* The Moral Equivalent of War by William James; War Is the Health of the State by Randolph Bourne (HT: Ralph Luker at Cliopatria)
* At "GetReligion" there's a good post on why Spong is not the model to hold up for moderate Muslims (in case you were tempted)!
* Johann Hari notices something about the locations of the London attacks.(HT: GetReligion)
* Volokh asks why people kiss. Well, it's a bit more comfortable than biting....+ For those more interested in the how-to, remember that you live in the Computer Age. You can find instructions about how to kiss on the internet. Indeed, more than you could ever possibly need. And if you clicked any of those, perhaps you should consider this: Maybe you would be having a more enjoyable time if you stopped reading about how to kiss and actually went out and did it.
* "Just as history cannot be rewritten, so we cannot rewrite our anthem to suit current tastes," said Jean-Louis Debre, speaker of the assembly. Somehow the analogy doesn't strike me as a strong one.... (HT: Dappled Things)
******
+ The joke raises an interesting point. One possible account of explanation sees the explanandum in such an explanation as contrastive between a fact and a foil. Thus explanation is not of the form "p explains why q is the case" but of the form "p explains why q rather than r is the case." So A wants to know why we kiss rather than not kiss; B responds with an answer that would explain why we kiss rather than bite. Hence the joke; if there weren't this crossing of contrastive explananda, there wouldn't be anything humorous about it. Now you know. [If you like this sort of thing, I recommend Chris's post at "Mixing Memory" on the Cognitive Science of Humor. Good stuff. And there's James Beattie, whom I had almost forgot made a showing, which makes it even better!]
Sunday, July 10, 2005
Saturday, July 09, 2005
Whewell on Theory Change
...when a prevalent theory is found to be untenable, and consequently, is succeeded by a different, or even by an opposite one, the change is not made suddenly, or completed at once, at least in the minds of the most tenacious adherents of the earlier doctrine; but is effected by a transformation, or series of transformations, of the earlier hypothesis, by means of which it is gradually brought nearer and nearer to the second; and thus, the defenders of the ancient doctrine are able to go on as if still asserting their first opinions, and to continue to press their points of advantage, if they have any, against the new theory. They borrow, or imitate, an din some way accommodate to their original hypothesis, the new explanations which the new theory gives, of the observed facts; and thus they maintain a sort of verbal consistency; till the original hypothesis becomes inextricably confused, or breaks down under the weight of the auxiliary hypotheses thus fastened upon it, in order to make it consistent with the facts.
William Whewell, "Of the Transformation of Hypotheses in the History of Science" in Selected Writings on the History of Science, Yehuda Elkana, ed. U Chicago P (Chicago: 1984) p. 385.
This essay was read May 19, 1851; he gives a detailed and brilliant case study of "the battle of the Cartesian and Newtonian systems" to make his argument. Yet again, Whewell, in his philosophy of science, was ahead of his time by more than a generation; and yet again, he was largely ignored and the point he had already made had to be independently rediscovered. A bit sad, really.
William Whewell, "Of the Transformation of Hypotheses in the History of Science" in Selected Writings on the History of Science, Yehuda Elkana, ed. U Chicago P (Chicago: 1984) p. 385.
This essay was read May 19, 1851; he gives a detailed and brilliant case study of "the battle of the Cartesian and Newtonian systems" to make his argument. Yet again, Whewell, in his philosophy of science, was ahead of his time by more than a generation; and yet again, he was largely ignored and the point he had already made had to be independently rediscovered. A bit sad, really.
Friday, July 08, 2005
The Onocephalic Calumny
I've been reading a collection of Jean Borella's writings (translated) called The Secret of the Christian Way. (Borella does work in esoteric Christianity -- Christian gnosis [e.g., Clement of Alexandria], pseudognosis [i.e., what's usually called Gnosticism], responses to pseudognosis, etc.) He speaks at one point of Gnostic (in the heretical sense) aberrations, and notes a text, called Genna Marias (The Lineage of Mary), that claims that the Jews worshipped a man with the face of an ass who stood in the Holy of Holies, and that this was the reason why Zechariah was killed in the Temple. He notes that Flavius Josephus attributes a similar calumny to Apion (Against Apion Bk. II, 7), the claim that Jews put an ass's head in the Holy of Holies. Tacitus (Histories 1.5, 3, 4) also claims that the Jews are onolators. The Christians were also targets of this calumny; Tertullian deals with it in two works, Defense of the Christians agains the Gentiles and To the Nations.
JewishEncyclopedia.com gives an excellent summary of the history of this calumny. The source of it (as Borella also says) appears to be in Typhon worship: "Typhon" is the Greek name for Set, the murderer of Osiris, an underworld god.
JewishEncyclopedia.com gives an excellent summary of the history of this calumny. The source of it (as Borella also says) appears to be in Typhon worship: "Typhon" is the Greek name for Set, the murderer of Osiris, an underworld god.
Links
* An excellent post on the use of labels in history of philosophy at "Philosophical Fortnights": Ism-itis, or the Vanity of Labels. I think in some sense labels are for the historian of philosophy what Duhem thought mechanical models were for the physicist: they assist us in simplifying, when simplification is needed in order to reduce confusion (as it often is in pedagogy,or when we are just starting out); but precisely for that reason real progress in understanding a philosopher doesn't rest much on them at all.
* Philologos discusses interest and usury in the Bible. (HT: Paleojudaica)
* Miriam Burnstein points to this article at CoHE about the possibility that blogging might ruin one's job search. If so, I've pretty much sunk myself a thousand times over; which is entirely fine, I guess, since I'm not sure I'd want colleagues who are so far behind the times that they'd make such odd inferences. It's a bit like rejecting an applicant after finding out by accident that they've been divorced twice, or that they're all-out-no-holds-barred Manchester United fans, or (in a case almost exactly parallel to the 'Techno Geek' case, which is the one that actually irritates me) that they are passionately addicted to stamp collecting. What sort of crazy, sour-faced, self-righteous department would that be? I found this part of the article hilariously funny:
I can just imagine some search committee trying to wade through a month's worth of my entries, which average about three a day, most of them hastily jotted notes on just about everything under the sun! When I started blogging, it never occurred to me to do so under a pseudonym; I was surprised to find that so many people did so, although I can entirely understand it. I don't put Siris on my CV, but it's easy enough to find, even despite the jillion and a half Brandon Watsons on the internet. People do need to keep in mind that their weblogs are accessible to the public (it's admittedly easy to forget); anything you say might come back to bite you. Probably will. Such are the consequences of saying and doing things in public. I'll still go about saying things in public; how else does one learn? [UPDATE: Daniel Drezner probably strikes the right note with his two bits of advice; see also Dr. B.]
* An interesting post on theology of the body at "Catholic Ragemonkey".
* "Studi Galileiani" has a good post on teaching science, opening discussion about whether the historical method is the best way to go about it. Duhem has a great argument that it is, at the end of La theorie physique; but for some reason I'm blanking on important parts of it at the moment, so I won't say more about it, but just direct you to the argument itself.
* Some interesting discussions touched off by the London bombings:
Soldier On at "Easily Distracted"
The Rhetorics of Violence at "Michael Berubé Online"
Some doubts at "Mode for Caleb"
Violence and Agency at "Easily Distracted"
"No right of secession from modernity" at "The Elfin Ethicist"
* (This is primarily a reminder to myself) The Provisional Schedule for the 32nd International Hume Conference can be found here. I present on Wednesday, July 20 in a good slot (not too early, not too late).
I'm still catching up on posts that I intend to write, and I'll get through them. But I'm also at the beginning of preparing for a move, and the Hume Society conference is approaching, so posts may be a bit sporadic.
* Philologos discusses interest and usury in the Bible. (HT: Paleojudaica)
* Miriam Burnstein points to this article at CoHE about the possibility that blogging might ruin one's job search. If so, I've pretty much sunk myself a thousand times over; which is entirely fine, I guess, since I'm not sure I'd want colleagues who are so far behind the times that they'd make such odd inferences. It's a bit like rejecting an applicant after finding out by accident that they've been divorced twice, or that they're all-out-no-holds-barred Manchester United fans, or (in a case almost exactly parallel to the 'Techno Geek' case, which is the one that actually irritates me) that they are passionately addicted to stamp collecting. What sort of crazy, sour-faced, self-righteous department would that be? I found this part of the article hilariously funny:
Several members of our search committee found the sheer volume of blog entries daunting enough to quit after reading a few.
I can just imagine some search committee trying to wade through a month's worth of my entries, which average about three a day, most of them hastily jotted notes on just about everything under the sun! When I started blogging, it never occurred to me to do so under a pseudonym; I was surprised to find that so many people did so, although I can entirely understand it. I don't put Siris on my CV, but it's easy enough to find, even despite the jillion and a half Brandon Watsons on the internet. People do need to keep in mind that their weblogs are accessible to the public (it's admittedly easy to forget); anything you say might come back to bite you. Probably will. Such are the consequences of saying and doing things in public. I'll still go about saying things in public; how else does one learn? [UPDATE: Daniel Drezner probably strikes the right note with his two bits of advice; see also Dr. B.]
* An interesting post on theology of the body at "Catholic Ragemonkey".
* "Studi Galileiani" has a good post on teaching science, opening discussion about whether the historical method is the best way to go about it. Duhem has a great argument that it is, at the end of La theorie physique; but for some reason I'm blanking on important parts of it at the moment, so I won't say more about it, but just direct you to the argument itself.
* Some interesting discussions touched off by the London bombings:
Soldier On at "Easily Distracted"
The Rhetorics of Violence at "Michael Berubé Online"
Some doubts at "Mode for Caleb"
Violence and Agency at "Easily Distracted"
"No right of secession from modernity" at "The Elfin Ethicist"
* (This is primarily a reminder to myself) The Provisional Schedule for the 32nd International Hume Conference can be found here. I present on Wednesday, July 20 in a good slot (not too early, not too late).
I'm still catching up on posts that I intend to write, and I'll get through them. But I'm also at the beginning of preparing for a move, and the Hume Society conference is approaching, so posts may be a bit sporadic.
Thought for the Day
People learn no general lessons from war; but with a little luck we can perhaps make sure that they remember what actually goes on during war.
Wisdom from Maurice Blondel; and the Analogical Leap
But it must be realized (for, more and more, philosophers who take the data of sensible intuition or the symbols of the positive sciences as materials for their thesis will be disqualified and will not count for those who count) that the time is past when mathematics , physics or biology could be thought to have a direct bearing on philosophy....There is no passage from one to the other; and the sciences will develop indefinitely without making any contact with what they are mistakenly supposed to signifiy; for it is no business of theirs to attain or to reveal the final ground of thigns: their sole task is to constitute an increasingly coherent system of relationships on the basis of their own special conventions, into which a certain element of arbitrariness always enters, and in so far as each of their various hypotheses proves to be in conformity with factuale vidence.
Thus to discuss conceptions of mass, of the atom, of affinity and so forth, as if one could derive from the scientific theories which elaborate them some information of immediate relevance for the philosopher, is to waste one's time; worse still, it is to become sterile and to discredit oneself. There is no more agreemetn or disagreement possible between the sciences and metaphysics than there is between two lines drawn on differetn planes. When once one has awakened, really awakened, to this truth, which is quite independent of the variety of philosophical opinions, it is impossible to understand how one could have believed the contrary. And then a great deal of time is saved which would have been simply wasted on false problemsna nd a great deal of misdirected effort.
[Maurice Blondel, "A Letter on the Requirements of Contemporary Thought and on Philosophical Method in the study of the Religious Problem," The Letter on Apologetics & History and Dogma, Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan, eds. Eerdmans (Grand Rapids: 1994) pp. 131-132.]
Verily, verily, amen. I recall reading once in Etienne Gilson somewhere a discussion of the association of determinism with Newtonian physics. It is, in some sense, a real puzzle: there is nothing particularly deterministic about Newtonian physics; many who accepted Newtonian physics (I would go so far as to say the overwhelming majority) were not determinists, and were clearly not inconsistent in this; you can only get rationally from Newtonian physics to determinism by a vast number of controvertible suppositions; and so forth. So why did the association between Newtonian physics and deterministic metaphyics arise? Gilson points out that the source seems to have been a vague analogy. When determinists would appeal to Newtonian physics as proof of determinism, the inference from one to the other was not a rational one but an imaginative one, based on a strong felt analogy between certain aspects of Newtonian physics and certain aspects of their deterministic worldview. The inference consists entirely of this analogy; nobody did the hard rational work of building a rational inference. Newtonian physics suggested to the imaginations of determinists (and others, it should be said) certain things that felt or seemed similar to certain deterministic claims. The whole association was based on nothing stronger than a felt resemblance of structure between the scientific theory and the philosophical position; a felt resemblance which was taken for granted rather than rigorously and critically examined. Something very similar happened with quantum indeterminacy; some people, like Eddington, held that it refuted determinism and made room for free will. What was really going on was that, their imaginations having been trained by the previous analogy to associate certain aspects of Newtonian physics with determinism, when those aspects turned out not to show up in quantum mechanics, they made a similar sort of analogical leap in the opposite direction.
It has become more and more clear to me that this failing is extremely common. You can find it everywhere. Steady state theorists often opposed Big Bang cosmology simply because of a felt resemblance to a doctrine of creation; an analogical inference (and again, nothing more than an analogical inference) that seems to be very common. William Lane Craig holds that Big Bang cosmology contradicts the view that the universe has always existed; in fact, this is just analogical, as well, since the only rational way to get from Big Bang cosmology to the refutation of the claim that the universe has always existed is by way of a string of debatable suppositions. Some people think that evolutionary theory involves an attack on morals; what they really mean is that what they hear about evolutionary theory has a strong felt resemblance to an amoralistic worldview. Lindsay, in reply, says:
[The footnote at the * just points out that the label 'Darwinism' is being borrowed from the context of the discussion, rather than having any deep meaning for Lindsay's argument.]
But evolutionary, of course, says nothing whatsoever about these things. What Lindsay means is that certain aspects of evolutionary theory have a strong imaginative resemblance to a moral view of the human race in which all human beings would morally be able to be counted as family, animals are not so morally different from human beings. These are, as Lindsay rightly says, "Darwinian-inspired"; they are not Darwinian. The tenets are only based on what is felt by the imagination to be a strong resemblance between the physical structure and process indicated by evolutionary theory and the moral structure and process of certain moral views. People in the early twentieth-century who read evolutionary theory in exactly the opposite way, as licensing racism and human superiority over animals, were making an argument of exactly the same sort. The move from evolutionary theory to a moral claim would rationally involve many complicated and difficult-to-defend suppositions; imaginatively it just takes a sense of similarity.
Nor is ethics the only area in which this is true. One of Darwin's most brilliant philosophical insights about how evolutionary theory could be established was in his recognition of the need sharply to distinguish imagination and reason in one's approach to the theory of natural selection. Natural selection, properly speaking, is unimaginable: there are simply too many factors involved in it for anyone to imagine anything remotely close to accurate. People who try to understand natural selection by imagining it will get it wrong. But reason can go where imagination cannot; it can find ways to get around and overcome the complexity of the topic. The path of reason is much, much harder than that of imagination, requiring much, much more careful argument. But Darwin rightly recognized that it is on reason, not imagination, that the theory of natural selection had to be built. If you try to convey the theory by imagination, you will fail and you will mislead people, because you will only convey a caricature that is vaguely analogous to the theory of natural selection, not the theory itself.
I am far from saying that these analogical leaps are always wrong, or even that they are always bad. Hume is right, I think, that the problem with analogical inference is not that it is weak (some analogical inferences are very strong) but that, on its own, it is very uncertain: we cannot say from the inference itself whether it is strong or weak. Only when you begin actually tracing the rational path the analogical inference leaps over can you begin to tell whether the analogy is actually relevant. I do think that these imaginative moves are almost ineliminable; they are an artefact of the way the human mind works, and, recognized for what they are, they can sometimes serve a heuristic function, or (used carefully) they can sometimes be a useful way to shorten an otherwise extremely complicated discussion that can (for the moment) be glossed over. But they need to be recognized for what they are: leaps based on a subjective sense of resemblance, not on any real rational analysis.
Thus to discuss conceptions of mass, of the atom, of affinity and so forth, as if one could derive from the scientific theories which elaborate them some information of immediate relevance for the philosopher, is to waste one's time; worse still, it is to become sterile and to discredit oneself. There is no more agreemetn or disagreement possible between the sciences and metaphysics than there is between two lines drawn on differetn planes. When once one has awakened, really awakened, to this truth, which is quite independent of the variety of philosophical opinions, it is impossible to understand how one could have believed the contrary. And then a great deal of time is saved which would have been simply wasted on false problemsna nd a great deal of misdirected effort.
[Maurice Blondel, "A Letter on the Requirements of Contemporary Thought and on Philosophical Method in the study of the Religious Problem," The Letter on Apologetics & History and Dogma, Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan, eds. Eerdmans (Grand Rapids: 1994) pp. 131-132.]
Verily, verily, amen. I recall reading once in Etienne Gilson somewhere a discussion of the association of determinism with Newtonian physics. It is, in some sense, a real puzzle: there is nothing particularly deterministic about Newtonian physics; many who accepted Newtonian physics (I would go so far as to say the overwhelming majority) were not determinists, and were clearly not inconsistent in this; you can only get rationally from Newtonian physics to determinism by a vast number of controvertible suppositions; and so forth. So why did the association between Newtonian physics and deterministic metaphyics arise? Gilson points out that the source seems to have been a vague analogy. When determinists would appeal to Newtonian physics as proof of determinism, the inference from one to the other was not a rational one but an imaginative one, based on a strong felt analogy between certain aspects of Newtonian physics and certain aspects of their deterministic worldview. The inference consists entirely of this analogy; nobody did the hard rational work of building a rational inference. Newtonian physics suggested to the imaginations of determinists (and others, it should be said) certain things that felt or seemed similar to certain deterministic claims. The whole association was based on nothing stronger than a felt resemblance of structure between the scientific theory and the philosophical position; a felt resemblance which was taken for granted rather than rigorously and critically examined. Something very similar happened with quantum indeterminacy; some people, like Eddington, held that it refuted determinism and made room for free will. What was really going on was that, their imaginations having been trained by the previous analogy to associate certain aspects of Newtonian physics with determinism, when those aspects turned out not to show up in quantum mechanics, they made a similar sort of analogical leap in the opposite direction.
It has become more and more clear to me that this failing is extremely common. You can find it everywhere. Steady state theorists often opposed Big Bang cosmology simply because of a felt resemblance to a doctrine of creation; an analogical inference (and again, nothing more than an analogical inference) that seems to be very common. William Lane Craig holds that Big Bang cosmology contradicts the view that the universe has always existed; in fact, this is just analogical, as well, since the only rational way to get from Big Bang cosmology to the refutation of the claim that the universe has always existed is by way of a string of debatable suppositions. Some people think that evolutionary theory involves an attack on morals; what they really mean is that what they hear about evolutionary theory has a strong felt resemblance to an amoralistic worldview. Lindsay, in reply, says:
Simple Darwinism* tells me that every single human is literally family to me. Darwinism tells me that racism is crazy. Pace Genesis, Darwinism also reminds me that I'm not so different from a lot of other animals who are capable of feelings and therefore shouldn't be tortured, regardless of what any deities have to say about our respective statuses. I'm not saying that Darwinism is the only road to those conclusions, just that these Darwinian-inspired tenets are at least as good prima facie reasons for tolerance as anything in Genesis.
[The footnote at the * just points out that the label 'Darwinism' is being borrowed from the context of the discussion, rather than having any deep meaning for Lindsay's argument.]
But evolutionary, of course, says nothing whatsoever about these things. What Lindsay means is that certain aspects of evolutionary theory have a strong imaginative resemblance to a moral view of the human race in which all human beings would morally be able to be counted as family, animals are not so morally different from human beings. These are, as Lindsay rightly says, "Darwinian-inspired"; they are not Darwinian. The tenets are only based on what is felt by the imagination to be a strong resemblance between the physical structure and process indicated by evolutionary theory and the moral structure and process of certain moral views. People in the early twentieth-century who read evolutionary theory in exactly the opposite way, as licensing racism and human superiority over animals, were making an argument of exactly the same sort. The move from evolutionary theory to a moral claim would rationally involve many complicated and difficult-to-defend suppositions; imaginatively it just takes a sense of similarity.
Nor is ethics the only area in which this is true. One of Darwin's most brilliant philosophical insights about how evolutionary theory could be established was in his recognition of the need sharply to distinguish imagination and reason in one's approach to the theory of natural selection. Natural selection, properly speaking, is unimaginable: there are simply too many factors involved in it for anyone to imagine anything remotely close to accurate. People who try to understand natural selection by imagining it will get it wrong. But reason can go where imagination cannot; it can find ways to get around and overcome the complexity of the topic. The path of reason is much, much harder than that of imagination, requiring much, much more careful argument. But Darwin rightly recognized that it is on reason, not imagination, that the theory of natural selection had to be built. If you try to convey the theory by imagination, you will fail and you will mislead people, because you will only convey a caricature that is vaguely analogous to the theory of natural selection, not the theory itself.
I am far from saying that these analogical leaps are always wrong, or even that they are always bad. Hume is right, I think, that the problem with analogical inference is not that it is weak (some analogical inferences are very strong) but that, on its own, it is very uncertain: we cannot say from the inference itself whether it is strong or weak. Only when you begin actually tracing the rational path the analogical inference leaps over can you begin to tell whether the analogy is actually relevant. I do think that these imaginative moves are almost ineliminable; they are an artefact of the way the human mind works, and, recognized for what they are, they can sometimes serve a heuristic function, or (used carefully) they can sometimes be a useful way to shorten an otherwise extremely complicated discussion that can (for the moment) be glossed over. But they need to be recognized for what they are: leaps based on a subjective sense of resemblance, not on any real rational analysis.
Wherein I Am Saint Anselm, the Wesleyan Roman Catholic Evangelical
You scored as Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan. You are an evangelical in the Wesleyan tradition. You believe that God's grace enables you to choose to believe in him, even though you yourself are totally depraved. The gift of the Holy Spirit gives you assurance of your salvation, and he also enables you to live the life of obedience to which God has called us. You are influenced heavily by John Wesley and the Methodists.
What's your theological worldview? created with QuizFarm.com |
(HT: NWW)
There is a story somewhere about a meeting between John Wesley and Joseph Butler that didn't go so well; Butler, like most eighteenth century Anglicans, was shocked at anything 'methodistical', and firmly disapproved of it. I am quite a bit more open to the 'methodistical' than Butler; but I pay only a tiny bit more attention to Methodist theology than he did.
You scored as Anselm. Anselm is the outstanding theologian of the medieval period.He sees man's primary problem as having failed to render unto God what we owe him, so God becomes man in Christ and gives God what he is due. You should read 'Cur Deus Homo?'
Which theologian are you? created with QuizFarm.com |
(HT: The Elfin Ethicist)
I'm not sure why Anselm is considered "the outstanding theologian of the medieval period," but I am very pro-Anselm, and thus am pleased. I suspect the main factor in whether you get Anselm is how close you are to accepting an Anselmian account of the atonement.
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