A World Full of Gods: Chapter Two

In Chapter One, Greer set the stage for the book, but in order to address the subjects he wishes to discuss, he has to overcome a hurdle at the very beginning, namely, certain basic issues of religious epistemology. Greer identifies three basic positions:

(1) We can know about gods on the basis of religious authority (e.g., a sacred text or prophet or some such).

(2) We cannot know anything whatsoever about gods, either because statements about them do nothing but express attitudes and emotions (and therefore are not the sort of thing knowledge deals with) or because statements about them have no meaning except for those who believe them.

(3) We can know about gods on the basis of reasoned inference from experienced evidence (and this may, of course, take either an atheistic form, in which what we can know about gods is that they don't exist, or a theistic form, in which we can know that they do).

Greer suggests that the typical Pagan view strongly upholds the third option: Paganism, in both its ancient forms and its modern revivals, usually places a strong emphasis on religious experience, which then forms the basis of conclusions that are refined through processes that have been developed by the community. This is the foundation for the fact that Pagan religious life can be very baroque, with a bewildering variety of approaches: it is very common for Pagan communities to try things out, and if it works in such a way as to meet the approval of the community, it is kept and over time integrated into the whole fabric. This is why Paganism has traditionally handled religious diversity so easily: people with diverse religions come into contact with each other, shared experiences are integrated with each other, and disagreements are at least to some extent tested against those shared experiences. This emphasis on religious experience will be found throughout the book, and forms its core. It also provides most of the more interesting arguments of the work.

In response to (1), Greer recognizes that testimony does play a major role in our understanding of the world. Not all testimony is equal, of course, but some of it could be good. If one takes the view of a religion with a sacred text inspired by God, the basic idea would be that one can trust the testimony given here completely. This is, says Greer, "sound in the abstract; if one did have access to an omniscient witness, and reason to trust his honesty, it would be entirely reasonable to accept his statements at face value" (p. 23). The problem, he suggests, arises from religious diversity: were there only one candidate being put forward this might be a strong position, but things get complex very quickly when one considers all the different texts put forward in this way -- the Bible, the Quran, the many Ofudesaki of recent Japanese religions, and so forth. This provides a challenge that has to be met. Greer actually provides no arguments that it can't be met. He also doesn't consider at all the important complications arising from what might be called fallibilistic interpretations of sacred texts, in which the testimony ultimately derives from an omniscient and trustworthy witness but filtered through fallible human beings; one variety of this opinion, which one at least occasionally does find in the wild, is that all the major sacred scriptures are of this sort, and such a position will handle religious testimony in pretty much exactly the way Greer says Pagans handle religious experience. But it is worthwhile to keep in mind Greer's goal in the book, which is not to provide definitive answers but to make the case that polytheists have something interesting and philosophically significant to say to the questions.

Greer also discusses, with regard to (1), fideistic and Reformed epistemology variations on it; these are very quickly discussed, and this quick discussion (along with the discussion of Schleiermacher in the next section) is, I think, far and away the weakest part of this chapter: it really needed more discussion than Greer decided to give it, even given the goal of the book.

With regard to expressivist forms of (2), Greer notes Wayne Proudfoot's claim that it is a defensive tactic devoted nothing other than to stopping inquiry outright, and says that it is harsh but not inaccurate. Greer notes that a purely expressivist approach is very difficult to square with actual religious claims, experiences, and practices. He then considers Wittgensteinian "form of life" accounts of (2), arguing (it is an interesting discussion, but I won't go into it here) that it is crucially and fatally vague.

With regard to atheistic forms of (3), Greer quite rightly notes that the sheer diversity of religions makes the position necessarily very complex: merely from the fact that some religious claims are rejected one cannot conclude that all are, so the claims that are proven wrong would have to be very broad and very widespread; this then, is the challenge that would have to be faced by the atheistic defender of (3).

Given the shortness of the chapter, it's best to see it as simply identifying the major challenges for the major competitors to the Pagan epistemological view that Greer will develop in Chapters Five through Seven. He does not at any point give a sufficient argument for anyone to conclude that the challenges are unanswerable, but given, again, that the point of the book is simply to make a case of the philosophical interest and significance of Pagan thought, he doesn't really need to do so. As noted above, I do think that he fails to make a very plausible case for a major challenge to fideism, to Reformed epistemology, and to Schleiermacher-style expressivism; the questions he raises are more of the "well, why not?" type than anything that speaks to the heart of the projects being addressed.

But in a sense we are all still dealing with preamble, and the weakness here isn't very problematic for the argument as a whole. Some of these positions will also be re-addressed at least somewhat along the way, so it's important not to jump the gun. But as Greer goes forward with a theistic version of (3), he has more obstacles to get out of the way: there are very definitely monotheistic versions of (3) with some very recognizable arguments that, if they get off the ground, could very well make the development of a polytheistic version of (3) moot. This will be the subject of what Greer calls a "detour" through Chapters Three and Four; Three will try to make a limited case that at least some of these arguments need not be seen as inconsistent with polytheism, and Four, far and away the weakest chapter in the book, will try to make another limited case that at least some typical atheistic challenges need not be seen as inconsistent with polytheism, either. I think this "detour" should have been better integrated into the overall argument, and think that even the limited case Greer is trying to build is very weakly supported by his actual argumentative approach; but I'll discuss them in more detail in a later post.

A World Full of Gods: Chapter Five

Having gone through his detour in Chapters Three and Four, Greer settles down to the primary argument of the book, namely, the argument that "religious experience is inherently polytheistic" (p. 70).

We have to be careful about the term "religious experience", of course; because it can apply to many different things, Greer is careful to emphasize that he is only considering religious experience in the sense of "apparent encounters between one or more people and a god, spirit, or sacred presence, which either does not have a material body or which appears to transcend the limits of its material embodiment in ways not readily explained by a purely materialist analysis" (p. 67). This rules out, among other things:

(1) potentially ordinary material events (e.g., the appearance of omens) taken to have religious causes;
(2) experiences of oneness with all things;
(3) otherworld experiences;
(4) out-of-body experiences in this world.

Greer recognizes that these, especially the last three, have a great deal to tell us about religion, but notes that these are all things that one can find associated with monotheistic, polytheistic, and even atheistic religions and spiritualities alike -- they don't tell us much about gods, in any sense of the word, except perhaps with a measure of interpretation, or when they also fall under the definition given above.

Greer notes (although this part could surely be better argued than it is, with more up-to-date information) that religious experiences in his sense are actually very common features of the human landscape -- the number of people in most societies who have had a religious experience in Greer's sense is genuinely immense. Greer notes a study in which 23% of agnostics and 24% of atheists had had at least one religious experience; obviously they interpret them somewhat differently than theists do, but the point is that this is a standard part of human experience, and as such can be found all over the place, regardless of culture, economic status, or education.

Just as important for Greer's argument, the experiences are extremely diverse:

Even narrowing the focus to gods worshipped by existing religious and experienced by present-day worshippers, the diversity remains vast. Some gods are terrifying, others comforting, still others majestic, playful, fierce, impassive, maternal, passionately erotic -- and such a list could be extended indefinitely. (p. 69)

It's extraordinarily implausible, however, to suggest that an experience of the Risen Christ, an experience of Kali, and an experience of a buffalo spirit are just all experiences of one supernatural thing or amorphous divinity. If we just take the religious experiences at face value, then, the natural conclusion is polytheism.

Greer notes that many parties in the discussion have a vested interest in ignoring this. Atheists often discount religious experiences out of hand; monotheists often ignore those religious experiences that do not fit their own scheme of things or that would undermine their claim to possession of the truth. But people do in fact appeal to religious experiences for validation of their beliefs, and without a clear and definite argument for why they shouldn't, it's difficult to see how they could possibly be counted as irrational or unreasonable for doing so. Likewise, one temptation might be to focus on the subject having the experience -- what's going on in the brain, psychological background, and so forth -- but, again, without a clear and definite argument that the whole experience can be reduced to blips in the brain or neuroses, there's no good reason to ignore the object of the experience.

And it's clearly the object of the experience that's the real battleground. Traditional monotheists claim that God is one, eternal, etc.; more liberal monotheists are more creatively diverse; atheists and agnostics, Greer drily notes, more creatively diverse still:

Gods have been redefined by these latter as seasonal phenomena, neurotic projections, diseases of language, prehistoric political figures, prescientific explanatory strategies, bugs in human neurological programming, alien space travelers from other worlds, and more. (p. 75)

But Greer wants to insist that we focus on the key point he has already identified: the fact that, whatever gods may be, human beings encounter them in very common kinds of experience. We meet the gods, whatever they may be, and we live with the gods, whatever they may be, and this is a fundamental fact of human life. Even if the gods are blips in the brain, or projections of some kind, this does not affect the importance they have, Greer insists -- it just rules out a certain kind of theology. And this is yet another reason to pay close attention to religious experiences -- even a reductionist about the gods has to admit that they are the things about the experiences that need to be understood.

On the basis of the argument, Greer suggests that we use religious experiences to test claims about the gods, just as we use any other experiences to test claims about what they seem to be about. (And, again, if you're a reductionist about the gods, this is still the natural path to take: if you are going to disprove that what someone seems to experience is Kali, you have to test any such argument against the actual experiences people have of Kali in order to establish that your purported disproof is even relevant.)

Of course, the issue of interpretation of these experiences remains just as crucial, and perhaps even more so. Because of this, Greer will discuss the various possible interpretations of religious experience -- atheist, monotheistic, and polytheistic -- at greater length in Chapter Six.

A World Full of Gods: Chapters Three and Four

Chapter One of John Michael Greer's A World Full of Gods discussed the basic idea of polytheism and Chapter Two discussed some preliminary philosophical issues relevant to assessing the philosophical promise of polytheism. With Chapters Three and Four, however, we take what Greer himself calls a 'detour'. As I previously mentioned, I think conceiving of these chapters as detours was a serious structural mistake, which weakens and diffuses the argument of the work. One of the effects it has, of course, is that by the end of Chapter Four we have gone through a third of the book without even beginning its main argument, which starts in Chapter Five.

Further, the detour doesn't seem structurally well-conceived. Greer gives two different accounts of what he is trying to do in this digression, and why he thinks it is worthwhile. The first is that the strength of arguments for monotheism (discussed in Chapter Three) and for atheism (discussed in Chapter Four) is relevant to building a case for the intellectual merits of polytheism:

If traditional arguments produce a strong case for for the god of monotheism, or for no gods at all, an exploration of polytheism will have to take that case into account. If those arguments turn up evidence bearing on the relative merits of monotheism and polytheism, similarly, that evidence deserves a place in our discussion. For these reasons, a review of the standard arguments need not be a waste of time. (p. 39)

This suggests one possible strategy for situating polytheism within a field largely dominated by monotheistic and atheistic arguments: identify the strongest case for each that one can and, from a polytheistic perspective, meet them head on. If polytheism even manages to build a strong and distinctive counter-case, both in terms of objections and positive proposals, the basic point of the book (to show that polytheism can have real philosophical merit) would be met. In fact, we don't really get this in either Chapter Three or Four. The survey of arguments is fairly cursory (less than thirty short pages to cover four families of theistic arguments and three families of atheistic arguments), the objections raised against them are mostly the standard generic ones, and while there are some insightful points made, the discussions here are the weakest discussions in the book.

There is another justification Greer gives for the detour; the previous one was given before embarking on it, but this one comes after he has finished it:

That detour was unavoidable, since so much previous argument about gods has focused on topics such as the origins of the universe or the reasons for human suffering. Nor must a detour of this sort be entirely a waste of time; if gods exist, after all, it's reasonable to think that there may be circumstantial evidence for their presence. (p. 66)

This suggests a second strategy that could be taken in attempting to deal with the philosophical issues arising a field currently dominated by monotheism and atheism: focus on what Greer here calls "circumstantial evidence." I think we get more of this strategy in Chapters Three and Four, and most of the more interesting passages in these Chapters fit this strategy quite well: Greer will identify an argument usually assumed to lead to monotheism, e.g., cosmological arguments, and argue that you can have polytheistic versions as well. This is certainly true; certain kinds of cosmological and teleological argument, for instance, actually have polytheistic origins, or began in forms that are clearly suggestive of polytheism (Aristotle's discussion of first movers, for instance). And there is a rich vein of serious work here waiting to be uncovered; a Hellenic Reconstructionist, just to take one example, has an entire robust philosophical heritage to draw from, and other Neo-Pagan groups have plenty of room to discuss features of the world that play a major role in their religious life and examine how these features of the world display "circumstantial evidences" of the gods they worship. Likewise, Greer makes an effort to argue that at least some standard atheistic arguments depend crucially on monotheistic assumptions. One can imagine an extensive attempt to argue for ways in which polytheism manages to avoid or overcome standard problems posed by atheists against theism.

However, in the actual form we have these discussions in this book, the "circumstantial evidences" are discussed very briefly and tentatively, while the relationship of polytheistic arguments to atheistic arguments is largely confined to some interesting but incomplete discussion of theodicy. I think there are two major problems that prevent Greer from bringing these chapters together properly: (1) the fact that there really isn't space enough to pursue both the strategies suggested by Greer's justification of the detour, and thus they interfere with each other; and (2) the fact that Greer is deliberately refraining from intensive discussion of details. The point of the book is to look at polytheism in general; particular examples of polytheistic religions -- Greer's own Druidry, Wicca, folk religions, and so forth -- come up throughout the book. But they are precisely that: brief examples for illustration. Being stuck in generalities, however, is an impediment to serious discussion of the sort of topics that will come up in the monotheistic and atheistic arguments Greer is discussing. You need to ask questions like, "Is there something necessary about the gods?" and "Are the gods the causes of the world, or causes of parts of it, or caused by it?" and "What traces of the gods do we find in the world around us, that can reasonably be attributed directly to them?" and "What role do the gods play in moral life?" and "What do the gods do in the face of evil?" Generalities don't get us far with these questions.

These two chapters are still worth reading, however; they serve as a good, albeit very elementary, introduction to any polytheists who are unfamiliar with the basic ideas and arguments commonly discussed the philosophy of religion -- they are, in fact, little more than a whirlwind tour of these ideas and arguments, with some comments here and there about how polytheism might fit into the picture. But the atheistic side of the story is shortchanged, I think, and the monotheistic arguments are too briefly handled to have much effect, and the polytheistic discussions, far and away the most interesting parts of these Chapters, often seem to be crowded out by the rest.

However, even if the reader agrees with me about these two chapters, all is not lost; the detour is soon over, and with Chapters Five and Six we finally get into the meat of the book, and its most interesting and well-developed argument: the argument that religious experience in fact provides a support for polytheism that is (1) reasonable and (2) robust in the face of possible monotheistic and atheistic objections. I'll discuss Chapters Five and Six in a future post or two.

A World Full of Gods: Chapter One

It has been noted over and over again that contemporary philosophy of religion is a bit one-note. It's actually gotten much better over the past fifteen years or so, but one still gets a real sense, when one reads much in the field, that it walks a relatively tiny treadmill of problems that are treated in a relatively isolated fashion. As I say, people have noted this quite often, but philosophers noting things and philosophers doing much about it are quite different things.

John Michael Greer's A World Full of Gods is an interesting attempt to do something about it. Greer is a modern Pagan associated with the contemporary Druidic movement. His goal in the book is to make a case for greater attention to polytheism and, since this is philosophy, polytheistic arguments. Greer's certainly right about that, and I think the book does touch on several reasons for thinking there is a real need to do so. I don't think the book is entirely successful in other ways, chiefly because Greer tries to do too much. But there is much that is interesting in the book, and here and there I will be posting on things Greer discusses.

Chapter One gives a basic case for why philosophers of religion should not uncritically accept the "monotheistic assumption": first, that there are still a great many polytheists in the world, and in the West they have become more visible than they have been in previous generations; second, that at least some philosophical work, albeit very scattered, has already been done, and this work shows that there are genuinely interesting philosophical issues to be discussed when it comes to polytheism. On the basis of an article by George Mavrodes, Greer characterizes polytheism as having the following features:

(1) realism about the divine: the gods are taken to be real and not figments of imagination or hypothetical constructs;
(2) pure descriptivism about the term 'god': the term 'god' is simply descriptive, and does not necessarily convey anything about one's personal worship (a polytheist can recognize gods he or she does not worship);
(3) pluralism about gods: gods are really distinct and not merely apparently distinct;
(4) finitism about divine attributes: something can be divine even if its attributes aren't infinite, e.g., a god does not need to be omnipotent;
(5) 'a common world', i.e., what we might call (Greer doesn't) interactionism about the relation between deity and world: the gods are involved with each other and with the ordinary world.

These five characteristics contrast in a number of ways with the assumptions that underly much philosophy of religion (which is usually either atheistic, and therefore lacking (1), or monotheistic, and therefore lacking (3) and usually (2) and (4), or deistic, and therefore lacking (5)), and this raises a number of philosophical questions. Greer will tackle these questions through the rest of the book; but it's important to keep in mind that his point in doing so is not to give definitive or magisterial answers to them, but to show that they may be worth raising in the first place. Chapter Two will argue that we can at least begin to answer such questions; and I'll discuss it briefly in a future post.

A World Full of Gods: Chapter Six

Having laid out the basic frame of his main argument in Chapter Five (that "evidence from religious experience supports a belief in many gods more firmly than a belief in only one" (p. 81)), Greer fills it in somewhat in Chapter Six. It's important to remember what, precisely is being argued. The term 'religious experience' has a restricted meaning in this argument, namely, "apparent encounters between one or more people and a god, spirit, or sacred presence, which either does not have a material body or which appears to transcend the limits of its material embodiment in ways not readily explained by a purely materialist analysis" (p. 67). And the key point about these experiences on which it builds is their sheer diversity.

But so far the book has really done little more than argue "that polytheism is a reasonable interpretation of human religious experience" (p. 81) and that polytheism might have some advantages over monotheistic and atheistic alternatives. In particular, Greer's argument in Chapter Five does little more than indicate that polytheism has a prima facie viability as an interpretation of the diversity of religious experiences; this is a very weak conclusion. In Chapter Six he attempts to strengthen this conclusion by a comparison between the polytheistic interpretation of diverse religious experience and its major monotheistic and atheistic rivals.

He does this by way of a somewhat heavy-handed (he himself recognizes it as such) analogy. Suppose you have a little village of five houses and you are a folklore researcher, studying beliefs the villages have developed through their experiences of what they call Cat. We can summarize the five houses in the following way:

(1) House One is certain that Cat exists; it is a tabby with blue eyes. Why do they think Cat exists as a tabby with blue eyes? They were told so by their parents, and it is confirmed by their experience: every morning they leave out kibble, and every evening it is gone. What is more, once Cat was actually seen when the kibble was put out. Because of this House One is sure that whenever the other houses in the village claim that there are different Cats that they are obviously wrong; their kibble is probably eaten by wandering vagabonds.

(2) House Two is also certain that Cat exists; it is a black shorthair with green eyes. Like House One, House Two puts out food -- milk, in this case. And once, they, stumbling home drunk one night, came across Cat, which let out a terrifying screech and glared at them. As to the beliefs of other villagers about Cat, House Two is certain that they are actually feeding rats, not Cats; some of them may be doing it sincerely, but House Two is sure that some do it knowingly.

(3) House Three is also certain that Cat exists; it is a big marmalade tom with orange eyes. Unlike House One and House Two, House Three suspects that the other villagers who have seen Cat probably really did see him, just not under optimal conditions. They think that Cat likes best the food they put out (canned food), but wouldn't be at all surprised if he also eats the food at the neighbors' houses; they've seen him on top of the fences between yards, so know that he can go to any house he pleases.

(4) House Four is certain that there is no Cat at all, and pities his neighbors for believing such ridiculous nonsense. They've never seen Cat; they've never heard Cat; all his neighbors' claimed experiences with Cat can be explained by hallucination, bad lighting, wishful thinking, and the like. An obvious confirmation of this is the fact that none of them agree about what Cat looks like. Who knows exactly what happens to the food, but it's probably eaten by wandering vagabonds.

(5) House Five insists that there are at least three Cats in the village: a tabby, a black shorthair, and a marmalade tom. And more. They can understand why someone might think there's only one -- each Cat has its own preferred territory, and different preferences in food, although none of them is so thoroughly picky as to stick only to one territory and eat only one kind of food. They all come around at least occasionally, so House Five keeps a selection of kibble, milk, and canned food just in case.

So now that we have the set-up, let's do some correlating. Houses One, Two, and Three are Cat equivalents of monotheism; they deriving according to their assessment of the other views about Cat. One and Two are exclusive. One thinks that the others are simply wrong (One's explanation for all other Cats but his own is the same as the explanation given by Four). Two thinks that there probably is something there, but something more malignant than Cat; this correlates to monotheistic views in which all others are worshipping demons, or something like them. Three is more inclusive, like those who think that everyone worships the one God, but some better than others. Four, of course, correlates to the atheist, and Five to the polytheist.

Houses One, Two, Three, and Five all have experiences that are crucial to their beliefs; Four lacks any such experience, or else simply discounts it as inadequate, but in a sense is drawing on an overall experience of life in the village. All Five have an error theory that explains why the others go wrong. So we are considering positions that have (1) a experiential component; and (2) an interpretive component. What Greer wants to argue is that in the cases of One, Two, Three, and Four, the interpretive component has some element of special pleading: none of the four have an error theory that rules out the possibility that they, too, might be committing that sort of error. One's kibble could be eaten by vagabonds, Two's milk could be drunk by rats, Three could be the one who only saw Cat under bad conditions, and Four could be subject to wishful thinking and the like. Only if we already knew that their position was true House Five, however, is using one standard for everybody, and the error that is attributed to others is simply having too narrow a view of things; and House Five could even admit this is true of them without giving up the House Five interpretation.

So let's call this the Special Pleading Problem. Greer's basic case for polytheism is that polytheism is, almost by its very nature, immune to the Special Pleading Problem. A polytheist could, of course, be exclusivism (only the gods of Olympus exist, etc.), but there's nothing about polytheism itself that requires this -- it would have to be for additional reasons, which would have to be examined on their own. And in general polytheists are not exclusive in this way.

The Special Pleading Problem occurs at the interpretive end of things; it can be combined with the problem noted in Chapter Five and developed a bit more fully in Chapter Six, which we can call the Natural Explanation Argument: the most natural explanation of diverse religious experiences is diverse objects of experience. From this Greer concludes that monotheism and atheism have a burden of proof that polytheism does not have; and that, therefore, "polytheism should be the starting point for any reasonable discussion of human religious experience, barring the presentation of good evidence or sound arguments that such an interpretation is not correct" (p. 88). As he says later, it's the default option. Greer, of course, recognizes that monotheists think they have such evidence; but he goes on to argue that it is in general inadequate. Suppose the monotheist points to miracles, and even suppose that the monotheist makes an excellent argument that the God the monotheist worships gives miracles while the polytheist's gods don't. What does that actually establish? At most that the monotheist is worshipping a god who is freer with miracles than other gods. In order to do better than this, the monotheist has to argue that there is a real difference in kind between the experiences of the monotheist and the experiences of the polytheist -- that the monotheist's experiences don't just show his God, but show that his God is exclusively God.

It's pretty much here that makes me wish that Greer had taken his subject more seriously in Chapters Three and Four, rather than treating them as a detour. The argument that Greer develops through Chapters Five and Six depends crucially on the assumption that the only thing to go on is experience, and the most natural interpretation of the experiences in question. But this can only really be the case if monotheists are wrong that that there are more abstract arguments for the existence of God that at least suggest that there is only one God and if atheists are wrong that there are more abstract arguments suggesting that there is nothing divine at all. Strict demonstration wouldn't be required. If, for instance, the monotheist has a cosmological argument for God's existence, and a corollary of this particular argument is that it is a little bit more likely than not that there is only one God, then the level playing field Greer assumes (we all just have experiences to go on and have to interpret them as best we can) is suddenly no longer level: the argument, if it stands, introduces a preference for One, Two, and Three over Four and Five. Even if it's only a tiny bit, this changes the nature of both the Special Pleading Problem and the Natural Explanation Argument. The argument of Chapter Six, so strongly polytheism-favorable, can only be so if (1) the only thing to be explained is religious experience; and (2) the only criterion of what counts as a good interpretation is best fit to religious experiences without special pleading. (2) depends crucially on the monotheists and atheists not having special arguments that go beyond religious experience as used in this argument and that add new criteria for what counts as a good interpretation of the experiences. The argument in Chapters Five and Six, which in its own way is quite brilliant if the assumptions are granted, is making assumptions that are both controversial and only weakly supported by the prior argument of the book.

Nonetheless, while Greer does go for the strong conclusions in these chapters, it's important to keep in mind that the point of the book as a whole is not to establish that polytheism is true but to establish that polytheism is worth taking seriously, and Greer's argument puts him on strong ground with respect to this conclusion. The rest of the book builds on the argument given in Chapters Five and Six in order to discuss what a polytheist can claim to know about the gods, and what life in a polytheistic world is like. There's a lot of fairly diverse material in the upcoming chapters, but much that is interesting as well. We'll discuss them in future posts.

Congressional Subpoenas

I haven't commented at all on the Schiavo case, since I don't know enough about it to say anything that isn't already said, and in this case I am largely ambivalent, because on the one hand I don't find the arguments for her potential rehabilitation convincing, and under those circumstances don't think it rational to scramble after every last jot of life; and on the other hand the sort of people on the other side have largely given me the creeps with the ethical views I've heard many of them spout. And I am willing to concede to both sides that I know next to nothing of this matter, if that's a comfort to either; I might well be missing something.

But I do want to say something about the recent Congressional subpoena, about which I have strongly unambivalent feelings. Whatever one's views about the rationality or propriety of the move, Congress has, and should have, the authority to subpoena anyone and everyone relevant to its legislative work. Further, Congress itself is the one that determines whether something is relevant to its legislative work. I thus find reports of Judge Greer's ordering hospital staff to disregard the congressional subpoena rather disturbing, far more disturbing than the abuse of Congressional powers I have seen people claim the subpoenas to be (personally, I see no abuse). And the arguments I have seen in support of the judge's actions are utterly absurd. For instance, this comment:

Stetson University law professor Charles Rose said that if a congressional subpoena can be used to keep her alive, Congress would essentially have blanket power to overrule state courts.

Which is absurd; the only way this could happen is if Congress forced the person served to testify for the rest of their lives. What a congressional subpoena does is call a person before Congress in order to testify. An equally silly comment, from the same source:

"If you do that, why have a state at all?" Rose said. "Why not just have the federal government do everything? It's absolutely contrary to every principle of federalism."

Yes, that makes sense; Congress is going to usurp all state government functions purely in virtue of requiring people to testify before it. Oh, the menace.

My inclination is to agree with those who say that Judge Greer should be charged with contempt of Congress; whatever the propriety of the subpoena, it is not his place to decide whether Congress is within its rights in issuing it. But part of this is due to the fact that I see no constitutional need for conflict of powers here: at most the testimony delays state action until after the hearing, nothing more. Worry about the bills, not the subpoenas.

Were I to be convinced there is a need for conflict of powers here, I would be more sympathetic to Judge Greer. But in any case, unlike some people, I am not squeamish about direct conflict of powers; that's the way balance of powers is supposed to work. It's better if it doesn't have to work that way, but sometimes it has to do so if we are to get clarity on where the lines are. Congress has a legitimate power to subpoena; state courts have legitimate power to issue injunctions. Congress issued a subpoena to Annie Santamaria, the director of the hospice, to appear before Congress with Theresa Schiavo, with all equipment relevant to her care remaining in the state of operation it was in when the subpoena was issued. It is a federal crime for Santamaria to fail to obey the subpoena, and it is, from what I understand, a federal crime to obstruct someone in the obeying of it; Greer has effectively issued an order for Santamaria to do so. In the next few weeks we will find out what becomes of state court judges who require people to ignore Congressional subpoenas.

[UPDATE: Two other cases that need also to be considered. (hat-tip: Kleiman.) I'm not convinced as some are, though, that there is any general inconsistency in people outraged about the Schiavo case not being outraged about these particular cases; I rather suspect they just don't know about it. The Schiavo case has been going on a long, long time, and it has taken most of that time for the case to occupy much public attention. The futile care law involved allows things to move very swiftly. It's rather odd, though, that the National Right to Life Committee, which opposes futile care laws, helped write this one, and is not calling attention to the results.)

Dashed Off XXI

A healthy public sphere must first and foremost be honest.

the 3 elements of Catholic Action (Peter Maurin)
1. Teaching of Christian Doctrine
2. Daily Practice of the Works of Mercy
3. Reconstruction of the Social Order

The tendency to think in terms of predicate calculus has led to an unnatural separation of sense and reference, with senses stuck on references like flags on poles, and, of course, both of these are separated from other aspects of meaning. It is as if one treated steering a ship as one thing, its hydrodynamics as another, its materials as another, all just glommed onto each other, without starting where we actually start, the ship and how it moves.

Hume scholars tend to focus on ideas, but Hume himself is often more interested in the transitions; it is not a static view but a dynamic one.

Much of Hume's theory of imagination makes a very good theory of guessing.

"When people find themselves every moment in danger of being robbed of all they possess, they have no motive to be industrious." Adam Smith

good government as the union of authority and usefulness

Priests who sneer at legalism are often in fact sneering at the rights of the faithful.

Veto and prorogation both provide much needed checks and balances (it is a weakness of the American system that it lacks the latter); but prorogation to be appropriate needs to be done with public conditions (usually time limit and a condition relevant to the resolution of the problem requiring prorogation).

monarchical sources of revenue
(1) demesnes (rents, working estates)
(2) civil list (salaries, pensions)
(3) taxes reserved for monarch
(4) grants (e.g., by parliament)

Popular sovereignty requires that citizens, operating as citizens, have executive, legislative, and judicial authority of some kind. Only to the extent that (1) they clearly have this and (2) other authority is clearly dependent on their having this, is it reasonable to say that the people are in some sense sovereign.

"Moral repair is the process of moving from the situation of loss and damage to a situation where some degree of stability in moral relations is regained." (Margaret Walker)
"Moral repair is the task of restoring or stabilizing -- and in some sense creating -- the basic elements that sustain human beings in a recognizably moral relationship."
"Repair cannot mean return to a status quo, but must aim at bringing morally diminished or shattered relations closer to morally adequate form."

'external' in 'external world' as analogous to 'other' in 'other mind' (perhaps there are analogues of external, independent, and continuing in 'other')

"All other values are relative for, of, or in a person." TH Green

absolute idealism : metaphysics :: coherence theory of truth : logic
-- this raises the question of the metaphysical analogues of other theories of truth

least means (Rosmini)
as considering means: secondary causality
as considering leastness: excluded superfluity
-- from both of these comes permission of defect
as exclusion of superfluity involves using secondary causes to answer needs of secondary causes: systemic totality
as considering distribution for greater good: continuous gradation
as uniting continuous gradation with secondary causation: variety in actuation and modification
as uniting variety and excluded superfluity: excluded equality (excluded redundancy)
as applying least means maximally: unity of action

If PSR is principle of causality plus note of intellect, one would expect reason-principles analogous to causal principles.

three parts of law of germ (Rosmini)
(=seminal reasons!)
(1) all beings have been created in a state of involution or germ
(2) Germs produce other germs by evolution.
(3) Original germs should be no more in number than is sufficient for the purpose.

ordered or directed analogy (this can make some sense if one thinks of analogy as act of analogizing)

Just as a community cannot make all wrongdoers accountable, it cannot validate all victims.

real being & rational being (being of reason) // real truth & rational truth

"Where would such an idea, say as that of God, come from if not from direct experience?" C. S. Peirce (6.493)

now -> always -> ground of always
here -> everywhere -> ground of everywhere
allowed -> obligatory -> ground of obligation
this -> all -> ground of all

Aquinas takes the oblation to be the genus and sacrifice to be a species of it involving making-sacred (i.e., doing something to what is offered rather than just giving it).

happenstance eclecticism vs principled eclecticism

nice example of anti-skeptical retorsion in Nyayasutra 2.1

rethinking the structure of philosophy of religion
God, the tutelar, the beyondgrave, the preternatural [by: what is met]
address, oblation, taboo, commemoration [to: the priestly]
inspiration, revelation, miracle, union [fro: the prophetic]
loyalty, liturgy (semiotic economy), adeption, superliminality [with: the communal]
genesis, providence, eschaton, alterity [in: the forum of meeting]
lure, gift, repair, mystery [through: the mode of presence]
religions proper, disenchantments, as-if religions, fictional religions

at least minimally personal: God, tutelar, some beyondgrave
impersonal: some beyondgrave, preternatural

kinds of tutelar: (1) transcendent, (2) imminent
(1) are tutelars starting to receive Divine attributions (Zeus being the obvious case). Likewise, beyondgraves may be tutelar (gods of death, demons), or human (shades, ghosts), or preternaturals (poltergeists).
Demigods as human tutelars, personifications as preternatural tutelars
pure preternaturals: Ideas (qua 'more divine than the gods'), karma, Lifeforce, mana, eternal Veda
-- How would Brahman be classified here? Will obv. depend on exact school, but prima facie seems a God/preternatural overlap
--All of these overlaps mean that we really need precise and principled definitions.

kinds of arguments for tutelars
(1) religious experience (e.g., Greer)
(2) design
(3) custom
-- (1) can be (a) direct (cf Epinomis) or (b) visionary (which is what Greer seems to have in mind) or (c) indirect (Muse)
-- (2) is obv. particularized. In a sense, Kant's complaint is that the design argument as such does not rise above the tutelar. Design + argument from evil (which are, strictly speaking, not inconsistent with each other) a possible reason for particularizing.
-- (3) seems to need to reduce to one of the others + testimony (although the source may be unknown)
-- Pluralism a reason for particularizing (1) to tutelars.
-- We may need (4) more purely causal as well -- cp Aristotle on first movers, if you don't take it to be (1a) or (1c).
--Is the impossibility of an ontological argument a distinguishing mark of the tutelar domain (or perhaps tutelars and beyondgraves)? Could you have a promiscuity of ontological arguments, as in mathematics? A possibility: A view like Platonic Forms but treating them as tutelars. (Abstract tutelars getting preternatural features seem most promising Tutelars getting divine attributions, on the other hand, are indistinguishable from God when get to an ontological argument.)

tutelar/devata, deity/Ishvara, preternatural/brahman
--this raises the question of where bhagavat fits; it seems extrinsic (based on devotional relations)

demiurge as tutelar with strongly divine attribution

It seems best to think of tutelar et al. as *kinds of attribution* rather than kinds of things.

Veneration of the Cross as a proxy for Eucharist on Good Friday

Recognizing incongruities requires counterfactual reasoning.

sophism // joke

kinds of incongruity in joke
(1) misassociation
(2) absurd effect (disproportion)
(3) impropriety

Since whether a characteristic is observable or not depends on suitable circumstances whether a term designating it is an 'observation predicate' depends on circumstances and whether an assertion involving it is an 'observation sentence' depends on circumstances.

All governments are some extent mixed constitutions; but there may be cases where on part is mostly residual or occasional.

"In searching for the principles of government, we may divide them into two kinds: the principles of authority, and the principles of power. The first are virtues of the mind and heart, such as wisdom, prudence, courage, patience, temperance, justice, etc.: the second are the goods of fortune, such as riches, extraction, knowledge, and reputation." Adams

Any society of popular government, if it is to be just and stable, must be pervaded by the common expectation that gods are to be worshiped, parents to be honored, elders to be respected, and customary laws to be obeyed.

etymological splitting and doubling in the enrichment of language
tradition -- tradition and treason
ratio -- ratio and reason
holiness (from Germannic) and sanctity (from Latin)
watch (from Germannic) and observe (from Latin)

God has unlimited standing to forgive because He is the Good Itself, the First Good which all other goods participate. All wrongs are primarily against Him, and all standing to forgive derives from Him. (None of this is true, of course, of us.)

Liberalism corrupts beliefs through pleasure-pressures; authoritarianism corrupts beliefs through utility-pressures.

"Truth, expressed in practice, is called Justice." Soloviev

contiguity as resemblance with respect to causal reach (resemblance in how one would get to it causally)

the importance of encouraging poor entrepreneurs

Counterfactual reasoning for large, variable populations tends to fail because there are so many things that could shift the population behavior -- thousands and thousands of things that could affect voting or buying patterns, for instance. One is often best advised to look at narrow ranges of shifts, and even then one may have counterfactual explosion.

parsimony & the need to make experiments as useful as possible

two kinds of trivial maps: empty (Hunting of the Snark) and identity (Sylvie and Bruno Concluded)

Sankara's use of the principle of noncontradiction against the Jains

convertibility of being and being causal (not, of course, being caused)

syadvada as a modal logic

(cp. Loke)
Resurrection experiences: either (1) no disciples had purported resurrection experience (legends) or (2) some disciples did.
if (2), either the (2.1) experience was actual or (2.2) merely purported (false testimonies)
if (2.1), either the experience as (2.1.1) real or (2.1.2) hallucinatory
if (2.1.1), either (2.1.1.1) the person experienced was the same person as Jesus or (2.1.1.2) it was not (mistaken identity)
if (2.1.1.1), either (2.1.1.1.1) Jesus did not die (mistaken death) or (2.1.1.1.2) he died and rose
if (2.1.1.1.1), either it was because (2.1.1.1.1.1) He was never actually crucified (escape) or because (2.1.1.1.1.2) the crucifixion was botched (swoon).
if (2.1.1.1.2), either he rose (2.1.1.1.2.1) because of a chance cause (scientific anomaly) or (2.1.1.1.2.2) because of a divine intervention or miracle (resurrection)
-- Each alternative requires positing a defective cause of the testimony.
-- Note Strauss's argument against the swoon hypothesis in Life of Jesus
-- Note that the Gospels are structured so as to eliminate each branch that is an alternative to resurrection, and they do this fairly explicitly, emphasizing evidences of death, eyewitnesses, multiple witnesses, extended interactions, physical interactions, etc.

(cp. Loke)
empty tomb: assume either (1) there was no crucifixion or (2) there was.
if (1), this is either (1.1) because the story is made up (invention/legends) or (1.2) because the crucifixion was evaded (escape)
if (2), either we should assume (2.1) there was a burial or (2.2) there wasn't (unburied and destroyed)
if (2.1), either we should assume (2.1.1) there was a real change or (2.1.2) there wasn't (remained buried, but misplaced or lost)
if (2.1.1.1), the change is due either (2.1.1.1.1) to a human cause or (2.1.1.1.2) to a nonhuman cause.
if (2.1.1.1.1), either (2.1.1.1.1.1) Jesus removed himself or (2.1.1.1.1.2) others removed him.
if (2.1.1.1.1.1), either (2.1.1.1.1.1.1) he was there due to swoon or (2.1.1.1.1.1.1.2) he rose by anomaly.
if (2.1.1.1.2), either (2.1.1.1.2.1) the cause was natural (anomaly) or (2.1.1.1.2.2) the cause was supernatural (resurrection)

exploitation of citizens and their alienation from public work

Academia conceals its existing-for-others by failing to consider its dependence on the good will and support of the community, that it is, in fact, made possible by the sacrifices of others in the expectation that it will do general good.

In a genuinely free society, citizens can treat support of the functions of governments as a way of expanding their freedoms.

genius, taste, and spirit (there seems little aesthetic work on the last, although cf. perhaps Campbell on rhetoric)

Sometimes by 'hope' we merely mean patience.

Epistemology of any field simply reiterates the field from the perspective of knowing. The same is true of axiology from the perspective of known willing.

values as the qua of willing

"All defects are possibly remediable, otherwise they would not be defects." Ferrier

Marxism is often not bad when it comes to diagnosing the plight of the worker, but it has no actual solution to it because the response always amounts to, "Eventually the workers will fix it themselves."

The responsible citizen puts his life into the common good; but the danger is that this may make his life belong no longer to him but to those who have managed to find their way into the roles and offices that have been given power to care for the common good. The danger is that the latter may lay a trap with the common good as bait.

Working well under just conditions
(1) to act and be treated as a person
(2) to meet human needs of self and others in appropriate ways
(3) to be involved in fair exchanges
(4) to be an active member of society

Labor, work, is merely a material of civic participation.

creative citizenship: in which one's citizenship is an expression of one's person, a culmination of oneself as social, a good willed, something more than getting by -- a matter of honor, of which to be proud

Educational institutions estrange people by intensifying the emphasis on expertise while refusing serious recognition and respect to all expertise but their own.

On Arguing with Polytheists

John Michael Greer, who is himself a polytheist, somewhere notes that most arguments used by atheists don't make any sense against polytheists; and it doesn't take much to show this to be true. I was put in mind of this today by someone talking about how, to an atheist, 'God', like 'Zeus', does not refer to anything that exists.

The problem, of course, is that polytheists can usually point to their gods, at least some of them. We see this with the dialogue Epinomis. If you asked Philip of Opus, assuming that he was the author, whether the god Ouranos existed, all Philip would have to do is take you outside and point up at the sky. And he could also point out Zeus to you, without any trouble whatsoever; later Roman polytheists, of course, following along, would point to the same exact, obviously existing, thing, and tell you that it was Jupiter. The entire reason we call it Jupiter is because some polytheists pointed it out as their god, Jupiter. 'Zeus' refers to something that exists; someone who disbelieves in Zeus just thinks that the existing thing is not, in fact, a god.

In general, the rule with polytheists is that they cannot be refuted by arguing that their gods simply don't exist; as I said, they can usually point to at least some of their gods. The only way a polytheist can generally be refuted is to argue that what he is pointing to in the world is not actually divine; arguing that it doesn't exist is not a viable way to go. Long ago, in reading something or other on (I think) scientific reduction, I came across a passage in which the author repeatedly used the example of Thor's Hammer: Once lightning was thought to be Thor's Hammer, and now it is known that it is electrical discharge. It was, of course, just a stand-in example, rather than any serious comment about Mjölnir. But if you were to ask any actual Asatruar, he will point out that in Ásatrú, there is no denial of the electric discharge description when one uses the Mjölnir description; the point was never that lightning was an ordinary warhammer, which any ancient Viking could easily have already told you it wasn't, but that it was Mjölnir, i.e., lightning, which is Thor's, and it is called a warhammer because it can do what a warhammer or battle-ax does on a scale suitable for a god. And no matter how thoroughly atheistic your theory of electricity is, I can without any hesitation guarantee that it has not established the nonexistence of lightning.

This is, interestingly enough, a feature that polytheists share with pantheists; it is even more obviously impossible to argue that what the pantheist calls 'God' does not exist, because you have only to look around to see that it does. The only question is whether it is, as they say, divine.

Links of Note

 * Dwayne Moore, The Argument from Reason and the Dual Process Reply (PDF)

* Santiago Chame, The Non-kinetic Origins of Aristotle's Concept of Ἐνέργεια (PDF)

* Edmund Waldstein, The So-Called 'New Natural Law Theory', at "The Josias"

* Mark Fisher, What would Thucydides say?, at "Aeon"

* James Chamberlain, Hume's 'General Rules' (PDF)

* The Stone of Destiny was a doorstep, at "The History Blog"

* Diane Mantagna interviews Edward Feser on Dignitas Infinita, at "The Catholic Thing"

* Mark Agrios, A Very Elementary Introduction to Sheaves (PDF)

* Hedda Hassel Mørch, Phenomenal Powers (PDF)

* Freddie deBoer, Why Doesn't AI Want to Show Me Jesus Washing the Feet of His Disciples?

* Elle Griffin, No one buys books, at "The Elysian"

[ADDED LATER: John Michael Greer has an interesting post on Griffin's essay, Lenocracy in Extremis: The Case of Publishing, at "Ecosophia".]

* Francesca Bellazzi, Biochemical functions (PDF)

* Christine Norvell, Work and Leisure: A Pieper Primer, at "Front Porch Republic"

* Nicholas Colgrove, Defending the Doctrine of the Mean Against Counterexamples: A General Strategy (PDF)

Links of Note

 * David Torillos-Castrillejo, Philosophical Reflection on Beauty in the Late Middle Ages: The Case of Jean Gerson (PDF)

* Marius Ion Benta, The Multiple Realities of Paul's Mystical Experience: A Phenomenological Perspective in the Anthropology of Religion (PDF)

* Patrick J. Casey, What is 'lived experience'?, at "Aeon"

* Mark Vernon, The enchanted vision, on love as a cosmic quality, also at "Aeon"

* Alexandre Billon, "The only organ of contact with reality is love", on love as a sense of reality, at "Le Substack de Alexandre"

* Alberto Oya, Religious Fictionalism and the Ontological Status of God (PDF)

* John Michael Greer, The Secret of the Sages, at "Ecosophia"

* William H. Harwood & Paria Akhgari, Heroes and Demigods: Aristotle's Hypothetical "Defense" of True Nobles (PDF)

* Matthew Duncombe, Diodorus Cronus, at the SEP

* Gregory Salmieri and Benjamin Bayer, How We Choose Our Beliefs (PDF)

* William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature

* Sinan Dogramaci, Evolutionary Explanations of Our Reliability (PDF)

* William F. Vallicella, Intentionality in Locks and Keys?, at "Philosophy in Progress"

* Don Garrett, Hume's Geography of Feeling in A Treatise of Human Nature (PDF)

* William L. Bell, Rights Reclamation (PDF)

* Edmund Waldstein, He Misses Someone He's Never Even Met, on David Foster Wallace, at "Humanum"

Links of Note

 * Musa al-Gharbi, On Clarence Thomas, White Liberals, and Racial Politics

* Adam M. Willows, Stories and the Development of Virtue (PDF)

* Crispin Sarwell, The Supreme Court's Legitimacy. One of the problems of talk of 'legitimacy' is that it really means either that something is legal, that something is effectively supported, or something that someone takes to be important independent of any legality or support; and the result is that almost all talk of 'illegitimacy' in politics would either better handled by talking about legality or support, or else is just an attempt to pretend that state agencies and institutions can magically be ignored or attacked despite being legal and/or having significant political support. It is, practically speaking, a useless concept.

* Martin Pickup, The Problem of Change Restored (PDF)

* Jennifer Frey, Teaching virtue in the digital age

* Matthew Walker, Reconciling the Stoic and the Sceptic: Hume on Philosophy as a Way of Life and the Plurality of Happy Lives (PDF)

* T. Greer, A Guide Map for Reading the East Asian Canon

* Lara Buchak, Faith and Traditions (PDF)

* Chris Petitt, The Story of the Leonine Walls

* Aaron Wells, Science and the Principle of Sufficient Reason: Du Chatelet Contra Wolff (PDF)

* Carroll Quigley, Epistemology, Semantics, and Doublethink

* Rasmus Jaksland, A trilemma for naturalized metaphysics

* Geoff Shullenberg, Is wokeness just for the elite?, reviews Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò's Elite Capture.

* Dolf Rami, Notions of Existence in Frege (PDF)

* Harper, Burser, and Baguley, Do Concepts Creep to the Left and the Right? Evidence for Ideologically Salient Concept Breadth Judgments Across the Political Spectrum

* Hands Up Primary Latin Course

Dashed Off XXIV

This starts the notebook that was begun in September 2018.

To see why things don't work is immensely useful.

The homily is the preeminent form of preaching precisely because it is structured by the liturgical year and is in service to the liturgy.

The testimony of the Holy Spirit is recognized first and foremost in His actions in and through the Church.

Calvin's argument that the pictorial kind of image is only to entertain fails to account for the pictorial (and not historical) images of the ark of the covenant and of the Temple.

The iconographer must, by means of the visible, paint the invisible.

This is the thing with tradition: great trees that grew for centuries can be cut down in an hour, and the cutting cannot be undone. All one can do is replant.

"Evil preaches tolerance until it is dominant, then it tries to silence good." Chaput

The two pillars of intellectual greatness are rigorous abstraction and humane tradition.

rites as 'marking the Way' like signs that mark treacherous spots at fords (Xunzi 17.11)

God is love (1 Jn 4:8,16) and love is from Him (4:7), such that God's love is primary and principal (4:10); God is unseen but is known by His abiding in love (4:12).

(1) Love admits of more and less.
(2) What admits of more and less does so insofar as it approaches or recedes from what is as such (a maximum).
(3) Therefore there is love as such.
(4) Love is a simple (pure) perfection.
(5) What is a simple perfection is in itself immeasurable.
(6) Love as such is immeasurable.

The act of the first mover is love.

Confucian rectification of names rightly recognizes that society and practical life are built on classifications.

"...those natures which are not susceptible of highest degree are not perfections." Leibniz (DM 1)

Commensal, mutualistic, and parasitic relations between ecclesial and state institutions.

HoP is good for teaching that interpretation is an evidential process of approximation, and thus can be right/wrong and can also come in degrees.

Being gentlemanly presupposes a framework within which giving respect gets respect.

In the Eucharist, our gift to God is transformed by God into God's gift to us.

The Eucharist is in the fullest sense a sacrifice because it is address, oblation, consecration, and commemoration all at once.

Calvin explicitly assimilates the eucharist to baptism (Institutes IV.17.14), which is why his account of the real presence in the Supper always sounds like the real presence of the Spirit in baptism.

religious attributions
admit of universal causal argument: deity, preternatural
admit only of local causal argument: tutelar

beyondgrave attribution complexes
(1) chiefly tutelar: Hades, Osiris
(2) tutelar-preternatural: Ma'at, Grim Reaper, Angel of Death
(3) deity-preternatural: Death in a death cult
(4) deity-tutelar-preternatural: God as Judge
inworld vs beyondgrave attributions

superpersonal, at-least-personal, and impersonal tutelars and 'HADD'
agency detection -> tutelar attributions
abstraction -> preternatural attributions
? -> deity attributions
Obviously Descartes argues that deity attributions can derive from nothing except God causing as to have them

Essay Toward a More Complete Philosophy of Religion
(1) Limit and Beyond
--- (a) Religions ritually tend to focus on boundaries/thresholds.
--- (b) Otto on the numinous
--- (c) kinds of beyondness-attribution
(2) Tutelar Attributions
--- (a) agency-candidate detection
--- (b) design arguments
--- (c) the Democritean account?
--- (d) tutelar separation
--- --- (1) difficulty of equation (Greer)
--- --- (2) argument from evil
(3) Preternatural Attributions
--- (a) abstraction
--- (b) abstract entities
--- (c) interaction with abstract entities
--- --- (1) subjective
--- --- (2) exemplar
--- --- (3) directly causal
--- (d) concrete indefinites (partial abstractions)
--- (e) allegorization
--- (f) Neoplatonism
(4) Deity Attributions
--- (a) There is no obvious psychological derivation for deity attributions (failure of Lockean account).
--- (b) The Cartesian Argument
--- (c) The Traditionary Argument
--- (d) A Mediation Argument (tutelary-preternatural mediation)
--- (e) Global Cause Argument
--- (f) relation to ontological argument
(5) Interaction of Attributions
--- (a) examples in polytheistic contexts
--- --- (1) preternatural tutelars
--- --- (2) Neoplatonic
--- (b) examples in monotheistic contexts
--- --- (1) Christ
--- --- (2) Sri Guru Granth
--- (c) examples in popular arguments
--- (d) examples in philosophical arguments
(6) Inworld vs Beyondgrave Versions
--- (a) Death as another threshold
--- (b) NDE's and senses of presence
--- (c) Beyondgrave attributions cut across all three.
--- --- (1) Tutelar: Hades, Osiris, Angel of Death
--- --- (2) Preternatural: Death
--- --- (3) Deity: God as having power over the realm of the dead
(7) Kinds of Meeting
--- (a) inspiration (suggestive)
--- (b) revelation (saturated)
--- (c) miracle/wonder
--- (d) union
(8) Basic Responses
--- (a) Address (speaking)
--- (b) Oblation (giving)
--- (c) Consecration (setting apart)
--- (d) Commemoration (remembering)
(9) Rites and Rituals
--- (a) performatives
--- (b) symbolic representation of liminal and superliminal (allegorization)
--- (c) liturgical knowing
--- (d) Neoplatonism
--- (e) Neoconfucianism
(10) Institutions and Practices
--- (a) initiation and adeption
--- (b) community loyalty (Royce)
--- (c) liturgy and semiotic economy
--- (d) askesis
(11) Religion and Civilization
--- (a) Politics (civil religion & theology)
--- (b) Aesthetics
--- --- (1) Greek drama
--- --- (2) iconoclasm
--- (c) Ethics
(12) Religion and the Religion-like
--- (a) proper mode: Cicero and Aquinas on religio
--- (b) disenchantment mode
--- --- (1) Hopi disenchantment rituals
--- --- (2) Santa Claus
--- --- (3) Feuerbach
--- (c) as-if mode
--- --- (1) Santa Claus
--- --- (2) State Shinto
--- --- (3) Irish Murdoch
--- (d) fictional mode
--- --- (1) symbolic representation
--- --- --- (a) Aslan
--- --- --- (b) Crystal Dragon Jesus tropes
--- --- (2) imaginary religion (e.g., Jedi)
--- --- (3) religion imitation

It is remarkable that philosophers assume that abstract entities are inert, given that nobody normally talks about them as if they were.

When people talk about Confucianism as a religion, it is clear that the elements they take as religion are not particularly derived from Confucius himself, nor even from ruism generally, but from ancestor veneration.

Nonpopulist regimes tend to depend on economic incentives overwhelming other incentives; they tend to fall by assuming they automatically will do so.

contrast counterfactuals vs intervention counterfactuals

Christ, rising from the dead, through the eucharist (Luke 24:30) makes us to rise in heart (Luke 24:33).

narrative participation in pilgrimage, tourism, souvenirs

Composition fallacies conflate wholes/parts in Boolean and in Classical Squares of Opposition; but the inference goes through if there is a bridge principle.

civil rights as artificial armor for the juridical person

"My loved one is the abbreviation of the universe, the universe the elongation of my loved one." Novalis
"Love is the final goal of world history, the unum of the universe."

Every hegemony manufactures an acceptable rebelliousness in order to defang dissent.

Actual reasoning about conflicts of interest involves counterfactual reasoning about causes of distortion in judgment. But there's also a set of distinctions applied to this (evitable/inevitable, serious/nonserious), and these seem to posit a rational spectator as a reference point.

testimonial drift vs testimonial selection
-- the two elements of testimonial drift are memorial and communicational

A church building should be designed in such a way as to recognize the importance of sacraments, of icons, and of relics.

Nietzsche's point in TI VI.7 that men were considered free that they might be judged and punished is right insofar as freedom is a precondition for rational judgment and punishment, but defective in that it makes it impossible to understand why anyone would have ever conceived of the latter to begin with, because it is specifically this kind of judgment and punishment that is concerned, and not, for instance, merely retaliatory feeling.

the referential & acousmatic aspects of poetry

We experience the expressiveness of music in three ways: in the feel (e.g., tempo or sharpness of beat), in the imagination, and in the reason; and each aspect has different features -- associative, interpretive, etc.

Rejection, and often major revision, of free will requires the rejection of common conceptions of causation. This is recognized by Spinoza, Hume, and Nietzsche, but is regularly overlooked by those who want to have their cake and eat it too.

holiness of life as expressiveness (the life expressive of the divine)

The sacraments are divine holiness arousing human holiness through holy signs established by the holy promises of God Most Holy.

Sacraments are not merely signs of holiness but signs expressing holiness, communicating holiness.

hypermetacognition as a means for imitating genius?

While Journet associates the doctrinal power with Christ as King and the sacrament power with Christ as Priest, it seems better to regard them as each different expressions of the union of Prophet, King, and Priest in Christ.

character : Priesthood :: Gifts : Prophethood :: juridical status or rights? : Kingship

Christ ascended and in session as the proximate exemplar cause of the Church
-- the Church Triumphant as complete exemplate, the Church penitent as completing exemplate, the Church Militant as beginning (incipient) exemplate
-- Israel in OT as seminal exemplate

Locked room mysteries play with interpretation: under one interpretation of the room, the thing was impossible; under another, it was possible. But in the best locked room mysteries, both are in a sense true.

Arousal theories of expression are a poor fit for hymns.

music as a way of dancing without dancing

the last Oracle of Delphi (to Julian the Apostate):
"Tell the emperor the Daidalic hall has fallen.
No longer does Phoebus have his chamber, nor mantic laurel,
nor prophetic spring; and the speaking water has been silenced."

"If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly, if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all." C. S. Lewis

Links for Linking

I've been busy on and off with starting up the term. This term doesn't look like it will be difficult overall, but it looks I'll be extraordinarily busy the next couple of weeks, so we'll see how posting goes in the near future.

* At "D-brief" there's a post discussing how gardeners are accidentally interfering with the life cycle of Monarch butterflies by planting the wrong kind of milkweed in an attempt to help them.

* Thomas Hobbes's attempt to explain Prince Rupert's drops. (As I've mentioned before, Prince Rupert's drops were a kind of early modern novelty item that went by several different names. The 'Prince Rupert' is the brother of Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia; Rupert didn't invent them, but seems to have contributed to their popularity.)

* Selections from the geological field notebooks of Henry M. Cadell.

* The history of Braille.

* Nicolas Steno and the Principles of Modern Geology at "yovisto blog". It is not, however, entirely clear that Steno "essentially abandoned science" when he became a priest; there's some evidence he continued at least to maintain his interest in the structure of the brain. But there hasn't really been much work done on Steno's later thought, in part (I suspect, since I'm not a researcher on Steno particularly, only interested in his work) because of the relative lack of evidence. It is true, though, that given all the things that was doing once he became a priest, he may well not have had much time for serious scientific pursuits.

* Aili Bresnahan at the SEP on the Philosophy of Dance.

* Eugene Marshall at the IEP on Margaret Cavendish.
Ronnie Littlejohn at the IEP has a historical overview of Chinese philosophy.

* Joseph Heath and Benoit Hardy-Vallée discuss the implications of intoxicated behavior for moral psychology in Why Do People Behave Immorally When Drunk?

* T. Greer on Sunzi (Sun-tzu).

* Pater Edmund discusses Vatican II's Declaration on Religious Liberty:
Religious Liberty and Tradition I
Religious Liberty and Tradition II
Religious Liberty and Tradition III
Religious Liberty and Tradition IV
Dubium: Can the State Limit Non-Catholic Religions?

* John Lamont reflects on attacks on 'manualist theology'

* Kareem Abdul Jabar is co-authoring a Sherlock Holmes pastiche about Mycroft. Apparently he's quite the fan of Sherlock Holmes.

* Suburbanbanshee on freedom of the press.

* James Hannam on the mounting problems with the dating of ancient events in Babylonia and Egypt.

* Whewell's Ghost #30 has lots of history-of-science links.

* Ashok at "Rethink" discusses William Butler Yeats's poem, "The Choice".

Links of Note and Notes that Note

* This cartoon by Jason Bach captures almost everything there is to say about recent media discussion of the Pope's interview.

* An article at Science discusses peer review in open-access journals. It concludes that sometimes there is and sometimes there really, really isn't.

* Dubious shenanigans in community college accreditation.

It's worth remembering that accreditation is a relatively recent thing, and that there is no reason to think that it does much. Canada, whose higher education system is as good as anything in the U.S., has no national or regional accreditation system; colleges are simply regulated by provincial governments, and that somewhat indirectly, and instead of jumping through hoops for accreditation, colleges simply maintain their status as members in good standing in professional associations; some particular departments and degrees have their own form of accreditation through appropriate agencies that can determine the right kind of accreditation for those programs. It's a system that works and makes sense -- it's programs and degrees, not colleges, that need accreditation, when it is needed at all. As noted at the link, we here have a case in which the accrediting organization's policies are actually interfering directly with the educational policies of the state of California, and on grounds that cannot be linked to superior educational quality.

* Ross Wolfe has a review of Victor Farias's Heidegger and Nazism at "The Charnel-House".

* Rebecca Stark looks at the basic meaning of mortification of sin, with links to Reformed resources on the subject.

* John Wilkins has a post on the idea that the brain could be downloaded, saying many salutary things.

Of course, even if it were possible, it might not be like we think; I remember a short story somewhere in which aliens learn how to hack a human being's brain, and they land on earth expecting to conquer us easily -- after all they can just break straight into our minds. And they discover that every single human brain is so different that they would have to start virtually from scratch for every single one.

* Rabbi Yaakov Ariel on Maimonides's 13 principles.

* Jana at "Wondering Aloud with Young People" discusses Rachel Carson's The Sense of Wonder, which I think is her best book.

* Hic Rhodus, hic saltus: Aesop, Erasmus, Hegel, and Marx

* T. E. Hulme Reconsidered at "The Imaginative Conservative". Hulme was born 130 years ago this past September.

I suspect history will treat Hulme reasonably well. He'll never be one of the greats, but I think people will keep coming back to him at least indirectly. His manuscripts on the philosophy of language, literature, and style are brilliant, and much better than almost any other twentieth century philosophy of language, since Hulme actually knew his subject in greater depth than being able to string words together into sentences. He is one of those philosophers who is brilliant in fragments; Leibniz is the most famous, and, ironically, given Hulme's arguments against romanticism, the Romantic philosophers. He is not as brilliant as Leibniz, and he lacks the movement the Romantics had, but he is of the same general kind. I think he will be a minor philosopher who is read far longer than many more famous for philosophy in their day.

An aphorism from his manuscripts on language: "Thought is the joining together of new analogies, and so inspiration is a matter of an accidentally seen analogy or unlooked-for resemblance."

* Another anniversary this year: Albert Camus turns 100.

* James Chastek on the trial of Socrates as the trial of all philosophy.

* John Michael Greer on the flight to the ephemeral at "The Archdruid Report".

Links of Note

 * Mateusz Kotowski & Krzysztof Szlachcic, Deconstructing the Phantom: Duhem and the Scientific Realism Debate (PDF)

* Jane Psmith reviews Peter Lawrence's Road Belong Cargo, at "Mr. and Mrs. Psmith's Bookshelf". Highly Recommended.

* Erich Przywara, Philosophy as a Problem, at "Church Life Journal"

* Carla Bagnoli, Kant and Sidgwick on Practical Knowledge and Rational Action (PDF)

* SDG, What is a miracle? It depends partly on interpretation, at "SDG's Dailies and Sundays"

* David Hume and Suzanne Collins's Sunrise on the Reaping 

* W. Matthews Grant & Mark K. Spencer, Activity, Identity, and God (PDF). This paper makes the common mistake made on this topic, of conflating identitas with identity (the former is a much less restrictive term), and (a perhaps related mistake) in at least one passage seems to make odd assumptions about rationally distinct acts (e.g., that they are not actually distinct). I think this mistake also leads to exaggerating some of the differences among the Thomistic commentators. But with that caveat, it's a nice collection of arguments on various aspects of what it means to say that distinct acts are not diverse things in God.

* Ken MacVey, Corporations, Free Will, Responsibility, and AI: How Do They Fit Together?, at "3 Quarks Daily"

* Leonardo Flamini, Inquiry and conversation: Gricean zetetic norms and virtues (PDF)

* Chad Hansen, Daoism, at the SEP

* Klaas Kraay, Divine Freedom, also at the SEP

* Bartosz Biskup, Two Senses of Law as an Artefact (PDF)

* Bradley J. Birzer, Canticle for Leibowitz

* Laurenz Ramsauer, The Efficacy Problem (PDF), on the nature of legal systems

*John Michael Greer, The death of Progress, at "Unherd"

* Lisa Cassell, The Positive Argument for Impermissivism (PDF)

* Armand D'Angour, The truth about love, on Diotima and Socrates, at "Aeon"

* Nathan Pinkoski, Pope Francis's Managerial Revolution, at "Compact"

Immediate Book Meme

 Mrs. Darwin recently did an Immediate Book Meme, so I might as well do one here.

***********************************

There are plenty of memes that want to know all about your book history and your all-time greats and your grand ambitions, but let's focus on something more revealing: the books you're actually reading now, or just read, or are about to read. Let's call it The Immediate Book Meme.

***

Over the past couple years, I've been doing quite a few audiobooks as well as books, so for some questions I'll give two answers, the book answer and the audiobook answer. 

1. What book are you reading now?

A. Books

Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, which is the current fortnightly book

Erik Varden, The Shattering of Loneliness -- only just started this

Luke Timothy Johnson, The First and Second Letters to Timothy: A new translation with introduction and commentary

B. Audiobooks

Agatha Christie, Evil Under the Sun -- Enjoying this one more than I expected

Michael Flynn, Rogue Star

R. F. Kuang, Babel -- only just started this

C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature

2. What book did you just finish?

A. Books

Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat, which was the previous fortnightly book

Gillian Russell, Barriers to Entailment -- excellent, I'll certainly have something up about it at some point

B. Audiobooks

Agatha Christie, Hercule Poirot's Christmas

Agatha Christie, One, Two, Buckle My Shoe

Michael Flynn, Firestar

Agatha Christie, Cards on the Table -- of the Agatha Christies I hadn't read before, this has certainly been the best, although I think it would probably be a better read than a listen.

3. What do you plan to read next?

A. Books

By far, this is the hardest of these questions to answer. The obvious thing is the  next fortnightly book, but I haven't decided yet what that will be. At some point over Lent, which starts in about two weeks, I expect to do Sigrid Undset's Saga of the Saints. 

After a short pause, I will probably re-read Gillian Russell's Barriers to Entailment.

Last week, I picked up a few books at Half Price Books, some of which I intend to get through at some point in the near future:

Philip Zaleski & Carol Zaleski: The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse -- I think I read this one in high school, but can't recall much about it.

Agatha Christie, Towards Zero -- I don't think I've read this one at all.

B. Audiobooks

The following are currently checked out on my Libby Shelf and just need to be started.

Agatha Christie, Appointment with Death -- I've read this multiple times, but really want to see how it works in audiobook

Agatha Christie, Mrs. McGinty's Dead -- I don't know if I've read this one at all, although I think not

The following are currently on hold with Libby, waiting for available copies.

Agatha Christie, Sad Cypress

Agatha Christie, The ABC Murders

Agatha Christie, Five Little Pigs

C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

4. What book do you keep meaning to finish?

St. Anthony's Greek Orthodox Monastery, The Departure of the Soul According to the Teaching of the Orthodox Church -- but this is a bit-at-a-time book, anyway

The other two I started before Christmas vacation and just haven't gotten back to them yet:

Albert the Great, On the Body of the Lord

Henri Poincare, The Value of Science

5. What book do you keep meaning to start?

John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods, 2nd edition.

Mortimer Adler, Philosopher at Large

6. What is your current reading trend?

In books I don't have a reading trend, but as should be obvious, I have (since November) been going through Agatha Christie on audiobook. I did the Marples in November last year and have been doing the Poirots since then. (As a sidenote, from what I've listened to so far, Miss Marple does consistently better in audiobook than Poirot, who is much more uneven; and of the Poirot works, it is, perhaps surprisingly, the middling works that usually seem to work best -- Murder in Mesopotamia, Dumb Witness, and the like. The better books often trade on subtleties that are just easily missed in audiobook, and the worst Poirots tend to be overly complicated, so the books that work best as audiobooks are those that trade on neither subtlety nor detail, or at least very little, and thus are primarily carried by what might be called 'psychological' features of the story and the general sense of each character.) I am also currently going (much more slowly) through Michael Flynn's Firestar series on audiobook.

Telegraph's "50 Best Cult Books"

From here. Books I've read are bolded. There are a few here that I keep intending to read but never have gotten around to reading, and a few I've read parts of but not cover to cover. (Yes, I have read Baby and Child Care cover to cover.) Most of the ones I have read I had read before the end of high school; but there are actually some decent members of the list, including one or two that the reviewers for the Telegraph panned, so of the ones I've read, I've starred those that I recommend generally and double-starred those I especially recommend.

1. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
2. The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (1957-60)
3. A Rebours by JK Huysmans (1884)
4. Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946)
5. The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (1991)
6. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
7. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
8. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
9. The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield (1993)
10. The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart (1971)
11. Chariots of the Gods: Was God An Astronaut? by Erich Von Däniken (1968)
12. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980) **
13. Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
14. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1824)
15. Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health by L Ron Hubbard (1950)
16. The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley (1954)
17. Dune by Frank Herbert (1965) *
18. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979) **
19. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)
20. Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973)
21. The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
22. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943) *
23. Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter (1979)
24. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)
35. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (1982)
26. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948)
27. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)
28. Iron John: a Book About Men by Robert Bly (1990)
29. Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and Russell Munson (1970) *
30. The Magus by John Fowles (1966)
31. Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (1962) **
32. The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1958)
33. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
34. No Logo by Naomi Klein (2000)
35. On The Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
36. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson (1971)
37. The Outsider by Colin Wilson (1956)
38. The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (1923)
39. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell (1914)
40. The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám tr by Edward FitzGerald (1859) **
41. The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (1937)
42. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922)
43. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)
44. Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954)
45. The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)
46. The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda (1968)
47. Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1933)
48. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1883-85) **
49. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960) **
50. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig (1974)