Mary Magdalene, Equal to the Apostles

I haven't had much chance to post anything about it today, but I did want to note that today, the 22nd is the Feast of St. Mary Magdalene, Equal to the Apostles on the Orthodox, Catholic, and Anglican calendars. 'Equal to the Apostles' is a liturgical title, used primarily by the Orthodox and by Eastern Rite Catholics, translating 'isapostolos'. It designates not a rank -- while there may be saints of more or less universality, there's no point in ranking them because they are all one in Christ -- but a calling. It is given to those who were called to spread the Gospel 'just like' the apostles were. Saints Cyril and Methodius, who missionized Russia, had an isapostolic calling; Saint Benedict, the 'Apostle to Germany', had an isapostolic calling; Saints Olga and Vladimir, responsible for the conversion of Russia, had isapostolic callings; and so forth. For what is Mary given the title? For the most important thing, because she was the first to see the dawn of the new age. As Hippolytus said, she was the apostle to the apostles:

Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping?" She said to them, "They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him." When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?" Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away." Jesus said to her, "Mary!" She turned and said to him in Hebrew, "Rabbouni!" (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, "Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, `I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'" Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, "I have seen the Lord"; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

Because the gospels say that Jesus cast seven devils out of her, Mary of Magdala has become one of history's great symbols of repentance and transformation. So it seems fitting to remember the tears of the Magdalene by repentance of wrongs we have done, and forgiveness of wrongs done to us.

Arts and Crafts

Some links on The Arts and Crafts Movement.

See also William Morris's work Hopes and Fears for Art, in which he discusses the 'lesser arts', that is, the decorative arts. Morris makes a very interesting argument that the decorative arts, despite being 'lesser', are central to civilization, and that when they get separated from the 'greater arts',

it is ill for the Arts altogether: the lesser ones become trivial, mechanical, unintelligent, incapable of resisting the changes pressed upon them by fashion or dishonesty; while the greater, however they may be practised for a while by men of great minds and wonder-working hands, unhelped by the lesser, unhelped by each other, are sure to lose their dignity of popular arts, and become nothing but dull adjuncts to unmeaning pomp, or ingenious toys for a few rich and idle men.

As Morris points out, the whole point of decoration is to give people pleasure in the things they use and make, and the importance of this for life at large can hardly be overestimated. One of the effects is that our attitude toward decoration tends to have a major influence on our attitude toward labor in general (because decoration contributes a great deal to the beauty of labor), so much so that Morris suggests that a healthy attitude toward the decorative sciences is one of the great aids of progress. Thus we need a healthy philosophy of the decorative arts, for the sake of progress and our own humanity; without one (and Morris didn't think we had one, and certainly wouldn't think we have one now) we get "Unhappiness and Brutality." That's perhaps a bit exaggerated, but it's less exaggerated than it looks. In any case, the book is well worth reading; I recommend it highly. It's a much-neglected classic of aesthetics. One of the many memorable lines:

I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.

Which, in a single sentence, encapsulates an argument of its own for the importance of the 'lesser arts'. Another:

Believe me, if we want art to begin at home, as it must, we must clear our houses of troublesome superfluities that are for ever in our way: conventional comforts that are no real comforts, and do but make work for servants and doctors: if you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it:

'HAVE NOTHING IN YOUR HOUSES THAT YOU DO NOT KNOW TO BE USEFUL OR BELIEVE TO BE BEAUTIFUL.

That's a much sterner asceticism than it sounds, but there's no doubt we would all be benefitted by it.

More links. Charles Robert Ashbee, an overview at "The Victorian Web" (some great pictures).

Fairy Tale Illustrations of Walter Crane.

John Ruskin's The Two Paths, subtitled "Lectures on Art, and Its Application to Decoration and Manufacture Delivered in 1858-1859." Ruskin argues that "all noble design" derives from the sculpting or painting of organic form. He also makes more controversial arguments, like his argument that the fine arts lead to the deterioration of society and that fashion is bad for morals; this is an argument like Morris's, but more controversially stated.

I had previously mentioned a thing or two about Eric Gill.

Philosophy and Critique

Chris at "Mixing Memory" has a post on a recent article by Graham Priest in Philosophy on the question, "What is Philosophy?" I haven't read the article, but Chris's summary makes it sound rather unimpressive (but it does sound like something a contemporary analytic philosopher would say). Chris asks,

Is "philosophy is critique" insightful or profound in some way that I'm not seeing? Is it anything more than such a vague and abstract definition that you can't possibly say it's wrong, even when it looks like people aren't doing any critiquing but are still doing what looks like philosophy (Priest notes that philosophy has its constructive side, too, but it's built on the critical side -- to paraphrase Nietzche, to create, one must also destory)?

Without seeing the article, I'd have to say it sounds fishy to me. 'Critique' is just a fancy way of saying 'thinking critically', and that just comes down to evaluating things using good judgment, so saying that philosophy is critique is like saying that philosophy is thinking really hard about stuff in a good way. There may be something to that, but at best it's a little too vague to be of much help.

Of course, there are more substantive notions of critique (the Marxist notion comes to mind as an example), so it's always possible that he has one of these in mind. That would certainly be interesting. But then it would need a serious defense, since the more substantive the notion of critique, the more doubtful (at first glance) the statement "Critique is what philosophy is."

The most plausible way of making 'philosophy is critique' work, at least that I can think of, is to connect it with something along the lines of Aristotle's notion of aporia (e.g., we come upon things that don't (yet) make sense on what we know thus far about the world -- aporia, or doubts -- and we wonder about them, and philosophy starts with wondering) or Socratic ignorance. That would at least give you something concrete to start out with, and to be profound about philosophy in general you'd need to start out concrete.

i sometimes get very annoyed at the things people in philosophy say about philosophy for this very reason. I do history of philosophy, or I consider myself to be doing what I call history of philosophy, and that's very metaphilosophical in nature. As I've noted before, a great deal of what you do in history of philosophy is handle 'the problem of the philosophical problem', so it's metaphilosophical in that sense. But it's also metaphilosophical in another sense, in that you can't really say anything about philosophy without grounding it in the history of philosophy. The history of philosophy is your data, your connection to the real thing you're supposed to be talking about. That's why Aristotle, for instance, is able to say such such amazingly profound things about philosophy: more than most philosophers he takes the history of philosophy up to his time seriously, and he uses this to immense advantage (perhaps to greater advantage than anyone has since).

But without history of philosophy there is a great temptation to try to answer the question, "What is philosophy?" without any regard for how people have actually done philosophy across time, across cultures, across language barriers. I once knew someone, fairly famous, who told his intro classes that the universal method of philosophy was 'skepticism'. Such a view cannot possibly withstand serious examination; but now there are hundreds of students, over many years, who have been told it. That annoys me to no end. But this sort of thing is very common.

Notes and Links

* Jospeh Bottum discusses A. J. Cronin at First Things. I haven't read The Keys of the Kingdom, but Judas Tree was probably good (i.e., if I'm not confusing it with something else), and The Citadel was definitely good, and I loved Adventures in Two Worlds.

* Michael Pahl at "the stuff of earth" has a series on the historicity of Jesus: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V. I like Pahl's approach, although in a sense it is a moot: to argue seriously, without detriment to our ability to do history in the first place, that Jesus did not exist, you have to argue that none of the witnesses to his existence -- the non-Christian witnesses Pahl discusses in Part II, the New Testament witnesses discussed in Part III, the existence of the Church prior to the writing of the New Testament, the witness of the apostolic Fathers -- can be relied upon on this point. This is not proof in the sense Pahl discusses in Part IV, but any historian can point to excellent historical existence claims put forward on much less evidence. If we have any knowledge of who existed two thousand years ago, Jesus is a good candidate; if he's not a good candidate, most of the people we think existed then are not good candidates. While it's not obvious, Part V makes a controversial theological claim that needs more defense than Pahl gives, namely, that things would not be much different historically if we had only the (false) belief that Jesus existed -- since for this to be true it has to be false that the Church has a special connection to the Living Christ. But his other two points about the theological implications of the historicity of Jesus are well worth reading and thinking about.

* If you liked Buffy the Vampire Slayer and/or Angel, and you aren't watching the second season of Cherub the Vampire with Bunny Slippers, you're missing out.

* In discussing the current situation between Israel and Lebanon, The Elfin Ethicist makes an important point that's exactly right:

But a just war is not about killing guilty people. It's about protecting innocent people. So even if going to war is otherwise justifiable, it may not be wise in the long run. That distinction is lost on our hawks and adventurists, who may appeal to just war criteria but who seem to have little respect for unintended consequences.

* Clayton Littlejohn presents some mereological puzzles for your enjoyment. My answers: (1) Head to the DMA for the statue and sue the dumpster diver for copyright infringement. (2) The thief has the original parts, but he's just copied the statue in such a way that the copy has the original parts. The original has been adulterated to the point that it is a reconstruction. It's as if someone restoring a painting were to replace all the paint; the result is not the original+touch-up but simply a forgery. (3) If I implied at any point in the negotiation that Junkbarge was unique, he should sue me for fraud; but he has the statue. I just have a twinned statue. And this is true, I think, in all these cases. The statue is what was originally placed in the DMA. Replacements The other statue, however, is definitely a twinning: it is, as it were, split off of the original. But this has perhaps as much to do with our notion of 'artifact' (or 'artwork') as with mereology itself.

It reminds me of a mereology joke. An Illinois farmer happened to mention to a city slicker that he had an axe that had been used by Abraham Lincoln. The city slicker was eager to see it, so they went out to look at it.

"Why, it's in excellent condition!" the city slicker said.

"It ought to be," the farmer replied. "The head has been replaced twice and the handle three times."

* An algorithm for multiplying roman numerals. (HT, GMBM)

UPDATE:

* Ralph Luker notes that the current edition of Essays in Philosophy looks at philosophy of history.

* Benjamin Cohen answers the question, "If you could have practiced science in any time and any place throughout history, which would it be, and why?" with the answer mid-eighteenth century France, because of the optimism. It's a good answer. But, of course, we have to keep in mind the Other Side. Lavoisier, for instance, had his head chopped off in the French Revolution, and Rousseau was both paranoid and extremely pessimistic about the whole trend of the times. But it's a good answer.

Aquinas and Design

John Wilkins has a nice post on design at "Evolving Thoughts." One thing I disagree with quite a bit, though, is the attribution of a design argument to Aquinas. Wilkins points to the Fifth Way (ST 1.2.3), quoting a common translation:

...things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end.

The problem is that the Fifth Way is not actually a design argument. The phrase translated by 'designedly' here is actually ex intentione; but ex intentione does not signify design but orientation. The Fifth Way is actually an argument not from design but from the fact that there's any causation at all. On Aquinas's scholastic adaptation of Aristotle, the end or final cause is what selects the effect for the efficient cause -- in other words, it is what answers the question, "Why does this cause produce this effect rather than some other effect?" The disposition of the cause to the end is its intentio. The word is associated in the medieval imagination with archery: the aim of the arrow is its intentio. So the argument of the Fifth Way is roughly that because nonintelligent things act regularly in order to achieve an end, they must achieve their end not a casu, by chance, but ex intentione, by being disposed to it. But things not capable of determining their own ends have to be, in the end, disposed to them by things capable of determining ends, namely, intelligences. So what is supposed to be at stake in this argument is not design but any sort of causation that is not due to deliberate self-determination; what's being examined is the very possibility of bodies having effects at all. This is perfectly general; final causes are for Aquinas the explanation for the fact that efficient causation occurs at all.

Aquinas does make design arguments, but he makes them in the way they usually were made before the early modern period, i.e., as arguments not about God's existence but about God's activity: given that God exists, why would we think that God interacts providentially with the world? (Compare Leibniz's argument in the Discourse on Metaphysics that, given that we know that God exists, it's not reasonable to ignore Him as a possible explanation for certain types of order in the world.) A more plausible locus classicus for design arguments as we usually think of them is the discussion of contrivance in Paley or, slightly earlier, Boyle's essay on final causes, Newton's Optics, or Hume's Dialogues on Natural Religion. But this disagreement aside, it's a post worth reading.

Brown and Shepherd on the Five Propositions of Hume's Causal Theory

In his important work, Observations on the Nature and Tendency of the Doctrine of Mr Hume, one of the earliest significant works of Hume scholarship, Thomas Brown distills Hume's causal theory into five basic propositions, which he goes on to evaluate. (Brown is important because he is one of the first people to look seriously at Hume's causal theory who doesn't interpret Hume as denying that we have an idea of cause and effect. As Brown points out, Hume's whole argument only makes sense on the assumption that he thinks we do have such an idea -- necessary connection -- and that the tricky thing is to determine which impression provides it.) The five propositions are:

(1) The relation of cause and effect cannot be discovered a priori.
(2) Even after experience, the relation of cause and effect cannot be discovered by reason.
(3) The relation of cause and effect is an object of belief alone.
(4) The relation of cause and effect is believed to exist between objects, only after their customary conjunction is known to us.
(5) When two objects have been frequently observed in succession, the mind passes readily from the idea of one to the idea of the other: from this tendency to transition, and from the greater vividness of the idea thus more readily suggested, there arises a belief of the relation of cause and effect between them; the transition in the mind itself being the impression from which the idea of the necessary connection of the objects, as cause and effect, is derived.

Brown's view is that (1), (2), and (3) stand or fall together; he also thinks Hume is right on all three counts. (4) and (5) he regards as related to each other, but independent from the first three. He also regards them as clearly wrong. His basic argument against (4) is that we can believe things to be causally connected even in the absence of customary conjunction (e.g., in inferences about single experiments). Hume, of course, has ways to handle some of these, but Brown argues against them. Thus Brown substitutes Hume's basic explanatory principle, 'custom', with his own, 'instinct' or 'instinctive belief'.

The fourth chapter of Lady Mary Shepherd's An Essay upon the Relation of Cause and Effect is explicitly devoted to Brown's Observations. Shepherd accepts Brown's criticisms against Hume on (4) and (5), but, of course, sharply criticizes Brown for accepting (1), (2), and (3), and devotes some space to showing that Brown's instinct doesn't fare much better than Hume's custom as an explanation of causal reasoning. She notes that both Hume and Brown are guilty of an ambiguity with regard to the first two propositions: they don't properly distinguish questions about the general form of reasoning from questions about particular instances of it. For instance, Shepherd admits that we can't know a priori the particular qualities that will arise under particular circumstances; but she points out that this is neither surprising nor particularly interesting. What we want to know is the answer to questions like: "Must like causes in general necessarily be connected with like effects?" Given these general forms, we just need to go to experience to fill them in with details. Her argument against the third proposition is more indirect, since she argues that neither Hume's custom nor Brown's instinct can do the work they would have to do even assuming that causation is a matter of belief and not knowledge. (This is relevant because a great deal of Brown's argument against (4) is devoted to arguing that Hume's custom cannot do this work.)

Shepherd thinks that a problem with (5) is that it makes Hume seem to argue in a circle. Hume's search for foundational impressions, the whole point of the Treatise, is a causal search -- impressions are important because they are the causes of ideas. Ideas must be derived from impressions, because there is a necessary connection between them; but then he disproves the only account of necessary connection on which the original principle could be built. She attributes this argument to Brown, but, unless I am missing something, this appears to be a mistake. Most of Brown's argument is actually an argument against Hume's account of belief, combined with the argument that if necessary connection derives from the impression of the mind's transition from idea to idea, all associations would be causal. But it is clear that Hume has to distinguish causal associations from associations due to resemblance and contiguity in order to motivate his inquiry about causes. Thus Brown accuses Hume of petitio principii, but it is a different petitio than the one Shepherd accuses Hume of here.

Macrina the Righteous

Today is the memorial of St. Macrina the Righteous, by all accounts a remarkable woman. You can read about her in her little brother's Life of Macrina, where St. Gregory records her death-bed prayer:

Thou, O Lord, hast freed us from the fear of death. Thou hast made the end of this life the beginning to us of true life. Thou for a season restest our bodies in sleep and awakest them again at the last trump. Thou givest our earth, which Thou hast fashioned with Thy hands, to the earth to keep in safety. One day Thou wilt take again what Thou hast given, transfiguring with immortality and grace our mortal and unsightly remains. Thou hast saved us from the curse and from sin, having become both for our sakes. Thou hast broken the heads of the dragon who had seized us with his jaws, in the yawning gulf of disobedience. Thou hast shown us the way of resurrection, having broken the gates of .hell, and brought to nought him who had the power of death----the devil. Thou hast given a sign to those that fear Thee in the symbol of the Holy Cross, to destroy the adversary and save our life. O God eternal, to Whom I have been attached from my mother's womb, Whom my soul has loved with all its strength, to Whom I have dedicated both my flesh and my soul from my youth up until now----do Thou give me an angel of light to conduct me to the place of refreshment, where is the water of rest, in the bosom of the holy Fathers. Thou that didst break the flaming sword and didst restore to Paradise the man that was crucified with Thee and implored Thy mercies, remember me, too, in Thy kingdom; because I, too, was crucified with Thee, having nailed my flesh to the cross for fear of Thee, and of Thy judgments have I been afraid. Let not the terrible chasm separate me from Thy elect. Nor let the Slanderer stand against me in the way; nor let my sin be found before Thy eyes, if in anything I have sinned in word or deed or thought, led astray by the weakness of our nature. O Thou Who hast power on earth to forgive sins, forgive me, that I may be refreshed and may be found before Thee when I put off my body, without defilement on my soul. But may my soul be received into Thy hands spotless and undefiled, as an offering before Thee.