Saturday, May 07, 2005
It Took Long Enough....
Descartes has finally won out over Voetius (in French). In March the University of Utrecht lifted its 363-year-old condemnation of the teaching of the works of Descartes. (hat-tip: Philosophical Fortnights). Honestly, I hadn't even realized the condemnation was even still in place; it's amazing how long this sort of thing sometimes lasts.
Two More Scribbles
Two more, this time a bit closer to my usual.
Other Things
The sky was bright blue,
Bursting with the sunlight,
But I continued on my way,
Concerned with other things.
The sky threatened rain;
I walked on, undaunted,
Hurried by the end before me,
Thinking of other things.
The sky wept tears,
Thundering over my negligence,
But I paid no attention,
Worrying about other things.
As you hurry on your way,
Stop a moment to see the sky;
I have too often neglected it
In my fretting about other things.
For When the Sun is Bright
Sing your praise unto the Lord,
sing of the joy of Him;
among His people He abides,
between the cherubim.
Play, O lambs upon the hills,
leap with solemn play,
upon the mountains of the Lord
in light of God's own day.
Holy, Holy is the Lord,
Holy is His light;
tabernacled here with us,
He saves us in the night.
Glory is a heavy thing;
it presses down with love.
Raise your voice and gladly sing
the praise of God above.
Other Things
The sky was bright blue,
Bursting with the sunlight,
But I continued on my way,
Concerned with other things.
The sky threatened rain;
I walked on, undaunted,
Hurried by the end before me,
Thinking of other things.
The sky wept tears,
Thundering over my negligence,
But I paid no attention,
Worrying about other things.
As you hurry on your way,
Stop a moment to see the sky;
I have too often neglected it
In my fretting about other things.
For When the Sun is Bright
Sing your praise unto the Lord,
sing of the joy of Him;
among His people He abides,
between the cherubim.
Play, O lambs upon the hills,
leap with solemn play,
upon the mountains of the Lord
in light of God's own day.
Holy, Holy is the Lord,
Holy is His light;
tabernacled here with us,
He saves us in the night.
Glory is a heavy thing;
it presses down with love.
Raise your voice and gladly sing
the praise of God above.
Selling What Cannot Exist
Herzog at "Left2Right" has what he calls a skeptical challenge. Fill in the blank:
(C) ________________ is unnatural and therefore wrong.
And then provide an account of why (C) is true.
My off-the-top-of-my-head suggestion:
Usury is unnatural and therefore wrong.
My off-the-top-of-my-head account:
Money presupposes the stable existence of society, which is organized for common good; as a matter of common good, we need something that can serve as a medium of exchange and savings. Money (as such), therefore, has no legitimate use except as fulfilling this role. In usury, one attempts to use money as such not purely for the fulfilling of the role of being a medium of exchange and savings, but as a commodity for rent. Usury, being rationally perverse, is unnatural and therefore wrong; QED. Confirming evidence: Most forms of usury involve charging people for being in need.
Or to put it in Aristotelian terms: usury is very unnatural; or in the popular slogan: Money does not breed.
The rest of Herzog's argument, by the way, is (as far as I can see, at least) incoherent; not only does it recklessly conflate Aristotelian teleology with teleology in the later sense, it puts excessive emphasis on what are the unique conditions for human nature (which play no relevant role in the discussion, contrary to Herzog's implication), historically it fails to recognize that teleology in the later sense was not in any noticeable way replaced by the mechanistic view (indeed, it is a mechanistic view, arising for the same mechanistic reasons the design argument became so popular), the claim that teleologists were never able to explain why nature sometimes failed to realize her intentions is utterly absurd, it fails to recognize that the views he is criticizing can be formulated without appeal to nature, etc., etc.
(C) ________________ is unnatural and therefore wrong.
And then provide an account of why (C) is true.
My off-the-top-of-my-head suggestion:
Usury is unnatural and therefore wrong.
My off-the-top-of-my-head account:
Money presupposes the stable existence of society, which is organized for common good; as a matter of common good, we need something that can serve as a medium of exchange and savings. Money (as such), therefore, has no legitimate use except as fulfilling this role. In usury, one attempts to use money as such not purely for the fulfilling of the role of being a medium of exchange and savings, but as a commodity for rent. Usury, being rationally perverse, is unnatural and therefore wrong; QED. Confirming evidence: Most forms of usury involve charging people for being in need.
Or to put it in Aristotelian terms: usury is very unnatural; or in the popular slogan: Money does not breed.
The rest of Herzog's argument, by the way, is (as far as I can see, at least) incoherent; not only does it recklessly conflate Aristotelian teleology with teleology in the later sense, it puts excessive emphasis on what are the unique conditions for human nature (which play no relevant role in the discussion, contrary to Herzog's implication), historically it fails to recognize that teleology in the later sense was not in any noticeable way replaced by the mechanistic view (indeed, it is a mechanistic view, arising for the same mechanistic reasons the design argument became so popular), the claim that teleologists were never able to explain why nature sometimes failed to realize her intentions is utterly absurd, it fails to recognize that the views he is criticizing can be formulated without appeal to nature, etc., etc.
Things of Interest
* PseudoSeven: Nathanael Robinson hosts Carnivalesque #7 #5, the Early Modern Carnival. There are some really great posts. Here are just some of the topics: whether Newton was a deist, Ratzinger on Galileo and the Church, Hume's natural history of religion, the nature of Carnival, the role of women in the French economy, British royal scandals, Jane Austen's word artistry, the inimitable Sor Juana, the Reformation, Reuchlin and the Dominicans on Jewish books, and the methodology of the history of ideas. An awesome collection of posts. Go see!
* Richard discusses The Argument from Hell at "Philosophy, etc."
* Lindsay at "Majikthise" continues her discussion of moral relativism with a Relativism Case Study.
* William Vallicella at "Maverick Philosopher" summarizes an argument that Romanticism is subjectified occasionalism in About Schmitt: Romanticism as a Form of Occasionalism. I find this a very intriguing idea. It's an odd interpretive move, but the more I think about, just given what little I know about the Romantics, the more I think there may be something in it, at least as a suggestive beginning for interpretation.
* Steven Riddle at "Flos Carmeli" has a nice poem called Jonah.
* Colonel David Hackworth, military reform advocate, died Wednesday. Hackworth is best known for his organization, "Soldiers for the Truth," which provides a forum for investigation and dissemination of information about (among other things) mismanagement of the military by Congress or the Pentagon, civil rights issues for soldiers and veterans, and the accurate flow of information between the military and civilians. Hackworth was a pro-military voice who was sharply critical of American participation in and handling of the Iraq war. (hat-tip on the bad news: Vox Popoli)
* Apparently, East Waynesville Baptist in North Carolina asked nine members of the congregation to leave because they were Democrats, leading to more than 40 leaving in protest. (hat-tip: Science and Politics). There has been a lot of fuss about it in the blogosphere; but it's actually not particularly surprising. Baptists are schismatic by nature, and there are few of us who are or have been Baptists who have not experienced church splits of one sort or another over some silly detail or other: the use of tambourines and overheads in church services comes to mind as one example. It follows from the Baptist emphasis on the individual and the local congregation; the church power structure is entirely bottom-up, with the real power belonging to the individual Baptists, who gather together into a congregation, which pools money with other congregations for particular purposes (usually missionary purposes of various sorts) to create a convention. What seems to have happened -- although the news articles are very vague -- is that the pastor exceeded his authority, which is established, of course, by the by-laws created by the congregation.
* At "Ralph the Sacred River" there's an interesting post on George Psalmanazar (1679-1763).
* By all accounts, Revenge of the Sith will be much better than Episodes I and II. Hurray!
* Richard discusses The Argument from Hell at "Philosophy, etc."
* Lindsay at "Majikthise" continues her discussion of moral relativism with a Relativism Case Study.
* William Vallicella at "Maverick Philosopher" summarizes an argument that Romanticism is subjectified occasionalism in About Schmitt: Romanticism as a Form of Occasionalism. I find this a very intriguing idea. It's an odd interpretive move, but the more I think about, just given what little I know about the Romantics, the more I think there may be something in it, at least as a suggestive beginning for interpretation.
* Steven Riddle at "Flos Carmeli" has a nice poem called Jonah.
* Colonel David Hackworth, military reform advocate, died Wednesday. Hackworth is best known for his organization, "Soldiers for the Truth," which provides a forum for investigation and dissemination of information about (among other things) mismanagement of the military by Congress or the Pentagon, civil rights issues for soldiers and veterans, and the accurate flow of information between the military and civilians. Hackworth was a pro-military voice who was sharply critical of American participation in and handling of the Iraq war. (hat-tip on the bad news: Vox Popoli)
* Apparently, East Waynesville Baptist in North Carolina asked nine members of the congregation to leave because they were Democrats, leading to more than 40 leaving in protest. (hat-tip: Science and Politics). There has been a lot of fuss about it in the blogosphere; but it's actually not particularly surprising. Baptists are schismatic by nature, and there are few of us who are or have been Baptists who have not experienced church splits of one sort or another over some silly detail or other: the use of tambourines and overheads in church services comes to mind as one example. It follows from the Baptist emphasis on the individual and the local congregation; the church power structure is entirely bottom-up, with the real power belonging to the individual Baptists, who gather together into a congregation, which pools money with other congregations for particular purposes (usually missionary purposes of various sorts) to create a convention. What seems to have happened -- although the news articles are very vague -- is that the pastor exceeded his authority, which is established, of course, by the by-laws created by the congregation.
* At "Ralph the Sacred River" there's an interesting post on George Psalmanazar (1679-1763).
* By all accounts, Revenge of the Sith will be much better than Episodes I and II. Hurray!
Thursday, May 05, 2005
A Scribble
A bit different from my usual....
I Remember
your words are only words
your dreams are only dreams
but I remember
once we sat beneath an oak
murmuring beneath gold-green leaves
that shushed us softly
you took my hand
tracing the lines of truth
in the veins of my skin
I Remember
your words are only words
your dreams are only dreams
but I remember
once we sat beneath an oak
murmuring beneath gold-green leaves
that shushed us softly
you took my hand
tracing the lines of truth
in the veins of my skin
Enquiry Concerning the Origin of Religion
Hume's The Natural History of Religion, published in 1757, opens with a distinction between two questions one might ask about religion. The first is "that concerning its foundation in reason" and the second is "that concerning its origin in human nature." The first, which has to do with the rational justification of religion, is discussed in Hume's more famous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. The second, and I think Hume's more important contribution, is about the psychological factors involved in religious belief. What Hume is trying to do is discuss the psychological factors that make it possible to talk about the history of religion. If religion were merely a matter of argument, it would have some sort of history, but a very attenuated one. Religion, however, is more than argument, so a more involved investigation is necessary. In this investigation he comes to several conclusions.
A. That Polytheism was the Primary Religion of Man. The prior work that perhaps most closely approaches the sort of thing Hume is attempting here was the De Religione Gentilium (1663) of Edward Herbert of Cherbury. Herbert argued that all actual religions in existence were corruptions of an original rational worship consisting of five notions:
(1) That there is a supreme God;
(2) That this God ought to be worshipped;
(3) That the primary form this worship takes is piety combined with virtue;
(4) That men should repent of their sins;
(5) That vice and virtue are punished and rewarded (respectively).
Herbert's book was an attempt to argue that religions exhibited these principles in more or less faithful forms. Hume takes an entirely contrary approach, arguing that human beings were originally polytheistic. The farther back we go in history, Hume argues, the more polytheistic societies become. The "savage tribes" of America, Asia, and Africa are all polytheists. Hume allows that it is possible to develop an argument for monotheism from an accurate investigation into the frame of nature, but suggests that common people of any time don't really pay much attention to the data that would be required to make and appreciate this argument.
B. Religion originally arises out of hope and fear in matters of everyday life. If we aren't going to locate the origin of religion in speculative reason, then, Hume argues, we must locate it in the passions; in particular, in "the anxious concern for happiness, the dread of future misery, the terror of death, the thirst of revenge, the appetite for food and other necessaries" (p. 28).
The way in which these passions lead to polytheism is this. Actuated by hope and fear about the future, human beings begin to worry about the unknown causes that govern things like sickness, famine, and the like; "and while the passions are kept in perpetual alarm by an anxious expectation of the events, the imagination is equally employed in forming ideas of those powers, on which we have so entire a dependance" (p. 29). In the absence of a developed theory of the relevant causes, the human mind anthropomorphizes. Not only does it happen in poetry, but common people often go farther than the poet and begin believing in the hamadryad in the wood or the spirit of the waters. Even philosophers, Hume thinks, are not immune, giving the standard list of supposed scholastic anthropomorphisms (the horror of the vacuum, sympathies, antipathies, natural appetite).
Any human passion, Hume thinks, may lead to the belief in "invisible intelligent power"; but Hume thinks that the less agreeable passions -- fear, grief, and the like -- are more conducive to the development of religion, since they lead to attempts to appease the invisible powers.
Interestingly, the bulk of this explanation is not found exclusively in Hume. One also finds it in Malebranche. Malebranche's The Search after Truth discusses a very similar type of mechanism in explaining how original sin creates a pagan mindset in people; this mechanism plays an important role in Malebranche's account of how we fall into the error of believing that things have their own causal powers. Hume would certainly have known of the passages in which Malebranche discusses this; he quotes elsewhere from one of the most important. Whether Hume's eighteenth-century naturalistic account is adapted from Malebranche's seventeenth-century Catholic account is unclear, however; very little work has been done on the historical influences for The Natural History of Religion.
C. Monotheism arises through a propensity to flattery. After discussing various other issues (e.g., the limited non-creative function of polytheistic gods, allegory, hero-worship, and the like), Hume goes on to discuss the origin of theism from polytheism. His view is that it does not arise by any process of reasoning but by a sycophantic tendency in human nature. Polytheists tend to have special devotions to a particular god; as time goes on they tend to flatter and eulogize that deity, whose characteristics become greater and greater until all the other gods are edged out. Gods become supreme through bootlicking.
D. Polytheism and monotheism are engaged in a perpetual cycle of flux and reflux. The propensity to anthropomorphize forces the mind in a polytheistic direction; the propensity to adulation forces the mind in a monotheistic direction.
From this Hume passes on to discussion of how the two, polytheism and monotheism compare. Polytheism makes men tolerant, monotheism makes them intolerant; polytheism makes men heroic, monotheism makes them servile; monotheism, while initially more rational, is more likely to corrupt philosophy for precisely that reason; both are a bad influence on morals. Hume finds this all quite puzzling, and thus ends the work with a famous passage:
One of the interesting limitations of Hume's approach in The Natural History of Religion is that his knowledge of the "savage" societies is very indirect. Virtually all of his knowledge of pagan life is drawn from classical writings, particularly from Greek and Roman historians. This means that his knowledge of other religious cultures is a curious mix of idealization and traveler's tales. In this sense, Hume's attempt to a psychological history of religion runs into a problem that is common in this period: newly interested in other cultures, Europeans of the time are nonetheless almost wholly dependent on ancient sources, traveler's tales, and missionary reports.
[Page numbers are from David Hume, The Natural History of Religion. H. E. Root, editor. Stanford University Press (Stanford: 1956).]
[For a more modern approach that Hume would have loved, and which occasionally shows some surprising agreement with his speculations, see Chris's January posts at "Mixing Memory" here, here, and here.]
A. That Polytheism was the Primary Religion of Man. The prior work that perhaps most closely approaches the sort of thing Hume is attempting here was the De Religione Gentilium (1663) of Edward Herbert of Cherbury. Herbert argued that all actual religions in existence were corruptions of an original rational worship consisting of five notions:
(1) That there is a supreme God;
(2) That this God ought to be worshipped;
(3) That the primary form this worship takes is piety combined with virtue;
(4) That men should repent of their sins;
(5) That vice and virtue are punished and rewarded (respectively).
Herbert's book was an attempt to argue that religions exhibited these principles in more or less faithful forms. Hume takes an entirely contrary approach, arguing that human beings were originally polytheistic. The farther back we go in history, Hume argues, the more polytheistic societies become. The "savage tribes" of America, Asia, and Africa are all polytheists. Hume allows that it is possible to develop an argument for monotheism from an accurate investigation into the frame of nature, but suggests that common people of any time don't really pay much attention to the data that would be required to make and appreciate this argument.
B. Religion originally arises out of hope and fear in matters of everyday life. If we aren't going to locate the origin of religion in speculative reason, then, Hume argues, we must locate it in the passions; in particular, in "the anxious concern for happiness, the dread of future misery, the terror of death, the thirst of revenge, the appetite for food and other necessaries" (p. 28).
The way in which these passions lead to polytheism is this. Actuated by hope and fear about the future, human beings begin to worry about the unknown causes that govern things like sickness, famine, and the like; "and while the passions are kept in perpetual alarm by an anxious expectation of the events, the imagination is equally employed in forming ideas of those powers, on which we have so entire a dependance" (p. 29). In the absence of a developed theory of the relevant causes, the human mind anthropomorphizes. Not only does it happen in poetry, but common people often go farther than the poet and begin believing in the hamadryad in the wood or the spirit of the waters. Even philosophers, Hume thinks, are not immune, giving the standard list of supposed scholastic anthropomorphisms (the horror of the vacuum, sympathies, antipathies, natural appetite).
No wonder, then, that mankind, being placed in such an absolute ignorance of causes, and being at the same time so anxious concerning their future fortune, should immediately acknowledge a dependence on invisible powers, possessed of sentiment and intelligence. The unknown causes which continually employ their thought, apeparing always in the same aspect, are all apprehended to be of the same kind or species. Nor is it long before we ascribe to them thought and reason and apassion, and sometimes even the limbs and figures of men, in order to bring them nearer to a resemblance with ourselves. (p. 30)
Any human passion, Hume thinks, may lead to the belief in "invisible intelligent power"; but Hume thinks that the less agreeable passions -- fear, grief, and the like -- are more conducive to the development of religion, since they lead to attempts to appease the invisible powers.
Interestingly, the bulk of this explanation is not found exclusively in Hume. One also finds it in Malebranche. Malebranche's The Search after Truth discusses a very similar type of mechanism in explaining how original sin creates a pagan mindset in people; this mechanism plays an important role in Malebranche's account of how we fall into the error of believing that things have their own causal powers. Hume would certainly have known of the passages in which Malebranche discusses this; he quotes elsewhere from one of the most important. Whether Hume's eighteenth-century naturalistic account is adapted from Malebranche's seventeenth-century Catholic account is unclear, however; very little work has been done on the historical influences for The Natural History of Religion.
C. Monotheism arises through a propensity to flattery. After discussing various other issues (e.g., the limited non-creative function of polytheistic gods, allegory, hero-worship, and the like), Hume goes on to discuss the origin of theism from polytheism. His view is that it does not arise by any process of reasoning but by a sycophantic tendency in human nature. Polytheists tend to have special devotions to a particular god; as time goes on they tend to flatter and eulogize that deity, whose characteristics become greater and greater until all the other gods are edged out. Gods become supreme through bootlicking.
D. Polytheism and monotheism are engaged in a perpetual cycle of flux and reflux. The propensity to anthropomorphize forces the mind in a polytheistic direction; the propensity to adulation forces the mind in a monotheistic direction.
From this Hume passes on to discussion of how the two, polytheism and monotheism compare. Polytheism makes men tolerant, monotheism makes them intolerant; polytheism makes men heroic, monotheism makes them servile; monotheism, while initially more rational, is more likely to corrupt philosophy for precisely that reason; both are a bad influence on morals. Hume finds this all quite puzzling, and thus ends the work with a famous passage:
The whole is a riddle, an aenigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspence of judgment appear the only result of our most accurate scrutiny, concerning this subject. But such is the frailty of human reason, and such the irresistible contagion of opinion, that even this deliberate doubt could scarcely be upheld; did we not enlarge our view, and opposing one species of superstition to another, set them a quarrelling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy. (p. 76)
One of the interesting limitations of Hume's approach in The Natural History of Religion is that his knowledge of the "savage" societies is very indirect. Virtually all of his knowledge of pagan life is drawn from classical writings, particularly from Greek and Roman historians. This means that his knowledge of other religious cultures is a curious mix of idealization and traveler's tales. In this sense, Hume's attempt to a psychological history of religion runs into a problem that is common in this period: newly interested in other cultures, Europeans of the time are nonetheless almost wholly dependent on ancient sources, traveler's tales, and missionary reports.
[Page numbers are from David Hume, The Natural History of Religion. H. E. Root, editor. Stanford University Press (Stanford: 1956).]
[For a more modern approach that Hume would have loved, and which occasionally shows some surprising agreement with his speculations, see Chris's January posts at "Mixing Memory" here, here, and here.]
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Various, Including Providential History
* If the recent long posts are a bit fatiguing, I apologize; April was a busy month and a number of things I wanted to do had to be put off to the side. There will be more to common, but (I hope) not all in one lump.
* I have to do some re-working of the paper on Malebranche's mind-body union that I'll be giving later this month, so posting will probably be light until Saturday or Sunday. I'm pretty sure that I'll be doing a post on Hume's Natural History of Religion, though; I've been wanting to do it since Chris was discussing cognitive science work on religion in December, and I think I'll probably submit it to Carnivalesque, since I've intended to submit and haven't done so.
* Which reminds me: For Carnivalesque (the early modern carnival), don't forget to turn in your submissions to Nathanael Robinson at rhineriverATearthlinkDOTnet (replace AT with @ and DOT with .). For the Philosophers' Carnival put in your submission at the link.
* Jonathan Dresner has an excellent post on providential history at Cliopatria. I'm not sure I quite follow his point in the last paragraph about logical tautology, but it's well worth reading. I don't think I have a firm grasp on the whole dispute, but I think I'm pretty much in agreement with it. I consider providential history (or some equivalent) to be a necessary and important part of how we approach history; but there's a sense in which it is not history at all, but a higher-order philosophical and theological reflection on history. It needs to be sharply distinguished from the historical work itself, which should be more or less the same in all cases. It's the higher-order interpretations, necessary not so much for historical work as it is for what we decide to learn from it, that are really at issue. And I think this is true from the providential history end as well as from the historical end. For, in the end, I hold to an Old Testament view of providential history: a good providential history never papers over the endless tale of human failings and folly. What makes a providential history different from mere propaganda is that it gives us an idea of how providence deals with us as we are and have been, not with some idealization of ourselves. And that generally requires good, standard historical work to begin with. (I like the analysis in section I, as well).
* Clark links to this paper on Levinas and the Talmud.
* At "Majikthise," Lindsay discusses What's wrong with relativism (the discussion in the comments section is long, but worth reading as well).
* At "Maverick Philosopher," Bill Vallicella posts his paper responding to Quentin Smith on the questio of whether the universe could cause itself to exist.
* Rebecca is collecting the Words We Love. One word I love is syzygy. The opportunity to use it doesn't come up much. I once wrote a nonsense poem consisting of words I enjoy hearing; it was called "A Syzygy of Caribou".
* misteraitch at "Giornale Nuovo" presents us with Michelangelo's Dream.
* I have to do some re-working of the paper on Malebranche's mind-body union that I'll be giving later this month, so posting will probably be light until Saturday or Sunday. I'm pretty sure that I'll be doing a post on Hume's Natural History of Religion, though; I've been wanting to do it since Chris was discussing cognitive science work on religion in December, and I think I'll probably submit it to Carnivalesque, since I've intended to submit and haven't done so.
* Which reminds me: For Carnivalesque (the early modern carnival), don't forget to turn in your submissions to Nathanael Robinson at rhineriverATearthlinkDOTnet (replace AT with @ and DOT with .). For the Philosophers' Carnival put in your submission at the link.
* Jonathan Dresner has an excellent post on providential history at Cliopatria. I'm not sure I quite follow his point in the last paragraph about logical tautology, but it's well worth reading. I don't think I have a firm grasp on the whole dispute, but I think I'm pretty much in agreement with it. I consider providential history (or some equivalent) to be a necessary and important part of how we approach history; but there's a sense in which it is not history at all, but a higher-order philosophical and theological reflection on history. It needs to be sharply distinguished from the historical work itself, which should be more or less the same in all cases. It's the higher-order interpretations, necessary not so much for historical work as it is for what we decide to learn from it, that are really at issue. And I think this is true from the providential history end as well as from the historical end. For, in the end, I hold to an Old Testament view of providential history: a good providential history never papers over the endless tale of human failings and folly. What makes a providential history different from mere propaganda is that it gives us an idea of how providence deals with us as we are and have been, not with some idealization of ourselves. And that generally requires good, standard historical work to begin with. (I like the analysis in section I, as well).
* Clark links to this paper on Levinas and the Talmud.
* At "Majikthise," Lindsay discusses What's wrong with relativism (the discussion in the comments section is long, but worth reading as well).
* At "Maverick Philosopher," Bill Vallicella posts his paper responding to Quentin Smith on the questio of whether the universe could cause itself to exist.
* Rebecca is collecting the Words We Love. One word I love is syzygy. The opportunity to use it doesn't come up much. I once wrote a nonsense poem consisting of words I enjoy hearing; it was called "A Syzygy of Caribou".
* misteraitch at "Giornale Nuovo" presents us with Michelangelo's Dream.
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