Habitude I

 Introductory Note: By a very long tradition, philosophy is said to involve three things: physics (i.e., the philosophical study of natural order), logic (i.e., the philosophical study of rational order), and ethics (i.e., the philosophical study of human order). Each of these aspects of philosophy has a unifying principle or 'springboard', a concept that serves as a platform from which you can reach anything else. For physics, the springboard is change, for logic the springboard is sign, and for ethics the springboard is habitude. Habitude (Gk. hexis, Lat. habitus, often transliterated into Eng. as 'habit') is arguably understudied, so I thought I would here and there translate some texts of Aquinas on the topic.

Therefore he [Aristotle] says, first, that for investigating what is virtue, one must assume three things in the soul, namely, passions, powers, and habitudes, one of which it is necessary for virtue to be. Thus he said above that virtue is a principle of certain works in the soul; but nothing is in the soul as a principle of working unless it is one of these three. For it seems that man sometimes acts from passion, such as anger, sometimes from habitude, such as when he works from productive skill, sometimes from bare power, as when he first begins to work. And it is clear that under this division is not comprehended absolutely everything that is in the soul, because the essence of the soul is not any of these, nor is even intelligible working; rather, only those things are touched on that are principles of some action.

Then when he says, "But I call passions" &c., he explains [manifestat] the members of the previous division. And first he explains those that are passions, second those that are powers, at "And powers" &c., and third those that are habitudes, at "Habitudes according to which" &c....

Then, at "Habitudes according to which" &c., he explains those that are habitudes. And this is not done in general, but in moral matters through comparison to the passions. And he says that habitudes are called such according as we have passions well or badly. For a habitude is a kind of disposition determining a power through comparison to something, which determination, if it is appropriate to the nature of the thing, will be a good habitude disposing one to doing something well, and otherwise it will be a bad habitude so that according to it something will be done badly. And he gives the example [exemplificat] that according to some habitude we have it in us to be angry either badly, when this is done either vehemently or lackingly, that is according to excess or defect, or well, when this is done in the manner of the mean.

[Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, lecture 5, sections 290, 291, & 298, my translation. Even at the cost of some occasional awkwardness, I have attempted to clearly distinguish opere words for action from agere words for action, by using 'work'-related words for the former.]

Dashed Off XXVII

 mind as intelligibilizing intelligibility

"A perfect language would be like a garment of light, unfolding with clear transparency the life it was formed to invest and represent." John Williamson Nevin

While the sensible may be evident, it is always a mediated evidentness.

Faith proceeds from Christ through Christ to Christ.

Genesis 1 : natural headship of Adam :: Genesis 2 : federal headship of Adam

"According to the view we have of Christ, in the end, will be and must be our view also of the Church. We come to the true conception of the Church through a true and sound Christology (as in the Creed) and in no other way." Nevin

'make disciples' and ordination

cosmos: God creates the world, giving it active and passive powers (seminal reasons) that develop on their own, as permanent instrumental causes, toward an end (cosmic order) whose principles we articulate as 'laws of nature'; this natural order is itself a component and instrument of a larger rational/intelligible order.

"...exact prose abstracts from reality, symbol presents it." Farrer

There are perhaps more kinds of good reasoning possible than have ever been canvased.

Leibniz notes (NEHU) that unlike the second and third figures, the fourth figure cannot be derived from the first figure with only the principle of noncontradiction; it is the only one that *requires* conversion (or else the second & third figures).

Narrative theme has a teleology or bias tending toward what we might usually call the spiritual or mystical; this tendency might be called Chestertonian, being something that can be found if one begins to emphasize the thematic elements of even simple stories about trains running on time or pubs serving good beer.

In the modern world, we share civil interests only in the sense we share religious interests, i.e., rational interest in the socially good and true. Get much more specific than that, we already begin to diverge.

Liberalism always exaggerates how much is shared in an attempt to *make* a particular set of things shared.

There are no all-purpose means for the effective use of liberties; our means for effective use of liberties are a patchwork of locally useful things.

Good-willed, reasonable, and rational people will converge on principles of justice, over time, but only to the extent & in the way they are good-willed reasonable, and rational; but what is more, they will actively seek to find agreement with each other.

Liberalism is not based on what we all share; it makes things that it then tries to make to be shared.

To endorse rules and practices as just is not like adopting a set of attitudes; it may or may not be associated with any particular attitude; it may or may not be associated with sanctions or demand for enforcement; it may or may not involve any regard for costs and benefits, and indeed costs or benefits may not even be relevant.

'Public reason liberalism' is always gerrymandered-reason liberalism. This is because actual liberal societies do not descend from unified principle but are built out of many different solutions to many different problems, which arise out of applying many different principles with many different judgments. In building such societies, people use any reasons they have at hand that seem to be relevant for the purpose at hand.

Society as such does not need moral justification; it is just an integral part of human life, and forms its own subdomains of moral justification.

"An entire mythology is stored within our language." Wittgenstein

major doctrine (Scripture, liturgical prayer, conciliar definition, formal catechesis) & minor doctrine (homily, devotional, sacraments and sacramentals as pedagogical, &c.)

We argue from all the finite effects to the infinite cause.

civilization as a system of friendships

the aspirational communion of human nature
the sympathetic communion of human nature

The best teaching always involves a significant indirect element; this is not always easy to see, and thus is often difficult to imitate.

I wish I knew the path to take;
I cannot find the way;
and all the errors that I make
grow graver by the day.

"For the human mind takes in a great deal at a glance, and we hobble it when we try to make it halt at every step it takes and express everything that it is thinking." Leibniz

The spiritual presence that Reformed theologians ascribe to the Lord's Supper is in fact always available to the Church in faith; but it is true that the Eucharist is pledge and seal of this presence, and that while this particular & ecclesial spiritual presence is not contained in the Eucharist, it is exhibited in it.  The Church is always nourished spiritually by His body and blood, and the Eucharist shows this continual vivificity. But this ecclesial ubiquity is not an adequate account of the specifically Eucharistic presence of Christ, and the spiritual presence to faith is not sporadic and occasional.

Disrespect for the Creed is poisonous to Protestantism, for it implies the position that even the most well trod and rationally and prayerfully defended understanding of Scripture, enduring in faith and love and prayer for however long, may be overturned by any fool of a reader who may come along. If the Creed may be dismissed, Scripture may mean anything, and no one can ever be sure of having read it well.

Papal infallibility is not a power except insofar as it is a structure of service.

A philosopher must allow himself a little madness or he will never get far.

Free will is the capability for civilization.

God as the ultimate limit of context

general kinds of theistic arguments
(1) incoherence or God
(2) skepticism or God
(3) insoluble puzzle or God
(4) pointlessness or God

"The creation or non-creation of the world, and the end of creation, are God's absolute choice because they are prior to the world." Rosmini

self-sustaining rhetorical cycles

Probation precedes exaltation.

Any descriptive proposition may be used in the right context to express an attitude.

"A thing is said to be virtually contained in another when the thing can naturally terminate with its action in the other." Rosmini
"The human mind is as unlimited and universal as undetermined being, but undetermined being is not unlimited and universal in the sense that it manifests an infinite actuality. It is virtually unlimited and universal in so far as it admits unlimited, infinite terms and generally reveals its infinite capacity."

"...since these necessary truths are prior to the existence of contingent beings, they must be grounded in the existence of a necessary substance." Leibniz

Axioms connect regions of knowledge.

We are always loved more than we feel; the greatest loves cannot be felt.

Democratic politics is a politics of rumors, gossip, and guesses.

"The intuiting human being embraces all being, which informs him and communicates its own dignity to him as if he were stamped by a seal impressing itself on him and repeating itself in him." Rosmini

A juridically single border may be physically noncontiguous.

"God's presence makes a place frightening because he has power over life and death." Chrysostom

primary spectacle (integral to plot) and secondary spectacle (just for spectacle)

Fine art always occurs within a broader context of art.

rhetoric & 'ghost' reasoning (i.e., reasoning merely suggested by the manner of discourse)

Most conclusions of scientific inquiry are known by mediated knowing.

Being that is most perfectly being is intellectual being.

The divine ideas are acts of the free divine intellect, in which God reflects on God as able to cause.

"The Platonists posited ideas, saying that all things were made by their participation in an idea, for example, a human being or any other species. However, in place of these ideas, we have one thing, that is, the Son, the Word of God." Aquinas (In Col. 1.4)

Oppressors often force inclusions on the oppressed; it is a way to keep them under control.

Something is a part. Whatever is a part is a part of a whole. This whole can itself be part of a whole, and that whole a part of another whole. But this cannot proceed infinitely. Therefore there is a whole that is not part of another whole.

Christ calls us to go to all peoples and make them students; he doesn't say that we are to make them students except in politics, or except in philosophy, or except in social interaction.

the argument from stories to ethical categories

"A *cause* in the realm of things corresponds to a *reason* in the realm of truths, which is why causes themselves -- and especially final causes -- are often called 'reasons'." Leibniz

argumentum ad vertaginem (Leibniz): If this is not accepted, we have no way to attain certainty about the matter in question.

For any good, however good, you will find that men are often lax in pursuing it.

Sovereignty is not an unlimited right but a legal authority that covers what is needed for a complete society.

Rights are the source and font of the state, by which and for which and limited by which it exists.

the natural social ontology

What is changed is changed by another?
(1) Yes
---- (a) with respect to a first other
---- (b) without respect to any first other
---- ---- (1) finitely per accidens
---- ---- (2) infinite regress
(2) No
---- (a) because there is no change (change is not coherent)
---- (b) because some things strictly change themselves

Part of the expressiveness of music is its appropriateness for specific kinds of dance.

Yurei moji (ghost kanji) typically arise from misreadings, but a few may just be rare real kanji whose meanings aren't remembered and have survived purely by accident.

God as the sufficient reason for the principle of sufficient reason

In John 14, Jesus characterizes the Ascension as to the Father, he prepares a topon, a place, with the Father, and He Himself is the way to it.

A complicated knot of related errors has been built into the fabric of all modern nation-states: confusion of citizenship with subjecthood, of participation with allegiance, of the State and the Sovereign.

That there is a prior implies that there is a standard for something's being prior. In most situations we identify as that standard a beginning, so that to be prior is to be closer to an initial or original. In other situations, not knowing the beginning, we posit one and fine our posit confirmed. In yet others, not knowing the beginning, nor yet knowing a confirmation of the posit, we still posit it and use it to reason about the rest.

I think in doubting, therefore I am such that I have the potential to do so; therefore at least some things have potential. 

Given a choice between their dignity and their will, people often choose their will.

"The church is not to be viewed as a thing at once finished and perfect, but as a historical fact, as a human society, subject to the laws of history, to genesis, growth, development. Only the dead is done and stagnant." Philip Schaff

When we say that Christ's kingdom is not of this world, we do not mean that Caesar can overrule Him in this world.

What is 'of Caesar' is not anything in creation that Caesar wants but things like currency, that are themselves made directly or indirectly by Caesar's authority. Creation is God's, not Caesar's. Human life is God's, not Caesar's.

Political institutions are juridical entities that require some sort of system of rights for their setting.

No state has ever had an even in principle monopoly on the use of coercive force, except totalitarian states, and even these have always recognized some non-state force, for their own convenience (or, more properly, have connived at such use by those in powerful office).

Even very well developed civil societies have pre-civil aspects.

human rights that belong to humankind as a community (e.g., the right to exist)

disruption of another's rights
(1) rights pertaining to what is external to the ambit of a person
(2) rights pertaining to the ambit of a person
--- --- (a) disruption in contractual specifications with another person
--- --- (b) disruption not itself concerned with contract with the other person
--- --- --- --- (1) through failure to do what is reasonable to expect
--- --- --- --- (2) through doing what is reasonable not to expect
--- --- --- --- --- --- (a) so that it constitutes a standing threat of disruption
--- --- --- --- --- --- (b) so that it has actually disrupted

Truth, goodness, and beauty are the three unifiers of civil society.

erotetic evocation: beginning from nonquestions, can infer questions
erotetic implication: from a beginning with at least one question, can infer question
--> a difficulty in almost all discussions of both is a failure to recognize that these must be rototed in gaps of starting-points rather than starting-points themselves -- from a nonselection of a definite disjunct, we draw the question of which disjunct.

In the Ring, Sauron has treated himself as a mere means and a tool to use, alienating something as himself in order to gain greater mastery over his own person.

The understanding one has of liberty is always commensurate with one's understanding of goodness.

Evening Note for Thursday, November 6

 Thought for the Evening: Tractatus Coislinianus

I am currently reading Walter Watson's The Lost Second Book of Aristotle's Poetics (I am only partway through, and don't agree with everything, but I highly recommend it), so I'm thinking about the Tractatus Coislinianus.

Aristotle's Poetics as we have it is known to be incomplete; it promises to discuss topics that it never gets around to discussing, and other references clearly attribute to the Poetics topics that we do not find in our extant version. The most obvious of these topics is comedy; almost the entire Poetics we have is about tragedy. Generally the best guess about why is that in Andronicus's standard ordering of the works of Aristotle, the Poetics is the last book, and likely the original source collection for all the versions that have survived had lost its tail end, possibly at a point in the manuscript that obscured the fact that something was missing. Be that as it may, in 1839, J. A. Cramer was researching in the De Coislin collection in the Bibliotheque National and came across three manuscript pages that summarized an account of comedy. The manuscript, Coislinianus 120, seems to have been a manuscript from the Great Lavra on Mount Athos, copied at some point in the tenth century; it entered into the collection of the seventeenth century's most remarkable book collector, Pierre Seguier de Coislin, and thence ended up in the Bibliotheque National. Cramer found the manuscript remarkable, and published it in his Anecdota Graeca series, suggesting that it was an abstract of the missing part of the Poetics.

Cramer's suggestion was not widely accepted; it was the nineteenth century, and scholars were on a tear to prove that things were inauthentic. Jacob Bernays discussed the manuscript in 1853 and argued that while some parts may derive from Aristotle, the work as it exists in the Tractatus is inconsistent with views Aristotle elsewhere gives. This became the standard view of the text -- that it was probably indirectly derived from the original Poetics, but garbled and mixed with non-Aristotelian elements, to such an extent that most of it was just not derived from Aristotle's Poetics. In 1980, Umberto Eco, writing The Name of the Rose, used it as the source for his reconstruction of the lost second book of the Poetics, but Eco, of course, was writing historical fiction, and therefore could evade any scholarly opprobrium over using it in this way.

All of this began to shift in 1984, when Richard Janko's Aristotle on Comedy argued that this entire scholarly tradition was wrong and at times poorly argued, claiming that the work was in fact what Cramer had thought it might be, an abstract of part of Aristotle's Poetics. He therefore used it, along with the various already extant references and a couple of works with content closely related to that of Tractatus Coislinianus to reconstruct Aristotle's account of comedy. As Janko was a scholar well reputed for his philological work, this had some weight, particularly when he refined and improved his work in his 1987 translation of the Poetics. Nonetheless, scholars still tend to resist the idea that the Tractatus is a genuine summary of the authenthic second book, although there does seem to be more acceptance of the possibility that it might at least go back to a post-Aristotle Peripatetic source, like Theophrastus. Many of the arguments don't really seem to bear on the issue; it's obvious that the Tractatus is a summary, for instance, not the original work, so it is pointless, as far as the question of connection to Aristotle goes, to give arguments that the summary itself is later than Aristotle.

In any case, Watson's translation of the Tractatus's definition of comedy (Walter Watson, The Lost Second Book of Aristotle's Poetics, The University of Chicago Press (Chicago: 2012), p. 179):

Comedy is an imitation of action laughable and with no share in magnitude, complete, in speech made pleasing by accessories whose forms are different in different parts, by acting and not by narration, through pleasure and laughter achieving a catharsis of such emotions.

Links of Interest

* Zack Savitsky, Carlo Ravelli's Radical Perspective on Reality, at "Quanta Magazine'

* Daniel D. De Haan, Aquinas on Perceiving, Thinking, Understanding, and Cognizing Individuals (PDF)

* Sagrada Familia recently became the world's tallest church, beating out Ulm Minster. (Take that, Lutherans! Although Catholics also built Ulm Minster before the Lutherans took it over, so really, we are the undisputed champions.) The spire on Sagrada Familia is not finished yet, so it still has some growing to do.

* Garrath Williams, Kant Incorporated (PDF)

* Larry Sanger, Grokipedia: A First Look

* Riin Sirkel, Aristotle on Demonstrative Knowledge: Particulars Included (PDF)

* Patrick Flynn, Real Natures, at "The Journal of Absolute Truth"

* Nabeel Hamid, Teleology and Causation in Clemens Tipler (PDF)

* Kieran Setiya discusses Alice Ambrose and her complicated relationship with Wittgenstein, at "Under the Net"

Currently Reading

In Book

J.-K. Huysmans, En Route
Walter Watson, The Lost Second Book of Aristotle's Poetics
Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason

In Audiobook

Lois McMaster Bujold, Brothers in Arms
Scott Lynch, Red Seas Under Red Skies
Agatha Christie, Twelve Radio Mysteries
Jim Butcher, Grave Peril

A Source of Puzzlement

  To the question "What is a human body?" I intend to propose seven preliminary answers: that it is an animal body with various powers of movement, some voluntary and directed; that it is a body whose movements afford expression to intentions and purposes that thereby possess a certain directedness; that, as an expressive body, it is interpretable by others and responsive to others; that, as an interpretable body, a variety of its characteristics are signs whose meanings others can understand; that its directedness has the unity of agency; that it cannot be adequately understood except in terms of the social contexts in which it engages with others and others with it; and that it is in certain respects enigmatic, a source of puzzlement, since alone among animal bodies it occasionally emits the question "What is a human body?" and directs its powers towards giving an answer to that question. 

[Alasdair MacIntyre, "What is a human body?", The Tasks of Philosophy, Cambridge University Press (New York: 2006) p. 86.]

And I Have Many Miles on Foot to Fare

 Sonnet
by John Keats

Keen, fitful gusts are whisp'ring here and there
 Among the bushes half leafless, and dry;
 The stars look very cold about the sky,
 And I have many miles on foot to fare.
 Yet feel I little of the cool bleak air,
 Or of the dead leaves rustling drearily,
 Or of those silver lamps that burn on high,
 Or of the distance from home's pleasant lair:
 For I am brimfull of the friendliness
 That in a little cottage I have found;
 Of fair-hair'd Milton's eloquent distress,
 And all his love for gentle Lycid drown'd;
 Of lovely Laura in her light green dress,
 And faithful Petrarch gloriously crown'd.

Two Poem Drafts

 A Nightmare

Mammon and License,
the gods of America,
walk like ifrits
on the sands by the shore.
A fire is in them,
a darkness of fire,
a burning of fire
that burns where it strays.
Their shadows devour,
their flames unenlighten,
and by the far end
every good will be ash,
all bonds will be broken,
desires made sterile,
and all we have made
will be nothing at last.

A Shield Against Darkness

Arise, God!
Be broken,
His foes,
and flee,
His enemies,
before Him;
as smoke is routed,
be routed,
as wax is melted
by fire's face,
be lost,
O wicked,
before God's face.

But be glad,
O just!
Rejoice
before God's face;
rejoice gladly!
He rides
from all ages
the heavenly heavens;
He grants
His voice,
a mighty voice.

Arise, Lord God,
for Sabbath-rest;
You and the Ark,
the Ark of Your might!

Personal Identity and Transworld Identity

 The philosophical question of personal identity over time is, roughly, the topic of what is required for a person at one time to be the same person at another time; due to some complications with questions of personhood, this is sometimes generalized a bit to the question of what is required for something (perhaps a person) at one time to be the same something at another time. (Olson's characterization in his SEP article, I think, gets this backwards, taking the latter as the fundamental problem; this is not tenable as an account of the actual topic of personal identity in the actual history of philosophy.) However, topics of this form are not exclusive to personal identity (even if we stay with speaking about persons). Here are just a few others of similar kind:

what is required for a person at one place to be the same person at another place
what is required for a person in one possibility to be the same person in another possibility
what is required for a person in one society to be the same person in another society|
what is required for a person in one doxastic state to be the same person in another doxastic state
what is required for a person in one legal system to be the same person in another legal system
what is required for a person with respect to one set of duties to be the same person with respect to another set of duties

More could be added. All of these, including times, can be modeled as possible worlds in one way or another, so all of these are in fact just different variations of what is known as transworld identity. Transworld identity is usually discussed in talking about some version of the second topic in the above list: what is required for a person in one possibility to be a person in another possibility. It has tended to be dominated by discussions of David Lewis's particular view of possible worlds, interpreted only as complete possibilities and literally as worlds, but as I've noted before neither of these interpretations are strongly motivated. You can perfectly well interpret 'possible worlds' as times or places or any number of other things, and occasionally we do.

Most attempts to give an account of personal identity over time focus on things particularly relevant to time -- persistence of a psychologically continuous stream over time, persistence of a material body over time -- but in reality, given that personal identity over time is really just a much more general problem applied specifically to the domain of times, any account of this should be something that is also generalizable, in one of two senses:

(1) the account for personal identity over times, or at least a generalized form of it, can be directly applied as an account in these other transworld identity topics;

(2) the account for personal identity over times is analogous to the accounts for these other transworld identity topics, in such a way that, while they have to be adapted to the different domains, the account for one can be used as a model for how to develop an account for another.

(In fact, the kinds of domains are diverse enough that I suspect that you will have (1) for some and (2) for others.)

When we try this out, most accounts of personal identity over time simply don't do very well. First, as noted before, they tend to be very time-focused, but it's not always clear what the analogue for the time-focused element would be in another domain. What is the analogue of psychological or physical continuity over time when we are talking about different possibilities or places or doxastic states? And what's more, even when you can find something that might be an analogue, it's often not clear that the analogue could even do the work it would need to do in the analogue domain to solve analogous problems. 

Further, the answers often just push back any puzzles. If personal identity is a matter of a persisting material body, then we just have turned any questions of personal identity over time into questions of the identity of material bodies over time. This is not necessarily a bad thing in itself (presumably some of these transworld identity topics are in fact reducible to more basic transworld identity topics, in the sense that the interpretations of possible worlds may be more and less fundamental), but it's noticeable that the actual point in question -- identity over time -- is still on the board as a point in question. In fact, I think it becomes clear that most modern accounts of personal identity over time simply don't go deeply enough actually to give an adequate account of the topic. (In this way they are somewhat analogous to attempts to attempts to give an account of transworld identity that reduce it to some form of transtemporal identity. OK, but transtemporal identity is just transworld identity where the possible worlds are interpreted as times.)