Dear Physician

 Whereas many have set their hand to organize a narration about the deeds accomplished among us, as handed down to us from the beginning by those who had been eyewitnesses and underoarsmen of the word, it occurred also to me, having closely followed it all from the beginning, to write it exactly in order to you, honorable Theophilos, that you may recognize the sureness of the accounts concerning which you were taught.

*****

So the first account I composed about everything, O Theophilos, that Jesus began to do and to teach, up to that day when, having commanded through Holy Spirit the apostles he had selected, he was raised up; and to them he exhibited himself alive after his suffering, with many signs, being seen by them for forty days, and speaking about the realm of God.

[Luke 1:1-4; Acts 1:1-3; both my rough translations.]

Today is the feast of St. Luke the Evangelist. 'Lucas' was not a common name, but it seems to have been a nickname, a shortened form of 'Lucanus'; several people associated with St. Paul have shortened-form versions of Greek names, so it may well have been a Pauline quirk to give people nicknames. In Colossians 4:14, he is called ho iatros ho agapetos, the dear/beloved healer; this could mean any number of things, but traditionally it has been interpreted literally, as meaning that Luke was a physician, and very possibly the official or semi-official physician attached to St. Paul's missionary group. He is also mentioned in Philemon 1:24, as a fellow-worker of St. Paul, and in 2 Timothy 4:11 as the only one of the group still with Paul while Paul was in prison. He has sometimes been identified with the "brother famous among all the churches for proclaiming the gospel" in 2 Corinthians 8:18, although this also sometimes thought to have been Barnabas.

According to a longstanding tradition, he was one of the seventy-two disciples sent by Jesus on missionary journeys, as mentioned in Luke 10, which is why he could say, as he does at the beginning of the Gospel, that he had closely followed everything from the beginning. He is traditionally considered to have been a Gentile from Antioch; one reason for the thinking that the Gentile tradition is right is that the mention in Colossians explicitly names Aristarchus, Mark, and Justus as the only Jewish co-workers with Paul at the time. It is still possible, however, that Paul specifically means Judeans, and that Luke was ethnically a Jew, of Hellenistic, rather than Judean, family. (This would make his being a member of the Seventy more probable.) And of course he is the traditional author of both the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, which constitute a little over one-quarter of the entire New Testament.. Famously, the Greek of both works is quite good -- not fancy, but clearly the work of someone who was very familiar with the language not just as spoken but as written. It's easy in our relatively literate age to forget that in most ages for most languages the spoken language and the written language can diverge quite a bit; several of the New Testament authors seem to have had a mostly spoken grasp of Greek, the author of the Gospel and Acts was clearly familiar with both. He effortlessly, and quite smoothly, alludes to a wide selection of the more widely accessible Greek literature. Insofar as we get a sense of him from his writings, he tends to be quite accurate, even meticulous, about things like cities and official titles; urbane and urbanite, I suppose.

The tradition suggests that he died of old age near Thebes, somewhere after about AD 84. It's unclear whether he was martyred; stories that say he was, say he was hanged, but other stories seem to depict him as dying of old age. He is a patron saint of historians, of course, but also patron saint of painters; there is an old legend that he painted a picture of the Virgin Mary. In any case, it is true that the Gospel of Luke has been perhaps the most favored source for paintings of the Life of Christ, so there is more than one reason to associate him with painting.

Ignatius Theophorus

Today is the feast of St. Ignatius of Antioch, Martyr, one of the Apostolic Fathers in the generation after the Apostles. He was bishop of Antioch, and according to tradition the third after St. Peter, and (also according to tradition) he died around 116. From his letter to the Ephesians (18:1-19:3): 

My spirit is made an offscouring for the Cross, which is a stumbling-block to them that are unbelievers, but to us salvation and life eternal. Where is the wise? Where is the disputer? Where is the boasting of them that are called prudent? For our God, Jesus the Christ, was conceived in the womb by Mary according to a dispensation, of the seed of David but also of the Holy Ghost; and He was born and was baptized that by His passion He might cleanse water. And hidden from the prince of this world were the virginity of Mary and her child-bearing and likewise also the death of the Lord -- three mysteries to be cried aloud -- the which were wrought in the silence of God. How then were they made manifest to the ages? A star shone forth in the heaven above all the stars; and its light was unutterable, and its strangeness caused amazement; and all the rest of the constellations with the sun and moon formed themselves into a chorus about the star; but the star itself far outshone them all; and there was perplexity to know whence came this strange appearance which was so unlike them. From that time forward every sorcery and every spell was dissolved, the ignorance of wickedness vanished away, the ancient kingdom was pulled down, when God appeared in the likeness of man unto newness of everlasting life; and that which had been perfected in the counsels of God began to take effect. Thence all things were perturbed, because the abolishing of death was taken in hand.

The Cogitative Sense

 Thomas Aquinas, in great measure, although not slavishly, following Avicenna, organizes our sensory experience into particular sensory powers. The external powers are the senses in our usual sense; vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell. The internal powers or senses process these: the common sense is, so to speak our sense of sensing and thus is how we are aware that we are sensing in such-and-such way and also is our sense of our sensations relating to each other (our sense of co-sensing, e.g., that the sound we hear is co-sensed with the sight of something rushing by); the imagination retains and recombines what we have sensed; the estimative is concerned with 'intentions', i.e., principles organizing our senses in particular ways, and in brute animals, for instance, is their sense of safety and danger, or of things as attractive or repulsive; and the memorative retains these intentions, and is therefore among other things the sense that something has been retained by the imagination. In human beings, however, according to Aquinas, we have instead of an estimative sense a cogitative sense, which does still seems to have, as part of its lower act, some estimative role like that found in other animals, but whose higher and principal act in human beings is ministry to the intellect.

As Aquinas puts it, the excellence of the cogitative sense compared to the estimative sense in other animals lies in its "affinity and proximity to universal reason, which, in a sense, overflows" into it (ST 1.78.4 ad 5). The formality under which the cogitative sense handles our sensory experience is cognition of  individuals as under a common nature. Unlike the intellect, it has no conception of universals as such, but it does identify and create particular patterns and groupings and recognize individual, singular, particular things as members of those groupings and components of those patterns. Because it serves as an instrument for intellectual acts, the cogitative sense is also called the passive intellect and the particular reason. It is not strictly intellect, at all, but it organizes and disposes our sensory experience in ways that facilitate or are responsive to things like intellectual abstraction. It is likewise not strictly reason at all, but it re-organizes our internal sensory processing in light of reasoning, and most importantly is how we think about singular, particular things. The latter means that it has a central role in practical problem-solving and moral reasoning; prudence as a moral virtue primarily works by organizing the cogitative sense.

I have been thinking about the cogitative sense because I am re-reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and it suddenly struck me that almost everything Kant describes in the work is concerned with what Aquinas would call the cogitative power, and if you understand it in this way as Kant's 'reason', and even more his 'understanding', actually being the cogitative sense, suddenly so many things about Kant's argument start to make sense. 

This is not an accident, but arises from the structure of the problem that Kant has set himself. Kant concedes a lot to empiricism, and one of things he concedes is that we only have empirical objects of cognition. All objects of cognition must come from sensation, imagination, or empirical apperception (sense of self).  Thus all of our cognition of objects consists of acts that are what Aquinas would call acts of the internal senses. However, Kant is not an empiricist; he (correctly) recognizes that empiricism cannot possibly account for our actual thought and experience. Attempting to work out the possible conditions for our actual thought and experience, he sets himself the problem of how our sensations, imaginations, and empirical apperceptions can possibly have the unities they actually do; he calls this synthesis, and, using transcendental arguments, he establishes that these syntheses must conform to concepts and possible judgments, and that to make sense of any such synthesis and its conformity, you must take the concepts and the forms of judgments to be a priori, and to make sense of our actual experience of objects, you must be able to make the distinction between the phenomenal (the empirical) and the noumenal; however, given the empiricist restriction, we cannot take the noumenal as object, so it can only be a concept, held a priori, that serves as a limit-concept for the phenomenal, without which the latter cannot be interpreted as we inevitably interpret it. 

Now, the highest cognitive power that specifically concerns empirical objects in Aquinas's scholastic account is the cogitative sense. Thus Kant's empiricist restriction of objects to the empirical means that his analysis of human thought and experience cannot rise higher than the cogitative power. The cogitative power is what synthesizes everything done by all of our other senses, internal or external, and it is also apperceptive, in the sense that in at least a rudimentary way it is a sense of self -- it is how we cognize ourselves as individuals in relation to other individuals, and are able to compare and contrast ourselves with other things, because it is how we cognize anything as individual. However he (correctly) recognizes that cogitation works the way it does only because of what it presupposes, which makes its particular syntheses possible and which can be dimly recognized as the limits or boundaries in light of which everything else is organized. Everything that Kant calls 'transcendental' or 'a priori' or 'noumenal' is what in scholastic terms would be called (depending on the case) intellectual acts and concepts or intelligible objects. In St. Thomas's terms, Kant, starting with the cogitative sense, by transcendental argument establishes that its actions of synthesis require the intellect as a condition for their possibility. However, since he does not rise above what can be found in the cogitative power, he can only consider the intellect 'remotively' -- going simply on what the cogitative power provides, we cannot know what the intellect is or how it works, but only that it is, and that our experience is organized in light of it, and what it is not. This apophatic character is why Kant has so much difficulty in characterizing the noumenal.

As one might expect from how I have described this, I think Aquinas at the fundamental level has the stronger position. Kant concedes too much to the empiricists, and many of the weirder aspects of his epistemology and critique arise directly from those concessions. At the same time, he shows that the empiricists can't be right, even given those concessions, because human experience does not work they way they claim it should and their very limited principles can't explain what we actually experience. In doing this, he's not really doing anything that any other rationalist wouldn't, although he does it very well, particularly given how much he has conceded. But what he ends up establishing is that even with those concessions you keep running up against something that goes beyond what those concessions can directly allow, much less explain. We have concepts and principles (or rules, as he often calls them) that, with respect to the kinds of thinking he has been considering, are 'transcendental', and understanding the phenomenal content of experience requires positing the noumenal as a limit. Yet the noumenal has to be more than just a limit, although Kant due to the empiricist concessions is unable to say anything, or at least anything very consistent, about it. All of this can be cleared up simply by recognizing that we have, in however limited a form, a higher cognitive ability than Kant allows when he makes his empiricist concessions. That ability, all call 'intellect'.

Teresa of Avila

 Today was the feast of St. Teresa of Avila, Doctor of the Church. From The Way of Perfection (Chapter 17):

I do not mean that it is for us to say what we shall do, but that we must do our best in everything, for the choice is not ours but the Lord’s. If after many years He is pleased to give each of us her office, it will be a curious kind of humility for you to wish to choose; let the Lord of the house do that, for He is wise and powerful and knows what is fitting for you and for Himself as well. Be sure that, if you do what lies in your power and prepare yourself for high contemplation with the perfection aforementioned, then, if He does not grant it you (and I think He will not fail to do so if you have true detachment and humility), it will be because He has laid up this joy for you so as to give it you in Heaven, and because, as I have said elsewhere, He is pleased to treat you like people who are strong and give you a cross to bear on earth like that which His Majesty Himself always bore. 

 What better sign of friendship is there than for Him to give you what He gave Himself? It might well be that you would not have had so great a reward from contemplation. His judgments are His own; we must not meddle in them. It is indeed a good thing that the choice is not ours; for, if it were, we should think it the more restful life and all become great contemplatives. Oh, how much we gain if we have no desire to gain what seems to us best and so have no fear of losing, since God never permits a truly mortified person to lose anything except when such loss will bring him greater gain!

Patricia Routledge

 Somehow I had missed that Dame Patricia Routledge, one of the great comic actresses of our day, died earlier this month at age 96. She is best known for portraying Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced 'bouquet') in Keeping Up Appearances, but I also like her more wry and dry humor as Hetty Wainthrop in Hetty Wainthrop Investigates, a criminally underrated show. She earned a Tony Award in 1968, playing in Darling of the Day across from Vincent Price and an Olivier Award in 1988 for playing in Candide. Her acting range was extraodinary; while best known for comedy, she played in everything, and did well in everything.

Proposition, Question, and Conclusion

 A proposition (propositio) is an expression (oratio) signifying what is true or false; for instance, when someone says that the heaven is revolvable, this is called a statement (enuntiatio) and an assertion (proloquium). A question is a proposition brought into doubt and uncertainty, as when someone asks whether the heaven is revolvable. A conclusion is a proposition confirmed by arguments, as when someone shows by means of other facts (rebus) that the heaven is revolvable. A statement, whether it is said only for its own sake or brought forward to confirm something else, is a proposition; if one asks regarding it, it is a question; if it is confirmed [by other facts], it is a conclusion. So a proposition, question, and conclusion are one and the same, though they differ in the way mentioned above.

[Boethius, Boethius's De topicis differentiis, Stump, tr., Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY: 2004) p. 30. Part of the point here, I take it, is to establish what it is that remains the same through dialectical inquiry -- we can have a question, which receives confirmation to be a conclusion, and then is affirmed as a proposition, and these three have to be in some sense the same thing, or you've just changed the subject, although they also have to be distinguishable.]

Two New Poem Drafts

 Exclusion

I suppose we can say, if nothing else will do,
that all things have a measure, some accounted span,
that limits make the the thing and keep its focus true,
that all things spread their being in just the ways they can.
Yet still it seems absurd, improper, even rude,
that we, so like strange gods, with reason hold full sway,
yet like some sword-kept Eden, the world dares exclude
such as us from endless life, imposing a final day.
We stamp our feet, demand the Manager give His time,
insist that we are deserving, our merit known to all,
weep at the unfairness, in anger scream and rant,
and are firmly turned away, no matter how sublime.
We feel, deep inside, that immortal regions call,
but no matter -- when it comes to evading death, we can't.

The Tie

The sun through the blinds
on the houseplants streaks lines
which then tickle the eyes;
through glass and in part
ray pours from sun's heart,
between star and my soul forming tie.

Links of Note

 * Ian J. Campbell & Christof Rapp, The Definition of Fallacies: A Defence of Aristotle's Appearance Condition (PDF)

* Robert Keim, The Poet of Assisi, at "Via Mediaevalis"

* Jared Dembrun, Mariology Is Always Christological, at "Son of St. Catherine"

* Daniel D. De Haan, The Doctrine of the Analogy of Being in Avicenna's Metaphysics of the Healing (PDF)

* Laura Caponetto, Undoing things with words (PDF)

* Ben Burgis, My Preferred Solution to the Liar Paradox, at "Philosophy for the People". There are serious problems with disquotationalism (e.g., it requires already and independently being able to assign truth values), but this is an interesting disquotationalist attempt to deal with the matter.

* Noam Hoffer, Kant's Teleology as the 'True Apology' to Leibniz's Pre-Established Harmony (PDF)

* Jessica Tizzard & Hugo Hogenbirk, The infinite divisibility and multiplicity of creatures: Conway's non-absolutist theory of space (PDF)

* Chad Engelland, Dare Students Go Amish on the Topic of AI?

Fortnightly Book, October 12

 In working through Maurice LeBlanc's Arsene Lupin stories, we find ourselves having to make a judgment call after The Confessions of Arsene Lupin. The next published work is The Teeth of the Tiger, but it is peculiar in that it was published in English translation, in 1914, before it was published in the original French, in 1920. In 1916, LeBlanc published The Shell Shard (or The Shrapnel), which was originally a standalone tale, but which was written to be a Lupin tale and re-published as such in 1923. Then comes The Golden Triangle, serializec in 1917 and published in book form in 1918. We can set aside The Shell Shard as not being Lupinesque until later (and it may well be that, in any case, LeBlanc got the idea that he could make The Shell Shard a Lupin story from how he handled Lupin in The Golden Triangle), but we have to make a choice as to the order of the other two. After some thought, I have decided to follow the French publication order here, which means that the next fortnightly book is The Golden Triangle, also known as The Return of Arsene Lupin. This also has the advantage, in this case, of following the internal chronology of the narrative.

At the end of the tragic events of 813, Arsene Lupin left for the Foreign Legion, assumed by most of the world to be dead, and The Golden Triangle gives us a glimpse of him afterward. By all the descriptions, it seems to be in the style that would later be associated with Marquand's Mr. Moto -- that is, he is not the main character of the story but the resolving character, the one who links the essential elements so that the whole can come to a resolution. As some of the prior Lupin works gave us a bit too much of Lupin himself, showing the gentleman thief in a more indirect light could very well be showing him in a better light. We shall see.

Captain Patrice Belval rescues a woman from an attempted kidnapping. The ensuing adventure brings him into contact with a conspiracy to steal the gold reserves of France, and in opposition to a dangerous adversary. To deal with this problem, he gets help from a friend of a friend, Don Luis Perenna, but saving three hundred million francs in gold during World War I is going to require solving some difficult problems....

A Most Excellent Creator

 Let us, then, now seek the Trinity which is God, in the things themselves that are eternal, incorporeal, and unchangeable; in the perfect contemplation of which a blessed life is promised us, which cannot be other than eternal. For not only does the authority of the divine books declare that God is; but the whole nature of the universe itself which surrounds us, and to which we also belong, proclaims that it has a most excellent Creator, who has given to us a mind and natural reason, whereby to see that things living are to be preferred to things that are not living; things that have sense to things that have not; things that have understanding to things that have not; things immortal to things mortal; things powerful to things impotent; things righteous to things unrighteous; things beautiful to things deformed; things good to things evil; things incorruptible to things corruptible; things unchangeable to things changeable; things invisible to things visible; things incorporeal to things corporeal; things blessed to things miserable. And hence, since without doubt we place the Creator above things created, we must needs confess that the Creator both lives in the highest sense, and perceives and understands all things, and that He cannot die, or suffer decay, or be changed; and that He is not a body, but a spirit, of all the most powerful, most righteous, most beautiful, most good, most blessed.

[Augustine, De Trinitate XV, iv, 6.]