Augustine on Readers of His De Trinitate

I expect, indeed, that some, who are more dull of understanding, will imagine that in some parts of my books I have held sentiments which I have not held, or have not held those which I have. But their error, as none can be ignorant, ought not to be attributed to me, if they have deviated into false doctrine through following my steps without apprehending me, while I am compelled to pick my way through a hard and obscure subject: seeing that neither can any one, in any way, rightly ascribe the numerous and various errors of heretics to the holy testimonies themselves of the divine books; although all of them endeavor to defend out of those same Scriptures their own false and erroneous opinions. The law of Christ, that is, charity, admonishes me clearly, and commands me with a sweet constraint, that when men think that I have held in my books something false which I have not held, and that same falsehood displeases one and pleases another, I should prefer to be blamed by him who reprehends the falsehood, rather than praised by him who praises it. For although I, who never held the error, am not rightly blamed by the former, yet the error itself is rightly censured; while by the latter neither am I rightly praised, who am thought to have held that which the truth censures, nor the sentiment itself, which the truth also censures.

De Trinitate 1.3.6

I thought of this passage while discussing Augustine's discussion of the Trinity elsewhere; the part that is particularly striking, and worth keeping in mind in any theological discussion, is that it is better to be censured for a genuine error not held than to be praised for the same. Since Augustine is perpetually censured for errors that are not his, it's worthwhile to remember when responding to these censures what Augustine's own attitude to them was.

Four Evangelists

I looked, and I saw a windstorm coming out of the north—an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light. The center of the fire looked like glowing metal, and in the fire was what looked like four living creatures. In appearance their form was that of a man, but each of them had four faces and four wings. Their legs were straight; their feet were like those of a calf and gleamed like burnished bronze. Under their wings on their four sides they had the hands of a man. All four of them had faces and wings, and their wings touched one another. Each one went straight ahead; they did not turn as they moved.

Their faces looked like this: Each of the four had the face of a man, and on the right side each had the face of a lion, and on the left the face of an ox; each also had the face of an eagle. Such were their faces. Their wings were spread out upward; each had two wings, one touching the wing of another creature on either side, and two wings covering its body. Each one went straight ahead. Wherever the spirit would go, they would go, without turning as they went. The appearance of the living creatures was like burning coals of fire or like torches. Fire moved back and forth among the creatures; it was bright, and lightning flashed out of it. The creatures sped back and forth like flashes of lightning.

Ezekiel 1:4-14

Macht on Proofs

I liked this remark by Macht at "prosthesis":

I've suggested before that "proofs" should be thought of as a sort of "table of contents" of an argument. One thing I was getting at was that while they give the appearance of clarity and neatness, proofs very often serve to conceal major issues (meanings of words, background assumptions, etc.). Because of this, clarity can help prevent understanding. To put it another way, a very clear, concise argument can cause us to accept (or reject) the argument before we put forth a major effort to understand the argument.

I think it's fruitful to think of the desire to find proofs as an element in cost-of-reasoning reasoning. As a practical matter we simply can't reason out every little thing; having a proof already in hand allows us to jump safely from point A to point B without worrying too much about intermediate steps, and by boiling things down to bare essentials the proof itself enables us to avoid distractions, tangents, and red herrings. But cost-of-reasoning reasoning always has its dangers: it may lead to overlooking important things, or, in a case like proof-finding, to placing excessive importance on things that are easy to prove, just because they are easy to prove, or any number of other things. By thinking of a proof as a table of contents to a more thorough and elaborate discussion (including what its conclusions are relevant to, the assumptions that make its steps good one, the intelligibility of its premises and the reasons for starting with them, the end in view when reasoning in this way, etc.) we can avoid some of this danger. In the case of some proofs, of course, the more thorough and elaborate discussion won't be all that much more elaborate, or at all interesting; but for others it certainly will be.

Teaching Ethics

Janet Stemwedel has an interesting post on science ethics. One thing often done in (well-taught) business ethics courses is not to focus on what's right and wrong at all (which, as DrugMonkey points out, is usually not that difficult to figure out in the abstract when sitting in a classroom), but to focus on ethical risks and crises. That is, the course is geared toward identifying types of ethical crises in business (like the Arthur Anderson fiasco), their anatomy, the risks that are taken that increase the likelihood of their occurrence, the practical steps that can be taken to avoid those risks altogether and reduce the likelihood of the ethical crisis, and (perhaps equally important but so often forgotten when ethics courses are taught) what practical steps to take when ethical crises actually do happen in order to restore trust and good will. That fits very well with her two suggested approaches.

A problem is that this works well, and is at least somewhat effective, because there's a lot of demand for the general sort of things taught in those classes; but the reason good business courses came to be taught in this way is less that there was originally enthusiasm for them, and more that massive ethical crises actually occurred, so massive as to put entire professional fields under critical public scrutiny, and people in those fields began to look around for something to help them avoid new crises and weather the scrutiny. I suppose the worry is that there's a danger that scientists will follow the same pattern, and only become interested in ways of making sure things are done ethically after something happens that leads the general public to lose faith in their ability to do anything ethically. Faraday, when asked why he went into scientific work rather than the trades (where with his knack for invention he could obviously have made a lot of money), attributed it to the greater ethics of scientific practice. It would be a sad day that led to new Faradays being turned off of scientific careers because everyone has let them get a shady reputation.

I think it's a sign, incidentally, of how very poorly ethics is generally taught in philosophy departments these days that in an ordinary ethics course you get almost nothing of this practical aspect. After all, individuals take ethical risks; they find themselves in ethical crises; they need to know what practical steps to take to reduce those risks and avoid those crises; and (again, just as important, but only barely touched on in modern ethics) what one might do to make things right when the wrong has already been done. Students need to be introduced to methods that have been suggested for living better, for improving their habits, for avoiding even the occasions for temptation, for making reparation. If you look at your typical ethical syllabus, however, you get virtually nothing of this; the only practical features of ethics you get have to do with ethical reasoning, and those only when the courses are taught relatively well. So students learn how to reason like utilitarians, like emotivists, like deontologists; they get a few tools to help them make more sophisticated ethical arguments and a chance to pick their own preferred pattern of reasoning. That's not a trivial thing, and when people teach it right it's a great thing to teach; but it's the absolute minimum, and it's not good that we are OK with the absolute minimum on a matter of such importance.

[Added Later: It occurs to me that one might call this, using the term a bit loosely, a Confucian approach to teaching ethics, since the emphasis is on self-cultivation. The Internet Encyclopedia article on Chu Hsi gives you the general idea.]

Martyr Justin the Philosopher

Today, the first of June, is the feast of Justin Martyr. A famous passage from his First Apology:

But lest some should, without reason, and for the perversion of what we teach, maintain that we say that Christ was born one hundred and fifty years ago under Cyrenius, and subsequently, in the time of Pontius Pilate, taught what we say He taught; and should cry out against us as though all men who were born before Him were irresponsible--let us anticipate and solve the difficulty. We have been taught that Christ is the first-born of God, and we have declared above that He is the Word of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them; and among the barbarians, Abraham, and Ananias, and Azarias, and Misael, and Elias, and many others whose actions and names we now decline to recount, because we know it would be tedious. So that even they who lived before Christ, and lived without reason, were wicked and hostile to Christ, and slew those who lived reasonably. But who, through the power of the Word, according to the will of God the Father and Lord of all, He was born of a virgin as a man, and was named Jesus, and was crucified, and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, an intelligent man will be able to comprehend from what has been already so largely said.

There's an interesting philosophical test implicit here: one might well wonder if modern-day 'philosophers' would be willing to die if that were the way to live according to reason, as Socrates died, as Justin himself died. I very much doubt that most would.

If this blog were to have a patron saint, I suppose it could be St. Justin. Siris was started on either the first or second of June three years ago, although the first post was definitely on June 2nd.

Tichy on Propositions and Propositional Constructions

From Pavel Tichy, "Constructions," Philosophy of Science, 53 (1986), pp. 514-534:

Failure to distinguish clearly between entities and different ways of constructing them is an inexhaustible source of philosophical confusion and doubletalk. The notion of proposition is a case in point. There is an almost universal tendency to impute the structure of propositional constructions to propositions themselves. Although few would maintain that the numbers nine and two and the subtraction function are ingredients of the number denoted by '9 - 2', few will hesitate to regard Tom, Sam, and the taller-than relation as ingredients of the proposition, or state of affairs, denoted by 'Tom is taller than Sam'. Yet the situation is completely parallel. The number seven does not contain the minus function because if it did, it would also have to contain the plus function, since seven is not only nine minus two but also three plus four. Likewise, the fact that Tom is taller than Sam does not contain the taller-than relation, for if it did, it would also have to contain the shorter-than relation, for Tom being taller than Sam and Sam being shorter than Tom are surely and the same fact.

He goes on to say, "A sentence is not a picture of the proposition it denotes but of a particular construction of that proposition."

Tichy's point may be obscured by the tendency of people to play fast and loose with the term 'proposition', using it now to indicate a sentence, now to indicate a state of affairs, now to indicate something not quite either. The way to think of it is this (what follows is partly Tichy, partly me, and so any errors should not necessarily be attributed to Tichy). '9 - 2' is a phrase that tells how to construct a number; another phrase that does this is '3 + 4'. However, while '9 - 2' constructs the same number as '3 + 4', it does not do so in the same way. They differ by construction: 9 - 2 is one way to construct seven; 3 + 4 is a different way to construct seven; 7 is an entirely different way to construct seven (namely, by starting with seven rather than with anything else). 9, 2, and the subtraction operation are elements of the construction of seven; it is absurd, however, to say that they are elements of seven, when they are not even elements of seven as constructed with the elements 3, 4, and the addition operation. If we did say that, of course, we would be committed to saying that every number is is an element of every other number, which is a claim that begins to look, at best, a little murky. The need to insist on this becomes especially clear if we take constructions like 9/0. 9/0 is a construction, and one that arises sometimes in math problems; but there is nothing it constructs, and so there is no number with the elements nine, zero, and the division function as put together in the construction 9/0. '9/0' names a construction that is abortive. It does not name a number, but a construction that fails to construct a number; and likewise, we cannot say that '9 - 2' names a number, but only that it names a construction (one that does succeed in constructing a number). The expressions '9 - 2' and '3 + 4' are said to be equal or equivalent because they name constructions that reach the same number, not because they are names of that number; they are equivalent because they are itineraries with the same destination, not because they are that destination. Think of it in terms of mathematical education. If Joe understands that 12/3 = 4, what he understands is that 12/3 and 4 give you the same number, even though they have different elements. This goes beyond merely having Joe learn the operations involved in the construction (like an imperfect pocket calculator, Tichy says dismissively in another article), to seeing how one constructs numbers using those elements.

Now, consider the sentence 'Tom is taller than Sam'. The sentence has the elements Tom, Sam, and the taller-than relation; but it would be absurd to say that what it names (the 'state of affairs' or 'fact') has these elements, and for exactly the same reason it is absurd to say that the number seven has the elements 9,2, and -. Rather, 'Tom is taller than Sam' is one way of constructing a given state of affairs or fact. You can construct the very same state of affairs or fact in a completely different way, namely, with the elements Sam, Tom, and the shorter-than relation. 'Tom is taller than Sam' is not a state of affairs or fact; it is a way of formulating a state of affairs or a fact; you can formulate that fact in a different way with different elements. The point remains the same whether you talk about facts or properties. 'Tom's being taller than Sam' does not name a different 'property' from 'Sam's being shorter than Tom'; they do not name properties at all. Rather, they name different constructions of the same property. A physicist, a mechanic, and an ordinary Joe might look at the same car and decompose it intellectually in different ways -- into a complex interaction of molecules and forces, or into a combination of functional auto parts, or into this single thing, the car. But it's still the same car. There's nothing controversial about this; the different intellectual constructions of the car by our three different spectators are different ways of constructing one and the same car, or, if you prefer, constructing a formula that yields the car as a terminus for the mind's contemplation. They are different itineraries that culminate in the same destination.

So 'Tom is taller than Sam' does not name the fact that Tom is taller than Sam; it is a way of taking the elements, Tom, taller than, and Sam, and constructing either the true or the false. In other words, the expression 'Tom is taller than Sam' is a way your mind gets either to truth or to something that's not truth. If by 'proposition' you mean what you can think about, come to believe things about, etc. (a destination of thought), then it constructs a proposition (it is an itinerary to get you to that destination). But the sentence is not the proposition it constructs; nor is the sentence a name for that proposition. Rather, the sentence just tells you one way to get that proposition in mind. When I am thinking about 'Tom is taller than Sam' I am taking that construction or path as itself an object of thought, just as I do when I am thinking about '9 - 2 = 7'. Likewise, 'Today is sunny' does not name a state of affairs; it names a construction, a procedure for finding a state of affairs. It is, I would suppose, an incomplete construction, since it constructs different things depending on what today is. But it is quite common to think that we can get away with treating something like 'Today is sunny' as a label for a fact, rather than a way for the discursive intellect to get to a fact.

Visitation

Soothly Mary rising up in those days, went with haste into the hilly places, into a city of Judaea. And she entered into the house of Zacharias, and greeted Elisabeth. And it was done, as Elisabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the young child in her womb gladded.

And Elisabeth was full-filled with the Holy Ghost, and cried with a great voice, and said, "Blessed be thou among women, and blessed be the fruit of thy womb! And whereof is this thing to me, that the mother of my Lord come to me? For lo! as the voice of thy salutation was made in mine ears, the young child gladded with joy in my womb. And blessed be thou, that hast believed, for those things that be said to thee from the Lord, shall be perfectly done."

And Mary said:

"My soul magnifieth the Lord,
and my spirit hath gladded in God, mine health.
For he hath beheld the meekness of his handmaiden.
For lo! of this all generations shall say that I am blessed.
For he that is mighty hath done to me great things,
and his name is holy.
And his mercy is from kindreds into kindreds,
to men that dread him.
He made might in his arm,
he scattered proud men with the thought of his heart.
He put down mighty men from their seats,
and enhanced meek men.
He hath full-filled hungry men with goods,
and he hath left rich men void.
He, having mind of his mercy, took Israel, his child;
as he hath spoken to our fathers, to Abraham and to his seed,
into worlds."

And Mary dwelled with her, as it were three months, and turned again into her house.

[Wycliffe's translation, with some slight repunctuation]

I sincerely hope that your spirit, too, has gladded in God this Visitation-Day.