Classification

John Wilkins has a great post on William Hamilton on classification. I've been toying with the idea of eventually posting a summary of William Whewell's philosophy of classification; in part, because I also find interesting the importance 19th-century philosophers place on classification. He suggests that the drop of interest may have been due to views on relations; which is an interesting idea that I hadn't considered before. My own thought on this point has been that the drop of interest in part has something to do with the depreciation of naming. It always strikes me how often 19th-century philosophers of science reflect on the importance of naming things well; both John Herschel and Whewell, for instance, treat it as a very important part of scientific progress. And in a sense it's not difficult to see why; just by casually looking around they could see several cases in which concern about names had contributed to science in important ways. Lavoisier, for instance, became the father of modern chemistry because he wanted to improve chemical nomenclature for easier use in application and discovery; to do this, he had to find the right classification, which meant he had to construct certain sorts of experiments and find the right way to interpret them, etc. Naming and classification go together. But there's a sense in which proper naming (and the classification required for it) is only exciting when you see them actually set a chaos in order; when they aren't really paying attention to that, philosophers tend to have a sort of nonchalance about naming, as if it were purely a matter of attaching labels to things -- i.e., it contributes nothing to our knowledge. (And, of course, simply labeling something doesn't contribute to our knowledge; but while one can simply label things, very often naming is much more than labeling, and classification is a good example of this.) But that's all a vague speculation. I'll have to think about this suggestion about relations, since it seems like it might be a more powerful way of looking at the issue.

Kant and Romantic Love

Dan at "Doing Things With Words" is soliciting comments about a paper on Kant and romantic love. I'll have to look at it more closely when I have the time; but go over and help him out. Even if Kant isn't your thing, he's also looking for comments about how readable it is.

UPDATE: The second part is here. A third part is coming.

UPDATE 2: Now you can read the complete draft.

Poem Draft

This, tidied up and improved a bit, would make a good prologue to something....

In Aenigmate

Our paths are dark--not lacking light,
but we lack the seeing eye,
ours being dim and covered over
with darkness and dismay.
The understanding mind, confounded,
seeks truth in the grosser image,
finding vision in the grotesques of sense
by which a greater glory is shown,
the latitude of love's secrets,
exceeding every sensation's confinement.
No prison holds the truth,
no image contains the light,
overarching, undergirding, all-pervading,
but every image must burst open,
twist and sway in mind's creation,
be remade to gesture upward
at heaven with a holy hint.
Our paths are dark, our journey needful;
we seek our way with staves,
tapping here and there before us.
Thus slowly can we come to know
the cause, the excess, the negation
that makes reason to overflow.
By enigma we are freed, liberated unto light;
the darkness of this Mystery
being a brilliance beyond all seeing;
and we, poor owls in sunlight,
mole-like creatures bursting forth
into the ecstasy of a painful day,
take refuge in these shadows,
subtle and sundry intimations,
thereby to know the living sun.

The Berry and the Bath

The Kalevala is one of the world's most important works of literature. (You can find a summary of the Kalevala's contents at the Finnish Literature Society, and John Martin Crawford's 1888 translation at Sacred-Texts.com.) 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 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 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. (One thinks of various similar moves in other cultures. For instance, the Berry legend plays on the association of Marjatta and marja; similarly, we have 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. No doubt examples could be multiplied.)

[All quotations from the Kalevala are from Keith Bosley's excellent translation, Oxford Univeristy 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.

Linkage

* "Farkleberries" points to an interesting article on chimerism; apparently it is quite common. Chimerism occurs when a body absorbs a genetically distinct zygote; some researchers hold that 50 to 70 percent of healthy living adults have this condition. In general, of course, the genetically distinct populations of cells are quite small in comparison with the dominate genetic population of cells.

* Verbum ipsum directs us to an interview with Rene Girard on Ratzinger's notion of the 'dictatorship of relativism'.

* "Allthings2all" is collecting posts on the Darfur crisis. If you've written anything on it, send it that way. (HT: Rebecca Writes)

* Don't forget to look around your weblogs to see if you have anything suitable for the History Carnival, the next edition of which will take place at St. Nate's Blog.

* "Early Modern Notes" has a great post on medical history: how does one accurately diagnose people long dead? It's a tricky issue. Even when we have a clear medical diagnosis of the time -- e.g., as is the case with Christopher Smart's mental illness -- we have to take into account the many shifts in medical common wisdom; Smart was diagnosed with 'religious mania', a very vague label that could many any number of mental illnesses. Sharon suggests that in looking at these issues, researchers would be well-advised to take a page from the methodology of the sort of historical research historians actually do.

* The University of Toronto Philosophy Department recently had the honor of being listed as a graduate program that is especially "women and feminist friendly" according to the in a recent report (PDF) by the APA Committee on the Status of Women.

* The Christian Carnival is up at Semicolon. Of special interest is Pseudo-Polymath's notes on N. T. Wright's speech on the Holy Spirit at the Fulcrum Conference. He also provides a link to the transcript.

* "Flos Carmeli" has a post on 'Intelligent Design theory'.

* "Parableman" has an interesting post on Chronology in I Samuel 16:1-18:5.

The Imaginary Flaw

One of the great dangers one faces in History of Philosophy is the identification and correction of imaginary flaws. Malebranche is a good case in point. Many of Malebranche's conclusions are obviously wrong. But I think people make the mistake of assuming that because the conclusions are obviously wrong, the reason he was led astray must be equally obvious; and this, I think, is almost universally false. When Malebranche comes to an untenable conclusion, the error is always a very subtle one. But because people assume that the flaw must be an obvious one, they leap on just about anything that doesn't immediately seem right. Many positions Malebranche puts forward that seem at first to be implausible are actually quite plausible in context, given other things he holds; if you bay at the first apparent implausibility, you're off on the wrong trail. The result is that people are constantly proposing as problems for Malebranche things that really aren't problems for him at all; and then other people have to come through and point out that if you read a bit more widely, and place the issue a bit more carefully in its context, the supposed problem evaporates. The flaw is a figment of one's manner of reading. So a major question is: How does one avoid getting mired down in imaginary flaws?

I don't know the answer; but, on the plus side, knowing that it's a serious issue seems like a good start.

Testimonial Bias

Hume, in his Essay on Miracles:

The wise lend a very academic faith to every report which favours the passion of the reporter; whether it magnifies his country, his family, or himself, or in any other way strikes in with his natural inclinations and propensities. But what greater temptation than to appear a missionary, a prophet, an ambassador from heaven? Who would not encounter many dangers and difficulties, in order to attain so sublime a character? Or if, by the help of vanity and a heated imagination, a man has first made a convert of himself, and entered seriously into the delusion; who ever scruples to make use of pious frauds, in support of so holy and meritorious a cause?

The problem with this argument is the first premise: "The wise lend a very academic faith to every report which favours the passion of the reporter." The problem with this, as was soon noted in responses to Hume, is that this, despite an initial plausibility, turns out to be untenable. Boswell records the following conversation with Samuel Johnson, which touches on the problem:

We talked of denying Christianity. He said it was easy to be on the negative side. "If a man were now to deny that there is salt upon the table, you could not reduce him to an absurdity. I deny that Canada is taken, and I can support my assertion with pretty good arguments. The French are a much more numerous people than we; and it is not likely that they would allow us to take it.--'But the Ministry tells us so.'--True. But the Ministry have put us to an enormous expense, and it is their interest to persuade us that we have got something for our money.--'But we are told so by thousands of men who were at the taking of it.'--Ay, but these men have still more interest in deceiving us. They don't want you should think they ahve gone a fool's errand; and they don't want you should think that the French have beat them, but that they have beat the French. Now suppose you should go over and see if it is so, that would only satisfy yourself; for when you come home, we will not believe you. We will say you have been bribed.--Yet, for all these plausible objections, we believe that Canada is really ours. Such is the weight of common testimony."

[Boswell's London Journal. Pottle, ed. McGraw-Hill (New York: 1950) 301-302.]

A similar line of thought forms part of Richard Whately's satire on Hume's arguments against miracles, Historical Doubts Relative to Napoleon.

And we can back their arguments up with an additional consideration. If you haven't recognized it yet, journalism is largely about testimony: reporters don't generally identify facts directly, but find a source that will give testimonial evidence for whatever is being put forward. Now, it has also been recognized that journalists have an infuriating habit of reporting crackpot testimony alongside respectable testimony. I think if you look closely at this practice, one will see that what lies behind it is Hume's principle. When scientists give testimony about what the best explanation of a phenomenon is, this testimony is in conformity with the passions and interests of the scientist themselves; when this is combined with Hume's principle, it follows that we must lend an 'academic faith' to the reports of scientists, because of the potential for bias. So journalists go off and find some other testimony with a countervailing potential for bias, so as not to prevent a one-sided view of a matter that is clearly conformable to the interests of those giving testimony.

Hume's principle, in other words, is, if taken strictly, the stuff of quackery and conspiracy theory.

Why then does it initially seem so plausible? The reason, I think, was rightly recognized by many of the early critics of Hume (Campbell, Shepherd, etc.): we do use something like Hume's principle, when we have independent reason for thinking the testimony in this particular case to be distorted by the passions of the reporter. In other words, Hume mistakenly treats as a general principle what in fact is a rule of thumb for particular cases that meet certain conditions. For Hume's principle to have merit, each case of testimony must be considered on its own merits. The reason is that there is very little testimony that is not in conformity with the passions and the interests of the reporter in some way; and, indeed, for all we can say a priori, the passions and interests of the reporter may in this case be helping them to give a more accurate testimony. We have to look and see whether there is any reason to think the testimony in this particular case is genuinely distorted.