The Mencius, Book V

Book V.A (Wan Zhang I)

In the fifth book we see Master Meng as a teacher, answering questions from students and commenting on texts. Many of the sections comment on various aspects of the reign of the legendary hero-king Shun. In addition to this theme, the book as a whole is also unified by the student Wan Zhang, who is in thirteen out of eighteen total sections (eight in A and five in B). Other themes that recur are the mandate of heaven and the responsibility for ministers to put the Way into practice.

In the first three sections Wan Zhang and Mencius discuss various things attributed to the life of Shun and how they relate to moral questions. V.A.1 discusses whether Shun, because he wept over the treatment his parents gave him, bore a grudge against his parents (i.e., failed to be dutiful to his parents); Mencius replies that it is part of the relation of son to parent to want to be loved by parent, and thus that it shows his dutifulness to his parents:

When a person is young he yearns for his parents; when he begins to take an interest in women, he years for the young and beautiful; when he has a wife, he yearns for his wife; when he enters public life he yearns for his prince and becomes restless if he is without one. A son of supreme dutifulness yearns for his parents all his life.

But Wan Zhang presses the point in V.A.2. When Shun married, neither he nor his father-in-law, the Emperor, told his parents, which seems a bad example to follow. Mencius is not impressed by the argument, though; the reason Shun's parents weren't told was that they would have opposed the marriage. Nor was this in any way undutiful; to have to forgo such an important relationship as marriage simply on one's parent's whim is, besides not good in itself, the sort of thing that makes one bitter against one's parents. Shun's younger brother Xiang, with the help of his parents, tried to kill him, but failed; Shun, however, went on as if nothing had happened, and Wan Zhang wonders whether Shun could have been so oblivious (presumably because it reflects on his wisdom)? Mencius, however, doesn't think he was oblivious but that he was just strongly attached to his brother. This leads in V.A.3 to a related question: Xiang constantly tried to kill Shun, but Shun made Xiang prince -- this seems problematic, because, as Wan Zhang notes, it seems a rather bad thing to do to the people he made Xiang prince over. But Mencius replies that a humane man loves his brother, and wishes him to do well. At the same time, however, he took care of the people by appointing officials to do the actual work of government.

The rest of Part A consists of a common pattern of someone (in every case except V.A.4 Wan Zhang) asking Master Meng whether something commonly said about some important figure is true; Mencius then goes on to argue that this common claim doesn't make any sense and that something else must be true. In the course of doing this he gives us a great deal of information about his views on several subjects. For instance, V.A.5 gives us Mencius's basic idea of the mandate of Heaven. According to common story, Yao gave the Empire to Shun, who succeeded him. Mencius, however, denies that this makes sense; the Empire is not an Emperor's to give. What actually happened is that Yao recommended Shun to Heaven and Heaven accepted the recommendation by turning the Empire over to Shun. This was seen reflected in the fact that his sacrifices went well and that the people flocked to his support without being in any way forced to do so.

This discussion continues with V.A.6, in which a contrast case is considered: people say that Yu tried to choose Yi as his successor, but whose successor ended up being his own son, thus showing that people were less virtuous. Mencius denies this, however; it is a matter of what Heaven does. When Shun recommended Yu, Yu did not grasp after the throne; Shun's son could have been Emperor, but people continued to treat Yu as Emperor because of all the good he had done in cooperation with Shun. The same thing happened in the case of Yu: Yu recommended Yi to Heaven, and Yi did not grasp after it. But the people did not flock to Yi; they flocked to Qi and supported him because he was the son of their Emperor. Yi had not helped Yu for as long as Yu had helped Shun or Shun had helped Yao; and, moreover, Shun and Yu were obviously better people than the dissolute sons who didn't get the throne, while Qi was not himself a bad or stupid man at all. Thus, Mencius says, it is not enough to be a good and virtuous man: one must also have the recommendation of the Emperor (which is why Confucius was never Emperor), and Heaven does not set aside the sons unless they are depraved (which is why a good man with the Imperial recommendation like Yi was never Emperor).

As is always the case in Confucian discussions of the mandate of Heaven, an obvious concern throughout this discussion is to insist that moral principle has a superiority over political will -- it is Heaven, not human design, that makes emperors -- but it is also true that Confucians never assume that ruling is only a matter of being virtuous.

Book V.B (Wan Zhang II)

The second part of Book V seems less structured than the first part, but a number of sections have to do with ministers serving princes. V.B.1 discusses a number of several different ministers who could seriously be considered sages, drawing lessons about the nature of wisdom from their cases. It also identifies the sense in which Mencius takes Confucius to be a great sage:

Po Yi was the sage who was unsullied; Yi Yin was the sage who accepted responsibility; Liu Hsia Hui was the sage who was easy-going; Confucius was the sage whose actions were timely. Confucius was the one who gathered together all that was good. To do this is to open with bells and conclude with jade tubes. To open with bells is to begin in an orderly fashion; to conclude with jade tubes is to end in an orderly fashion. To begin in an orderly fashion is the concern of the wise while to end in an orderly fashion is the concern of a sage. Wisdom is like a skill, shall I say, while sageness is like strength. It is like shooting from beyond a hundred paces. It is due to your strength that the arrow reaches the target, but it is not due to your strength that it hits the mark.

One significant aspect of this conclusion is that, as Mencius understands it, sagehood is consistent with many different styles and talents. The great ministers here, Bo Yi, Yi Yin, Liu Xia Hui, Master Kong, all had very different approaches. What makes Confucius the greatest of these was not so much that he was more of a sage but that he was adaptable, so that he was not merely skilled in this or that but able to adjust his actions to any circumstances. Other sages had the strength of character to 'hit the target', but their doing so depended to some extent on how well suited their talents were to their situation; Confucius, on the other hand, could hit the target under a wide variety of conditions. This adaptability is shown in V.B.4: "Confucius took office sometimes because he thought there was a possibility of practising the way, sometimes because he was treated with decency, and sometimes because the prince wished to keep good people at his court." It is likely that this is also at least part of the point of V.B.5 and V.B.7.

V.B.8 gives us another insight into Mencius's understanding of the importance of the ancients, calling it "looking for friends in history":

And not content with making friends with the best Gentlemen in the Empire, he goes back in time and communes with the ancients. When one reads the poems and writings of the ancients, can it be right not to know something about them as men? Hence one tries to understand the age in which they lived. This can be described as "looking for friends in history".

The truly noble in a sense transcend the times. Their rightful companions are determined by virtue (cp. V.B.3), not transient things.

to be continued

Rosmini for August XX

ST. BERNARD

The very smallest degree of holiness acquired by man is of infinite value, and we may well give all to purchase so precious a gem and the field wherein it is hidden. I take this field to signify the religious state, in which, according to those beautiful words of St. Bernard: "Man lives more purely, feels more rarely, rises more speedily, walks more cautiously, receives the dew of grace more frequently, rests more securely, dies more confidently; his soul is cleansed more quickly and rewarded more abundantly."
Letters 5649 [SC]

Rosmini for August XIX

Let us start from this truth, that God is the God of Holiness and Holy is His Name. Sanctity is the perfection of His nature, the end of all His works; all that He does, all that He wills, is directed to this end. God therefore essentially wills His own sanctity, and the sanctity of His creatures.
Conferences on Ecclesiastical Duties xix.7 [SC]

My Tongue a Plaint Composes

Thule's Lament
(To her homing war sons)
by Stephan G. Stephansson

My tongue a plaint composes,
My heart compels a tear,
On greeting you exhausted
From the battle's grim career,
With broken shields and sabres
With kindred blood asmear.

A blessing high—without intent—-
Was rendered me by him,
Who first disarmed my eager sons,
Unscathed of heart and limb.
Our friendly shores, at peace with all,
No fears may since bedim.

But thrice accursed be the knaves
My errant sons beguile
To war, with blinded eyes, upon
A neighbor's domicile;
As Hoth, with tragic innocence,
Obeyed a tempter's wile.

About the graves of No-man's-land
May peace be with the slain;
And may the stains of clotted gore
Conceal the marks of Cain.
But oh, to view the human wrecks
That wander back again
Repletes a mother's pain!

Rosmini for August XVIII

Humility is a most lovable virtue. Everybody loves and wishes well to the humble man because he never gives offence, and willingly yields to the desires and feelings of others, even at the sacrifice of self. He is readily listened to, and his words like some sweet balm penetrate the heart.
Conferences on Ecclesiastical Duties ix.9 [SC]

Haripota

If Harry Potter were done as an anime:


(ht)

I particularly liked the Hogwarts founders, although it was a bit funny how perfectly James Potter and his friends map onto standard anime stereotypes.

Rosmini for August XVII

All Christians should remember to walk constantly in the Divine Presence. This exercise is sufficient to guard those who practice it faithfully from all sin, and indeed even to make them saints.
Catechetical Instructions 7 [SC]

Meet Bl. Antonio Rosmini-Serbati

MrsD asked me about Rosmini's life, and I realized that I've never actually said more than a few things about it. So it seems appropriate to remedy that.

Antonio Rosmini-Serbati was born March 25, 1797 at Rovereto, which at the time was in an Italian-speaking area of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Ordained in 1821, he founded the Institute of Charity in 1828 while in Milan. The Institute started very small, but had the cautious approval of Pius VIII and the enthusiastic approval of Gregory XVI, who was a close friend of Rosmini; despite Gregory XVI's urging, it was not until 1837 that Rosmini was satisfied enough with the shape of the society to submit its constitutions for papal approval. There were some complications (the Rosminian interpretation of the vow of poverty was quite limited), but after some discussion it was granted recognition in 1838 as a regular congregation by the Congregation of Bishops and Gregory XVI. The basic idea of the Institute was to reform the clergy and the laity by working toward complete charity. Unlike many religious societies, it has never actively sought to gain members. Full members take the standard vows, but the vow of poverty is still interpreted in the way that was controversial at the time: those who have taken the vow of property are allowed to own property, of any kind, but this is regarded as a purely civil and legal stewardship for the purposes of the state, and is to be treated as common for other purposes.

Beginning in the 1830s, Rosmini, always boldly speaking his mind, became mired in an extended series of controversies due to some of his published arguments. The most controversial of these was Of the Five Wounds of the Holy Church (written in 1832 but published in 1848), in which Rosmini vociferously attacked five basic problems with the Church in Italy:

(1) Lack of sympathy between clergy and laity;
(2) Poor education of priests;
(3) Division among bishops;
(4) Control of nomination of bishops by secular authorities;
(5) Subordination of Church property and jurisdiction to secular jurisdiction.

The book seems to have been originally intended to be published for a small circle of friends, and the publication seems to have arisen because of an enthusiasm for the recently elected Bl. Pius IX, whom Rosmini thought might reform some of the ills. The book, however, spread like wildfire, pirated by multiple publishing houses, and got him into serious trouble with the Jesuits and with secular authorities. In particular, he was attacked for (a) advocating liturgy in the vernacular; (b) insisting upon the separation of Church and state; (c) criticizing scholastic philosophy; and (d) arguing that clergy and laity had a right in the election of bishops. Rosmini, asked by Pius IX to clarify, did so, but the Congregation for the Index nonetheless decided to place the work on the Index, with Pius IX's approval; Rosmini was never given any indication of what in his clarification was inadequate -- in fact, he was repeatedly told that it was not for any particular theological reason, and Rosmini's own suspicion was that it was done to smooth things over with the Austrian government -- but he submitted to the decree without any hesitation.

Rosmini continued to be investigated, but in 1854 the conclusion was reached: he was a faithful son of the Church, and his works were othodox (although that did not imply that they were correct). Pius IX regarded this as settling the matter entirely, and slapped down any of Rosmini's opponents who tried to restart any inquiries into the matter. It was a happy ending, of a sort; Rosmini lived just long enough to see it, dying the next year. But his opponents did not die, and every so often new controversy would flare up.

In 1878, Bl. Pius IX died, and the great Leo XIII was elected Pope. In the period between Rosmini's death and the death of Pius IX, quite a few manuscripts that he himself had never published, had been published. As a result, a new investigation by the Holy Office produced in 1887 a list of forty propositions drawn from Rosmini's works that were censured; and the censure was affirmed by Leo XIII.

There are a number of peculiarities with the censure. For one thing it is very vague. There is not a single explanation for why any of the propositions were censured, although guesses can be made in some cases. It is unclear how the propositions were collected; in one notorious case, the proposition is built out of phrases that are not only not found together in any passage in Rosmini's works, but aren't even from the same volume of the work from which they are drawn. Most of the propositions are from the posthumous works; the few that aren't are clearly to be read in light of those that are. And the censure itself is unique, and one of the weakest ever given in the nineteenth century -- an era in which the Holy Office had a very wide variety of precisely understood censures to draw from. The censure was, in particular, that at least these forty propositions, all philosophical, in Rosmini's works did not seem to be consonant with Catholic truth.

The Holy Office in the era of Leo XIII was not frivolous with words. It is important to grasp this: nothing in Rosmini's works has ever been condemned as heretical. Here is a test of your orthodoxy, for you: you leave seventeen volumes of writings, and the worst thing the most serious possible investigation can come up with in all of that is that there are at least forty of your claims, mostly drawn from works you never had a chance to finish revising, that appear not to harmonize the Catholic faith -- not that they are inconsistent with it, not that they definitely fail to harmonize with it, but that they do not seem to be in harmony with it.

The Institute of Charity, following Rosmini's example, submitted to the Decree immediately. Because of the Decree, Rosmini's thought did not have much of an influence for quite some time, although nobody every denied that he was a devout Catholic or that the Institute of Charity, who became known as the Rosminians, did an immense amount of good for the Church. It's sometimes speculated that he had some influence on the Second Vatican Council, because some of the Council's reforms were similar to those advocated by Rosmini a century before, but it's hard to know how much of this was real influence and how much of this was convergence on similar solutions. Things began to change, however, with St. John Paul II's 1998 encyclical, Fides et ratio, on Catholic philosophy. It reaffirms the special importance of St. Thomas Aquinas to the philosophical tradition of the Church, but also mentions a number of other philosophers favorably: Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Augustine, Anselm, Bonaventure, Edith Stein, and others. One of these was Rosmini.

In 2001, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Cardinal Ratzinger issued a clarification about the nature of the censure of the forty propositions, and in 2007 Rosmini was beatified by Ratzinger, who had become Benedict XVI.

Despite the fact that he was very active in the intellectual life of his day, relatively little has been done on his work, although, due to the activity of the Institute of Charity in English-speaking countries, it is fairly easy to find many of his works in English. But there has been some slowly expanding study of Rosmini's thought, and he notably has an article devoted to his philosophical work in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Rosmini for August XVI

When a man about to do or to say something good, feels tempted to vanity, he should not on that account refrain from doing or saying that which tends to the divine glory, but having raised his mind to God and purified his intention, let him say to the enemy with St. Bernard: "I did not begin for you, neither will I leave off for you."
Manual of Spiritual Exercises p. 66 [SC]

Some Links of Note

I have been in Montana the last week, visiting family, doing some whitewater rafting on the Gallatin River, as well as some light hiking on the edge of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness up to Sioux Charley Lake and back. Substantive posting will likely be light over the next week as well, though, due to preparation for the Fall term. Some interesting links I've come across recently:

* Philosophers on the Decriminalization of Prostitution -- setting aside Demetriou's embarrassing bluster, there is a good deal of interesting thought here.

* Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind.

* Yohan John has an interesting post trying to think through the way the brain might work in terms of the metaphor of an economy.

* John Gray on Friedrich Hayek

* Syriac language resources

* Thony Christie looks at the history of sozein ta phainomena and how it relates to Duhem's positivist account of mathematical astronomy.

Rosmini for August XV

ASSUMPTION OF B.V.M.

On the Feast of Our Lady's Assumption we ought, in the first place, to congratulate her upon the glory and happiness which she enjoys in heaven; secondly, we ought to excite within ourselves a great confidence in her powerful patronage, resolving to invoke her aid at all times in our needs; thirdly, we should beg of her to save us by her intercession, that we may see her and praise her for all eternity as she deserves.
Catechism no. 763 [SC]

Rosmini for August XIV

All Christianity is summed up in these solemn words In Christ, because they express the real mystical union of man with Christ, in which union and incorporation real Christianity consists.
Introduction to St. John's Gospel p. 179 [SC]

Hobbes and a National Church of England

I have been re-reading Benson's By What Authority? off and on recently, and the arguments for the Church of England as a national church have very much put me in mind of Hobbes. And it leads me to something that I don't think I've ever really talked about here, which is that in my view Hobbes's Leviathan is, in fact, through and through an argument for a National Church -- that is to say, that the whole point of the book seems to be to argue for it. This is, I suppose, not any sort of original view, but it's an aspect of the book that tends to be lost entirely when discussing it in the context of political philosophy, despite the fact that it unifies the work. Thus it's worth noting explicitly at times.

Hobbes's basic argument for a National Church is quite easy to state: "they that are the Representants of a Christian People, are Representants of the Church: for a Church, and a Common-wealth of Christian People, are the same thing" (Leviathan, Chapter XLII; cp. Chapter XXXIII). In Hobbes's account of authority, authority involves personation or representation -- that is to say, for the community to act as a whole, its power to act must be invested in a person who can act for it. He holds, of course, that the authority of a commonwealth is personated in a Sovereign, making that person nothing less than the entire commonwealth in one person. But if church and commonwealth are the same people, then the church is already personated in the Sovereign, who is therefore Sovereign of the church as well as the commonwealth. This is why the book ends with an out-and-out attack on the Catholic account of the Church. As Hobbes sees it, Catholic ecclesiology is the diametrical opposite of this, since it makes of the Pope a Sovereign for the church, and therefore from the fact that the church and the commonwealth of Christian people are the same thing, claims for the Pope temporal power. But his aim is larger than this, since while he devotes his attention primarily to the Catholic position, scattered comments show that he also takes Calvinist ecclesiology to be an enemy. We see this, for instance, as he finishes up his criticism of Catholic ecclesiology (Chapter XLVII):

It was not therefore a very difficult matter, for Henry 8. by his Exorcisme; nor for Qu. Elizabeth by hers, to cast them out. But who knows that this Spirit of Rome, now gone out, and walking by Missions through the dry places of China, Japan, and the Indies, that yeeld him little fruit, may not return, or rather an Assembly of Spirits worse than he, enter, and inhabite this clean swept house, and make the End thereof worse than the Beginning? For it is not the Romane Clergy onely, that pretends the Kingdome of God to be of this World, and thereby to have a Power therein, distinct from that of the Civil State. From this consolidation of the Right Politique, and Ecclesiastique in Christian Soveraigns, it is evident, they have all manner of Power over their Subjects, that can be given to man, for the government of mens externall actions, both in Policy, and Religion; and may make such Laws, as themselves shall judge fittest, for the government of their own Subjects, both as they are the Common-wealth, and as they are the Church: for both State, and Church are the same men.

For Hobbes, as for Milton, new presbyter sometimes turns out to be just old priest writ large.

Sovereigns, therefore, are the supreme pastor of their national churches, with authority "to ordain what Pastors they please, to teach the Church, that is, to teach the People committed to their charge" (Chapter XLII). Hobbes takes this all the way, going so far as to argue that the Bible gets its authority for Christians due to its imposition by the Sovereign (Chapter XXXIII):

It is true, that God is the Soveraign of all Soveraigns; and therefore, when he speaks to any Subject, he ought to be obeyed, whatsoever any earthly Potentate command to the contrary. But the question is not of obedience to God, but of when, and what God hath said; which to Subjects that have no supernaturall revelation, cannot be known, but by that naturall reason, which guided them, for the obtaining of Peace and Justice, to obey the authority of their severall Common-wealths; that is to say, of their lawfull Soveraigns. According to this obligation, I can acknowledge no other Books of the Old Testament, to be Holy Scripture, but those which have been commanded to be acknowledged for such, by the Authority of the Church of England.

Reading Leviathan directly as an argument for the Church of England as a National Church is needed to make sense of the entire work in multiple ways. For instance, it clarifies what Hobbes is doing in his endless Scriptural exegesis throughout. It also explains the structure of the work, rising from general considerations of man, to the nature of commonwealth, to the notion of a Christian Commonwealth, and ending in a culminating attack on Catholic ecclesiology, the most extensive and obvious threat to the idea of the Church of England as a National Church governed by the Crown of England.

Rosmini for August XIII

Love correction, and receive it with a grateful heart and serene countenance, being mindful of those words of our divine Master, Jesus: "He that is of God, heareth the words of God."
Letters 4436 [SC]

Jeanne-Françoise Frémiot de Chantal

In the United States, today is the feast of one of my favorite saints, Jeanne-Françoise Frémiot, Baronne de Chantal. I say "in the United States" because a series of mishaps has led to her date being moved around. In the Extraordinary Form calendar, it is August 21. St. Jeanne died on December 13, so when the Ordinary Form calendar was developed, they moved it to December 12 -- December 13 already being occupied by one of the oldest and most important of the Roman saints, the virgin martyr St. Lucy. But in the U.S., the patronal feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe occurs on December 12, so the U.S. bishops got permission for the U.S. to commemorate her on August 18. But in 2001, Rome changed its mind and decided it should be August 12. And so we find her here.

Jane Francis was born in 1572; at the age of 21 she married the Baron de Chantal. They had seven very good years together, but in 1580, the Baron was killed in a hunting accident, and the Baroness found herself widowed at age 28 with four children. Despite being heartbroken at the loss, she took things in hand and became famous for the business savvy with which she managed the estates she had inherited from her husband as well as for the generosity with which she supported the poor. She considered becoming a nun. In 1604, however, she fatefully met Francis de Sales, and they hit it off marvelously; he became her spiritual director. St. Francis argued that a person of her capacities needed a vocation that was more active than that of a nun would usually have been. He eventually recommended that she might instead form a sort of society of women who were not bound by vows; they would only be in cloister for their early formation, and afterward would be out in the world helping the sick and poor. This eventually grew into a formal religious order, the Congregation of the Visitation, which, because of the unusually flexibility built into its structure, was able to take in women who could not, for one reason or other, join another religious order. St. Francis and St. Jane found considerable resistance to the Visitationists, however, and under considerable pressure from the bishops of the day were forced to turn it into a more conventional religious order. But the order nonetheless thrived, in part due to outside support arising from Jane's continuing reputation for good money management. After the death of Francis de Sales, Jane's spiritual director was St. Vincent de Paul. Thus the Visitationists were a major part of the expansion of what has come to be called the French School, which in great measure dominates Catholic culture throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. St. Jane died in 1641, leaving behind an extensive correspondence that has always made her one of the possible candidates for Doctor of the Church (which she has not, however, been given). The Baroness is a saint who went through every state of life that was possible to a woman in her day -- daughter, wife, mother, widow, nun -- and excelled at them all due to her very practical approach to life, which allowed her to combine a playful spirit with profound priorities and to infuse everyday life with an intense religious devotion.

The first Visitationist convent in the U.S. was founded in 1799, and it is still up and running.

Rosmini for August XII

Holy souls do not suffer temptations to pride and vainglory when God visits their souls with extraordinary supernatural favours and communications of light and grace, for during such times the sense of Christ's presence is most vivid. They experience, on the contrary, a feeling of the deepest humility, and are irresistibly prompted to give all the glory to God, as we see from the writings of the saints, especially of St. Teresa.
Introduction to St. John's Gospel p. 159 [SC]

Rosmini for August XI

The constancy of the good never fails them; because in that spiritual good which is neither obtained nor lost by violence, they have an inexhaustible store of spiritual strength, which renders them contented and invincible in their meekness.
Theodicy no. 882 [SC]

Philosophers' Carnival #178

Welcome to the newest iteration of the Philosophers' Carnival! As is always the case when we host the carnival here at Siris, where the golden chain is of a truly universal scope, we have a well rounded set of posts on a diverse selection of topics, any one of which is worth a bit of your time. If you find a topic dear to your heart not represented, though, please consider writing up a post on it and submit it as a suggestion for the next Philosophers' Carnival, which you can do through the link above.

* Throughout July, Catarina Dutilh Novaes blogged on the dialogical account of reductio ad absurdum:

Part I -- Problems with reductio proofs: cognitive aspects
Part II -- Problems with reductio proofs: assuming the impossible
Part III -- Problems with reductio proofs: "jumping to conclusions"
Part IV -- A precis of the dialogical account of deduction
Part V -- Dialectical refutations and reductio ad absurdum
Part VI -- Reductio arguments from a dialogical perspective: final considerations

* Sandrine Berges calls attention to an early analytic philosopher, Eleanor Bisbee. Has anyone read her papers in analytic philosophy or her dissertation on instrumentalism in Plato's philosophy? If so, comment at Feminist History of Philosophy to get a discussion going!

* Also at Feminist History of Philosophy, Emily Thomas discusses the British Idealist Hilda Oakeley, discussing her notion of 'creative memory' as an example of her insights.

* Deborah Mayo takes the anniversary of Jerzy Neyman's death to reflect on the philosophy underlying Neyman's statistical work, particularly with respect to hypothesis testing.

* Guy Longworth argues against a particular way to draw an analogy between telling and promising.

* At Sardonic comment, Hilary Putnam reflects on Davidson's "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs", giving his answer to the question, "The truth-evaluable content of a sentence on a particular occasion is given by its truth-condition, as specified by a passing theory that does WHAT?"

* The Carnap Blog argues that "Carnap’s pluralism was consistently linguistic."

* In the aftermath of the recent Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which cited Confucius as part of its account of the moral underpinnings of marriage, an extensive discussion of what Confucian moral philosophy might have to say about same-sex marriage took place among Confucian scholars. At Warp, Weft, and Way, Max Fong summarizes some of this discussion, looking at various arguments that have been put forward.

* Jacob Archambault discusses the way in which much history of philosophy research is constrained to trying to interact with past philosophy in ways that conflate it with present concerns or expectations of the future, as contrasted with recognizing it as (one's own) past.

* A discussion at The Indian Philosophy Blog considers the relationship between metaphysics and ethics in Śāntideva (and more generally), using Amod Lele's open-access The Metaphysical Basis of Śāntideva’s Ethics as the starting point for discussion.

* Eric Schwitzgebel, at The Splintered Mind, argues against intellectualism about belief, where that is understood as the position according to which "what we really believe is the thing we sincerely endorse, despite any other seemingly contrary aspects of our psychology."

* At Certain Doubts, Ralph Wedgewood argues that "if the notions of a belief’s being “justified” or “rational” are normative at all, then the permissibility of a belief is sufficient for the belief’s being justified or rational."

* Terence Blake reflects on the fortieth anniversary of Feyerabend's Against Method and on a number of oversimplifications and myths that have grown up around Feyerabend's work.

* At wo's weblog, Wolfgang Schwarz discusses the difficulty of constructing appropriate cases of transition between non-skeptical and skeptical scenarios for investigation of evidentialism and conservatism.

* Kirsten Walsh investigates the relations between Newton's and Bacon's philosophical approaches to scientific inquiry by examining whether Newton makes use of Bacon-like crucial instances in book 3 of the Principia -- a question that could go either way, depending on exactly how one interprets the evidence. How would you interpret the evidence?

* At Philosophical Percolations, Jon Cogburn raises a worry, drawing from an idea in Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos, for David Roden's Speculative Posthumanism (the view that descendents of current humans could cease to be human through technical alteration): Can it avoid collapsing into some form of trivial posthumanism?

* Alex Pruss argues that the kind of chance with which fear is concerned is an epistemic probability.

* Elisa Freschi uses Jorgensen's dilemma as a jumping-off point for thinking about the various ways in which schools of Indian philosophy approached questions of deontic logic.

* Richard Yetter Chappell argues that "any moral theory will have fittingness implications, even if they aren’t explicit in canonical statements of the theory."

* Tristan Haze gives an account of the analytic/synthetic distinction in order to consider the question of how the analytic relates to the a priori.

* M. A. D. Moore draws on the Theaetetus for clues as to how Plato's dialogues were composed -- in particular, the oral aspect of the dialogue form is likely not to be a mere literary conceit.

If you are in the mood for something a bit lighter, you might try some philosophical poetry, like James Beattie's "The Modern Tippling Philosophers", recently noted at The Mod Squad, or some comics, like one portraying Star Trek but with philosophers, from Existential Comics.

May your summer have a gentle -- but thoroughly philosophical -- landing!

Rosmini for August X

The first effect of the new life which man receives by his union with Christ is a moral power whereby he despises his natural life, physical and intellectual, and feels himself superior even to the fear of death.
Introdcution to St. John's Gospel, p. 169 [SC]

Fortnightly Book, August 9

It will be some time before I have a chance to finish the Arabian Nights, so we move on to something else in the meantime: Ivanhoe: A Romance, by Sir Walter Scott. A work of historical fiction published in 1820, the novel is arguably one of the most influential novels ever written in the English language, contributing to the nineteenth-century renaissance of interest in the Middle Ages and contributing in a major way to the course of the Romantic movement in England. Probably the strongest rival candidate is the novel that started the series of which Ivanhoe is a part, namely, Waverley.

Sir Walter Scott was a poet, particularly interested in Scottish ballads, whose reputation was established by the highly popular The Lay of the Last Minstrel, published in 1805. He ventured into novel-writing as a different way of using the material he had collected about Scottish oral culture -- but novel-writing, unlike poem-writing, was not particularly respectable. So he published his novels anonymously. As time went on, it became obvious to those who happened to read both that Sir Walter Scott was the author of novels like Waverley, Rob Roy, or The Bride of Lammermoor, but Scott continued to publish in official anonymity even when it was unofficially obvious who he was. The author listed on the title page of the first edition of Ivanhoe was "'The Author of Waverley' &c." Only in 1827, thirteen years after Waverley had come out, could anyone get him to admit in public that he was indeed the author of the Waverley novels, possibly because he was undergoing severe financial hardship. He died heavily in debt in 1832, but his novels sold well enough that they covered everything he owed shortly after his death.

Highly popular in his day, his reputation underwent a slow decline in the late nineteenth century and a nearly complete collapse in the early twentieth. Since then his reputation has slowly increased, with the past few decades restoring a fair amount of critical interest in him and his place as a major and influential innovator of the novel.

He is, incidentally, one of the Scotts behind the expression "Great Scott!" The expression seems to have started independently, although knows for sure the original, and would often be applied to others named Scott, but there was a period during which it was heavily associated with him. Mark Twain, for instance, repeatedly uses it in this sense as part of any number of jokes puncturing Scott's reputation -- most famously in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which is a satire of exactly the kind of medieval historical romance Scott made famous.

Rosmini for August IX

A good heart is to be preferred to great talents. Men of unusual power of mind are distrusted even by the world and as a rule have many enemies, whilst the good are loved by all.
Letters 598 [SC]

The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (Volume II)

Introduction

Volume I

Summary: In this middle stretch of the Nights, the narrative frame as become mostly background, with explicit mentions of it almost entirely just marking out the various nights. This does not mean that it has ceased to be relevant, however. One begins to notice by this point certain themes that come up regularly, one of which is kings and Caliphs showing mercy in exchange for a good story. Shahrazad is not telling her tales aimlessly. A good example of this is found in the Tale of Abu al-Husn and His Slave Girl. This story consists mostly of the titular slave girl showing her learning in a very long catechism on a wide variety of subjects (thus showing indirectly that Shahrazad knows it all as well), and ends with a relatively rare direct comment on the story by Shahrazad herself:

Marvel then, O King, at the eloquence of this damsel and the hugeness of her learning and understanding and her perfect excellence in all branches of art and science; and consider the generosity of the Commander of the Faithful, Harun al-Rashid, in that he gave her master this money and said to her, "Ask a boon of me"; and she besought him to restore her to her lord. So he restored her to him and gave her five thousand dinars for herself and made him one of his boon-companions. Where is such generosity to be found after the Abbaside Caliphs?--May Allah Almighty have mercy upon them, one and all! (p. 1821)

Hmm. Indeed, where is a king who could show such generosity -- O king? Again, Shahrazad is not telling her tales aimlessly.

Much of this middle stretch consists of smaller tales of diverse kinds. Some of them are no more than brief anecdotes or bawdy jokes of the kind that open with lines like, "The Caliph Harun al-Rashid once slept with three slave-girls, a Meccan, a Medinite and an Irakite" (p. 1655). There is also an Islamized version of the story of Susannah and the Elders (the Tale of the Devout Woman and the Two Wicked Elders), and several stories that have a striking and lovely fairy-tale quality (The Tale of the Ebony Horse, the Tale of the Queen of the Serpents). And, of course, we get a few story-series the Seven Voyages of Sindbad, which are more violent and comical than I remember from other sources: immense numbers of people die, but somehow or another Sindbad gets wealthier each time around in entirely crazy ways. There are also some humorous tales about rogues and sharpers throughout, of which I thought the best was the Tale of the Rogueries of Dalilah the Crafty and Her Daughter Zaynab.

To this point we have reached the 738th night and page 2650, bringing us two-thirds of the way through.

Favorite Passage: From the Adventures of Bulukiya, which is part of the Tale of the Queen of the Serpents:

Quoth the bird, 'I am one of the birds of Eden and followed Adam when Allah Almighty cast him out thence. And know, O my brother, that Allah also cast out with him four leaves of the trees of the garden to cover his nakedness withal, and they fell to the ground after awhile. One of them was eaten by a worm, and of it came silk: the gazelles ate the second and thence proceeded musk; the third was eaten by bees and gave rise to honey, whilst the fourth fell in the land of Hind and from it sprang all manner of spices. As for me, I wandered over the face of earth till Allah deigned to give me this island for a dwelling-place, and I took up my abode here. And every Friday from night till morning the Saints and Princes of the Faith flock to this place and make pious visitation and eat from this table spread by Allah Almighty; and after they have eaten, the table is taken up again to Heaven: nor doth the food ever waste or corrupt.' (p. 1989)

Because this is just the second volume of a three-volume edition that I will (eventually!) be completing, I will only do the usual 'Recommendation' section at the end for all three volumes.

Rosmini for August VIII

In the spiritual combat, provided we persevere and pray and believe in God's help, the victory may indeed be more or less prompt or slow, but it is certain.
Letters 7574 [SC]

Rosmini for August VII

To abandon ourselves wholly to Divine Providence: there is perhaps no maxim which helps us more than this to obtain the peace of heart and evenness of mind proper to the Christian life.
Maxims of Christian Perfection iv.1 [SC]

Transfiguration

The Transfiguration of Convent San Marco, by Blessed Giovanni da Fiesole, also known as Fra Angelico.

Thursday Virtues and Vices Index

Third Series -- Virtues

Chastity (Temperance)

Observantia (Justice)

Studiousness (Temperance)

Patience (Fortitude)

Moderatio Exteriorum Motuum / Modesty of External Action (Temperance)


Third Series -- Vices

Cruelty (Temperance)

Odium / Hatred (Justice)

Irony (Justice)

Discord (Justice)

Pusillanimity (Fortitude)


Second Series -- Virtues

Magnanimity (Fortitude)

Pietas / Xiao / Filial Piety (Justice)

Clemency (Temperance)

Affability (Justice)

Magnificence (Fortitude)


Second Series -- Vices

Audacity (Fortitude)

Ingratitude (Justice)

Susurration (Justice)

Civil Impiety (Justice)

Boorishness (Temperance)

First Series -- Virtues

Solertia and Eustochia (Prudence)

Gentleness / Meekness / Mildness / Mansuetude (Temperance)

Truthfulness (Justice)

Religion (Justice)

First Series -- Vices

Mollience / Effeminacy (Fortitude)

Craftiness, Guile, and Fraud (Justice)

Superstition (Justice)

Rosmini for August VI

A continual secret working is going on in every soul for good or for evil. He who does not attentively watch this interior working and gradual transformation may one day become aware of the fact that he is altogether different from what he was formerly. He may find himself in a miserable state of spiritual languor or even mortal sickness, without being able to account for this fatal issue.
Letters 7378 [SC]

Radio Greats: NC9-8012 (Candy Matson, Yukon-28209)

Hello. Yukon-28209. Yes, this is Candy Matson.

It's a classic trope: the noir detective is in his office when a blonde bombshell walks in with a case. And what if the noir detective is the blonde bombshell? Then you know you are in the office of Candy Matson.

In the age when noir detectives could be found in every newspaper stall and on every radio station, people were trying out every variation they could think of. Candy Matson is perhaps the most memorable of these. She's a gorgeous woman who could hold her own in a cocktail dress at a Hollywood party who is nonetheless a hardboiled private investigator. She does all the noir detective things, but as a sultry smart-talking blonde living in a fancy penthouse who is trying to get the guy she has her eye on, Lt. Ray Mallard, actually to commit; and that's pretty much the whole of what she was written to do. This means that her plots are rather limited, being for the most part very generic noir detective plots, and not always successful when they deviate from them. If you want a richly plotted hardboiled detective tale, you go to Johnny Dollar, not Candy Matson. But the whole thing works for one very big reason: they have a lot of fun with it. One problem with all the male-lead noir detective stories was that they often took themselves too seriously, and thus lost something of what makes it fun to listen to a good noir detective story. Not Candy Matson, though, which tends to be fun through and through.

This is seen in the aspect of noir detective fiction that Candy Matson does better than any other detective series: the dialogue. What do people find memorable about Sam Spade or any of the others? One of the things is always the dialogue, the snappy comeback, the witty snark, the cool sarcasm. And because Candy Matson is all about having fun with all that's fun in noir, this is front and center in the series. Candy often doesn't so much solve a case as outlast it as it unravels on its own, but that doesn't matter: the banter sparkles all the way through. And Natalie Parks Masters was born to play the part.

Since you tune in for Candy and friends more than the plot, you can jump in at pretty much any episode. That's perhaps a good thing, because almost all of the Candy Matson series is lost: out of 92 episodes that aired from June 29, 1949 to May 20, 1951, only a handful are extant. You can listen to them all at Internet Archive.

My recommendation for a first beginning is "NC9-8012" (episode 27, number 7 on the list at Internet Archive), which has some excellent Matson-Mallard interaction, plenty of Candy's sidekick, Rembrandt Watson, and a fairly interesting story. Lieutenant Mallard -- somewhat unexpectedly and suspiciously -- throws a case Candy's way: investigating a fatal plane crash at a small airport.

Rosmini for August V

Simplicity lies in love, prudence in thought. Love is simple, intelligence is prudent. Love prays, intelligence watches. Watch and pray: there you see prudence and simplicity reconciled. Love is like the moaning dove; the active intelligence is like the serpent that never falls or strikes against any obstacle, because it uses its head to feel its way along over the inequalities of the road.
Letters 6477 [SC]

The Mencius, Book IV

Book IV.A (Li Lou I)

Unlike most of the books of the Mengzi, this book is not named after Mencius's first interlocutor, but after the first person he mentions. Much of the book seems to take place in, or discuss matters relevant to the state of Qi, but thematically benevolence or humanity to self and others, especially in government, comes up often. The beginning of IV.A, in fact, has a number of sections that together make up a fairly thorough discussion of the subject.

IV.A.I gives Master Meng's account of why he insists so much on the importance of the Former Kings. In a given art, to reach new heights, the genius or sage has to strain himself to the utmost. However, one of the things that happens in the progress of an art is that the one wise in it also comes to invent ways to do it more easily. Thus it once took the very best draftsmen to draw excellent squares and circles; but one of the things those great draftsmen learned how to do was to use carpenter's squares and compasses. Once tuning took an extraordinary ear; but with this extraordinary feat came also, eventually, the pitch-pipe. And so too the sages of a former day strained themselves to the utmost to govern well, and through this they learned the basic principles of benevolent government. To try to govern without building on their discovery is like insisting on drawing perfect circles without any help. A state depends on its governors having principles, so that they can be understood, their courtiers know how to act, the measures that make trade possible can be regarded with complete trust as uncorrupted and incorruptible, the nobles are not degenerate, and the commoners are not in constant danger of punishment. The sages of yesterday are the templates, the compasses and squares, for good governance (IV.A.2). And this is seen by the fact that genuine success, seen through the long lens of history, is so closely connected with the question: empires on the rise become famous for making people's lives better, while those in decline become famous for cruelty and suffering; humane lords tend to prosper and cruel ones we see to be sowing the seeds of their own destruction; and so on down to the commoner who is more likely to live a long and enjoyable life if he is humane than if he is cruel (IV.A.3). Through humanity to self and others rulers become loved and their realms orderly (IV.A.4, IV.A.5, IV.A.6). When people do not follow the Way, the entire order of things becomes unstable and upside down, with those who are unable to rule well ruling those who would be able to rule well, but one who takes the Former Kings as model can become truly great in a very short time (IV.A.7; cp. IV.A. 13). Nor is this surprising: cruel men are the men least inclined to listen to reason, thus contributing to their destruction (IV.A.8), and a state depends on the love of its people, which requires being humane to them (IV.A.9).

What is more, it is the more natural path, that one that requires doing less violence to oneself and others, the one that makes things work with the least effort. It is something of which we are all capable:

Benevolence is man's peaceful abode and rightness his proper path. It is indeed lamentable for anyone not to live in his peaceful abode and not to follow his proper path (IV.A.10).

What is required to start achieving it is to love one's parents and defer to one's elders (IV.A.11). (IV.A.12 is often regarded as an interpolation, because it has a number of stylistic differences from most of the rest of the book, but it does fit in fairly well with the thought that the book has developed so far.) All of this is a matter of actually doing, not merely saying the words (IV.A.21, IV.A.22, IV.A.23).

IV.A.27 gives us the key elements of the virtuous life, along with the actions by which we begin to express them:

ren	benevolence (humanity to self and others)	serving one's parents
yi	rightness (correctness, dutifulness)	deference to one's elder brothers
chih	wisdom (understanding)	understanding & committing to benevelence & rightness
li	rites (appropriate norms of behavior)	orderly adornment of benevolence & rightness
yue	music	delight in benevolence & rightness

It seems reasonable to see a progression here: benevolence and rightness make possible wisdom, which, because it is an understanding and commitment to them, inevitably leads to rites that show forth their excellence; and when this is done, they begin to take forms that are delightful. When that happens, the moral life has begun to flourish.

Book IV.B (Li Lou II)

IV.B is more of a mixed collection than IV.A, with some extended passages and many brief aphorisms, as well as a section (IV.B.33) in which Mencius doesn't appear at all. A number of the sections have to do with the Former Kings, so we can perhaps consider this part of the book as extending and commenting on the main arguments of IV.A.

Since a number of sage kings show up, it is perhaps worthwhile to say something about them.

Shun (IV.B.1, IV.B.19, IV.B.28, IV.B.32): According to tradition, he died somewhere around 2184 BC. He was a minister under Emperor Yao, and was so effective at administering everything that Yao named him his heir. His rein is continually associated with ritual order. He was careful and thorough with sacrifices, regularized weights and measures, divided the realm into administrative units, and enforced ceremonial norms.

Wen Wang (IV.B.1, IV.B.20): He died about 1056 BC, and was one of the greatest epic heroes of Chinese legend. He was considered the founder of the Zhou dynasty, although he himself did not live to see the victory of the Zhou dynasty over the Shang dynasty. He rose to power by the sheer force of respect: his officials admired him, other nobles admired him, allied powers admired him, and so when he needed resources to accomplish his goals, he easily found them. By tradition he is the originator of the principles that later became embodied in the I Ching.

Yu (IV.B.20, IV.B.26, IV.B.29): By tradition, he died around 2100 BC. He is said to have been the founder of the Xia dynasty and his most famous and legendary feat is controlling the flood. His father, Gun, had been charged by Emperor Yao with finding a solution to the many floods that plagued the land, but despite a great deal of ingenuity was unable to find one. Yu followed in his father's footsteps, studying the ways of water and the system of rivers, and discovered the key: the reason all the ingenious solutions had failed was that they were acting against the nature of water. The way to handle the flooding was to work with the water. In other words: the problem is solved not primarily by making dams, which could only be supplemental, but by making irrigation canals. Instead of holding the flood back, direct it to the fields where it could be useful. This was a hard task, requiring much digging and dredging, and Yu was said to have lived with the common workers while he did it. This tale could hardly have been a better allegory for Mencius's idea of the moral life if it had been specifically invented for the purpose, so it is unsurprising that Mencius puts a fair amount of emphasis on it.

Tang (IV.B.20): Tang died around 1646 BC and was the founder of the Shang dynasty. He overthrow Jie, the corrupt ruler of the Xia dynasty, by taking advantage of the fact that Jie mistreated those under his command; he offered the people and nobles better treatment, and also had a sense of when someone had useful talent. When he reigned, the kingdom expanded and became more powerful even while taxes were lowered and the army became less dependent on conscription.

Wu Wang (IV.B.20): He was the second son of King Wen and the actual first king of the Zhou dynasty. His elder brother, the Duke of Zhou, was part of the secret of his success, and also managed to hold onto the kingdom after King Wu's death, despite extensive rebellions and attempts by the Shang to regain the hegemony.

Qi (IV.B.29): He was the son of Yu and the second king of the Xia dynasty. He was actually not his father's heir, but he was so widely admired by the nobles for his work in his behalf that the heir had to step aside for him.

Yao (IV.B.32): He is, with Shun his successor and Yu the Great, one of the great legendary kings of ancient China. He organized the kingdom, worked on the development of an accurate calendar through astronomical observation, and he and Shun are often credited with inventing the earliest version of the game of Go, weiqi, in an attempt to give his wanton playboy son a more wholesome and beneficial pastime.

Despite the emphasis on the ancient kings, one of the recurring themes of this book is that the way of the Former Kings is in fact available to us all; one of the striking examples of this is in IV.B.29, in which he puts Confucius' student Yan Hui in the same class as Yu and Qi, which is extraordinarily high praise.

One of the interesting short comments in this part of the Book is IV.B.22, in which he says that influence only lasts to the fifth generation. Mencius himself is, according to tradition, the fourth from Confucius: his teacher is said to have been Zisi (Confucius's grandson), who was taught by Boyu (Confucius's son), who was, of course, taught by Confucius. The comment can perhaps be seen as expressing Mencius's sense that even the teachings of great teachers need regular renewal or they fade, and that the Confucian way that he upholds is in danger of approaching its end already. The comment also shows a savvy historical awareness of philosophical influence, which proceeds by chains of indirect teaching, each step increasing the risk of confusion, loss of thought, or loss of emphasis.

to be continued

Rosmini for August IV

Had the religious state no other advantage than that of enabling us to fight our spiritual battles, not as individual soldiers, but in a compact body, this consideration alone should have much weight with one who seeks the greater glory of God: for a greater association implies a greater power, whether for good or for evil.
Letters 5649 [SC]

Not Hired Cabs

Schopenhauer strikingly noted that the causal law was not a hired cab. You can't accept it and take it only as far as you want; once you've accepted it, you are committed to it all the way down the line. The same is true of rejecting a claim as accepting it; if you reject a claim by rejecting premise A, you have, as it were, committed yourself to never appealing to premise A, and have to accept whatever consequences there might be to it. This is one reason why it is simply an error for a philosopher to focus only on single arguments at a time. (It's fine to focus on a single argument at a time; it's an error only to do this.) Your rejection of a causal principle in natural theology may cause extraordinary complications in philosophy of science; your rejection of a premise in aesthetics might throw into confusion entire realms of political philosophy; your acceptance of an argument in ethics might commit you to rejecting any number of political views.

So how does this work? There seem to be two basic routes, that work rather differently:

(1) Logical Implication: I've been in three discussions in the past year, with nonphilosophers, in which I argued that their claim A logically implied claim B, and their only response to this was that they didn't say B, only A. If one claims that A implies B, one should certainly be willing to back this up with argument; but it's quite clear that you can't avoid logical implications simply by not stating them. But, of course, there is also the fact that our knowledge of the implications of our claims does not have closure: we don't ever know all the logical implications of what we say, and may be logically committed to something that we would consider absolutely unacceptable.

(2) Parallel: There's a somewhat trickier route, arising because of the relations between different classes of arguments. We might describe it as one argument raising the question of another argument's viability. If one accepts a particular other-minds argument for the human body, this raises the question of whether one should accept some analogue for the whole world. If you accept a particular position on what makes literature worthwhile, this might raise the question of whether you should incorporate an analogous analogous position into your account of what makes music worthwhile. Unlike logical implication, it provides no guarantee; you can take one without the other. But because the two cases resemble each other in important points, you would, as we say, need to have a principled reason for not treating them similarly. This is, indeed, precisely the principle that seems operative here: We should treat similar things similarly unless there is a difference relevant to the treatment itself.

This would seem to be exhaustive -- if A leads to B, it seems to do so by either requiring it or by suggesting it -- but I have no definite proof of that; possibly there are more complicated ways positions and arguments can be linked.

Rosmini for August III

To act with a spirit of intelligence simply means to follow the dictates of right reason, without allowing ourselves to be moved or disturbed by any passion whatever. Now the highest and most universal of all reasons for acting is that of doing always and in all things the will of God.
Letters 6648 [SC]

Classifying Design Arguments

Design arguments for the existence of God are other minds arguments, i.e., arguments that other minds than one's own exist; this was explicitly recognized as early as Thomas Reid, who pretty clearly got the insight from Berkeley's arguments for God and for other minds, which are integrated with each other. The Argument from Analogy that serves as a starting point for almost every discussion of the problem of other minds (for instance, here and here) is a general form of the design argument discussed in Hume's Dialogues. Every kind of design argument also has a corresponding analogue for existence of minds other than God, so there is an analogy among different species in the genus. It's probably the case that there are other minds arguments with no analogue among design arguments, because design arguments are (among other things) a species of other minds arguments that involve some intermediary, and it's in principle possible that there are other minds arguments that don't -- but in general when we talk about other minds we are talking about human beings, and it is fairly clear that we know human minds through the intermediary of human bodies. We could even perhaps posit a spectrum of other minds arguments in light of the differences in intermediaries, ranging from a separate intermediary through greater degrees of integration of intermediary and mind to pure cases in which other minds are taken to be known directly and without intermediary:

(1) other minds via separated instrument
Separated instruments include anything separate from a mind that they nonetheless indicate, which makes for a very large field: computer, car, script, recorded vocal language, a corpse.

(2) other minds via conjoined instrument
The most obvious kinds of conjoined instrument are prostheses, but for our purposes we should also probably include a great many kinds of tools and instruments in active, ongoing use. A pen is a separated instrument from its designer, but a conjoined instrument for the one writing with it. According to Thomas Aquinas, angels can assume bodies but do not live them; if you met such a body and were trying to determine whether there was a mind to go with it, the body would be a conjoined instrument. Aquinas's Fifth Way would also fall here.

(3) other minds via organic instrument
The idea here is that we are dealing with something not identical to the mind but more closely integrated with it than a conjoined instrument; the mind inhabits, so to speak, the instrument. A pen in the hand is a conjoined instrument, but the hand is an organic one.

(4) other minds sans instrument
I've never run across a specific argument for an other mind that is both specifically designed to be of this kind and grown in the wild, but it's certainly possible to imagine what it might involve -- three obvious possibilities would be telepathy, innate ideas (possibly), and divine inspiration. On Aquinas's account of angelic knowledge, for instance, angels would know each other by divine inspiration and also by angelic speech (i.e., direct interaction of mind to mind). On Malebranche's account we know of God directly from God. (I say 'possibly' for innate ideas because I think it arguable that these are actually best understood as separated instruments -- e.g., Descartes's argument from the idea of God, which he does not, unlike Malebranche, regard as God Himself, analogizes ideas to machines.)

Given all of this, we can very well classify design arguments (any kind of design argument) in the same way:

(1) designer via separated instrument
What we most often call design arguments fall into this category. I see a watch, I infer there was a designer: the watch is a separated-instrument intermediary between me and the other mind that is the designer. When we are talking natural theology, these arguments are the ones that have a 'deistic' feel, although they need not actually require deism.

(2) designer via conjoined instrument
These are trickier to find; one often finds on closer analysis that candidates are really separated-instrument arguments. In natural theology, at least some arguments from miracles, from religious experiences, and from providential events would be examples. To borrow from and adapt Kant slightly, these are 'theistic' in character: they give us an designer who is not merely a cause of the intermediary but is acting or interacting through it. But, again, we need not be considering theism in particular. There are old vitalist arguments that are basically conjoined-instrument design arguments.

(3) designer via organic instrument
In natural theology these are 'pantheistic' in character, although, again, they need not actually require pantheism, or indeed any consideration of more than a small part of the world. Avatar-theophanies -- i.e., theophanies in which the god is the manifestation, such as one often finds in polytheism-- would be cases of organic instruments.

One can, of course, have arguments that are disjunctive by this classification; for instance, a design argument that does not depend on determining what kind of instrument is involved. And because intermediaries can be fairly different, none of this tells us much about the quality of any particular argument.

An interesting question, to which I have no clear answer, is how this way of thinking would impact on atheistic arguments from evil, which are 'nondesign' arguments. There tends to be a counterpart design argument for every argument from evil and a counterpart argument from evil for every design argument. So you could use this to classify arguments from evil. But it might well be a purely extrinsic classification.

Rosmini for August II

The Scriptures are one continual lesson of humility; they teach it in all sorts of ways, by means of the statements made, by the style, by the very words.
Letters 821 [SC]

Music on My Mind

Regina Spektor, "How"

Rosmini for August I

[My time this August is highly disjointed, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to do a quotation series to regularize things a bit. There was some interest in some of the excerpts from Bl. Antonio Rosmini a while back, and as it happens I came across A Spiritual Calendar, which was a thought-of-the-day book pulled together by Aloysius Lanzoni and translated from Italian into English and slightly modified by George Elson. It was published in 1911. So I'll post the bit from Rosmini for each day of August. I have slightly changed the formatting of the references.]

Shall I accuse the present generation of not reading the Scriptures? I would rather accuse them of not doing so devoutly. They read them coldly as they would read an ordinary book, and as if to judge rather than to be judged by them. Read them constantly, and in so doing, follow that advice given in that golden book, the Imitation of Christ. (Book I. chap. v.) You can have no better rule.
Christian Education Book I. chap. 2. No. 4. [SC]

The relevant passage from The Imitation of Christ can be found here.

Different Respects

Joel Feinberg in an influential article ["Some Conjectures about the Concept of Respect," Journal of Social Philosophy 4 (1973) pp. 1-3] suggested that we can divide forms of respect into three different kinds:

(1) Respekt: This is the sense of 'respect' in which one respects a rattlesnake. Its object is the dangerous, and it is the opposite of negligent or contemptuous disregard.

(2) Observantia: This is deference to others; its object is someone who has a claim on us. Feinberg suggests (not entirely plausibly, in my view) that this is a sort of generalization of (1).

(3) Reverentia: This is awe and its object is the sublime or sacred; it is the sort of thing, for instance, that Kant means when he says that we should have Achtung, respect, for the moral law.

A key difference, it seems to me, between respekt and observantia is that observantia is intrinsically concerned with communication. You cannot actually defer to others except insofar as there is some kind of communication between you and them. This is one reason to think it doubtful that social deference can genuinely be a direct of wary regard -- observantia or deference already presupposes recognized social relations and communications, whereas respekt does not.

An interesting question is whether reverentia is also distinguished from respekt in this way. Sublimity, it seems, need not belong to something with which you can be in a social interaction; one thinks, for instance, of the sublimity of a thunderstorm or of the 'starry sky above'. (This is, it should be noted, something that has been denied; Thomas Reid, for instance, holds that sublimity does, in fact, involve, at least indirectly, a mind other than one's own.) But it is also the case that in at least some of these cases, like the thunderstorm, one could argue that this is a case of the sublime calling forth respekt, not reverentia. Indeed, if you look at many early influential accounts of the sublime, the reaction to it is almost entirely in terms of dread and fear, like you would expect for respekt. Thus respekt and reverentia both seem to be something one can have for the sublime, which distinguishes them from observantia: the sublime is not something to which one merely defers. This makes it tempting to suggest, for symmetry, that reverentia and observantia share, against respekt, this communication aspect. To be sure, the standard examples from Kant, the starry heavens and the moral law, don't immediately suggest this to us, but this is complicated by the fact that in Kant's account our ability to recognize these as sublime is at least linked with our capacity to think of these things in personal terms (i.e., in terms of designer and Lawgiver, respectively), even if the link is not straightforward; and historically they both have, in fact, been thought of in such terms. And it's certainly undeniably that awe can involve this communication.

Two Poem Drafts

Wayfare

Reason traces every cause,
through laws,
and then the cause of laws,
to God, and -- ah!
Such sublimity!
By reason's endless thread we touch --
though barely touch --
and find our God,
shining like a radiant star,
at least infinitely far.

Faith traces every trace,
depicting grace,
an icon of the cause of grace,
our God, and -- ah!
Such intimacy!
By faith, as by an inner light,
a candle small --
but burning bright --
our hearts expand
and find our God,
shining more than solar star,
and only infinitely far.

Mockingbird

I would I were a mockingbird,
with all the notes the world has heard,
a language rich, too rich for word,
and only ever sung;

the day would pass in music sweet,
cicadas droning out the beat,
a pleasure perfect and complete,
but only ever sung.

Facts to Be Accounted For

A sense of music or a taste for travel are facts to be accounted for: it is perfectly true that many persons appear to exist in comfort without them; but it is another question as to how far the world without them could exist at all.

Robert Hugh Benson, Papers of a Pariah, p. 54.

Thursday Vice: Pusillanimity

Magnanimity, or great-souledness, plays an important role in Aristotle's list of virtues; he discusses it in Nicomachean Ethics IV. It is a virtue concerned with honor and dishonor. Since a virtue is partly to be understood by determining how it is a mean between extremes, he also briefly discusses the opposing vices. On the excessive side is vanity, the person who honors himself too much; and on the deficient side is pusillanimity, small-souledness. The pusillanimous man

being worthy of good things, robs himself of what he deserves, and [has] something bad about him from the fact that he does not think himself worthy of good things, and seems also not to know himself; else he would have desired the things he was worthy of, since these were good.

Aristotle sees magnanimity as a sort of justice to oneself, so the pusillanimous is likewise a sort of failing to do justice to oneself. When Cicero discusses magnanimity in De Officiis, he shifts the account so that magnanimity is associated primarily with fortitude rather than justice. The magnanimous man is not so much honoring himself as he is making himself honorable. He does this, first, by a contempt for outward incidentals, in which he keeps his mind on the right and rises above the passions; and second, by seeking out difficult challenges that contribute to the public good. The mark of the small-minded or pusillanimous man, on the other hand, is the kind of passion that leads one to evade this kind of greatness-seeking -- the most obviously problematic of these being a love of wealth, but fear, lust for fame, sensuality, and the like may be motivators of the small-souled, as well.

Aquinas's account of magnanimity blends Aristotle and Cicero, so it is unsurprising that his account of the vice of pusillanimity (ST 2-2.133) shows the effect of this. Like Aristotle, Aquinas takes magnanimity to concern honor for one's own virtue, but, like Cicero, he takes this to be associated with fortitude, because our regard for our own virtue is more concerned with what we will do than it is with what we have done. We have a natural inclination to accomplish things suitable to our capabilities; this inclination is part of who we are as rational beings in the first place, which means that failing to fulfill it is to do something morally wrong. Magnanimity is the virtue concerned with this kind of accomplishment; the two vices are presumption, in which we strive to do more than our capability can reasonably be considered to allow, and pusillanimity, in which we refuse to achieve what is appropriate to our basic capabilities. He gives as an example the parable of the talents, in which the fearful servant buries the talent he has received instead of daring to trade it so that it will multiply.

Pusillanimity, therefore, is the habitual disposition of burying one's talents, in which we fail to strive for a greatness commensurate with our gifts, whether those be gifts of nature, or gifts of education, or gifts of fortune. It is not a kind of humility, although it might superficially look like it; it is often even motivated by pride, because one way in which we can be proud is by clinging to our own opinions simply because they are ours, and not letting ourselves be corrected. This can happen regardless of what our opinions are, and so we can, out of pride, refuse to be corrected in our false opinion of our own incompetence. It is a truly remarkable feature of human capacity for obstinate self-importance that we can value ourselves too little by valuing our own opinions too much. Pusillanimity can also arise in other ways, however; for instance, we can shrink from greatness due to laziness in considering our capabilities, or because we have in some way become disheartened by other passions.

In the post-medieval era, Spinoza is notable for considering, at least to some extent, the moral problems of pusillanimity, in scattered discussions throughout the Ethics; a good example is in Part IV, Proposition XXIX, in which he characterizes it as thinking too little of one's self due to pain. It is a sort of humility -- which he regards not as a virtue but as a passion to be overcome -- taken to extremes. But he also regards it as rare; in fact, he thinks that the people who usually come across as so self-denigrating are in reality dissimulating, and that this elaborate self-denigration is often a cover for a pettily envious and ambitious mind.

Its Time Is the For-Ever

The Communion of Saints
by George Boole

When the light of day declineth,
And the fields in shadow lie,
And the dewy Hesper shineth
Fairest in the western sky,
Visions in the twilight rise,
Night unseals the spirit's eyes.

Then the dead, in thought arriving,
From the far-off regions bright,
Seem to aid our earnest striving
For the holy and the right;
Even they who sailed before
O'er this ocean to that shore.

Yes, the dead of all the nations
Who, in patient hope and sure,
Laboured in their generations
For the Lovely and the Pure;
Heavenly sympathizing yield
To their followers in the field.

Seeker after Truth's deep fountain,
Delver in the soul's deep mine,
Toiler up the rugged mountain
To the upper Light Divine,
Think, beyond the stars there be
Who have toiled and wrought like thee.

Good is even as its Giver,
As the Universal light,
And its time is the For-Ever,
And its space the Infinite;
As a linkèd chain of gold
All the world it shall enfold.

Also found in Mary Everest Boole's Symbolical Methods of Study. A very Siris-relevant poem, too, since Siris is named after the "linkèd chain of gold".

'The Bandwagon of My Own Uncertainty'

The poet Taylor Mali questions the habitual question-tone in his poem, "Totally like whatever, you know?":

The Mencius, Book III

Book III.A (Teng Wen Gong I)

The focus of Book III is on affairs along the border between Qi and Chu, particularly the realm of Teng, and understanding something about this little kingdom is valuable for understanding the philosophical arguments of this section of the Mengzi. The ruler of Teng who is of importance is Duke Wen; we met him in Book I (I.B.13-15), where he already gives some of the background.

Teng was immediately to the east and north of Song, which is why it's easy for Duke Wen (before he has ascended to become Duke Wen) to get advice from Master Meng residing in Song. It was also just south of Lu, of which it was often a vassal, and (if I am not mistaken amidst all the many border changes in this period) the also-tiny state of Zou, which was also often a vassal state of Lu and was where Mencius himself was born. It was located where the current city of Tengzhou, once its capital, is located; in fact, the entire ancient kingdom would easily fit within the jurisdiction of the modern city. Duke Wen inherited what is perhaps the single most unfortunate situation in the period: a tiny kingdom with a tiny population surrounded on almost all sides by more powerful neighbors, and, in particular, right at the border of political and military influence between two especially aggressive opposing kingdoms, Qi and Chu. In Book I.B, Duke Wen asks Mencius whether he should throw his lot in with Qi or Chu, and Mencius concedes the near-impossibility of finding an adequate answer to that particular question. Teng, then, provides some of the hardest questions of the day for political philosophy and statesmanship. Another significant fact about Teng is that it was the birthplace of the philosopher Mozi; it is thus unsurprising that we find a bit of interaction between Mencius and Mohist philosophers here.

III.A opens with a succession of episodes with regard to Duke Wen: his meeting with Mencius prior to ascending the throne, his consultation with Mencius on his father's funeral arrangement and the success he achieved in following Mencius's advice, and then a discussion of how a king should handle the economics of his kingdom. To be constant, the people need means of support, so working to make sure that they have it is a major and immediate priority. One of the policies that Master Meng discusses is the ching-field system. This is sometimes translated as 'well-field', because ching means 'well', but the system has nothing to do with wells. The reason it is called the ching-field system is due not to the meaning of the word ching, but to the fact that the Chinese character for it is two strokes crossed by two strokes -- in other words, it looks very similar to our hash, #. The ching-field system, therefore, divides an area into nine fields. The center field will belong to the state, the eight outer fields to various families; the center field will be cared for by the eight families together. This system provides a continual stream of revenue for the state, but much more importantly, it encourages cooperation among the people. In order to fulfill their responsibilities and keep their fields, people need to know their neighbors and find ways to work with them: "If those who own land within each ching befriend one another both at home and abroad, help each other to keep watch, and succour each other in illness, they will live in love and harmony" (III.A.3).

This part ends with Mencius's interaction with Mohists and Mohist-inspired philosophical movements in the region. Xu Xing preaches a philosophy of simplicity; according to tradition, he was the student of a student of Mozi, so he seems to be taking Master Moh's emphasis on simplicity to an extreme. The Mengzi says that he proclaimed the teachings of Shen Nong, the legendary creator of agriculture, so it's rural simplicity in particular that he advocates. A couple of Confucians, Chen Xiang and his brother Xin, convert to his teachings, and the former criticizes the economic policies of Duke Wen, and thus implicitly criticizes Mencius himself, whom we have just encountered giving Duke Wen economic advice. According to Xu Xing, the prince should farm along with the people and support himself by that means instead of filling up granaries by collecting from the people. You will note that this is not consistent with the ching-field system. Mencius points out that Xu Xing does not make everything himself; he must trade for most of it. And ruling an Empire is not an exception to this need for division of labor. He gives the example of the ancient hero-kings of China, who were involved in incessant projects for the good of their people. In addition, he sharply criticizes Chen Xiang himself for deviating from his Confucian teacher in order to follow "the southern barbarian with the twittering tongue, who condemns the way of the Former Kings" (III.A.4). Chen Xiang protests that the way of Xu Xing will restore honesty to the economic system by making everything equal, but Master Meng insists that it is this very fact that shows the intrinsic tendency of the policy to cultivate dishonest practices:

That things are unequal is part of their nature. Some are worth twice or five times, ten or a hundred times, even a thousand and ten thousand times, more than others. If you reduce them to the same level, it will only bring confusion to the Empire. If a roughly finished shoe sells at the same price as a finely finished one, who would make the latter? If we follow the way of Hsü Tzu, we will be showing one another teh way to being dishonest. How can one govern a state in this way?

In III.A.5, Mencius crosses arguments with the Mohist Yi Zhi over funeral practices for one's parents. The Mohists are big on simplicity and frugality, but Yi Zhi himself departed from this in giving his parents a lavish funeral. The rest of the passage is relatively obscure, and the exact interpretation somewhat disputed. Yi Zhi responds by appealing to the Confucian principle that the ancient kings did well because they cared for people as if they were caring for a newborn baby, and argues that it suggests not the Confucian doctrine of gradations of love but the Mohist doctrine of universal love. This is an argument of some potential bite, since, as we saw in Book II, Mencius's own argument for the rootedness of virtue in human nature was that we all will have compassion for a baby in danger.

It's unclear how it responds to the point about the funeral, but here is a rough possibility (partly suggested by Kwong-loi Shun's "Mencius' Criticism of Mohism: An Analysis of "Meng Tzu" 3A: 5", Philosophy East and West, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Apr., 1991), pp. 203-214, although I am simplifying the idea somewhat and glossing over nuances): Yi Zhi is arguing that lavish funerals are in fact (contrary to what one would expect from Mozi himself) consistent with the Mohist principle of universal love, which itself is the root of the Mohist critique of lavish funerals. In particular, the problem Mohists have with lavish funerals when they criticize them is not merely that they are lavish but that they are so in a way harmful to the good of society, because they violate the Mohist principle of universal love. If one approaches the funerals the right way, as a stepping-stone to acting with universal love, there is no real inconsistency. The Confucians, on this view, are actually guilty of the inconsistency, because they recognize that we would all protect a baby, and that the hero-kings were righteous because they protected the people as one would protect a baby, and they take the hero-kings to be exemplars for behavior, but they wish to combine all of these things with a principle of gradations in love, when they really show the importance of equality in love. Mencius replies in turn that while we would all protect a baby, this does not mean that we love all children equally. The one impulse of compassion will apply to all babies, but it will naturally apply even more to family members and so forth. There is no need for the balancing act of guiding our natural expression of affection for our parents according to Mohist universal principles that do not derive from this affection, as suggested by Yi Zhi; the whole of one's treatment of people flows from one properly cultivated source. Why have a lavish funeral for one's parents in particular? Because our compassion does have special regard for our parents, as can be seen if we reflect on what happens if sons see their parents' corpses rotting in the sun.

Book III.B (Teng Wen Gong II)

At the beginning of III.B, Mencius reiterates against several suggestions by various figures, probably his students, that the proper motive for action, including Mencius's own teaching, is not profit; one must act according to principle, and not be deflected from it by purported benefits. He also corrects the mistake (III.B.4) of thinking that the moral person can never benefit for his work, because benefits should be apportioned to the actual achieving of good, not according to whether people were aiming to be benefited. We continue with advice for the situations in between Qi and Chu, particularly for the kingdom of Song.

III.B.9, however, is particularly interesting. Gong Du notes that other schools regard Master Meng as particularly disputatious, and asks why. Mencius replies by giving an account of his entire approach. He does not argue because he wants to do so, but because he is forced to do so by the situation. He does not live in a time of sage-kings and heroes, but in a period of degeneration, in which all sorts of aberrant and dangerous philosophical movements are springing up:

The teachings current in the Empire are those of either the school of Yang or the school of Mo. Yang advocates everyone for himself which amounts to a denial of one's prince; Mo advocates love without discrimination, which amounts to a denial of one's father. To ignore one's father on the one hand, and one's prince on the other, is to be no different from the beasts.

We know very little about Yang, beyond a story, common to several sources, that he said he would refuse the throne of the Empire if it required harming even a hair on his head, and so cannot measure how accurate Mencius's assessment is. But it seems clear enough from what Mencius does say that, from his perspective, Yang and Mo are in one sense opposites -- Yang holds that one must focus on one's self and Mo holds that one must regard everyone equally -- but they both share the notion that our moral life is to be governed by some kind of benefit or profit. Against this Mencius is advocating the teaching of Confucius, which can form a middle way because it does not build on the notion of profit or benefit, but on the more fundamental principles of human nature. This teaching is not a mere abstract or academic pursuit; it shows the way to be moral and human, and a society in which this is not cultivated is a society in which men will turn on each other like beasts, a state, in other words, of some form of civil war. This is the reason for Master Meng's emphasis on argument:

The Duke of Chou wanted to punish those who ignored father and prince. I, too, wish to follow in the footsteps of the three sages in rectifying the hearts of men, laying heresies to rest, opposing extreme action, and banishing excessive views. I am not fond of disputation. I have no alternative. Whoever can, with words, combat Yang and Mo is a true disciple of the sages.

The last section, III.B.10, is perhaps an illustration of this, because he criticizes rather sharply a man he otherwise respects, because of the extremeness of his views and actions.

to be continued

Finite of Sense and Infinite of Thought

To the Number Three
by George Boole

When the great Maker, on Creation bent,
Thee from thy brethren chose, and framed by thee
The world to sense revealed, yet left it free
To those whose intellectual gaze intent
Behind the veil phenomenal is sent
Space diverse, systems manifold to see
Revealed by thought alone; was it that we
In whose mysterious spirits thus are blent
Finite of sense and Infinite of thought,
Should feel how vast, how little is our store;
As yon excelling arch with orbs deep-fraught
To the light wave that dies along the shore;
That from our weakness and our strength may rise
One worship unto Him the Only Wise.

This poem by Boole was published in Mary Everest Boole's Symbolical Methods of Study (1884), which also has several others. This is an interesting and difficult poem to interpret; Boole was a Unitarian (he is said to have considered converting to Judaism at one point), and it is possible that there is an implicit criticism of the doctrine of the Trinity here -- notice that we are "finite of sense and infinite of thought", and thus capable of rising above the world of sense, but the number three is specifically said to be the frame on the basis of which the "world to sense revealed" is framed. But it's also the case that Boole was not particularly dogmatic, so it's not clear that this is part of the intention. In any case, the poem is explicitly about higher-dimensional mathematics: three dimensions frame the world of sense, but the human mind is capable of thinking of more. Very similar themes and ideas are found later, long after Boole's death, in Edwin Abbott Abbott's Flatland (1884) and in the work of Charles Hinton (who married Boole's daughter).

The Virtues of Taste

Tina Baceski in a relatively recent article in Hume Studies has a nice summary of the Humean account of aesthetic judgment:

To summarize: An art critic possesses delicate sentiment, a quick and accurate perception of beauty. Delicacy comes through being practiced in the sense of having repeatedly experienced a certain kind of art as well as having repeatedly experienced the particular artwork judged. Experience facilitates the comparison of different works so that the critic acquires knowledge of the potential kind and range of qualities of those works. Moreover, a critic is free of prejudice that interferes with his adopting the right point of view. Finally, a critic has good sense: he employs his reason to overcome his prejudices, to make fine-grained distinctions among aesthetic properties, and to discern "complicated relations." This helps to ensure that his perception is discriminating and that his responses to art are appropriate. Together, these characteristics--the virtues of taste--distinguish accomplished art critics from persons of ordinary aesthetic sensibilities.

[Tina Baceski, "Hume on Art Critics, Wise Men, and the Virtues of Taste", Hume Studies, Vol. 39, No. 2 (2013) p. 245.]

I've summarized Hume's account of good taste in these terms before:

(1) a broad base of relevant experience, so you can make informed comparisons;
(2) relevant skills of discernment, i.e., the acquired ability to identify important moves, novel twists, and the like;
(3) good sense, understood as the self-critical fairmindedness that allows us to be objective and unbiased.