Hypatia Movie

There's a Hypatia movie coming out.

Pro: It's good to see a movie where the main protagonist is an important historical philosopher.

Con: All the indications are that they won't get her philosophy right. She was a Fourth Century Neoplatonist; it looks like they are going to try to make her a secular humanist, which she certainly was not. Disappointing waste; the Neoplatonism of the time, which of course is post-Iamblichus, is an extraordinarily complex and aesthetic blending of Platonic intellectualism and pagan religion, complete with philosophical lectures and religious rituals. It would make a mind-blowing big-screen spectacle.

Pro: Rachel Weisz will make a lovely Hypatia.

Con: She will be far too young; Hypatia was almost certainly in her sixties when she was killed. And that's just the most forgivable jumbling of chronology.

Pro: I'm all for a philosophical martyrdom story.

Con: Trapped in the Library of Alexandria while it is burning, the victim of people trying to prevent her from revealing that the earth revolves around the sun? What? What? I say again, what?

It looks like it will be awful. But if it does well enough, Roger Pearse is probably right:

Let’s welcome it. It should stir up interest in late antiquity, particularly if they can make the Byzantine world glow with light and colour. It doesn’t really matter if a shoal of false impressions get created. What we need to think of is the impressionable teenagers staring open-mouthed at the screen and thinking "Wow! I want to know more about that." Some will go on to become academics, more will buy books about the subject, and a few will get rich in the stock market and fund archaeological expeditions.

And, since Hypatia sometimes gets mentioned in my intro courses, if it does well, it would be a good learning example for how to approach the history of philosophy properly, even though (and perhaps especially since) it deviates from actual history. St. Cyril, of course, won't get a fair shake; but he hasn't since Kingsley, so that's nothing new.

If Hopes Were Dupes, Fears May Be Liars

Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth
by Arthur Hugh Clough

Say not the struggle naught availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke conceal'd,
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward, look, the land is bright!

Theory, Philosophy, and Poetry

There is a kind of sensualism or aestheticism that has decreed in our day that theory is not poetical; as if all the images and emotions that enter a cultivated mind were not saturated with theory. The prevalence of such a sensualism or aestheticism would alone suffice to explain the impotence of the arts. The life of theory is not less human or less emotional than the life of sense; it is more typically human and more keenly emotional. Philosophy is a more intense sort of experience than common life is, just as pure and subtle music, heard in retirement, is something keener and more intense than the howling of storms or the rumble of cities. For this reason philosophy, when a poet is not mindless, enters inevitably into his poetry, since it has entered into his life; or rather, the detail of things and the detail of ideas pass equally into his verse, when both alike lie in the path that has led him to his ideal. To object to theory in poetry would be like objecting to words there; for words, too, are symbols without the sensuous character of the things they stand for; and yet it is only by the net of new connections which words throw over things, in recalling them, that poetry arises at all. Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.

George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets, p. 124

Notes and Links

* A good ancient/medieval Carnivalesque is up at "Food History". The posts on Joan of Arc, on the Peasants' Revolt, and on scythes were the ones I found most interesting.

* China Mieville gives his list of reasons why Tolkien rocks; it's all the more interesting since Mieville has not hesitated to criticize Tolkien on particular points in the past. It's a very Mieville-like list, but, of course, that's in Tolkien, too, which is part of the wonder of Tolkien's accomplishment.

* Edward Feser has two posts on Aristotelianism and early modern empiricism: one on Hume and the other on empiricism generally.

* Michael Liccione argues that atheistic arguments are at root moral in character. A very interesting argument. As I note in the comments, I'm inclined to think that actually it's not morality but final causality that is the issue; but in practice, since moral reasoning is an area where everyone deals with final causes on a regular basis, this will mean that often the arguments do take on a moral tone, although they don't have to do so.

* Gina Khan has an interesting reflection on being a secular Muslim, including some brief discussion of the increasingly common phenomenon of 'reformed Islam'. It will be interesting to see how the New Ijtihad movement pans out; in essence, it is a rebirth (in new form) of the tradition of philosophical Islam, and I suspect that its future depends crucially on recognizing itself as such. Here and there (for instance, here and there in the writings of Muqtedar Khan) one finds recognition of this, but it really does seem a matter of 'here and there' to this point. Irshad Manji recently noted the publication of a new book on the subject of reformed Islam, Critical Thinkers for Islamic Reform.

* Sherry's hundred hymns list continues:

#92 On Jordan's Stormy Banks
#91 Man of Sorrows, What a Name
#90 From Depths of Woe
#89 Saviour Like a Shepherd Lead Us
#88 All Things Bright and Beautiful
#87 Lift High the Cross
#86 Fairest Lord Jesus
#85 I Surrender All
#84 All the Way My Savior Leads Me
#83 O Worship the King
#82 God of Grace and God of Glory

* A graphic novel version of James Joyce's Ulysses. (ht)

* Janet Stemwedel recently heard a very...unusual...paper at a philosophy conference.

* Kevin Edgecomb has up a translation of a Jewish lament on the Fall of Constantinople, basically a cento of prophetic passages.

A Chinese Parable

Once there was a man who had many monkeys, whose speech he could understand. All these monkeys were very expensive to maintain, and so he knew he would have to ration food or go broke. But he also knew that monkeys are not the sort of creatures that simply accept a restriction like that, so he decided he would have to reason with them.

"So that there will be enough food to go around," he said to them, "we will have to make it so that each of you gets three chestnuts in the morning and four in the afternoon."

The monkeys, however, were very angry at this.

"Fine!" said the man. "Then I will improve the offer, and give you four in the morning and three in the afternoon!"

And the monkeys were happy.

Thus the Chinese have a proverb, "Morning, three; afternoon, four," which is used of cases where clever deceivers take advantage of silly people who do not really know their own minds. That sounds like politics. But that means the monkeys are....

Beatrice

And she appeared to me clad in a most noble colour, a subdued and pure crimson, girded and adorned in a manner befitting her extreme youth.

At that moment I say truly that the spirit of life, which dwelleth in the most secret chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently, that it was painfully perceptible in the smallest pulses; and trembling it spake these words: "Behold a god stronger than I, who coming, shall rule over me."

At that moment the animal spirit, that inhabits the high chamber where the sensitive spirits have their perceptions, began to marvel greatly, and speaking more especially to the spirits of the eyes, he said these words: "Your beatitude hath now been manifested to you."

At that moment the natural spirit, which dwelleth in that part where we administer our nutriment, began to weep, and weeping spake these words: "Woe is me! for often I shall be troubled from this time forth!"

Henceforward I say Love swayed my soul, which was so early espoused to him, and he assumed such complete mastery over me, through the power of the imagination, that perforce I was compelled to fulfil all his behest. He commanded me many times, that I should seek this youngest of the angels: whence I in my boyhood went many times in search of her, and I beheld in her such noble and laudable bearing that certainly of her might be spoken the words of the poet Homer, "She doth not seem to be a daughter of a mortal, but of God."

Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova

On Two Kinds of Utilitarianism

There are two different things you might want to do with a principle of utility: you might want it primarily to serve as a theory of obligation, your obligation being to do what maximizes utility. But you could also want it to serve as the foundation of a general theory of practical rationality, in which case maximizing utility need not always be obligatory. One of the tricky things about reading John Stuart Mill's discussions of utilitarianism is that, if not careful, you can easily make the mistake of reading him as doing the first, when in fact he is clearly doing the second. On Mill's account we don't have an obligation to maximize utility in every case. Obligations only arise when double analysis shows both that the original act maximizes utility, or at least is of very high utility, and that sanctions are required by the principle of utility. In other words, Mill has a positivist theory of obligation: without sanction, no obligation. (See Utilitarianism, Chapter III) The principle of utility still has bite outside of cases involving sanction, though, because for Mill it delineates the very character of practical rationality. This is why, in fact, it is able to underlie the positivist account of obligation; obligations are acts, of the sort preferable from the perspective of practical reason, that are such that punishing failures to perform those acts is itself practically rational.

When you recognize that Mill's utilitarianism is really a theory of practical reason, many of the moves Mill makes begin to make more sense: the particular way he argues for utilitarianism in Utilitarianism, the discussions of the art of life scattered through Mill's works, the combined insistence on the (relative) inviolability of moral rules and tolerance for non-maximizing strategies, the fact that he has always been difficult to pin down under one of the standard utilitarian labels, and (I would suggest) the otherwise obscure connection between Mill's utilitarianism and liberalism. I would also suggest that Mill's utilitarianism turns out to be a much more interesting theory when we regard it as a general theory of practical reason rather than as a very odd and inconsistent theory of right and wrong.