Siris

Google's View of Me

2012-01-31T10:09:00.004-06:00

Age: 65+
Gender: Male

Apparently it thinks my primary interests are business and law. And there's a big web services component that comes, I think, from my use of StatCounter.

You should be able to find Google's view of yourself through the Ads Preferences Readout.

To Step Aside Is Human

2012-01-31T09:39:00.000-06:00

Yesterday we were moralistic with Kipling; today let's be moderate with Burns.

Address to the Unco Guid, Or the Rigidly Righteous
by Robert Burns

My Son, these maxims make a rule,
An' lump them aye thegither;
The Rigid Righteous is a fool,
The Rigid Wise anither:
The cleanest corn that ere was dight
May hae some pyles o' caff in;
So ne'er a fellow-creature slight
For random fits o' daffin.
Solomon.-Eccles. ch. vii. verse 16.

O ye wha are sae guid yoursel',
Sae pious and sae holy,
Ye've nought to do but mark and tell
Your neibours' fauts and folly!
Whase life is like a weel-gaun mill,
Supplied wi' store o' water;
The heaped happer's ebbing still,
An' still the clap plays clatter.

Hear me, ye venerable core,
As counsel for poor mortals
That frequent pass douce Wisdom's door
For glaikit Folly's portals:
I, for their thoughtless, careless sakes,
Would here propone defences-
Their donsie tricks, their black mistakes,
Their failings and mischances.

Ye see your state wi' theirs compared,
And shudder at the niffer;
But cast a moment's fair regard,
What maks the mighty differ;
Discount what scant occasion gave,
That purity ye pride in;
And (what's aft mair than a' the lave),
Your better art o' hidin.

Think, when your castigated pulse
Gies now and then a wallop!
What ragings must his veins convulse,
That still eternal gallop!
Wi' wind and tide fair i' your tail,
Right on ye scud your sea-way;
But in the teeth o' baith to sail,
It maks a unco lee-way.

See Social Life and Glee sit down,
All joyous and unthinking,
Till, quite transmugrified, they're grown
Debauchery and Drinking:
O would they stay to calculate
Th' eternal consequences;
Or your more dreaded hell to state,
Damnation of expenses!

Ye high, exalted, virtuous dames,
Tied up in godly laces,
Before ye gie poor Frailty names,
Suppose a change o' cases;
A dear-lov'd lad, convenience snug,
A treach'rous inclination-
But let me whisper i' your lug,
Ye're aiblins nae temptation.

Then gently scan your brother man,
Still gentler sister woman;
Tho' they may gang a kennin wrang,
To step aside is human:
One point must still be greatly dark, -
The moving Why they do it;
And just as lamely can ye mark,
How far perhaps they rue it.

Who made the heart, 'tis He alone
Decidedly can try us;
He knows each chord, its various tone,
Each spring, its various bias:
Then at the balance let's be mute,
We never can adjust it;
What's done we partly may compute,
But know not what's resisted.

Eight Functions of Money

2012-01-30T20:36:00.001-06:00

Money has eight different purposes. The first three are the ones already mentioned [means of payment for buying and selling, means of barter for other money, currency trade]. The fourth is to display one's riches, showing it to everyone or putting it in the marketplace where it is dealt with or exchanged. The fifth is to use as medals and clothing decorations. The sixth use is to cheer with its presence. The seventh use is to cure some illnesses with its broth as, they say, is one of the properties of gold powder. The eight use is as security for a debt. For these last five purposes, it is possible not only to lend and exchange money but even to rent it out.

[Martín de Azpilcueta, Commentary on the Resolution of Money, Chapter 3 in Sourcebook in Late-Scholastic Monetary Theory, Grabill, ed. Lexington Books (New York: 2007) p. 34.]

This is why it's a delight to read the scholastics. The function of display has in past years become more commonly discussed by economists as they catch up to something that the Doctor Navarrus recognized as obvious in the 16th century. But I still have yet to come across an economist giving due credit to how our use of money to cheer ourselves up affects how we use it; and while we don't go around like bedouins with gold coins sewn to our veils and belts, it's clear from any look at how money functions in such a society that the jewelry use is clearly distinct from both display and storage of value, and also clearly operative. And I don't think it would cross any modern economist's mind to try to think through the complications that arise from renting money for use in folk remedies. Some of this, of course, is that these things are more obvious in a monetary system that is based on a precious metal standard. But part of it is that economists often don't consider all possible cases, and, without making it explicit, really confine themselves to carefully contrived artificial markets or assume rather substantial conditions that are not universal.

Wabbling Back to the Fire

2012-01-30T16:11:00.000-06:00

Somehow it always has something relevant.

The Gods of the Copybook Headings
by Rudyard Kipling

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshiped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

State of Probation

2012-01-29T13:17:00.000-06:00

Arsen's mention of life as a reverberatory furnace reminded me of Butler's discussion of life as a state of trial and probation in the Analogy. Butler was the early eighteenth century's greatest moral philosopher -- and in the Anglophone world arguably the greatest moral philosopher of the early modern period. Some of his most important ideas are in the Fifteen Sermons, but the Analogy, an argument against a certain kind of Deism, is his masterwork. He discusses probation in chapters 4 and 5 of Part I.

If we consider the natural world and mere worldly prudence, we find that parts of our lives are natural trials or states of probation preparing us for greater goods later. Some of our actions bring pleasure, some of our actions bring pain, and we are capable, through experience, of developing the foresight to weigh these outcomes. Thus we find that in order to get what we really want we must often discipline ourselves when it comes to what is right in front of us. We subjugate our present interest to a greater future interest. Because of this, however, we clearly can make sense of the idea that our lives taken as a whole might well be probationary in themselves:

Thus mankind having a temporal interest depending upon themselves, and a prudent course of behaviour being necessary to secure it, passions inordinately excited, whether by means of example, or by any other external circumstance, towards such objects, at such times, or in such degrees, as that they cannot be gratified consistently with worldly prudence, are temptations, dangerous and too often successful temptations, to forego a greater temporal good for a less; i.e. to forego what is, upon the whole, our temporal interest, for the sake of a present gratification. This is a description of our state of trial in our temporal capacity. Substitute now the word future for temporal, and virtue for prudence, and it will be just as proper a description of our state of trial in our religious capacity; so analogous are they to each other.

Butler argues that the analogy is quite strong, and that it gives to the notion of life as a state of moral and intellectual probation an antecedent credibility: it makes sense to see life in this way. Our life is a state of maturation and refinement in virtue, one with three aspects: trial or difficulty, opportunity for discipline, and the manifesting of our genuine moral character. And once we posit the idea that our life is probationary, we find a lot in our lives that fits it to be probationary; indeed, Butler argues, even more that makes it appropriate as a moral state of probation than makes parts of it appropriate as natural states of probation. He doesn't want to say that moral trial, a probationary period for building up virtue, is the whole of life; but it is a key part of life, and one of which we can make a remarkable amount of sense.

Music on My Mind

2012-01-28T18:12:00.003-06:00

historyteachers, "Thomas Aquinas"

Students and the First Way III

2012-01-28T13:28:00.002-06:00

I keep a sort of loose track of a number of things in my teaching to see what sort of questions and issues regularly come up among students. So, for instance, I look at what students in my ethics class choose for their virtue analysis paper, at some key questions in the discussion board, or their answers to how they would restructure the course if they had as much time or resources as they could want. One of the several things I've found handy in my intro course is keeping track of their responses to questions about the First Way. I've posted summaries of these here and here.

This past term things were a bit different than usual; I had no ordinary intro courses, just two hybrid format courses, which work rather differently. There was also a restructuring of the content that meant slightly more time was spent on Aquinas's First Way, although it was still just one class and the point was still just to give students a basic tour of how medieval, and particular scholastic, philosophers argued, rather than devoted to any close examination of the argument; and it has to be kept in mind that the hybrid format is in some ways a limiting format -- students have much more going on that has to be done on their own initiative. And as always, it's worth keeping in mind that virtually none of the students knew anything about it except for their reading -- assuming that they did, which is not always a safe bet -- and what they could remember from one class period. I gave them all at least partial credit if they (1) showed that they knew what argument was meant and (2) actually gave reasons of some kind; and full credit if they identified an actual premise and said either something genuinely creative or something that could be interpreted as at least a crude form of something that you occasionally find professional philosophers saying. The question was:

We discussed Thomas Aquinas's First Way. (1) Identify the premise of the First Way that you think is weakest. By 'weakest' I mean the one that would require the most work to defend (whether you think it actually defensible or not). (2) Explain why you think this premise is the weakest premise of the argument.

The answers were (and, as usual, since I'm only interested in answer types, these are just summary-paraphrases to get at the substance rather than exact quotations):

* "Either there is a first mover or an infinite regress of movers." It is weak because an infintie regress of movers is impossible.

* The one in which he says the first mover is God. It's like he can't think of anything else the first mover could be.

* (no premise explicitly identified). How can something be moved if it has no mover?

* (no premise explicitly identified). The world is moved around the sun by the force of the sun. This would make the sun the first mover.

* (no premise explicitly identified). He admits that some things are moved and some things are not, and it seems obvious that there can't really be a first mover if it doesn't move everything.

* That there could be a first mover. That is a contradiction in terms.

* "For moving is nothing other than drawing forth something from potency into act" Couldn't moving also be moving from no energy to potential energy? For instance, by placing a ball on a tabletop?

* "What is actually hot cannot simultaneously be potentially hot." This seems right, but I say it is the weakest because Aquinas wants to use it to argue that something cannot be both moved and mover, which is a leap.

* "What is moved is moved by another." There are some motions that are caused by physics, not by another, like centrifugal force or gravity. He also needs to explain what the first mover actually moves in order to make the argument plausible.

* "There is a first mover, unmoved by any prior mover." This doesn't seem wrong, but it seems like the argument is made just to lead the reader to God rather than consider other options.

* "For moving is nothing other than drawing forth something from potency into act, for something cannot be reduced from potency into act, save through some actual being; thus actual heat (as fire) makes wood (which is potential fire) to be actually hot, and thereby moves and alters it." How is moving that only draws something from potential making it actual. Is it only parts within the potential that completes it to become actual?

* "This is the sort of thing people understand when they talk about God". I think this is the weakest because not everyone believes in God.

* "An infinite regress of movers is impossible." Some things are moved and whatever is moved, is moved by another; this seems to show that the movers are also being moved, without end.

* Without a first mover there are no other movers. I personally agree with this but it comes back to the age old question of "if God was the first mover, who was his mover?"

* The impossibility of an infinite regress and that there must be an unmoved mover. Who's to say where the unmoved mover starts? Theologically you can say God is an an umoved mover but what made "God"? [This student added a number of other things that were not relevant to the immediate question, but, interestingly, he argued that there would have to be a material cause for any change and thus that there could not be anything merely making something actual.]

* "Either there is a first cause/first mover or else nothing needs a cause to move it." Aquinas seems to assume that any force in motion had to be put in motion by another, and drawing that out infers that if you trace it back all the way to the beginning there has to be one force that put in motion all others. But what put that first mover in motion, and why do the movements have to be traced back to only one original mover?

* "Every event has a cause." This requires an infinite regress, which he wants to deny.

* "Either there is a first mover or an infinite regress of movers," because it contradicts the next premise, which says an infinite regress of movers is impossible.

* "Either there is a first mover or an infinite regress of movers." I know he's actually ruling out that there should be an infinite regress, but this makes it sound as if an infinite regress was possible. Also, the word 'infinite' is hard to understand.

* "There is either a first mover or an infinite regress of movers." This is contradicted when it goes on to say that an infinite regress of movers is impossible.

One of the summaries of the First Way they had available put the argument in disjunctive form; notice the problem students had with interpreting the disjunction. This is an implicature problem, I think; they have difficulty seeing why one would mention infinite regress in a disjunction at all if you were not suggesting that it is a real possibility. I'll have to keep this in mind in both this unit and the logic unit of future courses. (And actually one of the reasons I keep track of this is to identify logical problems that need to be addressed more carefully, as well as how I can tighten this particular unit up.)

Feast of Thomas Aquinas IV

2012-01-28T13:19:00.005-06:00

Godhead here in hiding, whom I do adore,
Masked by these bare shadows, shape and nothing more,
See, Lord, at thy service low lies here a heart
Lost, all lost in wonder at the God thou art.

Seeing, touching, tasting are in thee deceived:
How says trusty hearing? that shall be believed;
What God's Son has told me, take for truth I do;
Truth himself speaks truly or there's nothing true.

On the cross thy Godhead made no sign to men,
Here thy very manhood steals from human ken:
Both are my confession, both are my belief,
And I pray the prayer of the dying thief.

I am not like Thomas, wounds I cannot see,
But can plainly call thee Lord and God as he;
Let me to a deeper faith daily nearer move,
Daily make me harder hope and dearer love.

O thou our reminder of Christ crucified,
Living Bread, the life of us for whom he died,
Lend this life to me then: feed and feast my mind,
There be thou the sweetness man was meant to find.

Bring the tender tale true of the Pelican;
Bathe me, Jesu Lord, in what thy bosom ran---
Blood whereof a single drop has power to win
All the world forgiveness of its world of sin.

Jesu, whom I look at shrouded here below,
I beseech thee send me what I thirst for so,
Some day to gaze on thee face to face in light
And be blest for ever with thy glory's sight. Amen.

This, of course, is a translation of Aquinas's hymn, "Adoro Te Devote". The translation, which I think is very likely the best poetic translation, is by none other than Gerard Manley Hopkins; it is, if I recall, one of several versions he attempted, and is one of his fairly early poems. As all poetic translations tend to be, it's a bit loose in parts, but (1) it is remarkable how close it actually is, particularly given the verbal gymnastics of the original, and (2) every license taken is justifiable poetic license for the target language. The result is much wordier than the original, though. The literal translation of the first stanza would be something very roughly like:

Devoutly I adore you, hidden Deity [or Truth, depending on the reading]
who these figures [or appearances, or forms] truly underlies;
all my heart submits itself to you,
for in contemplating you it all subsides [or fails].

Caswall's slightly tighter translation of the same stanza:

O Godhead hid, devoutly I adore Thee,
Who truly art within the forms before me;
To Thee my heart I bow with bended knee,
As failing quite in contemplating Thee.

There are a number of hymns attributed to Aquinas. This and the hymns from the Mass of Corpus Christi universally attributed to Aquinas are the ones most widely accepted as really Thomistic; it would be genuinely surprising if they were not.

Feast of Thomas Aquinas III

2012-01-28T11:13:00.000-06:00

Reason employs anger for its action, not as seeking its assistance, but because it uses the sensitive appetite as an instrument, just as it uses the members of the body. Nor is it unbecoming for the instrument to be more imperfect than the principal agent, even as the hammer is more imperfect than the smith.

Thomas Aquinas, ST 2-2.123.10 ad 2

Feast of Thomas Aquinas II

2012-01-28T09:25:00.000-06:00

Now it is one thing to say: "I believe God" (credere Deum), for this indicates the object. It is another thing to say: "I believe God" (credere Deo), for this indicates the one who testifies. And it is still another thing to say: "I believe in God" (in Deum), for this indicates the end. Thus God can be regarded as the object of faith, as the one who testifies, and as the end, but in different ways. For the object of faith can be a creature, as when I believe in the creation of the heavens. Again, a creature can be one who testifies, for I believe Paul (credo Paulo) or any of the saints. But only God can be the end of faith, for our mind is directed to God alone as its end. Now the end, since it has the character of a good, is the object of love. Thus to believe in God (in Deum) as in an end is proper to faith living through the love of charity.

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John: Chapters 6-12, 901, The Catholic University of America Press (Washington, DC: 2010) p. 21

Feast of Thomas Aquinas I

2012-01-28T07:18:00.000-06:00

Beyond the life of assimilation and of sense experience there remains only the life that functions according to reason. This life is proper to man, fo rhe receives his specific classification from the fact that he is rational. Now the rational has two parts. One is rational by participation insofar as it is obedient to and is regulated by reason. The other is rational by nature as it can of itself reason and understand. The rational by nature is more properly called rational because a thing possessed intrinsically is always more proper than a thing received from another. Since, therefore, happiness is the most proper good of man, it more likely consists in the rational by nature than in the rational by participation. From this we can see that happiness will more properly be found in the life of thought than in a life of activity, and in an act of reason or intellect than in an act of the appetitive power controlled by reason.

Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, 126, Litzinger, tr., Dumb Ox Books (Notre Dame, IN: 1993) p. 42.

Baggini, "Subjective Experiences," and Suspicion

2012-01-27T21:49:00.002-06:00

Julian Baggini has an article up at CiF Belief responding to some arguments by Mark Vernon. I think the article sums up nicely the extraordinary confusions about psychology that typically plague Baggini's discussions of religion, and they are common enough to be worth pointing out. We see the confusions early on:

Traditional arguments for the existence of God and contemporary attempts to use fine-tuning and cosmology to back up the case for his existence always strike me as kinds of games, since hardly anyone believes on the basis of these arguments at all. Rather, they gain faith some other way and the arguments are post facto defences or rationalisations, attempts to reply to the rationalist atheist on her own terms, when the reality is the rules of engagement have never been accepted as fair. So I much prefer it when people come out and say honestly that their reasons for belief are not the kinds of reasons atheists accept as admissible, and for them to then make the case for why atheists are wrong about this.

It's not difficult to show, however, that this involves an extraordinarily simplistic understanding of the psychology of belief. The most notable thing about it is that this line of thought makes no proper distinction between causal factors leading to belief and causal factors supporting or maintaining belief. Let's take a simple case. Johnny is a physicist; he believes black holes really exist. However, he orginally came to believe that black holes really exist because someone happened to mention them when he was in the sixth grade and he felt at the time that the universe was so awesome that something like black holes had to exist. As he goes on, this same feeling motivates him to study physics; and as he does so he comes into contact with the arguments of actual physicists, based on both observations and mathematical theory, for the existence of black holes. Like any reasonable person interested in black holes, he takes these seriously; they become part of the structure that supports his belief in black holes. At no point does he take black-hole denialists seriously; he does, at times, think their arguments need to be addressed, either because he is worried about how they might mislead the public, or because he thinks they really do raise important issues on their own, and he responds in such cases either by summarizing the scientific arguments for black holes or by coming up with new arguments that are appropriate. Of course, you can replace black holes with any scientific issue you please. Now, we have here a case where belief leads understanding and where, if challenged in rational discussion, the arguments put forward all postdate the origin of the belief. Baggini, if we took his argument here seriously, would be committed to saying that all the appeals to scientific argument are in this case dishonest, because they are post facto defenses or rationalizations. This is clearly nonsense, however. Merely because something wasn't originally a reason for belief doesn't mean it never becomes one. If you want to explain the support for Johnny's belief in say, his later career as a physics professor, it would be a sign of stupidity to explain it by his middle-school feeling of what the universe's awesomeness requires. By that point, while it still may motivate him in his study of black holes, the original feeling that solidified the belief is likely one of the least of the real psychological supports of his belief.

We can take a rather different kind of case. Suppose Lisa one day becomes convinced that her husband Scott is cheating on her. She can't point to anything very definite, or even articulate very well why the things she can point to make her feel so strongly about the matter; there are just a few little things here and there that could be explained in other ways, but she can't shake the feeling that the best explanation is that he's cheating on her, although she can't really give an account of events under which it definitely would be the best explanation. She confides in her mother; and as it happens, her mother thinks it's all in her head, and raises some objections. So Lisa goes out to see if she can collect information that meets her mother's objections -- still no smoking gun, but when she comes back to her mother she has additional evidence, mostly circumstantial about his patterns of behavior, and has arguments that she's pretty sure show that her mother's objections don't apply in this case. Now, if we were to say what supports Lisa's belief at this juncture, it would be nonsense to say that "really" it's just that original sense that he must be cheating on her and that she doesn't believe on the basis of her new information "at all". This is not the way belief works. When we find new supporting information or new supporting arguments, the mere fact of their being new doesn't rule out their being grounds for belief. Quite the contrary; we add new supports for our beliefs all the time.

The problem, again, is that Baggini's argument fails to recognize that there can be any other supports for belief than the original ones. This remains a problem even if you put a great deal of emphasis on the phrase 'post facto defenses and rationalizations'. Most defenses, of course, are post facto; people often find their beliefs faced with objections they had not originally considered, and they naturally defend their beliefs. But even if the arguments in question are purely rationalizations -- we are simply making up an argument to go with our belief, one to which we have no particular prior commitment -- the quality of that argument is itself determined not by its psychological origin but by rational standards. And it can happen -- indeed, it is, I think, a common occurrence -- that what starts out as a rationalization becomes viewed by the rationalizer as a good argument and an important part of the supporting structure for their belief. Trying to say that something is not a real support for a belief because it started out as a rationalization simply shows a failure to understand how reasoning actually interacts with belief.

I also find it interesting that Baggini brings out the old trope that hardly anyone on this topic believes on the basis of the arguments. This is in fact true for most topics; the overwhelming majority of people who believe black holes exist do not do so because they have rigorously thought through the physics. Most probably have no better reason than that they heard it somewhere. We cannot tell from this, however, how significant the number of people believing precisely on the basis of rigorous physical argument may be. It could be almost nonexistent, or it could be that it's a sizable minority. People certainly are on occasion persuaded by arguments. There are plenty of testimonies of people claiming that they became theists because of this or that argument, or claiming that they became atheists when they came to the conclusion that this or that argument failed. Perhaps such people are lying or deluded, but that would have to be proven. And we simply cannot assume that they are best described as "hardly anyone". Nor can we assume, if "hardly anyone" does fit, that the arguments have no important role at all.

The muddled psychologizing continues in Baggini's later discussion:

I'm afraid it's all too common for defenders of faith to start off by piling up a whole load of interesting scientific findings, only to follow up with a plethora of non sequiturs.

The question rightly asked, however, is how reliable are the various cognitive mechanisms we use for establishing different kinds of truth? And there seems to be no escaping the simple fact that subjective experience, in all its forms, is a very unreliable detector of objective reality. Despite the comfort Vernon draws from recent research, there is no escaping the fact that the vast bulk of it points in exactly the opposite direction, undermining any confidence we might feel that our intuitive judgments are effective truth-trackers.

I find it rather amusing that he castigates believers for doing something he then goes on immediately to do. But there is a more immediate problem. The question he raises, "How reliable are the various cognitive mechanisms we use for establishing different kinds of truth?" is in fact not "rightly asked" for the reason that it is not directly relevant. Reliability is a statistical measure; it has to do with probability distribution in a population of cases. But reliability, although it can be important for assessing how strong certain kinds of inferences are, is not directly relevant here, because even if the statistical performance of a "cognitive mechanism" is very poor, if it ever, even in only one in a million cases, gives a true positive, that suffices. We would certainly want to know that it is unreliable, since it would help us to determine what we would also have to do to rule out, to a reasonable degree, that it is yielding its usual false positive, but that is all. A veridical experience is a veridical experience however rarely that kind of experience is veridical. (As a side note, it may be worth pointing out that recognition of this truth was one of the major insights that made possible the foundation of probability theory. A lot of early probability theorists originally began thinking of probability in terms of the proportion between how often, in an ideal series of cases, a given inference would turn out to be right and the total series of cases. A lot of refinements and improvements beyond this needed to be discovered, but it's not a minor point.)

Possibly what's tripping Baggini up is that we use the word 'unreliable' in an equivocal way. Sometimes when we call something unreliable we mean the normative claim that it should never be trusted because it is so rarely right that using it defeats our ends. At other times we mean it is never right. At yet other times we mean it is only occasionally right. There are sense of reliability corresponding to each of these. But it is only in this third sense, the primary sense, that it can be used in Baggini's question: the scientific evidence Baggini points to does not establish the first sense, and the second sense would make the rest of his argument question-begging at best.

Let me put the point again: drawing conclusions about veridicality from reliability alone is not itself very reliable, as a general matter. And this is for the clearest of reasons, namely, that one has to do with the properties of the population and the other has to do with the properties of individual cases. There are cases and conclusions, for instance, in which one only has to establish that something is at least sometimes veridical, however unreliably so. Likewise, one may have good reason to think something veridical in a given case even if this is often illusory; mirages may happen often in the desert, but you may still have good reason to think that you aren't seeing one despite being in the desert. The two issues are simply not the same. Reliability is important for assessing the further course of inquiry; and where we have already established very high reliability or very low reliability this can be useful for determining whether we should proceed on the assumption that any given case is veridical, where other evidence is lacking. But very general considerations of reliability -- which is all we get here -- tell us almost nothing.

Even if we set this aside, though, there is no "simple fact that subjective experience, in all its forms, is a very unreliable detector of objective reality." For one thing, this claim is radically hyperbolic. Take, for instance, your subjective experience of there being a world external to you, or your subjective experience that your wife or children are real people. We know for a fact that there are such subjective experiences because there are psychological conditions in which people don't have them. We also can be quite certain that almost everyone believes that there is an external world, or that their wives or children are real people, almost entirely on the basis of these subjective experiences. One of the most important factors leading almost any one of us to believe that there is an external world or that the humaniforms we meet are real people is that these things feel right. You will search in vain, of course, for any cognitive science research that shows that your feeling of the reality of the world around you is "very unreliable" or that you are usually wrong when you think, on the basis of your subjective experience of them, that your family members are real people. And these are hardly the only things we believe on the basis of subjective experience that either have never been shown to be unreliable or that, if unreliable at all, have never been studied adequately. The whole category is just too big to make such an irresponsible claim as Baggini is making here.

What we actually find in cognitive science research is more limited. A lot of external factors that we hardly notice can affect our judgment -- smells, for instance, or words we happened to have heard. Quite a few kinds of things that we might call 'intuitive judgments' have at least a sharply restricted range of reliability. Things that we might think closely connected -- for instance, our intuitive judgments about what is probable and probability theory -- turn out to come apart a lot. Given psychological complexity, experiments have to be very sharply defined and very precisely oriented, and so any general conclusions require interpreting a whole battery of tests -- no crucial experiments in cognition research, only experiments more or less valuable for clarification. No cognitive scientist will claim that they have rigorously studied the reliability of the whole field of intuitions, cognitive mechanisms, or subjective experiences, both in precise tests and in the wild, so as to be able to determine whether they are reliable as actually used or, with any precision, how reliable. And what we really get in the research is what you'd expect: some of these things are very reliable under some conditions and very unreliable under other conditions, and in some cases the conditions for reliability are fairly narrow. I can't avoid making an analogy here. It's rather like testing animal performance at cognitive tasks. Some animals, like border collies or dolphins are whiz-bang at all sorts of cognitive tasks. Others, like zebras, come across as utter morons at most of them. Zebras, unless there's been new research I'm not aware of, perform badly at most cognitive tasks. It's hard to say how much this indicates stupidity, since zebras are notoriously obstinate and bad-tempered. But give zebras a cognitive task requiring them to distinguish elaborate patterns of black and white stripes and it's suddenly like they're geniuses, massively outperforming animals that do better at almost everything else. And so here; a "cognitive mechanism" that doesn't track truth generally may do so extraordinarily well if certain other conditions are met. Precise specification of contextual conditions is extremely important; something may be very good at "truth-tracking" here and very poor at it there. And, indeed, if we are considering the full scope of possible situations, it is very, very dangerous to talk about truth-tracking. For the same reason, whether something is "truth-tracking" in a particular domain has to be established, not extrapolated.

Baggini ends:

The modern sceptic is indeed suspicious of subjective convictions, which is not to say they dismiss them completely. The modern believer is not suspicious enough, which is perhaps why when they try to construct arguments in their defence, the convictions are left doing all the work and reason, debilitated by neglect, weakly fails to prop them up.

I don't think, however, that modern skepticism can be put so vaguely. Most skeptics I know don't have general suspicions about "subjective convictions" even if they are suspicious of large classes of them. This is, again, the point about there being too many kinds of things that fall under such a label. Moreover, it is at least as irrational to be suspicious of something for no good reason as it is to accept it for no good reason; and at least in principle they want their suspicions as well as their beliefs to be well-grounded. And the only skeptic I've ever come across who appealed to such a ridiculously broad consideration as Baggini has here is Julian Baggini. And suspicion is as much a subjective experience as anything else: it's one of the kinds of ways we feel that something might not be right.

But if we were to use the word 'suspicious' somewhat sloppily to mean 'engaging in critical examination', instead, I fully agree that most modern believers should engage in more critical examination this way. I also think that most modern skeptics should, too. Except for where genuine practical limitations (time, resources, etc.) say otherwise, you can never have too much.

Stein on Husserl

2012-01-27T19:47:00.000-06:00

I am not at all worried about my dear Master. It has always been far from me to think that God's mercy allows itself to be circumscribed by the visible church's boundaries. God is truth. All who seek truth seek God, whether this is clear to them or not.

Edith Stein, from the Letter to Sr. Adelgundis Jaegerschmid, OSB, Freiburg Gunterstal (#259), Self-Portrait in Letters, 1916-1942, Gelber and Leuven, eds., ICS Publications (Washington DC: 1993) p. 272.

Here she's talking in particular about Edmund Husserl, her teacher. Like Stein, Husserl was Jewish by birth, but raised in a family that was largely secular; like her, he later was baptized, although he was baptized as a Lutheran rather than a Catholic; and like her he had problems with the Nazis due to being Jewish. He, however, died of natural causes in April of 1938, about a month after this letter was written.

Long Generations

2012-01-26T18:14:00.000-06:00

The Daily Mail has an interesting article on President John Tyler's two grandsons, who are still alive despite the fact that Tyler was born in 1790. (ht) Normally I would trust the Daily Mail about as far as I can throw the British Isles, but confirmation for this is easy to find, and they have the handiest article of it, complete with pictures and family tree. Basically the timeline is:

1790 John Tyler was born

1841 Tyler becomes Vice President and then becomes President on the death of William Henry Harrison

1844 Tyler marries Julia Gardiner Tyler, his second wife, who was thirty years his junior

1853 Lyon Gardiner Tyler born

1923 Lyon Gardiner Tyler marries Sue Ruffin, his second wife, who was twenty-six years his junior

1925 Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Jr. born

1928 Harrison Ruffin Tyler born

1935 Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Sr. dies

And Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Jr. and Harrison Ruffin Tyler are both still alive; their grandfather had started his political career on the eve of the War of 1812.

I, Child of Process

2012-01-26T11:42:00.000-06:00

“I am the Way”
by Alice Meynell

Thou art the Way.
Hadst Thou been nothing but the goal,
I cannot say
If Thou hadst ever met my soul.

I cannot see—
I, child of process—if there lies
An end for me,
Full of repose, full of replies.

I’ll not reproach
The road that winds, my feet that err.
Access, Approach
Art Thou, Time, Way, and Wayfarer.

Unwept, Untended, and Alone

2012-01-25T23:39:00.000-06:00

Sappho
by Christina Rossetti

I sigh at day-dawn, and I sigh
When the dull day is passing by.
I sigh at evening, and again
I sigh when night brings sleep to men.
Oh! it were far better to die
Than thus forever mourn and sigh,
And in death's dreamless sleep to be
Unconscious that none weep for me;
Eased from my weight of heaviness,
Forgetful of forgetfulness,
Resting from care and pain and sorrow
Thro' the long night that knows no morrow;
Living unloved, to die unknown,
Unwept, untended, and alone.

Semi-Non-Out-Of-Touch

2012-01-25T17:54:00.003-06:00

Back in the Long Ago Times, internet quizzes were a common feature of blogs. They contributed absolutely nothing but silliness, but I occasionally miss them. So here's an internet quiz to tell you whether you are out of touch in an upper class bubble:

On a scale from 0 to 20 points, where 20 signifies full engagement with mainstream American culture and 0 signifies deep cultural isolation within the new upper class bubble, you scored between 9 and 12.

In other words, even if you're part of the new upper class, you've had a lot of exposure to the rest of America.

I found some of the questions rather funny. Neither I nor my nonexistent spouse have ever bought a pick-up truck, so I picked 'no'; but my dad, my sister, several of my cousins, and lots of people I know (I live in Texas) have. I would never, ever, ever stock my own refrigerator with cheap beer because I rarely drink at all, and would take forever to get through it. I also don't talk politics with friends or family -- I find it excruciatingly boring -- so, although things come out here and there, I really don't have a clue what the political views of most of my friends are, much less any strong and wide-ranging disagreements. And I avoid hanging out with people smoking cigarettes because I am allergic to cigarette smoke -- I have a fairly strong constitution, but exposure to cigarette smoke for any extended stretch of time is one of the few things that can knock me down but good.

Crack!

2012-01-24T20:56:00.001-06:00

Classes look like they'll be good this term, but I'm feeling like I'm talking a bit too much. Perhaps I should hire a croc to help me out.

Incomparable Correspondence

2012-01-24T18:45:00.002-06:00

Today is the Feast of St. Francis de Sales, Doctor of the Church. From his Treatise on the Love of God, Book I, Chapter 15:

But besides this affinity of likenesses, there is an incomparable correspondence between God and man, for their reciprocal perfection: not that God can receive any perfection from man, but because as man cannot be perfected but by the divine goodness, so the divine goodness can scarcely so well exercise its perfection outside itself, as upon our humanity: the one has great want and capacity to receive good, the other great abundance and inclination to bestow it.

Contentment, Happiness, Pleasant States

2012-01-23T18:38:00.000-06:00

Early on in Book IV of Society and Its Purpose, Rosmini proposes an interesting set of distinctions between contentment, happiness, and pleasant states.

You are in a pleasant state when your felt needs are met and you feel no pain. Thus being in a pleasant state is purely a matter of how you feel.

More developed than this is contentment. In order to be content, you must not merely be in a pleasant state; you must assess yourself as being in a pleasant state. It requires conscious judgment that you are fine. Whereas pleasant states just arise naturally, contentment in this sense is a personal state, dependent on personal judgment. Because of this, human beings, as persons, cannot rest content with merely having pleasant states -- pun intended. Once our mind develops to a certain extent, we do not merely feel, we judge, and merely feeling good is not always enough. We need to judge that we feel good because we have something good. Feeling is, Rosmini says, just a "first tribunal"; it is intellectual judgment that finally rules.

This judgment of contentment, however, does not need to be explicit; it can be a 'habitual judgment', which is to say, contentment really lies in the disposition to judge ourselves as in a genuinely satisfying state. Or in other words, contentment in this sense is not an act of judgment but a state of being inclined to judge.

Happiness is the next stage in sophistication on Rosmini's view. You are happy when you are not merely content but you can ascribe your contentment to the possession of a true, complete, and lasting good.

Aegidius Draft VII

2012-01-23T17:02:00.002-06:00

Capitulum Primum: Wherein we meet the Wolf of Wolves
http://scion-of-lykaios.blogspot.com/2011/11/capitulum-primum.html
Capitulum Secundum: Wherein we learn something of Wolves
http://scion-of-lykaios.blogspot.com/2011/11/capitulum-secundum.html
Capitulum Tertium: Wherein a plan is made
http://scion-of-lykaios.blogspot.com/2011/11/capitulum-tertium.html
Capitulum Quartum: Wherein a war begins
http://scion-of-lykaios.blogspot.com/2011/11/capitulum-quartum.html
Capitulum Quintum
http://scion-of-lykaios.blogspot.com/2011/11/capitulum-quintum.html
Capitulum Sextum
http://scion-of-lykaios.blogspot.com/2011/11/capitulum-sextum.html
Capitulum Septimum
http://scion-of-lykaios.blogspot.com/2011/11/capitulum-septum.html
Capitulum Octavum
http://scion-of-lykaios.blogspot.com/2011/12/capitulum-octavum.html
Capitulum Nonum
http://scion-of-lykaios.blogspot.com/2012/01/capitulum-nonum.html
Capitulum Decimum
http://scion-of-lykaios.blogspot.com/2012/01/capitulum-decimum.html

So 9 and 10 are new here. I had hoped to have more, and to have had it sooner, but things kept coming up. Decimum is a not much of a chapter, and would probably vanish in revision, but writing-wise it's a pause before the final cascade of events as Aegidius starts reeling things in.

In many ways I think the storyline that will be coming, and which now is clear in all but some details, has a kind of Medea-like feel to it, quite by accident. Certainly Euripides is in one sense merely telling the story of a deus ex machina -- it just happens that the god from the machine was Medea herself all along, and anyone who thinks that deus ex machina is necessarily a lapse of art should study that tragedy closely to be corrected -- and there's some of that here. But the crucial difference is that Medea had the untamed and burning fire of the sun in her, while Aegidius has in him the coldly ruthless madness of the moon. And also, I think, that the end result here can't quite end up a tragedy, because I am not a pagan Greek. Revision would no doubt play with this a bit.

Music on My Mind

2012-01-21T22:42:00.000-06:00

Mumford & Sons, "Nothing is Written"

Notable and Noted Links

2012-01-21T10:46:00.003-06:00

* The Atlantic has an interesting interview with Tim Maudlin on philosophy of physics.

* Bernard Yack reviews Virtue and Politics, edited by Blackledge and Knight, and discusses the relationship between MacIntyre's current Aristotelianism and his Marxist background.

* I was hoping to have something to say about John Wilkins's recent post on what he calls the Shandyan dilemma for historical disciplines. I'm not sure I actually have enough well-formed ideas to say anything, but the post is definitely worth reading.

* I was impressed by the post on Fact and Value in Lawrence Solum's legal theory lexicon series -- in a short space and simple language, he manages to locate the problem's relation to Hume's famous ought/is passage, and yet to avoid virtually all serious interpretive mistakes. This is no mean feat -- there's a lot of confused and confusing discussion of the subject. There are things I would say slightly differently, but, again, I was impressed; it takes considerable powers of summarization and clear thinking to write something this good at this level without getting tangled up.

* I loved this post at "Obliscent" : The Adventures of Magical Realist Sherlock Holmes: A Scandal In Colombia.

* Reformed philosopher Michael Sudduth has converted to Hinduism -- Vaishnava Vedanta, to be exact. As Bill Vallicella notes, it's a bit of a surprise, although people have been noticing Sudduth's extensive engagement with Hindu ideas for some time now. The turning point was apparently a religious experience of Krishna. I suppose a possible good consequence of this is that we may get more analytic discussions of Vaishnavism, which I think is actually needed -- analytic philosophers of religion tend to walk a tight treadmill of topics despite the fact that there are many issues that need to be clarified, whether for exposition, defense, or refutation, and getting them to look around will inevitably have some benefits. But judging from his conversion testimony, I suspect that we will have to wait a bit for anything along these lines from Sudduth; the convert's warm glow is not always the best environment for cool reasoning.

* John Corvino has a post at the Independent Gay Forum arguing that it is hypocritical (particularly for Catholics, I think, is the subtext, but it is not explicitly stated) to combine easy tolerance for remarriage after divorce with (at least certain kinds of) arguments against homosexual marriage. It's a very interesting argument, although Corvino doesn't develop it with proper care. There's some good discussion at the Volokh Conspiracy.

* Michael Flynn on Why the Future Never Gets the SF Right.

ADDED LATER

* Eric Schliesser has a post on shared myths among analytic philosophers; this is something I've always said, so I'll definitely have to check out the Candlish book that he mentions.

* Kenny Pearce discusses William King on free will

128 Ways of Being Wretched

2012-01-21T00:51:00.001-06:00

Rosmini, in Society and Its Purpose, Book IV, proposes an exact rundown of all the ways in which human beings can make themselves unhappy; according to him, there are exactly one hundred twenty-eight ways in which we frustrate ourselves. He gives a brief summary in chapter 27:

We see, therefore, that the errors which the practical reason can make about unhappiness, and the various kinds of illusory capacities which continually extend and aggravate the human spirit as they lead it to a state which can only be called moral madness, are one hundred and twenty-eight.

Physical pleasure has one unsatisfiable capacity whenever the pleasure sought is not real and determined, but conceived in general.

Wealth has two unsatisfiable capacities; the aim is either wealth in general, or wealth sought for the sake of pleasure in general.

Power has four unsatisfiable capacities; the aim is either power in general for its own sake, or for pleasure in general, or for wealth which again, as we have said, forms an undetermined object whether sought for itself or as a means of obtaining pleasure in general.

Glory has fifty-six capacities, all of them unsatisfiable of their own nature. I have distinguished seven kinds of glory, each of which can be desired 1. for itself, or 2. as a means for obtaining physical pleasure, which has only one abstract concept, or 3. for the sake of obtaining wealth, which admits two abstract concepts, or 4. for the sake of obtaining power, which admits of four abstract concepts under which it is presented to our appetite as an abstract, chimerical object.

Finally, sixty-five capacities can be listed in knowledge. All of these are unsatisfiable, extend indefinitely in human beings and can never be filled. They are present 1. when pleasure in general is sought in knowledge; 2. when indefinite richness of mind is sought. Knowledge, considered as enrichment of mind, can then be desired for itself, or as a means to pleasure, or power, or wealth, or glory. As we saw, pleasure opens the gate to error in the intellect and waywardness of heart in one way, wealth in two, power in four and glory in fifty-six ways. All these ways constitute the same number of illusory, indefinite ends for which knowledge can serve as means.

Added together, all these unsatisfiable capacities, each specifically different from the others, is found to number one hundred and twenty-eight. This is the vast labyrinth in which the hearts of men and women wander endlessly and lose themselves.

Each of the 128 ways listed is a way in which merely apparent good can be substituted for actual good, in which we hope to get unbounded good from necessarily finite goods; he discussed these in prior chapters. Actually, Rosmini goes on to add a 129th; but this is a sort of union of all the 128 ways, and thus, as Rosmini puts it, is itself a moral dementia, pure unadulterated pride; in another of Rosmini's phrases, it contains diabolical grandeur, in which put ourselves in the place of God. I stick with the 128 number for convenience, because, as Rosmini further goes on to point out, none of the ways of being unhappy are inconsistent with any of the others, so the actual number of ways of being unhappy is every possible combination of the 128, and the 129th is only one of those combinations. And even this is not enough to map out all possible human unhappiness, because these are only the specifically distinct capacities for unhappiness; each one of these capacities of misery can be exercised in varying degrees.

So now you know. Actually, it's an interesting approach; what Rosmini is trying to do is to posit a manifold of possible states of human life, both morally successful and morally unsuccessful, so that in the formation and governance of a society of people we will be able to assess the quality of the society by how it helps people navigate this manifold.

Triage

2012-01-20T15:18:00.000-06:00

There has been some discussion of the recent case in which the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia was accused of denying a three-year-old girl a kidney transplant solely on the basis of mental retardation. (The Hospital has apologized, and the parents have since suggested that it was perhaps merely one doctor rather than the hospital as a whole.) One thing I have noticed is that several people have raised the issue of triage as a defense of the original decision; some of these are interesting arguments, but unfortunately most of these appeals to triage principles don't show an understanding of what triage actually is.

The entire point of triage is that only need is considered. Triage systems were originally developed in a military context when field doctors started giving medical treatment not on the basis of rank but on the basis of need, as determined by purely medical criteria. This is what genuine triage is: it is a system, operating under a scarcity of resources significant enough to require careful discrimination of who actually receives those resources (most clearly in emergency or disaster, but resources do not necessarily have to be anywhere near that scarce to become an issue), where distribution of those resources is done purely on the basis of actual medical need according to established principles that only consider medical issues. Remember, it has always been the case that doctors have had to make hard choices based on scarce resources. Actual triage systems only developed when the principles governing those choices were no longer official rank, social status, subjective assessment, or any other nonmedical criterion. We can call those other resource-management systems 'triage' in a loose sense, but they are radically different for moral purposes, and cannot all be lumped together as if the justification for one were justification for another. Just as genuine triage management cannot, by its nature, be indiscriminate in the use of medical resources, so it cannot, by its nature, take into account anything other than medical need. And precisely the reason why triage is an important ethical as well as medical concept is that it operates in conditions of necessity according to principles wholly geared to dealing with the necessity; it's the medical necessity, and the proportion of means to the end of dealing with that particular necessity, that justifies triage decisions.

Precisely one of the worries in this case -- and whether it is right or not, the issue needs to be taken seriously -- is that we here have a case in which the discriminatory principles were not purely concerned with medical need, but involved making subjective or merely pseudo-objective judgments about something like future quality of life. If this were in fact true, it would mean that the system was not a genuine triage system, and that triage principles could not justify the action. Mere scarcity of resources and the need to make hard decisions is not enough; and you can only defend an action on the basis of triage principles if the principles involved were real triage principles. This is something that requires investigation, and cannot be merely assumed.

My Response to the Wikipedia Blackout

2012-01-19T23:22:00.002-06:00

I didn't notice it.

2012 Edge Question

2012-01-19T20:05:00.000-06:00

The 2012 Edge Question is What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation? The answers to Edge Questions are often a mixed bag at best, althought the 2011 one ("What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?") actually had a lot of good answers. This year, I think, is one of the worst; most of the answers are not very good. For one thing, many of the answers seem to have weird assumptions about what an explanation is; they often propose something that, however useful, wouldn't be useful as an explanation at all (e.g., purely descriptive models, redescriptions of the explanandum, heuristics, practical arguments, metaphors, existence or nonexistence proofs for symptoms or correlations, and so forth). And, further, it seems clear that many of these people are simply unable to convey coherently what they mean by calling something deep, elegant, or beautiful, much less able to explain what it is about an explanation that makes it any of these things.

There are a handful of answers that are interesting, mostly from a few of the physicists. Dawkins's, I think, was actually the most interesting proposal; most of the others, at least the others that could be seriously considered as explanations of some kind and whose depth, elegance, or beauty was given an explanation, were rather trite examples of the sort you would expect -- not necessarily wrong, but also not necessarily indicative of having put any serious thought into the question.

A New Poem Draft

2012-01-18T22:47:00.001-06:00

Almost Half in Love

The rain on the eaves in the moonlight
was sparkling like pure diamond; it was so bright
that our eyes could hardly tell that it was midnight
and I was almost half in love.

Your hand was on my arm; it felt so nice
that I wouldn't have removed it for the world's price
and your eyes in light of moon had me so enticed
that I was almost half in love.

The memories of that night through each life-phase
have mingled with the ones in which we parted ways;
but who could ever lose the lessons of those old days
when we were almost half in love?

Farewell, Dublin Dr Pepper

2012-01-17T20:06:00.000-06:00

The US's oldest Dr Pepper plant has in a sense been closed. This is big news in these parts, Texas being Dr Pepper Country. The Dr Pepper brand is a very complicated one, being mish-mash of all sorts of different licenses. The Dublin plant, although it was a very tiny plant, was particularly significant in that its original license predated the Big Switch among sodas from sugar to high fructose corn syrup (due to high sugar prices), and when that switch came, the owner of the plant refused to make the switch. And thus Dublin, Texas is one of only a handful of plants in the country that has always continued to make Dr Pepper with sugar rather than corn syrup. (It also continued using original 1920s equipment.) The taste is noticeably better: not as sharp and metallic. Because of this, it was in high demand; despite the fact that Dublin is tiny little town, it received over a hundred thousand visitors a year, simply because of the Dublin plant. However, this popularity was precisely its downfall. Dr Pepper Snapple restricted distribution to a small area around Dublin, TX itself, but it soon began to be bootlegged all over the state, and convenience stores began to go to great lengths to stock such a popular item. So last year Dr Pepper Snapple sued the plant for violation of the terms of its agreement, and a settlement effectively ended the era of Dublin Dr Pepper, the best Dr Pepper in the land of Dr Pepper.

It's a huge deal for Dublin, Texas, of course, since the plant was the mainstay of the local economy. It only employed forty people -- although, again, it's a tiny town of less than 4000 -- but it brought in customers from all over. They have a Dr Pepper festival every year, in which the town is officially named 'Dr Pepper, Texas' for one day, and at which a Miss Pretty Peggy Pepper is crowned. Dr Pepper Snapple insists that there will still be a plant, and that they will continue to support the Dr Pepper Festival. Likewise, the famous soda shop next door to the plant, Old Doc's, will continue operating. But the plant will bottle other things, and there will no longer be any such things as Dublin Dr Pepper. Likewise, Dr Pepper Snapple insists that it will continue supplying sugar-based Dr Pepper from other plants. But there are a lot of unhappy Texans over this; Texans have brand loyalty like you wouldn't believe, and while Dr Pepper is itself a homegrown brand, and thus will likely continue to have widespread favor, by shutting down the Dublin plant, Dr Pepper Snapple has angered a lot of people.

Which is interesting, actually, because we aren't talking a huge volume, here; the Dublin plant, besides being the oldest Dr Pepper bottler in the country, was also undeniably the smallest, and did about $7 million worth of business a year. Likewise, Dublin was not even the only sugar-based Dr Pepper plant in Texas -- Dr Pepper Snapple started rolling out its own retro version, also sugar-based, not too long ago, and the plant in Temple, Texas, a far bigger plant, bottles and distributes that (and, indeed, actually bottled Dublin Dr Pepper for bottles and cans that the Dublin plant couldn't). But perhaps that was the problem: Dr Pepper Snapple didn't have a problem with Dublin Dr Pepper when it was a little-known eccentricity and wasn't competing throughout Central Texas with another sugar-based Dr Pepper variety; other bottlers were obviously not going to be happy with that. Dr Pepper Snapple was in a tricky position. But so it goes.

On Their Way to the Great Cognation

2012-01-16T08:41:00.000-06:00

Gersonides on Well-Grounded Refutation

2012-01-15T14:03:00.000-06:00

It is necessary that if someone wants to arrive at the truth on some disputed question that he try to defend each of the opposing theories as far as this is possible. Then the absurdity of the view he [wishes] to refute will be more easily established. For if he refutes any one of these theories but does not first try to argue for it (as far as possible), his refutation of that view is not well-grounded. This is obvious.

[Levi ben Gershom, The Wars of the Lord, Volume One, Feldman, tr. Jewish Publication Society of America (Philadelphia: 1984) p. 119.]

Thanks to Amazon gift cards for Christmas, I was able to attain the full three volumes of Feldman's translation of Gersonides's The Wars of the Lord without killing my wallet, which makes me very, very happy. Gersonides, of course, is one of the great medieval Jewish philosophers, and The Wars of the Lord is his major work.

Music on My Mind

2012-01-14T22:00:00.002-06:00

Lauren O'Connell, "All I Have to Do is Dream" (Everly Brothers cover). I very much like the instrumentation here.

Authorial Intention

2012-01-14T10:50:00.000-06:00

There is an ambiguity in what people mean when they talk about 'authorial intention' or 'intent of the author', arising from the fact that 'intention' has been used so long and in so many contexts.

(1) When people started using the term, 'intention' was a much broader term; it meant the act of disposing or orienting something to an end. Thus it included not only what one would like to get out of the action, but also the actual organization and structuring of the action. In the case of a text, saying that the meaning of the text was the intention of the author was saying that the meaning of the text is the organization and disposition, by the author, of words to mean something.

(2) However, there is a narrower sense of 'intention', which here we can just call 'intent', that sprang up at some point as an offshoot. In this case, the intent is merely what the author was aiming at, and not the whole act of aiming and firing at it. 'Intention' was an action term -- it is the orientation and force, the tendency, you actually give the arrow. 'Intent' is more subtle -- it is what you want the arrow actually to do, and, in particular, what you want it to hit.

We see the importance of distinguishing the two especially well in cases like Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works. One cannot assume that a pseudonym completely represents Kierkegaard's view; each of his pseudonyms is put forward as a persona. Thus there is an authorial intention discoverable in the text, since each text is carefully constructed, but Kierkegaard's own intent -- what he's aiming at in the first place -- is deliberately masked by the presentation of the persona and that persona's purported intent. Learning the intention for the text in Kierkegaard is usually not that difficult. You usually need some context so that, for instance, you can figure out that Kierkegaard is adapting terminology already in use, or is alluding to common philosophical topics of the time. But anyone worth their salt can do this, one text at a time, simply by studying the text, both in itself and in its context; this is effectively a study of how, and the way, in which a text means anything at all. Determining Kierkegaard's intent in writing it, on the other hand, is extraordinarily difficult, and requires a critical judgment based on familiarity with how the text fits into the whole of things that Kierkegaard writes about.

Nor is this an artifact of pseudonymity. Kant's book on Swedenborg, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, is a very readable book: the intention is not difficult to find. It's a well-organized text that can be read without much difficulty, and is certainly much easier to read than most of Kant's other works. On the other hand, it's notoriously difficult to interpret. How can this be? Because no one quite agrees on what Kant's intent was in putting the book forward and putting it forward in the way he does, and what can be gleaned from the text and context leaves a great deal undetermined. Much can be determined about what Kant is doing, and thus we can determine much about the authorial intention; but one part of it, why, exactly, he is doing it, is elusive, and so we argue about intent. We see this as well with Hume. The most irreconcilable interpretations have been put on Hume's work, despite a lot of agreement about the texts themselves, and why? Because people differ about how skeptical his intent actually is.

The distinction is important in another way, in that skepticism about authorial intention is often conflated with skepticism about authorial intent. Intent can be very tricky; it's a matter of motives and expected consequences, and is almost always the hardest thing to determine about the intention of the text. Just as in a conversation we can understand quite well what is said but miss the point of its being said entirely, we can grasp the organization and sense of a text without being aware of why one would write such a thing at all, or why one would write such a thing in this particular way. And the problem is exacerbated by the fact that the intention of the author can go awry, and deviate massively from his intent. Just as an archer can want to hit the bull's-eye, but actual dispose and orient the bow so that it ends overshooting the target entirely, so the intent of a text can be one thing and the whole intention or disposition of the text be heading in an entirely different direction. Clearly, any approach to a text that can't recognize this is radically faulty; but this is precisely what one gets when one fails to make the distinction between intention and intent.

Malleus Arianorum

2012-01-13T17:17:00.001-06:00

Today is the Feast of St. Hilary of Poitiers (c. 300 - c. 368), Doctor of the Church, Hammer of the Arians, and the most Greek of the Latin Fathers. He was a Neoplatonist who converted to Christianity. He became so popular in Poitiers that when the bishop died the people forced him to become bishop even though he was actually married and had a daughter. (Married priests were still not uncommon in the West; but it was by this point generally expected that bishops would not be married.) He became deeply involved in the controversy over Arianism, as one would expect from his nickname, and it got him exiled once and into trouble several more times. He was one of the great early defenders of Nicaea, and the greatest Western theologian prior to Ambrose and Augustine. His greatest extant work is the De Trinitate. Very little else is known about his life.

He gives us the story of his conversion in Book I of the De Trinitate. He spent an extended period reflecting on the meaning of life; on the basis of such reflection he rejected the view that life should be spent seeking material satisfaction; rather, a life of virtue was the only life that was fitting for a human being. But when he looked at the philosophers around him, he had difficulty finding any philosophy that rose above the mere animal minimum -- none of them really called human beings to the best and the highest. The kind of moral philosophy that human understanding calls out for, he thought, could not rest in anything other than something divine. But this, too, was a problem. When he looked around at the philosophers of the day, he found a wide variety of views, and, like many pagans of Neoplatonist bent in this age, he came to the conclusion that bare polytheism was itself not sufficient: the divine must have both eternity and power over all, and these were not communicable or divisible.

So far many other pagan Neoplatonists had gone, and not gone any further. But a happenstance changed Hilary's life forever:

While my mind was dwelling on these and on many like thoughts, I chanced upon the books which, according to the tradition of the Hebrew faith, were written by Moses and the prophets, and found in these words spoken by God the Creator testifying of Himself 'I Am that I Am, and again, He that is has sent me unto you.' I confess that I was amazed to find in them an indication concerning God so exact that it expressed in the terms best adapted to human understanding an unattainable insight into the mystery of the Divine nature. For no property of God which the mind can grasp is more characteristic of Him than existence, since existence, in the absolute sense, cannot be predicated of that which shall come to an end, or of that which has had a beginning, and He who now joins continuity of being with the possession of perfect felicity could not in the past, nor can in the future, be non-existent; for whatsoever is Divine can neither be originated nor destroyed. Wherefore, since God's eternity is inseparable from Himself, it was worthy of Him to reveal this one thing, that He is, as the assurance of His absolute eternity.

And reading further only confirmed the impression: here at last was the divine he had been seeking.

Schoen at Kickstarter

2012-01-12T23:49:00.001-06:00

Chris Schoen, who blogs at underverse, has a project up at Kickstarter. Kickstarter, if you don't know, is a really clever fundraising site in which people pledge certain amounts of money to certain projects in return for certain benefits. It's a good, solid way of getting basic artistic projects started. Such things were once not uncommon, but seem to have been harder to find for a while; it's good to see that they are still around. In any case, the project is compiling an album of Baudelaire poems translated by Chris and set to music, itself a subproject in a much larger project. Go over and look, and see if you are interested in pledging something.

Well, That Was a Different Take

2012-01-12T18:59:00.002-06:00

So a man named Bill Snyder came across a 1937 British children's book and saw at once its potential; he acquired the film rights in 1964 for a fairly small amount because no one knew the author yet. The only condition was that the rights would revert if no motion picture were made by June 30, 1966. That book was The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien. He got a young screenwriter to work up a screenplay on it. By this point The Lord of the Rings had been published, but very few people even knew that, and certainly not the people involved here. Because of this, the screenwriter, whose name was Gene Deitch, did what people do with children's books when they want to make them movies: he modified some of the storyline to make it easier to follow, added some characters for interest, and, in short, ignored the greater background of the book for the simple reason that he had no idea that it existed. He did, eventually, manage to read LOTR, and started revising his script to take it into account (to avoid shutting down the possible sequel, of course). But at first nobody knew Tolkien yet! Try as they might, Snyder, Deitch, and others struggled to find anyone who would want to back the movie. This ate up precious time and the clock was ticking. And then, with the publication of the paperback LOTR, Tolkien exploded into public recognition as the clock was ticking. Suddenly the film rights held by Snyder were much more valuable, and he wasn't going to risk losing them. But there was a loophole: the Tolkien lawyers had been a little sloppy in their language, and thus all Snyder had to do to keep the rights was produce some kind of full-color motion picture. So he made Deitch cut down his script to a short short and in thirty days had the very first film version of The Hobbit thrown together, all twelve minutes of it. Because of it Snyder was able to keep the rights long enough to sell them back for much more than he had paid for them.

Behold it now in the splendor of its sublime awfulness! (ht) But be prepared for the strangeness....

Correction in the Classroom

2012-01-12T17:24:00.001-06:00

Someone somewhere recently brought up this article from last summer by Peter Boghossian, in which he expresses both his complete cluelessness about something that anyone with a significant education should have figured out, namely, that most professors do not regard it as reasonable or practically effective pedagogical practice to go about directly attacking student's opinions, and affirms with every uncritical cliche in the book his resolution to teach students critical thinking:

Should professors attempt to change students’ beliefs by consistently challenging false beliefs with facts?

I believe that this is exactly what our role should be. My colleagues’ intense, unexpected, yet understandable reaction to my failed attempt change the mind of a student, I believe, fundamentally misconstrues what the role of educators should be. I believe our role as educators should be to teach students not just factual data, but the importance of critically examining beliefs by exposing them to facts, and then revising cherished notions when confronted with reliable but discomforting evidence.

There are a number of problems, of course, with Boghossian's entire argument. The first and most important, of course, is that education is by its nature a cooperative venture; teachers can't force knowledge into student heads. And that means without any doubt that one of the things teachers have to work for is the cooperation of the students themselves. We see this problem rear its head almost immediately in the article with Boghossian's clueless bafflement that his fellow instructors would be even more shocked by Boghossian's insistence when he read the comment made by the student. Obviously any such comment clearly indicates that the student has completely given up not just cooperation but any real possibility of it. Some students, of course, never give cooperation in the first place, and others are just overly inclined to give up at the slightest difficulty; but usually if they go out of their way to mention it that means something went terribly wrong. Sometimes it's not the professor's fault, sometimes it is, but when students go through the motions and then stubbornly insist that they are only going through the motions because they've been forced to do so, something has gone wrong.

In practice recognition of this means that most professors who put some thought into their pedagogy pick very carefully their hills to die on. If Boghossian had offered a topic-specific argument, i.e., that professors should work harder to provide accurate information to students on this or that topic (e.g., evolution, which seems to be an issue that Boghossian has in mind) rather than let inaccuracies slide, I would be much more sympathetic. But there are lots of situations where it is obviously better either just to encourage the students to look into the matter further, providing resources, or to aim for a more attainable goal than correction (e.g., getting them simply to recognize some attractions of the opposing side).

And even then professors need to take into account that their credibility to students is not unlimited; students do not just assume that professors know what they are talking about, although they are usually willing to defer quite a bit if the professor seems competent in general, seems not to be pushing a prejudice, and is clearly talking about a field he or she has studied extensively. If any one of these conditions fails, though, the attempt to correct students directly can backfire. On biological matters, students will, all other things being equal, respect the claims of a biology professor more than those of a philosophy professor, of a well-credentialed and obviously deeply informed professor over any other, and of a genial professor over one who seems abusive or confrontational. And note that it's not even about what one really is; you can be the best informed person in the world, talking completely objectively, out of a genuine love for your students, and if the students don't get that impression, it's almost for nothing. You'll simply be convincing the students that you can't be trusted, either because you are ignorant, or because you are prejudiced, or because you are stupid. There will be students who will end up thinking this no matter what; but there is good reason to avoid recklessly pushing students into deciding all at once, on a single issue or a small collection of issues, that you either are right or ignorant/prejudiced/stupid. In part because for a lot of practical reasons the latter option is going to be much easier for students to take.

This gets into the whole critical thinking issue. Apparently Boghossian doesn't grasp this fact, but there is a form of critical thinking most students engage in a lot. They don't always do it optimally -- indeed, I think there is a good argument that they usually do not -- but they do it constantly. And this form of critical thinking is the assessment of whether a professor is worth learning from at all. When it comes to such an issue, they are not really very trusting, and not inclined to give much benefit of the doubt. If professors really want to go around correcting every incorrect thing a student says, they need to be constantly proving to the students that they are fair, trustworthy, and informed. This is harder to do than it sounds, and modern universities and colleges are not really set up to make it easier. One of the signs of excellent pedagogical practice is when instructors can with some regularity start with students actively suspicious of them -- there are always a few, and under some conditions more than a few -- and at least by the end of the term convince some of them that they can afford to be more open-minded in this context and take the opposing arguments seriously.

This is complicated by the fact that students don't grow up in academia. They are used to the idea that there are people who disagree with them, but they aren't usually used to direct correction. They, unlike Boghossian, do not start with the assumption that professors, or anyone else, has the right to tell them they are wrong. They'll accept that professors get to set the hoops they have to jump through to get through the obstacle course of college, they'll generally accept that you can suggest that other views are better, but many students come in inclined to treat direct correction, where they have not clearly already consented to it, as attack or power play. And this is amplified by the consumerist attitudes of many students, which sometimes leads them to think that professors are being paid to deliver a much narrower service than professors are actually paid to deliver. (This came up in my Ethics class, twice, last fall. It was a really great group of students, one of the best classes I've had, but they were occasionally frustrated, particularly when studying Kant, that I didn't just tell them the answers but made them work through them on their own or as a class. And twice they told me that they were paying me to give them the answers. To which I replied that if they were paying me I would be charging them a lot more than the college did; and that the college, which actually was paying me, was not paying me to do things their way but to do whatever I deem fit as long as it meets the standards of the college and the department. As I said, it was actually a great class; and the fact that they even dared say it straight to my face says something about how well the class and I were getting along. But you can tell from evaluations and the like that students often think it even if they won't say it.) These problems can be handled, but, again, it requires that professors prove their integrity by working with the students in a way that students will generally see as fair, by showing competence in their field, and by starting where the students are, at least to the limited extent that current college set-up allows that. You don't teach children to take medicine simply by forcing it down their throats at any cost; if you do that, all you teach them is that they can't avoid doing things your way when you're around. They have to come to see themselves that it's a good thing, and that's much harder. And students are not really different. Spoon full of sugar, and all that. This is really part of why Boghossian's colleagues were aghast at his position. They no doubt believe that "students must cross the boundary between knowledge and belief," although this way of using the terminology is somewhat eccentric; what Boghossian fails to grasp is that they are not denying this. They are denying that Boghossian is achieving it by the means he is using.

But there is a more serious issue here. I agree with Boghossian's claim that one of our roles as educators should be "to teach students not just factual data, but the importance of critically examining beliefs by exposing them to facts, and then revising cherished notions when confronted with reliable but discomforting evidence," although I doubt I understand it in quite the way he does, but the most fundamental thing about this is that you can't teach it except by example. You cannot teach the value of critical examination and revision in light of facts unless they see you yourself critically examining your ideas and revising them in light of evidence. Anyone who thinks he is succeeding at teaching critical thinking when students cannot see the professor himself practice it is deluding himself (and, again, it's what the students can see that matters). This makes it a very hard thing, because as a professor you have a very limited window in which to teach by example, just a few hours a week over a few months, and these are hours in which a lot already has to be done. And the simple fact of the matter is that students aren't seeing you engaging in critical thinking if you are correcting them all the time. All they see is that you are so certain that you are right that you think everyone else has to agree with you. To be sure, you may be right; but you are delusional if you think it's teaching them critical thinking.

So if the point is not merely to correct students what is it? That surely is obvious, and it's what most professors are really aiming for: exposure that allows for understanding. Understanding can't be forced, but we can do a lot to make it more likely, simply by exposing students to what they didn't know before. And when we recognize this as the better end, we recognize that correction still has an important place: we correct students when they have outright misunderstood the issue, or have clearly misconstrued the arguments, or are overlooking some serious evidence, and we try to do so in such a way that leaves them open-minded enough that the arguments and evidence have a chance of working on their own. That is, we set them up for successful self-correction. There are still times when I would be willing to risk burning all my credibility to convince a student of something -- usually when the error in question is clearly preventing them from even understanding the alternatives. And then there's the housekeeping kind of correction -- this is directly relevant to the course, this is the only answer that is going to be accepted as correct, this is why, and, yes, it will be on the test. But, of course, this doesn't get you any farther than the sort of student who wrote the comment Boghossian mentions at the beginning of his article. Most of the time I'll just say, "Well, I'm not convinced of that myself, for such-and-such reasons," or "Most people think otherwise, because &c." and move on; particularly if it is only loosely relevant to the immediate discussion. Sometimes, if it's on a really important issue, everything else gets set aside, and, instead of simply 'correcting' the student, the whole course is diverted temporarily into looking at the background of the problem, the evidence, the arguments, and so forth. And then there are cases when it's just not worth the precious time it would burn to handle the matter properly, but students are nonetheless clearly thinking things through more carefully, and the only reasonable thing to do is let it slide and trust that their thought will work itself out.

The biggest mistake an instructor can make, I think, is to focus too narrowly on the course itself. In many cases our best successes have not been achieved by the end of the course; they are sometimes achieved when it's only down the road that the student grasps the point. As teachers we cannot afford only to look at the fact that a student is, here and now, wrong; we need to set things up so that, at least in principle, students who are wrong now will come to see on their own how they were wrong, even if it takes three more years. To be sure it takes a little trust that Boghossian doesn't seem to have: a little trust that students can figure things out on their own if they are only given the right resources and enough time, a little trust that it's often better for them to learn by discovery rather than by rote, a little trust that gentle exposure to evidence and arguments and encouragement not to dismiss them out of hand will work in the long run, and a little trust that you are running your course well enough that students will take seriously your view even if they are not inclined to agree and even if you don't press it very forcefully. But (1) this is the better path of pedagogy; and (2) given our limitations of resources and time, it's often the best we can do anyway. And it is the task of the teacher not to shape students but to help them shape themselves in a better way than they otherwise would. Simply trying to force students to accept things they aren't inclined to accept is not teaching but perversion.

The Buzzing of a Fly

2012-01-12T12:50:00.002-06:00

One of the main causes of our mind's lack of application to abstract truths is that we view them as remote, whereas things much closer to the mind are constantly being presented to it. The mind's close attention, as it were, brings the ideas of objects it is attending to much closer, but it often happens that when one is intent upon metaphysical speculations, one is distracted from them because some sensation crops up in the soul that is, as it were, still closer to it than its ideas....The buzzing of a fly, or some other slight noise -- given that it is communicated to the main part of the brain so that the soul may perceive it -- in spite of our resistance is capable of preventing us from thinking about the loftiest abstract truths, because no abstract idea modifies the soul as sensations do.

Malebranche, The Search After Truth 3.1.4 (LO 213).

Meet Nicholas Steno (Repost)

2012-01-11T16:04:00.001-06:00

Apparently Google is honoring Nicholas Steno today (ht). So I thought I'd put up a re-post, with some revisions, of something I've done on Steno before.

Depending on whether you date according to the Julian or the Gregorian calendar, Niels Stensen was born in Copenhagen January 1 (Julian) or January 11 (Gregorian) 1638. (The Gregorian calendar only began to be used in Denmark itself after 1700.) He was a second child of the goldsmith Sten Pedersen; his mother's name was Anne. He would become one of the great overachievers of the early modern period. While other people were often working on the same subjects, and there are several instances of 'firsts' typically attributed to him where it's possible to argue, depending on how you define terms, that he was really co-discoverer or independent discoverer, it is nonetheless extraordinary how often his name comes up as a candidate for a 'first'; whatever else may be said about his discoveries, Steno was at the forefront of a wide number of fields.

In 1656 he matriculated under the name Nicolaus Stenonis at Copenhagen University, and it is under variants of this name that he is most widely known. While he was attending University, Denmark and Sweden became involved in a war, and King Karl X Gustav of Sweden invaded. Because of winter ice in 1658, Karl Gustav was able to cross over to Zealand, the island on which Copenhagen was located. King Frederik III of Denmark had to cede territory to stop the advance. Karl Gustav invaded again in 1659 in an attempt to take all of Denmark; Copenhagen repelled the main attack, but remained under a landside siege until 1660. We know that Steno spent some time in a student company manning the ramparts, but not much more; most of what has survived of Steno's life is found in a text called the Chaos-manuscript (discovered in 1946 in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence, Italy, by Father Gustav Scherz): 92 folio pages of closely written observations, experiments, reflections, and excerpts.

In 1659 Steno seems to have sailed to Amsterdam, perhaps with an extended stop in Rostock, where he attended lectures by Gerard Blaes (Blasius), the City Physician. He was given leave at the time to do his own dissections, and entered the first major controversy of his life. During dissection of a sheep's head, he discovered the parotid excretory duct, and showed it to Blaes, who was inclined to dismiss it as either an artifact of dissection or a freak of nature. While it had been discovered before, this was not known at the time. Several days later he found the parotid excretory duct in a dog's head, and showed it to Blaes. After defending his thesis (on hot springs), he left Amsterdam for Leiden. At the University of Leiden, he showed his discovery to to several professors, one of whom (Van Horne) began demonstrating it in his anatomical lectures as the ductus Stenonianus (Stensen's duct, which is its name still). At about the same time, however, Blasius was demonstrating it in his lectures as his own discovery and by 1631 had published it, also as his own discovery. Niels found himself attacked as a plagiarizer by Blaes and his supporters. The dispute, quite fierce, lasted for some time, and did not entirely die out until it became more generally known just how brilliant an anatomist Steno actually was. Spurred on by the dispute, Steno plunged into his investigation of glands and ducts, and discovered (among many others) the lateral nasal gland, which is still called Steno's gland. Steno published his work, which was very well received. At this point he wanted to give anatomy a rest, but for various reasons soon returned to it. One of those reasons was the posthumous publication in 1662 of Descartes's Treatise on Man. Niels began to study the major subjects of that work: the heart, the muscles, and the brain. In 1662 he discovered sino-atrial and atrio-ventricular dissociation. He proved that the heart was entirely a muscle (which had been affirmed, without full explanation, by Harvey, but was not the common view at that time); he also discovered, pace Harvey, that the muscle was arranged spirally rather than circularly.

While in Leiden he made a number of acquaintances, which he would later call a very freethinking group, including Swammerdam, de Graat, and Spinoza, but he didn't stay long; in early 1664, he returned to Copenhagen. There he published De musculis et glandulis observationum specimen, one of the major early modern works in the history of cardiology. At this time he was 26.

In autumn of 1664, Steno left Copenhagen for Paris, and at some point in winter of 1665 he delivered a lecture on the brain (published in 1669 as Discours sur l'anatomie du cerveau). In the lecture he criticized Descartes's view of the brain, and, in particular, the appeal to animal spirits. After traveling in the south of France, Stensen arrived in Tuscany. In 1667 he published his major work on muscles, the Elementorum myologiae specimen, one of the distinctive features of which is that in it Steno develops a theory of muscle contractions that did not appeal to animal spirits. His alternative theory was attacked again and again, so that it was no longer held by anyone by the end of the 18th century. Work on the subject since 1980 has shown that parts of his argument actually did have merit, and, on this point at least, myology has now caught up to where Steno was at age 29 in 1669.

The Elementorum myologiae specimen is also significant in that appended to it were two works describing shark dissections. One of these works, called Canis carchariae dissectum caput, noted the resemblance between shark's teeth and certain fossils; Steno agreed with those who had suggested that the latter were somehow versions of the former, and began to develop an argument that this was possible. The second treatise, the Historia dissecti piscis ex canum genere, showed that the 'testes mulierum' of the non-oviparous dogfish were sufficiently ovary-like to be considered ovaries. This is commonplace now, but at the time it was unclear whether the females of many species had ovaries. After the publication of this work, Steno continued his study of female reproductive organs, and is sometimes credited with being the first discoverer of the mammalian ovarian follicle.

In November 1667, Steno became Catholic. He was confirmed December 8, and on the same day he received a letter from Frederik III ordering him to return to Copenhagen; he replied with a letter asking if the order was still stood given that he was no longer Lutheran. In the meantime, he studied geological formations, publishing a preliminary report on them in 1669: the De solido intra solidum naturaliter contento dissertationis prodromus (also here in Latin). In it he gives the first systematic classification by common origin for solids within solids, and in so doing laid down the principles of reconstruction of geological history. The Prodromus is a founding text of paleontology and dynamic geology; it is also, with the work of Erasmus Bartholin on Iceland spar, one of the founding works of crystallography. One of its many important contributions was the recognition that the faces of quartz crystals are related to each other by a constant angle, which is perhaps the fundamental insight of crystallography. Here and there it is referred to as "Steno's rule".

From late 1668 to early 1670, Steno traveled through Europe confirming his geological theories and giving anatomical demonstrations. At one such demonstration (at Innsbruck in June) he dissected the head of a hydrocephalic calf, showing that the deformity was caused by a disease, and thus providing a strong argument against the view that it was caused by maternal fantasies, a view that still had some broad acceptance even up to the early nineteenth century. When he returned to Florence in 1670, he was made court geologist by the Grand Duke, Cosimo III. Steno became more involved in theological discussions, and on the publication of Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus in 1670, he wrote a letter to his old acquaintance urging him to become Catholic.

In April 1675 he was ordained a priest in Florence and became tutor and moral preceptor to the Crown Prince. In 1677 he was appointed by Innocent IX apostolic vicar of the northern missions and was consecrated the titular bishop of Titiopolis. Steno went to Hanover at the invitationof Duke Johann Friedrich of Brunswick-Lüneburg. When Johann Friedrich died, Steno became auxiliary bishop to Prince Bishop Ferdinand von Fürstenberg of Münster. Catholicism there seems to have been rather lax; Steno spent much of his time there advocating pastoral reform against strong opposition, and eventually left in protest. He began to live an ascetic life of poverty at Hamburg, during which he began, but never completed, an essay reviewing confirmed knowledge of the nervous system.

Steno died November 25 (Julian, 5 December Gregorian), 1686. He was 48. His last words are said to have been Jesus sis mihi Jesus et misericordiam tuam, Domine, in aeternum cantabo. Cosimo III had Steno's body brough back to Florence, where it can be found in the Church of San Lorenzo. on 23 October 1988, John Paul II beatified him. His feast, officially celebrated in certain areas of Europe, is celebrated (as they often are) on the day of his death, December 5.

It's difficult to find good works on Steno in English. Here are two recommendations, from which some of the details above come.

Troels Kardel. Steno: Life - Science - Philosophy. Acta Historica Scientarum Naturalium et Medicinalium, vol 42. Munksgaard (Copenhagen) 1994.

Hans Kermit. Niels Stensen: The Scientist who was Beatified. Michael Drake, tr. Gracewing (Leominster, Herefordshire) 2003. (This is good as a purely introductory work.)

Bonds We Cannot Break

2012-01-11T09:56:00.001-06:00

To destroy the Stoic wisdom completely, one need know but one thing, which is sufficiently proved through experience and by what has already been said, that we are tied to our body, to our parents, to our friends, to our prince, to our country, by bonds we cannot break, and would even be ashamed to try to break. Our soul is joined to our body, and through our body to all visible things by a hand so powerful that it is impossible to loosen them by ourselves....One is never above nature, unless through grace, and a Stoic will never hold the glory and esteem of men in contempt simply through the strength of his mind.

Malebranche, The Search After Truth 2.3.4 (LO 182-183).

The Tebowological Argument

2012-01-10T17:56:00.002-06:00

People play a lot of games, things that are just a bit of horsing around; and one of the games people are playing right now online is the construction of Tebowological arguments. That is, they take some fact or other about Tim Tebow, or the Denver Broncos and their unexpected knack of suddenly winning when Tebow is on the field despite the fact that everyone agrees that Tebow looks like a combination of how not to do things as a quarterback, especially when it comes to passing. And, of course, other people argue that the Tebowological argument fails in some respect or others. You can find a large number of things just by googling Tebow "existence of God". Most of them are just slapped together, but some of the arguments are actually pretty ingenious in their own way; and it's always amusing at how heated some of the arguments get over a bit of sophistical exercise.

But I think there are probably connections between this bit of light horseplay and less fun things. Tebowological arguments are, after all, design arguments -- artificially manufactured design arguments, but design arguments nonetheless. And arguments that they fail are arguments from evil -- artificially manufactured ones, again, but still arguments from evil. It's not difficult to find the parallels. I'm interested in philosophical folklore, so if I had the time, it would be interested to look at the phenomenon more closely as a way of getting insight into how people process and construct philosophical arguments, even if only jokingly, on this subject outside the usual limited treadmill of arguments. This would be potentially valuable both for getting a better idea of how people think when dealing with the topic and for studying the potential structural variations of this general kind of argument, since people are constructing them under conditions that are less constrained than real arguments for and against the existence of God. And both of these are interesting for understanding how arguments work in practice.

Notable Links for Noting and Linking

2012-01-10T11:57:00.000-06:00

* An interesting post by Eric Schliesser on Hume and Clarke on Newton

* In 1961 C. S. Lewis nominated J. R. R. Tolkien (whose birthday anniversary on January 3 recently passed) for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Prize Committee was rather dismissive (although given how dismissive they were of the others, Tolkien was in good company). In any case, Tolkien wouldn't have cared either way, and Ivo Andrić, who actually won, did some good work with the prize money by donating it for the development of libraries in Bosnia.

* Is frankincense on its way to extinction?

* An interesting post on Euripides' Bacchae at "Rethink"

* John Haldane on Michael Dummett

* A post on Berkeley's philosophy of language

* The IEP article on Platonism and Theism has some interesting bits.

* MrsDarwin comments on Catholic discernment.

Two Poem Drafts

2012-01-10T11:09:00.001-06:00

Hy Breasail

Valiant-timbered reason
through the river-veins
of vine-rich jungle-lands
vales of mist discovers;

there visions softly rain,
swiftly flood the rivers,
with vital, vivid dreams.

In Luthany the Shadows Fall

In Luthany the shadows fall
on ruins of deserted halls
that, great of beam, still rise on high,
that, strong of stone, yet stand and wait;
for earth may fade and sun may die
but Luthany will stand and wait.

In Luthany the birds yet trill
and there are lark and whippoorwill,
where nightingales remember days
and mockingbirds recall the years
when merchants traversed well-trod ways;
but only birds recall those years.

Yet someday soon will woods awake
and gods undie and hearts unbreak;
and then the dreaming souls will rise,
and then the sleeping land will dance,
when lives again the thing that dies,
when you and I once more will dance.

With Looks Aghast and Sad

2012-01-09T19:07:00.000-06:00

Now had the great Proclaimer with a voice
More awful then the sound of Trumpet, cried
Repentance, and Heavens Kingdom nigh at hand
To all Baptiz'd: to his great Baptism flock'd
With aw the Regions round, and with them came
From Nazareth the Son of Joseph deem'd
To the flood Jordan, came as then obscure,
Unmarkt, unknown; but him the Baptist soon
Descri'd, divinely warn'd, and witness bore
As to his worthier, and would have resign'd
To him his Heavenly Office, nor was long
His witness unconfirm'd; on him baptiz'd
Heaven open'd, and in likeness of a Dove
The Spirit descended, while the Fathers voice
From Heav'n pronounc'd him his beloved Son
That heard the Adversary, who roving still
About the world, at that assembly fam'd
Would not be last, and with the voice divine
Nigh Thunder-struck, th' exalted man, to whom
Such high attest was giv'n, a while survey'd
With wonder, then with envy fraught and rage
Flies to his place, nor rests, but in mid air
To Councel summons all his mighty Peers,
Within thick Clouds and dark ten-fold involv'd,
A gloomy Consistory; and them amidst
With looks aghast and sad he thus bespake.

From John Milton, Paradise Regain'd, Book I.

Tabulae Novae

2012-01-08T23:45:00.001-06:00

Who in the world, indeed, that has the feelings of a man, can endure that they should have a superfluity of riches, to squander in building over seas and leveling mountains, and that means should be wanting to us even for the necessaries of life; that they should join together two houses or more, and that we should not have a hearth to call our own? They, tho they purchase pictures, statues, and embossed plate; tho they pull down new buildings and erect others, and lavish and abuse their wealth in every possible method, yet cannot, with the utmost efforts of caprice, exhaust it. But for us there is poverty at home, debts abroad, our present circumstances are bad, our prospects much worse; and what, in a word, have we left, but a miserable existence?

Will you not, then, awake to action? Behold that liberty, that liberty for which you have so often wished, with wealth, honor, and glory, are set before your eyes. All these prizes fortune offers to the victorious. Let the enterprise itself, then, let the opportunity, let your poverty, your dangers, and the glorious spoils of war, animate you far more than my words. Use me either as your leader or your fellow soldier; neither my heart nor my hand shall be wanting to you. These objects I hope to effect, in concert with you, in the character of consul—unless, indeed, my expectation deceives me, and you prefer to be slaves rather than masters.

Lucius Sergius Catilina, An Exhortation to Conspiracy (as presented by Sallust). This, of course, is the Catiline denounced by Cicero who attempted to overthrow the Roman Republic. People go back and forth on Catiline, depending largely on whether they judge him sincere in his advocacy for the poor or simply a rabble-rouser using them for his personal ends. But it's a little unsettling to think how well the Catilinian line would play today.

Three Gifts They Bring, Three Gifts They Bear Away

2012-01-07T21:46:00.000-06:00

The Epiphanye
by Robert Southwell

To blase the rising of this glorious sunne,
A glittringe starre appeareth in the Easte,
Whose sight to pilgrimm-toyles three sages wunne
To seeke the light they long had in requeste;
And by this starre to nobler starr they pase,
Whose armes did their desired sunne embrace.

Stall was the skye wherein these planettes shynde,
And want the cloude that did eclipse their rayes;
Yet through this cloude their light did passage finde,
And percd these sages' harts by secrett waies,
Which made them knowe the Ruler of the skyes,
By infant tongue and lookes of babish eyes.

Heaven at her light, Earth blusheth at her pride,
And of their pompe these peeres ashamed be;
Their crownes, their robes, their trayne they sett aside,
When God's poore cotage, clowtes, and crewe, they see;
All glorious thinges their glory nowe dispise,
Sith God contempt, doth more then glory-prize.

Three giftes they bringe, three giftes they beare awaye;
For incense, myrrhe and gould, faith, hope and love;
And with their giftes the givers' hartes do staye,
Their mynde from Christ no parting can remove;
His humble state, his stall, his poore retynewe,
They phansie more then all theire ritch revenewe.

I just realized that St. Robert was pretty much my age when he was hung, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn. A little sobering, that. This Southwell poem doesn't seem to be one of the more quoted poems, but I think it works very well. Southwell is usually considered the first of the Metaphysicals, and works of metaphysical poetry can be a bit gymnastic (as it gets sometimes with John Donne), but here all the metaphysical conceits are relatively mild and the paradoxes delineated with some subtlety, and the wit never obscures the point, and Southwell displays here his usual knack for not letting the didactic overwhelm the lyric.

Even with the original spelling, it's very readable if you read it aloud ('clowtes' is 'clothes'), and, really, you should always read Southwell aloud.

Two Poem Drafts

2012-01-07T10:56:00.003-06:00

Shulammite

Blackly lovely Shulammite
Bringing peace and perfumed night,
Lily nested deep in thorns,
Purity your heart adorns!
Can I measure all our love?
Worlds you are, my grace, my dove,
Plains of glory, mountains high,
Flawless color, sculpted thigh,
Majesty with woman's face:
Let us paths to vineyards race,
Never any moment wasting,
Ever choicest passion tasting.

Despair

War among the gods, they say, anciently shook the world.
Mountain thrust back sea, sea swallowed islands whole,
wind uprooted mighty stone, monsters fought in boundless deep.
Can any imagine, can any dream, the mighty convulsions of gods at war?
But even divine wars fall to quiet, even gods know harsh defeat.
Battles ended. The darkest god, who brings the darkness dark night fears,
a starless lightlessness that burns, to his knees fell. His crown broken,
his mighty form chain-encircled, he was driven across the wastes,
and brought to judgment by the gods. Cany any imagine, can any know,
the rite and law of that ancient court? But once I traced an errant strand
of darkest darkness in my dreams, a cord of lightless thread.
At its end spread out like glass a silent sea that knew no wind
was sorrowing at the world's end. Within its quiet depths were stars.
Across that sea the darkness rolled in blanket fog, wisps of cloud,
from which my lightless clue had come. Upon the lapping shore a boat
with mighty prow had been moored. In it I crossed that glassy sea,
for, windless, nonetheless it moved, into the center far from shore.
There upon a mighty stone, where it rained and water dripped,
a form of darkness sat in bonds, a mountain up it, towaring, rose,
and from it darkness poured, a darkness blind of light.
There in brooding the darkest god in links of iron sits engloomed.
I quailed and fled; but I had seen and know too well the end.
In all this world the darkest dark is but a night that knows the stars,
or else that darkness in the earth that fire knew, and light of sun.
Only here and there in impure strands we find a darker darkness.
But on that island made of stone sits the darkest god. The rain
will slowly rust his iron chains until they weaken, twist, and break,
until the end of sentence comes, and on the earth, with mighty form,
the darkness walks again.

Six Hundred Years of Joan of Arc

2012-01-06T20:37:00.000-06:00

This year is the sexcentennial anniversary of the birth of Jehanne, la Pucelle. We're fairly sure that she was born in 1412, although it's entirely possible she was born slightly earlier or slightly later -- since she was a peasant in a time when peasant births weren't really recorded and lived in a culture that was not as obsessive about birthdays as ours, she herself could only estimate her own age, although it was probably a pretty accurate estimate. We do not know the exact date of her birth, and Jehanne almost certainly didn't either. There is one contemporary source, Boulainvilliers, who claims that she was born on January 6, the Feast of Epiphany. This is certainly not impossible; but it's also possible that Epiphany was just a notable feast near her birthday, and it's equally possible that this idea grew up as a pious association. Nonetheless, it's the only date we have. And while her true birthday for liturgical purposes is the date of her martyrdom, it's as good a day as any to say something about her in this six hundredth year of Johanna Puella.

Contrary to common English usage, the "d'Arc" or "D'Arc" should probably not be translated as "of Arc" since it was just her father's name (Jacques d'Arc), but it's a bit late to do anything about it now. Likewise, I doubt she would have often used the name herself, if at all; surnames were a very inconsistent thing in this period. Joan d'Arc was born in the little village of Domrémy to two peasants, Jacques d'Arc and Isabelle de Vouthon, who, however, were doing fairly well as peasants. Jacques d'Arc had about fifty acres of decent land and held the important local post of doyen, in charge of collecting taxes and organizing local defense. Joan was one of five children; we know very little about the rest. We know, on the other hand, an extraordinary amount about Joan, perhaps more than about any other person in the fifteenth century, because so much information was recorded about her by contemporaries, at her heresy trial, and at the nullification trial at which she was vindicated.

All of this began when the Maid was 13; she began having visions of the Archangel Michael, of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and of Saint Margaret of Antioch. Both Catherine and Margaret were virgin martyrs; it is perhaps also significant that St. Margaret was, like St. Michael, a dragonslayer, but the connection with Margaret seems to be more immediate, since she was represented in the chapel at Domrémy. For the next four years she continued to have visions, and then in October of 1428 everything changed through an event that seemed to have nothing to do with a little peasant girl: the English, allied to the Duke of Burgundy, laid siege to Orleans. And from then on we have history: Joan the Maid went to the court of the Dauphin and told him that she had been sent by God to free Orleans. Which she did, even to the point of returning to the field after an arrow wound in the neck in order to urge her men on. Then she captured Jargeau, again continuing to urge her men on after being hit on the head with a rock and falling off a siege ladder. Then victory after victory after that, in a matter of three months completely turning around what had seemed an almost hopeless situation.

She was captured by the Burgundians in 1430, tried for heresy, and burned at the stake on May 30, 1431. She was nineteen years old. She was beatified in 1909 and canonized in 1920. Her story had become legend, and she had begun to be regarded as a saint, well before then. Mark Twain wrote a book, which he claimed was his favorite and considered his best, called Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, his last finished novel. It has not been very widely accepted by others as his best work, because it's not a very Twain-like book (and, indeed, he originally published under a different pseudonym). What humor is in it is largely subtle, and book overall is rather serious in tone; instead of being put together largely on the fly, he spent about a decade researching it. Despite critical reluctance to accept such an un-Twain-like book, it is actually quite a good read, and I would not be surprised if time were eventually to bear out Twain's own assessment. Everybody knows that Twain can write teenage boys; but he gets Joan's teenage-girl-ness almost exactly right (it is said that he modeled her partly after his own daughter in her teenage years, and one can believe it). Twain also wrote an essay, sometimes appended to the Personal Recollections, called "Saint Joan of Arc" -- it is well worth reading, and summarizes the feeling of a great many people when it comes to the Maid of Orleans.

George Bernard Shaw, also wrote a well-known play about her, Saint Joan; it's notable for trying to do justice to the English and Burgundians as well as Joan and the French. Shaw's Joan tells us more about Shaw than about Joan, but it's a good piece, a tragedy in which everyone is sincere and well-meaning.

For those who have the French, Christine de Pizan's Ditie de Jehanne d'Arc is exquisitely good -- it was the very first literary work with Joan of Arc as a subject, written while she was still alive, by one of France's great writers in the period.

Discernment and Dithering

2012-01-06T14:00:00.004-06:00

Michael Hannon has an excellent post on the current Catholic fad of "discerning one's personal vocation." For those of you who are not Catholic, "discerning your personal vocation" is Catholic-speak for "dithering about what you should do with your life." I find this bit of faddish Catholic-speak largely exasperating, because in fact almost everything that goes into what's known as the 'discernment process' really is just trying to make people dither. The point of true discernment, as opposed to this fakery, is to come to a clear decision on the basis of the kind of information that's needed for a good decision. For some people this will take some time, yes, but for others it won't. What people don't need are stupid exercises and long drawn out excuses; they need good, clear information in the form in which they can best understand it. That's it.

The fact of the matter is that every Christian already knows how to discern their vocation; every Christian has the vocation of their baptism, which is to be Christ in the world, to love God and neighbor, and to stand for the faith and all else that is good, true, and beautiful. (The three properly understood come to the same thing.) All other vocations are merely secondary extensions of this. As Hannon says,

The Christian ought to make major life decisions as he ought to make all decisions: by evaluating how he can serve God, by choosing a course of action accordingly, and by having the courage to follow through and do it.

Here's a checklist on how to decide if your vocation is marriage:

1. There's no fundamental impediment to getting married.
2. You've met someone really great.
3. You think you'd like to be married to them.
4. They think you're really great.
5. They think they'd like to be married to you.
6. You could meet your responsibilities as a married person and they could meet theirs.
7. It wouldn't be an act of stupidity in general or a harm for yourself or the other person for you to marry them.

Here's another checklist on how to decide if your vocation is priesthood:

1. There's no fundamental impediment to ordination.
2. You are interested in being a priest.
3. You could fulfill the responsibilities of a priest without scandal.
4. You are willing to commit to putting other people's good above your own, and especially God above yourself.
5. It wouldn't be an act of stupidity in general or a harm for yourself and others for you to become a priest.

Of course, these aren't even universal; there have been arranged marriages and there have been times and places where congregations forced promising young men to be priests. But, again, it's really not that difficult to make decisions.

ADDED LATER:

Given this discussion, I should probably clarify:

(1) The checklists are not really intended to be rigorously reductive, since they are really intended to be checklists for finding out what one needs to know in order to make a decision and not algorithms for making the decision itself (I don't think any possible checklists would suffice for that). Taken this way I think that at a very general level they cover all that's usually necessary, barring special interventions by God, rare circumstances, and deliberate human perversity. I am afraid I was being somewhat sarcastic, though, in making the point that discernment of vocation is perfectly ordinary practical reasoning, albeit about a very important thing; and this no doubt obscured the intention.

(2) Strictly speaking it is possible to be Catholic and have both a vocation to marriage and a vocation to priesthood; it happens fairly commonly among Eastern Catholics (they only have the celibacy requirement for bishops), who are, of course, Catholics in good standing. And the discernment of both could overlap; I know at least one person for whom I think this was the case. It is, of course, not possible for Roman Catholics (and Eastern Catholics, to avoid confusion, avoid it in areas dominated by Roman Catholics), because of Roman canon law, except under unusual dispensations arising from conversion (usually from Orthodoxy or Anglicanism), which wouldn't be relevant to Catholic discernment. So the incompatibility is not a general one, but depends on the Catholic tradition to which one belongs and the canon law governing it. It is certainly true that if the checklist is not taken to cover this already under its weasel clause of "act of stupidity or harm" then it would have to be amended to include it as something you would need to find out if you didn't already know. This is a good example, actually, of how 'discernment of vocation' is concerned with practicalities. What one 'feels God is calling them to' may well be such a practicality, as one's own interest certainly is; but most of real discernment deals with things like whether it's legal or whether it would cause confusion, matters that require clear information and objective analysis.

Remote and Proximate Objects of Measurement

2012-01-05T11:48:00.000-06:00

Perhaps the single most important concept for both scientific reasoning and scientific literacy is what I would call the distinction and comparison of remote and proximate objects of measurement. It is very common in serious scientific reasoning, although, of course, not usually put in those terms. The basic idea is this. Every act of measurement has an object, namely, what we want to measure. But measurement in a practical sense is very often not direct: what I want to measure and what I can directly measure are often two different things. For instance, I may need to use a device for the kind of measurement I am making -- a Geiger counter, for instance. This introduces a sort of hierarchy of objects of measurement. For instance, if it's a very simply Geiger counter, I may just count clicks; these clicks in turn measure pulses in the circuits of the device; these pulses in turn measure brief events of electrical conductivity in a tube full of inert gas; and the whole device is being used to measure ionizing radiation in the device's environment. None of these objects of measurement are simply equivalent, though, and being able to conceive of a Geiger counter requires at least some basic recognition of this fact. Ionizing radiation doesn't go around inducing audible clicks; I need to know that these clicks measure something that measures something (and so forth) that measures ionizing radiation. Getting to this point required recognizing that one thing can measure another thing under certain circumstances, and assessing the quality of Geiger counter measurement (whether it is being used properly, whether it is working properly, whether it works at all as a measuring device) depends entirely on work that established a channel from the most remote object of measurement (ionizing radiation) to the more proximate objects of measurement (like electrical pulses or audible clicks) so that the more proximate objects of measurement are adequate to the more remote objects of measurement in the channel.

The reason this sort of thing is important is that massive portions of scientific inquiry depend on establishing proxy measurements. This is fundamentally why we have experiments, in fact. If one could always assume that there was no disparity between remote and proximate objects of measurement, so that all you ever needed to collect precise data was to go and look, there would be no need for experiment. Experiments become more important than mere observation to the extent that we need to establish rather than assume the adequacy of proximate objects of measurement to remote objects of measurement. Because of this, it is always important to determinate the proximateness and remoteness of the objects of measurement in an experiment in order to determine what kinds of conclusions you can draw from it.

Consider, for instance, happiness studies. Getting precise measurements of happiness by any direct means is obviously out of the question. So we need some proximate object of measurement which can be adequately linked (probably through other objects of measurement) to our remote object of measurement, which is happiness itself. One proximate object of measurement you might choose is subjective a response to a set of survey questions. Another you might choose is some measurement of activation of this or that part of the brain. There are, in fact, many you might choose; the big question is how adequate they actually are for measuring what you are trying to measure. What you're aiming for is practical equivalence. It need not be strict equivalence; you don't need to say that happiness just is having certain answers on a particular kind of survey. But you do need it to be the case that the one can be substituted for the other for the purpose of reasoning about the remote object of measurement. Achieving this substitutability requires determining (1) whether the reliability of this kind of measurement depends on specific conditions; (2) whether the measure is a partial or total measurement (i.e., whether other things need to be measured); (3) how it relates to other objects of measurement in the same channel; and (4) how it relates to other useful proximate objects of measurement that are not in the same channel. And, of course, with happiness studies people constantly worry about the adequacy of the most proximate objects of measurement to the most remote object of measurement. People who support happiness studies obviously think they can overcome such challenges; but the important thing here is that they are rational in thinking this precisely to the extent that they have good reason to think that the more proximate objects of measurement are adequate to the remote object of measurement about which they are trying to draw conclusions. Reasons to think the one object adequate to the other are a precondition even for considering the experiment relevant to the subject you are trying to talk about.

Whenever we are assessing experiments or drawing conclusions on the basis of them, then, we really are asking how the proximate objects of measurement in the experiment are related to most remote object of measurement.

Music on My Mind

2012-01-04T19:46:00.000-06:00

Bosshouse featuring Amanda Abizaid, "A Place in Time (The 4400 Theme)". I've just gone through a 4400 marathon, so it's very much in my head. The 4400 is one of the better science fiction series in recent memory; highly recommended if you've never seen it. One of its strengths is characterization; it's the series since Babylon 5 that best managed to have character arcs that were both plausible (given the premises of the show) and central to the story.

Less Ambitious Books

2012-01-03T21:41:00.000-06:00

One of the topics that various Twitter People (who are Pod People, but briefer) have been playing around with is that of #lessambitiousbooks. Some of my favorites so far:

The Adequate Gatsby

Where the Mild Things Are

The Facebook Profile of Dorian Gray

Love in the Time of the Common Cold

Room with a Loo

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Commerce*

Being and Somethingness

War and Peace Process**
--

* Rowling starts getting dangerously close to something like it in Goblet of Fire.

** It really would take a Russian novelist to write a book that long.

Counterfactuals as Descriptions of the Factual

2012-01-03T10:02:00.000-06:00

A post at Arminian Chronicles comments on an old post of mine about interpretation of counterfactuals of freedom in Scripture:

Steve also posted a link to Brandon’s post suggesting that in Matthew 11:21-23, Christ uses a figure of speech meaning Capernaum is more hard-hearted than Sodom. Unquestionably Christ is teaching Capernaum is more hard-hearted than Sodom, but how is He teaching that? Are we looking at a divine guess? No way I am buying that. Is it exaggeration? Rhetorical exaggeration works if the person knows you are exaggerating. If I tell my kids, have some of this salsa, but not that one or smoke will come out of your ears, it works, because they know I am exaggerating. But is it obvious Christ is exaggerating? No, what He is saying is plausible. Besides, His point is better made with the truth.

I'm not hugely committed to this particular interpretation of the passage, but this misses the point, and it is worth pointing out how it does so. There is no need for any additional figure of speech beyond the counterfactual itself; and such counterfactual conditionals, while they can be combined with hyperbole (as someone would be if they said, "If Charles were here, I'd strangle him"), are not themselves rhetorical exaggerations. Rather, using a counterfactual conditional as an indirect description of the factual is an entirely normal, and virtually universal, way of using counterfactual conditionals. We see this particularly in the fact that one kind of (very common) counterfactual is the per impossibile counterfactual: we use counterfactual conditionals that refer to impossible situations and say what would happen in those impossible counterfactual situations. ("If God did not exist, life would have no meaning"; "If basic counting arithmetic were inconsistent, our entire view of the world would be wrong"; "If contradictories could both be true, we wouldn't be able to make sense of anything"; "If Martin Elginbrod were God and God were Martin Elginbrod, Martin Elginbrod would have mercy on God"; etc.) Obviously such counterfactual conditionals are not statements about what would be true if the impossible were true, since no sense can be made of what would happen if the impossible were true; they are statements about what must be true for the actual situation to be possible or actual. And here I quote Brian Ellis arguing that we find the same thing in causal counterfactual conditionals (of which counterfactuals of freedom are one kind). Unless we are specifically elaborating the counterfactual scenario for its own sake, we are almost always using counterfactual claims to describe the way the world is in fact. In particular, we are indirectly describing how two things are related in the world as it actually is.

There is actually some research in cognitive science that confirms this point; it's rather old (about seven years old now), but this post by Chris from Mixing Memory briefly summarizes thinking in cognitive science about counterfactual conditionals (as far as I am aware, current thinking has not made any massive revisions to the idea).

The question is simply this: What are you actually committing yourself to if you use counterfactuals, especially counterfactuals of freedom? And the answer is that it simply depends on whether the context requires us to take the counterfactual situation as the subject of discussion or whether it requires us to take the actual situation as the subject of discussion. If, in describing someone's joy over a gift, I say, "If Charles were here, Diana would kiss him," I am in no way committing to its being true that in the counterfactual situation she would actually kiss him; anyone who responded to this by saying, "No, she would probably would still restrain herself," is either making a joke or missing the point. The claim is counterfactual if read literally but is in fact a figurative factual claim about Diana's state of mind. And what is important to understand is that this figurative use of counterfactual conditionals is more common than the strictly literal reading; the figure of speech arises all the time in colloquial contexts, whereas the literal reading usually only becomes important in technical discussions although on rare occasions it can be important in colloquial contexts, too.

Thus, faced with any counterfactual conditional, we simply can't go about interpreting it on the assumption that it is probably about the counterfactual scenario unless we have already established that the point of mentioning it is to tell us something about the counterfactual scenario rather than to tell us something about the relation between two things in the factual scenario. At the same time, it is true that we can't automatically rule out that the point of the statement is to talk about counterfactuals; this, too, has to be determined by context. The result is that there is no easy rule for interpreting counterfactual conditionals; we have to assess each in its own context. It does mean, though, that we can't assume that the most natural reading of any given counterfactual of freedom is the one that the Molinist would prefer; it has to be argued for each and every single case. Indeed, we can't even assume that the counterfactual is intended to be taken as literally telling the truth about counterfactual situations, rather than figuratively telling the truth about the factual situation. It must be shown. This is nothing peculiar to counterfactuals of freedom; that a counterfactual claim can be read both counterfactually and factually is a general problem for the interpretation of any kind of counterfactual claim.

Saints Basil and Gregory

2012-01-02T22:43:00.001-06:00

Today was the Feast of Saint Basil of Caesarea and Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, two of the three major Cappodocian Fathers (the other being St. Gregory of Nyssa, Basil's brother), and also two of the Three Holy Hierarchs (the other being St. John Chrysostom).

Basil is a saint I have always found interesting. He was raised in a family of saints. His grandmother on his father's side was Saint Macrina the Elder; she and her husband -- whose name seems to be unknown -- were confessors who survived the Galerian persecution. His father was Saint Basil the Elder and his mother was Saint Emilia, who was herself the daughter of a martyr -- whose name also seems not to have survived history. Basil and Emilia had either nine or ten children, five of whom were canonized as saints: Saint Basil the Great, Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Saint Peter of Sebaste, Saint Naucratius, and Saint Macrina the Younger. You can learn a little about them in Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Macrina, which is one of the great classics of Christian theology.

Basil himself was something of what we could call a Forceful Personality. He was the sort of man who gets things done, and in the course of getting things done gets his way. In his long disputes with the Arians, he got a reputation for being the sort of person who could not be budged; Emperor Valens, who was an Arian, repeatedly tried to banish him -- and repeatedly failed. When he became bishop of Caesarea, he was essentially in charge of a region large portions of which were allied against him, and so, being Basil, he set about shoring up his position. He appointed his brother Gregory to be bishop of Nyssa, and he maneuvered his best friend, also called Gregory, into being bishop of Sasima. Now, this was no favor to either Gregory; Nyssa and Sasima were not exactly prime locations. We have letters from Gregory Nazianzen complaining vociferously about how Basil had stuck him in an awful backwater; he really and truly hated the place. When his father was dying, Gregory Nazianzen went back to Nazianzus and there he began to help run the Nazianzen diocese. Basil insisted that he return to Sasima; Gregory refused. They never stopped being friends, but they were never quite reconciled, either. It was all very much a Basilian thing; it is not for nothing that he is known as Basil the Great. He did not merely administer, he ruled; he did not merely maneuver, he conquered; he did not merely argue, he won. He was just that sort of person. But precisely because of his strategic and tactical mind, an immense amount of good was done for the people of his diocese: the list of things that Basil managed to accomplish for the poor in only nine years as Bishop of Caesarea is extraordinarily long, on top of his theological work, his episcopal duties, and outmaneuvering more enemies than you can count on the fingers and toes of a crowd. He was prodigiously competent at everything he did, almost more a force of nature than an ordinary man.

Gregory was no less interesting. He was also from a family of saints, albeit a slightly less prodigious one. His mother, Saint Nonna, married a Hypsistarian named Gregory -- Hypsistarians were pagans who, impressed by the Jews, had become monotheists and practiced some Jewish customs without actually converting. She converted her husband to Christianity. He was eventually made bishop of Nazianzus, and has become known as Saint Gregory the Elder of Nazianzus. They had had three children, Saint Gorgonia, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, and Saint Caesarius of Nazianzus. Gregory Nazianzen continued on his career after Basil's death. He was persuaded by fellow bishops to become Patriarch of Constantinople in order to try to counter the spread of Arianism there. He became popular enough that an Arian mob tried to kill him; he survived. But he was soon betrayed by one of his friends, Maximus the Cynic (called so because of his interest in philosophy), who managed to get himself appointed Patriarch in Gregory's place. Basil would never, ever have been outmaneuvered in this way, but Gregory was no Basil. Precisely one of his complaints at Sasima was that he really just wanted to lead a life of prayer; he was not well-suited for ecclesiastical and imperial politics. In any case, Gregory was only barely convinced by friends not to resign; and for a while there were two people claiming to be the legitimate Patriarch of Constantinople. Gregory's claim was eventually upheld by the First Council of Constantinople, but almost immediately after this victory he resigned and went back home. Also a very un-Basilian thing to do; but it was a very Gregorian one.

Experience and Object

2012-01-02T21:39:00.002-06:00

We presume that Plotinus' encounter with the One had its subjective correlative, its phenomenological aspect. His was what we might call a "mystical experience." On the other hand, if we take "to become one with the divine" in its strictest sense, then perhaps such a thorough identification with the One, resulting in a radical de-identification and separation from the physical, will leave no trace on the conscious mind. Plotinus himself wrote that the soul when unified cannot distinguish itself from the One and so can neither recognize nor relate the event. Unification gives rise, not to knowledge, but to a presence beyond knowing (6.9.3-4).

Plotinus evinced no interest in trying to describe his experience (nor did Porphyry after his vision; nor Aquinas later). In any case, whether or not unification has a phenomenological correlate, the subjective aspect is secondary, derivative, beside the point. This is the premodern attitude. For modern man the subjective experience is everything. For the premodern the object of the experience is all that really matters.

[Mark Anderson, Pure: Modernity, Philosophy, and the One. Sophia Perennis (San Rafael, CA: 2009) 26-27.] The reference, of course, is to the Enneads.

New Year's Resolutions

2012-01-01T20:42:00.006-06:00

I generally find New Year's resolutions to be rather silly, but I've decided to have one this year. My resolution for 2012:

To be even more awesomely me.

I feel good about this resolution.

ADDED LATER: Other resolutions that would be good:

To be at least as amazing as myself.

To do things that are at least as good as the things that I will do.

To avoid being right and being wrong at the same time and in the same way.

To do a few things sometimes.

The World Above in the World Below

2011-12-31T23:28:00.000-06:00

New Year's Chimes
by Francis Thompson

What is the song the stars sing?
(And a million songs are as song of one.)
This is the song the stars sing:
Sweeter song's none.

One to set, and many to sing,
(And a million songs are as song of one),
One to stand, and many to cling,
The many things, and the one Thing,
The one that runs not, the many that run.

The ever new weaveth the ever old
(And a million songs are as song of one).
Ever telling the never told;
The silver saith, and the said is gold,
And done ever the never done.

The chase that's chased is the Lord o' the chase
(And a million songs are as song of one),
And the pursued cries on the race;
And the hounds in leash are the hounds that run.

Hidden stars by the shown stars' sheen;
(And a million suns are but as one);
Colours unseen by the colours seen,
And sounds unheard heard sounds between,
And a night is in the light of the sun.

An ambuscade of light in night,
(And a million secrets are but as one),
And a night is dark in the sun's light,
And a world in the world man looks upon.

Hidden stars by the shown stars' wings,
(And a million cycles are but as one),
And a world with unapparent strings
Knits the simulant world of things;
Behold, and vision thereof is none.

The world above in the world below
(And a million worlds are but as one),
And the One in all; as the sun's strength so
Strives in all strength, glows in all glow
Of the earth that wits not, and man thereon.

Braced in its own fourfold embrace
(And a million strengths are as strength of one),
And round it all God's arms of grace,
The world, so as the Vision says,
Doth with great lightning-tramples run.

And thunder bruiteth into thunder,
(And a million sounds are as sound of one),
From stellate peak to peak is tossed a voice of wonder,
And the height stoops down to the depths thereunder,
And sun leans forth to his brother-sun.

And the more ample years unfold
(With a million songs as song of one),
A little new of the ever old,
A little told of the never told,
Added act of the never done.

Loud the descant, and low the theme,
(A million songs are as song of one);
And the dream of the world is dream in dream,
But the one Is is, or nought could seem;
And the song runs round to the song begun.

This is the song the stars sing,
(Ton-ed all in time);
Tintinnabulous, tuned to ring
A multitudinous-single thing,
Rung all in rhyme.

This is one of those poems that you have to read several times before you get the hang of it: technically brilliant on the part of the writer, and technically demanding on the part of the reader.

Pop Apocalypse (Re-Post)

2011-12-31T16:40:00.002-06:00

This is a reposting, with some revision, of a post that originally was posted in 2007. It seems a fitting post for the year's closing time, when we all look to the future.

A distinction can sometimes be made in the apocalypse genre between dark apocalypses and gentle apocalypses; they both exhibit the Final Judgment but in different ways. It's interesting to compare in this regard two of Leonard Cohen's songs from his album The Future: The Future and Closing Time.

"The Future" is a dark apocalypse. In the future mankind has become fundamentally corrupt:

Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won't be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul
When they said Repent Repent
I wonder what they meant

It's therefore no surprise that God's judgment is correspondingly harsh:

You don't know me from the wind
you never will, you never did
I'm the little Jew who wrote the Bible
I've seen the nations rise and fall
I've heard their stories, heard them all
but love's the only engine of survival
Your servant here, he has been told
to say it clear, to say it cold:
It's over, it ain't going any further
And now the wheels of heaven stop
you feel the devil's riding crop
Get ready for the future: it is murder.

Mankind is in hell, a hell so terrible that we would rather have the evils we have now; but humanity deserves every bit of the future it has made for itself.

We get a different apocalypse in "Closing Time". There, too, the human race has piled its sins high; there, too, the Final Judgment comes, bringing hell with it. But it's pictured in terms of a drunken humanity getting busted by the cops because "the Boss don't like these dizzy heights." And the tone is one of bittersweet resignation:

And I loved you when our love was blessed
and I love you now there's nothing left
but sorrow and a sense of overtime
and I missed you since the place got wrecked
And I just don't care what happens next
looks like freedom but it feels like death
it's something in between, I guess
it's closing time.

It's closing time; the drunks are all being thrown out of the bar. It's hell; but here it is almost a relief, something between freedom and death, because the party has gone on too long and, despite its highlights, maybe wasn't all that great anyway.

and I lift my glass to the Awful Truth
which you can't reveal to the Ears of Youth
except to say it isn't worth a dime

The Ambiguity of the Modern Word 'Political'

2011-12-31T12:16:00.002-06:00

We talk about things being political, and political literally means what has to do with the polis, the city, the society of citizens (in one sense or another). It's clear that our usual use of the word does not really mean this; by it we mean not all that comes with citizenship but all that comes with elected or appointed offices of governance. But I think it's also clear that the older meaning is still there as a common secondary meaning.

In this sense, it's interesting to contrast the fate of the term 'political' with the term 'civic' (or 'civil', as we sometimes find it, although more commonly civil is to civic as polite is to political). In a sense you would expect them to be the same -- civitas is a rough, but natural, Latin equivalent for Greek polis -- but they really aren't, and that is because 'civic' seems to have headed (more slowly) in the opposite direction from 'political': the civic has more to do with the society of citizens, and usually not with the elected or appointed offices of governance unless we're talking about local govenments. (It still retains some connection with 'city'.) But the boundaries here are much looser, I think, than in the case of the primary meaning of 'political'; 'political' is often used as a sort of opposition to the society of citizens (abstracted from elected and appointed offices), while 'civic' rarely is. And, of course, in much of government, 'civil' positions are the opposite of 'political' positions: the latter are elected or appointed, while the former are hired.

The fact that 'political' has these ambiguities -- a specialized primary sense and a more general secondary sense that occasionally pops up, can make it difficult to determine what people mean at any given point when they talk about the political, and I think this often creates serious and troubling equivocations. 'Everything is political' if we take 'political' in the secondary sense, in the sense that is closer to what we usually mean by 'civic' -- directly or indirectly everything is civic, and it is as citizens (whether of cities, states, nations, or the world) that human beings achieve their highest natural goods. It is in this sense that man is a political animal, and it is in this sense that being a political animal both follows from and necessarily presupposes being a rational animal. Other animals are members of societies; only human beings actually become citizens of societies. It is a distinctively human spin on membership in a society. On the other hand, 'everything is political' is dangerous nonsense if we mean it in the primary specialized sense of 'political', which in the modern world has to do with political parties, into whose hands we ultimately end up committing elected and appointed political offices. We are not political animals in this sense; and in this sense it has very little to do with rationality. And clearly you are going to understand 'everything is political' in a very different way if you are thinking of the whole body of citizens working together as citizens than if you are thinking of politicians as legislators and magistrates.

What worries me somewhat is that I think there's an argument to be made that the ambiguity of the word 'political' -- which is a far more common word than 'civic' -- is a symptom of a collapse in our civic understanding. The ambiguity of the word encourages an equivocation that seems actually to be very common: that the only way to work together as citizens is by means of political offices or parties, which, again, get their power from the fact that we really think of political offices in partisan terms. This removes the emphasis on finding ways to work together (which does not always mean compromise in our usual sense, but sometimes means deference or even argument) and puts the emphasis on organizations which tend to be groups of citizens trying to shut other groups of citizens out of power. The one can't completely eliminate the other in a society that is still functioning -- when the partisan political completely abolishes the civic political we have civil war. But thinking of our political lives in terms of political parties more than in terms of citizenships is simply and utterly a deterioration, a degeneration, a fall. Political parties exist for the sake of political offices; political offices exist for the sake of the whole society of citizens precisely as citizens. When we take them as an important part of who we are, rather than affiliations for better expressing our positions as citizens, we have perverted what it is to be political.

Buridan's Ass and the Major

2011-12-30T19:22:00.000-06:00

Thus it was to-day, at my friend Marmaduke Langdale's. The last course was no sooner removed, than the fermentation of wit and humour began; and the first display was elicited by the major, who observed, that "he was not like Buridan's ass (as General Sibthorpe used to say), for he had both eaten and drunk to his heart's content."

"I dare say you don't know the origin of Buridan's ass," interrupted Burlingham.

"I can't say I do," replied the major; "but I know what it means—that I have made a good dinner."

"Buridan," continued Burlingham, "was one of the schoolmen; and, in order to prove the existence of free will, he supposed a hungry ass—or an ass equally hungry and thirsty—"

"As you were, major, when you sat down," interrupted Jeremiah Chesterton; "only my friend Burlingham did not like to say so."

"Buridan," pursued Burlingham, "supposed such an ass placed between a bushel of oats and a tub of water, each being equi-distant from him; and then inquired—what the ass would do?"

"Nothing at all," said the Rev. Jonas Dankes, "for equal powers must produce equal results, and the ass would be starved to death; his hunger and thirst would be suspended between co-ordinate attractions."

"When that was the answer," observed Burlingham, " Buridan derided it as a palpable absurdity: but when it was contended that the ass would both eat and drink, then he maintained it had free will—else it followed, that of two equal attractions one was greater than the other, which involved a contradiction of terms."

"Buridan was a magnificent ass himself," exclaimed Jeremiah, "to suppose he proved anything by such an argument."

"I am not going to defend Buridan," replied Burlingham; "I merely wished to explain to Major Bagot tbe origin of the expression."

"Thank you," said the major; "it is very curious, and I'll try and recollect it, please the pigs—"

"I dare say," interrupted Burlingham again, " you don't know the origin of that phrase either; and little think, while using it, that you are employing a corrupt formula of popish adjuration."

"God forbid !" exclaimed the major, "for I hate the pope and all his works."

From "The Chudleigh Papers: A Dinner Scene in the Reign of George the Second," The Canterbury Magazine, vol. 2, no. 9 (March 1835), p. 103.

Some Notable Links

2011-12-30T18:27:00.000-06:00

* Michael Kremer, What is the Good of Philosophical History? (PDF)

* Jeff Bell discusses Hume, Husserl, and Deleuze.

* Jerome Copulsky reviews two books on Moses Mendelssohn.

* John Farrell recommends Toby Huff's Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution.

* A very awesome little house in Wales.

* Lots of interesting things in SEP's Philosophy of Chemistry article.

* Robert Paul Wolff has a pair of posts appreciating Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments:
Part I
Part II

Michael Dummett (1925-2011)

2011-12-29T18:49:00.003-06:00

Michael Dummett died recently. I never had much philosophical connection with him, because he was wrong about most things that he spent most of the time discussing, but he had some excellent moments: his attacks on British racism were excellent, and would, in fact, be worth the time of Americans or anyone else; and his modern-style revival of Berkeley's argument for the existence of God in his Gifford Lectures, Thought and Reality, is worth reading, and a splendid joke on everyone who dismisses that argument facilely. The IEP has an article on his philosophical thought.

He also had some facets that deserved more recognition than they got. He was, for instance, an expert on the history of card games, and a wrote a fairly hefty number of works on it. One of his major arguments was that Tarot's association with fortune-telling is actually fairly late, and an offshoot of the game's extraordinary popularity in the early modern period.

He was one of the great Catholics in analytic philosophy in the third quarter of the twentieth century; now that he's gone, Peter Geach is about the last. He argued both for and against the Catholic position on contraception; his arguments against are, I think, the arguments that should most be taken seriously. He wrote a short piece a number of years back that was very critical of the English translation of the Mass that came about after the Second Vatican Council, arguing for the complete replacement of ICEL. That's a pretty strong view. But Dummett was never afraid to put forward a strong view if he thought he had an argument for it.

ADDED LATER: Skholiast has a nice post on the subject.

Ritual

2011-12-29T11:47:00.000-06:00

Ritual is really much older than thought; it is much simpler and much wilder than thought. A feeling touching the nature of things does not only make men feel that there are certain proper things to say; it makes them feel that there are certain proper things to do. The more agreeable of these consist of dancing, building temples, and shouting very loud; the less agreeable, of wearing green carnations and burning other philosophers alive. But everywhere the religious dance came before the religious hymn, and man was a ritualist before he could speak.

G. K. Chesterton, Heretics. And from the same book:

Christmas remains to remind us of those ages, whether Pagan or Christian, when the many acted poetry instead of the few writing it.

A Poem Draft

2011-12-29T00:51:00.000-06:00

On a Flight from Billings to Denver

Bright the lights of God in the sky, the first gems;
bright are men's lights shining below with warm cheer;
darkness mediates in the middle night air --
planes are there flying.

World below my feet as the plane on high mounts,
I with calm mien look on the nighttime wind.
Coldly, cloud-like, misty, it arches wide wings,
rushing to darkness.

I as well: the world in its speed will rush past.
I, a mist, will fall to the aft and be gone.
Yet -- and I with surety and vision know it --
stars will be shining.

High above me, God's own creations gleam gold.
Down below me, streets will be lined with bright light.
Here in the middle spaces the world will pass by,
light all around it.

What will worry wind? In the light it leaps up.
Time is not its foe; it will dance in deep night.
Only worlds pass, only the planes; the wind plays --
time cannot rule it.

Gaudete

2011-12-25T04:33:00.000-06:00

Music on My Mind

2011-12-22T16:41:00.001-06:00

Crosby wanted "Little Drummer Boy," Bowie didn't; they compromised, and I've heard this song probably every Christmas of my life. Crosby died a month after recording, in October 1977.

"There Is No Peace on Earth," I Said

2011-12-21T19:59:00.001-06:00

Christmas Bells
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till, ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said;
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead; nor doth he sleep!
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men!”

Longfellow's wife had died due to an accidental fire a few years before, and he never really recovered from it, developing, in fact, a laudanum problem to cope. He had even been unable to attend her funeral because he was burned badly trying to save her from the fire. It is clear that Christmas especially hit him hard each year because of it; he once wrote that all holidays were inexpressibly sad. His son Charles had been seriously wounded in the War; Longfellow was still trying to nurse him back to health. And this was still months away from Lee's surrender and the end of the Civil War. He wrote this on Christmas Day, 1864.

But the Civil War did end, and Charles went on to have a productive life, traveling the world.

The Hobbit Trailer

2011-12-21T16:31:00.002-06:00

So far, so good.

A Brief History of Catechisms, and Peter Canisius

2011-12-21T07:01:00.002-06:00

Catechetical instruction goes back to the earliest beginnings of Christian history; in its basic character it is simply the instruction of those being baptized. Several of the Church Fathers had catechetical lectures that were preserved; the most notable of these were those of Cyril of Jerusalem, whose Catechetical Lectures is one of the great theological classics of the fourth century. Likewise, Augustine wrote a manual on the subject of how to catechize. None of the catechetical works of the Church Fathers includes anything clearly and definitely identifiable as a catechism in our sense of the term, although some do occasionally approach it; but they are worth mentioning, because catechisms were an early modern attempt to get back to the patristic emphasis on catechesis in a form suitable for the day; both Cyril and Augustine, as well as some other Church Fathers, were highly influential for the development of the catechism.

One can find catechism-like fragments throughout Church history simply because catechesis is found throughout Church history. If you want a convenient point from which to identify the beginning of the catechism in the proper sense of the term, though, that is, a writing not consisting of lectures that systematically and topically arranges the foundational doctrines of the faith to serve as a guide to catechesis, it's useful to start with the fourteenth century, in which things recognizably what we would call a catechism appear. There tend to be two kinds, one in a simple question-and-answer format for the laity to learn, and another, more detailed, to assist the catechist, and both kinds continue until today.

What really makes the catechism take off, however, is the Protestant Reformation. Well before Luther, as early as the fourteenth century, it had regularly been recognized that catechesis was essential to reform of the Church. The Reformers carried this idea forward, and with them we find the beginnings of a process of refinement; taking the idea of a catechism, which had already developed, they began to improve upon it. This resulted in at least four major classic works, two of which were Luther's Small Catechism and his Large Catechism, both published in 1529. Luther placed extraordinary emphasis on the importance of catechesis, and devoted himself to it with a will; his exhortation at the beginning of the Large Catechism is well worth the reading. Starting with Calvin the Reformed tradition also produced catechisms regularly; the most notable in English were developed in the seventeenth century (1647-1648), namely, the Westminster Shorter Catechism and the Westminster Longer Catechism. The beginning of the Westminster Shorter Catechism has achieved almost legendary status:

Q. Quis hominis finis est præcipuus? (What is the chief end of man?)
A. Præcipuus hominis finis est, Deum glorificare, eodemque frui in æternum. (The chief end of man is to glorify God, and enjoy him forever.)

The publishing of catechisms was not a purely Protestant matter, however. And this brings us to the Jesuit, Peter Canisius, whose feastday is today. Canisius published three important Catholic catechisms: a long major form (1555), a very short minimus form (1556), and an intermediate minor form (1558). They quickly became the Catholic catechisms throughout the Catholic communities of Greater Germany, and then began to be translated into other languages all over Europe. "Knowing Canisius" became a common expression for being well-catechized, regardless of whether it was out of his books or not. Canisius's catechisms were a model for Bellarmine's catechisms at the end of the sixteenth century, and Bellarmine's catechisms in turn were raised up as a general model for Catholic catechisms.

Canisius was one of the most important theologians of his day. He attended the Council of Trent. He also attended the Diet of Worms and provided the primary Catholic responses to the arguments of Melanchthon -- and, indeed, it was his list of points that was actually under discussion when those attending discussed the Augsburg Confession. Canisius had the upper hand in the discussion, in part because (as he himself wrote in a letter to the Jesuit vicar in general) the Protestants were in complete disarray. One of Canisius's major points had been to note that there were divergences in the text of the Augsburg Confession, due to Melanchthon, who had both drawn up the original and also a later version that broadened the language of some of the clauses; and thus he and the other Catholic collocutors asked that the Protestants clarify what version they actually meant when they talked about it. The result was sheer confusion among the Protestants, who on the spur of the moment were unable to come to any agreement on the acceptability of Melanchthon's changes.

Nonetheless, Canisius was one of the more irenic voices of the Counter-Reformation, repeatedly insisting that polemical approaches should be avoided in dealing with Protestants; his letters to his superiors are full of complaints about the corruption of clergy, asking them to push for remedies, so he was well aware of the problems, and sympathetic to that extent. And he more than once insisted that the German people should be treated leniently because, decent and humble at heart, they could be brought about if treated with courtesy and if, instead of trying to force them into submission, someone just spoke honestly and plainly with them. A German himself (his name is Peter Kanis) he was very pro-German, a lover of German language and life. It is largely due to the work of Canisius, and his furthering of the Jesuits throughout the German provinces, that Bavarian and Austrian parts of greater Germany remained Catholic. His levelheadedness and generally irenic temper led him to be widely respected even by Protestants -- he was known as a man with whom, no matter how much you disagreed with him, you could always have a reasonable discussion. I say 'widely'; he was also criticized widely, in very sharp terms, because he was recognized as one of the major opponents of the Protestants, and his catechisms as a significant part of the Catholic response. But, opposed to polemic and ridicule to the very end, he refrained from attacking people and instead focused on arguments and claims. He stands as a testimony to the extraordinary power of intelligence combined with an ability not to take offense. Leo XIII described him as the Second Apostle to Germany, and Pius XI named him a Doctor of the Church. From one of his sermons:

It is not enough for the Gospel-teacher to please the people with his speaking. He must also be the voice of one crying in the wilderness, and so by his eloquence call many to the good life. He must not be a dumb dog, not even able to bark, as spoken of by the Prophet Isaiah. Yea, he should also burn in such a way that, equipped with good works and love, he may adorn his evangelical office, and follow the leadership of Paul....Those churchmen err who imagine that it is by brilliant preaching that they fulfil their office; rather, it is by holiness of life and all-embracing love.

A Poem Draft

2011-12-20T21:15:00.003-06:00

No icy lace here, though; Austin weather, firmly committed to keeping Austin weird, has been gracing us with mild rainy days broken up by chill sunny days. But I'll be going up to Montana to see family over Christmas; no doubt there will be webs a-plenty there.

Lace

Tranquil tapestries in the breath of house-air,
Like the white fog blown in the cold, the pure smoke
Children puff in play, but with power, strength, force,
Memories growing --

White and cold, ice forms on the sill in laced webs:
Flawless winter spiders enmesh the whole world,
Artisans of power and grace with fair threads
Catching the shadows.

Devil's Advocate

2011-12-20T11:55:00.005-06:00

I really have no interest in Christopher Hitchens, and never have, but in all the talk over his recent death, I did come across something interesting that I did not know before:

The 1983 streamlining of canonization eliminated the traditional position of Devil's Advocate, whose job was to make the case against a given candidate. Nevertheless, the people who were handling Mother Teresa's cause wanted to be as thorough as possible, and decided to call as a witness her harshest critic.

"Somebody in the world had to represent the Devil pro-bono. And I was perfectly happy for that to be me," says author Christopher Hitchens, who recalls being thunderstruck when he was called to testify in Mother Teresa's case.

Hitchens, who specializes in the slaughter of sacred cows, wrote a book that took the 20th Century icon to task for perpetuating poverty with her militant opposition to family planning, and preaching that poverty was a blessing.

"I met her. My impression was that she was a woman of profound faith, at least in the sense that one can say of anyone, who is a completely narrow-focused single-minded fanatic, that they are a person of faith," says Hitchens.

Did he meet her before or after he made up his mind about her?

"It was by talking to her that I discovered, and she assured me, that she wasn't working to alleviate poverty," says Hitchens. "She was working to expand the number of Catholics. She said, 'I'm not a social worker. I don't do it for this reason. I do it for Christ. I do it for the church.'"

And the church listened to Christopher Hitchens, but decided that his argument was irrelevant.

Yes, if that's the argument he gave for why she shouldn't be a Catholic saint, I rather suspect the Congregation did regard it as a bit irrelevant. But I find the reason for his animus rather interesting, and also (and this was the part I didn't know before) that they brought him in -- which was really the right thing to do, since there was a reason for the Devil's Advocate position originally. Without it, bringing in Hitchens as a makeshift Devil's Advocate was the best thing to do.

The truly great irony, of course, is that the other name for the original Devil's Advocate, indeed, the real name, was Promoter of the Faith.

Historical Analysis as Causal Reasoning

2011-12-19T20:20:00.000-06:00

One thing study of Hume, his influences, and responses to him has taught me is that the single most important area of philosophy, in terms of its ramifications, is philosophy of causation. Everything leads back there; it pulls everything together; and a very tiny change there can lead to massive changes everywhere else. While not all reasoning is causal, most reasoning involves causal reasoning of some sort. It is crucial in the strictest sense; it is the major crossroads of philosophy. One thing that I think needs to be worked out more clearly is the way in which historical reasoning is causal reasoning, and these are just some notes in that direction.

(1) To say that a given description of the past is reliable is to say that this description is an effect of such sort that it can only be traced back to actual historical actions that are such as the description describes, allowing for approximation (or, what is the same thing, in such a way as to be an appropriate means for the ends of the kind of inquiry one is doing). By saying 'it can be traced back' to these causes, I mean that it is caused by them, through intermediating causes.

(2) All historical accounts are effects; all effects have causes. The big problem for historical inquiry is determining how the features in the effect can be accounted for by causes, and what kinds of causes those must be. This genus of causal reasoning has not gone unnoticed in the history of philosophy; in fact, most undergraduates in philosophy have read one of the most influential early modern texts on the subject, although the discussion there was for different ends than clarifying historical inquiry. I speak, of course, of Descartes's Meditations III. There the question is of how to determine the features of the cause of an idea from the features of the idea, considered as an effect. But it is structurally the same problem, and what follows are some rewritings of parts of the argument of Meditations III in terms of historical accounts rather than ideas in the mind.

If we only take historical accounts to the extent that they are accounts, they seem on par. But if we take historical accounts in terms of what they represent to us as objects of thought, they end up being rather different. And this is the key point. Everything in the effect must be traced back to the causes of the effect. Thus, taking historical accounts as effects, as they obviously are, we must be able to identify causes not merely of the formal reality of these accounts, that is, for the fact that they exist and are accounts, but also for the objective reality of them, that is, for their being accounts saying this rather than that. What is more, we must take the causal chain resulting in the historical account to explain everything in the historical account without remainder, although obviously for practical purposes there will often be gaps. But it must be so: it is an a priori precondition for any inquiry that effects can be fully explained by their full set of causes. Given a principle of this sort, rational inquiry is possible; without it, it will never get off the ground.

Now accounts may, with the help of additional intermediate causes, give rise to other accounts, serving as the partial cause of later accounts (partial because accounts tend not to be self-propagating). This cannot regress infinitely, though; we must in the end reach a first account, the cause of which is the archetype from which the objective reality or content of the historical account comes. (There need not, of course, be one single cause for the whole content of the historical account, but every bit of content in the historical account must have some originating cause.)

Historical inquiry, insofar as it deals with historical accounts, is the attempt to identify, from the features of the effect and what is known about the intermediate causes, what the features of this archetype must be, may or may not be, or must not be.

(3) It is clear from thinking about these chains of intermediate causes that the most important thing to determine about them is whether any of the parts of the total cause of our historical account are defective or deficient causes. This genus of causation, too, has been given some thought, although again not with the specific purpose of elucidating historical inquiry. It has arisen in the context of privation theories of evil. As Augustine noted, if evil as such is a privation of good, then, while there is an oblique sense in which evil has an efficient cause, it is more accurate to say it has a deficient or defective cause. That is, evil as privation traces back not to an efficient cause insofar as it is effective, but an efficient cause insofar as it fails to be effective.

This is actually going to be true of privations generally, including failures to be accurate in recording something. When we ask whether an account is reliable, we are asking whether it lacks what is required to be a true account; or, in other words, we are asking whether any of the partial causes that constitute its total cause are defective causes precisely to the extent that they are causes of the account at all; and, if so, whether these deficiencies are significant for our purposes and whether any other causes compensate for them. All errors must have some defective cause; and in assessing the reliability of an account historians spend their time ruling out the possibility of various deficiencies in the causes, such as malice, deception, confusion, gullibility, or mistake.

(4) We could also say that claiming an account to be reliable involves claiming that it can be trusted. It's important to understand that this is not a different account of reliability from that found in (1). When we trust an account to tell us what happened we are assuming something about how it relates to its causes. Either we have reason to think it can only be traced back to actual historical actions that are such as it describes, or we have no reason to think it doesn't and are willing for our purposes to work on the assumption that it does. The primary value of putting it in terms of trust is, besides the fact that this is often the way people put it anyway, that talk of trust brings out the fact that every evaluation of the reliability of an account is in terms of how reliable it is as a means for whatever precise ends we have in view. It is this that raises questions about whether the account is reliable to a sufficient degree of approximation. Sufficient for what? Sufficient for whatever we are doing with it. Putting it in terms of trust brings this out nicely.

(5) All of the above talks about what historians do with accounts -- that is, testimony. Obviously historians do not only work with testimonies about what happened. They work with artifacts (papyrus, monuments, coins, etc.) as well, and even with natural objects. The reasoning in these cases is causal as well -- artifacts and natural objects are effects, with causes of their own, and we can ask broadly similar questions. The main reason for focusing on testimonies or historical accounts first, though, besides the fact that historical accounts are very, very important for historians, is that causal inferences to positive conclusions about the content of a historical account are generally quite direct and straightforward. The full-scale causal inquiry to establish these inferences can be quite complicated, and a single account can require many, many such inferences. But the inferences themselves are fairly straightforward, and tend all to be of the same kind. This is not necessarily so with other things historians look at. In talking about historical accounts, we have already narrowed down the type of cause we will be considering: accounts are by their nature direct or indirect effects of cognitive agents. Other causes only have to be considered very indirectly, insofar as you might want to know why a cognitive agent might make this mistake, or that modification, or anything else. Any involvement of a noncognitive cause that is direct (i.e., not mediated by a cognitive cause) would be rather unusual. Almost the only time it ever comes up at all is when the medium in which the account itself is preserved can be a defective cause for the account; and the way in which the medium can be a defective cause of the account is simply by loss of information (holes develop, edges shred, magnetic structure is disrupted). When we deal with artifacts as such, however, there are lots of other causes besides cognitive agents that consistently are important, despite cognitive agents still being fairly important; and when we talk about natural objects, cognitive agents are often very minor parts of the full explanation, if at all, and there are jillions of other factors to consider. Thus historical analysis of testimony, while not simple in itself, tends to be simpler in overall structure than other kinds of historical reasoning.

PNC Christmas Price Index

2011-12-18T22:02:00.001-06:00

PNC Financial Services Group does a 'Christmas Price Index' each year based on the song, "Twelve Days of Christmas." The main website is an awfully unnavigable flash page, but they also provide a nice PDF. Calling birds and gold rings are slightly cheaper this year than last, but everything else is at least as expensive as last year. In our current economy, the price of getting twelve drummers drumming, eleven pipers piping, ten lords-a-leaping, nine ladies dancing, eight maids a-milking, seven swans a-swimming, six geese a-laying, five golden rings, four calling birds, three french hens, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree is $24,263.18, up 3.5% from last year, although a good deal of that is driven by the highly volatile swan market; dancers (both lords and ladies) are the most expensive items on the list, at least at dance company and ballet prices. But swans are far and away the most expensive non-service items on the list, and there are a whopping seven of them; which has a considerable effect on the price, because swan mating cycles are highly unpredictable, and thus supply of swans can vary drastically from year to year. It is apparently not a good year for buying swans. If you take the swans out of the picture, the rise of the price over last year is only 0.7%.

Vaclav Havel (1936-2011)

2011-12-18T09:43:00.003-06:00

Václav Havel, one of the most profound statesmen of recent times, has died at age 75. He started his career in drama and first became famous as a playwright. Because of his active support of Czechoslovakian freedom in the Warsaw Pact Invasion, his works were banned from stage in 1968 and to support himself ended up having to take a job in a brewery. He wrote a play about this experience, and other plays as well; although no one could stage them, people all over Czecholslovakia copied them and read them in secret. He became one of the founding members of the Charta 77 group and the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted. He was imprisoned several times, once from 1979 to 1984. Things turned when he became one of the leading figures of the Velvet Revolution; on December 29, 1989, he was elected president of Czechoslovakia by the Federal Assembly, which was confirmed by popular vote in June of the next year. One of his first acts as president was a general pardon for the imprisoned, arguing that the corruption of courts under the Communist regime meant that none of its verdicts could be trusted. (It was an act for which he was severely criticized.) It was he who withdrew Czechoslovakia from the Warsaw Pact. He opposed the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, but when it was a done deed, he became president of the Czech Republic. He was also a cancer survivor.

He was not a perfect man, but in everything he sought to live according to his motto, Truth and love must prevail over lies and hate. We are less for having lost him.

Every story begins with an event. This event-- understood as the incursion of one logic into the world of another logic -- initiates what every story grows out of and draws nourishment from: situations, relationships, conflict. The story has a logic of its own as well, but it is the logic of a dialogue, an encounter, the interaction of different truths, attitudes, ideas, traditions, passions, people, higher powers, social movements, and so on, that is, of many autonomous, separate forces, which had done nothing beforehand to define each other. Every story presupposes a plurality of truths, of logics, of agents of decisions, and of manners of behavior. The logic of a story resembles the logic of games, a logic of tension between what is known and not known, between rules and chance, between the inevitable and the unforeseeable. We never really know what will emerge from the confrontation, what elements may yet enter into it, and how it will end; it is never clear what potential qualities it will arouse in a protagonist and what action he will be led to perform by the action of his antagonist. For this reason alone, mystery is a dimension of every story. What speaks to us through a story is not a particular agent of truth; instead, the story manifests the human world to us as an exhilarating arena where many such agents come into contact with each other.

(from Stories and Totalitarianism)

Music on My Mind

2011-12-17T10:19:00.000-06:00

Trevor Jones, "Delbert's Theme". A bit of instrumental, because Enbrethiliel brought it to mind.

Advent Giving

2011-12-16T20:23:00.001-06:00

It's a little late in Advent for this, but if, like me, you had a hectic early Advent, it might still be worthwhile. I've previously recommended Africa Windmill Project as a candidate for Advent giving, and still do:

Africa Windmill Project focuses on educating and supporting rural farmers as they work to feed and care for their families. We do this by working directly with the farmers and by supporting other organizations as they work with farmers. Currently Africa Windmill Project is focused in the Central Region of Malawi.

The Africa Windmill Project has a blog where they occasionally post notices about the status of projects; lots of interesting things there. (For those who prefer to review financial data before donating, that can be found by registering with GuideStar.)

I have also in the past had fairly good experiences with International Justice Mission, although you should know beforehand that they are rather assertive mailers:

International Justice Mission is a human rights agency that brings rescue to victims of slavery, sexual exploitation and other forms of violent oppression. IJM lawyers, investigators and aftercare professionals work with local officials to secure immediate victim rescue and aftercare, to prosecute perpetrators and to ensure that public justice systems - police, courts and laws - effectively protect the poor.

International Orthodox Christian Charities, which is, as it says on the tin, an Orthodox organization but is devoted entirely to humanitarian activities, has also been a charity with which I've had good experiences in the past. It has a number of programs.

Any other suggestions?

Marjatta and the Berry (Re-Post)

2011-12-16T15:13:00.000-06:00

This is a repost, with minor revision, of a post originally posted in 2005.

The Kalevala is one of the world's most remarkable works of literature. Compiled by Elias Lönnrot in the early nineteenth century from Karelian folk songs, it is the national epic of Finland. What Lönnrot was attempting to do had been attempted before with much less scholarly skill, in particular by James MacPherson in his 1760 Ossian, an attempt to pull together Highland folksongs into a national epic.* But Lönnrot's masterpiece is in another league entirely.

One of the interesting aspects of the Kalevala is Lönnrot's adaptation of the first three poems in a religious cycle of Christian legends; in a trope common in folklore, he presents it as the ending of the Kalevala -- the old gods and heroes sail away as they are replaced by Christianity. As the story goes, there was a young girl named Marjatta who was sweet and pure and innocent; so pure and innocent, in fact, that she refuses to sit in a sledge drawn by a stallion. One day she's out tending sheep on the hillside, when she comes across a cowberry, which she eats ('Marjatta' suggests the Finnish word marja, 'berry'). She becomes pregnant. After nine months, she begins to realize that she needs a sauna (to ease childbirth, of course); so she goes to her mother, who gives this supportive response:

'Fie upon you, demon's bitch!
Who were you laid by?
Was it an unmarried man
or else a married fellow?'

So she goes to her father, who is equally supportive:

'Go, you whore, further than that
scarlet woman, further off
to the bruin's rocky dens
ino the bear's craggy cells--
there, you whore, to breeed
there, scarlet woman, to teem!'

Marjatta responds:

'I am not a whore at all
no kind of scarlet woman:
I am to have a great man
to bear one of noble birth
who will put down the mighty
vanquish Väinämöinen too.'

Väinämöinen is the sky-god/hero who is the protagonist of most of the Kalevala. According to Bosley's notes the line 'who will put down the mighty' might be more literally translated as 'who will have power over power itself'. But back to Marjatta: she needs that sauna, and it doesn't seem to be forthcoming; so she sends her servant-girl Piltti find a sauna at Sedgeditch; when Piltti asks who she will ask for one, Marjatta replies that she should ask for Herod's bath at Saraja's gates.

Piltti comes to Herod's cabin and there finds Herod at a feast. The picture is unforgettably good:

Ugly Herod in shirtsleeves
eats, drinks in the grand manner
at the head of the table
with only his lawn shirt on;
Herod declared from his meal
snapped, leaning over his cup:
'What do you say, mean one? Why
wretch, are you rushing about?'

Piltti replies that she's looking for a bath at Sedgeditch. When Herod's mistress asks her for whom she's asking, Piltti replies that it's for Marjatta. To which Herod's mistress replies:

'The baths are not free for all
not the saunas at Saraja's gate.
There's a bath on the burnt hill
a stable among the pines
for a scarlet woman to have sons
a whore to bring forth her brats:
when the horse breathes out
bathe yourself in that!'

Piltti returns to Marjatta with this bit of helpful counsel. Poor Marjatta bursts into tears and goes to the stall on Tapio hill, praying as she goes:

'Come, Creator, my refuge
and my help, merciful one
in this hard labour
in these most hard times:
free a wench from a tight spot
a woman from the belly-throes
lest she sink in woes
perish in her pains!'

So Marjatta gives birth with the horse's breath as a sauna, and beside a manger brings forth a baby boy, whom she wraps in swaddling clothes.

The story goes on from there, with a confrontation between the little boy and Väinämöinen. It's an interesting set of legends, forming a sort of mythological symbol of the life of Christ that plays on the association of Marjatta and marja; one thinks of the common medieval play on the association of Maria and Latin maris, as in Stella Maris, Star of the Sea, a popular title for Mary.

[All quotations from the Kalevala are from Keith Bosley's translation, Oxford University Press, 1989.]

[*] The Ossianic question, namely, whether MacPherson had forged the poem, was one of the major literary disputes and scandals of the eighteenth century, with most of the period's literary intellectuals in Britain lining up on one side of the question or another, e.g., Hugh Blair argued that it was genuine, David Hume and Samuel Johnson that it was not. My understanding is that current folklore scholarship holds it to be based in actual Highland folksongs, but massively re-worked.

Palantirs on Every Desktop

2011-12-16T13:35:00.000-06:00

David Brin shows himself to be completely incompetent at literary analysis:

We owe absolutely nothing to $%#! elfs or wizards who clutch secret "wisdom" (what we moderns call "useful information about the world") to themselves for thousands of years, leaving men and women to flounder in miserable ignorance, when they might have opened a college in Lothlorien Forest, so we'd have flush toilets and palantirs on every desktop. Oh, thank God such creatures are mythological, because Tolkien himself opined that they were - in truth - the enemies of humankind.

Too true, because a society in which the Eye of Sauron has direct access to every desktop would be quite splendid, and flush toilets will necessarily be the highest priority of all rational people when they are engaged in a struggle with Morgoth. But the level of literary sophistication in the post does explain why I always find Brin's stories to be extraordinarily tedious characters used for implausible developments of ideas that are occasionally mildly interesting.

Links of Note

2011-12-15T19:21:00.000-06:00

* Brit Brogaard has a paper up on eudaimonistic virtue epistemology.

* The Symbolism Survey. A sixteen-year-old in 1963 did a project in which he sent a survey on symbolism to 150 authors; seventy-five responded, and these are some of the notable ones. The Ayn Rand one has caught the most attention, being very Ayn-Randish -- but it is noticeable, and also Ayn-Randish, that she thought it important enough to reply. Ray Bradbury's response is somewhat interesting, too.

* The IEP has a new article on Immanuel Kant's Philosophy of Religion

* Geza Vermes on early Jewish Christianity. I'm glad to see him pointing out that the Patriarchs of Jerusalem up to the time of Hadrian were, as Eusebius puts it, "of the circumcision."

* Bill Witt has some Anglican Reflections on Justification by Faith, in which he corrects some common misunderstandings of the Reformation view.

* Humphrey continues discussion of some of Pinker's statistics.

* Janet Smith clarifies her argument on lying. I find it very unhelpful; it leaves me more baffled than ever about how the different parts of her argument are supposed to work (particularly her discussions of purposes of speech). But I thought I should point to it. In any case, nothing she says here persuades me to modify my quodlibetal question on lying.

* There are rumors that the Pope will name St. Hildegard von Bingen a Doctor of the Church at some point in 2012. (ht) If so, I'll end up having to modify my Doctors of the Church post again.

* An interesting post on the Carolingian argument for why the Frankish Emperors could call themselves Emperors of the Romans.

The Myth of Judgment

2011-12-15T10:32:00.000-06:00

Fr. James Schall has an interesting post on the eschatological myth with which the Gorgias ends. I'm not sure I fully follow the line of argument in the essay, but I read the myth rather differently -- that is to say, the afterlife is not the point at all. When Socrates sums up, he says that Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles have failed to prove that you shouldn't live the sort of life that the myth says you should. Thus I don't think the justice or injustice of the world is Socrates's primary concern; it comes up, but is not discussed extensively. Rather, what Socrates is doing is showing that Callicles's trump card -- the claim (entirely true as far as it goes) that Socrates's philosophizing will result in his being brought before a jury and condemned to death -- is just a story, and other stories can be told. And what matters is that Callicles and the others have been unable to refute Socrates's contentions that those who do wrong are always worse off for doing it, that nothing bad really happens to the just person, and that being good is always better than seeming good; these are all contentions woven into the story. What the gods do in the story is bring the question back to truth: Zeus sets up a situation in which no soul can hide behind rhetoric, in which every soul stands naked and unadorned for its judgment. Souls scarred with injustice are seen as scarred; souls beautiful with justice are seen as beautiful. The myth is not chiefly about eschatology, what will happen after you die, although that is the framework of the story; the myth is about reality, how things are now, even if we ourselves, not being gods, cannot always see them.

But, as I said, it's an interesting little post.

Wrongmaking Characteristics of Right Actions?

2011-12-15T01:00:00.001-06:00

I was looking at something in Tooley's SEP article on the problem of evil, which is one of those SEP articles that makes an interesting paper without being very good as an encyclopedia article, and stopped to read his "Concrete, Deontological, and Direct Inductive Formulation" of the PoE. Evaluating it he goes through each of the nine premises and concludes, "So all of the premises seem fine"; I don't actually think this is true, since several of the premises seem to me to be ambiguous as formulated. But this premise in particular just baffled me:

(10) An action is morally wrong, all things considered, if it has a wrongmaking characteristic that is not counterbalanced by any rightmaking characteristics.

It reminds me of Campbell's cutting comments (in his critique of Hume on miracles) about the bizarreness of Hume's principle of counterpoise. Clearly if we are accepting this principle as "by virtue of the concepts of rightmaking and wrongmaking characteristics, together with the concept of an action's being wrong, all things considered," we can't be using the phrase "wrongmaking characteristic" to mean "characteristic that makes an action wrong". And the same with "rightmaking characteristic". In every other discussion I've come across in which phrases like these have been used, 'wrongmaking' was the adjectival form of 'making wrong'. So what, then, are these wrongmakers and rightmakers that don't necessarily make actions wrong or right? What general features do they have?

When he first mentions them, he says that they are properties "that determine whether an action is one that ought to be performed, or ought not to be performed, other things being equal." I take it that the ceteris paribus clause here is supposed to be doing some major work, but combining it with (10) seems to convey the idea that wrongmaking characteristics are characteristics that make an action wrong when it's not a right action, and rightmaking characteristics are characteristics that make an action right when it's not a wrong action. And then (A) we need to have a clear account of how we identify them in a non-question-begging way, which we don't have; and (B) we need to have an argument that they are universally stable and not merely functional according to circumstances -- i.e., that characteristic of type C is not wrongmaking under some circumstances and rightmaking under others; and (C)we need to know how we assess the balance of rightmaking and wrongmaking. Indeed, rather weirdly, rightmakers and wrongmakers don't make actions right or wrong; rather, what makes an action right or wrong is the higher-order characteristic of how your wrongmakers relate to your rightmakers. This is not, as far as I have been able to determine, standard usage of the terms at all; in standard usage, 'rightmaking' indicates something that makes your action right. It's not normally used to talk about what makes your action right assuming it isn't "overbalanced" by the sort of thing that makes your action wrong (if it's not "overbalanced" by the sort of thing that makes it right...); or, to put it in other terms, we don't usually talk about oughts in such a roundabout, vague, and wishy-washy way.

Setting aside the unnecessarily confusing nature of the terminology, part of the weirdness is that this is a principle of the kind that usually indicates a consequentialist view, but it is stated in terms that are usually used to indicate a deontological view. (Tooley seems to want to get away from a consequentialist view in order to avoid certain controversies, but this sort of principle is not a usual part of deontological views, and so it's difficult to see how it avoids the problem of controversy.) We can make sense of:

(10') An action is morally wrong, all things considered, if it has disutility that is not counterbalanced by any utility.

But (10) is not obviously even coherent, and even if we assume it coherent, it isn't clear how we'd identify our wrongmaking and rightmaking characteristics as they'd have to be understood here (without begging any questions), and even if we assume we could, it isn't clear how we'd determine whether (say) 'letting Pinocchio become a real boy' was counterbalanced by (say) 'letting Bambi's mother die', and by what measure. Under what moral theory does it actually make sense to analyze actions this way?

A Poem Re-Draft

2011-12-14T10:53:00.000-06:00

Self-Critique

'Tis true he's not the greatest bard
to grace the human race;
his poems are filled with little lines
that hang in filler-space.
He has a certain fervor
(more a fever in the brain);
it substitutes for music --
thus all his lyrics strain.
And he preaches like a pastor,
and lectures all the day;
I'd love to love his poems
but his words get in the way.
He is pompous and pretentious --
yes, a flash of wit thrown in,
but his taste is all the former,
the clunky prosist's sin.
And, boy, he likes a good conceit
(conceited people do!),
writ in vain and empty words
dressed up like clerihew.

Epilogue

Homer may be an ocean
and Virgil a city spired;
I think that people tell it true
who say Dante is a choir.
But this poet is a napkin
scribbled in a dim-lit bar
before the scribbler passes out
and the barkeep calls a car.

The Foe of Every Cruelty

2011-12-13T09:46:00.001-06:00

Today is the feast of St. Lucy, Virgin Martyr; she is one of the saints who is often easily picked out because she is usually represented as carrying her eyes on a plate, like so:

The reason is that the stories of her martyrdom tell that her eyes were gouged out during the Diocletian persecution.

She was extraordinarily popular. She has an important, although mostly offstage, role in Dante's Divine Comedy (Dante, who had eye troubles, was highly devoted to her); she is the saint that the Virgin Mary sends to Beatrice, telling her to send Virgil as Dante's guide through hell; or so we are told by Virgil himself:

" 'That Lady called on Lucia with her request
And said: "Your faithful follower has now
Such need of you that I commend him to you."

" 'Lucia, the foe of every cruelty,
Started up and came to where I was,
Sitting at the side of the aged Rachel.

" 'She said, "Beatrice, true credit to our God,
Will you not help the man who so loves you
That for your sake he left the common crowd?

" ' "Do you not hear his pathetic grieving?
Do you not see the death besieging him
On the river which the ocean cannot sway?"

She is also conspicuously mentioned in the Paradiso, where Beatrice confirms Virgil's story:

"And opposite the eldest family father
Lucia sits, who stirred your lady when
Your head was nodding downward, to your ruin."

Thus in the Mystical Rose of Heaven she is directly across from Adam.

John Donne also has a famous poem on St. Lucy's Day:

A Nocturnall upon St. Lucie's Day, Being the Shortest Day
by John Donne

'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks ;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays ;
The world's whole sap is sunk ;
The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed's-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr'd ; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring ;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness ;
He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death—things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have ;
I, by Love's limbec, am the grave
Of all, that's nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown'd the whole world, us two ; oft did we grow,
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else ; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death—which word wrongs her—
Of the first nothing the elixir grown ;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know ; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means ; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love ; all, all some properties invest.
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.

But I am none ; nor will my sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all,
Since she enjoys her long night's festival.
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year's and the day's deep midnight is.

This poem is usually thought to have been written in 1627, a year in which Lucy Donne, his daughter, and Lucy, Countess of Bedford, a close friend, both died. The reference to the 'year's midnight' is to the fact that St. Lucy's feast was at one time more-or-less the Winter Solstice (in England in Donne's day, and for quite some time before it, St. Lucy's would have been the closest major saint's day to the Winter Solstice -- you need to keep in mind, of course, the difference between the Julian and the Gregorian calendar). St. Lucy's as liturgical Winter Solstice creates an interesting series of juxtapositions given that her name is derived from the word for 'light'; exactly suitable to the poetic conceits of a metaphysical poet like Donne.

On an Answer to a Quiz Question

2011-12-12T23:19:00.001-06:00

I've recently finished grading one of the take-home tests I give for my Intro courses; it's a test on the history of philosophy, and is a rather difficult two-part test, so I throw in a lighter question or two. One of them is simply to name something they learned from the course that is not on the test. As you might expect, there's a wide variety of answers, but one answer I've come to expect, which is virtually always mentioned by one or two students, is that they were surprised to discover that there were any Christian philosophers. That is to say, any Christian philosophers ever. Sometimes I get a more generalized form, expressing surprise at the existence of religious philosophers of any sort.

They learn that such people have existed, of course, because I always have a medieval philosophy segment to the course, and all the philosophers there are Christian, Jewish, or Muslim and, because it is convenient for giving some order to the period, explicitly labeled as such. I think of this as being to some extent a vindication of teaching Introduction to Philosophy with a historical approach, despite the difficulties it introduces: had I not taught this course several times, and if I taught it by problem-units (free will, skepticism, etc.) rather than by historical sweep, it would never have occurred to me even to raise the point explicitly -- it's the sort of thing I ordinarily take completely for granted. And, whatever one may think about the interest of that point in general, this is a matter that is undeniably a point of interest to many students: I mean, there are students whose minds are seriously just blown by it, and all their preconceptions of philosophy smashed into bits by it.

One wonders what the background causes are that lead so many students to disassociate the concepts of philosophy and religion, but it's not an uncommon thing. The number of people who, on discovering (usually through different channels) that I'm both Christian and teach philosophy, have actually been taken aback, and puzzled about how that could possibly work, is extraordinary. It can't be any well-defined conception of philosophy. I find that most people, that is, most ordinary people going about business that has nothing to do with academia and have never taken a philosophy class before, have difficulty keeping philosophy and psychology straight. And (for instance) it's not difficult to find people whose conception of philosophy is that it is a sort of koan meditation; in their mind philosophy works by coming up with questions that have no possible answer -- not many possible answers that can't be narrowed down but no possible answers at all. (This is, incidentally, worth keeping in mind when one teaches philosophy, because such students can go through philosophy courses without ever being disabused of it, since they have no problem with saying that such questions can look like they have answers, or that people can think they are giving answers to them. But a lot that is puzzling about the way students respond to, say, trolley problems or skeptical scenarios suddenly makes sense if you assume that some of the students are assuming from the beginning that posing a trolley problem or skeptical scenario is like asking about the sound of one hand clapping. To them it's a category mistake to think that one can really get any farther than merely posing it.) But it is very, very common. Perhaps the heavy emphasis on skepticism that has been such a common staple of the modern undergraduate philosophy class is a contributing factor; but, again, we are talking about people who have never had an undergraduate philosophy class before, and whose acquaintance with the very term consists entirely of pop culture references and whatever might come up in ordinary conversation.

Dashed Off

2011-12-12T22:12:00.000-06:00

domain-specific principles of sufficient reason
->cf. Suarez: "we have a general rule that distinctions are not to be multiplied without sufficient reason (seeing that a distinction does not occur in anture without a sufficient cause or without necessity)."

Ezekiel's repair of the temple as figure of resurrection

acquired faith: opinion fortified by argument

(1) the infinite for-any-finite-a-greater
(2) the infinite greater-than-any-finite
(3) the infinite than-which-nothing-greater
->For each we may inquire whether it can be in potentia and whether it can be in actu
->in each case the potential is with respect to some power real or posited

negative indistance

reflection on the Passion a prayer for purity

The worst forms of despair disguise themselves as faith and hope, especially the former.

We should avoid both mortal sin and venial sin, but our reason for avoiding them is not the same: we avoid mortal sin so that we may love God and neighbor, and we avoid venial sin so that we may love them better, and not defectively.

Both Hobbes & Leibniz take conatus to be the impulse of motion considered pointwise -- in Leibniz's analogy conatus : motion :: point : space

analogy between reduplicative & material propositions (Leibniz)

Faith, being an infused virtue, has a twofold analysis, one human that concerns itself with motives of credibility and one divine that is spritiual discernment through divine illumination; and a twofold synthesis, one human that concerns itself with the beauty of the whole world and one divine that is intimacy with glory.

The divine side of faith is entirely on God's terms, not ours.

the perichoresis of virtues

We can only appropriate ideas of the Mysteries, never the Mysteris themselves; but they can appropriate us.

The vocation of a writer is to bear witness; and it is perhaps the very distinguishing mark of the good writer, as opposed to the bad, that the good writer bears witness to what is definitely something.

We learn our true worth through humility; and one thing we learn through humility is that the beatitude or happiness worth having is a very great thing.

People who see the world as it is but cannot give different priorities to what they see will inevitably become depressives.

Without prudence, conscience is mere abuse.

Mockery is answered by proof of rightnes,s proof of congruity, or proof of defensibility.

the world as an occasion of aspiration

A painting, like a text, is a composition of signs.

Impassibility is moral transcendence.

the link between the Ascension & the Headship of Christ

Ascension as anticipation of parousia (Acts 1:11)

Analysis of argument is fundamentally analysis of means and ends; formal structure becomes relevant insofar as it makes arguments suitable or unsuitable for their ends.

adapting belief revision models to argument revision (some are at least primitive versions of the latter already)

It is a mistake to confuse acting without a principle and acting in violation of it. People violate noncontradiction all the time; it is still the first principle of all reasoning, without which nothing makes sense....Just as it would be follish to assume that inconsistency, which is mere violation, means either that we are free from noncontradiction or that noncontradiction is not a norm of consistency,m, to too with bonum faciendum, mutatis mutandis.

If you are not wrong often, you are not thinking enough. (But being wrong often is rather different from being wrong always, or even being wrong about most things; both of these are dysfunctional in a way that being wrong often is not.)

In sexual life our bodies are rational signs of deeper things.

No one understands heroism who thinks it can be forced.

The Faith is not merely our fidelity but our confidelity.

Human beings are often at their best when humbly attempting great things and earnestly doing simple things well.

intense emotion concentrating itself into an image in which the subjective is expressible by the objective

images as seeds of civilization

evocative juxtaposition of images

In art as well as science even failures can be progress (for this is a feature of reason that learns).

Analytic philosophy of the more formal sort is like cubism in its focus on the abstract and inorganic structures of concrete and living forms; it is like impressionism in its more intuition-peddling sorts. This philosophical cubist impressionism has its place, but the museum of philosophical art, even the museum of modern philosophical art, is not chained to one such style. The same can be said of the philosophical tachisme of certain continental schools.

Bentham & Grote seem wrong in saying that pain has more various shapes than pleasures.

Sometimes useless information combines with other useless information to become useful information.

The philosopher has a responsibility to take even false and dubious positions seriously, to the extent that they raise points that may indeed need to be resolved.

computers as mathematical looms

Some contributions to a nation, or to humanity, are so great that ar eword or honor that can be confined to a lifetime is not adequate; this was one reason for heritable titles.

'Observation' as used in different scientific fields is an analogical term, not a univocal one. Observing double stars is not the same as observing bird song, and neither is the same as observing subatomic particles.

In at least some cases (e.g., solution of proportional equations) analogical reasoning is fully rigorous. So the question becomes: under what condtions are analogical inferences so rigorous?

It is true that truth does not contradict truth, but it is also true that the coherence of truth with truth may be subtle.

Reasonable gadflies and intelligent kooks have always performed inestimable services for the intellectual world.

We are beggars in the face of grace in exactlyt eh saem sense we are beggars before nature, and just as we must panhandle for air to breathe, we must panhandle for divine light. But these are all loose metaphors; they capture nothing but our dependence on things that do not depend on us.

Polytheism tends to monotheism by two routes: henotheism (this god is more deserving of my worship, at least, than other gods) and theomonism (all gods are in some way one).

To overcome suffering for what is right is greater by far than signs and wonders.

Bentham's methods of paraphrasis and archetypation are valuable if freed from Benthams complete incapacity to understand the human mind, and the inevitable self-parodying crudeness that results.

Paraphrasis naturally tends to abstraction, not concretion; where concreteness is increased there is generally implicit modification in which concrete things are treated as if they were themselves abstract (i.e., the paraphrasis is by figure of speech), or else information and meaning is definitely lost.

"To try wrong guesses is, with most persons, the only way to hit the right. The character of a true philosopher is, not that he never conjectures hazardously, but that his conjectures are clearly conceived, and brought into rigid contract with facts." Whewell

Because hypocrisy is chiefly a matter of motivation, and becaus ethe values and ideas the hypocrite chooses as whitewash are often genuinely good, we should not forget that the arguments & criticisms made by hypocrites can be right.

To make human beings means to the ends of technology rather than vice versa is inconsistent with human dignity and therefore with justice.

Sacrifice is associated with eating because the latter is assimilation.

As Christ's redemption comes under natural signs, so His body and blood under signs of bread and wine.

Some kinds of prayer, like exercise, require good form. (Hence Acts of Contrition, Faith, Hope, Love, and so forth.)

the familial munus: to guard, reveal, and communicate love

Hope is the patriotism of Heaven.

the liturgical year as an oscillation of anticipations and remembrances

All is material, everything occasion, for grace.

loyalty to the virtuous as a group
-Foot's army of volunteers

the books of Daniel & Esther as models for hagiography

the eduction of anecdote and moral from story

Money in the broad sense is a system for comparing, prioritizing, and rationing in a broader system of exchange.

the conditions for self-sustaining intellectual networks

Pleasures without contexts corrupt.

All intellectual insults, however specific, approximate over time to synonymy with 'stupid', i.e., to indefinite and generalized denigration of intellectual & reasoning abilities. Since any intellectual criticism can be turned into insult simply by being used that way, critical vocabulary has a sort of natural tendency to degeneration and impoverishment.

We have in Scripture not one voice but a consonance of voices, and they do not sing all the same notes, but harmonize different notes in polyphonic song.

It is the grace of the young tnot to be terrified of the precipice on which they stand; we have all been there and we all barely noticed.

The aim of the poetic art is to make something to be wondered at.

logical time as measured in inference steps
- note significance of branches of argument (one branch to C can take longer than another branch to C, and two lines of argument can be non-simultaneous or simultaneous)

circular reasoning as a sign of the edge of argument
(cf Aristotle's point that petitio principii treats non-principles as principles)
-> the edge of argument is like the edge of fractal if we consider structure alone

per accidens & per se series of questions

Hope lies in understanding priorities and differences of importance.

Conversions that are not moral miracles always build on some kind of intellectual curiosity or some kind of natural piety, and, indeed, often a mix of both.
-> Indeed, thinking of this further, how many of the obviously unconvertible are so wholly because they are incapable of even basic intellectual curiosity about what they are rejecting? Rational curiosity doesn't guarantee conversion; but deadness of intellectual interest is deadness to all but miraculous persuasion.

Freedom is exactly as valuable as the acts of honor and virtue it makes possible.

Delusion is a stopping of the mind before it has returned to first principles.

seraphim and scorpions

Lists being natural or rational in character, no infinite list of numbers can ever include all real numbers. This suggests the possibility of superlists, pertaining to higher cardinalities: the real superlist, etc.

Equality between human beings necessarily has to take many different forms; any account of human equality failing to recognize this will fail to attain certain needful kinds of equality. For equalities are as diverse as relations between people, and while these fall into kinds, there are many kinds; and there are equalities that pertain to unequal incidentals, as with employers and employees, or parents and children, that are distinctive to those relationship and easily lost through an attempt to reduce all equality down to one kind.

the history of philosophy as a datum for natural theology (cf. civil theology)

Our call is not to civilize the earth but to be civilized in it.

As signs the sacraments are revelations.

The Eucharist is not merely Passion and Resurrection extended to us; it is also Pentecost extended to us.

hamartia - hubris - nemesis - anagnorisis

Since sin consists of dwelling on lesser goods to the exclusion of greater goods, the key practice that must be learned in moral life is looking beyond good to greater good.

It is the beauty, not the complexity, of the universe that most properly indicates divine wisdom.

In the finest classical tragedies, nemesis operates unseen: we are destroyed before we know it.

mereotopology of regions of influence

Means of communication that allow swift transmission of ideas do not always do the best job of establishing them; and vice versa.

the cultivation of play into art

young man's humor, old man's calm

The most dangerous kind of person who presents himself as an intellectual is the one who will not allow others room to be wrong.

rings & fields & the theory of lists

Error theories are not merely useful but necessary when otherwise the existence of a concept or term is itself reason or evidence for the opposing position. That is, when you can say, "But how could we have had the concept/term X at all, if we didn't somehow get it from X?" So Descartes (at least) showed that this is so for God (qua the infinite) & the rationalists extended this in their anti-empiricist arguments; other examples would be things like 'contingency', 'good', and so forth. That is, there is an actual argument from our having that very idea that would need to be addressed by the opposing side (or else it stands).

People who tell no stories of darkness and light, in stark black and white as we say, cannot see shades of gray as gray.

Religious liberty protects the supremacy of the Faith from neglect, fraud, and discord insinuated into society by political interests.

We seek out ritual & liturgy not for pleasure but for rich experience.

paradox of tragedy & extreme initiations

The pretense that all other men contribute equally to the common good as good fathers do is a dangerous one for both societies and men.

Unpredictable turns of argument can form predictable patterns.

nonpersonal, emotional, and analytical factors shaping turns of argument

The potential parts of argument-types are typical deteriorations and adaptations of the original.

argument simulacra

therbligs of reasoning

Facts are feats of intellect and thing.

Lullian combinatorial method as an attempt to trace the fractal edge of argument.

invariances in voluntary acts

the 'great chain' of the good (much more important, perhaps, in hostorical cases than Lovejoy's interpretation allows)

An advantage of the mathematician over the logician is that in some/many areas of logic the lgoician cannot take advantage of the power of massively iterated operations.

The pursuit of wisdom is necessary for a government; it is the only way to be both consistent and flexible enough to stay just in the face of the world's mutability.

comparison & contrast of seed crystal and pollen metaphors for aphorisms

- there needs to be more exploration of marriage as a sign

Logic has analogies to every art.

zones of reasonable doubt and constraints thereupon

regions of acceptable utility

A utilitarianism without a semiotic of goods is blind.

drivers and enablers in historical explanation
- disablers as well

NQV analysis of interscholastic disputes
Boyd's Loop analysis of interscholastic disputes

secularism vs. liminalism

Like ocular blindspots, mental blindspots can be identified by inference. Doing so, however, requires being open to such inferences in the first place.

incantatory functions of money

the oracles, especially Delphic, as having seeded Greek philosophy

Mary as the Mother of Many Ends (Lull)

"As the end is, so is the hope." Lull

"One virtue is an exemplar for another." Lull

Standards of artistic excellence must consider the difficulty of what is being done.

To study philosophers requires appreciating the interest of philosophical experiments that didn't work out.

paratypical modifications of arguments

(1) Regions of influence are colelctions of nodes linked by arcs of influence.
(2) Of two regions of influence, a region A mediately influences a region C when there is some region B such that there is a path through B from a node in A to a node in C.
(3) A region A includes a region B as a subordinate region of influence if every path of influence to a node in B includes at least one node in A, and there is at least one node in A not in any path in B.
(4) Region A and region B overlap when there is some region C that is a subordinate region of both A & B.

We can think of the nodes of regions of influence as persons, texts, artifacts, or institutions.

Possibility of arcs of influence is determined by the causal conditions for communication.

bridge influence can be represented by cuts, on assumption that all relevant influences are considered

utility-amplifying institutions
utility-generating institutions

decision theory & the modeling of prudence

prudence in limited, closed situations vs. prudence in open-ended situations

Laity are not simply subordinate to clergy but functionally interordinate with them, by each being subordinate to the ends of the other in certain respects. The two errors in ecclesiology to avoid are that in which the clergy do not serve their flocks and that in which the laity have no real shepherds.

the vocation of marriage to be revelatory

Society can only reliably be ruled by philosopher-kings when society is filled with potential candidates for philosopher-kings.

sophistry as idolopoetic

If the Seventh Letter hadn't been written by Plato, we would still have to say that its anonymous author was one of the most remarkable minds of ancient Greece.

the divine pastor in Plato's Statesman
(he feeds, heals, arranges nuptials, acts as midwife, soothes with music)

baptism as maieutic

The statesman, politikos, weaves the friendships of the city into balanced harmonies.

self-interrogating reasoned exposition

sexual usury

rhetoric as the art of persuading many by means of mythology rather than instruction (Plato Polit. 304d).

The universe participates the likeness of the Word, but is not the Word.

Christian eschaton is not mere phthora.

Agape is what most suits the pursuit of agathon.

immediate self-sameness (point)
mediate self-sameness (circular motion)

Intention is one of the things capable of temporal asymmetry.

The best thing for good government is prudence in the authorities; the second best thing is for law to be sovereign; the latter is easier to guarantee.

Just as virtue in a person is not merely knowledge, so justice in a city is not merely the knowledge of those in charge.

One of the things writing cannot convey is the massiveness of true dialectic, both its scope and detail; take a text as long as you please, it is merely one surface of the rational discourse that created it.

Times of adversity require patience, forbearance, and pardon.

"The source of wisdom is God's word in the highest heaven." Sir 1:5

the battle of cant & candour

It takes true candour not to call virtue cant.

An understudied area is how much philosophy depends on the mild approval or even mere toleration of large numbers of people who are otherwise largely indifferent to it.
--> NB: this is today most clearly seen with the sciences

Totalitarianism is an attack on MacIntyrean practices.

Immorality corrupts but does not destroy society -- until it becomes immoralism.

The caricature of fortitude will seem more like fortitude than fortitude itself to those who have little acquaintance with fortitude. And so with all other virtues.

Excessive fear of hypocrisy is quite as dangerous as hypocrisy.

open & closed premise sets
-> quasi-closed premise sets for nonmonotonic/defeasible inference

a theory of human exchange in terms of object, work, expense, and risk

The extent of hypocrisy in a society is an indirect (and somewhat unfortunate) measure of the excellence of its moral standards.

the horror reveal & the suspense nonreveal

The amount people are willing to pay for something is usually less than their estimate of its value; people like bargains, and want things at bargain price.

Demand is explained by taste, need, price, and ability to demand.

The key to economics is the difference between real equality and practical equivalence in a domain.

accessibility relations between markets

Lending markets are generally markets involving asymmetric information; they rarely even approach ideal symmetry.

The reason for interest lies in bargaining about loans (not lending itself).

What matters most in modern democratic politics is who is known to oppose you.

Is 55:10-11 & fourfold sense

Political parties are expressions of practical reason; many of their quirks & abuses chiefly arise when practical reason is severed from speculative reasoning.

Finance as a field is nothing other than contract engineering.

protecting the juridical person in man through juridical equality & due process
protecting the moral person in man by protecting memory & conscientious objection
protecting the individual identity in man by protecting creative spontaneity and assertion

commonalities of sentiment reflect natural law which reflects divine law

(1) Being is prior to becoming.
(2) Knowledge originates in experience.
(3) Logic alone does not verify.

Fortitude "is a habit that builds fortifications against the vices" (Lull)

"Faith is the intellect's instrument and enables it to elevate its understanding through belief." (Lull)

the source & sink of an idea

Participation is the basis of testimony.

remote & proximate preparations for rational inquiry

Pleasures must be purified, moderated, and mortified.

the parallel between skepticism & scruples
(note that scruples is often caused by meticulous-mindedness combined with confusions about principles, and failure to distinguish sentiment and consent)
(note too the major remedies for scruples: reasonable obedience & deference to others)

As there are many kinds of assent (imaginative, opinion, knowledge), so there are many kinds of inference (in Newman's sense) corresponding to each.

Holidays and festivals, however vulgar, give nourishment to imaginative and poetic life in people who otherwise may get little.

pseudo-traditionalists who throw out internals to maintain externals

Too much activism breeds an unwillingness to listen to others.

Latin & Greek as treasuries of alternative conceptual vocabularies (obviously any language shaped by robust interplay of philosophical traditions could serve -- classical Chinese and Sanskrit have similar value)

The mountain in the reflection has no height at all. This is half of Zen.

treating words as fields of association

Much of the task of life is to learn how to go bravely to meet our fate, whatever it may be.

Economics is fundamentally an exercise in recognizing what you cannot assume.

For one who has done wrong but retains a living and well-formed conscience, judgment is itself a punishment or at least partial expiation. Hence purgatory: the just find judgment a vindication, the honest wrongdoer under mercy finds it expiation; for both it is salvation.

We measure space by the power to traverse it.

The translator presents the original not literally but by an extraordinary figure of speech.

Participation is another way to talk about final causes (directly or indirectly, depending on the kind of participation).

ongoing operational preferences in reasoning

Every premise set establishes not just conclusions strictly deduced by also conclusions apt to be drawn.

Remnants of older arguments remain in later arguments.

As belief requires context, there must be cognitive acts prior to it.

What makes fideism a coherent kind of position is that (1) we often find ourselves believing things without knowing why and (2) we take at least some beliefs to be themselves evidence of their own truth (the act of believing is itself evidence of the belief). Thus the general logical type, fideism, is possible: We could indeed find ourselves believing something on no discernible evidence but reasonably take the believing itself as evidence of the belief's truth, and this just is fideism. (You will note the similarity of this to taking something to be self-evident; which is no doubt why fideists not uncommonly make the mistake of conflating fides and intelligentia.) Things get trickier when it comes to specific fideistic positions, especially in areas in which the belief in question is not somehow self-reflexive.

Prayer gives stability toboth work and study, whether we are thinking individually or communally.

The greater part of maturity is learning how to work with what the world throws at you.

All formal systems explicitly representing identity necessarily require the assumption that at least some intensional or modal contexts are irrelevant. Consider X=Y. But as labeled, X is X, and not Y, and Y is Y, and not X, and X is on the left and Y is on the right; thus if this is identity, these must be considered irrelevant.

Our discourse about time is modally complex, including not just time-ordering modalities, but also alethic, epistemic, incipit/desinit, and perhaps even deontic. It is a stew of modalities.

Love of the good is health of the will.

Precepts of natural law fructify into prudential counsels of moral philosophy.

Faith we have because of the good, hope we have because of the true.

If families or nations have duties, they have the rights requisite to perform them.

-- a map of the episcopal, monastic, and mendicant lines of the Doctors of the Church

Religious rituals are in effect dialectical negotiations of vaiorus kinds, and thus exhibit on a large scale the features we recognize on a small scale in argument, persuasion, courtesy, and otehr interactions with human beings.

Courtesy is the natural expression of respect, whether we speak of respect for another person, or resepect for truth or justice, or respect for the natural world. Courtesies just are what human beings do in expressing respect.

We often require of people a rational account of how they avoid the problems of not believing something.

Agnosticism is not a simplifying position; it uses necessity to eschew simplicity.

Much of analytic philosophy is voodoo philosophy: to attack or support reasoning you attack or support toy models of it.

Definition is the test of self-evidence.

Music on My Mind

2011-12-12T14:42:00.002-06:00

Loreena McKennit, "The Star of the County Down"

Three New Poem Drafts

2011-12-11T16:49:00.002-06:00

Distance and Silence

If distance dimmed the heart's fair fondness,
who would love the stars?
All beauty will we seek more deeply
who see it from afar.
And if their silence were obnoxious
to our waiting ears,
what poets would ever seek to catch
the music of their spheres?
For all that they do never sing,
their music fills our hearts:
their silence is but a negative
we transpose into parts.

Fairies

The fairies are godlings Christ has tamed;
we know their haunts and speak their names,
we hear their whispers in the air,
and majesty and strength are there,
but never do we rise to pray
or sacrifice to keep their way,
nor ever do we bend the knee,
but stand before them, less but free.
Some may revere, but all are made bold:
we love them as loved tales of old,
rumors long-lost of an age of gold.

Wraith in the Mountains

Shines the moonlight down on the mountains,
Sings the wind through snow-laden crags;
Listen closely, can you not hear me
Echoing down into valleys below?
Words are not a means of expression
Able to sing the depths of my plaint;
Only the moonbeam cold and undying
Can ever record the tale of my woe.
Youthful hearts' love can die unavailing,
Deepest hopes can break on cold stone.
Waters pouring in falls from the mountains
Histories tell of this ominous woe.
Ever is too long for man to remember.
Ever years cover all minds and all hearts.
Sorrow alone speaks and always remembers;
Grief will yet linger beyond human heart.
See the moonlight shining on mountains;
Hear the wind sing softly on high;
All that they tell, beyond all recalling,
Lingers on here in hint and in muse.
Have you never in all of your far-flinging journeys
Moved past a scene great-burdened with time,
Knowing that somehow there once was a story,
Never yet knowing the tale for the feeling,
Words unavailing to capture the mood?
Shines the moonbeams bring on high summits,
Harping of wind pours through the cold stone;
Listen closely -- can you not hear me
Hinting my tale to the valley below?

Admin Note

2011-12-09T18:01:00.000-06:00

As I'm currently in Odessa, TX, visiting family, and am finishing up grading, posting will be a bit light this weekend.

I've been meaning to recommend this review at Armarium Magnum for some time, though.

The Nativity in Paintings IV

2011-12-07T22:23:00.002-06:00

This is a painting by Conrad von Soest, from about the early fifteenth century; it is a small panel on the Niederwildungen Altarpiece, which, thanks to the joy that is Flickr, you can see in full here. This altarpiece is in a Protestant church in Bad Wildungen in Germany.

One of the big issues in any painting of the Nativity is what to do with St. Joseph. He doesn't have a big role to play; obviously all eyes are on Virgin and Child. And the Gospels don't actually tell us much about him. We know he was a carpenter (actually a tekton, which is a skilled artisan, but taking it as indicating a woodworker goes back at least to the second century). We know some of his dreams (which should have more paintings devoted to them than they do, although Rembrandt has a very lovely one and Daniele Crespi another). He never speaks -- not one word is attributed to him. What we do know is that he travels like crazy; every time we see him he is either in the middle of a journey, or about to start one, or has just finished one. He travels from Nazareth to Bethlehem, Bethlehem to Jerusalem, down to Egypt, up to Nazareth, and the last we hear of him directly, he and Mary are taking yearly trips to Jerusalem for Passover. That's a lot of moving. But the Bible doesn't give much to paint when it comes to Joseph and the Nativity; and unlike most of the other details that are left open, you can't really do anything you want with him, although painters sometimes do get creative.

Usually we find Joseph holding a candle, and sometimes sleeping. This is one of those Bridgettine details; in Birgitta's vision, Joseph is holding a candle, whose light is obliterated, swallowed up, in the light from the Christ Child. It's a feature often found even in paintings that are otherwise not all that Bridgettine; the candle was in the Flémalle painting. Joseph is cut out of the Nativity at Night painting; but the painting on which it is based certainly had him, and almost certainly had him holding a candle. There are other things he can do. In the Hohenfurth painting he is pouring water. von Soest's painting, however, is the only painting I have ever seen in which Joseph is cooking a meal. Somehow I like that very much -- it shows Joseph as a practical man of action. With so much travel he must have been an excellent organizer.

Because we are never told Joseph's age in the Bible, there are two different traditions in painting: the Old Man tradition and the Young Man tradition. The Old Man tradition has going for it the fact that Joseph disappears from the scene relatively early; he was certainly alive when Jesus was twelve, but beyond that we are told very little. Third- and fourth-century legends, most notably the Protevangelium of James, always portray him as old, though. The Panarion of St. Epiphanius of Salamis, which is perhaps the first to give an age, goes so far as to claim he was about eighty (with four sons and two daughters) when he was betrothed to Mary. And overwhelmingly this is what we overwhelmingly get until about the seventeenth century, although most painters paint him as rather younger than eighty. But here and there in very, very early representations he is portrayed as a much younger man, and this has become more common in the modern era.

Inveni David (Re-Post)

2011-12-06T06:31:00.000-06:00

Today is the feast of St. Nicholas of Myra. This is a slightly revised version of a post from 2008.

Among Thomas Aquinas's extant sermons is one, usually known by the name Inveni David, which is devoted to St. Nicholas of Myra. The exact circumstances of the sermon are unknown, but we know that it was preached in December in Paris either on St. Nicholas Day or around that time. A Tale of Two Wonderworkers (PDF) by Peter Kwasniewski does a good job of giving the background.

The topic of the sermon is that God works wonders in His saints, and St. Thomas treats of this topic by taking a verse from the Psalms about David (a standard verse for saints who are bishops):

I have discovered David my servant; with my holy oil I have anointed him; my hand will help him, and my arm will strengthen him (Ps. 88:21-22).

Aquinas reads this as giving us a series of wonders that God works in the servants of God -- David in particular, of course, but also any servant of God. And thus Thomas uses it to speak of how St. Nicholas was such a servant. There are four basic parts to the verse, to which Aquinas assigns one feature of God's wondrous working in the saints:

(1) I have discovered David my servant: election
(2) with my holy oil I have anointed him: consecration
(3) my hand will help him: execution of duties
(4) and my arm will strengthen him: steadfastness

Thus Thomas will show wondrous election, singular consecration, effective execution of office, and abiding steadfastness in St. Nicholas. Actually, he never gets to the last; the sermon we have stops abruptly and without explanation after (3).

Wondrous Election

I have discovered David my servant, the Psalmist says; what's involved in discovering someone? Discovery, says Thomas, suggests rarity, at least to the extent that it needs to be discovered; it suggests search; it suggests disclosure; and it suggests conviction through experience. All these are elements of God's wonderful choosing of St. Nicholas: the first in that St. Nicholas was virtuous from youth, the second in that the Lord seeks faithful souls to delight in; the third in that Nicholas stood out through his pious affection and profound mercy and compassion; and the fourth in that Nicholas faithfully served the Lord's interests rather than his own. The third is particularly important for Aquinas; St. Nicholas is an example he holds up in more than one place for his compassion and mercy. He clearly likes the story of St. Nicholas finding a way to give gold in secret to the poor virgins so that they could have a dowry without the embarrassment of being beholden to him for it. Notably Thomas also uses his discussion of Nicholas's election to attack abuses by the clergy.

Singular Consecration

According to legend, St. Nicholas was elevated to the position of bishop by God Himself. The old bishop had died with no one obvious as a replacement. Those who were trusted with choosing the successor had a dream one night that they should consecrate as bishop the first man who walked through the door of the Church that morning. This happened to be Nicholas, who was at the time a young priest and a newcomer to Myra. He took considerable convincing, but eventually he was installed as bishop. This is perhaps subtly in the background here, although Aquinas doesn't mention it explicitly here (he does explicitly mention it elsewhere, so he knew of the story). Instead he focuses on the phrase with my holy oil I have anointed him. Oil has four uses, says Aquinas, all of which are suggested in this context.

First, oil is used for healing. Thus oil is an image of God's healing grace, and we see the operation of such grace in such a holy man as Nicholas.

Second, oil is used for lighting. To this extent it symbolizes the learning of wisdom, which is why it is associated with prophecy and illumination.

Third, oil is used for flavoring. In this sense it is an image of spiritual joy; just as a sprinkling of oil makes food taste better, so does a sprinkling of spiritual joy make good works easier. It is in this sense that oil is associated with priesthood.

Fourth, oil is used for softening and smoothing. Understood in this way it signifies mercy and kindness of heart which, of course, St. Nicholas had in astounding measure. Thus, says Thomas Aquinas, just as oil spreads itself out, so does mercy, and just as oil coats things, so mercy coats every good work. He then has a very interesting passage:

You ought to consider that in the future, according to the merits of graces the evidence of rewards will appear in the glorified bodies of the saints, and that even in this life the signs of their affection appear. This is evident in the case of blessed Francis, where the signs of the passion of Christ became visible, so vehemently was he affected by the passion of Christ. In blessed Nicholas's case, signs of mercy appeared when "his tomb sweated oil," thus indicating that he was a man of great mercy.

The linking of the two extremely popular saints, Saint Francis and Saint Nicholas, is rather interesting in itself, since, while Nicholas founded no order, there are nonetheless a great many similarities between the two, as regards their place in the Church and what they have left for posterity. It has also not gone without notice that here Thomas the Dominican goes out of his way to mention the stigmata of Saint Francis, which has suggested to some that his audience may have been Franciscan. Saint Nicholas was a favored saint of the Dominicans, playing a large role in early Dominican spiritual life, and thus the linking here strongly indicates that Aquinas wants to suggest something about the two orders taken together.

In any case, Thomas holds that this fourth signification of oil is why oil is often associated with kingship. And thus in these four ways, divine grace, prophetic wisdom, priestly gladness, and kingly compassion, God works wonders in His saints.

Effective Execution

My hand shall help him. The hand symbolizes God's strength, and Thomas suggests four ways in which God's strength is found to operate in saints like Nicholas. First, God drew Nicholas to Himself and away from evil. Second, God guided Nicholas as He does all the just. Third, He gave him strength and comfort. And fourth, because Nicholas showed exquisite mercy, God worked miracles through him.

And this is how the sermon ends, abruptly but memorably:

It was mercy that made blessed Nicholas an extraordinary man, and the Lord strengthened him even unto everlasting life. May He lead us there, who lives with the Father and the Holy Spirit, &c.

The Nativity in Paintings III

2011-12-05T11:41:00.001-06:00

This is an early fifteenth-century painting by the Master of Flémalle, who has come to be identified with Robert Campin. Campin was something of a pioneer; he took realism in painting farther than most of his contemporaries (although, as you can see in the painting above, he also is considerably influenced by the conventions of manuscript illumination), and was one of the first to experiment with the switch from egg-based tempera to oil.

In paintings we find two major traditions for the location of the scene: the Cave or the Shed. Both are usually highly stylized, with the animal shed, for instance, often being little more than a canopy. The Nativity at Night appears to be in the Cave tradition, while the Hohenfurth painting is very definitely in the Shed tradition. Here we have a remarkably realistic, and very rickety, old animal shed; the fact that the shed is virtually falling apart does multiple duty here by creating a contrast with both the Christ Child in the foreground and the castle representing the centers of power in the background, and also by opening up more space for painting, thus allowing us to get the ox and (behind the ox) the ass.

The Cave vs. Shed option is an interesting one. Of course, when we talk about Christ in the stable, in our sense of the word, we are appealing to the Shed tradition. In fact, neither Matthew nor Luke give us any indication beyond Luke saying that there was a manger available. It could very well have been simply an adjoining room of the house dug in a little lower than the main room to keep the animals out of the latter; or, if the house was near a cave, a cave is certainly a possibility; it's unlikely to have been an out and out shed, but a sort of crude approximation to one adjoined to a house can't be wholly ruled out, either, since the word for 'manger' can also sometimes indicate an animal pen or stall.

The Cave tradition, however, seems to have the longest history; Justin Martyr in the second century states unequivocally in the Dialogue with Trypho (chapter 78) that Jesus was born in a cave just outside of Bethlehem:

Joseph took up his quarters in a certain cave near the village; and while they were there Mary brought forth the Christ and placed Him in a manger, and here the Magi who came from Arabia found Him.

And Origen writing a little bit later also states it. The Church of the Nativity itself is in this tradition: the Basilica of the Nativity (the Orthodox portion of the Church of the Nativity) is built over the Grotto of the Nativity, an underground cave that by long tradition is the place where Jesus was born, and, even if not, has for over a millenium and a half done as a proxy for it.

As far as painting goes, of course, artists will paint according to customs and times; and paintings will tend to paint Jesus as where the animals are in the culture in which the painter lives. The rise of the standalone Nativity creche has probably also given a boost to the Shed tradition since the thirteenth century, since it is easier to have a standalone stable than a standalone cave. In painting, the Shed tradition allows one to have a richer background than the Cave tradition; as with the painting above, the Shed tradition allows one to paint the Christ Child as situated within a much more vast world, while the Cave tradition instead puts greater emphasis on the foregrounded figures.

The Nativity in Paintings II

2011-12-04T16:29:00.000-06:00

This painting, by the Master of Hohenfurth, also known as the Master of Vyšší Brod, dates to the fourteenth century and originally was part of an altarpiece devoted to the life of Christ. The painting is a mix of Eastern and Western styles. The posture of the Virgin, lying in bed with the newly born Christ Child rather than kneeling before a manger is (at least in the late medieval and Renassiance period in the West) usually a sign of Byzantine influence, which often came by way of Byzantine communities in Italy. In general this attitude, associating the Nativity with more standard birthing practices, emphasizes the humanity of Christ, while the genuflecting attitude emphasizes the divinity of Christ; naturally, the more realistic the style of painting the more one would want to do to represent the divinity of Christ by symbolism, while in a more stylized style one might well prefer to emphasize the humanity of Christ.

Notice the ox and the ass, which are very nicely painted here in the background. They were there in the previous painting, as well, although there the ass is a little difficult to see. The two animals are not found in either Matthew or Luke, but are pretty much ubiquitous. They come from another Bible verse, Isaiah 1:3, in which the prophet says, "The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib." Indeed, the ox and the ass pre-date almost all other artistic conventions regarding the representation of the Nativity; it is possible to find very early representations of the Nativity consisting entirely of Christ in swaddling clothes with an ox on one side and an ass on the other, nothing else in sight. That particular representation seems to owe itself to another prophet, Habakkuk 3:2, at least in the Septuagint:

O Lord, I have heard thy report, and was afraid: I considered thy works, and was amazed: thou shalt be known between the two living creatures, thou shalt be acknowledged when the years draw nigh; thou shalt be manifested when the time is come; when my soul is troubled, thou wilt in wrath remember mercy.

Thus in those artistic representations Christ is known between the two living creatures, ox and donkey. The two animals gain more significance in that they they are sometimes seen as symbolic of the faithful children of Israel (the ox) and the just Gentiles (the ass); in that way, the placing of the Christ Child in the manger of the ox and the ass serves as a metaphor for the Incarnation itself, for we are the ox and the ass, and He has come among us. It is really rather remarkable how constant the imagery of the ox and the ass has been; we're talking about an artistic tradition that's only just short of two millenia old. It probably helps that the ox and the ass are a free detail: since the conventions for how one represents the ox and the ass are not very elaborate, an artist can do almost anything with them, and thus contribute something unique to the depiction of the scene. It's always interesting, when looking at a painting of the Nativity, to ask yourself: What is the artist doing with the ox and the ass? It's usually not anything theologically profound, but there are times when it really adds some nice touches to the painting.

The Nativity in Paintings I

2011-12-03T17:47:00.005-06:00

This is one of the most famous Nativity paintings, called Nativity at Night. It is a fairly small oil painting on oak panel that was made in the late 15th century by Geertgen van Haarlem; it was probably for private devotional use. It is actually an adaptation of an earlier painting by Hugo van der Goes which no longer survives; from descriptions and other versions (the most famous of which is Michael Sittow's early 16th-century version) we know that Geertgen's version shrinks and simplifies the original, and also reverses the orientation. The effect of the simplification, however, is quite striking, and I think makes for much of the attraction of the painting: it is all light and darkness.

All major Nativity scenes in painting are mediated versions of the original stories, much as all Christmas pageant plays are mediated versions of the originals. In this case the mediation is by way of St. Birgitta of Sweden's vision of the Nativity, which still exercises its influence. It is to Birgitta that we owe the image of the Virgin kneeling before the manger; on the basis of the striking description she gives of this in her Revelations, this became a popular scene in paintings, and thus a common part of Nativity scenes in any medium. And the brilliant light radiating from the Christ Child, which makes this painting so striking, is a Bridgettine detail, as well.

Music on My Mind

2011-12-02T17:14:00.002-06:00

The Magnetic Fields, "The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure"

As I Went I Sang with Them

2011-12-02T09:55:00.000-06:00

After Rain
by Archibald Lampman

For three whole days across the sky,
In sullen packs that loomed and broke,
With flying fringes dim as smoke,
The columns of the rain went by;
At every hour the wind awoke;
The darkness passed upon the plain;
The great drops rattled at the pane.

Now piped the wind, or far aloof
Fell to a sough remote and dull;
And all night long with rush and lull
The rain kept drumming on the roof:
I heard till ear and sense were full
The clash or silence of the leaves,
The gurgle in the creaking eaves.

But when the fourth day came–at noon,
The darkness and the rain were by;
The sunward roofs were steaming dry;
And all the world was flecked and strewn
With shadows from a fleecy sky.
The haymakers were forth and gone,
And every rillet laughed and shone.

Then, too, on me that loved so well
The world, despairing in her blight,
Uplifted with her least delight,
On me, as on the earth, there fell
New happiness of mirth and might;
I strode the valleys pied and still;
I climbed upon the breezy hill.

I watched the gray hawk wheel and drop,
Sole shadow on the shining world;
I saw the mountains clothed and curled,
With forest ruffling to the top;
I saw the river's length unfurled,
Pale silver down the fruited plain,
Grown great and stately with the rain.

Through miles of shadow and soft heat,
Where field and fallow, fence and tree,
Were all one world of greenery,
I heard the robin ringing sweet,
The sparrow piping silverly,
The thrushes at the forest's hem
And as I went I sang with them.

Aegidius Draft VII

2011-12-02T01:34:00.002-06:00

Taylor on the Good of Organisms

2011-12-01T15:47:00.000-06:00

We can think of the good of an individual nonhuman organism as consisting in the full development of its biological powers. Its good is realized to the extent that it is strong and healthy. It possesses whatever capacities it needs for successfully coping with its environment and so preserving its existence throughout the various stages of the normal life cycle of its species. The good of a population or community of such individuals consists in the population or community maintaining itself from generation to generation as a coherent system of genetically and ecologically related organisms whose average good is at an optimum level for the given environment....

The idea of a being having a good of its own, as I understand it, does not entail that the being must have interests or take an interest in what affects its life for better or for worse. We can act in a being’s interest or contrary to its interest without its being interested in what we are doing to it in the sense of wanting or not wanting us to do it. It may, indeed, be wholly unaware that favorable and unfavorable events are taking place in its life. I take it that trees, for example, have no knowledge or desires or feelings. Yet it is undoubtedly the case that trees can be harmed or benefited by our actions. We can crush their roots by running a bulldozer too close to them. We can see to it that they get adequate nourishment and moisture by fertilizing and watering the soil around them. Thus we can help or hinder them in the realization of their good. It is the good of trees themselves that is thereby affected.

Paul W. Taylor, The Ethics of Respect for Nature (PDF)

Not Frankly and in Fellowship

2011-11-29T09:59:00.000-06:00

The Song against Grocers
by G. K. Chesterton

God made the wicked Grocer
For a mystery and a sign,
That men might shun the awful shops
And go to inns to dine;
Where the bacon’s on the rafter
And the wine is in the wood,
And God that made good laughter
Has seen that they are good.

The evil-hearted Grocer
Would call his mother “Ma’am,”
And bow at her and bob at her,
Her aged soul to damn,
And rub his horrid hands and ask
What article was next
Though MORTIS IN ARTICULO
Should be her proper text.

His props are not his children,
But pert lads underpaid,
Who call out “Cash!” and bang about
To work his wicked trade;
He keeps a lady in a cage
Most cruelly all day,
And makes her count and calls her “Miss”
Until she fades away.

The righteous minds of innkeepers
Induce them now and then
To crack a bottle with a friend
Or treat unmoneyed men,
But who hath seen the Grocer
Treat housemaids to his teas
Or crack a bottle of fish sauce
Or stand a man a cheese?

He sells us sands of Araby
As sugar for cash down;
He sweeps his shop and sells the dust
The purest salt in town,
He crams with cans of poisoned meat
Poor subjects of the King,
And when they die by thousands
Why, he laughs like anything.

The wicked Grocer groces
In spirits and in wine,
Not frankly and in fellowship
As men in inns do dine;
But packed with soap and sardines
And carried off by grooms,
For to be snatched by Duchesses
And drunk in dressing-rooms.

The hell-instructed Grocer
Has a temple made of tin,
And the ruin of good innkeepers
Is loudly urged therein;
But now the sands are running out
From sugar of a sort,
The Grocer trembles; for his time,
Just like his weight, is short.

But so far there seems no bite in the prophecy; grocers you can find easily, but innkeepers, to the extent they exist at all, are more and more like grocers. Someone could write a poem called "The Vaunt of the Grocers" on the subject.

Five Thousandth Post

2011-11-28T18:26:00.000-06:00

This is, according to Blogger, my five thousandth post here. Also according to Blogger, here are the most visited posts, with #1 being the most visited:

1. Rule of Law vs. Rule by Law (August 2005)

2. Jesuit Jokes (June 2011)

3. Best Known Philosophical Sentences (July 2004)

4. Water is Not H2O (October 2011)

5. Immanuel Kant's Guide to a Good Dinner Party (July 2010)

The blogs that have sent me the most traffic since Blogger began keeping track in June 2009 are:

Philosophy, et cetera
Edward Feser
Catholic and Enjoying It!
Just Thomism
DarwinCatholic
Evolving Thoughts

Far and the way the countries that send me the most traffic are:

USA
UK
Canada
Germany
Australia
Philippines

Aegidius Draft V

2011-11-28T17:56:00.001-06:00

I'll slowly be putting up rough draft chapters at http://scion-of-lykaios.blogspot.com/. While I'll be writing every day, I'll only be posting as chapters are finished.

Capitulum Primum: Wherein we meet the Wolf of Wolves
http://scion-of-lykaios.blogspot.com/2011/11/capitulum-primum.html
Capitulum Secundum: Wherein we learn something of Wolves
http://scion-of-lykaios.blogspot.com/2011/11/capitulum-secundum.html
Capitulum Tertium: Wherein a plan is made
http://scion-of-lykaios.blogspot.com/2011/11/capitulum-tertium.html
Capitulum Quartum: Wherein a war begins
http://scion-of-lykaios.blogspot.com/2011/11/capitulum-quartum.html
Capitulum Quintum
http://scion-of-lykaios.blogspot.com/2011/11/capitulum-quintum.html
Capitulum Sextum
http://scion-of-lykaios.blogspot.com/2011/11/capitulum-sextum.html
Capitulum Septimum
http://scion-of-lykaios.blogspot.com/2011/11/capitulum-septum.html

Two more chapters today. This brings us to something over 13500 words; mostly talking, talking, talking. An artifact of trying to throw it hurriedly together in bits and pieces in times I have free; since I think in fragmentary dialogues, that's what's going to get put down if I'm in a hurry. There should be one more chapter up by December 1, and then we'll assess where things are at. I've pretty much given up on subtitles to chapters, because with all the discussion the subtitles would pretty much have to be variations on "Wherein people talk some more".

In 6 and 7 we more or less get an answer to Cat's question about what Giles was really at with "anonymous renegade" swipe at Eric, i.e., it wasn't really directed at Eric but at another person at the table; and we finally move a step closer to discovering who killed Joanne. Giles also lets slip a tiny bit more of his unpleasant side.