Dashed Off XVII

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

Look *through* the argument and see its mechanism.

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

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

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

Every con works by consent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

polite fictions // legal fictions

Law exists only in an ocean of reason.

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

'One' is predicable of every multitude.

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

Half of every profession is consistency.

Intellectuals unchallenged become intellectually flabby.

participation, appreciation, participative appreciation, appreciative participation

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

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

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

academic logistics as planned economy logistics

Hegelian dialectic as a progressive system of transcendental arguments

Eros seeks life undying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

make-believe as mimesis (internal/imaginative mimesis)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Both the natural and the artificial imitate the divine.

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

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

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

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

It takes a universe to make a man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

transfictional identity

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

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

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

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

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

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

the Eucharist and the longing for paradise

taste as confused and obscure knowledge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A novel scores and choreographs a performance.

Beauty is needed for speed of learning.

Even innocence bubbles up against constant imposition of rules.

The actor clothes himself in the character.

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

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

Storytelling is often explicitly deontic.

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

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

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

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

Serious philosophical argument is generally quite digressive.

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

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

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

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

It takes a lot of leisure to learn things well.

medicamentum quotidianae poenitentiae

imputation, adoption, and inheritance

Tradition is a weaving of old and new.

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

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

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

quasi-vowel-harmony in singing

in timelit lands we walk our way

the ascetic discipline of understatement

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

We usually need not empathy but many different empathies.

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

Links of Note

 * Mateusz Kotowski & Krzysztof Szlachcic, Deconstructing the Phantom: Duhem and the Scientific Realism Debate (PDF)

* Jane Psmith reviews Peter Lawrence's Road Belong Cargo, at "Mr. and Mrs. Psmith's Bookshelf". Highly Recommended.

* Erich Przywara, Philosophy as a Problem, at "Church Life Journal"

* Carla Bagnoli, Kant and Sidgwick on Practical Knowledge and Rational Action (PDF)

* SDG, What is a miracle? It depends partly on interpretation, at "SDG's Dailies and Sundays"

* David Hume and Suzanne Collins's Sunrise on the Reaping 

* W. Matthews Grant & Mark K. Spencer, Activity, Identity, and God (PDF). This paper makes the common mistake made on this topic, of conflating identitas with identity (the former is a much less restrictive term), and (a perhaps related mistake) in at least one passage seems to make odd assumptions about rationally distinct acts (e.g., that they are not actually distinct). I think this mistake also leads to exaggerating some of the differences among the Thomistic commentators. But with that caveat, it's a nice collection of arguments on various aspects of what it means to say that distinct acts are not diverse things in God.

* Ken MacVey, Corporations, Free Will, Responsibility, and AI: How Do They Fit Together?, at "3 Quarks Daily"

* Leonardo Flamini, Inquiry and conversation: Gricean zetetic norms and virtues (PDF)

* Chad Hansen, Daoism, at the SEP

* Klaas Kraay, Divine Freedom, also at the SEP

* Bartosz Biskup, Two Senses of Law as an Artefact (PDF)

* Bradley J. Birzer, Canticle for Leibowitz

* Laurenz Ramsauer, The Efficacy Problem (PDF), on the nature of legal systems

*John Michael Greer, The death of Progress, at "Unherd"

* Lisa Cassell, The Positive Argument for Impermissivism (PDF)

* Armand D'Angour, The truth about love, on Diotima and Socrates, at "Aeon"

* Nathan Pinkoski, Pope Francis's Managerial Revolution, at "Compact"

Dashed Off XXVIII

 Scientific evidence depending on the likeness of the universe to design (i.e., the experiment) and on the likeness of the universe to abstract intelligibles (i.e., theory), no scientific evidence could ever be such as to rule out an intelligent cause of the universe.

covenant as exemplate of Trinitarian procession

Everything truly personal is to some extent timeless.

A theory of modality can only be fully unified through positing necessary being, ie.., a case in which necessity, actuality, and possibility are mutually implying.

symbolic delomic legisign as communicable imitation of incommunicable person

Human beings use symbolic delomic legisigns to construct other signs.

"Son of God and of a human being, incapable of being violated by reason of the one state, capable of suffering by reason of the other, he renewed our mortal essence through his immortal one." Leo I (Sermon 65)
"We possess the sign of circumcision, the sanctification of anointing, the consecration of priests. We possess the purity of sacrifice, the truth of Baptism, the honor of the temple. Rightly should the messengers have ceased after the message had come to pass. Yet our reverence for these promises should not be diminished just because the fullness of grace has been shown."
"Rational souls should cling especially to those thoughts from which they gain an increase of faith."
"A double remedy has been prepared for us miserable people by the Almighty Physician, one of which is in the mystery, the other in his example. Through the one, divine grace is conferred, by virtue of the other, human response is required. As God is the author of justification so human beings are debtors of devotion."

"Christ, the primordial mystery, the primordial sacrament and the source of all sacramentality, gives to the Church the quality of being a sacrament." Dumitrus Staniloae
"The Church is constituted through sacraments, is nourished by and extends itself through them."

"El Derecho es una especial normatividad que descansa sobre dos nociones: La titularidad, y la de capacitación o potestad." (Leonardo Polo)
"La mentira destruye la organizazión, porque la organizació se basa en la communicación y la mentira la anula. Si el conectivo social es el lenguaje, corromper el lenguaje es disolvenete."
"Lo malo de la mentira es la incommunicación que introduce."

The human race has always lived in an age of wonders.

One thing that must be understood about progress is that an undeniable improvement may create an insoluble problem.

The saintly intrigues us but is also just out of reach; we find it only in reflections and flashes.

It is easy to assume that our task is to attain mature adulthood, and in the long run it is, but our primary task here and now is to be born.

Salt brings out the flavor of everything, and we are the salt of the world. Light brings out the color of everything, and we are the light of the world.

"Magic is the art and science of causing changes in consciousness in accordance with will." John Michael Greer
"A symbol held in one mind, charged with will and desire, can affect another even when there's no obvious way for the effect to take place; that's the central thesis of magic."
"You win a magical struggle by formulating an ideal, as strongly, precisely, and vividly as possible, while completely ignoring the other guy."

Listening goes beyond letting people speak; one cannot listen without communicating.

Title to rights is always membership in a class (sometimes a class with no or one member).

reasons for the eminence of Shakespearean plays
-- development in an era of fruitful interchange between 'high brow' and 'low brow' culture
-- competent reworking of material already proven popular
-- balance in guiding and in giving freedom to the actors
-- richness of tehcnique used, suitable for teaching various aspects of dramatic art
-- balance in actability and in readability on the page
-- flood of memorable metaphors and expressions

Spatial and temporal coincidence should derive from constitution, not vice versa.

Visiblity plays a larger role in successful law enforcement than is usually recognized.

All bodies are located in various places at once; it's just that these places are usually overlapping. However, since place depends on boundary, and boundary can be relative, it does not seem absolutely imposssible for one body to be in two places that are from a particular perspective not overlapping.

The modern world has increased the extent to which people become entangled in prisons of words.

The degree to which one uses profanity is in general the degree to which one uses language primarily as an expressive medium rather than an instrument of reason.

Language rules us unless we domesticate it for ourselves.

To treat material objects as constituted in terms of space and time is to treat them as being relative to measurement.

proper semi-parts: like proper parts, but imperfectly distinguishable from other proper parts; thus supplementation does not strictly apply, because a whole may consist of one proper part and at least one proper semi-part. --> borders/boundaries may be an example

procrastination as a sign of boredom

'Whatever is moved is moved by another' as required for linking dreaming and waking

Moralizing is often not the moral course of action.

The Eucharist exhibits the maximum unity of sign, i.e., the maximal unity of representamen, object, and interpretant, that a sign can have and still be a genuine sign having all three.

Dreaming is arguably several distinct phenomena that are loosely grouped together.

-- the question of how much of what we call 'the dream' is actually the interpretation of a chaos, like an internal pareidolia, or story-association over a gibberish process

dreams as having only relative coherence

Some things are changed in a regular way; what is changed in a regular way has a separate cause of its being changed in a regular way; an infinite regress of such causes is not psosible; therefore we reach a first cause of regular change.

Empathy does not easily generalize.

The abstract specification of an experiment, being the relating of boundary values by experimental means, is in itself temporally and spatially indifferent. (This is important for replicability.)

the making of an artifact as selection of contingent possibilities of natural things

A legal system requires not merely laws but institutions (which may or may not have their origin in laws). 

The immediate object of a sign is that to which it refers in use. This use is always part of a broader process, whether inquisitive or practical, within which the sign reaches toward the object as it is at the end of the progress; this is the dynamic object. Every such process is part of an intellectual life whose end is the Beatific Vision, and the sign has in this context the relevant divine ideas as its final object.

dividing the representamen
Diamond: immediate representamen : what we primarily think of as the sign-vehicle 'itself'
Null: dynamic representamen : what the sign-vehicle is in its relevant context
Box: final representamen : what the sign-vehicle is in context of all creation

"Signum est quod se ipsum sensui et praeter se aliquid animo ostendit." Augustine (De dial.)
"Loqui est articulata voce signum dare."
"Omnis doctrina vel rerum est vel signorum, sed res per signa disuntur." (De doct.)

"Figures came first so that their fulfillment could follow." Leo I

Human societies have a tendency to fracture along lines of stress, but some such societies have compensating elements.

People often underestimate the extent to which interpretation of our sensory epxeriences is affected and refined by testimony.

Vices shut us into the prison of our own character; virtues, on the other hand, open toward the fullness of human potential.

Links of Note

 * Dwayne Moore, The Argument from Reason and the Dual Process Reply (PDF)

* Santiago Chame, The Non-kinetic Origins of Aristotle's Concept of Ἐνέργεια (PDF)

* Edmund Waldstein, The So-Called 'New Natural Law Theory', at "The Josias"

* Mark Fisher, What would Thucydides say?, at "Aeon"

* James Chamberlain, Hume's 'General Rules' (PDF)

* The Stone of Destiny was a doorstep, at "The History Blog"

* Diane Mantagna interviews Edward Feser on Dignitas Infinita, at "The Catholic Thing"

* Mark Agrios, A Very Elementary Introduction to Sheaves (PDF)

* Hedda Hassel Mørch, Phenomenal Powers (PDF)

* Freddie deBoer, Why Doesn't AI Want to Show Me Jesus Washing the Feet of His Disciples?

* Elle Griffin, No one buys books, at "The Elysian"

[ADDED LATER: John Michael Greer has an interesting post on Griffin's essay, Lenocracy in Extremis: The Case of Publishing, at "Ecosophia".]

* Francesca Bellazzi, Biochemical functions (PDF)

* Christine Norvell, Work and Leisure: A Pieper Primer, at "Front Porch Republic"

* Nicholas Colgrove, Defending the Doctrine of the Mean Against Counterexamples: A General Strategy (PDF)

Links of Note

 * David Torillos-Castrillejo, Philosophical Reflection on Beauty in the Late Middle Ages: The Case of Jean Gerson (PDF)

* Marius Ion Benta, The Multiple Realities of Paul's Mystical Experience: A Phenomenological Perspective in the Anthropology of Religion (PDF)

* Patrick J. Casey, What is 'lived experience'?, at "Aeon"

* Mark Vernon, The enchanted vision, on love as a cosmic quality, also at "Aeon"

* Alexandre Billon, "The only organ of contact with reality is love", on love as a sense of reality, at "Le Substack de Alexandre"

* Alberto Oya, Religious Fictionalism and the Ontological Status of God (PDF)

* John Michael Greer, The Secret of the Sages, at "Ecosophia"

* William H. Harwood & Paria Akhgari, Heroes and Demigods: Aristotle's Hypothetical "Defense" of True Nobles (PDF)

* Matthew Duncombe, Diodorus Cronus, at the SEP

* Gregory Salmieri and Benjamin Bayer, How We Choose Our Beliefs (PDF)

* William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature

* Sinan Dogramaci, Evolutionary Explanations of Our Reliability (PDF)

* William F. Vallicella, Intentionality in Locks and Keys?, at "Philosophy in Progress"

* Don Garrett, Hume's Geography of Feeling in A Treatise of Human Nature (PDF)

* William L. Bell, Rights Reclamation (PDF)

* Edmund Waldstein, He Misses Someone He's Never Even Met, on David Foster Wallace, at "Humanum"

Immediate Book Meme

 Mrs. Darwin recently did an Immediate Book Meme, so I might as well do one here.

***********************************

There are plenty of memes that want to know all about your book history and your all-time greats and your grand ambitions, but let's focus on something more revealing: the books you're actually reading now, or just read, or are about to read. Let's call it The Immediate Book Meme.

***

Over the past couple years, I've been doing quite a few audiobooks as well as books, so for some questions I'll give two answers, the book answer and the audiobook answer. 

1. What book are you reading now?

A. Books

Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, which is the current fortnightly book

Erik Varden, The Shattering of Loneliness -- only just started this

Luke Timothy Johnson, The First and Second Letters to Timothy: A new translation with introduction and commentary

B. Audiobooks

Agatha Christie, Evil Under the Sun -- Enjoying this one more than I expected

Michael Flynn, Rogue Star

R. F. Kuang, Babel -- only just started this

C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature

2. What book did you just finish?

A. Books

Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat, which was the previous fortnightly book

Gillian Russell, Barriers to Entailment -- excellent, I'll certainly have something up about it at some point

B. Audiobooks

Agatha Christie, Hercule Poirot's Christmas

Agatha Christie, One, Two, Buckle My Shoe

Michael Flynn, Firestar

Agatha Christie, Cards on the Table -- of the Agatha Christies I hadn't read before, this has certainly been the best, although I think it would probably be a better read than a listen.

3. What do you plan to read next?

A. Books

By far, this is the hardest of these questions to answer. The obvious thing is the  next fortnightly book, but I haven't decided yet what that will be. At some point over Lent, which starts in about two weeks, I expect to do Sigrid Undset's Saga of the Saints. 

After a short pause, I will probably re-read Gillian Russell's Barriers to Entailment.

Last week, I picked up a few books at Half Price Books, some of which I intend to get through at some point in the near future:

Philip Zaleski & Carol Zaleski: The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse -- I think I read this one in high school, but can't recall much about it.

Agatha Christie, Towards Zero -- I don't think I've read this one at all.

B. Audiobooks

The following are currently checked out on my Libby Shelf and just need to be started.

Agatha Christie, Appointment with Death -- I've read this multiple times, but really want to see how it works in audiobook

Agatha Christie, Mrs. McGinty's Dead -- I don't know if I've read this one at all, although I think not

The following are currently on hold with Libby, waiting for available copies.

Agatha Christie, Sad Cypress

Agatha Christie, The ABC Murders

Agatha Christie, Five Little Pigs

C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

4. What book do you keep meaning to finish?

St. Anthony's Greek Orthodox Monastery, The Departure of the Soul According to the Teaching of the Orthodox Church -- but this is a bit-at-a-time book, anyway

The other two I started before Christmas vacation and just haven't gotten back to them yet:

Albert the Great, On the Body of the Lord

Henri Poincare, The Value of Science

5. What book do you keep meaning to start?

John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods, 2nd edition.

Mortimer Adler, Philosopher at Large

6. What is your current reading trend?

In books I don't have a reading trend, but as should be obvious, I have (since November) been going through Agatha Christie on audiobook. I did the Marples in November last year and have been doing the Poirots since then. (As a sidenote, from what I've listened to so far, Miss Marple does consistently better in audiobook than Poirot, who is much more uneven; and of the Poirot works, it is, perhaps surprisingly, the middling works that usually seem to work best -- Murder in Mesopotamia, Dumb Witness, and the like. The better books often trade on subtleties that are just easily missed in audiobook, and the worst Poirots tend to be overly complicated, so the books that work best as audiobooks are those that trade on neither subtlety nor detail, or at least very little, and thus are primarily carried by what might be called 'psychological' features of the story and the general sense of each character.) I am also currently going (much more slowly) through Michael Flynn's Firestar series on audiobook.

Links of Note

 * Johan Olsthoon, The problem of penal slavery in Quobna Ottobah Cuguano's abolitionism (PDF)

* Michael Walschots, The Rationality of Love: Benevolence and Complacence in Kant and Hutcheson (PDF)

* Daniel O'Malley, A Thomistic Argument against the Simulation Hypothesis, at "Reality"

* Cheryl Misak, C. David Naylor, Mark Tonelli, Trisha Greenhalgh, and Graham Foster, Case Report: What—or who—killed Frank Ramsey? Some reflections on cause of death and the nature of medical reasoning, at Wellcome Open Research

* Elzė Sigutė Mikalonytė, Musical Works Are Mind-Independent Artifacts (PDF)

* Roe Fremstedal, Kierkegaard on the Metaphysics of Hope (PDF)

* John Michael Greer, Science as Enchantment, at "Ecosophia"

* Andrea Raimondi & Ruchika Jain, Dispositions, Virtues, and Indian Ethics (PDF)

* Aaron Wells, Du Chatelet's Philosophy of Mathematics (PDF)

* Michael Lind, Profit, Power, and Purpose: Rethinking the Modern Corporation, at "The Hedgehog Review"

* John Schwenkler, The Categories of Causation (PDF)

* Tony Svoboda, A Kantian Approach to the Moral Considerability of Non-human Nature (PDF)

* A new open access philosophy journal: Philosophy of Physics

* Raffaele Carbone, Cartesian and Malebranchian Meditations (PDF)

* Kevin J. Lande, Pictorial Syntax (PDF)

* Razib Khan, Genomics Has Revealed an Age Undreamed Of, at "Palladium"

* James Mahon, Getting Your Sources Right: What Aristotle didn't say (PDF), on metaphor

* Helga Varden, How to Move Beyond Our Endless Disagreements over Abortion Policies, at "Public Seminar". The position in the article does not, in fact, do anything to move beyond disagreements over abortion policies; and, despite Varden calling it 'Kantian', I think the particular distinction in the article between 'personal' and 'legal' conceptions is not at all Kantian. In a genuine Kantian position, the 'legal' only covers external behavior, and the contrast is not with the 'personal' but the 'moral', which is more, not less, common than the legal, since it obligates all rational beings. I think Varden's Step Two also underestimates the extent to which legal classifications do, in fact, presuppose moral classifications; the particular kind of legal positivism that Varden's argument seems to presuppose is also definitely not Kantian. It's also notable that Varden puts her hand on the scale, and assumes (what is in fact one of the major points of contention) that there is a moral right to an abortion; her 'let's all get along' position is not really a resolution but boils down to 'Pro-choicers should make minor concessions and pro-lifers should make major concessions'. Nonetheless, despite these criticisms, I think Varden's argument is interesting, and I do think there is a tendency to overlook the ways in which the gap between the statutory and the moral complicates the situation of what laws to have whenever controversies arise on matters intimately associated with our lives as persons.

Evening Note for Friday, March 31

 Thought for the Evening: Regimes of Justice with Regard to Bad Situations

Justice is involved in many things, but one part of its range of activities is dealing with bad situations. If we think of full-blown bad situations as cases in which harms are done by wrong behavior stemming from a faulty disposition, then we have three elements here (fault, misbehavior, harm) that can make something a bad situation in some sense. We also have to consider whether remedy is practicable. If we add this, then we get a number of different kinds of bad situations, broadly construed, with which justice may have to deal, based on four variables. We can then represent each kind of situation by a number involving 0's and 1's; for standardization, we'll keep the order always as fault-misbehavior-harm-remediability, with remediability after a decimal. Here are some examples to make that clear:

111.0  This is the full-blown bad situation where there is no adequate remedy for what has been done.

001.1 This would be a case where a harm was done that was wholly accidental (unintentional and the action itself that led to it was not wrong), but something can be done to remedy the harm.

110.0 This would be a case in which someone did a bad thing out of bad motives but no harm was done, and there's nothing particularly adequate that can be done as remedy.

And so forth. In light of these different combinations, we can identify what we might call 'regimes of justice', structurally distinct general patterns of how justice will have to deal with these kinds of bad situations. The situations 000.0 and 000.1 fall outside of anything that we are considering here.

I. Regime of Repair. [111.1, 011.1, 101.1] The regime of repair always, of course, requires that the situation involve remediable harm for which one is in some way responsible. Thus in a regime of repair you are always engaging in some restoration or reparation or satisfaction (if done for yourself) or requiring others to do this (what is historically known as vindication). 

II. Regime of Mitigation [001.1] In the regime of mitigation, there is a harm for which you are not responsible, but you have it in your power to remedy it. As a matter of strict justice, you are not required to engage in repair if it is detrimental to you and yours, but as a matter of the root principles of justice, you should extend your assistance in repairing the situation to the extent that it can be done in a mutually beneficial way. If it's not you but a third party who is involved, your responsibilities are more tenuous, but would involve, to the extent you can reasonably and with mutual benefit do so, assisting and making possible what mitigation can be done.

III. Regime of Correction [100.1, 010.1, 110.1] In the regime of correction, someone acted with a bad disposition, or acted in a bad way, but a remedy is possible and for whatever reason no harm was done; given the situation, the remedy would involve at least self-correction and resolution not to act that way again. Again, if it is not oneself but a third party who has done this, the case may call for rebuke or reprimand, or it may just call for encouragement to improve, or something like that.

IV. Regime of Apology [111.0,  110.0, 101.0, 011.0, 001.0, 010.0, 100.0] The regime of apology deals with bad situations in which there is no adequate remedy. The human way of handling these situations in which nothing substantive can be done is the creation of symbolic remedies and token remedies, which can take a number of forms, but fall broadly under the category of apologizing (although some particular kinds of apologies may be part of repair, mitigation, and correction) or at least sympathetic acknowledgement.

So these seem to be the broad regions of justice in handling cases where something bad has been done, whether intentionally or by accident.

Various Links of Interest

 * Andrew Chignell, Leibniz and Kant on Empirical Miracles: Rationalism, Freedom, and Laws (PDF)

* Kathrin Koslicki, The threat of thinking things into existence (PDF), on Lynne Rudder Baker's account of artifacts

* Michel Dufour, Old and New Fallacies in Port-Royal Logic (PDF)

* Taylor Patrick O'Neill, The Relation of Justice and Mercy in Anselm's Prosogion

* Jon Tveit, A Brief Introduction to the Common Good, at "The Josias"

* David Neuhas, Christians and the Torah, reviews Rabbi Edward Feld's The Book of Revolutions, at "Commonweal"

* Jacob Blumenfeld, The Role of Potentiality in Aristotle's Ethics (PDF)

* John Michael Greer discusses Rudolf Steiner in The Perils of a Pioneer, at "Ecosophia"

* Brian Kemple, On Signs and Simulations

Currently Reading

Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pius II), Secret Memoirs of a Renaissance Pope
John Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions: The Church AD 450-680
Michel Rene Barnes, The Power of God

In Audiobook

Roger Zelazny, Roadmarks
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Links of Note

 * Musa al-Gharbi, On Clarence Thomas, White Liberals, and Racial Politics

* Adam M. Willows, Stories and the Development of Virtue (PDF)

* Crispin Sarwell, The Supreme Court's Legitimacy. One of the problems of talk of 'legitimacy' is that it really means either that something is legal, that something is effectively supported, or something that someone takes to be important independent of any legality or support; and the result is that almost all talk of 'illegitimacy' in politics would either better handled by talking about legality or support, or else is just an attempt to pretend that state agencies and institutions can magically be ignored or attacked despite being legal and/or having significant political support. It is, practically speaking, a useless concept.

* Martin Pickup, The Problem of Change Restored (PDF)

* Jennifer Frey, Teaching virtue in the digital age

* Matthew Walker, Reconciling the Stoic and the Sceptic: Hume on Philosophy as a Way of Life and the Plurality of Happy Lives (PDF)

* T. Greer, A Guide Map for Reading the East Asian Canon

* Lara Buchak, Faith and Traditions (PDF)

* Chris Petitt, The Story of the Leonine Walls

* Aaron Wells, Science and the Principle of Sufficient Reason: Du Chatelet Contra Wolff (PDF)

* Carroll Quigley, Epistemology, Semantics, and Doublethink

* Rasmus Jaksland, A trilemma for naturalized metaphysics

* Geoff Shullenberg, Is wokeness just for the elite?, reviews Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò's Elite Capture.

* Dolf Rami, Notions of Existence in Frege (PDF)

* Harper, Burser, and Baguley, Do Concepts Creep to the Left and the Right? Evidence for Ideologically Salient Concept Breadth Judgments Across the Political Spectrum

* Hands Up Primary Latin Course

Loose Jottings Toward a Philosophy of Religions

* I call it 'philosophy of religions' rather than 'philosophy of religion' to distinguish it from the many things that get lumped together under the latter label. 'Religions' or 'a religion' gives us something distinct from 'religion' qua system or attitude or virtue, even though obviously there will be relations between the two.

* One always runs into the difficulty of defining religion, but part of the reason for the difficulty of this is that religion is inherently an orientation to something other than itself, and people regularly run into problems trying to define 'a religion' independently of that to which a given religion is oriented. One can think of an analogy here, as if one tried to define 'thought' without taking into account the fact that thought has objects, and, indeed, extremely different and widely variable objects; this becomes perplexing because intentionality is the very heart of what thought is, so trying to abstract from it gets us strange results. Likewise, we should simply avoid trying to define everything religious as if it were all univocally so; we should instead pick something particular and discuss it.

* It is more useful, then, to go around a different way and consider the structure of the orientation as an orientation. A crude, intuitive starting point can be the idea of liminality from anthropology. Van Gennep in studying rites and rituals, particularly rites of passage, saw them as having a threefold structure: preliminal, liminal, postliminal. The pre- and post- make sense of rites of passage, which involve a transition, but they presuppose a this-side-of-the-threshold and a that-side-of-the-threshold first. The essential idea is that human beings experience human life as involving fundamental borders -- again, this is a crude, intuitive place to begin, but every given religion has, as a genus, orientation across a fundamental border of human life. The 'across' is important. Everyone recognizes life-borders; but for the general kind of orientation that a religion has to be, the life-border has to be a crossable threshold. And in particular, a religion, as an orientation across a life-border, is a particular kind of orientation to a power across the border, to which either we can cross, or which can cross to our side. For instance, human beings recognize death as a limit. Merely recognizing death as a limit does not get one to a religion. Recognizing it as a crossable limit (there is something beyond death) gets closer, and taking there to be a power across the border of some kind is much closer, and organizing one's life in part around the power across the border of death is the sort of thing I here call 'a religion'. The primary qualification of all this crude groundwork is that it generally seems more convenient not to call 'a religion' every particular cross-liminal orientation to a power beyond the threshold of human life, since virtually all people (perhaps indeed all) have a tangle of such orientations, and it seems reasonable to say that 'a religion' is a given kind of orientation-tangle.

* This is, incidentally, why 'grave goods' are significant for the history of religion. It is impossible to make sense of a consistent custom of placing goods in graves without taking there to be some actual point to doing so. Graves indicate a recognition of death as a life-border; grave goods seem only to have a point if they are taken to cross that life-border as a threshold, even if only symbolically; while we have no direct information that far back, the simplest hypothesis is recognizing that the dead across the border have some kind of agency and power, even if only on their side; and the practice is orienting our life to that power. Death is not the only life-border, by any means, but it is the first for which we have definite evidence that it was probably taken as a crossable threshold with an other-side significant for this-side, even though we don't have any direct evidence for how people thirteen thousand years ago conceived the crossability, or the other side, or the significance.

* All this is, again, crude, but it puts us into position to make a more fundamental move. Rather than talk directly about such powers, which is the temptation, we should talk about the kinds of attributions under which something is classified as a beyond-threshold power. This has several advantages, one of which is that it gives us much more flexibility than other approaches, because it takes into account that human beings relate different kinds of attributions in different ways, and mix them up in various ways.

* So what are the kinds of attributions that we find? There are at least three, and probably only three. First, we can attribute a distinct personal or quasi-personal power on the basis of a local causal inference. Call these tutelar attributions. Second, we can attribute an abstract power on the basis of a global or general causal inference. Call these preternatural attributions. Third, we can attribute an ultimate power on the basis of a global or general causal inference. Call these deity attributions. And, as noted, these can be mixed. For instance, if we stick with death as our example of a threshold, the power across the way may be attributed as

tutelar, like Hades or Osiris, distinct 'caretakers' for matters concerned with the other side of the death-threshold;
preternatural, like Death as a powerful abstract entity;
tutelar-preternatural, like the Angel of Death or Grim Reaper as a personation of abstract Death;
deity-preternatural, like Death worshipped as an ultimate divinity in a death cult;
deity-tutelar, like ultimate Judge of the dead;

and so forth. It's important to keep in mind that we are talking attributions, not things; the same thing may have multiple different attributions. Thus, to take a very different example, Christians use all different kinds of attributions to talk about God. 'God' usually indicates a deity attribution (unsurprisingly), that is an ultimacy of power; but God is also referred to as 'Heaven' or as 'Deity' or 'Divinity', which is a preternatural attribution; and God is referred to by attributions indicating provident caretaking, like 'Father', and such attributions are tutelar attributions.

* A good example of why it is useful to think in terms of attributions can be seen in terms of tutelar attributions. Tutelar attributions largely arise because we think of the world socially; we are very able to relate to things to the extent we see them as intelligent powers, or at least like such. Thus it can be argued that we take personality (in at least a broad, loose sense) to be the default; we take things to be at least candidates for at least quasi-personal agency, until we have reason to think they are not. Thus we find, throughout the world, people applying tutelar attributions to natural things. But if we look at many of these, there is not necessarily any sharpness to the attribution; people apply the attribution -- the tree has a numen, a hidden (cross-threshold) quasi-personal agency, and who knows it has related to everything else. You could have people who hold that all trees have the same numen, or that each tree has a distinct numen; you could have people who hold that the numen of a tree is very different from the numen of a river, and people who don't. You can have one thing (like a river) with multiple tutelar attributions for various different reasons, or you could take the attributions each to be identifying something separate. The primary driver for separating tutelar attributions is difficulty in seeing how they are related (cf. Greer's argument for polytheism); arguments from evil perhaps also play a role, by suggesting that certain tutelar attributions cannot be combined. But nothing about tutelar attributions as such prevents people from uniting them together, either, and people have done so throughout history. Think of the interpretatio graeca and the interpretatio romana. 'Sulis' and 'Minerva' are distinct tutelar attributions; but nothing prevents combination into 'Sulis Minerva', if you can find some commonality. This is why we have the peculiarity in almost every polytheism that apparently distinct gods are sometimes also apparently conflated. Plutarch has a work in which a character argues that the God of the Jews must be Dionysus, because their primary holy day is the Sabbath, which obviously indicates a feast of Sabazios, who is Dionysus or Zeus, just depending. This is excellent reasoning for someone who primarily thinks in terms of tutelar attributions. For Jews, who subordinate tutelar attributions to the deity attribution of the Ineffable Name, which they mostly only allow to be united to tutelar attributions connected to their history (God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), it inevitably sounds like gibberish; the Lord who is One is equated with a god who is also another god or two. This is because the function of tutelar attributions is very different from the function of a deity attribution; the former indicate caretakings, the latter an ultimacy. But caretakings can flow in and out of each other.

* Preternatural attributions arise from abstraction; abstracting, we posit an abstract entity with a reality of its own. This may be separate from any tutelar appellation -- the Forms are not gods, but more divine than the gods -- but they may also be combinable, since it's fairly natural for us to personify abstractions, and indeed, personifying abstractions involves combining with tutelar attributions. Thus we get the goddess Virtue, which is a preternatural attribution that has begun to be combined with specific tutelar attributions (e.g., the power that has patronage of this temple). The reverse can happen as well. We can start with a tutelar attribution and allegorize it into abstraction, as Lucretius does with Venus.

* Deity attributions are a puzzle. They are much more rare, and while they do get associated with tutelar and preternatural attributions, it's very hard to see how deity attributions arise psychologically. The Lockean account takes us to get to God as an ultimate attribution by removing limits from our own mind; but this just seems to give us a tutelar attribution. The same happens with accounts that try to use a primary tutelar attribution. More plausible are cases where we start with the preternatural abstraction of Divinity, but it's still unclear how we get beyond this. Many accounts of religion really require the assumption that there are only tutelar or preternatural divine titles; but the Ineffable Name, for instance, or 'God' as it is usually used by Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Sikhs, is neither. There seem three possible paths: the Cartesian path (the capacity for deity attributions is always innate), the traditionary path (the capacity for deity attributions is taught, ultimately from something for which it is innate), and we-know-not-how.

* A pecularity -- but it is an advantage -- of the attribution approach is that one can attribute without belief. The obvious example of this is Santa Claus, who is characterized as a power across a life-border under tutelar attributions. Super-liminal powers are attributed to him, and we reorganize our lives around him. Atheists who try to lump together gods and Santa Claus are not wholly wrong; they both involve tutelar attributions. But attributions can be in different modes. We can attribute in a proper mode, as with the devout or as with the superstitious. This involves real belief. We can attribute in a mode of disenchantment. The Hopi believe the kachinas existed, maybe still do, but young Hopi have to learn eventually that the things that they call kachinas in feasts and the like are not, because the real kachinas are gone, who knows where, and we don't know what happened to them. There are many agnostics likewise who still use tutelar attributions, just in disenchantment rather than proper mode. The attributions stand, but we use them specifically as being not what we thought. We can attribute in an as-if mode, playing along, as with the Renaissance literary use of Greek and Roman mythology, swearing to Jove and the like. And we can attribute in a fictional mode, either as symbolically representing something known under other attributions in other modes (Aslan) or as purely fictional. The tutelar attributions of Santa Claus are attributed (by adults) in disenchantment, as-if, and fictional modes. It would be a mistake, though, to assume that the tutelar attributions of gods in whom one believes are always in proper mode; religious believers of all types often use every mode of attribution of their divinities, depending on context, and in fact, in many religions, it can be very difficult sometimes to tell which is being used because all the modes are used so promiscuously. Greek polytheism is a good example; it was not a belief-based religion, so there was no penalty for not prioritizing the proper mode if you didn't want to do so, and the Ancient Greek religion was practiced in part by literally making up and acting out stories about the gods known by tradition. Most of what we know about the Greek gods is from fictional stories about local ritual traditions, which we know were sometimes believed to be at least plausible but sometimes not believed at all, and, allowing for cultural differences, the same is true of many other polytheisms. Divine Caesar received his tutelar attributions, and you practiced part of the Roman religion by merely attributing them (whatever the mode) in relevant ritual and ceremony; the Christians got into trouble because they refused to do so even in as-if mode. Similarly, all agnostics and atheists still use tutelar and preternatural attributions at least occasionally; they just stop using the proper mode. When discussing things with religious believers, they often use disenchantment or as-if modes; they may still use religious attributions as symbols or in fictional stories. They personify abstractions like everyone else; they allegorize concretes like everyone else; they interact with their world as if there were persons on the other side like everyone else. The attributions can still stand even if you don't believe them. This is why there is sometimes still a clear distinction between a 'Catholic atheist' and a 'Muslim atheist'; they still carry around them, although unbelieved, a religion, a tangle of cross-liminal attributions of power.

Evening Note for Thursday, June 24

 Thought for the Evening: Reduction to Box

If we set aside some marginal forms, the most obvious feature of modal logic is the division of modalities into a strong modality (Box) and a weak modality (Diamond). The exact interpretation of each can vary considerably, since we can take the pair to be necessity-possibility, always-sometimes, everywhere-somewhere, everyone-someone, required-allowed, obligatory-permissible, and many more.

One of the things that is noticeable about our explanatory practice is our tendency to try to trace everything back to (some kind of) Box. We try to explain the variable in terms of the invariable, the possible in terms of the necessary, the permissible in terms of the obligatory. If someone asks why John is doing something, "Everyone is doing it" would be a perfectly reasonable answer for a wide variety of cases; if someone asks why Mary is doing something right now, "She always does it" will often work as a response. Or we may trace it back to some Box that is less obviously connected to our starting case; for instance, if someone asks why John is taking a given route, I might say, "Because it is necessary for him to get back home." This seems to be quite general; the weakly modal case is traced back to the strongly modal rule.

The implications will differ according to the modality and how it works. I've previously suggested that anything that can be put into a square of opposition can be treated as a modal operator. But there are different kinds of square of opposition, and how you reduce to Box differs according to which one describes your modal operator.

One kind, the semidegenerate square, collapses Diamond and Box into each other; it's not actually a 'square' at all, just a line that divides things into two categories Box/Diamond and Not-Box/Not-Diamond. If you have a weakly modal case, like this possible thing, you can immediately recognize it as necessary. Systems like this in which you can go directly from Diamond to Box are very boring. If "Sometimes A" implies "Always A" or "X is Permissible" implies "X is Obligatory", reduction to Box is trivial; you have a flat, unstructured system. Total determinism gives you such a flat, unstructured system; everything possible is necessary, and all your explanation ends where it started. Nonetheless, I suspect that this is why determinism  is a kind of recurring dream; if it's all necessary already, there's not much left to explain. It cuts the Gordian knot, gets you where you want to be, even if it is by the lazy shortcut of moving the finish line to the starting line. Nonetheless, you do get real modalities like this, particularly in mathematics and logic: sometimes in those fields you can prove that something is necessary just by proving that it is possible. If it's genuinely possible that there is an odd number higher than four, then it is necessary for there to be an odd number higher than four.

In a Boolean or modern square of opposition, Diamond and Box are only minimally related: Box is contradictory opposite to Diamond-Not and Diamond is contradictory opposite to Box-Not, and that's it. This makes reduction to Box extremely difficult; it's like trying to explain an actual event with a bare hypothetical -- even if the bare hypothetical is relevant, it doesn't have a lot of explanatory heft. Perhaps because of this, we don't actually use Boolean-square modalities all that much.

The other major square of opposition, of course, is the Aristotelian, classical, or traditional square, which has not only contradiction but also contrariety, subcontrariety, and subalternation. Subalternation seems particularly important: Box implies Diamond. This gives us a full set of resources (beginning from one corner of the square we can get to any other corner in several ways), so Aristotelian-square modalities seem to be the ideal kind of modality for reduction to Box. And indeed most of the modalities we use in an explanatory way are quite naturally seen as subalternating: if something happens always, it happens sometimes; if something happens everywhere, it happens somewhere; if something is necessary, it is possible; if something is obligatory, it is permissible; and so forth.

If we start with Diamond, how do we reduce to Box. Well, one way is that you can divide up all the Diamond-states precisely and then sum over them. For instance, if you want to move from 'sometimes' to 'always', one way you can do it, is by taking all the particular 'sometimeses', that is, the individual times, and identify what is true of all of them. If something is true at every time, it is always true. You could also, however, get to Box without summing if you could rule out the right kinds of things; in practice, I think, we tend to do this by appealing to causes.

This is all immensely simplified. In fact, we run into any number of complications. One of the obvious ones is that strong and weak modalities are not equally strong and weak, so you can reduce Box to stronger Box; and by the same token, there are always many different Boxes to which you could reduce Diamond. For instance, if our Diamond is interpreted in terms of time, This happens sometimes, we can explain this by a temporal Box, This happens always; but it also seems that we could explain it by an alethic Box, This happens necessarily. Those are obviously two very different explanations, and they would not be equally useful in every situation. The relations are also not always straightforward. There are situations in which it is perfectly legitimate to reduce "This happens sometimes" to "It is obligatory that this happens"; but how "It is obligatory that this happens" relates to "This happens always" is less than lucid. And, of course, we are rarely in a position to reduce directly; we often have to do it in qualified ways (e.g., we might not be able to reduce directly to "This happens always" but only to "This happens always unless that does")  or with scaffolding that gives us additional information we need to maneuver (like causal reasoning or analogy or physical theory), all of which introduce their own complications.

Various Links of Interest

* Asya Passinsky, Norm and Object: A Hylomorphic Theory of Social Objects (PDF)

* Zion Lights, The Sad Truth about Traditional Environmentalism

* Kenneth L. Pearce, Astell and Masham on Epistemic Authority and Women's Individual Judgment in Religion (PDF)

* Shane Gassaway, Just Silence in Plato's Clitophon (PDF)

* Edmund Waldstein, Common Good Eudemonism

* Tanner Greer, How I Taught the Iliad to Chinese Teenagers

* Philip Pilkington, Monetary Faith

* Ljiljana Radenovic, From Deficient Liberalism Toward a Deeper Sense of Freedom

* Rafael de Arizaga, Matrimony Doesn't Exist

* Hrishiskesh Joshi, Dare to Speak Your Mind and Together We Flourish

* Nur Banu Simsek, Arise to Wisdom, on Ibn Tufayl

* The Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress

* Chiara Marletto, Our Little Life is Rounded with Possibility, on the importance of counterfactuals to understanding the world

* An interesting look at a particular case of agro-mining, in which plants are grown in metal-heavy soil and then the metal harvested from the plants.

* Christopher Frey, Plato and Aristotle between Autonomy and Oppression

* Zachary Micah Gartenberg, On the causal role of privation in Thomas Aquinas's metaphysics (PDF)

* Avery Hurt, What's Really Happening when You Experience Deja Vu?, discusses the current speculations (for speculations are all we actually have at present) about the phenomenon. It's a topic I'm interested because I have a long history of very intense deja-vu experiences.

* Umberto Eco's private library is being moved to Bologna University, where it will be preserved as an archive, i.e., it will continue to be organized along the same plan Eco himself used, as a distinct part of the library. They will also eventually digitize all his notes and comments on the books.

* Thornton Lockwood, In Praise of Solon: Aristotle on Classical Greek Democracy (PDF)

Currently Reading

The Vinland Sagas
Peter Martyr Vermigli, Commentary on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics
Richard Courant & Herbert Robbins, What is Mathematics?

Dashed Off XXIV

This starts the notebook that was begun in September 2018.

To see why things don't work is immensely useful.

The homily is the preeminent form of preaching precisely because it is structured by the liturgical year and is in service to the liturgy.

The testimony of the Holy Spirit is recognized first and foremost in His actions in and through the Church.

Calvin's argument that the pictorial kind of image is only to entertain fails to account for the pictorial (and not historical) images of the ark of the covenant and of the Temple.

The iconographer must, by means of the visible, paint the invisible.

This is the thing with tradition: great trees that grew for centuries can be cut down in an hour, and the cutting cannot be undone. All one can do is replant.

"Evil preaches tolerance until it is dominant, then it tries to silence good." Chaput

The two pillars of intellectual greatness are rigorous abstraction and humane tradition.

rites as 'marking the Way' like signs that mark treacherous spots at fords (Xunzi 17.11)

God is love (1 Jn 4:8,16) and love is from Him (4:7), such that God's love is primary and principal (4:10); God is unseen but is known by His abiding in love (4:12).

(1) Love admits of more and less.
(2) What admits of more and less does so insofar as it approaches or recedes from what is as such (a maximum).
(3) Therefore there is love as such.
(4) Love is a simple (pure) perfection.
(5) What is a simple perfection is in itself immeasurable.
(6) Love as such is immeasurable.

The act of the first mover is love.

Confucian rectification of names rightly recognizes that society and practical life are built on classifications.

"...those natures which are not susceptible of highest degree are not perfections." Leibniz (DM 1)

Commensal, mutualistic, and parasitic relations between ecclesial and state institutions.

HoP is good for teaching that interpretation is an evidential process of approximation, and thus can be right/wrong and can also come in degrees.

Being gentlemanly presupposes a framework within which giving respect gets respect.

In the Eucharist, our gift to God is transformed by God into God's gift to us.

The Eucharist is in the fullest sense a sacrifice because it is address, oblation, consecration, and commemoration all at once.

Calvin explicitly assimilates the eucharist to baptism (Institutes IV.17.14), which is why his account of the real presence in the Supper always sounds like the real presence of the Spirit in baptism.

religious attributions
admit of universal causal argument: deity, preternatural
admit only of local causal argument: tutelar

beyondgrave attribution complexes
(1) chiefly tutelar: Hades, Osiris
(2) tutelar-preternatural: Ma'at, Grim Reaper, Angel of Death
(3) deity-preternatural: Death in a death cult
(4) deity-tutelar-preternatural: God as Judge
inworld vs beyondgrave attributions

superpersonal, at-least-personal, and impersonal tutelars and 'HADD'
agency detection -> tutelar attributions
abstraction -> preternatural attributions
? -> deity attributions
Obviously Descartes argues that deity attributions can derive from nothing except God causing as to have them

Essay Toward a More Complete Philosophy of Religion
(1) Limit and Beyond
--- (a) Religions ritually tend to focus on boundaries/thresholds.
--- (b) Otto on the numinous
--- (c) kinds of beyondness-attribution
(2) Tutelar Attributions
--- (a) agency-candidate detection
--- (b) design arguments
--- (c) the Democritean account?
--- (d) tutelar separation
--- --- (1) difficulty of equation (Greer)
--- --- (2) argument from evil
(3) Preternatural Attributions
--- (a) abstraction
--- (b) abstract entities
--- (c) interaction with abstract entities
--- --- (1) subjective
--- --- (2) exemplar
--- --- (3) directly causal
--- (d) concrete indefinites (partial abstractions)
--- (e) allegorization
--- (f) Neoplatonism
(4) Deity Attributions
--- (a) There is no obvious psychological derivation for deity attributions (failure of Lockean account).
--- (b) The Cartesian Argument
--- (c) The Traditionary Argument
--- (d) A Mediation Argument (tutelary-preternatural mediation)
--- (e) Global Cause Argument
--- (f) relation to ontological argument
(5) Interaction of Attributions
--- (a) examples in polytheistic contexts
--- --- (1) preternatural tutelars
--- --- (2) Neoplatonic
--- (b) examples in monotheistic contexts
--- --- (1) Christ
--- --- (2) Sri Guru Granth
--- (c) examples in popular arguments
--- (d) examples in philosophical arguments
(6) Inworld vs Beyondgrave Versions
--- (a) Death as another threshold
--- (b) NDE's and senses of presence
--- (c) Beyondgrave attributions cut across all three.
--- --- (1) Tutelar: Hades, Osiris, Angel of Death
--- --- (2) Preternatural: Death
--- --- (3) Deity: God as having power over the realm of the dead
(7) Kinds of Meeting
--- (a) inspiration (suggestive)
--- (b) revelation (saturated)
--- (c) miracle/wonder
--- (d) union
(8) Basic Responses
--- (a) Address (speaking)
--- (b) Oblation (giving)
--- (c) Consecration (setting apart)
--- (d) Commemoration (remembering)
(9) Rites and Rituals
--- (a) performatives
--- (b) symbolic representation of liminal and superliminal (allegorization)
--- (c) liturgical knowing
--- (d) Neoplatonism
--- (e) Neoconfucianism
(10) Institutions and Practices
--- (a) initiation and adeption
--- (b) community loyalty (Royce)
--- (c) liturgy and semiotic economy
--- (d) askesis
(11) Religion and Civilization
--- (a) Politics (civil religion & theology)
--- (b) Aesthetics
--- --- (1) Greek drama
--- --- (2) iconoclasm
--- (c) Ethics
(12) Religion and the Religion-like
--- (a) proper mode: Cicero and Aquinas on religio
--- (b) disenchantment mode
--- --- (1) Hopi disenchantment rituals
--- --- (2) Santa Claus
--- --- (3) Feuerbach
--- (c) as-if mode
--- --- (1) Santa Claus
--- --- (2) State Shinto
--- --- (3) Irish Murdoch
--- (d) fictional mode
--- --- (1) symbolic representation
--- --- --- (a) Aslan
--- --- --- (b) Crystal Dragon Jesus tropes
--- --- (2) imaginary religion (e.g., Jedi)
--- --- (3) religion imitation

It is remarkable that philosophers assume that abstract entities are inert, given that nobody normally talks about them as if they were.

When people talk about Confucianism as a religion, it is clear that the elements they take as religion are not particularly derived from Confucius himself, nor even from ruism generally, but from ancestor veneration.

Nonpopulist regimes tend to depend on economic incentives overwhelming other incentives; they tend to fall by assuming they automatically will do so.

contrast counterfactuals vs intervention counterfactuals

Christ, rising from the dead, through the eucharist (Luke 24:30) makes us to rise in heart (Luke 24:33).

narrative participation in pilgrimage, tourism, souvenirs

Composition fallacies conflate wholes/parts in Boolean and in Classical Squares of Opposition; but the inference goes through if there is a bridge principle.

civil rights as artificial armor for the juridical person

"My loved one is the abbreviation of the universe, the universe the elongation of my loved one." Novalis
"Love is the final goal of world history, the unum of the universe."

Every hegemony manufactures an acceptable rebelliousness in order to defang dissent.

Actual reasoning about conflicts of interest involves counterfactual reasoning about causes of distortion in judgment. But there's also a set of distinctions applied to this (evitable/inevitable, serious/nonserious), and these seem to posit a rational spectator as a reference point.

testimonial drift vs testimonial selection
-- the two elements of testimonial drift are memorial and communicational

A church building should be designed in such a way as to recognize the importance of sacraments, of icons, and of relics.

Nietzsche's point in TI VI.7 that men were considered free that they might be judged and punished is right insofar as freedom is a precondition for rational judgment and punishment, but defective in that it makes it impossible to understand why anyone would have ever conceived of the latter to begin with, because it is specifically this kind of judgment and punishment that is concerned, and not, for instance, merely retaliatory feeling.

the referential & acousmatic aspects of poetry

We experience the expressiveness of music in three ways: in the feel (e.g., tempo or sharpness of beat), in the imagination, and in the reason; and each aspect has different features -- associative, interpretive, etc.

Rejection, and often major revision, of free will requires the rejection of common conceptions of causation. This is recognized by Spinoza, Hume, and Nietzsche, but is regularly overlooked by those who want to have their cake and eat it too.

holiness of life as expressiveness (the life expressive of the divine)

The sacraments are divine holiness arousing human holiness through holy signs established by the holy promises of God Most Holy.

Sacraments are not merely signs of holiness but signs expressing holiness, communicating holiness.

hypermetacognition as a means for imitating genius?

While Journet associates the doctrinal power with Christ as King and the sacrament power with Christ as Priest, it seems better to regard them as each different expressions of the union of Prophet, King, and Priest in Christ.

character : Priesthood :: Gifts : Prophethood :: juridical status or rights? : Kingship

Christ ascended and in session as the proximate exemplar cause of the Church
-- the Church Triumphant as complete exemplate, the Church penitent as completing exemplate, the Church Militant as beginning (incipient) exemplate
-- Israel in OT as seminal exemplate

Locked room mysteries play with interpretation: under one interpretation of the room, the thing was impossible; under another, it was possible. But in the best locked room mysteries, both are in a sense true.

Arousal theories of expression are a poor fit for hymns.

music as a way of dancing without dancing

the last Oracle of Delphi (to Julian the Apostate):
"Tell the emperor the Daidalic hall has fallen.
No longer does Phoebus have his chamber, nor mantic laurel,
nor prophetic spring; and the speaking water has been silenced."

"If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly, if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all." C. S. Lewis

Dashed Off XXI

A healthy public sphere must first and foremost be honest.

the 3 elements of Catholic Action (Peter Maurin)
1. Teaching of Christian Doctrine
2. Daily Practice of the Works of Mercy
3. Reconstruction of the Social Order

The tendency to think in terms of predicate calculus has led to an unnatural separation of sense and reference, with senses stuck on references like flags on poles, and, of course, both of these are separated from other aspects of meaning. It is as if one treated steering a ship as one thing, its hydrodynamics as another, its materials as another, all just glommed onto each other, without starting where we actually start, the ship and how it moves.

Hume scholars tend to focus on ideas, but Hume himself is often more interested in the transitions; it is not a static view but a dynamic one.

Much of Hume's theory of imagination makes a very good theory of guessing.

"When people find themselves every moment in danger of being robbed of all they possess, they have no motive to be industrious." Adam Smith

good government as the union of authority and usefulness

Priests who sneer at legalism are often in fact sneering at the rights of the faithful.

Veto and prorogation both provide much needed checks and balances (it is a weakness of the American system that it lacks the latter); but prorogation to be appropriate needs to be done with public conditions (usually time limit and a condition relevant to the resolution of the problem requiring prorogation).

monarchical sources of revenue
(1) demesnes (rents, working estates)
(2) civil list (salaries, pensions)
(3) taxes reserved for monarch
(4) grants (e.g., by parliament)

Popular sovereignty requires that citizens, operating as citizens, have executive, legislative, and judicial authority of some kind. Only to the extent that (1) they clearly have this and (2) other authority is clearly dependent on their having this, is it reasonable to say that the people are in some sense sovereign.

"Moral repair is the process of moving from the situation of loss and damage to a situation where some degree of stability in moral relations is regained." (Margaret Walker)
"Moral repair is the task of restoring or stabilizing -- and in some sense creating -- the basic elements that sustain human beings in a recognizably moral relationship."
"Repair cannot mean return to a status quo, but must aim at bringing morally diminished or shattered relations closer to morally adequate form."

'external' in 'external world' as analogous to 'other' in 'other mind' (perhaps there are analogues of external, independent, and continuing in 'other')

"All other values are relative for, of, or in a person." TH Green

absolute idealism : metaphysics :: coherence theory of truth : logic
-- this raises the question of the metaphysical analogues of other theories of truth

least means (Rosmini)
as considering means: secondary causality
as considering leastness: excluded superfluity
-- from both of these comes permission of defect
as exclusion of superfluity involves using secondary causes to answer needs of secondary causes: systemic totality
as considering distribution for greater good: continuous gradation
as uniting continuous gradation with secondary causation: variety in actuation and modification
as uniting variety and excluded superfluity: excluded equality (excluded redundancy)
as applying least means maximally: unity of action

If PSR is principle of causality plus note of intellect, one would expect reason-principles analogous to causal principles.

three parts of law of germ (Rosmini)
(=seminal reasons!)
(1) all beings have been created in a state of involution or germ
(2) Germs produce other germs by evolution.
(3) Original germs should be no more in number than is sufficient for the purpose.

ordered or directed analogy (this can make some sense if one thinks of analogy as act of analogizing)

Just as a community cannot make all wrongdoers accountable, it cannot validate all victims.

real being & rational being (being of reason) // real truth & rational truth

"Where would such an idea, say as that of God, come from if not from direct experience?" C. S. Peirce (6.493)

now -> always -> ground of always
here -> everywhere -> ground of everywhere
allowed -> obligatory -> ground of obligation
this -> all -> ground of all

Aquinas takes the oblation to be the genus and sacrifice to be a species of it involving making-sacred (i.e., doing something to what is offered rather than just giving it).

happenstance eclecticism vs principled eclecticism

nice example of anti-skeptical retorsion in Nyayasutra 2.1

rethinking the structure of philosophy of religion
God, the tutelar, the beyondgrave, the preternatural [by: what is met]
address, oblation, taboo, commemoration [to: the priestly]
inspiration, revelation, miracle, union [fro: the prophetic]
loyalty, liturgy (semiotic economy), adeption, superliminality [with: the communal]
genesis, providence, eschaton, alterity [in: the forum of meeting]
lure, gift, repair, mystery [through: the mode of presence]
religions proper, disenchantments, as-if religions, fictional religions

at least minimally personal: God, tutelar, some beyondgrave
impersonal: some beyondgrave, preternatural

kinds of tutelar: (1) transcendent, (2) imminent
(1) are tutelars starting to receive Divine attributions (Zeus being the obvious case). Likewise, beyondgraves may be tutelar (gods of death, demons), or human (shades, ghosts), or preternaturals (poltergeists).
Demigods as human tutelars, personifications as preternatural tutelars
pure preternaturals: Ideas (qua 'more divine than the gods'), karma, Lifeforce, mana, eternal Veda
-- How would Brahman be classified here? Will obv. depend on exact school, but prima facie seems a God/preternatural overlap
--All of these overlaps mean that we really need precise and principled definitions.

kinds of arguments for tutelars
(1) religious experience (e.g., Greer)
(2) design
(3) custom
-- (1) can be (a) direct (cf Epinomis) or (b) visionary (which is what Greer seems to have in mind) or (c) indirect (Muse)
-- (2) is obv. particularized. In a sense, Kant's complaint is that the design argument as such does not rise above the tutelar. Design + argument from evil (which are, strictly speaking, not inconsistent with each other) a possible reason for particularizing.
-- (3) seems to need to reduce to one of the others + testimony (although the source may be unknown)
-- Pluralism a reason for particularizing (1) to tutelars.
-- We may need (4) more purely causal as well -- cp Aristotle on first movers, if you don't take it to be (1a) or (1c).
--Is the impossibility of an ontological argument a distinguishing mark of the tutelar domain (or perhaps tutelars and beyondgraves)? Could you have a promiscuity of ontological arguments, as in mathematics? A possibility: A view like Platonic Forms but treating them as tutelars. (Abstract tutelars getting preternatural features seem most promising Tutelars getting divine attributions, on the other hand, are indistinguishable from God when get to an ontological argument.)

tutelar/devata, deity/Ishvara, preternatural/brahman
--this raises the question of where bhagavat fits; it seems extrinsic (based on devotional relations)

demiurge as tutelar with strongly divine attribution

It seems best to think of tutelar et al. as *kinds of attribution* rather than kinds of things.

Veneration of the Cross as a proxy for Eucharist on Good Friday

Recognizing incongruities requires counterfactual reasoning.

sophism // joke

kinds of incongruity in joke
(1) misassociation
(2) absurd effect (disproportion)
(3) impropriety

Since whether a characteristic is observable or not depends on suitable circumstances whether a term designating it is an 'observation predicate' depends on circumstances and whether an assertion involving it is an 'observation sentence' depends on circumstances.

All governments are some extent mixed constitutions; but there may be cases where on part is mostly residual or occasional.

"In searching for the principles of government, we may divide them into two kinds: the principles of authority, and the principles of power. The first are virtues of the mind and heart, such as wisdom, prudence, courage, patience, temperance, justice, etc.: the second are the goods of fortune, such as riches, extraction, knowledge, and reputation." Adams

Any society of popular government, if it is to be just and stable, must be pervaded by the common expectation that gods are to be worshiped, parents to be honored, elders to be respected, and customary laws to be obeyed.

etymological splitting and doubling in the enrichment of language
tradition -- tradition and treason
ratio -- ratio and reason
holiness (from Germannic) and sanctity (from Latin)
watch (from Germannic) and observe (from Latin)

God has unlimited standing to forgive because He is the Good Itself, the First Good which all other goods participate. All wrongs are primarily against Him, and all standing to forgive derives from Him. (None of this is true, of course, of us.)

Liberalism corrupts beliefs through pleasure-pressures; authoritarianism corrupts beliefs through utility-pressures.

"Truth, expressed in practice, is called Justice." Soloviev

contiguity as resemblance with respect to causal reach (resemblance in how one would get to it causally)

the importance of encouraging poor entrepreneurs

Counterfactual reasoning for large, variable populations tends to fail because there are so many things that could shift the population behavior -- thousands and thousands of things that could affect voting or buying patterns, for instance. One is often best advised to look at narrow ranges of shifts, and even then one may have counterfactual explosion.

parsimony & the need to make experiments as useful as possible

two kinds of trivial maps: empty (Hunting of the Snark) and identity (Sylvie and Bruno Concluded)

Sankara's use of the principle of noncontradiction against the Jains

convertibility of being and being causal (not, of course, being caused)

syadvada as a modal logic

(cp. Loke)
Resurrection experiences: either (1) no disciples had purported resurrection experience (legends) or (2) some disciples did.
if (2), either the (2.1) experience was actual or (2.2) merely purported (false testimonies)
if (2.1), either the experience as (2.1.1) real or (2.1.2) hallucinatory
if (2.1.1), either (2.1.1.1) the person experienced was the same person as Jesus or (2.1.1.2) it was not (mistaken identity)
if (2.1.1.1), either (2.1.1.1.1) Jesus did not die (mistaken death) or (2.1.1.1.2) he died and rose
if (2.1.1.1.1), either it was because (2.1.1.1.1.1) He was never actually crucified (escape) or because (2.1.1.1.1.2) the crucifixion was botched (swoon).
if (2.1.1.1.2), either he rose (2.1.1.1.2.1) because of a chance cause (scientific anomaly) or (2.1.1.1.2.2) because of a divine intervention or miracle (resurrection)
-- Each alternative requires positing a defective cause of the testimony.
-- Note Strauss's argument against the swoon hypothesis in Life of Jesus
-- Note that the Gospels are structured so as to eliminate each branch that is an alternative to resurrection, and they do this fairly explicitly, emphasizing evidences of death, eyewitnesses, multiple witnesses, extended interactions, physical interactions, etc.

(cp. Loke)
empty tomb: assume either (1) there was no crucifixion or (2) there was.
if (1), this is either (1.1) because the story is made up (invention/legends) or (1.2) because the crucifixion was evaded (escape)
if (2), either we should assume (2.1) there was a burial or (2.2) there wasn't (unburied and destroyed)
if (2.1), either we should assume (2.1.1) there was a real change or (2.1.2) there wasn't (remained buried, but misplaced or lost)
if (2.1.1.1), the change is due either (2.1.1.1.1) to a human cause or (2.1.1.1.2) to a nonhuman cause.
if (2.1.1.1.1), either (2.1.1.1.1.1) Jesus removed himself or (2.1.1.1.1.2) others removed him.
if (2.1.1.1.1.1), either (2.1.1.1.1.1.1) he was there due to swoon or (2.1.1.1.1.1.1.2) he rose by anomaly.
if (2.1.1.1.2), either (2.1.1.1.2.1) the cause was natural (anomaly) or (2.1.1.1.2.2) the cause was supernatural (resurrection)

exploitation of citizens and their alienation from public work

Academia conceals its existing-for-others by failing to consider its dependence on the good will and support of the community, that it is, in fact, made possible by the sacrifices of others in the expectation that it will do general good.

In a genuinely free society, citizens can treat support of the functions of governments as a way of expanding their freedoms.

genius, taste, and spirit (there seems little aesthetic work on the last, although cf. perhaps Campbell on rhetoric)

Sometimes by 'hope' we merely mean patience.

Epistemology of any field simply reiterates the field from the perspective of knowing. The same is true of axiology from the perspective of known willing.

values as the qua of willing

"All defects are possibly remediable, otherwise they would not be defects." Ferrier

Marxism is often not bad when it comes to diagnosing the plight of the worker, but it has no actual solution to it because the response always amounts to, "Eventually the workers will fix it themselves."

The responsible citizen puts his life into the common good; but the danger is that this may make his life belong no longer to him but to those who have managed to find their way into the roles and offices that have been given power to care for the common good. The danger is that the latter may lay a trap with the common good as bait.

Working well under just conditions
(1) to act and be treated as a person
(2) to meet human needs of self and others in appropriate ways
(3) to be involved in fair exchanges
(4) to be an active member of society

Labor, work, is merely a material of civic participation.

creative citizenship: in which one's citizenship is an expression of one's person, a culmination of oneself as social, a good willed, something more than getting by -- a matter of honor, of which to be proud

Educational institutions estrange people by intensifying the emphasis on expertise while refusing serious recognition and respect to all expertise but their own.