Boswell, 1764

I finally got around to putting up at HL the last part of my Boswell's Christmas 1764 series. The first three parts discussed Boswell's meeting with Rousseau in the early part of December; this last one discusses his meetings with Voltaire over Christmas.

Instrumental Causes and Extended Minds

Edward Feser has an interesting post on one "kernel of truth" a Thomist might find in the extended mind thesis, the claim that the mind extends into the world by the way of certain kinds of objects. He focuses on the issue of the forms of the intellect. I actually think there's another, and more obvious, point at which the two can be said to touch, namely, in the Thomistic account of instrumental causes.

Suppose you have a pen. A pen has the power to write. But, if you think about it, it can't write on its own; its power to write is purely instrumental. For its writing ability to manifest in action, the pen has to be applied to actual writing: you take it in hand and write with it, thus using the pen's ability to write in order to write. This applicatio virtutis ad actionem, the application of the power to the right sort of action, is one side of instrumental causality.

But you can look at it in a different way, and think of the pen as really having the power to write, in a full sense, when it parcels out, so to speak, or participates in, the activity of a higher power: in this case, your power. When you take the pen in hand and apply its ability to write to actual writing, it has become an extension of your own ability to write. And thus the pen writes, which it cannot do on its own, because it is an instrument of your own power to write.

These points are quite general, and one way to interpret the extended mind thesis charitably from a Thomistic point of view is to see it as a rediscovery of the considerable use by the human mind of instrumental causes, applying various things (like notebooks and iPods) to their actions, so that these things participate in the power of the mind itself, as its instruments. As Clark and Chalmers say (in the paper linked above):

It is not just the presence of advanced external computing resources which raises the issue, but rather the general tendency of human reasoners to lean heavily on environmental supports. Thus consider the use of pen and paper to perform long multiplication (McClelland et al 1986, Clark 1989), the use of physical re-arrangements of letter tiles to prompt word recall in Scrabble (Kirsh 1995), the use of instruments such as the nautical slide rule (Hutchins 1995), and the general paraphernalia of language, books, diagrams, and culture. In all these cases the individual brain performs some operations, while others are delegated to manipulations of external media.

And the Thomist has a reasonable analysis of how this would work in terms of instrumental causality, and even can capture the striking feature of the extended mind thesis -- the apparent extension of the mind into the world -- with the notion of participation, and all in a way that relies less on metaphor and more on actual careful analysis of action than one usually finds associated with the extended mind thesis.

A Triumph and a Victory

A Song on a Bare Bough
by Grace Noll Crowell

I saw a valiant cardinal
Dark-red against the winter dawn,
He whistled from a leafless tree
Upon a barren lawn,

The tiny dauntless splotch of red
Shot up a challenge straight and high:
A rocket-burst of silver stars
To shower a winter sky.

The little brave intrepid thing--
A conqueror of cold and night--
He drenched the bare boughs suddenly
With color and with light--

A triumph and a victory
That I have come to understand.
I laughed--a broken laugh--and took
Life once more by the hand.

The Duke of True Lovers

Ooh, nice find at Google Book: Christine de Pisan's The Book of the Duke of True Lovers.


The book of the Duke of true lovers By Christine, Christine de Pisan, Alice Kemp-Welch, Laurence Binyon, Eric Robert Dalrymple Maclagan

I hadn't come across it before; judging from the translation, it looks like the original was prosimetric, which would be fairly unusual -- prosimetric works are hard to write because you have to integrate very different ways of writing. It's rather difficult to find Christine's works in English, despite the fact that she was one of the great early modern writers. And while I am still reading it, it's Christine de Pisan, so you know it's going to be good.

A Poem Re-Draft

'Tis the season.

Blessed Is the Blood Now Bled

Blessed is the blood now bled
from down the thorn-encircled head,
from out the spear-intruded side,
upon the cross where Christ has died.

Blessed is the holy Name
that lives from age to age the same,
that bled upon the unjust cross
and drew just blessing from the loss.

Blessed are the tears of grace
that flow down from Our Lord's own face
from health of mind and depth of heart
that never shirks the servant's part.

Blessed is the open tomb
which angels herald as the womb
from whence the Lord of life speeds true
to make our weary hearts as new.

The Taste of the Fig

I was at the Metaphysics and Philosophy of Religion workshop in San Antonio the past two days; quite a bit of fun (although, since I drove, I learned that San Antonio drivers are horrendously bad, much worse than Austin drivers, who I had thought were bad enough). Lots of thought-provoking arguments -- and, as Socrates might say, it's always good to go beyond the written logos to the living, breathing logos. In any case, one of the papers was by Andrei Buckareff, on the pairing problem for immaterial agents; a key premise of an argument being considered by him was that spatiotemporal effects must have spatiotemporal causes. Since my mind is unruly, it always goes off on tangents, and I started thinking about how Hume would deny this premise -- for he pretty clearly does. And, as I've already written a post about Hume's argument on this subject, here it is again, with some slight modifications. (Constant conjunction, by the way, is nothing other than Hume's answer to the pairing problem.)

*****

In Treatise 1.4.5, Hume presents an argument for the following claim:

N An object may exist but be nowhere

In support of this Hume claims that our sense of place or locality is rooted entirely in our senses of sight and touch; other senses convey a sense of place only by association with these. In light of this he argues (T. 1.4.5.9):

1. Whatever has a place must either be extended or be a mathematical point.
2. Whatever is extended has a figure or shape.
3. A desire has no figure or shape
4. Mathematical points can be combined and disposed so as to form a volume.
5. A desire is not disposable in this way.
6. Therefore a desire has no place.

So, despite the apparently counterintuitive nature of N (which was explicitly denied by Samuel Clarke in his correspondence with Leibniz), Hume says of it that "this is not only possible, but...the greatest part of beings do and must exist after this manner" (T 1.4.5.10). We can say that an object is nowhere when its parts are not so related to each other as to form a figure or volume, and the whole is not related to other things so as to be distant or contiguous. Hume puts all our perceptions in this category (with the exception of those of sight and touch, which he thinks are extended). Indeed, not only are most of our perceptions (and their objects) nowhere, they are such that they could not possibly be in a place. If this is so, however, most of our perceptions (and their objects) cannot be 'locally conjoined' to matter, i.e., they cannot be united to matter in a place, because any relation requires that both be similar enough to serve as the ground of relation.

But we do often try to attribute local conjunction to the things Hume says can't be locally conjoined to anything. Suppose, says Hume, that we have a fig at one end of a table and an olive at the other end. We are naturally inclined to say that the taste of the fig is at the fig's end of the table, and the taste of the olive is at the other end. Hume thinks that the reason we do this is mere prejudice: we associate the fig's taste with the fig, knowing that the fig-body can cause a fig-taste to follow it in time. Since the fig-body and the fig-taste are related by causation and temporal succession, we assume that they are also related by local conjunction. Indeed, Hume's view is that this is almost impossible to avoid: when we are faced with an incomplete union the imagination has a natural tendency to fill in whatever relation is necessary to make the union complete; only then can we be satisfied. On reflection, Hume thinks, we would recognize that the result we've arrived at is clearly unintelligible and incoherent. For where in the fig-body is the taste located? There is no extended thing or set of points within the fig that constitute the fig-taste; therefore the locality we give the fig-taste is that of the fig-body and every part of it. In other words, we assume that the fig-taste is located in the whole fig-body, and located wholly in every part of the fig-body (totum in toto et totum in qualibet parte, as Hume notes the scholastics would say of the soul). Hume thinks that this is an obvious contradiction: it is equivalent to saying that the fig-taste is both in a place and not there at the same time.

So, Hume argues, we are faced with a trilemma. Either

(a) some beings exist without any place;

or

(b) all beings (including things like desires and passions) are extended and figured;

or

(c) some things are so incorporated with extended objects that they are wholly in the whole and wholly in every part.

Since Hume has argued against (b) and (c), the only option left is (a), which is equivalent to N.

Philosophy and Refereeing

An interesting post on philosophy and refereeing for journals. I'm afraid I agree with Larry Laudan's comment:

That said, I dispute that any one of us has a moral or professional obligation to referee. As a former journal editor, I know firsthand that many philosophers --including some very productive ones—make deplorable referees, just as many authors of good books make terrible book reviewers. If one knows or suspects that about oneself, surely the best thing to do is to refuse requests to referee. I also believe that, in the case of highly productive and original philosophers, it is far better for the profession if they spend their time doing their own work rather than carrying the broom to sweep up behind the rest of us. Finally, making a good argument of one’s own and detecting bad arguments in the work of others are not skills that always go together. Being a good writer doesn’t entail one is a good editor of others’ writings and vice versa; being a good pitcher doesn’t automatically qualify one to be a plate umpire. The idea that each of us owes it to the profession to referee frequently fails to reckon with the fact that the field is full of poor referees, whose highest moral calling would be to refuse ever to take on a task that they are unlikely to discharge quickly and competently.

I also agree with his further point that, whatever may be the case with other fields, in academic philosophy, a field which consists almost entirely of people commenting on other people's work, this sort of reviewing system is not as crucial for the field as one might at first think; it's primarily a convenience for journal quality-control, not (as one would think it is for some other fields) a major gate-keeping system. There are plenty of other sorts of roles in current academic philosophy -- commenting on papers, reading and asking questions about drafts, and the like -- that are vastly more important for the field. Certainly we have no obligation to journals to help them secure quality referees; and if one is speaking of obligations to the professional community in general, as a professional, there are many, many things of much greater importance against which the time and effort and likely quality of one's refereeing has to be weighed in each particular case.