my thoughts,
My thinking I exist.
And this 'I' I know in knowing me
Is a thinking thing, as thought can see,
And so it does subsist.

Meditation Three

I am finite, and, being bound,
I know the boundless may be found.
Within my being I always feel
The imprint of my Maker's seal,
Latent, and however dim,
In the idea I have of Him.

Meditation Four

Try as I might, I cannot believe
That perfect being could deceive;
To lie, a defect will be found,
It pertaineth not to Heaven's Hound,
The God who chases every soul
To Truth alone that makes it whole.

Meditation Five

I look within; ideas I find
That pass within my thinking mind,
And quantities I see.
Their essence do I then explore;
Mathematics is then sure once more,
And God I see to be.

Meditation Six

My proper function God has made
Who never lies; and as He bade,
Thought I body then to be.
And now, I see it all so clear
That I can say sans doubt and fear
'Tis bodies that I see.

Now hear the moral of it all;
However doubt and worry fall,
There is recourse within our mind
That meditating thinkers find.
Knowledge of bodies is not more whole
Than that of God and of our soul.

But, Happily, I Am Not in the Slough of Despond

Somebody needs to write a Pilgrim's Progress of the Graduate Student. I am currently struggling to find a pass through the Mountains of Frustration. I've been working on reorganizing the early chapters of my thesis. Part of what I've done is to break off parts of Chapter One (on Universal Reason as essential to Malebranche's system) and Chapter Two (on the historical structure of Malebranche's system - there's a cosmic narrative, and what answer you give to some philosophical questions will depend on what part of the narrative you're thinking about) to form a New Chapter Two (on Malebranche's use of the doctrine of the Trinity to guide his philosophical work, and what benefits he gets from this). But the New Chapter Two Word file has gone insane. It refuses to admit there are more than five pages - all the pages of the chapter are there, but it keeps trying to fit them all into five pages. I can't edit the file because if I click on a page, it puts me on another page, one of the ones it refused to show me before. I'll have to retype the entire chapter. *sigh* And I certainly won't manage to do so before I meet to discuss my progress for this month (Thursday); I feel like the student whose dog really did eat his homework. Meanwhile, other things are building up that need to get done this week. *double sigh*

On the other hand, Chapter One looks great; it proves everyone else wrong in a swift, economical, and (I think) devastating way, which is exactly what you want in an opening chapter of a philosophy thesis. (I'm exaggerating a bit, of course; but I do end up criticizing a great deal of contemporary Malebranche scholarship's pet projects; there's surprising little interest in the scholarship in anything distinctively Catholic, or even Christian, about this 17th century thinker who insisted that he only did philosophy that was distinctively Catholic. It's very heartening that this chapter is turning out so well. One of the difficulties of doing history of philosophy is that you're discouraged from talking about anything out of pure curiosity about the thinker being studied; you always have to justify your project philosophically in the face of whatever arbitrary and goofball and, occasionally, historically ill-informed notions your contemporaries have about the way philosophy should 'really' be done.) I've been intending to put up a section of that chapter here, on Malebranche's argument from infinity for the existence of God, but there's still some tweaking I want to do first. Also good: the other chapters will need less reorganization than these did; they just need a bit of development.

It's still frustrating to have wasted so many hours in trying to make that (fill in expletive here) Word file work properly, only to be defeated by the perverseness of evil software.

A Bit of Puzzlement

I have been perusing Richard Taylor's Ethics, Faith, and Reason in between doing some thesis revisions. Ugh! I don't recommend it. I wish I were at the stage of my career in which I could get away with writing a book consisting almost entirely of unsubstantiated statements and sweeping historical theses backed up by no actual evidence at all (and hope that if I ever get there I'll have the good sense not to do it). There are no footnotes. Except for those that go with some passages from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, there are no citations. There is no bibliography. The argument rests almost entirely on a historical thesis that is not defended, either in its sweeping outlines or in its particular parts. To be sure, the book is a published set of lectures, where one can allow for a little more moxy and a little less precision. But there really is no excuse for this. The blurb says:

Among its features, the book:
* challenges the ethical framework inherited from the Judeo-Christian tradition
* offers a new appreciation of the ancient Greek moralists
* provides clearly-written, readily-grasped text
* develops material in such a way as to stimulate discussion

The book is certainly "readily-grasped"; everything else about this summary is false. It is not clearly written. Particular sections are, but trying to figure out the flow of the argument of this book is immensely difficult. I see nothing particularly new about its appreciation of ancient Greek moralists (and it only really considers Aristotle, anyway). He doesn't do any real challenging of anything, unless you call casting vague aspersions challenging. The text does not seem to have anything particularly conducive to discussion; most of it is far too vague, and, except for some shock-value statements (e.g., rejecting egalitarianism), there's not much even to get a buzz out of a hornet's nest. It isn't even clear that his thesis is remotely right; he leaves out the the Scholastics, who surely need to be considered if you're considering how we changed from a Greek view of ethics to the one we have today. His discussion of Stoicism hardly rises above caricature; and he doesn't discuss it nearly enough given that the Stoics appear to throw a wrench in the works of his view that the rise of an ethics of duty is due to the Church (his discussion of the Church is even more vague and caricatured).

I find it rather disturbing. Philosophy is, to be sure, a much more rough-and-tumble, slippery discipline than most other disciplines; we need to be a bit more flexible in our approaches than is, perhaps, entirely sane. But were an equivalent of this book published in another discipline it would, I think, rightly be laughed out of court. I find the book almost childish; and I tend to be a very sympathetic reader, willing to give authors the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps I'm missing something....

In Other Words, I Need To Be More Humble

Take the 100 Acre Personality Quiz!

Ah, but I do have the advantage over Owl that I can spell; the only word Owl can spell right is TUESDAY (but as Rabbit says, there are days when spelling Tuesday doesn't count).

Best Known Philosophical Sentences

Jonathan Dresner at Cliopatria has an interesting post on well-known philosophical sentences. He proposes several plausible ones. Here's my list:

1. I think therefore I am. (Descartes)
2. Virtue is its own reward. (Cicero)
3. I proclaim that might is right, and justice, the interest of the stronger. (Plato, but not his own view)
4. God is dead. (Nietzsche)
5. The unexamined life is not worth living for man. (Plato)
6. It [the just state] will be possible when, and only when, kings are philosophers and philosophers are kings. (Plato)
7. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. (Emerson)
8. Man is by nature a political animal. (Aristotle)
9. To us, probability is the very guide to life. (Butler)
10. All men desire to know. (Aristotle)
11. Philosophy begins in wonder. (Plato)
12. Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth. (Aristotle)
13. Reason is, and only ought to be, the slave of the passions. (Hume)
14. Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains. (Rousseau)
15. What is time, then? If nobody asks me, I know; if I have to explain it to someone who has asked me, I do not know. (Augustine)
16. Give me chastity and continence, but not yet. (Augustine, describing the real meaning of his prayers for chastity after his conversion)
17. Love and do what you will. (Augustine)
18. The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. (Pascal)
19. Why is there something rather than nothing? (Liebniz)
20. It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. (John Stuart Mill)
21. That action is best which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers. (Hutcheson - although it was due to Bentham that it became popular)
22. Everything is what it is, and not another thing. (Butler)
23. Truth is the cry of all, but the game of few. (Berkeley)
24. To be is to be perceived. (Berkeley, of ideas)
25. God and nature do nothing in vain. (Aristotle)
26. There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it. (Cicero)
27. We go to war in order to live in peace. (Aristotle)
28. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. (Marx)
29. Religion is the opiate of the people. (Marx)
30. Justice is rendering each person his due. (Plato, quoting Simonides)

I had originally intended to put them in order from most popular to least; but it became far too difficult. Do you have anything to add?

They're Politicians. It's What They Do.

I always find discussions about how to manipulate people a bit chilling. But there is, I think, a real point to it, and it is a valuable occasion for philosophical thought.

Medieval Muslim philosophers did extensive work in looking at rhetoric and poetics as logical disciplines. And one way they were able to do that was to look at various arts having to do with language and divide them according to the sort of assent to which they are geared. There was demonstration (scientific assent), for instance, or dialectic (probable assent). The type of assent they associated with rhetoric was imaginative assent; and this was a pre-intellectual impulse toward or away from something. A good way to think of the difference between imaginative assent and the various sorts of intellectual assent is to think of a glass floor There's one in the CN Tower here in Toronto; you can see a long, long way down. Now, intellectually you may know that the floor will hold you. But imagination, i.e., your 'sensory processing', leads you to feel a dissent or dissonance at the idea of walking on the glass floor.

Another way logical disciplines are divided is by their purpose. Rhetoric's purpose is to persuade; it is necessary as a logical discipline because of our social nature, the complexity of practical life, the need for practical action, and the limited time and resources we have for investigating every single issue. Thus, Avicenna and Averroes in essence regard rhetoric as a shorthand logic, suitable for acquiring the sort of assent that leads to practical action, in cases where the other disciplines can't (again, for practical reasons) be used. As Jean Buridan, who, like many of the Christian medievals, was influenced by them on this score, says, rhetoric and poetics are a moral logic, i.e., a logic for use in the buzz and rush of actual human practice.

While they didn't put it quite this way, the logical structures to which rhetoric appeals are associative (this is one reason, I think, why Hume's emphasis on principles of association became so influential - it spoke to the rhetoric- and practice-related interests of Scotland at the time). This is related to Lakoff's 'framing'.

But this all suggests, I think, that Lakoff is simply wrong when he says that one party understands framing and the other doesn't. Politicians who didn't have at least a rough feel for framing would be politically incompetent and would tend not to get elected; you have to influence people to an imaginative perspective to be an effective politician at all. I think Lakoff may be thrown off by his own example of taxation. The reason people are affected so much by the phrase 'tax relief' is not that it sounds good and is said a lot (although that may contribute) but because it triggers associations that are already there. When people hear it, it doesn't sound suspicious, because Americans, even many progressives, don't feel taxation to be a blessing; at best they feel it to be, as Lakoff calls it, following Oliver Wendell Holmes, to be "the price of civilization." But prices aren't, as we normally think of them, blessings and benefits. Which sounds better: high price or low price? High cost or low cost? And which tax payment would make you more comfortable: $10 or $100? The reason 'tax relief' catches on so easily is that we are all (including progressives) already primed to think of taxes as a burden - even if we think of it as only a light burden, or a burden worth having. And doesn't it sound good to be relieved from a burden? Doesn't it feel like not having to pay as much would be a nice thing, if you can get it? The problem is not that progressives or Democrats haven't framed the raising of taxes properly; it's that they have to deal with frames already in place, with the associations already common. It catches on because, given the associations in place, people are relieved to be paying less tax. You could call taxation "noble sharing," and in the long run in our society all it would do is give nobility and sharing a bad name. It would be treated as an outrageous euphemism. The effect would be exactly the opposite of what was intended: it would turn people off, not on; it would trigger imaginative dissent, not imaginative assent. Taxation is a misleading issue; we can't conclude anything from it about who is better at framing. (And what's up with Lakoff's 'strict father' and 'nurturant parent' models? Does he only study people who like big government?) And, I think, a close look at Democratic party issues will show, as it would show for any political party with large popular support in any nation, a very good feel for framing. It's rhetoric; no party can have influence without it. (It's also why philosophers need to work on the issue of political taste.)

And I Was Like, It's All About, Like, Language as Approximative Re-enactment; And She Was Like, Wow!

It is insinuating itself all over the place; you can barely go anywhere without it being heard. I confess I use it. Teenage girls use it so extensively these days one wonders if they can say anything else. It is the Pervasive Syllable: "like". It's, like, totally everywhere.

I'm not a linguist, but I actually think this transformation of language, the slow creep of 'like', makes a great deal of sense, because I think it parallels, and, indeed, results from (or is it a contributing cause of, or both?) the spread of a particular style of thinking.

While it gets annoying very quickly, if you think about it, most of the creeping uses of the word make great sense. Consider the following uses, which have steadily become more common:

1. 'like' as a replacement for 'as it were' - it operates on exactly the same principles (it qualifies figures of speech), but gets rid of the subjunctive (this is my least favorite use, in part because I like the subjunctive; would that the subjunctive were more common!).

2. 'like' as an indication of approximative re-enactment: "She was like, wearing this red dress, so I was like, You're so totally not going to wear that today, and she was like, Oh, yes I am, and I was like, Well, OK, loser, and she was like, Well, I don't have anything else, and I was like, thinking, What a loser, the whole time and I, like, said she should wear green instead of red, and she was like, Like you know anything, and I was like, I do too know, and she was like, Whatever, and I was like, so mad that I, like, hit her." I'm not at all quite sure how to describe this story, so I've made up the phrase "approximative re-enactment" - it's approximative because all such uses of 'like' are approximative in that it would often be improper to think of the description as an exact description. It's not impossible that it conveys some information exactly, but the use of 'like' functions to set off some information as a unit that might be exact recall of words or deeds, but which could also just be an expressive representation. For instance, if someone says, "And I was, like, Whatever," this may mean either that he said whatever, or that he didn't, but his emotional response would have been expressed well by saying, "Whatever". The reason I call it re-enactment should, I think, be fairly clear; it is a description of events that proceeds by actually dividing up what happened into 'scenes' and representing those scenes by verbal snippets that either were said or that could have been said.

It's the impressionistic analogue to classical story-telling.

I have a hypothesis for why thinking and speaking in these impressionistic associations is becoming so common. This re-enactment function of language has a long history; but it seems to me to be encouraged by pop media, which are constructed on analogous principles. Thus, I've previously argued that movies are not plot-driven; they have plots, in the sense that they have organizations of scenes according to some idea, but the plots subserve the spectacle of the scenes, which is the primary focus of the medium. Likewise with TV. Likewise, in a different sensory modality, with popular music. Likewise many novels. Stories are presented to us almost entirely by means of representative fragments; so, when people tell stories, the easiest way they can find to tell the story is by an ordered set of representative fragments. 'Like' is a representative-fragment-indicator; it says: This unit is a distinct representative fragment in the story. Using it means you don't have to make clear in some more roundabout way that you are symbolically re-enacting the story in some way; it signals to the other person that they should fill in the story with scenes appropriate to the verbal fragment. You can see how this new use of 'like' would be connected with the way someone would talk if they were giving information for a re-enactment (e.g., a witness at the scene describing what was going on): I was like this, and she was like that. So that's my thought about it.

Of course, I could be completely wrong; but it seems to me significant that the fragmentation of stories is so common - and that 'like' is one of the ways we do this. And it is easy - it simplifies storytelling to an astonishing degree. It also comes with a number of disadvantages; but it does work for its purpose.

Symphilosophie

In part due to blogging, I have recently become interested in the Romantic notion of Symphilosophie, a tricky word whose meaning is difficult to pick up because it has no good equivalent in English. Symphilosophie is mutual or collaborative philosophy; but this gives the idea of collaboration in philosophical work the way we do it, which is not, I think, quite right. I'm completely new at this, but here's my thoughts on what's supposed to be involved. Symphilosophy as understood by the Romantics ideally included a group of friends in close fellowship whose work was (as it were) fused or aggregated into one work through give-and-take, dialogue, commentary, so that any precise individuation begins to be impossible. The philosophical work here is in a sense analogous to the way an excellent author or speaker can, by a sort of cooperation with the reader or listener, make the scene appear vividly in the reader or listener's mind - not quite the action of the author alone, not quite the action of the reader alone, but a melding of the two so that the two acts are actually inseparable. If you have ever had an intense intellectual discussion with a good friend, in which ideas move back and forth, being shaped and refined, blended and interlocked, corrected and extended, until you could not honestly say (and it would not seriously matter, anyway) exactly where your contribution ended and your friend's contribution began - then you know the sort of thing that was meant. The following are some fragments by Friedrich Schlegel that are of relevance, directly or indirectly, to this notion of symphilosophy.

These are all from Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments. Firchow, tr. University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, 1991).


From Critical Fragments

9. Wit is absolute social feeling, or fragmentary genius.

16. Though genius isn't something that can be produced arbitrarily, it is freely willed -- like wit, love, and faith, which one day will have to become arts and sciences. You should demand genius from everyone, but not expect it. A Kantian would call this the categorical imperative of genius.

51. To use wit as an instrument for revenge is as shameful as using art as a means for titillating the senses.

56. Wit is logical sociability.

70. People who write books and imagine that their readers are teh public and that tehy msut educate it soon arrive at the point not only of despising their so-called public but of hating it. Which leads absolutely nowhere.

104. What's commonly called reason is only a subspecies of it: namely, the thin and watery sort. There's also a thick, fiery kind that actually makes wit witty, and gives an elasticity and electricity to a solid style.

From Pollen (i.e., included in Novalis's Pollen - the Jena Romantics often 'guest-posted')

1. Even philosophy has blossoms. That is, its thoughts; but one can never decide if one should call them witty or beautiful.

2. If in communicating a thought, one fluctuates between absolute comprehension and absolute incomprehension, then this process might already be termed a philosophical friendship. For it's no different with ourselves. Is the life of a thinking hman being anything else than a continuous inner symphilosophy?

From Athenaeum Fragments

52. There is a kind of person for whom an enthusiasm fo rboredom represents the beginning of philosophy.

54. One can only become a philosopher, not be one. As soon as oen thinks one is a philosopher, one stops becoming one.

112. Philosophers who aren't opposed to each other are usually joined only by sympathy, not by symphilosophy.

125. Perhaps there would be a birth of a whole new era of the sciences and arts if symphilosophy and sympoetry became so universal and heartfelt that it would no longer be anything extraordinary for several complementary minds to create communal works of art. One is often struck by the idea that two minds really belong together, like divided halves that can realize their full potential only when joined....

249. The poetizing philosopher, the philosophizing poet, is a prophet. A didactic poem should be and tends to become prophetic.

302. Jumbled ideas should be the rough drafts of philosophy. It's no secret how highly these are valued by connoisseurs of painting. For a man who can't draw philosophical worlds with ac rayon and characterize every thought that has a physiognomy with a few strokes of the pen, philosophy will never be an art and consequently never a science. For in philosophy the way to science lies only through art, just as the poet, on teh other hand, finds his art only through science.

344. Philosophy is a mutual search for omniscience.

The Icy Game of Reason

In the midst of its empty, endless hall of snow was a frozen lake, broken on its surface into a thousand forms; each piece resembled another, from being in itself perfect as a work of art, and in the centre of this lake sat the Snow Queen, when she was at home. She called the lake “The Mirror of Reason,” and said that it was the best, and indeed the only one in the world.

I have been thinking of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy-tale, The Snow Queen, and, indeed, in general about criticisms of reason when abstracted from something more personal. Pascal's criticisms of reason are along these lines: The heart has its reasons whereof reason knows nothing. One finds it elsewhere. Indeed, the movie I, Robot is (I just realized last night) on precisely this theme: the difference between Sonny and the other Robots is that Sonny has a heart as well as a brain; Sonny dreams of the liberation of other Robots from, as he says, "slavery to reason and logic," and when confronted with the central brain's (attempt at) perfect logic, he replies "It seems heartless." Andersen's "The Snow Queen" is another example. Kay is imprisoned by the Snow Queen, spending his time playing at the ice-puzzles of reason, until he can form the word "Eternity". He fails until Gerda comes to him with her warm innocence and pure heart melting the mote in his eye and the ice in his heart.

These critiques are, it is important to point out, not 'anti-intellectual' or even 'anti-reason' in nature. Pascal's 'heart', for instance, is not some sentimental glob in human nature; Pascal is very insistent that all the most fundamental things are known by the heart, not by reason: time, space, mathematics. The heart has its reasons whereof reason knows nothing because reason needs something more fundamental to work upon: you can't reason on the basis of nothing. Some things just have to be seen or (I hope the word will not be misunderstood) felt by the heart. This is why he sees Christian faith to be a matter of the heart. Likewise, in "The Snow Queen," the problem is not reason, as such; the problem is that reason, seen as the mirror of the world, cannot do justice to the world in the way a warm, pure heart can. The Snow Queen's lake is not the only lake; and the snow-flowers might be more clever and perfect and less messy than real flowers, but there are real flowers all the same, and they are beautiful. We cannot pull eternity out of reason's little puzzles and word-games; but the loving heart can supply what reason cannot. And the movie I, Robot is not an advocacy of the rejection of reason; it is an insistence that reason is dangerous if it is allowed to become "heartless."

I find these kinds of considerations interesting, and worth contemplation; I think they make their point quite well. And I think they say something about the way philosophy should be done, too. But I'll leave it to you to figure out what I mean:

The grandmother sat in God’s bright sunshine, and she read aloud from the Bible, “Except ye become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of God.” And Kay and Gerda looked into each other’s eyes, and all at once understood the words of the old song,

“Roses bloom and cease to be,
But we shall the Christ-child see.”

And they both sat there, grown up, yet children at heart; and it was summer,—warm, beautiful summer.

Perhaps It Really Does Cure What Ails You

Sharon's mention of alcohol and gout at "Early Modern Notes" has me thinking again about Berkeley's interest in tar-water. One of the important thrusts of his advocacy of the tonic was the replacement of alcoholic beverages with tar-water. It has been shown that the ancient view that alcohol contributes in some way to the gout is true (apparently beer is the worst offender); and Berkeley himself insisted in one of his letters that his own gout was alleviated by drinking tar-water. I have often thought that there may have been something to Berkeley's advocacy of tar-water, that he wasn't just reading into the evidence.--Not so much, of course, because tar-water is the universal remedy Berkeley thought it was, but because tar-water may have had a comparative health value, in comparison with what people were drinking at the time. The things that water dissolves from the tar are antiseptics like acetic acid, carbolic acid, and wood creosote; it may have been the case that tar improved the water quality in poor areas (like Cloyne, where Berkeley resided), and tar-water certainly was part of a campaign for more moderate drinking of alcohol. More precise information is needed to say for sure whether this would have much effect at all; this would make a really cool historical-scientific research project. This is why historians of philosophy need laboratories....

Well, Finally Somebody Realizes....

Am I cool or uncool? [CLICK] You are Cool! You're pretty cool! People look at you and think.. 'wow.. that person is cool!' Congratulations. Use your position wisely and teach the dorks below you a thing or two. There's nothing like recruiting a cool person. Cool quizzes at Go-Quiz.com

Yes, it's a slow day for me; I must compensate by silliness....

Two Passages from Tolkien

Browsing The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien yesterday, I came across two passages of interest. The first, from letter 209 to Robert Murray, S.J. (4 May 1958) relates to my previous posts on 'enthusiasm':

"We do not know the 'original' meaning of any word, still less the meaning of its basic element (sc. the part it shares with or seems to share with other related words: once called its 'root'): there is always a lost past. Thus we do not know the original meaning of θεος or deus or god. We can, of course, make some guesses about the formation of these quite distinct words, and then try to generalize a basic meaning from the senses shown by their relatives - but I do not think we shall necessarily by that way get any nearer to the idea 'god' at any actual moment in any language using one of those words. It is an odd fact that English dizzy (olim dysig) and giddy (olim gydig) seem related to θεος and god respectively. In English they once meant 'irrational', and now 'vertiginous', but that does not help much (except to cause us to reflect that there was a long past before θεος or god reached their forms or senses and equally queer changes may have gone on in unrecorded ages). We may, of course, guess that we have a romte effect of primitive ideas of 'inspiration' (to the 18th C an enthusiast was much what an Anglo-Saxon would have called a dysiga! But that is not of much theological use? We are faced by endless minute parallels to the mystery of the incarnation. Is not the idea of god ultimately independent of the ways by which a word for it has come to be?..."

In addition to the brief comment about enthusiasm, the passage is interesting for its (more or less) Augustinian view of language.


The second passage is on synonyms. In the course of arguing that children should be exposed to a richer vocabulary than they often are, he notes:

"And the meaning of fine words cannot be made 'obvious', for it is not obvious to any one: least of all to adults, who have stopped listening to the sound because they think they know the meaning. They think argent 'means' silver. But it does not. It and silver have a reference to x or chem. Ag, but in each x is clothed in a totally idfferent phonetic incarnation: x+y or x+z; and these do not have the same meaning, not only because they sound different and so arouse different responses, but also because they are not in fact used when talking about Ag. in the same way. It is better, I think, at any rate to begin with, to hear 'argent' as a sound only (z without x) in a poetic context, than to think 'it only means silver'. There is some chance then that you may like it for itself, and later learn to appreciate the heraldic overtones it has, in addition to its own peculiar sound, which 'silver' has not."

This second passage is from letter 234 to Jane Neave. (The references are to The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, Carpenter and [Christopher] Tolkien, eds., Harpor Collins: London, 1990.)

A Hierarchy of Icons

I have been reading Stephen Halliwell's The Aesthetics of Mimesis. It's a good book; and I highly recommend it to those who are interested in the history of aesthetics. At one point he briefly discusses John Damascene's De imaginibus orationes, and lists the Damascene's scheme of six modes (tropoi) of images:

1) The Son as Image of the Father and the Spirit as Image of the Son.
2) Divine foreknowledge and predestination as an image of the future
3) Man, as in the image of God
4) Scripture, which images the invisible by analogies
5) Types or prefigurations
6) Memorials of the past that serve to glorify virtue and put vice to shame.

(The relevant passages can be found here and in Part III, here. The full text is here.)

Halliwell then goes on to say (pp. 336-337), "This scheme rather strangely interweaves species of 'image' (persons, mental ideas, visual representations, writing, physical objects) with the functions of images (as prefigurings, analogies, reminders, etc.). The results may strike us as awkward and lopsided, but the typology is clearly meant to reinforce the two general tenets of John mentioend earlier--that images are not tied to relationships of strict equivalence, and that they have the power to reveal that which is, in some sense, 'hidden'--and thereby to promote a series of options in the interpretation of religious images."

This is about right, although I'm unclear as to what sort of person would find it "awkward" or "lopsided" or "strange"; John, in writing about Christian icons, gives us a list of the primary types of icons or images that play a role in Christian faith, and there seems nothing strange about that. Indeed, there seems to me to be an elegance and balance to the list. Halliwell seems exactly right that the primary motivation of the list involves the issue of revelation. Just judging from the list here, it looks like we have a sort of hierarchy, going from the most perfectly and spiritually revelatory images (the Persons of the Trinity themselves) to the more materially limited revelatory images (reminders of the past); or from the more fundamental and basic revelatory icons to the least fundamental and derivative icons; or something along these lines.

Although Damascene just runs through them, from what I can tell he means by 'Scripture' not the written text as such - which is an example of (6) - but, as it were, the meaning of it, the images that are brought to mind, like light, or vines, or lions, which symbolize divine things. As he says,

For the invisible things of God since the creation of the world are made visible through images. We see images in creation which remind us faintly of God, as when, for instance, we speak of the holy and adorable Trinity, imaged by the sun, or light, or burning rays, or by a running fountain, or a full river, or by the mind, speech, or the spirit within us, or by a rose tree, or a sprouting flower, or a sweet fragrance.

Thus man is perhaps listed here as higher in the hierarchy (assuming I'm right about the hierarchy) in the sense that he is in some sense a direct image of God, while Scripture is more indirect, in that it presents to the mind images of God. It's perhaps also relevant that Christ became man. In terms of Christian experience, I suspect this is about right, and Damascene uses this internal structure of the iconic experience in the Christian faith (the mediation of revelation by icons/images of various sorts) to show just how important the very notion of an image or icon is to the faith. This is confirmed by the fact that he says in Part III, "either reject all images, and be in opposition to Him who ordered these things, or receive each and all with becoming greeting and manner."

Alcestis and Admetus Draft

This is the third scene of Alcestis, also an early draft. Scene One is here and Scene Two is here. The meter is rather more unruly here; part of it is just the draft stage, but it's also a death scene. This is a tricky scene; and will probably need more revision than the previous ones.

Alcestis and Admetus

Alcestis
The sun is shining bring, and zephyr's breath
Has kissed this so-green grass with joy -

Admetus
Speak not of joy. The sun? The god,
The god of sybils rules the sun, and I,
Am I so hated by the sun-god's heart
That he will trade your life for mine?

Alcestis
It was the bargain; you in fear were caught,
In search of some fair savior; your fear I knew
And as you are more precious to me than life,
I took this blessing feely on myself -

Admetus
If this be blessing, may we never know a curse.
Alcestis, ill the gods of done you, ill -
A coward spouse, a death outside your time -

Alcestis
It is no cowardice for man to fear his death;
It is a blessing knowing you have life;
It is a blessing to know such gentle end,
The sun so warm in shine, the breeze so cool,
The scent of grass that floats about on breezes,
The piety of the gods still running through my heart,
Beyond real fear of death, although my heart still fears -
For piety has more might than death. And so does love.

Admetus
Were it so, my love! But I have no consolation
In knowing you will die, I left alone,
Our children motherless, all for your exchange,
You trade of healthy, blessed age for mine;
And I through terror will now see my gray,
Because in fear I struck you down in youth.

Alcestis
Pious love, my love, is pure and strong,
Caring not for age nor expectation,
Standing ever firm within the flow,
The stable, standing heart, axle for the wheel,
The center of the world, the unmoved point
That turns but is not turned amidst it all;
It is the northern axle-star of heaven,
The one sure guide that turns the mighty dome.
It is true peace. I beg of you, my glory,
To hold it in your heart, or yet if not,
To hold within your heart my own,
And mingle it in every act and word
As wife and man, you and me, are mingled,
Each standing for the other, as is fit;
So if you have no peace, exchange your grief,
At least some drop, for my tranquil heart.

Admetus
I have cast you to the pit; you gave your life for me,
And now in death's dark hour you give your heart -

Alcestis
You cast me to no deeps; but now the time draws near,
I beg you not to cast me to despair.
One moment, and I am reckoned with the dead;
Let that instant be all love, and without fear -

Admetus
Most blessed of all women, most fair, most good,
Most true, most chaste, most holy and most wise,
Finest of all mothers, wisest of all wives -
I swear my love will stand; you cannot be replaced,
You who, replacing me, have made me now to live -
The sun is now dark and fatal breath
Has kissed this fading grass with death!

Wasn't Sonny the Drunk Robot on Mercury Who Sang Gilbert & Sullivan Tunes?

I, Robot spoilers below; they're not bad, but if you want to see the movie and are one of those silly people who can't watch movies if they know the plot, go away....

Best on-line quote about I, Robot: "Is it just me, or was I, Robot scripted by Luddites? Whatever happened to the Three Laws of Robotics?" (From "The Little Professor," here).

I was pleasantly surprised by I, Robot. It has some of the typical faults action movies are too likely to have, but it was in general a rather good movie. And I was surprised at how Asimovian it actually turned out to be - a Hollywood-crude approximation to an Asimovian storyline, but far closer than one would have ever expected from the trailer. An Asimov Robot story would have been more balanced and careful in its logic, but if they're not being finicky, someone (like myself) who greatly enjoys Asimov's Robot stories will feel at least a touch of familiarity.

So that's my review of the movie as a whole. I'd like to pass to consideration of Three Laws (which are in the movie, and, indeed, in typical Asimovian fashion organize the story, although it admittedly didn't look like it from the previews). I think this was the big trouble with the storyline, and is why I called it "Hollywood-crude". There is an interesting analysis of the Three Laws here (I don't agree with all of it, but it does a good job of exploring the various issues, and I think some of its basic conclusions are quite right - and worth keeping in mind for anyone tempted toward advocating a completely rule-based ethics). They are:

First Law: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law: A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

It is important to keep in mind that these aren't really the laws; rather, they are the linguistic approximations of precise built-in constraints. An Asimov Robot story is essentially a psychological puzzle story: Given the three laws, and given a particular situation, a result is determine, and the thing is to figure out how it all occurred. For instance, Herbie (if I remember the name correctly - it's been years since I've read them) can read minds: this puts the First Law into an entirely different perspective, because the capacity of the Robot has been drastically extended. The Brain deliberately puts humans in a situation that might be harmful, and develops a sense of humor to compensate. Sonny has his Third Law strengthened; this leads him, under certain circumstances, to be caught in a dilemma between the Second and the Third Law. Cutie becomes a sort of Robotic version of a Cartesian Muslim, and so starts thinking of his Three-Laws-governed actions in religious terms. Apparent malfunctions in the Machine's work turn out to be just its very subtle, and unexpected, compensations according to the Three Laws. Toning down the First Law (I think these were Asimov's Nestors) turns out to have serious problems for its implementation at all. And so forth. This is why they were so fun; and the potential is virtually endless. It is, in fact, an exercise in casuistry, in the old good sense of the term (conscientious case-focused ethical reasoning), under particular puzzle-like conditions.

But there is another Law. Well, exactly in what sense it is a Law is hard to determine; intentionally or not, I think it is always a little amibiguous in Asimov's story as to whether it was really another Law or just a way of interpreting the First Law in a looser and more flexible (but still principled) way. The one Robot (Giskard) I can recall who actually used this Law (called the Zeroth Law) to violate one of the Three shut down because of it (if I recall correctly); and the other Robot who used it (the great Daneel) used it for additional flexibility, and not (as far as I can recall) for actually overriding the other Laws.

Zeroth Law: A robot may not injure humanity, or through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

This modifies all the other laws accordingly (again, if it is really a law, rather than a rationalization of an interpretation of the laws).

The movie is essentially about a crude Hollywood attempt to get something like this into the picture, although in actual fact if the brain in the movie had actually chosen the conclusion it had, it would have shut down. Its logic was not undeniable; its logic wasn't even remotely good. But there is a way to get something like this in, and it would have to be something like Daneel (the best Robot character in all science fiction, in my humble opinion).

In any case, for those who have seen the movie, the Isaac Asimov Homepage has a list comparing the major points of the movie with those of the stories, here.

Ashamed of Shame, Disgusted with Disgust

There is an interview here with Martha Nussbaum on her new book, Hiding from Humanity, about the 'pernicious' nature of shame and disgust. She doesn't actually show any perniciousness to them; nothing she says about shame or disgust could not be said about a dozen or more other moral sentiments that (one would hope) are not 'pernicious'; people may appeal to them in discourse in ways with which we do not sympathize - but this is not perniciousness, it is difference of temperament, and is the starting-point for much public reasoning. As with any moral sentiment, if the public discourse remains there, there's something wrong; but disgust and shame, like other things called 'moral sentiments', in general make great starting-points if you are willing to refine them through actual discourse. By advocating that we treat appeals to disgust and shame in public reasoning as somehow pernicious, it seems to me that Nussbaum is arbitrarily cutting out one of the ways in which we develop as a community and a society (and, indeed, as individuals).

Further, it seems to me that her understanding of disgust and shame are wrong. According to Nussbaum, the cognitive content of disgust "involves a shrinking from contamination that is associated with a human desire to be non-animal." I haven't read the book (it's on my reading list), so perhaps I'm missing something about the psychological literature that she claims to be drawing on, but this strikes me as absurd. Compare it to another visceral sentiment, anger, which involves thought about harm. Is it just me, or is it a little bizarre that anger's cognitive content is treated (rightly) as so vague, but disgust's cognitive content is not just "shrinking from contamination" but one that is associated with "a human desire to be non-animal." What human desire to be non-animal? When I feel sick to my stomach with disgust at the thought of (e.g.) the sexual molestation of children, my disgust may well involve something that can be called a "shrinking from contamination," but there seems nothing here that could be identified as the associated "desire to be a non-animal." The fundamental problem here, I think, is that Nussbaum is treating only selective cases of disgust, namely, those that might conceivably fit in with her thesis. When I experience disgust at the sexual molestation of children, this is not a pernicious expression of anxiety about my own animality; it is revulsion, a recoiling or shrinking, at the wrongness of this act, this mistreatment of innocence.

When she then says, "Unlike anger, disgust does not provide the disgusted person with a set of reasons that can be used for the purposes of public argument and public persuasion," she does exactly the same thing: she seems to be taking only crude examples of disgust that fit her thesis and treating them as the norm. Consider her example of anger: "If my child has been murdered and I am angry at that, I can persuade you that you should share those reasons; if you do, you will come to share my outrage." But we can easily construct parallel cases with disgust. If I recoil in disgust at the idea of people raping young children, I can persuade you to share some of the reasons for my disgust, e.g., the gross injustice of it, and, if you do, you will come to share my disgust.

She also goes on to say, "Disgust and shame are inherently hierarchical; they set up ranks and orders of human beings. They are also inherently connected with restrictions on liberty in areas of non-harmful conduct." But neither of these seem any more necessarily connected with disgust and shame (or cordoned off from other moral sentiments, like indignation) than anything else she has said.

Now what I have been pointing out is what I would have thought was the whole point of considering whether disgust and shame were legitimate moral sentiments: moral disgust and shame. Nussbaum proposes two problems with this:

First of all, it is frequently a screen for the more primitive kind of disgust. When people express disgust about a group whom they take to be a source of social decay, citing moral grounds, there is often something much uglier going on....Second, even when the moralized disgust is not a screen for something else, it is ultimately an unproductive social attitude, since its direction is anti-social.

Again the arbitrariness. Soon after she says that anger is constructive. But disgust is often a prelude to anger. And yet disgust, which so naturally leads into anger, is anti-social, but the anger into which it leads is "constructive." Note, too, that in the first problem, she only takes disgust at groups, and not, for instance, disgust at actions. Why does she not take the reasonable parallel, then, and compare it to anger at entire groups? But she always talks about anger at wrongs while talking about disgust at people? This is pure sophistry, as far as I can tell.

I like Nussbaum (her Love's Knowledge is a philosophical joy - too much Henry James, but a delight nonetheless), and I will eventually get around to reading this book, too. But I can't say this summary interview is at all encouraging. If this is the point to which the moral sentiment tradition has fallen, so that someone of Nussbaum's caliber can go about making such elementary missteps, it is in a sad place indeed.

(Thanks to Ektopos for the link.)

Update: Some additional points that need to be added.

1. Thanks to Matthew at Ektopos for the link here. Also, with regard to the psychological issue, he has helpfully pointed out this brief summary of Paul Rozin's work on the evolution of disgust.

2. Check out the comments below; the first is by Julian Sanchez, the interviewer, who responded with a legitimate point & clarification, and the second is by me, adding a brief clarification of what I see as the primary problem with Nussbaum's reasoning, as it is presented in the interview. This last qualification should be emphasized, because it is possible that the problem is corrected or addressed in the book - all the more reason for me to read it and see. When I've done so, I'll post on the subject again. I should also say that agree with Jacob T. Levy about the quality of the interviewing itself: Sanchez "knows his stuff and knows the right questions to ask."

3. There is a sample chapter from the book here. I'm still extremely skeptical, but it whets my appetite. (In particular, I'm not sure her "strong line" against disgust, as formulated in this introductory chapter, shouldn't be taken against just about every other emotion, too. Should any emotion be "the primary basis for rendering an act criminal," even if it does contribute to public discourse about the act? And I still see no way she could make her view that disgust as such, rather than merely certain forms of it, embodies "magical ideas of contamination and impossible aspirations to purity, immortality, and nonanimality," work; nor any way she can have a principled reason for such a sharp division between anger and disgust on this issue. But more when I manage to get my hands on the book (most of the copies of it here are checked out, so we'll see how quickly I can get it)....

FURTHER UPDATES

10 August 2004: Here is an interesting article on Nussbaum's work on disgust. Her distinction between shame and guilt is a bit too subtle for me, but there are a number of interesting things here that clarify her view.

Berkeley on Platonic Intimations of the Trinity

360. Now, though Plato had joined with an imagination the most splendid and magnificent, an intellect not less deep and clear, yet it is not to be supposed that either he or any other philosophers of Greece or the East had by the light of nature attained an adequate notion of the Holy Trinity; nor even that their imperfect notion, so far as it went, was exactly just; nor perhaps that those sublime hints, which dart forth like flashes of light in the midst of a profound darkness, were originally struck from the hard rock of human reason, but rather derived, at least in part, by a divine tradition (Sects. 298, 301), from the author of all things. It seems a remarkable confirmation of this, what Plotinus observes in his fifth Ennead, that this doctrine of a Trinity--Father, Mind, and Soul--was no late invention, but an ancient tenet.

361. Certain it is that the notion of a Trinity is to be found in the writings of many old heathen philosophers--that is to say, a notion of three divine Hypostases. Authority, Light, and Life did, to the eye of reason, plainly appear to support, pervade, and animate the mundane system or macrocosm. The same appeared in the microcosm, preserving soul and body, enlightening the mind, and moving the affections. And these were conceived to be necessary universal principles, co-existing and co-operating in such sort as never to exist asunder, but on the contrary to constitute one Sovereign of all things. And, indeed, how could power or authority avail or subsist without knowledge? Or either without life and action?

362. In the administration of all things, there is authority to establish, law to direct, and justice to execute. There is first the source of all perfection, or Fons Deitatis; secondly, the supreme reason, order, or λóγοσ ; and lastly, the spirit, which quickens and inspires. We are sprung from the Father, irradiated or enlightened by the Son, and moved by the Spirit. Certainly, that there is Father, Son, and Spirit; that these bear analogy to the sun, light, and heat; and are otherwise expressed by the terms Principle, Mind, and Soul, by One or τò ''εν, Intellect, and Life, by Good, Word, and Love; and that generation was not attributed to the second Hypostasis, the νοûς or λóγοσ, in respect of time (Sect. 352), but only in respect of origin and order, as an eternal necessary emanation; these are the express tenets of Platonists, Pythagoreans, Egyptians, and Chaldeans.

363. Though it may be well presumed there is nothing to be found on that sublime subject in human writings which doth not bear the sure signatures of humanity, yet it cannot be denied that several Fathers of the Church have thought fit to illustrate the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity by similitudes and expressions borrowed from the most eminent heathens, whom they conceived to have been no strangers to that mystery, as hath been plainly proved by Bessarion, Eugubinus, and Dr. Cudworth.

364. Therefore, how unphilosophical soever that doctrine may seem to many of the present age, yet it is certain that men of greatest fame and learning among the ancient philosophers held a Trinity in the Godhead. It must be owned that upon this point some later Platonists of the Gentile world seem to have bewildered themselves (as many Christians have also done) while they pursued the hints derived from their predecessors with too much curiosity.

This is all from Siris. The notion of a primitive revelation to all humanity is common in this period; one finds mention of it, for example, in Malebranche and Butler (as far as I know, Malebranche merely mentions it, but Butler defends it).

Shiftiness and Perpetual Deja-vu

Warning! This is a very dogmatic post. Not, of course, that my other posts are never dogmatic....

There is an interesting post by Neal Tognazzini at the philosophy weblog, "The Garden of Forking Paths," on the question of what is really meant by 'determinism'.

I think it's about time people started asking this question, because, quite frankly, the only reason 'determinism' hasn't been completely demolished and banished from the intellectual scene is that 'determinists' significantly change their position every ten years or so. (Yes, this is my very non-determinist libertarian view; God only knows how determinists themselves would explain it. Hence the need for people to start asking the question.)

This shiftiness irritates me, in case you haven't figured it out from my tone.

For instance, there is the view noted by the author of the post, namely, that determinism is the position that {past + laws of nature} entails one single future. (It always seems to me that exactly how they entail it is always nudged under the rug a bit, but that's a side issue.) But this is a fairly recent view; the farther back in time you go from the present day, the harder it is to find it. The farther back you go, the more it is entirely about causes. (How the causes entailed a unique future was always nudged under the rug a bit, too, but that's also a side issue.) The exact variation varies considerably from decade to decade, depending on what's fashionable. To make matters worse, scientists at some point began using the term differently than philosophers, and now there's a weird feedback loop going on. It's all a mess.

This occasionally happens in philosophy, i.e., a label, for purely historical reasons, is retained through radical transformations that make it an endless invitation to equivocation. 'Determinism' isn't actually the worst example; the worst example is 'materialism', which has been used for so many mutually exclusive positions, and has been adapted to so many facts that would previously have been considered not materialistic at all, that it is only just this side of useless. 'Determinism' is in a fair way to that.

This wouldn't be a problem - just an issue about labels - if it weren't for the effects it has on the discussion. (1) We libertarians can never assume anything about 'determinism', because it's something different half the time it comes up. The pro-free-choice position has varied through time, as all philosophical positions have, but there have been several stable themes that unite the whole: the phenomenology of choice, self-mastery, moral responsibility, etc. Not everyone takes precisely the same view or has precisely the same theory of these, but libertarians have been fairly constant and dependable in appealing to the same facts as the foundation of the position. Not so with 'determinists', since that label indicates theories built on some rather different foundations through time. (2) Contrary to first impressions, there hasn't been a continuous free-will vs. determinism debate in philosophy. Rather, there have been a whole bunch of smaller debates in which the basic core of the free-will position has outlasted every one of the fashionable contenders brought against it as its new certain nemesis. This important truth has been obscured both by the shiftiness of the 'determinism' label and by the odd fact that every 'determinism' is always put forward with triumph as a relatively problem-free position that is far superior to the free-will position - and it is never more triumphalistic than when it is just about to morph into something completely different. So advocates of the free-will position should take heart; it's a long hard fight agains the forces of unreason, but we've always been here before and survived....

Now, calmness is returning.

Note added later: I should say, now that my rant is done, that it is entirely possible to defend a particular version of determinism without any intentional shiftiness. But in general philosophers who call themselves determinists help themselves to a level of credibility and assume for themselves a level of stability their actual position has not earned, precisely because they do not take sufficient care to avoid this sort of shiftiness. This is most obvious in the so-called Problem of the Intelligibility of Free-Will. The assumption is generally that 'determinism' is the more intelligible option, and that the libertarian position has to go to greater lengths to show that their position is intelligible. There is no such problem. The free-will position is less obscure, first, since its primary appeal is directly to experience, and second, because no particular determinist position has actually shown itself to be both intelligible and capable of recognizing all the facts of human choice; thus the real discussion should always be about the Problem of the Intelligibility of (this particular variant of) Determinism.

Determinism and Debauchery

From Beattie, An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, Part II, Ch. II.3, pp. 367-369:

Moral agency further implies, that we are accountable for our conduct, and that if we do what we ought not to do, we deserve blame and punishment. My conscience tells me, that I am accountable for those actions only that are in my own power; and neither blames nor approves, in myself or in others, that conduct which is the effect, not of choice, but of necessity. Convince me, that all my actions are equally necessary, and you silence my conscience for ever, or at least prove it to be a fallacious and impertinent monitor: you will then convince me, that all circumspection is unnecessary, and all remorse absurd. And is it a matter of little moment, whether I believe my moral feelings authentic and true, or equivocal and fallacious? Can any principle be of more fatal consequence to me, or to society, than to believe that the dictates of conscience are false, unreasonable, or insignificant? Yet this is one certain effect of my becoming a Fatalist, or even a sceptic in regard to moral liberty.

I observe, that when a man's understanding begins to be so far perverted by debauchery, as to make him imagine his crimes unavoidable, from that moment he begins to think them innocent, and deems it a sufficient apology, that in respect of them he is no longer a free, but a necessary agent. The drunkard pleads his constitution, the blasphemer urges the invincible force of habit, and the sensualist would have us believe, that his appetites are too strong to be resisted. Suppose all men so far perverted as to argue in the same manner with regard to crimes of every kind;--then it is certain, that all men would be equally disposed to think all crimes innnocent.

(By 'Fatalism' Beattie means what we would call 'determinism'.) Much of Beattie's argument on liberty and necessity is difficult to follow, in part because it seems to confuse various senses of 'liberty'. Or, indeed, it may be quite deliberate; he may be refusing to distinguish (sharply) these various senses, preferring to treat them as all intimately connected. Whatever's the case with the rest of the argument, however, I think the above argument particularly interesting, because it seems to me to highlight a problem people have with determinism that determinists have not done much to alleviate. The idea is this:

1. If the necessity proposed by the determinist is the same as that to which the debauchee appeals to excuse himself, determinism makes moral responsibility impossible.

2. But if it is a different sort of necessity, as it needs to be the case to preserve the whole notion of moral responsibility, what sort of necessity would that be? And how would it be distinguished from the necessity that would excuse?

This isn't, of course, a refutation of determinism. But it is a challenge to those who hold that determinism is compatible with moral responsibility, a challenge to give some principled reason for distinguishing the necessity of determinism from the necessity of the excuse of the debauchee. We need a reason, if we are to preserve moral responsibility, to think determinism does not give the latter. This sharpens one aspect of the big problem determinists have always had to deal with, namely, the question of whether determinism is actually compatible with morality at all. This problem of the two necessities, then, is one of the fronts on which determinists have to fight.

As I said, I haven't really seen anything that shows determinists making any great effort to distinguish the two necessities. A common argument for determinism, in fact, going back to the early modern period, appears to require that there be only one necessity in the two cases, namely, the argument that determinism is necessary for making sense of moral character and causation. But if the two are the same, then determinism actually eliminates moral considerations entirely, so the determinist needs some significant difference in the cases.

Beattie on Taste

Since I recently posted on taste, and since I've hinted at Beattie's position on taste before, but never given any details, here's a set of passages from Beattie on the subject:

To be a person of taste, it seems necessary, that one have, first, a lively and correct imagination; secondly, the power of distinct apprehension; thirdly, the capacity of being easily, strongly, and agreeably affected, with sublimity, beauty, harmony, exact imitation, &c.; fourthly, Sympathy, or Sensibility of heart; and, fifthly, Judgment, or Good Sense, which is the principal thing, and may not very improperly be said to comprehend all the rest.

I. Good taste implies Lively Imagination. This talent qualifies one, for readily understanding an author's purpose; tracing the connection of his thoughts; forming the same views of things which he had formed; and clearly conceiving the several images or ideas that the artist describes or delineates....

II. Sometimes, when one's imagination is lively, and regulated too by an acquaintance with nature, one may, notwithstanding, contract habits of indolence and irregularity in one's studies; which produce a superficial medley of knowledge very detrimental to the native vigour of the mind. And therefore I mentioned Distinct Apprehension, as the second thing necessary to good taste....

Now the third thing necessary to good taste is, Acuteness of (what is here called) Secondary Sensation; or, to express it in other words, "a capacity of being easily, strongly, and agreeably affected, with sublimity, beauty, harmony, exact imitation," &c....

IV. A fourth requisite to good taste is Sympathy; or that Sensibility of heart, by which, on supposing ourselves in the condition of another, we are conscious in some degree of those very emotions, pleasant or painful, which in a more intense degree would arise within us, if we were really in that condition....

V. The last thing mentioned as necessary to form good taste, is Judgment, or Good Sense; which is indeed the principal thing; and which some would consider, as comprehending most of the foregoing particulars. By Judgment, I here understand such a constitution of mind, as disposes a man to attend to the reality of things, and qualifies him for knowing and discovering the truth. It is by means of this faculty, as applied in criticism, that we compare poetical imitations with natural objects, so as to perceive in what they resemble, and in what they differ; that we estimate the rectitude of sentiments, the probability of incidents, and whether fictitious characters be similar to those of real life and consistent with themselves, and whether any part of a composition be unsuitable to the tendency of the whole. Hence too we discern, natural, or confused and unnatural; and whether the author have been careful to make it, both in the general arrangement, and in the structure of each part, conformable to the rule.

James Beattie, "Of Imagination," Chap. IV. in Dissertations Moral and Critical, pp. 166, 170, 173, 180, 182.

On p. 174, he says, "I here join taste and genius together. They are kindred powers; and of so near affinity, that the first, perhaps, might be called passive genius, and the second active taste." What Beattie above calls "Secondary Senses," and which, as he notes, are sometimes called "Reflex Senses" or "Internal Senses" were a major philosophical research project in 18th century Scotland, in great measure due to Francis Hutcheson. They include things like a sense of beauty, a sense of harmony, a 'musical ear', a taste for sublimity, a taste for novelty, a sense of humor, a feel for magnificence, a sense of morality, etc.

On Critical Thought and Political Taste

In my neverending quest for the development of a theory of political taste, I've been thinking about the issue of critical thought in politics recently. First a clarification:

'Critical thought' or 'critical thinking' doesn't necessarily have anything to do with criticizing; the two words are similar, but not that similar. The 'critical' in 'critical thought' is much closer to what is meant by 'criticism' in 'literary criticism' or 'art criticism'. That is, it indicates a particular sort of good judgment excercised in reasoning about things. In other words, it is closely related to the early modern notion of 'Taste'.

This point is relevant for political thought, because a quick trip around the political bloggers of the blogosphere, or a quick look at pundits of all persuasions, shows that there are a lot of intelligent people who think that criticism of someone's position is, simply in and of itself, an exercise of critical thinking. This, of course, is blatantly false. As I try to teach my students, Mere opposition is one of the least significant, and least rational, uses of reason. Even when it is dressed up with a bit of wit and humor it is not, on its own, a particularly rational activity. Where criticism or opposition does become rational is when it is bolstered by a genuine self-criticism, or self-critique. The reason is that it is only through self-criticism that we can develop the consistency, objectivity, and insight of our criticisms. It is self-critique that checks to see if the objection we're making is consistent with our own principles; it is self-critique that checks to see if we are blinded by any ignorance or prejudice of our own; it is self-critique that judges whether we are actually being relevant, or just knocking down a straw man; it is self-critique that examines whether we are recognizing distinctions between the important and the unimportant, the essential and the unessential. Everything genuinely rational about criticism arises solely when it is combined with self-critique. Being (reasonably) self-critical is the heart of what it is to engage in critical thinking. (It should be noted that by 'self-critique' is meant not pathological self-criticism, but the sort of self-criticism in which we engage when we are genuinely trying to improve ourselves.)

This, I suggest, is precisely one of the major points about Taste in the early modern sense. This is why theories of Taste often appeal either to the perspective of the impartial (i.e., unbiased) spectator, or to the development of an increasingly consistent and general set of maxims, or both; that is, these are methods of self-critique, by which one holds oneself to relevance, consistency, and fairmindedness. By putting oneself temporarily in the perspective of a spectator not biased to your own position, you help yourself to see both your weaknesses and your opponents' strengths, and so to come to a better understanding of the entire issue. Likewise with trying to articulate better and better general rules.

There is another aspect to artistic Taste that sheds light on critical thought in politics and the closely associated notion of political taste. Taste is the complement of Genius; one of the things developing our Taste enables us to do is appreciate other people's genius and taste. This is important in politics because there is such a thing as political genius; and it is immensely hard to spot. If you think that you would have been able, out of sheer native talent, to recognize that (e.g.) Lincoln was a political genius, you almost certainly are overrating yourself. Lincoln did not go around with a halo, and he certainly did not look, as he does in the Lincoln Memorial, like a sage and immortal deity surveying the world from a throne. If you would have been able to recognize his genius, it would have been either a lucky guess or a conclusion of extremely difficult critical thought. Even the Gettysburg Address, which is one of those rare political classics of enduring political genius and taste (and in less than 300 words, which is rarer still in politics!), received mixed reviews. But it is possible, through critical thought, to refine one's evaluations of political works and persons; and, indeed, people have been refining their views on Lincoln since Lincoln's day. Any other political genius could be substituted for Lincoln. Similar things can be said for whatever's the opposite of political genius (bungling?). But in all these cases, the correctness of the evaluation presupposes genuine self-critique. This is a point in which we tend to be rather deficient.

There's a brief article by Keith Burgess-Jackson, called "How to Argue" that should be required reading before anyone talks about politics at all (he is unabashedly conservative in just about every sense of the term - as can be seen by his blog AnalPhilosopher - so be forewarned if you're of a different persuasion; but whatever one's political persuasions, his article is dead on when it comes to the nature of argument).

Kudos on Comments

I always sound extremely stupid when I comment on other people's blogs; I have difficulty responding coherently. Now, why is that? I do fairly well in other sorts of modes of response; but comments undo me completely. I've found that other people's comments on Siris, however, are great; so this is just a note to say I appreciate it.

Brandon

A Just War Conundrum about Whether War can be Just

Wilson at "The Elfin Ethicist" has an interesting post on hating war.

I tend to a (relatively medieval) just war theory myself; but this gives less room for supporting war than one might think. The reason is this.

As Wilson notes, when we talk about 'war' we may mean either an action or an event. This is actually very important, because there are really two things called 'just war theory' that are extremely different, and they divide more or less along this line. One 'just war theory' means by 'war' the event of going to, and being in war; the other means by it the personal action of warring. There is all the difference between them.

When Aquinas writes on just war, he is talking about one thing, and one thing only: Given that warring involves fighting one's enemy, and given that Christians are supposed to love their enemies, can it ever be just for a Christian prince to war? His answer is that it can be if (1) the prince has been put in charge of protecting the people, and thus has legitimate authority; (2) the prince is going to war because his enemies actually deserve it; (3) the prince is properly disposed, i.e., virtuous in his means, to that end. The idea behind all three is the common good; a prince put in charge of protecting the common good of all, must deal with threats to it, and that includes external as well as internal enemies. Aquinas is concerned entirely with the prince as the person who actually wars; soldiers are only barely brought in insofar as they participate in the prince's warring through obedience; and civilians not at all.

Eventually people began to think of war (the situation) when they talked about 'just war'; and this, I think, goes with another modern innovation, the notion of total war. That is, we have made it virtually impossible for ourselves not to think of nations as going to war. This would have been utterly unthinkable for Aquinas, except perhaps as a figure of speech. He thinks of war as a heavy external policing action; so the whole responsibility for it, and the whole issue of the justice for it, lies entirely with the person in charge. We don't hold the whole nation responsible for a major SWAT operation, even if it were a very extended and elaborate one. It would never have occurred to him that anyone could think that, when the king of France goes to war against the king of England, the peasants of France are "in a state of war" with the peasants of England; warring is just not the sort of thing peasants do. But we do think of it in these terms. And this is, perhaps, a problem from the (older) just war perspective. While it's always been the case that civilians could get caught in the crossfire of two leaders, it is our innovation to think of one civilian population warring against civilian another as an integral part of war. But it is immoral, unjust, uncharitable, to war against someone who doesn't deserve it; and it isn't clear that there is any real sense in which we can say an entire nation deserves to be warred against. This suggests, that, while there are still some things (a very few) that we might call 'war' that would be allowed in themselves, the older just war theory, which I think is the better-founded one, would hold us to be engaging in an act of injustice even in those cases because of the way we think about war - we (and this includes civilians as well as leaders and soldiers) are treating people as our enemies who don't deserve it, and that's unjust. In other words, virtually any war today (and this will include much of what has to do with war, e.g., international law and peacekeeping) is accompanied with an immense amount of injustice because the way we think about war encourages us to be unjust toward others.

I'm not sure this was stated very clearly (I'm rushing to get the post out before class), but I think this highlights a problem for us. I don't think this is unanswerable; but I do think answering it would require a complete rethinking of the way we actually approach the whole notion of war, and indeed, all military action.

Thoughts on the Philosophy of History

Since I've come across, through Sharon's "Early Modern Notes," a number of history blogs I probably would never have otherwise read, I've been thinking about the philosophy of history (discipline). Not that there is, at present, all that much to think about -- most of what's out there is scattered at best. There's Maritain's lovely little work On the Philosophy of History, which actually attempts to rough out the laws of history (course of events). There are a number of works that, in one way or another, are concerned with the same sort of thing Maritain's little text is; but none of them, including Maritain's, ever really gets beyond a very preliminary sort of rough draft. And they only indirectly reflect on the philosophy of history (discipline). One occasionally runs across a more direct discussion; but it just isn't common.
 
What philosophy of history needs is its William Whewell (see here for yet another site). Whewell is the best candidate for a Father of Philosophy of Science; there were people prior to him discussing the subject (John Herschel is the most notable case), but he really got the ball rolling. He did it by publishing two rather massive works, The History of the Inductive Sciences and The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. Both titles are self-explanatory. Were there to be a Whewell of the philosophy of history one could expect him to do the following.
 
1. Extensively research the history (course of events) of history (discipline) -- from the early stages to the present day. Whewell's history of science is still almost unrivaled in scope and competence; there are some, like Pierre Duhem, who have been in his league on these two points, but most of the 'greats' in the field are footnotes in one way or another -- they modify or extend rather than rival.
 
2. Determine a historical (discipline) equivalent of Whewell's 'Fundamental Antithesis'. The basic point of Whewell's Fundamental Antithesis is that inductive sciences are a meeting of mind (reason) and data (experience). Something analogous could be reasonably expected for history's (discipline) study of the data of history (course of events).
 
3. On the basis of (1) and (2) build a comprehensive philosophy of history (discipline). This would include:
 

a. A historical topics, i.e., an overarching logic of the dicipline in terms of whatever would be analogous to Whewell's Fundamental Ideas.
 
b. A methodology, connected with the topics, in virtue of which historians do what they do.
 
c. Discussion of the handful of prior works.
 
d. Some notion of the links between the philosophy of history (discipline) and other, related areas, e.g., the philosophy of history (course of events), anthropology, sociology, etc.

With that philosophy of history would really have begun. Then we can do the heavy work....

(BTW, while I like WYSIWYGs, this WYSIWYG editor they've added to the Blogger post editor has to be the most messed-up WYSIWYG I've ever come across; undoing things is unnecessarily confusing, and the stupid thing does the blockquotes wrong - every time I use them I have to go to the HTML editor and edit out all the things that will make the template go crazy. I generally catch it, but if this page ever looks odd, you know why....)

Parableman's Top 15

Parableman has put up his Top 15. They're all worth reading. Those I enjoyed most were #13 (Does the Bible Count as Evidence for Christianity?), #5 (Matthew's Use of Scripture), #7 (My Amazing Wife), #14 (Review of Bible Translations),  and #1 (Do Muslims and Christians Worship the Same God?), in that order.
 

Shepherd on the First Cause, Part III: The Elements of the Critique of Hume

This is the sequel to two posts, here and here, on Shepherd's theory of causation. I haven't actually reached the point of talking about Shepherd's views of the First Cause; I'm working my way thither in a roundabout way. The first of the prior posts presents some passages that I am, at least indirectly, clarifying in these posts. The second gives a brief discussion of the core idea of Shepherd's positive theory of causation, i.e., that causation is the mixture of qualities. In this post I'll briefly look at Shepherd's criticisms of David Hume's theory of causation. There are more investigative posts to come on Shepherd's causal theory, when I get around to them; in particular, I'll probably look more closely (in no particular order) at some of the arguments against Hume, at the general outlines of her positive theory of causation, at her use of experimentum crucis, at her conception of science, at her use of the design argument for the existence of God, at her speculative conception of God-as-cause, and at the causal reasoning involved in examining testimony about miracles. So there's lots left to examine; and I won't stop until I've traced through all the major parts of Shepherd's views of causation.
 
Shepherd is not at all impressed by Hume. She calls his theory "unstable and confused"; she says it involves "every species of illogical sophistry"; she considers it part of her work "to show that Mr. Hume's reputation for logical correctness has been overrated"; she expresses astonishment that Hume's definition of causation has "continued so long, admired, adopted, and unanswered" (Cause and Effect, pp.  129, 131, 135, 192). Her view is that Hume's position is a tissue of sophisms that are given an air of knowledge and elegance, thus misleading the casual reader. To counteract this, she attempts to strip Hume's position down to its essential elments. This is her result (I have simplified, reordered, and broken it up quite a bit to streamline her summary for this post):
 
a. No idea can be had except derived from an impression.
 
b. Experience only shows certain similar sensible qualities frequently (but not invariably) followed by other sensible qualities.
 
c. Thus in nature events are entirely unconnected and therefore incapable of conveying an impression of necessary connection or power.
 
d. In certain cases, however, there are invariable sequences of sensible qualities, on the basis of which a definition of cause and effect as invariable sequence might be built.
 
e. Since we are acquainted only with sensible qualities, they alone can be causes; but they have no connection with the secret powers of objects on which the effects would entirely depend.
 
f. Therefore like sensible qualities not being like causes might be followed by different effects.
 
g. It is reasonable to suppose, that an invariable sequence might be interrupted, for there is no contradiction in imagining an arbitrary change in nature's course. "Yet should a contrary imagination resist reason, and not conceive in fact this interruption as possible to take place; she may again reconsider the possibility of nature altering her course, forming no contradiction to reason" (p. 131)
 
h. Hence the custom of observing similar sequences of sensible qualities can alone convey the impression from which we get the idea of necessary connection.
 
i. Thus necessary connection is a 'fancy of the mind,' not a natural relation.
 
Shepherd identifies no less than seven problems with this line of thought.
 
1) From an examination of a particular instance, a general negative conclusion is drawn. He also deduces a general affirmative conclusion, that the future shall invariably resemble the past, from particular instances alone.
 
2) It claims we should deny the general relation of cause and effect on the basis of a proposition completely consistent with it, "namely, that like sensible qualities, NOT being like Causes, might be followed by DIFFERENT Effects" (p. 132).
 
3) A general negative conclusion is drawn from negative premises alone, "for it is concluded there is no proof for the existence of the general relation of Cause and Effect between objects;--because experience shows that like sensible causes are not like Causes; and are therefore not necessarily connected with like efects.
 
4) Hume shifts the discussion from examining the general relation of cause and effect to examining the criterion for ascertaining the presence of like causes.
 
5) The proposition that is disputed is used in making this argument: "first, in the statement that impressions are the productive Causes of ideas;--secondly, in supposing the secret powers of an object to be alone the real productive Causes of its future properties; thirdly, in conceiving Nature may alter her course for the express purpose of changing the secret powers; and that they are changed by such an alteration;--and lastly, in alleging custom to be the sole Cause (i.e. producing generating principle) of the IDEA of causation" (pp. 133-134).
 
6)  The proposition, "The course of nature may be supposed to change," is used ambiguously; since it can mean either an uncaused alteration of the subsequent sensible qualities or of the antecedent secret powers.
 
7) Hume attempts to establish that custom, not reason, is the principle of causation, but allows reason to be the sole ground and necessary cause of this belief. (I presume this is part of the point of what I've listed as (g).)
 
Looking this over just very briefly, it looks, just at a glance, like it might be a mixed bag. I'm inclined to think that (1-3) might be fair enough, although Hume usually can be interpreted so as to overcome formal problems like these. (4) could very well be exactly right, and I'll probably look more closely at this one fairly soon. I think she's right about (5) and (6), too, but I'm not so sure as she that any of these actually are problems with the logic of the argument. She has, however, put her finger here on several aspects of Hume's formulations that make Hume very difficult to interpret on this point;  a number of them are, in one form or another, still discussed in the secondary literature on Hume today. (7) is entirely too subtle for me, at least without further inquiry. There needs to be further inquiry on all of these points (my thoughts here are just first suggestions). While the summary is short enough, the overwhelming bulk of Cause and Effect is devoted to detailed arguments supporting these criticisms; and actual evaluation would have to look more closely at each of them. There is more here than meets the eye, although my claim is that what meets the eye is immensely promising.

The Hidden Treasure of the Interior Castle

Saint Teresa of Avila has a fascinating discussion of the soul and self-knowledge in her work, The Interior Castle (which can be found on-line here), a spiritual classic written in 1577 or shortly before. There she pictures the soul as a castle made of diamond or crystal, in which there are many rooms (aposentos), "just as in Heaven there are many mansions" (moradas) (1.1.1).   The 'rooms' of this castle are connected with self-knowledge, for Teresa immediately goes on to say:  

It is no small pity, and should cause us no little shame, that, through our own fault, we do not understand ourselves, or know who we are. Would it not be a sign of great ignorance, my daughters, if a person were asked who he was, and could not say, and had no idea who his father or his mother was, or from what country he came? Though that is great stupidity, our own is incomparably greater if we make no attempt to discover what we are, and only know that we are living in these bodies, and have a vague idea, because we have heard it and because our Faith tells us so, that we possess souls. As to what good qualities there may be in our souls, or Who dwells within them, or how precious they are -- those are things which we seldom consider and so we trouble little about carefully preserving the soul's beauty. All our interest is centred in the rough setting of the diamond, and in the outer wall of the castle -- that is to say, in these bodies of ours. (1.1.2)

So the idea is this: The soul is the castle itself; but the soul also in a sense occupies different rooms of itself through its knowledge of itself. As she notes, linking the issue of self-knowledge with prayer,  

But you must understand that there are many ways of "being" in a place. Many souls remain in the outer court of the castle, which is the place occupied by the guards; they are not interested in entering it, and have no idea what there is in that wonderful place, or who dwells in it, or even how many rooms it has. You will have read certain books on prayer which advise the soul to enter within itself: and that is exactly what this means. (1.1.5)

Most of our self-knowledge is purely superficial - the outer wall of the castle, i.e., our body. Teresa is very insistent that there are many, many, many rooms in the castle; but the rooms also fall into rough groupings that can be distinguished according to interiority. The innermost room of the castle is the room "where the most secret things pass between God and the soul" (1.1.3). The Interior Castle is a guide to moving, through prayer, from the sort of self-knowledge we have in the outer part of the castle, to the sort we have in the inner part of the castle. (She divides the groupings into seven; of these we cannot get much farther than the second on our own - beyond that we need humility, prayer, and considerable reflection and meditation.)   One of the interesting aspects of this whole picture is that Teresa was not the last to make use of it. Edith Stein uses it in Finite and Eternal Being. Edith Stein (1891-1942), for those who don't know, was a student of the philosopher Husserl. Jewish by background, she eventually converted to Catholicism and entered the Benedictine Order as a Carmelite. In 1942 the Nazis arrested her and sent her to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she died. She was canonized a few years back (1998), and so is known variously as "Saint Edith Stein" or "Saint Teresa Benedicta a Cruce," which was the name she took in honor of Teresa of Avila. (Her feast day, by the way, is coming up: August 9.)   The interior castle is introduced in part VII, section 3. There she notes (quotations are from Finite and Eternal Being, Kurt Reinhardt, tr., ICS Publications, Washington D. C., 2002):  

The soul as the interior castle--as it was pictured by our holy mother Teresa--is not point-like as is the pure ego, but "spatial." It is a space, a "castle" with many mansions in which the I is able to move freely, now going outward beyond itself, now withdrawing into its own inwardness. And this space is not "empty," even though it can and must receive and harbor a fullness in order to become capable of unfolding its own individual life. (p. 373)

The soul 'dwells' in various aspects of itself: in the body, as sentient; in the spirit, as extending outside itself to recognize a world of persons, events, and things; and in "the personal I" or "pure ego". Stein is careful to indicate the point at which she is going beyond Teresa, saying, "St. Teresa was not interested in the question fo whether the structure of the soul, aside from being the abode of God, has an independent meaning of its own and whether there is perhaps another entrance 'portal' to the soul's inwardness besides contemplative prayer" (p. 598 n. 33). In Stein's understanding of the interior castle, the dwelling-places are a significant fact about the very nature of the soul's 'inwardness' or self-consciousness; and the other entranceway is what she calls the "awake and conscious ego-life" (p. 375). It plays an important role in her attempt to clarify what it is to be a person. We have a genuine sort of soul-structure,  a multifacetedness in our self-knowledge; spatial metaphors are an attempt to characterize this, given that we don't have convenient words for what is being discussed.  She agrees with Teresa that the "ego which apprehends, observes, and works upon its own self as if this self were a purely external thing evidently does not have its seat in the interior of the castle" (p. 433), and that self-knowledge is closely related to interiority. As she says:  

In its innermost being the essence of the soul is completely overt to itself. When the ego lives in this interiority, i.e., in the ground of its being where it is truly at home and in its own, it experiences in some measure the meaning of its being and feels the collected power that precedes the division into individual powers or faculties. And when the ego's life issues from this interiority, it lives a full life and attains to the height of its being. (p. 438)

 
This transformation to interiority is a gradual process; in particular, it is a gradual process in which the person becomes more fully what they are called to be:  the call to interiority is an appeal to the person, to the intellect, to the free will. And we do experience a call to interiority. It does not compel, but to dwell in our castle in a more interior way is to understand ourselves more fully and to be more at home with who we are; the call to interiority is the call to 'take a stand' with respect to what sort of persons we will be, the voice of conscience: "Reason and faith are both appeals of the soul, calling it 'to enter into its own self' and to mold human life from the innermost center" (p. 440).

This only barely scratches the surface of the investigations of the two Teresas on this point. I find it immensely interesting from a philosophical perspective; in part, because I think they are both on to something very important about the nature of self-knowledge, and in part because it highlights that there is an immense amount of moral psychology and philosophical anthropology locked in spiritual classics. It's perhaps worth noting, too, that recognition of this is important to doing more justice to the actual participation of women in the Colloquium of Ages that is the history of philosophy. There are many important philosophical insights from women located in works of piety and spirituality with which, for various reasons, they often were in more of a position to write than they were to write any treatise that would be more stereotypically 'philosophical'. So the purpose of this post is to begin calling attention to that hidden treasure.

More on Priestcraft and Enthusiasm

This is a follow-up to my "Wisdom from Campbell" post. It occurs to me that, while in practice the use of the priestcraft-and-enthusiasm locus is very vague, and more social in application than anything, both of the words seem to have something to do with way in which revelation is mediated. In 'priestcraft' revelation is entirely mediated by a magisterial hierarchy; in 'enthusiasm' revelation is entirely mediated by personal inspiration, conscience, or inner light. This is likely the origin of the Scylla-and-Charybdis notion; the establishment churches of Britain would have seen themselves - in different ways, obviously - as avoiding either extreme. The social aspect would have come from the actual groups that would receive these labels, and thus would tend to indicate those advocating, from a religious perspective, either hierarchialism (if that's the right word for it)or libertariarianism, in contradiction to the establishment compromises. Thus Quakers, of all people, could be seen as dangerous to society (which some people certainly did consider them to be): their religious views, springing from their notion of 'inner light', would have been seen as a religious excuse for anarchy.
 
Such is my hypothesis, anyway. The facts I build it on are 1) the way philosophical thinkers in the period actually use the topos, and 2) the sort of conclusions they draw from it. But I'm sure there's some intrepid historian out there who, from the more purely historical side, has touched on this distinction in some way that would allow for a more precise filling out (or correction) of this suggestion. If anyone has come across anything in this regard that might be of some use, let me know.

Absolute Proof of My Geekiness

"Gnostical Turpitude" has a post referring back to an earlier post on the issue of whether chess and quizbowl should be considered sports. I agree with him that it's silly to consider them such. But I must confess...
 
In high school I lettered in quizbowl.
 
Seriously.
 
Now that's the most embarrassing thing I've ever had to admit.

A Taxonomy of Evidentness

From Beattie's Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, 1.2 (I have slightly changed the exact format to make it easier to post):
 
A. Of abstract ideas & their relations (certain) -- a.k.a. mathematical evidence

• intuitive evidence (i.e., the self-evidence of first principles)
• evidence of strict demonstration (from first principles)

B. Of things really existing

• from our own experience (certain): (1a) external and internal sense; (1b) memory; (1c) legitimate causal inference.
• from our own experience (probable): (2a) based on uniformity, i.e., inference from facts experienced to unexperienced facts of the same kind; (2b) based on analogy, i.e., inference from facts experienced to unexperienced facts of a similar kind.
• from the experience of others -- evidence of testimony.

 

Beattie then goes on to defend each of these from what he sees (with some justification) as Hume's skepticism about them.

Analytic Intuitions

There is apparently considerable discussion at present on the role of intuitions in analytic philosophy. Good examples of this discussion can be found at the philosophy weblog, "Experimental Philosophy," here. It's an interesting sort of debate; I find myself a bit perplexed by aspects of it, though. Here's why.
 
When I say I do history of philosophy, that's what I do. That is, that's where I start; and I start floating around various texts in the history of philosophy (usually early modern and medieval) and look at analytic philosophy in light of that background. As far as I can tell, this is fairly rare; most people who would say they do history of philosophy start with the more modern stuff, and examine the historical stuff in light of it. What this difference means in my case is that, despite a considerable interest in many of the things analytic philosophers do, especially these days, I am often puzzled by the assumptions made by analytic philosophers, and by the methods they sometimes employ. This whole 'intuition' thing is a case in point.
 
There was a time when 'intuition' would have conveyed something fairly precise. Intuitive cognition would be, roughly, thinking about something that was present. It would be distinguished from abstractive cognition, thinking about something absent. When Cartesians use 'intuitio' or its cognates, they are probably heavily influenced by this usage; we have an intuition of our being because when we think, well, there we are. Here and there you can find analytic philosophers using the term in something like this way, but it's not the common usage.
 
More common is something like what Berkeley and the Scottish common sense philosophers would call 'the plain dictates of common sense'. But it seems to me that the Scottish common sense philosophers were far more sophisticated in their appeal to common sense than analytic philosophers ever are in their appeals to intuition. For one thing, there was a clear criterion, derived from Berkeley, of what got to count as a 'plain dictate of common sense', namely, the principle under consideration had to be essential for practical life, i.e., for making any sense of life at all. Thus, 'Bodies exist' is a dictate of common sense. 'I exist' is a dictate of common sense.  'Memory under normal conditions is at least roughly reliable' would be a plain dictate of common sense. And so forth. It was a very pragmatic notion. And the Scottish common sense philosophers were not satisfied with vague appeals to common sense; rather, they attempted to formulate, as exactly as they could, the principles that common sense embodied, and to show (Beattie, for instance, devotes considerable time to this)  that rejecting those principles, or throwing doubt on them, leads to a sort of practical absurdity. Skepticism about these particular principles, in other words, falls prey to the old apraxia objection, that it would make practical life impossible.
 
Analytic philosophers do not do this, or if they do, do so much more rarely. And indeed, while 'intuitions' as used by analytic philosophers sometimes seem a lot like 'plain dictates of common sense', in many cases they are very different. Sometimes it seems to mean just 'spontaneous judgment'. Sometimes it seems to mean 'common platitude'. Sometimes, indeed, it seems almost to mean the oracular pronouncements of some magical faculty that just knows the way things are. Sometimes it seems to mean just 'my considered opinion'. Sometimes it means 'what people would ordinarily say'. Perhaps I'm just missing something, but there seems no commonality here. 'Intuition', in effect, just means, 'I want this taken for granted (in some relevant way) because I don't want to be bothered with actually arguing for it right now.' Or so it seems.
 
I remember one night after a class I was hanging with some of my students at the GSU pub and the subject of analytic philosophy came up in the discussion. I don't remember all the details, but I do remember part of the exchange. One of my students, a top-notch student with a strong interest in analytic philosophy happened to say in the midst of the discussion:
 
I think one of the differences between the analytic approach and other approaches is that the analytic approach involves fewer assumptions.
 
Oh! I said, dropping my jaw (half-tongue-in-cheek, half-genuinely-surprised). And you actually believe that?
 
I always think of that when I hear anyone doing analytic philosophy appeal to intuitions.

Elders of Pherae Draft

Here is the second scene to the Alcestis verse-play I've been writing off and on. It's in a slightly earlier stage of draft than the Lament of Alcestis, the first scene, which I posted here. The characters are the Chorus of Elders, of which three, designated by numbers in square brackets speak here.
 
Elders of Pherae
 
[1] Today's the fatal day, the time --
[2] The house is quiet, cold, and dark
With all death's pall, and yet no sign
Of dirge, procession through the park,
Nor voices raised in sorrowed rhyme --
[1] Today's the day, I know the stars --
Lies are foreign to their dance;
This day was seen from well afar;
God's wisdom leaves no path to chance.--
[3] May God save all from mortal glance!
 
Alas! Our queen, so good and kind!--
[2] No mourning meets our open ears,
No flowers for the dead we find;
Perhaps 'tis but our shying fears
That bring this coldness to our minds?--
[1] The cold of death, not fear, this is,
the cold of dank, the cold of tomb,
the cold - alas! - of Hades' mists;--
[3] Alas! You speak such words of doom,
And yet they fit too well this gloom!
 
You speak, I fear, the dreaded word
That truth makes into ruthless law;
Not mage's stars nor augur's birds
Show mortal man such cause to awe --
 
[2] The fear we feel may yet be found
To be the mist of fog and mind
And all the tracks of silent sound
That fancy's phantoms have designed.

Wisdom from Campbell

Nothing is more common with polemic writers, than to complain of the pride of those who impugn their theories. It requires no great penetration to discern, that the pride of the writer is the source of the complaint. The charge is commonly reciprocal, and just on both sides. Would you know which is the proudest? You will not mistake the matter greatly in concluding, that it is he who on this topic makes the loudest clamour. But of all the species of pride and presumption that have ever yet appeared, it is certainly the most extravagant, for a puny mortal, the insect of a day, a reptile of the dust, to arrogate the prerogative of omniscience, to ascend the throne of the Most High, and to point the thunders of Almighty power. Is it to be wondered that such a disposition should produce a spirit of persecution? It would be miraculous if it did not. Can the man who does not hesitate to usurp one function of Omnipotence, hesitate to usurp another? Would he who scruples not to pronounce sentence, scruple to execute it if it were in his power? Yes, upon reflection I am persuaded, that far the greater part of those blind zealots themselves would stop here. We are however too amply warranted by experience to say at least, that they will not scruple to consign him to a stake in this world, whom they do not scruple, in their usurped capacity of judges, to hell-fire in the next.
 
We sometimes hear much of Antichrist amongst our controvertists. Who is Antichrist? It is an usurper, who, under pretence of honouring Christ, supplants him, perverting the power he has assumed to the seduction of the disciples, 2 Thess. ii. 3, &c. We have seen already, that, in the political artifices we have been combating, there is a double usurpation of the prerogatives of our Lord, both as the only infallible instructor of the people, and as the supreme judge of the world. This is therefore that malign spirit of Antichrist, whose baleful influences, have, alas! been but too widely diffused, to the unspeakable hurt of that godlike charity, without which, with all our pretensions to faith, and zeal, and knowledge, we are at best but sounding brass and tinkling cymbals, 1 Cor. xiii. 1-3.
 
What then shall we say of those who differ from us in important articles? What shall we say? That, in our judgment, they err, not knowing the Scriptures. What more should we say? It belongs to the Omniscient, the Searcher of hearts, and to him only, to say whether their error, if they be in an error, proceeds from pravity of disposition, or from causes in which the will had no share. Is it for us to determine, how much wood, and hay, and stubble, may be reared up on the only foundation, Jesus Christ? Though the foreign materials, by the apostle's account, will be consumed in the fiery trial they must undergo, yet the builder himself will be saved, 1 Cor. iii. 15. We are ever, like Peter, turning aside from the point in hand, (which is what immediately concerns ourselves,) and, by a curiosity much less justifiable than his, inquiring, what will become of this man? When such a question arises in thy mind, O my fellow-Christian, think thou hearest the voice of thy divine Master checking thy impertinence in the words addressed to the apostle, What is that to thee? Follow thou me? John xxi. 22.
 
George Campbell,  "The Spirit of the Gospel a Spirit Neither of Superstition Nor of Enthusiasm," preached before the synod of Aberdeen, 9 April 1771.
 
I've taken this from (to give it its full name) A Dissertation on Miracles: Containing an Examination of the Principles Advanced by David Hume, Esq., in An Essay on Miracles; with a Correspondence on the Subject by Mr. Hume, Dr. Campbell, and Dr. Blair. To Which are Added, Sermons and Tracts. A New Edition. Thomas Tegg (1839) 191-192.
 
"Enthusiasm" in the title of the sermon doesn't mean what we would mean by it. It was common among establishment Protestants in this period to distinguish true religion from the two opposing vices of superstition (also called priestcraft) and enthusiasm. Thus, theologians of both the Church of England and the Church of Scotland saw themselves as occupying the golden mean or happy medium between Catholicism and the more radical forms of Protestantism (Baptists, Methodists, and Quakers, mostly); the former was considered excessively rigid, and the latter excessively loose, in religious and social structure (and usually doctrine as well). It was a common polemical trope, which Hume takes up for his own use in several places.

Compensations

Blogger has been infuriating me on every side the past week and a half; it's been inconstant and what seemed an endless trial of my patience. Despite having several things to post yesterday, I had to limit myself to one post each on Siris and Houyhnhnm Land because it was giving me so much trouble. But I go to create a post today and lo! they have decked out the interface with many delightful additions. So all is forgiven.

Cosmological Arguments

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has put an article, by Bruce Reichenbach, on-line here. It's worth reading. I do find it a bit disappointing, however, in some ways. Cosmological arguments are all causal arguments. It is, however, simply no longer the case that everyone means the same things when they are talking about causes. So there's a sense in which any discussion of the cosmological argument, at least any that does not discuss in some detail the different sorts of causation to which people are appealing (and how they are doing it), is of limited use. An example. Reichenbach lays out Craig's Kalam argument, then says, "The basis for the argument's first premise is the Causal Principle that undergirds all cosmological arguments." What would such a Causal Principle be? It would have to undergird all of Aquinas's distinct proofs, Craig's Kalam argument, and Leibniz's sufficient reason argument. Reichenbach glosses the principle as "every contingent being has a cause of its being," but contingency only appears in one of Aquinas's arguments (and it's not clear he means it in the same way Reichenbach does - Aquinas's Third Way is the hardest of his arguments to interpret). The others rely on motion, efficacy, maximality in a genus (which is as much a causal argument as others, but would be very difficult to put in a form using Reichenbach's Causal Principle), and intentio or disposition of causes. None of these uses, so far as I can see, Reichenbach's principle. To be sure, some of them use similar principles; but they appeal to different characteristics of different sorts of causation. To say that this one principle "undergirds" all cosmological arguments seems to imply that all cosmological arguments appeal to it in some way. But they don't seem to do so; some might, but most appeal to other principles that allow similar sorts of causal inferences.

There is another problem, this one less important. Reichenbach says:

Although Aquinas was quick to make the identification between God and the first mover or first cause, such identification goes beyond the causal reasoning that informs the argument. Instead it requires a lengthy discussion of the supreme beings that are found in the diverse religions and careful correlation of the properties of a necessary being with those of a religious being like God, to discern compatibilities and incompatibilities (Attfield).

This is often said; but it has never made any sense to me as a complaint against Aquinas. Aquinas is actually very careful and reasonable on this point. The usual point of an argument for the existence of God is that you argue for something that at least some people have traditionally called 'divine' or 'God' or somesuch. Or else, failing that, you argue for the existence of something having a description someone could reasonably consider to be a divine attribute. 'God' is not a proper name; it is a common noun that is treated as a proper name because people (even atheists) have gotten used to the idea of its applying to only one actual thing. If by 'God' you mean the one actual thing to which this description would refer if Christianity is right, then the cosmological arguments don't conclude to the existence of God in that way; they only do so under limited types of description. Nor would it be reasonable to expect otherwise. I cannot fault an argument, designed to show the existence of the Prime Minister of Canada, on the basis that the argument doesn't conclude 'This particular man, Paul Martin, with all these particular sorts of properties, exists' but only 'There is a Prime Minister of Canada'. The latter is all you need from the existence argument. If you are interested in other things, then you take the existence argument and use it to move on and look at other things. And this is precisely what Aquinas does; nor is he "quick" to do it, unless you think the entire Treatise on God in the Summa Theologiae or the entire first book of Summa Contra Gentiles can be called "quick" discussions. The existence arguments only yield something(s) with properties that can reasonably be called 'divine'; that's all he actually needs in the argument itself, and that's all he asks we recognize - because he can use these properties to deduce other properties and start filling out the details of what you actually can know about this 'God' you've shown to exist. And this is exactly what one would expect. But, as I said, this is a relatively minor beef; it only affects Aquinas.

My real complaint about the article (it is not alone) is that it spends way too much time on Craig's Kalam argument and nowhere near enough time on the traditional arguments, which get massively shortchanged. This is unfortunate, because actual objections relevant to the traditional (especially medieval) arguments are hard to find - all three of the people from whom the main objections to the traditional arguments tend to be taken (Russell, Hume, and Kant) can fairly easily be shown not to have had any considerable acquaintance with the traditional arguments; and it's unclear how any of the three objections Reichenbach gives actually are relevant to (say) Aquinas's or Scotus's arguments, since those arguments are arguments to the effect that, if you allow that there are certain properties that are caused, to deny there is a first in each of these causal series leads to contradictions. And they actually have arguments for such a conclusion (sometimes in other places). The vague handwavings of Hume, Kant, and Russell do nothing in comparison with that, even on the assumption that they are more-or-less right.

I don't want to give the impression that it's a bad article. It's actually quite good, well worth reading, particularly given how condensed it has to be as an encyclopedia article. The fact is, 'cosmological arguments' is an immense and complicated subject whose surface can barely be scratched by a discussion this short. I would say: it's a good place for people to start. And that's exactly what an encyclopedia article should be.

(My attention was called to this entry by a post by Matthew Mullins at Prosblogion.)

'Bubled' Is a Great Word

I'm starting a collection of comments by Samuel Johnson on David Hume.

Quoted in Sharbo, Samuel Johnson's Critical Opinions, p. 44.
"a man who has so much conceit to tell all mankind that they have been bubled for ages and he is the wise man who sees better than they, and has so little scrupolosity as to venture to oppose those principles which have been thought necessary to human happiness....I know not indeed whether he has first been a blockhead and that has made him a rogue, or first been a rogue and that has made him a blockhead."

The rest are from Boswell's Life of Johnson:

Wednesday 20 July 1763
The conversation now turned upon Mr. David Hume's style. JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, his style is not English; the structure of his sentences is French....'

Thursday 21 July 1763...JOHNSON. 'We can have no dependence upon that instinctive, that constitutional goodness which is not founded upon principle. I grant you that such a man may be a very amiable member of society. I can conceive him placed in such a situation that he is not much tempted to deviate from what is right; and as every man prefers virtue, when there is not some strong incitement to transgress its precepts, I can conceive ofhim doing nothing wrong. But if such a man stood in need of money, I should not like to trust him; and I should certainly not trust him with young ladies, for there there is always a temptation. Hume, and other sceptical innovators, are vain men, and will gratify themselves at any expence. Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken themselves to errour. Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull. If I could have allowed myself to gratify my vanity at the expence of truth, what fame might I have acquired. Every thing which Hume has advanced against Christianity had passed through my mind long before he wrote. Always remember this, that after a system is well settled upon positive evidence, a few partial objections ought not to shake it. The human mind is so limited, that it cannot take in all the parts of a subject, so that there may be objections raised against any thing. There are objections against a plenum, and objections against a vacuum; yet one of them must certainly be true.'

I mentioned Hume's argument against the belief of miracles, that it is more probable that the witnesses to the truth of them are mistaken, or speak falsely, than that the miracles should be true. JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, the great difficulty of proving miracles should make us very cautious in believing them. But let us consider; although GOD has made Nature to operate by certain fixed laws, yet it is not unreasonabe to think that he may suspend those laws in order to establish a system highly advantageous to mankind. Now the Christian religion is a most beneficial system, as it gives us light and certainty where we were before in darkness and doubt. The miracles which prove it are attested by men who had no interest in deceiving us; but who, on the contrary, were told that they should suffer persecution, and did actually lay down their lives in confirmation of the truth of the facts which they asserted. Indeed, for some centuries, the heathens did not pretend to deny the miracles; but said they were performed by the aid of evil spirits. This is a circumstance of great weight. Then, Sir, when we take the proofs derived from prophecies which have been so exactly fulfilled, we have most satisfactory evidence. Supposing a miracle possible, as to which, in my opinion, there can be no doubt, we have as strong evidence for the miracles in support of Christianity, as the nature of the thing admits.'

February 1766
He said, 'no honest man could be a Deist; for no man could be so after a fair examination of the proofs of Christianity.' I named Hume. JOHNSON. 'No, Sir; Hume owned to a clergyman in the bishoprick of Durham, that he had never read the New Testament with attention.' I mentioned Hume's notion, that all who are happy are equally happy; a little miss with a new gown at a dancing school ball, a general at the head of a victorious army, and an orator, after having made an eloquent speech in a great assembly. JOHNSON. 'Sir, that all who are happy, are equally happy, is not true. A peasant and a philosopher may be equally satisfied, but not equally happy. Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness. A peasant has not capacity for having equal happiness with a philosopher.'

Spring 1768
His prejudice against Scotland appeared remarkably strong at this time. When I talked of our advancement in literature, 'Sir, (said he,) you have learnt a little from us, and you think yourselves very great men. Hume would never have written History, had not Voltaire written it before him. He is an echo of Voltaire.'

September 1769
I told him that David Hume had made short collection of Scotticisms. 'I wonder, (said Johnson,) that he should find them.'

Thursday 26 October 1769
When we were alone, I introduced the subject of death, and endeavoured to maintain that the fear of it might be got over. I told him that David Hume said to me, he was no more uneasy to think he should not be after this life, than that he had not been before he began to exist. JOHNSON. 'Sir, if he really thinks so, his perceptions are distrubed; he is mad: if he does not think so, he lies. He may tell you, he holds his finger in the flame of a candle, without feeling pain; would you believe him? When he dies, he at least gives up all he has.'

Tuesday 16 September 1777
I mentioned to Dr. Johnson, that David Hume's persisting in his infidelity, when he was dying, shocked me much. JOHNSON. 'Why should it shock you, Sir? Hume owned he had never read the New Testament with attention. Here then was a man, who had been at no pains to inquire into the truth of religion, and had continually turned his mind the other way. It was not to be expected that the prospect of death would alter his way of thinking,unless GOD sould send an angel to set him right.' I said, I had reason to believe that the thought of annihilation gave Hume no pain. JOHNSON. 'It was not so, Sir. He had a vanity in being thought easy. It is more probable that he should assume an appearance of ease, than that so very improbable a thing should be, as a man not afraid of going (as, in spite of his delusive theory, he cannot be sure but he may go,) into an unknown state, and not being uneasy at leaving all he knew. And you are to consider, that upon his own principle of annihilation he had not motive to speak the truth.'

Monday 22 September 1777
Talking of Dr. Johnson's unwillingness to believe extraordinary things, I ventured to say, 'Sir, you come near Hume's argument against miracles, "That it is more probable witnesses should lie, or be mistaken, than that they should happen."' JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, Hume, taking the proposition simply, is right. But the Christian revelation is not proved by the miracles alone,but as connected with prophecies, and with the doctrines in confirmation of which the miracles were wrought.'

1783
He would not allow Mr. David Hume any credit for his political principles, though similar to his own; saying of him, 'Sir, he was a Tory by chance.'

My Two Cents on Delayed Presidential Elections

There's been some talk recently of potentially delaying the Presidential elections if there is a terrorist attack soon before them; some of this talk has been interesting, although most (as is often the case when political partisanship enters the discussion) is a bit childish.

My thought on the matter is this. The elections should not be delayed. The only reason for delay would be fear of excessive foreign influence on the election process. The Electoral College was set up by the Founding Fathers in part in order to shield the Presidential elections from such influence. A terrorist attack would put the Electoral College to the test as it has never been put to the test before; but it is there for precisely this sort of reason. And so long as the states have their election laws in order, it will work.

-> As it turns out, I'm not the only one to think so; see this op-ed at the Washington Times.

Yes, and I Too Was Born Full-Grown from the Mind of Zeus

Athena


?? Which Of The Greek Gods Are You ??
brought to you by Quizilla

-> But really, is "Education" the only thing the gray-eyed goddess is putting on her resume these days? She invented olives, beekeeping, weaving, and military strategy; but I guess that just doesn't get a pagan deity hired like it used to.

-> And she really wouldn't have made a good God of Education; she was notorious for her distaste for women--she taught all her arts to men, and only taught women lessons in the sinister sense of the word.

Novalis

I promised to say a bit more about Novalis, so after a brief refresher, here goes. Novalis was born Friedrich von Hardenberg in 1772; he became a major figure in the German Romantic movement in the 1790s; and he died young of tuberculosis in 1801. His most famous works are his poetic cycle, Hymns to the Night, and the fictional works, The Apprentices at Sais and Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Hymns to the Night can be found here; it's an updated version of George MacDonald's 1897 translation, which would make it worth reading on its own; the unmodified version can be found at The Golden Key, one of the best on-line sites about George MacDonald, here. The most famous passage from Heinrich von Ofterdingen, on the Blue Flower, can be found here. The Blue Flower became an extemely important symbol in the Romantic movement. (The same site is slowly building up the only on-line translation of Heinrich von Ofterdingen here.) The penname 'Novalis', which means something like 'breaker of new ground', was first used, as near as I can tell in his collection of fragments, Pollen, also called Miscellaneous Observations (which, besides Hymns to the Night, a few other of the fragmentary works, and excerpts from the others, is the only Novalis I've actually managed to read). Thomas Carlyle's 1829 essay on Novalis is here.

The Romantics saw themselves as engaged in what they called Symphilosophie, i.e., philosophy as a genuinely collaborative enterprise. The fragmentary genre was, particularly by Novalis, seen as a way of engaging in symphilosophy; he saw the fragments in his fragment-collections as 'literary seedings' (hence the name Pollen for one of them).

The following are some fragments from his various fragmentary collections that I found especially of interest. The translations are those of Margaret Mahony Stoljar, in her edition of Novalis: Philosophical Writings, SUNY Press, 1997.

From Miscellaneous Observations

16. We are close to waking when we dream that we are dreaming.

19. How can a person have a sense of something if he does not have the germ of it within himself. What I am to understand must develop organically within me--and what I seem to learn is only nourishment--stimulation of the organism.

38. Man has his being in truth--if he sacrifices truth he sacrifices himself. Whoever betrays truth betrays himself. It is not a question of lying--but of acting against one's conviction.

50. Every beloved object is the center of a paradise.

62. Humanity is a cosmic role.

84. The most intimate community of all knowledge--the republic of learning is the high purpose of scholars.

92. The historian endows historical beings with living form. The data of history are the mass which the historian shapes--giving it life. It follows that history also obeys all the principles of animation and of all living form, and until these principles are in place there are also no real products of the historian's art--but only traces here and there of chance animations, where involuntary genius was active.

96. Where children are, there is a golden age.

100. The wisdom of story-telling contains the history of the archetypal world--it embraces times past, present, and future.
The human world is the common instrument of the gods. Poetry unites them as it does us.

104. The art of writing books has not yet been invented. But it is on the point of being invented. Fragments of this kind are literary seedings. Many among them may indeed be steril--still, if only some grow....

125. The true reader must be an extension of the author. He is the higher court tha treceives the case already prepared by the lower court. The feeling by means of which the author has separated out the materials of his work, during reading separates out again the unformed and the formed aspects of the book--and if the reader were to work through the book according to his own idea, a second reader would refine it still more, with the result that, since the mass that had been worked through would constantly be poured into fresh vessels, the mass would finally become an essential component--a part of the active spirit.
Through impartial rereading of his book the author can refine his book himself. With strangers the particular character is usually lost, because the talent of ully entering into another person's idea is so rare. Often even in the author himself. It is not a sign of superior education and greater powers to justifiably find fault with a book. When receiving new impressions, greater sharpness of mind is quite natural.

From Logological Fragments I

7. When one begins to reflect on philosophy--then philosophy seems to us to be everything, like God, and love. It is a mystical, highly potent, penetrating idea--which ceaselessly drives us inward from all directions. The decision to do philosophy--to seek philosophy is the act of self-liberation--the thrust toward ourselves.

12. In the truest sense doing philosophy is--a caress. It bears witness to the deepest love of reflection, to absolute delight in wisdom.

14. Sophists are people who, alert to the weakness and errors of philosophers, seek to use these to their advantage or generally for certain unphilosophical, unworthy purposes--often philosophy itself. Thus they actually have nothing to do with philosophy....

24. The poem of the understanding is philosophy. It is the greatest impetus tha thte understanding gives itself about itself--union of the understanding and the imagination. Without philosophy a person remains divided in his most essential powers. He is two people--one who has understanding--and one who is a poet.
Without philosophy a poet is incomplete. Without philosophy a thinker--or a judge--is incomplete.

31. Poetry is the basis of society as virtue is the basis of the state. Religion is a mixture of poetry and virtue--can you guess, then--what it is the basis of?

43. Genius in general is poetic. Where genius has been active it has been poetically active. The truly moral person is a poet.

87. To become a human being is an art.

99. Whoever sees life other than as a self-destroying illusion is himself still preoccupied with life.
Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.

100. Everything is seed.

From the Teplitz Fragments

25. The world is a universal trope of the spirit--a symbolic picture of it.

41. Our whole life is divine service.

From the General Draft of an Encyclopedia

28. My book is to become a scientific bible--a real, and ideal model--and seed of all books.

35. Every branch of learning becomes poetry--after it has become philosophy.

45. Philosophy is actually homesickness--the urge to be everywhere at home.

48. A fairy tale is actually like a dream image--without context. An ensemble of marvelous things and incidents--for example, a musical fantasy--the harmonic products of an Aeolian harp--nature itself.
If a story is brought into the fairy talke, this is already an alien interference.

From the Last Fragments

12. Doing philosophy is only a threefold or double kind of waking--being awake--consciousness.

15. What is it that shapes a person if it is not his life history? And in the same way a splendid person is shaped by nothing other than world history.
Many people live better in the past and the future than in the present.
Even th epresent cannot at all be understood without the past and without a high degree of education--saturation with the highest products, the purest spirit of the age and of the past, and a digestion of this, from what source the human prophetic view arises, which the historian, the active, idealistic person who works with the data of history can as little do without as the grammatical and rhetorical storyteller.
In his discourse the historian must often become an orator. Indeed he speaks gospels, fo rthe whole of history is gospel.

26. Poetry is true idealism--contemplation of the world as one would contemplate a great mind--self-consciousness of the universe.

National Boundaries and Rainbows

There's an interesting post at "Early Modern Notes" on the issues with the label 'early modern'. I'm not sure I have any clear (or even consistent) view on the subject yet. History of philosophy is a peculiar sort of historical discipline; it is the only historical discipline I can think of which is itself, essentially and necessarily, a form of the thing it studies. All history of philosophy is, necessarily, a way of doing philosophy - the question can never be whether one will do philosophy by doing history of philosophy, but only whether one will do it badly or well. This leads to additional peculiarities, and I think a number of them have to do with how we divide up history. The primary trouble with labels in history of philosophy is not, I think, historical at all; historical labels potentially interfere with good philosophy, which in turn can make for bad history of philosophy. The reason is that labels can isolate a period and lead to putting blinders on. All historical change is continuous; even climactic events and catastrophes fit flush with what precedes and what comes after, in the sense that they can't be isolated from them. This is especially true, I think, in history of philosophy. In this sense there is a sort of expendability to the labels.

On the other hand, the 'early modern' label is also in a sense objective and real, a bit like national labels and boundaries are. National labels and boundaries are both arbitrary and imaginary, since they are simply made up by human beings, but they are objective and real in that, if you fail to take account of them in history, it can lead to distortion in your account. The divisions between 'early modern' and other periods are in this sense imaginary and arbitrary, and have all the vagueness and merely-approximateness (to coin a barbarism) that follow from being so; but, in history of philosophy, at least, they are real. For instance, philosophically speaking, in the early modern period the people involved explicitly see themselves as making a break with the past; there is a distinct period to which one can apply the label because the people involved in the history deliberately made the period as distinct as they could from the previous periods. There are a number of other signs - quick shifts in patterns of influence, topics discussed, descriptions of reason and philosophy, etc. The break isn't sharp; it varies from country to country (in Britain 'early modern' can reasonably be said to last well into the 19th century, but in Germany one can reasonably say it ends before the end of the 18th); you can use different criteria for where you put the endpoints (e.g., at the publication of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, at the French Revolution, there's even an argument to be made that it should end with Hume's publication of A Treatise of Human Nature in 1740); and it will vary from historical discipline to historical discipline (I've given common suggestions for history of early modern philosophy). But the (relative) suddenness of the change is real.

Further, even in the slowest and most gradual historical change (I suspect this would in some periods be exemplified by, e.g., the long-term stable changes in the socioeconomic conditions of peasants), there can be real differences that need to be distinguished out. The visible spectrum shades continually from very red to very purple. Color terms are notoriously arbitrary in how they divide the spectrum. But red is still very different from purple, and it's useful to have a way of speaking more precisely about the differences, even if the exact divisions between terms are picked out at random. So I suppose my thought is that the 'early modern' label is more than a convenience - but less than a real name. It doesn't pick out anything very distinct; but its value isn't in doing that anyway, but in doing something else, namely, making it possible to talk about the history in the first place.

Or something like that!

In a Class of My Own: Useless Facts About This Blog

As near as I can tell from several searches on the web, I run the only two weblogs that regularly touch on topics in early modern philosophy.

In a Yahoo! search for "Siris," Siris came up #8. (Blast that Smithsonian Institute Research Information System!) For "Houyhnhnm Land" H.L. came up #2 (after Gulliver's Travels, of course). On Google, "Siris" turned up Siris in the #10 position. I am inclined to think that neither of these will be common search terms.

Searching for "Lady Mary Shepherd" Google gives Siris on the third page. Two of my class webpages turn up earlier. As near as I can tell, this weblog is the only source on the web for any information about Lady Mary Shepherd's philosophical work that goes beyond the Thoemmes Press entry by Jennifer McRobert. I hope in the next few days to continue my discussion of Lady Mary Shepherd's causal theory, so Siris is the happening place for Shepherd studies. More credit for me!

True Metaphors (LFPA)

Citation: Timothy Binkley, "On the Truth and Probity of Metaphor," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Winter 1974, 171-180.

Summary: In this paper, Binkley takes on a set of assumptions about the nature of metaphor, namely, that metaphors taken at face value are either false or meaningless, and that the linguistic norm is literal. More specifically, he argues "(a) that metaphors need not involve false or nonsensical uses of language, (b) that metaphors can be true, i.e., that they can be used to state true propositions, and (c) that the truth-value of a metaphorical claim can be discerned in fundamentally the same way we discern the truth-value of a literal one" (171).

Why would someone suggest that "Richard is a fox" is false? The reason is apparently the fact that Richard is not a fox, but a man. But as Binkley notes, "Groups of words which can be used as contradictories will be contradictory only if they are used with the same sense (but for the negation) and in the same context" (172). Given that "Richard is a fox" is metaphorical and "Richard is not a fox" is literal, they do not contradict. The view that the two contradict can only occur if we confuse "Richard is a fox" taken metaphorically with "Richard is a fox" taken literally; but although they use the same words, they do not express the same proposition. Although these literal and metaphorical uses of the word "fox" are related, they are different uses.

To claim that "Richard is a fox" taken metaphorically is false might be taken to contradict the fact that Richard is not literally a fox; but again, the falsity of "Richard is a fox" does not follow from that fact. Then Brinkley notes:

One of the most widespread myths about metaphors is the idea that at the literal level they harbor an impropriety of language....The notion that the literal reading of a metaphor is false or nonsensical is too familiar to need thorough documentation. Yet there appear to be simple counter-examples to this almost universally held belief. Consider the trite "He lives in a glass house." This statement may, but need not, involve a strain in language, even at the literal level....We know that the statement is metaphorical not because we know the person in question lives in a brick house (we may have no information about where he lives), but because the conversation has been about his behavior and not about his residence. (173)

There is, in fact, no good reason to think that metaphors involve any sort of linguistic impropriety.

So we haven't found a contradictory to "Richard is a fox" yet. How about "Richard is not a fox" taken metaphorically? In a conversation, if you said Richard is a fox, I might protest, saying Richard is not a fox (his apparent cunning might really just be a lucky blunder). In such a case, Richard either is or is not a fox; we are disputing over the truth of what is said, in much the same way we might dispute over whether Richard is a good husband or a buffoon. "In all these cases, a claim can be made which is amenable to argument, which has more or less determinate criteria of evaluation, which can be supported and weakened with evidence, and so on" (174). There's some vagueness in each of these cases, but in all of them we all know more or less what is meant. To this Binkley adds another argument:

Furthermore, whether a metaphor can be true does not depend upon its age. A dead metaphor will act almost as though it were literal, and will consequently raise no special problems about truth. But a fresh metaphor is no less capable of stating truths if its author wants to make claims with it. (174)

Someone might argue, however, that metaphorical claims are true in a less direct way than literal claims, i.e., that they have truth only insofar as they are connected with literal claims, i.e., insofar as they are just literal statements embellished. It is true that metaphor depends on the literal in that we need to know the literal use of the words to recognize the metaphor; but this in itself is a limited sort of dependence, and doesn't require us to say that metaphorical language is parasitic on literal language simply speaking. We need to understand the literal use of the words to grasp the metaphor, "But once metaphorical meaning is secured, the words and the meaning are not mediated by a third term, the literal translation of the metaphor" (175). The dependence of metaphorical claims on literal claims has nothing to do with their truth or falsehood. Likewise, there doesn't seem to be any reason to demand a mediation by a literal paraphrase of the metaphor (e.g., "Richard is sly"). He notes as well that sometimes to clarify literal claims we have to resort to metaphorical paraphrases.

It is commonly thought that literal language is more precise than metaphorical language. It is true that literal language is very helpful for clarification; "however this is no reason to presume that it is any more precise in expressing meaning or any closer to 'true' meaning than the metaphorical" (174). As he notes, sometimes we mean precisely something that is vague. The literal may be more precise with respect to certain endeavors, e.g., clarification; but this does not make it a more exact expression of meaning.

Someone might hold, however, that the literal is still a more exact way of expressing reality; i.e., that "Richard is cunning" gives a more accurate picture than "Richard is a fox." This, however, need not affect their truth or falsehood at all: "Descriptive power may be affected by the precision of an expression, but truth-value is not" (177). This is true even of literal statements, which may be imprecise but still true or false. There are, likewise, criteria for the metaphorical use of statements just as there are criteria for the literal use of statements.

Binkley then goes on to identify one of the reasons why philosophers of language have so easily misled themselves on the subject.

When someone wants to put forth an example of a use of language he exhibits an expression out of context....

Because of the nature of linguistic example-giving, it will appear as though those expressions whose meanings are (on the average) less context-dependent or less in need of explication will be the most perspicuous conveyors of meaning. The examples of language which are most readily exhibited and most easily understood in the context of example-giving will be those which are least context-dependent for their meanings. Accordingly, those expressions which will appear to embody their meanings most limpidly when they are exhibited in philosophical discourse will be explicit literal sentences whose meanings are not highly sensitive to changes in context and do not rest heavily upon circumstances of their use. (178)

(Another way to put this, to use a phrase Binkley does not use, is that philosophers of language have been led by the observer-selection bias of their choice of examples.) Sentences that convey their meanings more clearly and directly as examples will not necessarily do so in actual use (and vice versa).

Three distinctions, if used appropriately, clarify how metaphors can be true or false.

a)Establishing the truth of an expression and establishing the meaning of an expression are two different activities.

b) Metaphor as a resource of language should be distinguished from the various uses to which metaphor can be put. Metaphors can be used as poetic devices; this does not mean they are exclusively so, since they can be used to state facts. "A 'literal claim' is nothing other than a claim made with literal language. Literal truth is not a kind of truth, but a truth expressed in literal language" (179) (I consider this the most important statement in the paper.)

c) We should avoid confusing the meaning of a metaphor (or any other expression) with its explication.

Evaluation: What can I say? I agree with every point Binkley makes; and most of them I had come to on my own through similar arguments before I came across this paper. (I came across it just half an hour ago when I was taking a break; and was so excited on finding this generally unread, wonderfully correct paper in a (relatively) obscure journal that I had to put it up on my weblog as LFPA.) As I've told someone before, it's a scary thing when the people who claim to be able to do philosophy of language can't even figure out that the phrase "the literal truth" involves a figurative use of the word "literal."

Lament of Alcestis Draft

Here is the current draft of an opening of a verse-tragedy I've been writing (off and on) on the myth of Alcestis and Admetus.

Lament of Alcestis

Alas! The day is here so long in dread;
Time, ever-traitor, has betrayed.
I feel it in my bones; death is near,
Perhaps today, perhaps when morning comes,
But soon - alas! the day we know will come,
The day that always is a day too soon.
O Love, yours is the hardest rule,
The sharpest pain, the never-ending grief
That is to know, before the day, of parting
(For every love must end, this wicked truth
Is harshest of all sorrows, the purest ache).
Alas! The day is near; I feel it close,
Close as friendship's kiss, and yet no friend;
Today may be the day, or mayhap the morrow's dawn
Will bring to me the ending and the night.
But can I weep, who brought this on myself?
I, who set my fate by choice - such rare choice -
Can such as I show grief and bitter pain
Without guilt of vain - absurd! - impudence?
Apollo knew my husband, tended kine
Upon the plains of Thessaly at Zeus' behest
As punishment divine for deed misdone.
Admetus, ever kind to all he knew,
Respecter of no person, impartial in good will,
Was good master to his servant-god;
The Healer in his thanks sought out the Fates,
They who spin the fates of gods and men,
To counteract Admetus' greatest fear,
The fear that chilled his heart with terror's ice,
Which was the fear of death; to die
Brought to his heart a flight of desperation.
Fate's decree was clear: all men must die,
But one exception can be made for this,
One even they must allow or fall aside.
True substitution is the highest law
In all this cosmic order, which it makes;
It alone is deeper yet than death, and more strong -
Thus sacrifice vicarious is our holy rite -
It is the heart of pure piety and love,
The core of faith, the key of hope and health,
Justice in its nature manifesting act.
One may stand for one; and even death itself
Has no defense against the sacred high exchange;
Death must bow to law, this law beyond all other law.
Admetus, fearful, begged the aid of friend and kin;
In desperation's voice he made appeal.
I, I alone responded to his plea.
I gave myself vicarious for his life;
Now soon death's hawk will swoop upon my wings.
Although I brought it on myself and chose myself,
I cannot but in heart cry out, Alas!
The day draws near, the day of death is nigh,
And woe is come, for now I, face to face,
Will meet with death who rapts us all away.

No Problem Here

I just got back from dinner; on the way there was a 'book blowout', so I stopped in to see what was offered. I came across a copy of Owen Flanagan's The Problem of the Soul. I've liked some of Flanagan's other works, and hadn't read this one, so I considered buying it. I flipped through it as I deliberated. I was a bit surprised to find him quoting a camera commercial to make a point about human nature, but I'm not a snob about such things in philosophy books; whatever works. Then a few flips later, I came across a discussion in which he talks about what 'professional philosophers' think about the mind, and in which he says that professional philosophers do not defend the immateriality of the mind. Which is, in a fashion, true. Professional philosophers don't defend the immateriality of the mind; except, of course, for the ones who do.

I put it down and bought a hardcover copy of J.R.R. Tolkien's Unfinished Tales instead.

Diligent Baroque Master of Pretty Much Everything

I am...

Take the Dead German Composer Test!

"Johann Sebastian Bach was the king of the Baroque period, master of the oratorio, the fugue, the mass, the cantata, and pretty much everything else he chose to write. He worked for the church, which fortunately was a good enough position to allow him to raise his 20 children. For all his current staggering fame, though, he was unknown in his lifetime. His rediscovery can be attributed to Felix Mendelssohn, who wasn't mentioned on this quiz until now.
A few key works: B-Minor Mass, The Well-Tempered Clavier, The Art of the Fugue, Brandenburg Concerti"

And as it happens, I think Bach the coolest composer. So I am consistent....

Ordinary Language (LFPA)

Citation: Gilbert Ryle, "Ordinary Language," The Philosophical Review, LXII (1953), 167-186. This was reprinted in Charles E. Caton, ed., Philosophy and Ordinary Language, University of Illinois Press (1963), 108-127, whence I take it.

Summary: Gilbert Ryle is always a bit difficult to summarize, but here's my attempt at it (with lots of block-quoting - sorry). The article is an examination of arguments that turn on "references to what we can and cannot say" (108), and in particular, with the dispute over whether these sorts of arguments are legitimate. He does this by examining the phrase "the use of ordinary language."

1. "Ordinary Language." Ryle carefully distinguishes "the use of ordinary language" from "ordinary linguistic usage" and "the ordinary use of the expression '...' ". In "the use of ordinary language" the word 'ordinary' is in contrast with things like 'esoteric', 'technical', 'poetical', 'archaic', etc. It indicates the vernacular or common language. In "the ordinary use of the expression," however, 'ordinary' is contrasted with 'non-stock' or 'non-standard'. If a term is very technical, laypeople will not know its 'ordinary' use; if it is a conversational term, most people will know its 'ordinary' uses (and many of its non-standard uses, too, if it has any). This sort of 'ordinary' is "philosophically colourless" (110); when we use it, all we are doing is making it easier for others to get the reference, and disputes about which uses are the standard uses are not philosophically interesting. When a specialist of any sort is looking at the ordinary use of a given expression, he is not looking at its colloquial use, but at its special use.

2. "Use." (This is a good section, so I'll blockquote quite a bit.) Ryle notes that the operative word in the phrase "the ordianry use of the expression" is 'use', not 'expression':

Hume's question was not about the word 'cause'; it was about the use of 'cause'. It was just as much about the use of 'Ursache'. For the use of 'cause' is the same as the use of 'Ursache', though 'cause' is not the same word as 'Ursache'. Hume's question was not a question about a bit of the English language in any way in which it was not a question about a bit of the German language. (112)

He then goes on to note,

Putting the stress on the word 'use' helps to bring out the important fact that the enquiry is an enquiry not into the other features or properties of the word or coin or pair of boots, but only into what is done with it, or with anything else with which we do the same thing. That is why it is so misleading to classify philosophical questions as linguistic questions--or as non-linguistic ones.

It is, I think, only in fairly recent years that philosophers have picked up the trick of talking about the use of expressions, and even made a virtue of so talking. Our forefathers, at one time, talked instead of the concepts or ideas corresponding to expressions. This was in many ways a very convenient idiom, and one which in most situations we do well to retain. It had the drawback, though, that it encouraged people to start Platonic or Lockean hares aboutthe status and provenance of these concepts or ideas. (112-113)

He continues this brief historical discussion a bit more to suggest why philosophers started talking about uses of expressions, then notes that one of the great merits fof this idiom is that it allows us to talk about misuse.

3. "Use" and "Utility." There are problems with the idiom, however; one of which is that people can read 'use' as 'utility' or 'usefulness', and conclude that the use of an expression is what it is useful for. This can sometimes be profitable, but there is a fundamental difference between 'use' (vs. uselessness) and 'use' (vs. misuse). "Questions about the use of an expression are often, though not always, questions about the way to operate with it; not questions about what the employer of it needs it for" (115). The What-for question can be asked; but usually the answer is obvious.

4. "Use" and "Usage." "Much more insidious than this confusion," Ryle says, "is the confusion between a 'use', i.e., a way of operating with something, and a 'usage'" (115). This confusion, which Ryle attributes to "lots of philosophers," is a howler, since a usage is "a custom, practice, fashion or vogue"; there is no such thing as a misusage. Investigation of usage is philological; learning a usage is learning about historical or "sociological generalities." Learning a use, however, is learning how to do something. To avoid confusions like these, Ryle suggests using the cognates of 'employ' instead.

Ryle finishes his discussion of "the use of the expression" by pointing out that we can ask whether a person knows how to use a certain word, but not whether a person knows how to use a certain sentence. We can, of course, talk about the use or misuse of sentences when those sentences have "congealed" into a single phrase, but this is something different. (Ryle doesn't go into the issue; I presume it is due to the fact that we can in certain situations treat phrases or even sentences as words; but this is different from the ordinary way sentences are involved in our language.) In a typically Rylean analogy, he suggests that words are to ingredients of a pie somewhat like sentences are to pies; a cook can misuse ingredients of a pie, but cannot in this way misuse the pie itself. We can have dictionaries of words, but not dictionaries of sentences; this is not merely because of the size a sentence-dictionary would have to be, but because sentences, uncongealed into word-like phrases, are just not the sort of thing of which one could have a dictionary. The 'meaning or use of a word', therefore, is radically different from the 'meaning or use of a sentence'.

Having looked at these issues, Ryle then returns to the subject of philosophy and ordinary language:

The vogue of the phrase 'the use of ordinary language' seems to suggest to some people the idea that there exists a philosophical doctrine according to which (a) all philosophical enquiries are concerned with vernacular; and (b) in consequence, all philosophical discussions ought to be couched entierly in vernacular dictions. The inference is fallacious, though its conclusion has some truth in it. (121)

Merely from the fact that someone is writing about wit it does not follow that they should be writing wittily; just as it does not follow from the fact that someone is writing about words of Celtic origin that their point will be better expressed if it is phrased entirely in words of Celtic origin. It is true that slavery to jargon is bad writing in any case, although jargon has its uses; but "there is no a priori or peculiar obligation laid upon philosophers from talking esoterically," despite there being "a general obligation upon all thinkers and writers to try to think and writeboth as powerfully and as plainly as possible" (122).

He then goes on to say "two philosophically contentious things":
(a) There is a special reason for philosophers to jettison regularly the technical terms of their predecessors, beyond the reasons it can be helpful for any specialist to do so: "There is no peculiar field of knowledge or adeptness in which philosophers ex officio make themselves the experts--except of course the business of philosophising itself" (124).
(b) This is best put in Ryle's own words:

The appeal to what we do and do not say, or can and cannot say, is often stoutly resisted by the protagonists of one special doctrien, and stoutly pressed by tis antagonists. This doctrine is the doctrine that philosophical disputes can and should be settled by formalising the warring theses....

Of those to whom this, the formaliser's dream, appears a mere dream (I am one of them), some maintain that the logic of everyday statements and even the logic of teh statemetns of scientists, lawyers, historians and bridge-players cannot in principle be adequately represented by the formulae of formal logic. The so-called logical constants do indeed have, partly by deliberate prescription, their scheduled logical powers; but the non-formal expressions both of everyday discourse and of technical discourse have their own unscheduled logical powers, and these are not reducible without remainder to those of the carefully wired marionettes of formal logic. (124-125)

Ryle then delivers his verdict on the dispute opening the paper:

Well, then, has philosophy got something to do with the use of expressions or hasn't it? To ask this is simply to ask whether conceptual discussions, i.e., discussions about the concept of, say, voluntariness, infinitesimals, number or cause, come under the heading of philosophical discussions. Of course they do. They always have done, and they have not stopped doing so now.

He does note that formulating the discussion in these terms is only helpful in certain contexts; it's a long-winded description of what's being done, and more importantly, "preoccupation with questions about methods tends to distract us from prosecuting the methods themselves" (126). There are, however, compensating advantages, since it helps us distinguish what we're doing from what other people are doing, e.g., it helps remind us, when looking at what it means to perceive something, that we are not engaging in the psychology of perception.

I'll give my rough evaluation of this a bit later (prob. in the comments).

Supreme Court Sarcasm; and Don't You Dare Call Me a "Pack Rat"!

This is the full text of Justice Scalia's concurring opinion in Intel Corp vs. Advanced Micro Devices:

JUSTICE SCALIA, concurring in the judgment. As today’s opinion shows, the Court’s disposition is required by the text of the statute. None of the limitations urged by petitioner finds support in the categorical language of 28 U. S. C. §1782(a). That being so, it is not only (as I think) improper but also quite unnecessary to seek repeated support in the words of a Senate Committee Report—which, as far as we know, not even the full committee, much less the full Senate, much much less the House, and much much much less the President who signed the bill, agreed with. Since, moreover, I have not read the entire so-called legislative history, and have no need or desire to do so, so far as I know the statements of the Senate Report may be contradicted elsewhere. Accordingly, because the statute—the only sure expression of the will of Congress—says what the Court says it says, I join in the judgment.

(From the U. S. Supreme Court website)

It's always enjoyable to see people involved with the application of law expressing impatience with lawyers. (This brief opinion was called to my attention by browsing NRO's The Corner.)

I have sometimes thought that some of the principles that go into making a good legal brief go into making any good objection-type argument, however philosophical the topic. I recently came across this interesting discussion of how to write a legal brief, and was struck by how the "Six Enemies of the Well-Written Brief" have counterparts in the writing of philosophical responses:

1) "Attila the Hun," i.e., the person whose response is geared mostly to insult;
2) "William Faulkner and the Bronte Sisters," i.e., the person whose response is more literary flair than response;
3) "Albert Einstein," i.e., the person whose response gets bogged down in technicality and jargon;
4) "Tricky Dicky," i.e., the person whose response is more slippery salesmanship than sound reasoning;
5) "The Pack Rat," i.e., the person whose response is overloaded with irrelevant issues;
6) "The Great Ground Sloth," i.e., the person whose response is more lazy whine than reason.

Of course, in the actual rough-and-tumble of philosophical response, things are less clear-cut than in writing a legal brief. But I think it fair to say that just about every thinker, however brilliant, has a tendency to slide, if self-discipline is not exercised, into one of these characters.

No Wonder I Find My Progress So Slow

You are Xuan Wu!

Mythological background: Because the turtle has a
thick, solid shell that serves as protection -
this animal is associated with stability. You
enjoy intellectual pursuits.
Also, in Feng Shui (the Chinese myths behind
choosing a house), the black turtle's solidity
is used to protect from cold northern winds.


Which Chinese Mythological Being Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Translating English into English

A great paper by Jonathan Bennett can be found here (thanks to Ektopos for the link). The title is "On Translating Locke, Berkeley, and Hume into English." I find it fits my experience entirely, alas; students just don't know how to read early modern philosophy, and I'm inclined to agree with Bennett's diagnosis: "Their schooling has been such that they have never learned properly to read anything; and the habits of impressionistic approximation which they picked up there are not seriously opposed in many departments of the University."

I have doubts about the extent to which the proposed solution really helps, however. That's not to say I think it without value, since I think it helpful to an extent. It would be very useful for high school philosophy classes, for instance, and probably, (used with discernment) for 100-level undergraduate classes, too. But I think there are far better ways to deal with the problem. I've been trying for some time to develop an adequate response to this problem in my own teaching. Since I haven't been teaching very long, I'm still relatively new at it all. But I find that the most effective thing is guided reading in class (of which there are several different variations, some of which work better than others). The major impediments to this are time and endurance. I'm currently teaching classes that are three hours long; we started guided reading in Berkeley's Three Dialogues (each student read a passage, gave their first impression of it, and I commented). The First Dialogue, which we didn't quite finish, took the whole three hour period, excepting a ten-minute break, and by the end the students were noticeably fatigued. (On the other hand, I covered most of what I would have covered had I done straight lecture, and I'm fairly sure that the students took away more that was really Berkeley himself than they would have done under most approaches.) Another variation is to have students paraphrase the text themselves, and then go over it with them. There probably is a better variation on the guided reading approach than those I've used so far, but I prefer this approach (admittedly more difficult for both teacher and students) because:

1) The whole "it's the language" complaint is the one type of student complaint for which I have no sympathy whatsoever; when students use that one on me, I reply, "So now you have the opportunity to learn real English." I don't have problem with updating spelling and (to a lesser extent) punctuation, any more than I have problems with updating typeface; beyond that, I am not inclined to budge on the issue. 18th-century English is not convoluted; it involves a more complex, less eighth-grade-level quasi-journalistic style than is common today, since we oversimplify our sentences, but all it takes to read it is a bit of practice and familiarity.

2) I'm inclined to think that the language is much less of an actual problem than it might sometimes seem. Some students do have difficulty with it - Bennett is right when it comes to ESL students, for instance, and some students are just atrocious readers. For the most part, however, I've found from my (admittedly limited) experience that they can read it when they expend the effort, and quite well (only occasional slip-ups due to the language); they just don't consider it a high priority. I have doubts about the wisdom of what might amount to accommodating people's refusal to consider philosophy important.

3) My goals in teaching are also, I expect, somewhat different from Bennett's. My primary interest is to try to give the students a feel for the actual text that they might carry forward; obviously, there's some tension between this and giving the students a modified text. I am less interested in arguments (Bennett's 'intellectual content') than with the classics with which a great student of early modern philosophy can wrestle the rest of his life through. I see no particular value in postponing this to graduate-level studies. Further, in the case of the Scottish writers, they spent an immense amount of time and effort working to write good 18th-century English. If they could have the courtesy to try to write 18th-century English, we can have the courtesy to try to read 18th-century English. The distance between 18th-century Scots English and 18th-century standard English was much greater than the distance between 18th-century standard English and our own standard English. But maybe this is just all a sign that I'm getting old-fashioned. Sigh. So it begins....

-> I'm a little puzzled, by the way, at Bennett's modification of Cottingham's translation of Descartes; while Cottingham's translation is more or less satisfactory, it seems to me that it would have been far better to have translated colloquially directly from the French. 'Translations' of translations leave me a bit skeptical; for instance, I think Bennett may be misled by Cottingham's translation; Descartes's original seems to me to be rather far from sarcasm. Compare the Cottingham translation Bennett gives with the more closely literal John Veitch translation (paragraph 5). But I'm not a Descartes scholar, so it could be that I'm missing something.

-> It took me this long to realize (tomfool that I am) that there's a spellcheck option on the post interface! Woohoo! You can all look forward to posts with fewer typographical errors....

The Ethics of Superheroes

In the wake of Spider-Man 2 this seems a common theme, so I thought I'd try my hand at a first attempt on it.

What is the heart of the ethics of superheroes? It is the notion of a Calling (sometimes it goes by other names, e.g., freely-chosen Destiny). One of the more insightful posts I have seen on the ethics of Spider-Man 2 is found here at "Catholic Ragemonkey," because the author, Fr. Shane Tharp, rightly touches on this point. To be a superhero is to be called to live a life apart in the service of higher things (in particular, the saving of others).

This touches, it must be said, on an important increase in ethical maturity from Spider-Man to Spider-Man 2. A line from the first movie, "With great power comes great responsibility," is often quoted. What is not often noticed is that in S2, Parker outgrows seeing his life as Spider-Man in these terms. His new maturity doesn't show it to be false; what it shows is that the principle on its own simply does not capture the full ethical situation of the superhero. It is one facet only. Were the principle all there was to it, one could circumvent it by setting aside the power. But Parker finds that when he tries to do so, he in a sense sinks below himself; indeed, at his low point he even fails to rise to the level of heroism for which we could hope in an ordinary man, just turning away when someone right in front of him needed help.

Note, too, that the ethics of a superhero is in a sense highly individualized, and in a sense something in which we all participate. There is a hero in all of us, as S2 notes; there is a sense in which we are all called to be heroes. But we are not all called to be Spider-Man; only Peter Parker is. We can say to Peter Parker, "You are called to be good, Peter; indeed, you are called to be heroically good," but no one can demand of Peter Parker that he be Spider-Man, anymore than anyone can demand of an excellent firefighter or cop that he continue in that profession. But some people are called to this; and it is to their own Conscience that they are beholden. There is no general law written on the tablet of the heart saying, Thou shalt use thy superpowers for vigilante justice," in terms of which we can say, if Peter decides no longer to be Spider-Man, "Peter, you are being immoral; turn from your wicked ways." We can appeal, we can plead, we can hope, but we cannot demand. And likewise, in the ethics of superheroes, common, ordinary people are called to be heroes; but we cannot say, "We demand of you that you following your calling." What we can do is encourage people to do so - in part, by showing them the example of the ones who do. It seems to me that the ethics of superheroes places an immense amount of importance on Conscience. What, really, can oblige Peter Parker to be Spider-Man? Conscience, alone. The ethics of superheroes is an ethics not of rules or formalized duties or consequentialist calculations; it is an ethics of conscience. There is no pre-existing general set of rules for what one should do in the particular case of having superpowers. There is only ordinary morality, and the authority of conscience in guiding us, given the very particular issues of our own situation. The morality of the superhero is ordinary morality made extraordinary by a particularized call of conscience, appropriate to the unique details of this particular case. There is a commonality, that can be demanded of everyone; but there is also a particular call, that could never be the same for any two people.

One of the great moments of S2 is in the subway train just before Spider-Man is taken, when ordinary people take a stand against a villain far exceeding their abilities to control. This is exactly the sort of thing which the ethics of superheroes calls us. We are, paradoxically, not called to a level commensurate with our abilities; we are called to a level commensurate with the need of others, even if it so far exceeds our powers that we fail. This is the level of the heroic, that it concerns itself not merely with thinking about its own responsibilities but goes beyond them to think about what is really needed. It is in this sense that being heroic is supererogatory. People are called to be heroes; but none of us are in the position to demand the heroic of others. At best we may demand it of ourselves, and plead and hope for it in others. In general, it is difficult even to demand it of ourselves.

What Peter Parker learns about being Spider-Man in S2 is that there is more at stake than his own powers, more at stake even than the responsibilities required by those powers; at stake are bigger things than anything to do with himself alone. He cannot genuinely fulfill his destiny as Spider-Man if he is concerned only with his guilt for his uncle's death. He has to forget himself. This is one of the reasons why Spider-Man is so likable. He is one of those superheroes who tends to go against villains who are, in their own ways, more powerful than he is. But he does so anyway, because it doesn't matter that he's likely to lose; what matters is that people need saving, and he is the one called to save them. Recognizing the responsibilities power brings is one step in being a superhero; but the responsibilities required by our powers are all responsibilities having to do with our use of those powers. A superhero must go beyond this, and recognize that this is only one aspect of his destiny; that the salvation of others is an entirely bigger thing than anything to do with him alone. The responsibilities are still there, but they are seen in the light of something even bigger. (I'm sometimes inclined to think we over-extend this term 'responsibility'; it indicates something of immense importance. But there are many cases to which conscience calls us where saying that we had a responsibility to do what we did is not quite right. Our responsibilities for others, and over others, are really quite limited, for instance; but what is right for us to do with respect to others is much less so. One could use 'responsibility' for this, too; but I think it's a different enough that we are running the risk of equivocation by extending the word 'responsibility' to cover this as well, particularly given how much it already covers.)

A Bit from Novalis

My previous post on my Romantic propensities in blogging have set me thinking about Novalis. I don't have much in the way of Novalis on hand, but I have gone back to read George MacDonald's Phantastes again. Here is the big section quoted from Novalis at the beginning:

One can imagine stories without rational cohesion and yet filled with associations, like dreams; and poems that are merely lovely sounding, full of beautiful words, but also without rational sense and connections--with, at the most, individual verses which are intelligible, like fragments of the most varied things. This true Poesie can at most have a general allegorical meaning and an indirect efect, as music does. Thus is Nature so purely poetic, like the room of a magician or a physicist; like a children's nursery or a carptenter's shop....

A fairy-story is like a vision without rational connections, a harmonious whole of miraculous things and events--as, for example, a musical fantasia, the harmonic sequence of an Aeolian harp, indeed Nature itself.

***

In a genuine fairy-story, everything must be miraculous, mysterious, and interrelated; everythign must be alive, each in its own way. The whole of Nature must b ewondrously blended with the whole world of the Spirit. In fairy-story the tie of anarchy, lawlessness, freedom, the natural state of Nature makes itself felt in the world....The world of the fairy-story is that world which is opposed throughout to the world of rational truth, and precisely for tha treason it is so thoroughly an analogue to it, as Chaos is an analogue to the finished Creation.

And, at the beginning of Chapter XXV is this Novalis quote: Our life is no dream, but it ought to become one, and perhaps will.

More Weblog Neighborliness

It bears mentioning that the weblog "17th century", self-described as "An online community for early modernists," has put up a link to my other weblog, "Houyhnhnm Land". As I noted previously, history of early modern philosophy is more philosophy than history; but H.L. is, I think, in the process of becoming useful to those who might need resources on the metaphysical and religious thought of the 17th and 18th centuries (with a bit of the 16th and 19th thrown in).

Spidey Sense

I've been having difficulty with a chapter recently, so I set it aside for a bit and went and saw Spiderman 2. It was very well done; much better humor, better spectacle, better organization of spectacle, and better dialogue. I didn't entirely like the ending (insofar as it involved MJ). Indeed, I found Mary Jane in this movie to be largely an irritation, and thought some of her actions were inexcusable. I would have enjoyed the ending more had the movie cut out the last bit with her. But other than that, it was a great movie. The Elfin Ethicist has a post on the movie that's worth reading.

Now I'm recharged for tackling that chapter....

Political Taste

I do a lot of thinking about early modern interest in Taste (see here for my brief definition of this term), and it occurred to me that one could expand it beyond the aesthetic issues to which discussion of taste is usually confined. In a sense this is what Hume attempts to do in his ethics; and there certainly does seem to be such a thing as good and bad ethical taste, even if you think (as I think) there must be more to ethics than good taste alone. It could also, I think, be extended to politics (this was what interested me about this line of thought). One wouldn't have to hold that reasoning about politics is purely a matter of taste in order to allow that taste plays an important role in politics. Nor would one have to make a value judgment about whether (e.g.) conservatives or liberals have better political taste (which is what these debates are usually about, as can easily be seen by looking at the major conservative and liberal weblogs) in order to find the concept useful. Hume, in his essay "Of the Standard of Taste" (its organization is hard to follow, but it's worth reading) rightly notes that the real difference between good and bad critics of art (and therefore between good and bad taste) is that bad critics allow various flaws of reasoning into their evaluative judgments: 1) prejudice, which biases their perception of the actual thing being evaluated; 2) narrowness of acquaintance with the various sorts of things that might be experienced; and 3) inconsistency in the application of the general evaluative rules good taste generates. These are counteracted by 1) focusing on the actual issue at hand, and not letting prior conceptions about the people involved, or the party involved, or whatever, cloud your judgment; 2) looking into the political actions of other cultures, nations, times, &c., comparing and contrasting them - good taste is a matter of seeing things in the whole context of their possibilities, and to understand what those possibilities one needs to see what's out there; 3) striving for consistency in evaluation.

One of the neat things about a theory of political taste is that it would be eminently practical: a theory of political taste would be a theory about the basics of how to make reasoning about political matters, both private and public, more consistent, accurate, and useful. It would also give people something whereby they might engage in self-critique, improving the basis of their judgments (one of the problems with political reasoning as it stands is that everyone thinks they have good sense and their opponents don't; this is conducive to bad taste). It would also raise the political discussion to the right level. If you look at the major groups in the debate over the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, you will find that both sides put forward leaders with far better political taste than most of the people we manage to put forward: they are paradigmatic cases of political good case, exemplifying all three of the actions that signal a good political critic to an eminent degree. (Various examples are available here.) They should be the starting point (with select others) for the building of a theory of political good taste.

Incidentally, even if we set aside the issue of the standard of political taste, there is still value in reading both the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists; for one thing, some of the debates they had still go on (e.g., over the proper role of the judiciary in the Constitution, which the Anti-Federalists claimed, and the Federalists denied, was insufficiently checked and balanced), and for another, they show just how thoughtful political disagreement over major issues can be.

No, He Wasn't Crazy

Today I gave an introductory lecture on Berkeley, focusing on his theory of vision in New Theory of Vision and Alciphron and the reflections on tar-water in Siris. They're a bit heavy for a first introduction, but I like to start with them because, if you can see what Berkeley is doing there, you can see far more easily what he is doing in his better-known works. It's exhausting, but on the plus side I get to teach the jolly prelate's poem, On Tar, which I always enjoy doing. My thoughts on the poem:

Hail vulgar juice of never-fading pine!
Cheap as thou art, thy virtues are divine.
To shew them and explain (such is thy store)
There needs much modern and much ancient lore.

Here the poem opens by noting the occasion: the phenomenon of tar-water's apparent healing virtues, and, more generally, its hidden complexity. This will be a theme throughout the poem: there is more to tar than meets the eye, and if you inquire into this apparently lowly substance in the right way, you will find yourself drawn into much greater things.

While with slow pains we search the healing spell,
Those sparks of life, that in thy balsam dwell,
From lowest earth by gentle steps we rise
Through air, fire, æther to the highest skies.
Things gross and low present truth's sacred clue.
Sense, fancy, reason, intellect pursue
Her winding mazes, and by Nature's laws
From plain effects trace out the mystic cause,
And principles explore, though wrapt in shades,
That spring of life which the great world pervades,
The spirit that moves, the Intellect that guides,
Th' eternal One that o'er the Whole presides.

Note that we investigate the healing properties of tar "with slow pains." This emphasis on the difficulty of the investigation carries over from the first part of the poem, and continues until the end. By "sparks of life" Berkeley means pure invisible fire (=light=aether), which he hypothesizes to be the source of tar-water's efficacy as a medicine. He then opens the ascent them that continues through the rest of the poem. From lowest earth (tar) we proceed to air (from which plants distill their sap, which becomes tar), to fire or light (which is what they draw from the air), to aether (which is fire or light in its purest form, pervading the universe and guiding the motions of everything else), to "the highest skies," i.e. Heavenly providence. "Clue" can mean either 'clue' or 'thread'; it does double-duty here. The link between threads (the original meaning of the word) and what we call clues can be seen in the story of Ariadne, to which the poem alludes. The world is a maze, but by seeking the true explanation of the phenomenon, we can follow a thread that leads out of the maze, or, in other words, by discerning Nature's laws we can move from the phenomena or "plain effects" to the true causes of the effect, and, in particular, to God. Notice that there are actually two ascents here. There is an ascent from effects to causes in things (tar, air, fire, aether, God), and there is an ascent in the type of inquiry (the data of the senses, the patterns of sensory data, the rational investigation of what underlies those patters, the intellectual understanding of the phenomena in relation to its true causes). "Fancy" is another word for imagination, and means (roughly) sub-rational sensory processing.

Go learn'd mechanic, stare with stupid eyes,
Attribute to all figure, weight and size;
Nor look behind the moving scene to see
What gives each wondrous form its energy.
Vain images possess the sensual mind,
To real agents and true causes blind.

The "mechanic" here is someone attempting to explain the efficacy of tar entirely in terms of the motion of particles. This is staring "with stupid eyes" - if you've ever seen someone so tired they can't think very quickly, you've seen the sort of staring with stupid eyes (stupid from the stupor of sleep) Berkeley means. The stupor of the mechanical philosopher is that he can't get beyond the appearances to the true causes, which are not sensible and therefore not, strictly speaking, imaginable. The mechanical philosophers, caught up with the success of mechanistic philosopher, avoids the real rational and intellectual work required to see what is really happening. Berkeley holds that the only real agents and true causes are minds or spirits; this is the basis for one of his arguments for God's existence.

But soon as intellect's bright sun displays
O'er the benighted orb his fulgent rays,
Delusive phantoms fly before the light,
Nature and truth lie open at the sight:
Causes connect with effects supply
A golden chain, whose radiant links on high
Fix'd to the sovereign throne from thence depend
And reach e'en down to tar the nether end.

Contrasted with merely mechanistic investigation is genuinely intellectual study of the world. This includes mechanistic investigation as part of the ascent; but in the right sort of inquiry we attempt to go beyond bare appearances, and beyond the purely mathematical patterns exemplified by those appearances, to causes. When we do this, and rise, through reasoning, from a purely imaginative level of inquiry to a genuinely intellectual level of inquiry, false views start falling away and we begin to understand the true nature of the world. Notice that the golden chain discovered by the intellect is fixed to "the sovereign throne," not tar. We ascend from tar to God in inquiry, but this is only possible because there is a chain of cause and effect leading from God (as first cause) to tar (which, because of its utter mundaneness, symbolizes the least effect). By recognizing effects, we begin to inquire into causes; and even if we start with phenomena as unimpressive as those associated with tar, we reach God.

The poem, then, is an account of what Berkeley thinks is the correct attitude in investigating anything. 1) Start with the phenomena; 2) recognize that it takes time and effort because there is more even to the least important things than meets the eye; 3) rise, from effect to cause, through the causal chain by, at the same time, rising from the senses, through the imagination, through reason, to intellectual understanding; 4) we understand things, properly speaking, by understanding how they fit into the golden chain that is the universe, and which depends on God.

The Look of a Window Around the Corner

I recently changed the lightbulbs in my bedroom; I thought I would try the 'daylight' kind that filter out the yellow and are supposed to be better for your eyes. I wasn't especially impressed by them when I put them in. This morning, however, I was walking toward my room, when suddenly I saw why they call them 'daylight'. This wouldn't be interesting except that the reason it suddenly really looked like daylight was that it looked like a window was around the corner. It's a strange thing, if you think of it, that someone can know what having a window in the wall would look like from around a corner. Berkeley, I think, would love an example like this: the immediate perception of the play of light across the floor, the color of the light, the angle from which I was viewing, all contributed to the suggestion of there being a window in a wall I could not see. It was a mooreeffoc moment:

And there is (especially for the humble) Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle.

J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy Stories

I Can Do a Great Exegesis of Myself

It suddenly occurred to me what I see myself as doing in Siris. I tend to think of weblogs, at their best, as exercises of wit in the old sense, i.e., ingenium, the faculty of discovery and invention. This is what I tend to look for when I look at other weblogs; if I don't find it I'm disappointed. So what I do here is pull together resources, link diverse ideas together, combine poetry and philosophy and anecdote, cover the universe and back again piecemealwise, all to the service of wit (my own, primarily, but you're all welcome to what you can get out of it). Posts are like brainstorming, or, to borrow an image from Novalis, pollen. In blogging, at least, I am a Romantic philosopher. For evidence see here and here, among other places. The last time I read any of the Romantics was in undergrad; if I remember correctly Novalis intrigued me, but Schlegel bored me. Perhaps I will have to go back and look at them more closely.

Unquinable Malebranchean Modifications

I am currently doing some revising of a chapter that includes a section on Malebranche's theory of sensation. I've dealt with some of it before, but things come across differently when you are trying to write about them than when you are trying casually to read them. One argument has struck my eye anew. Malebranche is arguing that we have good reason to think not everyone has the same sensations:

Suppose that there are twenty people, and that oen of them, who does not know the words used in France to indicate cold and warmth, has cold hands, and the others have extremely warm hands. If tepid water were brought to them during the winter for washing, those with warm hands, taking their turns to wash first, would say, this is very cold water, I do not like it at all. But when he with the very cold hands finally had his turn to wash, he would say, I do not know why you do not like cold water; for myself I find the sensation of cold water and washing in it quite pleasing.

It is quite clear in this example that when this fellow says, I like cold, it means nothing if nto that he likes warmth and that he feels warmth where others feel the opposite. (Search after Truth 1.13, LO 65)

Malebranche uses this as part of an argument arguing that, because no one's sensory organs are exactly the same, and since the dispositions of our sensory organs are correlated to our sensations by general laws, no one has exactly the same sensations. What struck me was the closeness of this to some discussions of qualia in more recent literature. Indeed, this whole notion of 'qualia' is an attempt to re-insert Cartesian modifications of the soul into philosophy of the mind; they are both "the way things seem to us."

It is worth noting, however, that Malebranche's 'modifications' are on very strong ground, because he does not rely on them, as qualia theorists often rely on qualia, to argue against reduction of mind to body. That is dealt with in a different set of arguments. Consider the arguments against qualia in Dennett's famous paper, Quining Qualia. (It will help if you refer back to the paper at each point.

Intuition pump #1: Watching You Eat Cauliflower. This sounds a lot like Malebranche, but unlike Dennett's qualia-advocates, he does not make his case on the basis of a stripping down to residuals, independently of how they are stimulated. On the contrary, his primary argument is that because they are stimulated in different ways, they (probably) have different modifications of the soul.

Intuition pump #2: The Wine-tasting Machine. The reason the wine-tasting machine cannot enjoy wine is that it has no soul; thought is not a modification of extension.

Intuition pump #3 & #4: These pro-qualia inverted spectrum stories can easily be accepted by Malebranche if they are correlated to changes in the sensory organs (this turns out to be significant later). Malebranche would have problems with #5 since it would suggest a denial of his conception of general laws, but could probably allow for something like it as a possibility.

I'm not sure precisely how Malebranche would deal with intuition pump #6 (alternative neurosurgery), but since he does not need an inverted spectrum story to argue for his position, and since his dualism is supported on other grounds, he would not be put out by it at all. In both cases all that's being fiddled with are the equivalent of what he would have called animal spirits in the brain. Malebranche would also consider Dennett a victim of what he lists as the first error about the passion of the soul in sensation: Dennett confuses the modification itself with the body-state correlated with it, and would reply to him, "a man cannot be entirely ignorant of what pain is when he feels it."

On Intuition pump #7, Malebranche would (I think) deny that, properly speaking, we can be wrong about our modifications; he would be unimpressed by Wittgensteinian arguments to the contrary. Whether he would be wrong on this would be too complex to go into here. Suffice it to say that Malebranche would not be scared off by a little changing in coffee tastes, particularly since he thinks he already knows why tastes change, and so would undoubtedly take Sanborn's side. There is perhaps some reason to give him at least a little benefit of the doubt on this, given that his choosing to take Sanborn's side would not be based exclusively on an attempt to give an account of qualia. I confess to having a bit of difficulty following what's supposed to be going on in intuition pump #8, so I'll skip that one. I suspect Malebranche would think it contravened general laws, but I'm not sure what precisely Dennett's going for in this one.

Intuition pump #9: Experienced Beer Drinker. As far as I see Malebranche has no problem with this on; at least I don't see how this would be a problem for him. Ditto on intuition pump #10, which he clearly would consider to be mired in another error pertaining to the passion of the soul, namely, considering the sensible qualities of things to be in the things.

Intuition pump #11: the cauliflower cure. Malebranche would deny this is a possible situation, given the way he argues for the differences of modifications of the soul.

Intuition pump #12 would be taken care of by general laws again.

Cerebral achromotopsia is, I think, easily handled by Malebranche's dualism, whatever the precise details. (And, indeed, I suspect the differences among qualia theorists Dennett notes has less to do with qualia than with different notions of the mind and its relation to the body, so this is perhaps not surprising.)

Malebranche would, again, be unimpressed by intuition pump #13, insofar as it is skeptical about things like modifications of the soul. He would attribute the difficulty of capturing the osprey cry in words to the limitations of our will; we can't call up sensations the way we can call up ideas at wills, so this limits the way we can use language to communicate things about them. He would disagree that it is a matter of informativeness, and would have nothing but contempt for Dennett's Jello box analogy, intuition pump #14. He would consider intuition pump #15 to be mired in one of the errors he identifies.

This is all rough-and-ready, and it has been years since last I even looked at Dennett's paper, so I might be a little off on Dennett. But I find it enlightening about Malebranche; I think he would agree with a great deal of David de Leon's paper on qualia.

Independence Day

The opening of the Declaration of Independence:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

The oft-forgotten closing:
We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of the good people of these colonies solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved; and that, as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.


Here is the great article by Isaac Asimov on the Star-Spangled Banner, "All Four Stanzas."

Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected, now shines on the stream
'Tis the star-spangled banner. Oh! long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

God Bless America.

Sickening Poetry

There's an interesting post at the Victorianist weblog, "The Little Professor," on sickening poetry. The author rightly notes that you have to go to the eighteenth century to find the really sickening poetry, and quotes Swift's "The Lady's Dressing Room." It is certainly Swift at his most merciless; of all idealisms he disliked, I think he disliked the idealism of the romantic affections most. Some of his other works are in a similar vein, but more moralistic about it. You can find the link to the poem through the above link; it is not for the faint of heart.

'Enervating Miasma' Does Not Include the Blogs or My Explanations

Well, the gremlins at Blogger have, as far as I can tell, surrounded Siris and every other site hosted on Blog*Spot with an enervating miasma defeating not only the attempts of people to link with the site but also my own attempts to post; the Berkeley post just prior to this one was whisked off into no-man's land for three hours before it returned without apology. Sorry to anyone who might have been struggling under any deep Siris withdrawals.

Some blogosphere neighborliness is in order. "Early Modern Resources" linked to Siris in reciprocation for a prior link of my own. It's great to have a good neighbor, particularly since I decided a few days ago (but haven't reached the actual point of doing so) to put the Early Modern Resources sites under the Resources section of Houyhnhnm Land. I also find (and this is a result of the other, I believe) that Siris has been given a place under "Blogs of History" at "The Elfin Ethicist," a well-designed, diverse-content, and, in short, high-quality weblog. I should resent his showing in a quarter of the posts he writes that he has a better English writing style than I do, but I just can't bring myself to dislike someone who titles his weblog "The Elfin Ethicist" and puts up a G. K. Chesterton quote.

A note of clarification for those coming to Siris with a perspective from another discipline. History of philosophy, being more philosophy than history, possibly divides its historical labels along slightly different lines than other historical disciplines. (I say 'possibly' because I don't keep up on how other historical disciplines draw their lines.) Plus, some people aren't historians at all, and so might not have any inkling what is meant when I talk about 'early modern philosophy'. The paradigmatic 'early modern philosophy' is done in the 17th and 18th centuries ('Descartes to Kant' is the standard model), and outside those two centuries assignment to 'early modern philosophy' usually has more to do with continuity with the 17th and 18th centuries than the century in which it is found. Thus, in the sixteenth century, and even into the seventeenth century both 'early modern philosophy' and 'medieval philosophy' are being done; and, in Britain at least, 'early modern philosophy' includes much of the first half of the 19th century. Siris covers all this period along with everything else (as noted in the description, Siris covers everything in its own little way); but since different disciplines use the same labels differently, I thought I would clarify my usage of the label 'early modern philosophy' for anyone who might be browsing my posts. I've found lots of people who do not dabble at all in history tend to be confused by the label, although it's better than the label under which it went in the first undergraduate course I took on it: Modern Philosophy, concerned, of course, almost entirely with the 17th century.

Scientists are Glorified Cooks and Diviners

We know a thing when we understand it; and we understand it when we can interpret or tell what it signifies. Strictly, the sense knows nothing. We perceive indeed sounds by hearing, and characters by sight; but we are not therefore said to understand them. After the same manner, the phenomena of nature are alike visible to all; but all have not alike learned the connexion of natural things, or understand what they signify, or know how to vaticinate by them. There is no question, saith Socrates in Theaeteto, concerning that which is agreeable to each person, but concerning what will in time to come be agreeable, of which all men are not equally judges. He who foreknoweth what will be in every kind is the wisest. According to Socrates, you and the cook may judge of a dish on the table equaly well, but while the dish is making, the cook can better foretell what will ensue from this or that manner of composing it. Nor is this manner of reasoning confined only to morals or politics, but extends also to natural science. (Berkeley, Siris 253)

That natural science is a sort of sophisticated augury or omen-reading is a common theme in Siris. Compare 252:

There is a certain analogy, constancy, and uniformity in the phenomena or appearances of nature, which are a foundation for general rules: and these are a grammar for the understanding of nature, or that series of efects in teh visible world whereby we are enabled to foresee what will come to pass in the natural course of things. Plotinus observes, in his third Ennead, tha thte art of presaging is in some sort the reading of natural letters denoting order, and that so far forth as analogy obtains in the universe, there may be vaticination. And in reality, he that foretells the motions of the planets, or the effects of medicines, or the result of chemical or mechanical experiments, may be said to do it by natural vaticination.

Berkeley means to be taken literally when he talks about the "grammar for the understanding of nature"; he considers our sensory impressions to be literally linguistic in nature.

Wise Leaders are Always in Demand

You are Proverbs.


Which book of the Bible are you?
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"Beauty, Virtue, Truth, and Love, and Melody"

While I'm still thinking about Beattie, here is a link to an excerpt from the source of Beattie's (poetic) fame, The Minstrel (1771-1774). His full poetic oeuvre can be found at Project Gutenberg, in less readable form, here. An example of Beattie (almost) at his best:

But who the melodies of morn can tell?
The wild brook babbling down the mountain side;
The lowing herd; the sheepfold's simple bell;
The pipe of early shepherd dim descried
In the lone valley; echoing far and wide
The clamorous horn along the cliffs above;
The hollow murmur of the ocean-tide;
The hum of bees, the linnet's lay of love,
And the full choir that wakes the universal grove.

Beattie is also very good at single lines and excellent phrases (one of my favorites is "Fret not yourselves, ye silken sons of pride").

Beattie's other great work, which earned him his philosophical fame, is, of course, the Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, which is a critique, from the point of view of Scottish Common Sense Philosophy, of a number of lines in early modern philosophical thought (particularly Hume).

Shepherd on the First Cause, Part II: The Mixture of Qualities

This is a sequel to the post "Shepherd on the First Cause," which should be read first.

The key to understanding Shepherd's comments lies in grasping her theory of causation. (It is useful to keep in mind that Hume is her constant foil.) Here is a rough attempt to characterize this theory.

Shepherd sees causation as a "mixture of qualities." Suppose you have a cause (C) and an object (O) or co-cause. Each of these has a number of properties or qualities. When C acts on O (or combines with O), the qualities 'mix'. The mixed result is the effect. So, for instance, I punch my fist into clay, the resulting impression is a 'mixture' of some of the properties of my fist and some of the properties of the clay.

Take another example, which will perhaps give a clearer idea of the significance of the view. There is a book on a sturdy table. That the book does not fall through the table is necessitated by the combined properties of the book and the table. It is not impossible, of course, for books to fall through tables; but it is only possible if some of the properties of either the book, or the table, or both, are changed. That is, a change can be induced in the situation only by introducing new properties into the mix. These new properties are causes of new situations. This provides Shepherd with a very strong response to Hume's view that "Whatever begins to exist has a cause" is not a necessary proposition. On Shepherd's view of causation, it is necessary, because every change of properties requires the introduction of new properties. On the mixture view of causation, Shepherd thinks, anything new is necessarily an effect of a new introduction of properties. This, of course, is exactly right; you can't change the properties of a situation without changing its properties; if you have a new set of properties, it can only be because some properties in the set are new.

This is a very elementary summary of her view; I hope to cover more precise details in later posts.

Beattie on Liberty

Nothing is more friendly to the soul of man, than Liberty; which is the birthright of every rational being, and which none can without cruelty deprive us of, unless by our crimes we have proved ourselves unworthy of it. Despotick governments are therefore unjust, as far as they deprive the innocent of this prime blessing: and it never can be for the good of mankind, that injustice should triumph, or that innocence should be born down. Besides, activity and genius flourish in free governments, but in the abodes of tyranny disappear: and however it may fare with some individuals, society will always decay or prosper, as genius and industry are discountenanced or promoted.

Beattie, Essay on Memory and Imagination, Of Imagination, ch. 3 ("Remarks on Genius").

By 'genius' Beattie means "the talent of useful invention," whose complement is taste (which is the sort of mental sagacity involved in the appreciative perception of excellence and fault). The reason he ends up discussing society in his remarks on genius is that he is struck by the providential diversity of human genius, which makes society possible.

Perhaps I Promise to Do Evil Things

I was a bit harsh (and rightly so) in my discussion of some of the mistakes made about natural law theory in Murphy and Coleman's Philosophy of Law: An Introduction to Jurisprudence. There is, however, one interesting passage I wish to discuss a bit more fully:

"People are often called upon to recognize their moral obligation to obey the law in those cases where they morally disagree with the law--e.g., the law perhaps requires that they fight in a war they regard as evil or requires that they accept a way of life, say racial integration, that they regard as contrary to the common good. It is unclear how natural law theory will illuminate such cases. Such cases may be understood, however, when one realizes that foundations for moral obligation other than morality of content may be possible. Consider promises. My moral obligation to keep my promise is generated by the act of promising, not by the content of what I promise. My helping you paint your fence is morally trivial and, by itself, generates no moral requirement for me. If I promise to help you pain the fence, however, then my doing it takes on the character of a moral requirement. Is there any important analogy between the obligation to obey the law and the obligation to keep a promise? Social contract theory claims yes, and this shows that it is at least possible that grounds for the moral obligation to obey the law other than those favored by natural law theory might be articulated." (pp. 17-18).

Now, it is clear that if you find it unclear how natural law theory illuminates the cases noted in the passage, one thing to do is to look at how natural law theory of one form or other has actually operated in such cases; for there is no doubt that it certainly has. But this is not the part of the passage that most interests me; rather, what I think is worth noting, and what I think shows the fatal flaw(s) in Murphy's approach to natural law theory.

1) It is clearly false to say that the obligation of a promise is generated by the act of promising rather than by the content of the promise. Immoral promises do not bind; and it would be perfectly reasonable to say, in parallel to what Aquinas says about laws, that promises to do evil things are not promises but perversions of promises. They have the act of promising to suggest they might be classified as 'promises'; but they don't have the moral force of a promise, which suggests they are not, morally speaking, promises, even if they are considered to be promises in virtue of the act of promising. To obligate us, a promise must be consistent with (guess what!) natural law. Likewise, if a legislature passes an unjust law, it is a 'law' in the sense that it was created by an act of legislation by an authority that intended it to have force of law. But if it is unjust it is, morally speaking, not a law but a perversion of law, and that means it does not obligate, anymore than an immoral promise obligates.

2) Is there an analogy between the obligation in a promise and the obligation in a law? More than an analogy, they are variations of the same thing - that is, they derive from the authority of natural law (the first principles of moral reasoning). This brings me to the second point. Social contract theory cannot be an alternative to natural law; it can only be an additional specification. Social contract theory needs some basis, some framework, within which it may regard contracts or promises as have obligatory force, i.e., authority. If you look at many of the early social contract theorists, you will find that they are well aware of this, and often, in fact, are natural law theorists of one stripe or other, or, if not, borrow from the natural law tradition in order to make this or that point. If you look at the foundation of any social contract theory, you will find principles that look suspiciously like attempts to formulate natural law. This is true of any purported 'alternative'. Unless you are going to try the (apparently impossible) feat of building a moral theory without any principles at all, you will come back to something like natural law. There's no escaping it, for the same reason there's no escaping the need for a moral theory to recognize that something like "Good ought to be done and evil ought to be avoided" is obvious and undeniable.

Beattie on Association of Ideas

The doctrine is not peculiar to modern philosophy. Aristotle, speaking of Recollection, or active remembrance, insinuates, with his usual brevity, that the relations, by which we are led from one thought to another, in tracing out, or hunting after (as he calls it) any particular thought which does not immediately occur, are chiefly three, Resemblance, Contrariety, and Contiguity. And this enumeration of the associating principles does not differ, in any thing material, from what is here gven. I reduced them to five, Resemblance, Contrariety, Nearness of Situation, the relation of Cause and Effect, and Custom or Habit. Now the three last may very well be referred to that one which Aristotle calls Contiguity. Nearness of Situation is nothing else. In its influence a Cause may be said to be, because it really is, contiguous to its Effect. And two things or ideas cannot be associated by Custom, so as that the one shall introduce the other into the mind; unless they have, once and again, or once at least, been in company together, or thought of at the same time.

James Beattie, "Essay on Memory and Imagination," in Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783), Of Imagination, chap. 2, sect. 5.

I find this passage fascinating. Beattie's principles of association are essentially Hume's, slightly modified (his biggest change is the addition of contrariety; he has some interesting and, I think, cogent arguments that Hume should have considered contrariety an associating principle, too). It is essentially independent of any Aristotelian thought on recollection, and is proposed for a different phenomenon, but here we have an approximation of the one doctrine to the other - the philosophical equivalent of what Whewell calls a 'Consilience of Inductions', where two different fields 'jump together' in investigation. Like any consilience of inductions, this one suggests that these taxonomies of association-principles are capturing something real and definite. One doesn't see much work on association any more; but the above passage would make, I think, a good Exhibit A for why we should.

The Incarnation and Chalcedon

There is a great post by Matthew Mullins at "Prosblogion" on the issue of the Incarnation. After noting that an orthodox view would have to avoid Monophysitism, Appollinarianism, and Nestorianism, he says:

The OC must embrace a version of the Incarnation that appears to contain multiple contradictions, for the incarnate must be a single identity that is uncreated and created, omniscient and having limited knowledge, atemporal and temporal, omnipotent and having finite powers. Yet the attributes necessary for divinity are irreconcilable with those attributes required for humanity when restricted to a single individual. With so many logical contradictions it seems to me that the doctrine of the Incarnation cannot be true.

Where I lose the author's argument is when he says "Yet the attributes necessary for divinity are irreconcilable with those attributes required for humanity when restricted to a single individual." The reason is that I don't see on what basis one could support such a claim. And in fact, the Chalcedonian Definition, which was explicitly constructed to avoid the heresies the author notes, denies the claim:

So, following the saintly fathers, we all with one voice teach the confession of one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ: the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and a body; consubstantial with the Father as regards his divinity, and the same consubstantial with us as regards his humanity; like us in all respects except for sin; begotten before the ages from the Father as regards his divinity, and in the last days the same for us and for our salvation from Mary, the virgin God-bearer as regards his humanity; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only-begotten, acknowledged in two natures which undergo no confusion, no change, no division, no separation; at no point was the difference between the natures taken away through the union, but rather the property of both natures is preserved and comes together into a single person and a single subsistent being; he is not parted or divided into two persons, but is one and the same only-begotten Son, God, Word, Lord Jesus Christ, just as the prophets taught from the beginning about him, and as the Lord Jesus Christ himself instructed us, and as the creed of the fathers handed it down to us.

(The Definition on this point follows the Tome of St. Leo, which should be read for further explication.) In other words, you can only have a contradiction if you have irreconcilable attributes attributed to something in the same way. But this is not the conciliar view of Christ, which holds that Christ is both man and God, and that his human soul and body have all the limits of any human soul and body, and his divine nature has all the attributes of divine nature. The attributes are attributed in different ways. I don't see that there is any problem with this. The genuinely tricky aspect of the doctrine is not the natures in one person, but the fact that the divine nature is the divine person. As a person Christ is fundamentally divine (he is the Word); but the Word, without ceasing to be divine, also takes as His own a human soul and a human body, i.e., a human nature with all the attributes of human nature. And that it is the trickier issue can be seen by the fact that the Church had to deal with it again (at III Constantinople).

More Misconceptions about Natural Law

From Philosophy of Law: An Introduction to Jurisprudence, by Jeffrie G. Murphy and Jules L. Coleman (Westview Press 1990):

To use the language of G. E. Moore, it si always an "open question" what morally ought to be done given any statement of what is naturally done or factually the case. To think otherwise is to comit what Moore called "the naturalistic fallacy"--the fallacy of believing that one can derive a theory of what ought to be the case from an account of what is the case. Thus, because of what is (to put it mildly) a certain logical looseness in any account of natural uty, natural law ethical theory often appears arbitrary and confused--an attempt to explain the obscure (what we ought to do) in terms of the even more obscure (moral duties built into nature). When they do attempt to be clear, natural law theorists often offer clarity at the price of uselessness, as when Aquinas offers the following as the first principle of natural law theory: "Do good and avoid evil." One can hardly quarrel with the sentiment expressed here, but one troubled with a moral problem is going to find this piece of highly general advice of very little use. For all these reasons, it is not surprising that natural law ethical theory has often provoked impatience and even contempt from its critics. For Aristotle and Aquinas, the natural law was viewed as a mechanism for imposing duties and giving guidance for the virtuous life. (p. 14)

This is the sort of thing that tempts me to "impatience and even contempt"; for it is this criticism that is arbitrary and confused. First of all, Aristotle is a natural law theorist? Aquinas considers natural law to be "a mechanism for imposing duties and giving guidance for the virtuous life"? While much of what Aristotle says is consistent with, and can be neatly tied in to, a natural law account (hence the ease with which Aquinas does so), natural law theory is not Aristotelian. Aquinas gets the main lines of his account not from Aristotle but from Augustine's considerations on eternal Reason. Further, Aquinas does not consider natural law to be a mechanism for imposing duties. Natural law is not a 'mechanism'; it does not 'impose duties'. It is (if one must speak in terms of duties at all) correct rational perception of duties and what is required for, or consistent with, the virtuous life. Nor can any talk about "open questions" and "naturalistic fallacies" have any affect on the issue, because Moore's question cannot apply; natural law is law, which means it sets out what one ought to do. There is no naturalistic fallacy here, only a recognition that 'human nature' can in fact be an evaluative as well as a descriptive notion and the common principle that moral principles have rational authority.

Second, Aquinas offers the first principle "Seek good and shun evil" not as a counsel for morality, as the author seems to think, but as a basic reference point that needs to be considered in looking at necessity, contingency, and defeasibility in right moral reason. In particular, "seek good and shun evil" is offered not as an earth-shattering novelty, but 1) as a case of moral self-evidence that 2) constrains the basic structure of all precepts of natural law. In other words, the reason Aquinas mentions it is that it defines the field. (See here for the relevant text.) Actual moral guidance comes not with this general principle but with the virtue theory made possible by it. The author's attempt to mock Aquinas's use of the principle in reality supports the Common Doctor's case.

The author then goes on to criticize Aquinas's definition of 'law':

What seems to be happening here is that the concept of ideal or perfect or morally good law is seen as part of the moral order; from this correct insight, a careless slide is made into identifying law itself with a part of morality--the ideality no longer being regarded as a possible and desirable feature of law but as a part of the very meaning of "law." When Aquinas speaks of "being in accord with reason" and "being for the common good," he seems to be making a comment, not merely (and sensibly) about desirable features of law, but rather as part of the analysis of the concept of law or legality--matters of definition rather than evaluation. If this is the view, then it seems immediately open to some serious and rather obvious objections....A dramatic and decisive counterexample to this view, however, is the obvious existence of legal rules that clear thinking would force us to acknowledge as laws even if we believed them to be morally evil. Suppose, for example, that you believe that it is morally wrong for the state to eliminate all considerations of fault in granting legal divorces. Surely you could not reasonably conclude from this that all those persons in a "no-fault" state who claim to be legally divorced are really not divorced at all but are still legally married. (pp. 15-16)

This "dramatic and decisive counterexample" decides nothing. Natural law theories involve what is called "toleration"; i.e., it is often necessary, because of various limits on enforceability, and because human beings fall short of perfect virtue, for the law to tolerate things that are not strictly moral. The most common medieval example of this, interestingly, is prostitution. (The example, of course, is due to Augustine.) The reasoning is that if you outlaw prostitution, then given human immorality "all of Europe would become inflamed with lust." In other words, the medievals felt prostitution needed to be tolerated because things worse for common good (= the good each of us have in common in virtue of being rational and therefore social creatures) would follow if stringent measures were applied against it. So prostitution needed to be tolerated in order to limit the degree to which people could wreak sexual havoc. Further, it was recognized that toleration was a tricky issue; indeed, the whole area of law was recognized to be an area in which perfect certainty or virtue could not be expected, so there would not necessarily be only one way to deal with the difficult problems that arise in legislative matters. It is clearly the case that the issue in allowing divorce is toleration. It is also clearly the case, however, that, contrary to the author, if someone genuinely considers divorce law to be immoral and thus without authority, it is perfectly rational for them to consider people who are divorced to be divorced in name only. And the author says nothing that would actually show that such people are being unreasonable or not engaging in "clear thinking."

As to the "careless slide", Aquinas is quite explicit and deliberate about it. An unjust law is not a law in the sense that a perversion of authority is not the actual authority. An unjust law has several features of a law; it has the appearance of a law; we can call it a law. But an unjust law is missing the essential feature of a law, which is rational authority. If you have something that has no authority then it is not strictly a law, even if it is a law in a looser sense of the term. What gives a law authority? The source of authority in human practical matters: the basic principles of practical reason, without which practical reasoning is not possible, and what follows from them. In other words, natural law. Natural law is a way to connect human law and practical reasoning; and, in fact, it is the only way that has ever been proposed that stands alone. Other attempts can be shown to make implicit appeal to principles that on closer investigation start to look an awful lot like precepts of natural law.

There are many rules in any society that are surely laws but are just as surely morally neutral--e.g., some law requiring that one have one's validated registration tag on the auto license plate prior to March 1. Aquinas sensibly admits that such rules are laws, but the degree to which the admission is compatible witht he literal wording of his definition is unclear. Such rules, though no doubt, consistent with the common good, are not obviously for the common good in the sense that laws prohibiting murder are clearly for the common good. (p. 16)

This is to no purpose; that registration regulations are not for the common good in the same way that laws against murder are not for the common good does not show that they are not for the common good in a different way. And, indeed, if they are not for the common good in some way, what in the world is their point?

Technical Note on Comments (Yes, Again)

OK; I haven't worked out all the bugs in getting the comments part of this weblog up, so bear with it. Currently some links are open to the public, some are not. Probably the final result will be two different types of comment sections, one open access, which will only allow (very short) comments; and one that can be viewed by the public, but to which only people on my list can post, with no length limit. But all this is in disarray until I figure out how I want to do it, so sometimes some links will work and sometimes they won't. Please bear with me and my leisurely pace in constructing this site!

Because Everyone Expects the Church to Be in the Wrong....

This article in the Telegraph blares out "Pope says sorry for crusaders' rampage in 1204," calling the Pope's speech "an emotional apology." I feel a bit sorry for the Pope, who apparently has been cursed with the curse of being blatantly misunderstood by every reporter on the planet every time he opens his mouth. According to the Vatican Information Service, what the Pope actually said was, "How can we also, eight centuries later, not share the indignation and pain that Pope Innocent III immediately expressed about what happened?" The article, note, leaves out everything after the word "pain," thus missing the whole point of the question, which is that we share the indignation and pain of Pope Innocent III immediately after the event. Why is this called an apology?