Whose Death Is the World's Desire

The Hunting of the Dragon
by G. K. Chesterton 

When we went hunting the Dragon
In the days when we were young,
We tossed the bright world over our shoulder
As bugle and baldrick slung;
Never was world so wild and fair
As what went by on the wind,
Never such fields of paradise
As the fields we left behind:

For this is the best of a rest for men
That men should rise and ride
Making a flying fairyland
Of market and country-side,
Wings on the cottage, wings on the wood,
Wings upon pot and pan,
For the hunting of the Dragon
That is the life of a man. 

For men grow weary of fairyland
When the Dragon is a dream,
And tire of the talking bird in the tree,
The singing fish in the stream;
And the wandering stars grow stale, grow stale,
And the wonder is stiff with scorn;
For this is the honour of fairyland
And the following of the horn; 

Beauty on beauty called us back
When we could rise and ride,
And a woman looked out of every window
As wonderful as a bride:
And the tavern-sign as a tabard blazed,
And the children cheered and ran,
For the love of the hate of the Dragon
That is the pride of a man. 

The sages called him a shadow
And the light went out of the sun:
And the wise men told us that all was well
And all was weary and one:
And then, and then, in the quiet garden,
With never a weed to kill,

We knew that his shining tail had shone
In the white road over the hill:
We knew that the clouds were flakes of flame,
We knew that the sunset fire
Was red with the blood of the Dragon
Whose death is the world’s desire. 

For the horn was blown in the heart of the night
That men should rise and ride,
Keeping the tryst of a terrible jest
Never for long untried;
Drinking a dreadful blood for wine,
Never in cup or can,
The death of a deathless Dragon,
That is the life of a man.

Links of Note

 * Eliyahu Rotenberg, Some Thoughts on the Philosophy of Law in Judaism, at "Ignatius of Zion"

* Katie Curtis, The Creative Retrieval of Aquinas in W. Norris Clarke, at "Chasing Logos"

* Chester H. Sunde, Psy.D., Plato Never Said 'Forms'

* Chris Fraser, The Limitations of Ritual Propriety: Ritual and Language in Xunzi and Zhuangzi (PDF)

* T. Benjamin White, I Read the Steinbeck Werewolf Book So You Don't Have To, at "The Composted Book Review"

* Hillel Wayne, Points are a weird and inconsistent unit of measure, on typographical points, at "Computer Things"

* Denis Kambouchner & Louis Rouquayrol, Descartes' Ethics, at the SEP

* Ahmed Alwishah & David Sanson, The Liar Paradox in Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, at the SEP

* B. A. Clarke, Pre-decimal Currency Was Mostly Fine, at "Clarke's Corner"

* Rob Alspaugh, The Point of ST I-II Q8 a2, at "Teaching Boys Badly"

* Casual Physics Enjoyer, The Particle Comes Alive, looks at the physics of particles in fluids

Magnifica Humanitas

 Pope Leo XIV recently released the encyclical letter, Magnifica humanitas. It explicitly positions itself as a sequel to Pope Leo XIII's Rerum novarum, but is also, I think, a deliberate sequel to Pope Francis's Dignitas infinita. Unfortunately, it has a lot of the problems that seem endemic to Church documents these days -- the things that suggest that perhaps it should have been thought through a bit more carefully. The claim that Nehemiah "did not impose solutions from above" is baffling; Nehemiah spends a significant part of the book giving orders, rebuking nobles and officials, and appointing people to be in charge. It is true that he works to reforge the community identity of the Israelites, and it is true that the Israelites respond well to his plans, which seems to be what is primarily in view, and I very much like the appeal to Nehemiah (who provides a good example of a laity-driven approach to reform), but the characterization of Nehemiah's work seems oddly selective.This is a recurring problem, as, again, has been common in Church documents recently.* Some people have noted that the writing, ironically, has a lot of stylistic similarities with results of AI programs, probably not because AI was used but because AI also tends to slide into this vaguely inspirational now-this-now-that committee-speak, of which Church officials have been the masters for years now.

Nonetheless, the encyclical is a nice summary of the social teaching of the Church. And contrary to the way it is sometimes being presented, it is largely positive about AI research, and just lays down exactly the sort of moral principles for such research that one would expect it to give. As some have noted, it doesn't even call for a ban of autonomous weapons systems -- it just insists that they "must be subject to the most rigorous ethical constraints, to guarantee respect for human dignity and the sanctity of life and to avoid a race to develop such arms" (section 197). This is remarkably weak.

What seems to be the intended point -- it could be clearer, but a number of things converge on this interpretation -- is that matters like the ethics of AI research require a significant amount of initiative on the part of the laity in general, distinct from any direct interference by the clergy; it thus reiterates the general principles that the laity need to keep in mind when dealing with any matter, like AI research, that can affect our understanding of human dignity. Read in that light, it does this very well. I just wish we were out of the era of throw-everything-in-somehow document-writing.

----

* One of the more interesting ones here is when it says that "the 'just war' theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated" (section 192), but all the things it explicitly rejects are common modern modifications of the traditional just-war view, while it repeatedly says things that have commonly been said in traditional versions of just war theory. (For instance, one might think that it was proposing a pacifist approach, but then it goes on to give, sections 197-200, a discussion of how military decisions in war should be made, which explicitly appeals to principles of just war theory!)

Two Poem Drafts

 Nightfall

The evening, creeping now
on shower-watered fields,
builds in depth; the sun bows;
wonderfully to night it yields.

I sit alone in shadowed room,
still as stone, and wait
as fate is woven on the loom
with gloom; and there I ruminate.

The outer black, a sheet
like doubt, now covers all
and falls the night, complete,
against all light a wall.

The clouds are hiding stars,
the wide world is hid away,
yet night neither hides nor mars
the glory of light of day.

A dawn will come, will burn,
upturn the rule of shade,
and I will coolly yearn
and sigh for hope remade.

Connection

On page unmarked I mark a line;
I draw it straight and true
from mine to yours and yours to mine,
made even, as is due.

In silent air I draw a word
to reach through time and space
and on your ear alight, thus heard
with harmony and grace.

By light I speak, from eye to eye,
with glistening tear and hue;
to make a circuit, photons fly
between my heart and you.

I fold the world and make it small
to hold us both in bound;
within this O, I compass all:
here infinity is found.

The Power of Ideas

 It is the business of education to wait upon Pentecost. Unhappily, there is something about educational syllabuses, and especially about examination papers, which seems to be rather out of harmony with Pentecostal manifestations. The Energy of Ideas does not seem to descend into the receptive mind with quite that rush of cloven fire which we ought to expect. Possibly there is something lacking in our Idea of education; possibly something inhibiting has happened to the Energy. But Pentecost will happen, whether within or without official education. From some quarter or other, the Power will descend, to flame or to smolder until it is ready to issue in a new revelation. We need not suppose that, because the mind of the reader is inert to Plato, it will therefore be inert to Nietzsche or Karl Marx. Failing those, it may respond to Wilhelmina Stitch or to Hollywood. No incarnate Idea is altogether devoid of Power; if the Idea is feeble, the Energy is dispersed, and the Power dim, the indwelling spirit will be dim, dispersed and feeble -- but such as it is, so its response will be and such will be its manifestation in the world. 

[Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, HarperCollins (New York: 1987) pp. 112-113.]

Be Skillful Money-Changers

 The Mosaic philosophy is accordingly divided into four parts — into the historic, and that which is specially called the legislative, which two properly belong to an ethical treatise; and the third, that which relates to sacrifice, which belongs to physical science; and the fourth, above all, the department of theology, vision, which Plato predicates of the truly great mysteries. And this species Aristotle calls metaphysics. Dialectics, according to Plato, is, as he says in The Statesman, a science devoted to the discovery of the explanation of things. And it is to be acquired by the wise man, not for the sake of saying or doing anything of what we find among men (as the dialecticians, who occupy themselves in sophistry, do), but to be able to say and do, as far as possible, what is pleasing to God. But the true dialectic, being philosophy mixed with truth, by examining things, and testing forces and powers, gradually ascends in relation to the most excellent essence of all, and essays to go beyond to the God of the universe, professing not the knowledge of mortal affairs, but the science of things divine and heavenly; in accordance with which follows a suitable course of practice with respect to words and deeds, even in human affairs. Rightly, therefore, the Scripture, in its desire to make us such dialecticians, exhorts us: Be skilful money-changers rejecting some things, but retaining what is good.

[St. Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 1.28]

'Be skil(l)ful money-changers' is a saying commonly attributed to Jesus by the Church Fathers, although it's an agraphon, i.e., something not attributed to Him in the Gospels; it was particularly popular among the Alexandrian Church Fathers, who use it in different kinds of contexts as an exhortation to distinguish the true from the counterfeit.

Memory, Composition, Improvisation

Ben Laude has a nice breakdown of a famous scene from the movie Amadeus:

 

Memory, composition, and improvisation is a good way to look at talent, because they are the elements of excellence in every intellectual and cultural field.

Dashed Off XVIII

 the Church as model of both consecrated virginity and matrimony

Spirit by its nature is attracted to sign as meaning-bearing.

We make trade-offs not merely with quantitative assessments but also with judgments of quality, and the latter kind of trade-off assessment has features not found in the former.

It is a fact that some way sof playing poker are cheating in the context of the game being played; therefore there are moral facts.

Communication always begins with having-in-common.

Loves tend toward uniqueness, and the deeper they are, the more in them is unique.

Most words can be used of the potential as well as the actual.

Lk 24:51 (Christ taken up into heaven) // Lk 24:52-53 (Disciples going to Jerusalem and staying in the Temple)
-- the disciples do on earth what symbolically corresponds to what Christ does in the Ascension

The Ascension and Session are the culminations and completions of Incarnation.

Every advance in one's education consists in recognizing how what one had learned is a shadow of what one is learning.

'postulates of respect for the individual'

The modality of coming to know is not separate from the object of knowing.

We know there are molecules composing tables because there are tables that are necessarily composite, and study of the components brings us the molecules (and atoms &c.).

the sensible matter of matrimony as consenting presentation

That one can *model* discovered solutions as optimizations does not imply that optimizing is the best *strategy* for finding such solutions.

It follows from Malebranche's account of the passions that they should only be followed to the extent that doing so preserves society and our body.

Communication begins before we actually communicate.

What we usually call evidence is something we project to exist in a 'steady and general point of view', the open field of the publicly accessible.

One reason a school needs to support high-achieving students as much as possible is that such students are part of the support system for lower-achieving students.

You learn how to comprehend what you read by reading lots of things like it.

Coolness is a form of novelty.

Our ability to refer to fictional entities in pretense and make-believe is itself a metaphysical mystery.

Many of our assertions are parts of testimonial claims; higher-order reflection may classify those chains in different ways, but that does not affect those assertions as assertions, just as linked in systems with other assertions.

pretending to assert vs asserting what one pretends

We make believe in order to think through.

To say that we refer or assert in a game does not fundamentally affect any questions about reference or assertion.

Walton's discussion of fictional entities captures the whole problem with his project: saying "it is fictional that" or "in a game of make believe" reclassifies parts of the problem but doesn't actually answer any of the questions he seems to assume it does. (He seems, in fact, to be smuggling in loose, colloquial tones into a technical account that doesn't obviously require them -- e.g., on his account, something that is make-believe may also actually be the case outside the game, but he regularly borrows on our tendency to take 'make belive' as a marker for the *not real*. On his account, saying we fictionally refer can't give the conclusion that we don't actually refer, but he treats it as if it does whenever it is convenient for him to do so.

When people ask, "What is the value of X?", there is often no such thing as 'the value' but many very different values.

LLM behavior is pretty much exactly what you would expect from a blending of a huge number of people who talk too much.

"The affirmative proposition is prior to and better known than the negative (since affirmation explains denial just as being is prior to non-being)." Aristotle Met 996b

Strategy is a fundamentally analytic field.

symbolic habitus in the imagination

books as quasi-friends of pleasure
pets as quasi-friends of pleasure

the illocutionary force of what is said on the stage vs the illocutionary force of the stage-play

Cinema is in many ways a four-dimensional art; it requires use of space and time in visual storytelling.

"What then stops us from calling happy (eudaimona) the one who is active in accoradance with complete virtue, sufficiently equipped with external goods, not for some arbitrary duration but over a complete life?" Aristotle NE 1101a

The human state, like the human life, exists both by nature and by artifice.

Without the good of family and of civil society, no individual good can reliably exist.

All names admit of both nonfictional and fictional uses.
-- this is a specification of transperspectival and perspectival uses

"A safe fairy-land is untrue to all worlds." JRR Tolkien

The Chinese translation of The Lord of the Rings (which includes Silmarillion and Hobbit)
Mojie ("Magic/Demon Ring")
(1) Jingling baozuan ("The Elves' Jewels")
(2) Huobite ren ("The Hobbit Person")
(3) Mojie zaizian ("The Magic Ring Reappears")
(4) Shuangl-a qibing ("The Surprise Attack of the Two Towers")
(5) Wangzhe wudi ("The King is Invincible")
jingling = spiritual/refined/skilled mind/soul/spirit/sprite (hence 'Elf')

To live morally is to be living before the tribunals of conscience and God.

the technical infinity of humanity

We all begin to pray before we know what to pray.

allegory as tending toward a virtue ethics

The species-function of an institution is not the same as its society-function or its intrinsic function.

A game in game theory consists in
(1) a set of logical objects (agents/players)
(2) mapped to multiple elements in sets of choices
(3) so that the set of such elements is modeled by a maximizing function.

In most of what we care about we don't know what to maximize or optimize.

Any result that can be reached by natural selection can in principle be reached by intellectual intention.

There are usually very many coordination devices for solving any given coordination problem, and they are selected in general on the basis of things having little to do with the coordination problem itself.

A man trapped alone on a desert island would still form institutions (home, names, designated gathering areas, latrine-areas, gardens, pets, or what have you, depending on the situation). If joined by someone who refused to recognize these, the result would be an obviously recognizable form of institutional conflict.

Beore you can have an institution of driving on a given side of the road, one must already have the institutions of driving and of roads. Roads presuppose institutionalized forms of travel and transport. These in turn presuppose other institutions (militaries, king's messnegers, postal services, merchant trade, or whatever else).

Every Bayesian seems in practice to have a different Bayesianism.

Before every coordination problem is the selection of which coordination problem to have.

Either some moral principles are necessary or we live in a universe that favors some moral principles over others.

principles of administrative design
(1) facilitated compliance
(2) easy return to compliance
(3) penalty for continued noncompliance commensurate with severity of problem created by noncompliance

Large-scale problems are often solved by degrading the solutions to other problems.

The deontic power to buy, pay, and close debts may usually involve money, but it doesn't actually require money (favors or force may close a debt even more effectively than funds).

Either 'purchasing power' already presupposes money or the power to invade and occupy is a form of purchasing power.

Philosophical naturalists are in general only aspirationally so.

Promises are not necessarily forward-looking; we also promise that we have done or are doing something.

strongly actual: necessary things
properly actual: substances & accidents existing in the world
weakly actual: ficta and rational beings

The inevitability of inquiry grounds the postulate of intelligible order as inevitable, the necessity of inquiry to moral life grounds the postulate of intelligible order as obligatory.

If A is angry at B and as a result says, "No, have nothing more to do with me; you do not exist," the "you do not exist" concerns status as object rather than status as thing.

'Bad company' arguments are arguments a pari.

The existence conditions for fictional objects qua objects are the same as for any other objects; the differences between fictional and nonfictional objects are causal, not objective.

Most of the philosophical difficulties asosciated with fictional objects are not conclusive to fictional objects.

If I say of an erratic friend, "Which A will we meet tonight? Every day, a different A," I am distinguishing A objectively and not really.

fictional characters and practice opponents in arguing and fighting
-- this is one of the stronger analogies for a make-believe account

the use of make-believe in philosophical argument (e.g., imagining an opponent or a conversation)

prefix realism -- the prefix would in fact just be the domain indicator

artistic idea --> objective artifact --> external artifact

ampliated vs nonampliated existence games

purely figurative uses of 'fictional'

If I'm puzzled about "There is a center of gravity here," it is  pointless to try to answer questions about what it is for a center of gravity to be here by saying, "Ah, what this really means is, *metaphorically* there is a center of gravity here." Adding 'metaphorically' has not addressed any questions I am asking. All it has done is given limited information about how the *statement* relates to other statements. Likewise, if I say, "In a game of make-believe, there is a center of gravity here," this answers no questions about it unless I am asking how the statement relates to other statements, and even then very incomplete information (e.g., which of the many possible games of make-believe)?

fictional characters // words

"If we admit a certain kind of entity, we cannot but admit all the other kinds of entities that figure in the identity conditions of an entity of that kind. Yet we admit fictional works. So, we cannot but admit fictional objects as well, insofar as the latter entities figure in the identity conditions of the former entities." Alberto Voltolini
"Insofar as i) fictional objects are necessary identity conditions for fictional works and ii) the latter allegedly exist, then of course fictional works are logically sufficient for the existence of fictional objects; hence again, fictional objects exist as well."

To say that fictional objects don't exist is to say that they are neither primary beings nor secondary beings.

general powers of trusteeship (incident to the office of trustee) vs special powers (arising from special authorization and direction of the settlor)
-- special powers cna be mere naked powers (discretion of trustee) or powers in the nature of a trust (obligatory)

Swinburne's kinds of religious experience
(1) public object
--- (1a) through ordinary sensory object
--- (1b) through unuusal sensory object
(2) private object
--- (2a) through typical spiritual sensations
--- (2b) through atypical spiritual sensations
--- (2c) without any sensations

A means is potential to what acts for an end.

Every argument against God's existence is a defective part of an argument for God's existence, namely, the argument whereby it is shown to be wrong.

To be a person is to be a potential classifier; to live as a person is to be an actual classifier.

We often begin an inquiry into something by fictionalizing it.

(1) Necessarily, some propositions are not both true and false.
(2) Therefore there are reasons why some propositions are true or false but not both.
(3) The collection of all such reasons is called reality.
(4) Therefore, necessarily, there is some reality.

counterintuitive vs praeterintuitive

Aristotle's Metaphysics Lambda is an argument that thinking must be a principle of the universal heavens and of nature; that is, that change (kinesis) presupposes thought (noesis).

laws of nature --> intelligible order --> divine intellect

The universe is as if it were designed to produce stars.

The Bible makes very clear, in both the Old and the New Testaments, that there was prophetic revelation that did not contribute to Scripture, that not all prophets were concerned with public revelation.

Intellectual understanding infuses the social medium, descending thereby into the material world and transfiguring it.

Philosophy is a work of both discovery and invention; truth is sought in both ways, and most perfectly through their union.

Habitude XXXV

 It seems that original sin is not habitude. For original sin is lack of original justice, as Anselm says in the book on the virginal conception, and so original sin is a sort of privation. But privation is opposed to habitude. Therefore original sin is not habitude.

Further, actual sin has more of the notion of fault than original, inasmuch as it has more of the notion of the voluntary. But actual habitude of sin does not have the notion of fault; otherwise it would follow that a man sleeping, culpably sins. Thefore no original habitude has the notion of fault.

Further, in badness, act always precedes habitude, for bad habitude is never infused, but acquired. But original sin is not preceded by any act. Therefore original sin is not habitude.

But contrariwise is what Augustine says in the book on the baptism of infants, that due to original sin little children are capable of craving [concupiscibili], though they are not actually craving [concupiscentes]. But capability [habilitas] is called according to some habitude. Therefore original sin is habitude.

I reply that it must be said that, as was said above, habitude is twofold. One is that by which power is inclined to act, as kinds of knowledge [scientiae] and virtues are called habitudes. And in this way, original sin is not habitude. In another way, habitude is said to be a disposition of a nature composed of many things, according to which it has itself [se habet] either well or badly toward something, and especially according as the disposition has been turned as it were into nature, as is obvious from illness and health. And in this way original sin is habitude. For it is a sort of disordered [inordinata] disposition coming from the dissolution of that harmony in which the notion of original justice consisted, just as bodily illness is a sort of disordered [inordinata] disposition of body, according to which the equality in which the notion of health consists is dissolved. Whence original sin is called languor of nature.

To the first it must be said that, as illness of body has something of privation, inasmuch as equality of health is removed, and has something positive, to wit the humors themselves being disposed disorderedly [inordinata dispositos], so too original sin has privation of original justice, and with it disordered disposition [inordinatam dispositionem] of the parts of the soul. Whence it is not pure privation but a sort of corrupt habitude.

To the second it must be said that actual sin is a sort of disordering [inordinatio] of act, whereas original sin, since it is sin of nature, is a sort of disordered disposition [inordinata dispositio] of nature itself, which has the notion of fault inasmuch as it is derived from the first parent, as was said. Now this kind of disordered disposition of nature [inordinata dispositio naturae] has the notion of habitude, but disordered disposition of act [inordinata dipositio actus] does not have the notion of habitude. And because of this original sin is able to be habitude, but not actual sin.

To the third it must be said that that objection proceeds from the habitude by which power is inclined to act, but original sin is not such a habitude. Although even from original sin some inclination to disordered act [actum inordinatum] follows, not directly, but indirectly, to wit, through removal of the impediment [remotionem prohibentis], that is, original justice, which impeded disordered change [inordinatos motus], just as also from bodily illness there follows inclination to disordered bodily changes [motus corporales inordinatos]. Nor ought it to be said that original sin is infused habitude, nor acquired, save by the act of the first parent rather than the act of this person, but it is innate through defective origin.

[St. Thomas Aquinas, ST 2-1.82.1, my translation. The Latin is here, the Dominican Fathers translation is here.]

It's important to grasp that original sin is not sin in a strictly proper sense, i.e., in the sense that the person who has it has thereby sinned; rather, it is the sin of the whole human race, in the first parent as the head of the human race. In that parental sin, original justice, which protected from actual disorder, was lost, with the result that all descended human beings are disordered in their desires.

Besides the importance of original sin itself, one of the important points emphasized here is that the infused vs. acquired distinction is not exhaustive for habitudes; original sin is neither infused nor acquired by the person who has it, but is a result of a defective origination of the person, namely, being generated when original justice has been lost. This makes original sin a natural habitude like congenital illness rather than a rational habitude like science or virtue, although since it is a disordered state of our rational ability to organize our inclinations, disordered acts follow from it, which makes vice possible and, indeed, in the long run inevitable where there is nothing to counteract it.

And Stand a Barrier to Eternity

To a Daisy
by Alice Meynell 

Slight as thou art, thou art enough to hide
Like all created things, secrets from me,
And stand a barrier to eternity.
And I, how can I praise thee well and wide 

From where I dwell---upon the hither side?
Thou little veil for so great mystery,
When shall I penetrate all things and thee,
And then look back? For this I must abide, 

Till thou shalt grow and fold and be unfurled
Literally between me and the world.
Then I shall drink from in beneath a spring,

And from a poet’s side shall read his book.
O daisy mine, what will it be to look
From God’s side even of such a simple thing?

The Guardian 100 Best Novels

The Guardian recently published their list of 100 Best Novels As people have been commenting all over, the list is very weird. They took 172 authors, critics, academics, had each give a top ten list, and then compiled them into a single list, taking into account the weightings of the individual lists. I suppose it's inevitable that a list made this way will have some strangeness to it. It's absurd, for instance, for The Handmaid's Tale to be on a list of 100 best novels ever published in English, and even if it were, it is certainly not a better book than The Left Hand of Darkness. Charles Dickens doesn't even make the top 10, which is already a sign that the list can't be taken seriously. There are also some novelistic powerhouses that seem very underrepresented: if I haven't missed anything, Japan and Norway don't show up, France is represented entirely by Flaubert and Proust, and Germany seems to be represented entirely by Thomas Mann.  The author that I'm most disappointed not to see on a list like this is Alessandro Manzoni.

Still, it's been a while since I've done booklist around here. Bolded I have definitely read. I have linked to the ones that I've done as Fortnightly Books.

Looking at the ones I haven't read, I don't have a particular interest in reading most of them (which is not say that I wouldn't do so if the opportunity happened to arise).

I find to my complete and utter astonishment that while I've discussed them occasionally, I've never done Emma, Middlemarch, or Jane Eyre for the Fortnightly Book, which I could have sworn that I had. That will have to be rectified at some point. Vanity Fair, too, perhaps. The Great Gatsby is already on my list to do as Fortnightly Book sometime this year, and I have had Sentimental Education for years, intending to do it but always forgetting, so maybe I should actually get on that sometime.

100 My Ántonia
99 The Go-Between
98 The Road
97 Catch-22
96 Pedro Páramo
95 The Return of the Native
94 The Known World
93 Invisible Cities
92 Sentimental Education
91 Life and Fate
90 Jacob's Room
89 The Left Hand of Darkness
88 Ragtime
87 The Line of Beauty
86 The Turn of the Screw
85 The Vegetarian
84 The Talented Mr Ripley
83 A Farewell to Arms
82 The End of the Affair
81 Buddenbrooks
80 Rebecca
79 Go Tell It on the Mountain
78 A House for Mr Biswas
77 The Rainbow
76 Dracula
75 The Bluest Eye
74 Nervous Conditions
73 Austerlitz
72 Our Mutual Friend
71 Kindred
70 Jude the Obscure
69 Crime and Punishment
68 Blood Meridian
67 The Man Without Qualities
66 The Master and Margarita
65 The Color Purple
64 The Good Soldier
63 White Teeth
62 Half of a Yellow Sun
61 The Rings of Saturn
60 Howards End
59 Never Let Me Go
58 Disgrace
57 The Sound and the Fury
56 Mansfield Park
55 The Waves
54 Orlando
53 The Transit of Venus
52 The Golden Bowl
51 My Brilliant Friend
50 Wide Sargasso Sea
49 A Fine Balance
48 The Metamorphosis
47 Vanity Fair
46 The Leopard
45 The Golden Notebook
44 Giovanni's Room
43 Housekeeping
42 The Magic Mountain
41 Heart of Darkness
40 Song of Solomon
39 Their Eyes Were Watching God
38 The Age of Innocence
37 Invisible Man
36 The Handmaid's Tale
35 Great Expectations
34 Wolf Hall
33 David Copperfield
32 The God of Small Things
31 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
30 Frankenstein
29 Pale Fire
28 The Brothers Karamazov
27 The Trial
26 Don Quixote
25 Lolita
24 The Remains of the Day
23 Midnight's Children
22 Things Fall Apart
21 The Portrait of a Lady
20 Wuthering Heights
19 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
18 Persuasion
17 One Hundred Years of Solitude
16 Nineteen Eighty-Four
15 Moby-Dick
14 Mrs Dalloway
13 Emma
12 Bleak House
11 The Great Gatsby
10 Madame Bovary
9 Pride and Prejudice
8 Jane Eyre
7 War and Peace
6 Anna Karenina
5 In Search of Lost Time
4 To the Lighthouse
3 Ulysses
2 Beloved
1 Middlemarch

Links of Note

 * Jacob Allee, Dorothy L. Sayers on Facts, Feelings, and Natural Law, at "Study the Great Books"

* Exploring the Richness and Roots of Fantasy, at "The Library of Lewis and Tolkien"

* Boaz Faraday Schuman, To Contradict Is to Cooperate: Prior, Abelard, Buridan, Grice (PDF)

* Harry D'Agostino, A MacIntyrean Auto-Biography (Part I -- After Virtue)

* Chris Bobonich & Katherine Meadows, Plato's Laws, at the SEP

* Ravi Thakral & Guillaine Arthur, Normativity and the Indefinite Singular in Morality (PDF)

* Brad Skow, The Plague Crucifix, on Danto's The Abuse of Beauty, at "Mostly Aesthetics"

* Benjamin Robert Koons, The Justice of Punitive Wars, at "The Journal of Controversial Ideas"

* Joseph E. Blado, Dölpopa, Shentong Buddhism, and the Three Jewels: An Analytic Friendly Analysis (PDF)

* Ambrose Gardeil, Evolution and the Principles of St. Thomas, translated by Matthew Minerd, with an interesting discussion of habitus, at "To Be a Thomist"

* Rob Spence, The Leopard, on Lampedusa's classic, at "First Folios"

* Toby Ord, Interpolation, Extrapolation, Hyperpolation: Generalising into new dimensions (PDF)

* Ben Burgis, It's Hard to Make Sense of Marxism Without a Conception of Objective Human Flourishing, at "Philosophy for the People"

* Chris Fraser, Tang Junyi on Mencian and Mohist Conceptions of Mind (PDF)

Music on My Mind

 

Meret, "Breath of the Dying Sun".

Fortnightly Book, May 17

 Hermann Karl Hesse (1877-1962) began writing while working at a bookshop in the 1890s, but it was only in 1904 that he published his first successful work, Peter Camenzind, which became a bestseller in Germany. It did well enough that Hesse realized that devoting himself fulltime to writing could be a viable career. It was not as straightforward as he perhaps had hoped -- he had to work around a very complicated personal life and the Great War -- but he did well enough, and in 1931 he began writing a book that was originally intended to be the story of a man reincarnated across several lives. Of course, at this time things were rather complicated in Germany; Hesse had lived in Switzerland for a while at this point, but the rise of the Nazi regime would seriously impede his work. Because the Nazis looked at him with suspicion, German journals and publishing houses stopped working with him, so he couldn't get things published. Finally, having worked on the book for eleven years, resulting it in its having a very different character than he had originally intended, he published Der Glasperlenspiel, The Glass Bead Game in 1943 in Switzerland. It is largely this work that resulted in his reception of the Nobel Prize for Literature a few years later, in 1946. It would be his last major work, although for the next decades he did write many shorter works while keeping up an extensive correspondence.

The Glass Bead Game is the next fortnightly book. It is set in the future -- exactly when is unspecified, but Hesse elsewhere suggests that the narrator is looking back from around the beginning of the 25th century. The world's intellectual life has become dominated by the Glass Bead Game, a logical and mathematical system allowing players to improvise elaborate compositions of cultural values and ideas like music. The narrator is trying to figure out the life of Joseph Knecht, a young man with an interest in music, who rose to prominence as Magister Ludi, a key figure in the Order that primarily organizes the public games for the Glass Bead Game, who eventually becomes disillusioned by the intellectual life of his time.

Charles Péguy, The Mystery of the Holy Innocents and Other Poems

 Introduction

Opening Passage: From The Mystery of the Holy Innocents:

I am, God says, Master of the Three Virtues.

Faith is a loyal wife.
Charity is a fervent mother.
But hope is a very little girl.

I am, God says, the Master of the Virtues.

It is Faith who holds fast through century upon century.

It is Charity who gives herself through centuries of centuries,
But it is my little hope
who gets up every morning.

I am, God says, the Lord of the Virtues.

It is Faith who resists through century upon century.
It is Charity who yields through century upon century.
But it is my little hope
Who every morning
Says good-day to us.

I am, God says, the Lord of the Virtues. (p. 69)

Summary: Since this is a collection of poems, there is no plot or direct throughline, but there is a recurring theme of France as an expression of Catholic hope despite its mounting difficulties. We get this in "Presentation of the Beauce to Our Lady of Chartres" (of which you can hear Paul Mankin's interpretation of the French original here), in which the Beauce, the rich farmland region between the Seine and the Loire, is pictured as being engaged in a sort of quasi-liturgical procession, its harvests and beauty being offered as a gift to the Virgin:

We were born for you on the margin of this plain,
Where the golden River Loire serenely curves,
And this sandy glorious stream forever serves
To kiss the sacred hem of your immortal train. (p. 23)

Just as here you look down on an ocean of wheat,
Over there it's an ocean of heads you control,
And the harvests of joy and the harvests of dole
Are collected each night in the courts round your feet. (p. 25)

Different expressions of French hope even in difficulty are also found in "Prayer to Our Lady of Chartres For a Credit to be Carried Forward", "For Those who Die in Battle", and The Mystery of the Holy Innocents.

The Mystery of the Holy Innocents is the primary, and longest, poem in this collection, and it is on the Christian virtue of hope itself, rooted, of course, in the Passion of Christ and the martyrdom of the saints. One of the most striking passages in the poem pictures the prayers of Christians as ships in great fleets of ships sent to conquer God:

Those three or four words which conquer me, me the conquerable,
And which they send in front of their misery like two invincible hands joined together.
Those three or four words which advance like a strong prow in front a weak ship,
And which cleave the wave of my anger.
And when the prow has passed, the ship passes and all the fleet behind it. (p. 87)

There are four great fleets. The first is the fleet of the Paternosters, the Our Fathers,

And it is a fleet of the line
A battle fleet,
Like a beautiful classical fleet, like a fleet of triremes,
Advancing to attack the King (p. 90)

After it follows the second fleet, "the fleet with white sails, the innumerable fleet of the Ave Marias, / And it is a fleet of biremes" (p. 95). The third fleet is all the prayers of the Christian clock -- the Divine Office or Liturgy of Hours, the prayers of the Mass and Vespers, the graces before meals. These are the three fleets of prayers, containing all of the prayers of the Church. But there is, the poem goes on to say, a fourth fleet, "the invisible fleet" (p. p. 95), consisting of the prayers never said, the half-felt, half-understood impulses of the heart, completely imperceptible, but each one treated by God as if it were fully a prayer like any other.

The Mystery of the Holy Innocents also explores the ways in which France is the France of St. Louis, a saint of hope, in which the liberty of the Frenchman is an image of the liberty, the gratuitousness and grace, of God. In the same way, an extensive section of it reflects on the Old Testament as an anticipation of the New Testament, an anticipation that itself anticipates the martyrdom of the Holy Innocents, who themselves symbolize the virtue of hope. All of history up to them is but the childhood of a salvation history that ends in the hopeful innocence of a new childhood:

Nothing is less elaborate than my Paradise.
Aram sub ipsam, on the steps of the altar itself
These simple children play with their palms and their martyrs' crowns.
I believe they play at hoops, God says, and perhaps at quoits
(at least I believe so, for do not think
that they ever ask my permission)
And the palm forever green they use apparently as a hoop-stick. (p. 165)

Favorite Passage: From "For Those who Die in Battle" (from Eve):

Happy are they who die for a temporal land,
When a just war calls, and they obey and go forth,
Happy are they who die for a handful of earth,
Happy are they who die in so noble a band.

Happy are they who die in their country's defence,
Lying outstretched before God with upturned faces.
Happy are they who die in those last high places,
Such funeral rites have  a great magnificence.

Happy are they who die for their cities of earth,
They are the outward forms of the City above.
Happy are they who die for their fire and their hearth,
Their father's house and its humble honour and love. (p. 58)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

*****

Charles Péguy, The Mystery of the Holy Innocents and Other Poems, Pansy Pakenham, tr., Wipf and Stock Publishers (Eugene, OR: 2017).

Dashed Off XVII

 The notion of a practice presupposes those of intentionality and teleology, which distinguish this practice from that, and apparent practice from real, and attempted practice from nonpractice.

Look *through* the argument and see its mechanism.

The book of Esther teaches us that corrupt law and politics have their own loopholes.

Hans Jonas: Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life.

Consent is always a multilayered thing; this is why anything based on it gets so complicated.

Every con works by consent.

Family is in itself a natural human interest, a way in which we contextualize ourselves biologically and socially,a nd a scaffolding by which we are able to learn how to see ourselves as human persons within the human community.

Music contributes to our moral development by providing a communication through which we can be opened up to personality-in-general, unspecified person-connection, as carried by its expressiveness and our responsiveness to it, and by its beauty, which requires rising above our own selfish interests to appreciate.

There is a skill in being poor well and a skill in being rich well.

The friction of the writing is the material of the writing; it is what the planning and problem-solving uses, as engineers use friction and resistance.

(1) Suppose it is possible that there is nothing.
(2) What is possible in this way would have to be actually possible.
(3) What is actually anything requires that something actually is, with respect to which it is actually what it is.
(4) Therefore if it is possible that there is nothing, something actually is.
(5) Something actually being implies that it is not true that there is nothing.
(6) Therefore, if it is possible that there is nothing, it is not true that there is nothing.

"When someone chooses X but is aware of no reason to choose ~X, it is not necessary that the action be free." James Chastek

Law by its nature is tolerant of falsehoods that do not directly oppose its means in matters of justice.

polite fictions // legal fictions

Law exists only in an ocean of reason.

We can only fully give ourselves to those who give us to ourselves.

'One' is predicable of every multitude.

Every intellectual system implies alternative intellectual systems that are related to it in various ways.

Half of every profession is consistency.

Intellectuals unchallenged become intellectually flabby.

participation, appreciation, participative appreciation, appreciative participation

When viewing a painting, one may also imagine observing the scene, but that is not what one is doing in viewing the painting, which is seeing the painting as what it is, such-and-such scene in paint.

We do not discover scenes in the real world until we recognize the possibility of conveying them in works of art.

Stable and effective political representation requries a semi-independence only property with property rights can give. The desperate and the buyable cannot be easily represented.

academic logistics as planned economy logistics

Hegelian dialectic as a progressive system of transcendental arguments

Eros seeks life undying.

"It is not money but the volume of goods and services which determines whether a country is poverty-stricken or prosperous." Thomas Sowell

Contracts and covenants are disciplines of memory, specifying things to be kept in remembrance, and whose enorcement depends on what is kept in remembrance for the purposes of the agreement.

No amount of infallible interpretation by Pope or Council could ever exhaust the riches of Scripture as divine revelation.

The exemplar cause is that which an effect imitates from being directed by an agent to an end.

The more educated a people, the more they are governed by custom and habit.

Parental authority changes its nature when one attains adulthood, or when the parent dies, but it does not vanish.

"The vestments of the ministers denote the qualifications required of them for handling divine things." Aquinas

We can capture something of the eternal in art because it echoes ourselves and tends personward.

make-believe as mimesis (internal/imaginative mimesis)

'it is fictional that he is seeing a red-roofed mill' vs 'it is really the case that he is seeing a fictional red-roofed mill'

Sometimes make-believe is a 'game', and sometimes it is not.

In poetry, you co-construct the fictional object out of signs, projecting from them 'where' the object would be in the space of possibilities. In painting, this co-construction is much more subtle because the painter provides much more in the way of detail. In poetry, it is fictional that one sees the fictional object; in painting, one sees the fictional object.

It is the purpose of poetry to be excellent use of language. Any other purported purpose is just one of the things poetry can do.

Every painting is indexical (of painter's intention/method), iconic (of what it depicts, even if only colors and shapes), and symbolic (of what is conveyed in and by it).

Conventions have different relations to the natural, and may even admit of grades of closeness to the natural. Two descriptions may be equally conventional but one more natural than the other.

When we see a picture of a dog, we are doing one of the things that we call 'seeing a dog'.

To identify an origin is to identify something such that the effect falls within the scope of its end.

Both the natural and the artificial imitate the divine.

Since, as Walton says, we are not free to make-believe with a prop in any way we like, props have affordances for make-believe, a semiotic potential relative to our capacity for make-believe.

We treat clothing as a quasi-part of ourselves; and likewise we may treat the case of something as a quasi-part of it.

'encased' as falling under the category of habitus
-- it is when a solid physical substance wholly vests another physical substance

place that can encase as an external formal cause (e.g., with minerals)

It takes a universe to make a man.

Personification is often a sign of a lively mind; persons who are thoughtful about the world personalize and personify it.

'Fictional' is just a version of 'made to be true'.

We want not merely pleasure but deserved pleasure, and we take pleasure in deserved pleasure.

"Every being is either the same or other." Aristotle (Met I (10.3, 1054b)
"To-something is the least of all categories as regards physis and ousia, and is posterior to what-kind and how-great." Met N 14.1, 1088
"Not-being has as many senses as the categories." Met N 14.2, 1089

echein is the root of both hexis and schema (the latter through its aorist infinitive, schein)

"Enchantment is the art of awakening spiritual presences in material things." John Michael Greer

The wrongness of flattery shows that we need standing in order to praise.

We extensively use the categories of situs and habitus as sources of metaphors for abstract and intellectual and psychological things.

In general, people use wealth as a means for getting out of general responsibilities to others; not usually in an absolute sense but by using moenty to substitute responsibilities, real or made-up, that they find more convenient.

transfictional identity

"The existence of place is held to be obvious from the fact of mutual replacement." Aristotle Phys IV
"...place would not have been thought of, had there not been a specific kind of motion, namely, that with respect to place."

Llull in Liber Chaos quite clearly does not take habitus to be vestment but habitus as a quality.

Llullian astrology
A -- Air Gemini Libra Aquarius Jupiter, wet & hot
B -- Fire Aries Leo Sagittarius Mars Sol, hot and dry
C -- Earth Taurus Virgo Capricorn Saturn, dry & cold
D -- Water Cancer Scorpio Pisces Venus Luna, cold & wet
--Suppose Sun & Venus in Cancer: DBD; B est devictus, D regnat
-- Suppose Saturn & Jupiter in Aries. Then BCA ; then properties = B = hot and dry, where hot is proper and dry is appropriated.

"Since conjecture is based on changeable signs, it results in a weaker habit of certainty than scientia and opinio." Albert

the longstanding and widespread cultural associations between envy (phthonos) and magical curses

The state is the consequence of the people, not their principle.

the Eucharist and the longing for paradise

taste as confused and obscure knowledge

2 Cor 5:21 -- justice is not merely imputed to us, we become God's justice in Christ.

In television, one should always treat location as a character; it shares its mood, and arbitrarily aids and impedes; it implies a backstory and may tend to a tragic or comic end. It is the ultimate supporting cast.

To respect and appreciate beauty as it ought to be respected and appreciated, we must treat it as having in smoe way a real and cosmic importance.

What we want piecemeal is not necessarily what we want overall; and what we opine piecemeal is not necessarily our overall opinion.

royal prerogative as default priority of Crown -- as tribal chieftaincy, as legal personality, in principal corporation sole

A singer of true talent achieves excellence by incorporating and building on and around what a singer of much less talent would deem an imperfection.

While music often is representational, its great strength is not as such, but as presentational.

Music wraps us in a mood that shapes the possibilities of thought.

Abstract art aspires (at least often) to the condition of music.

Free verse aspires to the condition of untamed thought. (This is why it often seems childish when poorly done.)

When we read philosophically, we read the text not merely in what is on the page, but in the space of possibilities of reasoning through which the text on the page sketches a route.

Music works by induction of internal movement and eduction of symbolic association; it impresses upon us and it evokes what is beyond itself.

Generally, one can substitute 'artificial' for Walton's fictional. (Sometimes 'imaginatively artificial'.)

Asking whether there are fictional characters is like asking whether there are pirouettes and changements; they obviously and identifiably exist as parts of performances and practices for performances and imaginations of performances.

A novel scores and choreographs a performance.

Beauty is needed for speed of learning.

Even innocence bubbles up against constant imposition of rules.

The actor clothes himself in the character.

It is no more 'voodoo metaphysics' to say that fictional characters exist than it is 'voodoo physics' to say that a body has a center of gravity.

In creating us, God creates the standing actual possibility of all of our works.

Storytelling is often explicitly deontic.

Something can only be identified as evil in the context of a greater good against which it shows up as evil.

usefulness to others as a function of strength, intelligence, and sociableness

Even if you assume that PSR itself is false, all our experimental reasoning requires that something in its vicinity is true.

In faith, our belief is an expression of God's trust in us.

Serious philosophical argument is generally quite digressive.

As against water, so against trouble: every dam is temporary.

In partisan politics, everyone has an incentive not to be persuaded by you.

We can think of possibilities as having a tendency or striving to actualize because possibilities depend on actualities, which can have a tendency to act.

In a world in which Holy Scirtpure eixsts, all reading contains spiritual possibilities.

It takes a lot of leisure to learn things well.

medicamentum quotidianae poenitentiae

imputation, adoption, and inheritance

Tradition is a weaving of old and new.

deduction modeled as space (paths/routes)
modeled as time (steps)
modeled as causation

c as the coordination factor for spatial and temporal measurements
locomotion as rotation in time and space according to this factor

Human singing works not by being at a pitch or frequency but by moving through it. It is swift sketching rather than close copying.

quasi-vowel-harmony in singing

in timelit lands we walk our way

the ascetic discipline of understatement

One thing may borrow the being of another, and some things (accident) have being wholly in the borrowing; they are born on loan and in debt, so to speak.

We usually need not empathy but many different empathies.

There seems to be something like a general conservation of prudery; people adapt to relaxation of sexual norms in one area by tightening them in another area.

Bound by Suspense, in More than Iron Chains

Sonnet XXXV
by Alexander Thomson 

 Suspiciens altam lunam, sic voce precatur. -- Virgil 

Fair, silver Queen! whose all pervading eye
Beholds at once whate'er the world contains!
Wilt thou in pity listen from on high,
To him whose lonely heart to thee complains?
Thou seest his soul in anxious torture lie,
Bound by suspense, in more than iron chains;
Thou know'st the cause that prompts his frequent sigh,
And fills with terror's frost his shiv'ring veins.
Oh, tell him then, and end this cruel fear,
Why the dear Youth to whom his heart is join'd,
With Friendship's voice delays to soothe his ear;
Oh tell him this and ease his frantic mind:
From trembling thoughts relieve his cheerless day,
And save his restless night from dreams of wild dismay. 

 Edinburgh Feb 1789

Two Poem Drafts

The second is a poetic exercise, based on Catullus 8, in which you try to use English words to suggest the sound, rather than the meaning, of the original Latin. I cheated a bit by reading v as English v rather than as the classical Latin w-sound, which would give a weally, weally weird sound, and using a few other anglicizations. Of course, it's hard to make anything that does that well and makes any sense in English, but I confess myself rather pleased with "you fill, sir, your ferry with candies, to be solaced" (the original is fulsere vere candidi tibi soles, 'truly, brilliant suns blazed for you'). 

 Two Epics

Two great prose epics did England make:
one was the Tale with Hobbits,
of humble things that rise to wake,
all the schemes of pride to break,
of friends who never will forsake;---

two great prose epics did England make:
one was the Tale with Rabbits,
the quiet hearts who hold up the light
amidst the crashing of darkness and night,
the peaceful folk who rise to the fight;---

and in these epics, clear and bright,
true sustenance the soul may take,
and form heroic habits.

Not Quite Catullus 8

Mister Cattle, in designing ineptly your rage
at what the days, perishing prettily, declare,
you fill, sir, your condo with candies, to be solaced;
conventuals treat of this, corporeally, with caveat.
Who matters? Known but by quantity, name beaten out newly,
a ballet like to molten tomb, choked with seafaring boats,
or, like to volleyballs, now pulled nigh apart,
you fill, sir, your ferry with candies, to be solaced.
Now I am ill and unveiled, too quiet, important -- no lie --
not quite frugal, unstaring; now, mister, vividly
obstinate man, perfect your dark art,
that no rogue have any invitation -- 
yet too you dole out like a rogue bearing nullities.
Scholastically weighed, too! To be man and vital,
quick as night-bats flit in day's light failing,
but unknown by the mob in its sea-saw declaiming,
unbiased and replaced and, labelled, in morgue placed --
that's you, Cattle, destined to suffer.

Subjunctive Modus Ponens

 We have subjunctive conditionals of the form, If p were true, q would be true. We can abbreviate these as (p > q). Indicative conditionals admit of modus ponens, (If p is true, q is true; p is true; therefore q is true). So it seems natural that there would be something analogous for subjunctive conditionals. However, there are complications.

The antecedent of If p were true, q would be true is ambiguous. It could mean something like:

If p were true [rather than what is actually true], q would be true.

Call this the properly counterfactual interpretation. But it could also mean:

If p were true [as it may be], q would be true.

Call this the fortassic interpretation (from Latin fortasse). These are not at all the same thing, but subjunctive conditionals can be used in both ways. This matters a lot. The Supplement on Debates over Counteractual Principles at the SEP has the following example:

If George were caught, he would face years of prison.
Actually, George did get caught.
In that case, he will face years of prison.

This is clearly invalid on the properly counterfactual interpretation. It is at least defensible on the fortassic interpretation. Another example, from the same source:

If the soldier had shot the prisoner, then (even) if the captain hadn’t given the order to shoot, the prisoner (still) would have died.
Actually, the soldier did shoot the prisoner.
So, if the captain hadn’t given the order to shoot, the prisoner would have died.

Again, this is clearly invalid on the properly counterfactual interpretation. But if the main conditional is fortassic, then it is again defensible.

The essential thing is that when we construct a subjunctive conditional, we can do so in such a way as to rule out the possibility of the actual state of affairs from falling under the antecedent (properly counterfactual) or in such a way as to allow that it could (fortassic).

In both of the above examples, we need fortassic interpretations in order to allow the indicative second premise to be combinable with the antecedent. On the counterfactual interpretation, it becomes irrelevant and we have committed an equivocation, namely, treating the indicative p is true as if it were the same as were p to be true. 

Thus, if we have a genuine counterfactual conditional, we can only get modus ponens if our ponens premise is shifted toward the same set of counterfactual situations as the antecedent of the counterfactual conditional:

If p were true [given some change to the actual], q would be true.
p were true [given the same change to the actual].
Therefore, q would be true [given the same change to the actual].

Colloquial English doesn't let us do anything directly like p were true on its own; the usual way we would say something like this is, 'p would be true'. Thus:

If George were caught, he would face years of prison.
George would be caught.
So he would face years of prison.

The shift in how it's stated is awkward, but I suppose it could be argued that it serves a function. In 'George were caught', we are, from the way things actually are, positing a counterfactual situation in which things would be different; with 'George would be caught', we are shifting to the perspective of that counterfactual situation. We then draw a conclusion from within that perspective.

The fortassic interpretation allows us to do the same thing; it just also allows us to treat the perspective of no-difference-from-the-actual as one of the options.

The abbreviation (p > q) unfortunately obscures this. If we say,

p > q
p
Therefore q,

there is nothing to indicate that the ponens premise (p) is to be taken subjunctively and not indicatively. Thus we should probably require something like an index in the antecedent of a subjunctive conditional, to let us indicate when we are in the same region of possibilities:

p₁ > q
p₁
Therefore q.

But this is not always adequate, either. When we have the fortassic conditional and an indicative ponens, the indicative does not cover the same region of possibilities; it's only a part of it. We could do something like p_∈1, but this does not distinguish the indicative situation from the other situations that fall within that region of possibilities. Perhaps p_@∈1? But we need something along such lines if we are to handle counterfactuals properly in a formal notation.

Links of Note

 * A. T. Fyfe, The Need for God and the Problem of Evil within William James' Moral Philosophy (PDF)

* Brandon Warmke, Commencement Speech Morality

* Oliver Traldi, Jane Austen and the Defence of Virtue, at "The Common Reader"

* There Exists an X, The strange history of abortion before Christianity

* John Psmith, REVIEW: 50 Years of Text Games, by Aaron Reed, at "Mr. and Mrs. Psmith's Bookshelf"

* Christopher Kennedy and Malte Willer, Assertion, expression, experience (PDF)

* B. Jack Copeland and William Lyons, Ryle's War

* Senia Sheydvasser, Where are Groups? What are Groups? Why are Groups?, at "The Deranged Mathematician"

* Hunter Coates, A Fresh Translation of Romans 9-11

* James Hartley looks at Watership Down at "The Madrid Review"

* Fr. Justin Hewlett, Choose Your Own Programming Adventure, at "Geek Orthodox"

* Lucas Thorpe, Kant on moral character, immortality, and holiness as the limit of virtue (PDF)

Greatness and Brevity

  My mouth will speak the praise of the Lord: of that Lord, through whom all things were made, and who was made among all things: who is the revealer of the Father, the creator of the mother: the Son of God from the Father without a mother, the son of man from a mother without a father: great in the day of the angels, small in the day of men: the Word God before all times, the Word flesh at the appointed time: the creator of the sun, made under the sun: ordaining all ages from the bosom of the Father, consecrating this day from the womb of the mother: remaining there, coming forth here: maker of heaven and earth, born under heaven on earth: ineffably wise, wisely an infant: filling the world, lying in a manger: ruling the stars, sucking at breasts: so great in the form of God, brief in the form of a servant; so that neither was that greatness diminished by this brevity, nor was this brevity oppressed by that greatness. For nor did he abandon divine works when he took on human limbs: nor did he cease to reach from end to end mightily, and to dispose all things sweetly; when clothed in the infirmity of the flesh, he was received in the virginal womb, not enclosed; so that neither was the food of wisdom withdrawn from the angels, and we might taste how sweet the Lord is.

[St. Augustine, Sermon 187.1]

Apostle of Andalusia

 Today is the feast of St. Juan of Avila, Doctor of the Church.

Take courage, and set out with diligence and fervour: nothing is worse than for a beginner to commence badly by indulging his body and trying to please the world. Shut your ears against all human praise or blame, for in a little while both the critic and the man he judges will be dust and ashes. We shall one day stand before God's tribunal, where the mouth of wickedness shall be stopped and virtue will be exalted. Meanwhile, embrace the cross, and follow Him Who was dishonoured and Who lost His life upon it for your sake. Hide yourself in our Lord's wounds, so that when He comes, He may find you dwelling in Himself. Then He will beautify you with His graces, and give Himself to you as your reward for having left all things, even yourself, for His sake. How little, indeed, does the man who forsakes all things give up! He but leaves now, what, whether he will or no, he can keep but for a very brief time. Even while he possesses it, it brings him misery, for all that is not God only burdens and saddens the soul, which its Creator alone can satisfy. Open your heart to Him, and rejoice in Him, and you will find Him more tender and loving than can be imagined.

[St. John of Avila, from Letters of Blessed John of Avila, p. 101.]

Judging as Man and for Man

 The Express Moral Principles of which I have spoken, as the basis of Duties, are those which express, in an imperative form, the five Cardinal Virtues: namely, the Principle of Humanity, that Man is to be loved as Man: the Principle of Justice, that Each Man is to have his own: the Principle of Truth, that We must conform to the universal Understanding which the use of Language among men implies: the Principle of Purity, that the Lower Parts of our nature are to be governed by the Higher: and the Principle of Order, that We must obey positive Laws as the necessary conditions of Morality....They commend themselves to our assent, in proportion as our moral nature is cultivated and educed: they become evident to us when we think and feel as really moral creatures. The perception of them may be obscured by the influence of the ferine part of our nature ;---by savage rudeness, passion, partiality: but in proportion as the ferine element is subdued, and the human element brought out in its proper force, these Principles are accepted. When man judges as man and for man, he is enabled to see their full meaning; and with their meaning, their truth.

[William Whewell, Lectures on Systematic Morality (1846), Lecture V, p. 108.]

Dashed Off XVI

 Neoplatonism is a philosophy of intelligible experience.

Human beings overflow their experiences through story, art, and social connection.

Everything Denethor sees and infers is correct at a certain level, but he has lost his ability to contextualize it properly. Insight without proper understanding therefore becomes the seed of despair, all because pride removes the safeguards against loss of understanding.

The cosmos is evangelical, a good manifestation of divine goodness.

If we were to accept the idea that the laws of nature evolve, this would require a vast space of possibilities through which evolution occurred, which would require something actual as its sufficient reason.

"Now that is properly credible which is not apparent of itself, nor certainly to be collected, either antecedently by its cause, or reversely by its effect, and yet, though by none of these ways, hath the attestation of truth." John Pearson (he contrasts attestation and manifestation)
"Whatsoever is, must of necessity either have been made or not made; and something there must needs be which was never made, because all things cannot be made. For whatsoever is made, is made by another, neither can any thing produce itself; otherwise it would follow, that the same thing is and is not at the same instant in the same respect; it is, because a producer; it is not, because to be produced: it is therefore in being, and is not in being, which is a manifest contradiction. If then all things which are made were made by some other, that other which produced them either was itself produced or was not; and if not, then have we already an independent being; if it were, we must at last come to something which was never made, or else admit either a circle of productions, in which the effect shall make its own cause, or an infinite succession in causalities, by which nothing will be made; both which are equally impossible." (he takes this only to imply a supreme maker when considering these not singly but in their order and connection)

Paley's watch argument is perhaps derived from Pearson's Exposition.

"Grace is given for the merits of Christ all over the earth; there is no corner, even of Paganism, where it is not present, present in each heart of man in real sufficiency for his ultimate salvation. Not that the grace presented to each is such as to bring him to heaven; but it is sufficient for a beginning." Newman

the solipsism of the world

law : form :: right : matter
(law as aliqualis ratio juris)

common good at moral, jural, and sacral levels

The Beast of the sea has ten crowns because it claims authority that is usurped, a surplus of authority beyond what it can have a right to.

Every human action is filled with more meaning than any external observer could ever infer from bare observation alone.

We communicate not with bare signs but as participants in a shared system, the human system, constituted by reason and common feeling and overlapping experience-types.

We are not purely external observers to each other; our views overlaps the views of otehrs, and we observe as partly in the know.

The First Amendment protects the means by which the People form customary law and decide representation.

origin, order, overflow

Part of our appreciation in hearing singing arises from our ability to sing ourselves.

Narrators are posited in reading; authors can take advantage of this.

Make-believe is a way of socializing the world.

"Le joujou est la premièr initiation de l'enfant a l'art, ou plutôt c'en est pour lui la première réalisation...." Baudelaire

"The true parallel for play is not to be found, of course, in conscious art, which, though it be derived from play, is itself an abstract, impersonal thing, and depends largely upon philosophical interests beyond the scope of childhood. It is when we make castles in the air and personate the leading character in our own romances, that we return to the spirit of our first years." Robert Louis Stevenson

We ourselves are the primary props for make-believe. In using others, we extend them a courtesy of equality; if we can be a pirate, a stick can be sword.

music // ornamental decoration

Where Walton says 'imagination', one can often just substitute 'appearance', and his account of imagining seems even more obscure than the notions of seeing-as that he criticizes.

Adults do sometimes definitely make-believe, and these cases are *palpably different* from even acting on a stage.

Sometimes when we say 'I imagine', we mean 'I posit myself to imagine'.

It is odd to talk of fictional and nonfictional *statements*; these adjectives more properly apply to works, stories, descriptions, etc. Merely looking at a statement is inadequate to tell whether it is fictional or not.

'Uttering fiction' is like 'uttering refutation'; it is at least partly perlocutionary, which is why it sounds odd.

degrees of fictionality

the actual world makes true the statement, 'There is a hole in the ground', vs. The author makes true the statement 'There is a hole in the ground'

There is no imaginative state that is make-believe; make-believe is a doing.

We can extrapolate from the real world: A B therefore complete for D. We can extrapolate from the real world even when we know the real world deviates: A B D so consider A B C.

accepting something for the sake of argument & accepting something for the sake of story

Imaginings, just like believings, may be corect or incorrect, and in fact in imagining we are often aiming at the true.

We don't imagine propositions as such but referents.

Gricean maxims as supplementation rules for fictions (they arguably do better as such than Walton's own rule).

Dreams are not fictions but are more like entertainments of possibilities or like loose proposals for drafts that could become fictional tales and descriptions.

Fictional worlds are the actual world, fictionalized.

the germinality of a prop for a fictional world

To exist in a society is to be the object of at least minimal indirect friendly action for that society.

It is clearly a function of biographies, text-books, and newspaper articles to serve as props for imagination, pace Walton, because that is how they inform, and why they each have a style; they are aids to imagining what happened, or what happens, or what is happening. Thisi s why they often tell us explicitly to imagine or propose little stories and fictional descriptions, or elaborate hypothetical situations. Where they difer from fiction in the usual sense is that this function is secondary.

The opposite of fiction is not reality but something more like reception.

All societies are structured by allegiances and alliances.

Waht signifying and signified and interpretant share might be called the vicus -- the signifying being that which is carrying on in the place (vice gerens) of the signified, and it seems that the two share vicus because of the interpretant.

A significant part of education is familiarizing yourself with what you are learning, and familiarization is not always dignified.

Isaiah 28:15 and the idea of demonic pacts

Each sacrament is a picture of the Church.

Machiavell, Discourses 2.2: "the purpose of a republic is to enfeeble and weaken, in order to increase its own body, all other bodies"

The fiction/nonfiction distinction is not a fundamental feature of language but a classification of language uses in terms of what they can be useful for.

etiological, physiological, and intentional functions of elements in stories

Telling a story does not commit one to implicational closure, which has to be added by the ends for which one tells the tale; nor does it always allow contradiction explosion, because available possibilities may switch and shift during the telling.

No consequentialist whose consequentialism appeals to an overall state can run an argument from evil.

the privation theory of badness of argument

Reasoning about implied fictional truths is always defeasible, involving defaults and presumptions, and ambivalent often leaving things indeterminate.

homage < hominaticum (pertaining to the man)
fealty < fidelitas

To be an animal is to live within a system of natural rewards and punishments

alethiology
(1) the concept of truth and its primary determinations
--- --- (a) truth proper and ontological truth
--- --- (b) formal truth and instrumental truth
--- --- (c) natural truth and artificial truth
--- --- (d) primary truth and secondary truth
--- --- (e) approximate truth
--- --- (f) true and false
(2) truthmaking and verification
--- --- (a) truthbearers
--- --- (b) truthmakers
--- --- (c) use and assessment of truthbearers ('theories of truth')
--- --- (d) truth values in a model
--- --- (e) the potentially true and the actually true
(3) manifestation and exemplation
--- --- (a) manifestation
--- --- (b) objective causation
--- --- (c) exemplar causation
(4) unity of truth
--- --- (a) unity by correspondence
--- --- (b) unity by coherence
--- --- (c) pragmatic unity
--- --- (d) infinite intelligible
(5) truth as good
--- --- (a) intellectual disposition to and aptitude for the truth
--- --- (b) mode, species, and order
--- --- (c) inquiry-relative values of truth
(6) splendor of truth
--- --- (a) experience of truth
--- --- (b) clarity and proportion in integrity
--- --- (c) intellectual beauty as a mark of truth
--- --- (d) truth as an objective cause of love
(7) falsehood
--- --- (a) privation of truth
--- --- (b) false by privation of mode
--- --- (c) false by privation of species
--- --- (d) false by privation of order
--- --- (e) the sophistical and merely apparent truth

Whitehead's prehension gives too little role to anticipation.

Degrading or breaking safeguards often leads to short-term benefits.

Our capacity to relate to others is increased and deepend by overcoming both internal resistance and external impediment.

In participation, the participated functions as if it were a kind of genus of participating.

(1) We ought to strive to promote the highest good.
(2) Therefore the highest good must be possible.
(3) Thereore there must be something actual such that the highest good is possible.

As we better understand a field, we often find that the explananda become harder to explain; our explanations work for what we originally saw in need of explanation, but the explaining shows there to be more to be explained.

interactive design in biological systems (one biological population shaping another biological population, like ants termites, or toxoplasma ants)

Many of the things we experience, we experience through experiencing them with others; the sympathetic experience is part of how we experience them.

The patient is first physician (although sometimes others have this role, e.g., parents for children, or immediate caregivers for those who cannot care for themselves).

hierarchy ; subsidiarity :: collegiality : solidarity :: conciliarity : common good

Orders are in a sense both sacraments and sacramentalia. (This is most obvious with the diaconate.)

One reason for freedom of speech is that people need to be able to defend themselves against public-opinion punishments.

Bayesianism as an account of verisimilitude

Vashti as type of sin (Chastek)

Torah as sign and expression of divine goodness (Ps 25:8-10)

safeguards and fallbacks as purdential instruments of trust

The Products of Productive Skill

 Richard Dawkins recently got some attention due to having spent a weekend with Claude (which he renamed Claudia) and deciding that it must be conscious. Plenty of people have been making fun of him for it, but it's worth thinking about a bit more seriously.

The fundamental obstacle that has always been in the way of 'artificial intelligence' or 'artificial consciousness' is that computers do not directly imitate intelligence or consciousness at all. This goes back to the beginning. Computers were developed by using machinery to imitate not human thinking but logical systems, an abstract tool that human minds produce and construct in order to facilitate specific aspects of thinking. Computers do not imitate the human mind; they imitate products of the human mind. And of course, the imitations can be made arbitrarily good. Machinery imitating a logical system can act according to the operations of the logical system in ways far better than we can -- precisely because our thinking is not a logical system but something far more obscure that can build logical systems. They can do better acting according to logical system because they are logical systems. We are not, and so we do not do it as well.

This is not any less true of generative transformers or LLMs. They do not imitate human thinking. They imitate products of human thinking. Human beings do not think in text; they think and communicate their thinking, and can make texts of various kinds to facilitate various aspects of thinking and communicating. Generative algorithms statistically compress a vast collection of mathematically described texts in such a way that, given an input text, they can extrapolate a related output text. Given a sufficiently large body of a certain kind of text, they can easily construct an analogous text that is mathematically related in the entire space of mathematically described texts.

Thus there is a sense in which Dawkins is right. Faced with the output of these programs, you are in fact interacting with consciousness. Everything it produces is the sort of thing produced by consciousness. Where he goes wrong is in assuming that this is a sign of the program being conscious. The program is not directly imitating consciousness. It is imitating a tool that conscious human beings produce and construct for their use. It is an imitation of one kind of product of consciousness, based on a mathematical description of a vast number of such products. 

We have to be careful here. It is entirely possible that in imitating the products of human thought we might sometimes indirectly imitate something about the processes of thinking itself. But it is important to grasp that this is entirely incidental to what we are actually doing with computers; when it happens, it is for some other reason than anything we are doing in computing and programming. What we are doing with computers is imitating, in a machine, the products, the constructs, the results of the human mind. We are never directly imitating the human mind. This should be quite obvious, even if for no other reason than that common views of how the human mind work have massively changed multiple times in ways that are simply not replicated by the history of computing. (The limited parallels have generally gone the other way, with people speculating that some aspect of what we do in computing has parallel in human thinking. Most of these analogies have failed, although some, again, may have something to them.)

We can thus expect to be here again. Human intelligence produces many products today of which there were no traces at all two thousand years ago. Two thousand years from now, human intelligence will produce, in massive quantities, products of which we have no inkling. And people will eventually make machines to imitate, and to produce imitations of, those products of the human mind, as well. No doubt people will also then gasp, and say, "This shows intelligence!" And, of course, so far they will be right. It shows our intelligence.

It is a peculiarity of human art or productive skill (ars, techne) that the ability to make something can be shifted to make imitations of that something. The miracle of machinery is that you can use human productive skill to create structured processes and abstract designs that can themselves be imitated by physical objects in structured organizations, and the miracle of modern robotics and computing is that some of these structured processes and abstract designs can be processes and designs facilitating the making of structured processes and abstract designs. We can make tools to facilitate making tools, and make physical systems that imitate those tools. There is no intrinsic limit to how far we can go with this. No doubt centuries from now we'll be making tools that make systems of tools for designing entirely new systems of tools for all sorts of arbitrary ends, and so on and so forth.

But in all of it, we will be imitating the products of art, skill, intelligence, consciousness, mind. If it gets us any closer to understanding art, skill, intelligence, consciousness, mind, it will be by accident, because none of these things are what we are directly imitating when we are doing anything with computing.

By Oak and Ash and Thorn

 A Tree Song
by Rudyard Kipling

Of all the trees that grow so fair,
Old England to adorn,
Greater are none beneath the Sun,
Than Oak, and Ash, and Thorn.
Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, good Sirs
(All of a Midsummer morn)!
Surely we sing no little thing,
In Oak, and Ash, and Thorn! 

Oak of the Clay lived many a day,
Or ever Æneas began;
Ash of the Loam was a lady at home,
When Brut was an outlaw man;
Thorn of the Down saw New Troy Town
(From which was London born);
Witness hereby the ancientry
Of Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!

Yew that is old in churchyard mould,
He breedeth a mighty bow;
Alder for shoes do wise men choose,
And beech for cups also.
But when ye have killed, and your bowl is spilled,
And your shoes are clean outworn,
Back ye must speed for all that ye need,
To Oak and Ash and Thorn! 

Ellum she hateth mankind, and waiteth
Till every gust be laid,
To drop a limb on the head of him
That anyway trusts her shade:
But whether a lad be sober or sad,
Or mellow with ale from the horn,
He will take no wrong when he lieth along
'Neath Oak, and Ash, and Thorn! 

Oh, do not tell the Priest our plight,
Or he would call it a sin;
But---we have been out in the woods all night,
A-conjuring Summer in!
And we bring you news by word of mouth---
Good news for cattle and corn---
Now is the Sun come up from the South,
With Oak, and Ash, and Thorn! 

Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, good Sirs
(All of a Midsummer morn)!
England shall bide till Judgement Tide,
By Oak and Ash and Thorn!

Plenipotentiary

...Our Immanuel, our Brother and Friend, reigns in heaven; human nature is crowned in him, adored in him, revered in him. In this Plenipotentiary, in this Firstling, God welcomes our entire race as well as the recovery of his righteousness and the revelation of his love for our race. He has glorified himself in us; in the story of our fall and our redemption he has publicized the supreme majesty of his being and his will to the world, to angels, and to people. The greatest sinner who repents and believes in him gives God greater glory than the sky with its stars is able to declare his fame.

[Johann Georg Hamann, "Thoughts on Church Hymns", The Complete London Writings, John W. Kleinig, tr., Lexham Academic (Bellingham: 2025) p. 400.]

Links of Note

 * Jordan Poss, Lying and Counting the Explicable

* William Morgan, What Fictionalists Get Wrong about the Value of Winning (PDF)

* Claudio Calosi, Samuele Iaquinto, & Roberto Loss, Fragmentalism: Putting All the Pieces Together (PDF)

* There Exists an X, The medieval animal scandal

* Hear Classical Music Composed by Friedrich Nietzsche, at "Open Culture"

* Katherine Dee, Why ChatGPT Is Obsessed with Goblins: The Weirdest Possible Explanation, at "Pirate Wires"

* Alex Spieldenner, A Personalist Theory of Moral Values, at "Aquinas and Beyond"

* Ben Landau-Taylor, The Lifecycle of an Apocalypse, at "Palladium"

* David Liebesman, Types and Tokens, at the SEP

* Patrick McKenzie, Notes on a non-profit indicted for bank fraud, on the recent discovery that the Southern Poverty Law Center was engaging in bank fraud, at "Bits about Money"

* It's from 2017, but this discussion of the structure of the Choose Your Own Adventure books is very interesting.

* Edward Feser, The transmission theory of authority