Dashed Off XVII

This ends the notebook that was finished May 2, 2016.

Note the occasional Byzantine tendency to see the sacraments as genera (e.g., Chrismation as covering both chrismation proper and dedication of a church; communion as covering communion proper and consecration of chrism; hagion schema as including orders and consecrated virginity; baptism as including baptism and holy water rites; penance as including penance and unction). There seems to be no standard classification, which is additional reason not to take it strictly literally; but it conveys something genuine and important.

rites and subjective parts of sacraments

chrismation as giving a vesture of incorruption and a seal of perfection
as confirmation against impure and evil spirits

Ps 31 and the sacraments of the initiation

catechesis: confirmation :: spiritual direction : confession

1 John and chrismation

Baptism tends toward Beatific Vision.

The resurrection of the children of God is not a mere physical renovation but a mode of union with God.

Baptism - Beatific Vision
Confirmation - Theosis
Eucharist - Membership in Christ
Matrimony - Marriage of the Lamb
Orders - New Jerusalem
Reconciliation - ?
Unction - Resurrection

The Church is a Temple made of temples.

monastic consecration as an intensification of baptismal responsibility

Unction anticipates our roles as prophets, priests, and kings in the world to come.

Arguments are linked to truth by way of accounts of universe of discourse.

"All Truth is Antient, as being from Eternity in the Divine Ideas" (Astell)

Whether something is well defined is always relative to an end of inquiry.

the role of philosophical system rediscovery in new discovery

the role of patience in inquiry (e.g., in archeology or geology)

counsel//testimony

Everyone in the Church is benefited by anyone receiving communion, assuming they do so worthily; it is not a matter of receiving benefits only from one's own communion.

Charity transfigures reciprocity, makes it more proactive, turns it into something suitable for the sons of God, and makes it reflect the Trinity itself.

Law tends by nature to unification.

thought-trials decomposing conjectures into subconjectures

The testing of teaching against Scripture is something that must be done together. (II Constantinople)

degenerating problem-shift in the history of philosophical problems

counterexamples
global & not local: problem for conclusion, not premises
local & not global: problem for premise, not conclusion
global & local: problem for premise and conclusion both

weeping and gnashing of teeth & the end of hypocrisy (Mt 24:51)

While people take opposing views in discussion, it is commentary that solidifies people into schools.

indulgences & the exponentiation of merit

Indulgences work on the principle of the unity of the Church (thus the Pope's relevance to them).

Ontological arguments for God's existence can be transformed into ontological arguments for an actual world by a slight shift.

The probability that lottery ticket T will win the lottery is not the same as the probability that Jane, who has T, will win the lottery, because the latter introduces additional causal structure. Consider (1) Jane gives T away just before the drawing; (2) Jane gives T away right after the drawing without knowing T won; (3) Jane loses T before she can claim the prize; (4) Jane is disqualified for independent reasons; (5) Jane dies before the drawing's end; (6) Jane decides to treat T as belonging to someone else before T has won; (7) jane forgets about T and never learns it has won.

sedevacantism as cafeteria Traditionalism

the wariness that naturally grows from honesty

the irascible as yang, the concupiscible as yin

Victory, like pleasure, can easily pall when light or very common.

memory storage requirements for civilization -- A large population is better able to preserve skills because (1) division of memory labor -- there is only so much one person can learn and recall; (2) increased chance of redundancy, thus reducing skill loss through death; (3) availability of those who can learn this or that skill in particular, thus reducing skill loss through nonteaching.
- This does not, of course, consider externalization of memory storage (libraries, etc.). This can be significant, but mostly by intensifying (2); it can't compensate much for limits in (1) or (3).
- the 'primitive' life in fact is just the small, scattered population life, in which survival skills have to be prioritized over other skills in a limited, high-competition memory state. Thus the 'primitive' life is often found among nomads, tiny villages in isolation, etc.; the opposite arises by linking population in stable and systematic ways.

Since the formal structure of utilitarianism has little to do with ethics (one could talk about greatest torture of the greatest number, the most sales most widely distributed, etc.), the quality of utilitarianism depends entirely on the correctness of its account of the good.

the intrinsically utilitarian structure of most universalisms (utilitarianism // universalism in itself, but in many cases the general arguments for the latter are just nonhedonistic nonpreferentialistic versions of arguments for the former; the universalist tends to argue that moral providence must be governed on the principle of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, with the happiness including heaven and the resources of omnipotent omniscience; this is a theological utilitarianism

expected foiling of expectation as part of the joy of story

All sacrifice is human sacrifice, although some is by symbol or by proxy, by metonymy or by metaphor.

Kant's moral arguments for theism require God to be extrinsic to happiness, etc. The real tendency he is misdescribing is to the Beatific Vision and the union with God it involves.

Plausibility as broadly causal (fitting things into a causal context).

We identify contiguities by causal inference (movement into and from, etc.).

We believe men because what they say tends to be true, or to be at least close enough for practical purposes, under most conditions; we believe God because He is Truth.

"without hell there is no consequence to concupiscence that is proportionate to concupiscence itself" (Chastek)

confirmation
(1) prophet, priest, and king
guarantee of the kingdom of God
(2) whole armor of God
to tread on serpents and scorpions and on all the power of the enemy
(3) gifts of the Spirit
participation in eternal life

kinds of sacramentalia in relation to sacraments
(1) material instruments for the sacraments
(2) adjunct facilitators for the sacraments
(3) potential parts of sacraments
(4) symbols of the sacraments

potential parts of
(1) baptism: signing with holy water, sign of the cross
(2) confirmation: anointing for reception of converts, blessing with holy oil
(3) reconciliation: nonsacramental confession
(4) matrimony: formal betrothal, reaffirmation of vows, consecration of widows
(5) holy orders: minor orders, liturgical ministers
(6) unction: funerary rites
(7) eucharist: blessed bread

the problem of counterexamples in the context of the sui generis

ontological arguments as revelation arguments
Note that Anselm (Pros 1) and Malebranche make them explicitly so.

Dialogue with Trypho 106 possibly identifies Mark under the description 'memoirs of Peter'; 103 also attributes a claim in Luke to 'the memoirs which I say were drawn up by His apostles as those who followed them' (Cp Apology 66 on the bread -- cup prob. from Mark, although possibly from Matthew).

Irenaeus Adv Haer (3.1.1) "while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome, and laying the foundations of the church"

humility to others as the root of genuine compassion

Pleasure, considered solely as such, is incapable of being any kind of common good, for it is the most private good of all.

An argument that the words of institution are more essential than the epiclesis: the Holy Spirit is not mentioned in the Institution Narratives themselves.

Judas Iscariot as type of unworthy communion (cf. Vianney)

(1) Suppose we consider whether to join the Church and receive its authority;
(2) What is lost if we do? I am imposed upon, but in no way that I might not be any way.
(3) What is gained, even if it is a merely human institution? I am enriched by the participation; if there is a future state, I am prepared for it, and if there is none, my life now is made greater and more exalted.
(4) What is lost, if it is the divine community and I reject it? What could be a greater affront to divine majesty, and how could one appear in His presence having abused the divine goodness? Moreover, is it not absurd to run the risk of eternal opposition to the Good simply to avoid being imposed upon.
- (cp. Mary Astell, CR sect 41)
- like all Wager arguments, it (1) assumes context for the division and (2) is more properly seen as an argument for inquiry, driving with practical reasons toward the attempt to discover speculative reasons.

freedom, immortality, and God as regulative ideas of politics

"really one should write philosophy only as one writes a poem" Wittgenstein

The four notes of the Church are all clearly discernible in the first Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descends on the Apostles united together in prayer, who then speak with universal tongue.

ST 3.68.11ad1 on God's grace to children in the womb
St 3.68.11ad2 and children as parts of their mothers

Note Aquinas's harsh assessment of the Protevangelium of James -- ST 3.35.6ad3

HoP & philosophy as human tradition

the bold humility of hope

the softening of anger into humor

Religion is constituted not just by states of mind but also by states of society.

A society always suggests a larger order within which it is intelligible.

Attributing a 'principle of causational synonymy' to Aristotle seems clearly to be overreaching -- when he says things like it, it is always either of particular examples or in a highly restricted and limited discussion; or it is taken so broadly and generally as to indicate only that causes cause effects because their forms make such effects possible.

baptism : confirmation : ordination
Baptism : Transfiguration : Ascension
Resurrection : Pentecost : Last Judgment

Beyond physiological reflex and the tendency to favor the part that has it, pain is actually not much of a motivator. Fear motivates, grief motivates, joy motivates; they have more distinct focus. Pain and pleasure are indistinct motivators, to the extent that they are even motivators.

"No nation remains civilized without the constant presence and activity of the powers that originally civilized it, any more than creatures continue to exist without the immanence of the creative act which produces them from nothing." Brownson

"Art, in the hands of the saint, ministers to virtue; in the hands of the sinner, to vice." Brownson

Good fortune often begins with trouble.

"And how could we ever love, unless we ourselves were loved first?"

Love is a fire burning away impurity.

Love of neighbor does not necessarily aim at 'a conscious and reciprocal relationship that is positively meaningful, allowing for deep sharing'. It does require acting in such a way that is at least consistent with friendship of virtue; but it does not necessarily require even that we be open to such a thing a tthe moment.

All human beings are at least partially resistant to divine love -- i.e., we, attached to lesser goods and tending to pride, tend to want to do our own thing. Original sin is a tendency to resist union with God -- or, rather, in the strict sense it is the privation of the effective tendency to be as we should be in order not to resist God.

All genuine prayer is a seeking for light.

Moral certitude without virtue is the source of some terrible things; but one must be careful, for there are many different kinds of moral certitude, which do not all work the same way.

Note Peirce's (late) sign classification in respect to Immediate Interpretant: Ejaculative (suggestive), Imperative, Significative (indicative, cognitative).

gray areas between interjection and command (Shoo!)

The interpretant proceeds from the sign and dwells in the sign.

The object of the sign that is marriage is Christ's union with His Church; the interpretant is the prayer, practice, and teaching of the Church on marriage. (Or is the latter rather the grace, with prayer, practice, and preaching bein gthe collateral information? But arguably grace is the object of the sign, sacraments effecting what they signify. -- The effects of marriage in the Church, however, are surely interpretant effects -- devotion and reverence for sacred things, further actions & practices, deeper understanding.)

sacramental character as dynamical interpretant

"anything that the sign, as such, effects may be considered as the Interpretant." (Peirce to Paul Carus)

union with God as the final interpretant of all sacraments
sensible appearance : immediate :: grace received/ sacramental character : dynamical :: union with God : final

A scientific specimen is not given but educed from a material for it.

The seven philosophical works of mercy
(1) to enlighten the ignorant
(2) to reflect on the thoughts of others
(3) to counsel the doubtful
(4) to correct those in error
(5) to endure correction well
(6) to put truth above glory and pride
(7) to solve problems that need solving

the utilitarian structure of divine hiddenness arguments (maximizing relationship)

overdetermination & overlap

speculative grammar: what is true of signs that they may mean (i.e., be signs)
logic proper: what is true of signs that they may be true (hold of an object)
speculative rhetoric: the laws by which one sign leads to another

"It is not sufficient to say that testimony is not true, it is our business to explain how it came to be such as it is." Peirce

(1) To function as law, purported law must be consistent as a directive and reasonably feasible.
(2) Consistency and feasibility are assessible only on principles of practical reason.
(3) Consistency as directive and feasibility are rationally assessible and concern means-eand reasoning.
(4) Whether a purported law functions as a law depends on its relation to principles of practical reason, not just the sources of law.

The vice of obstinacy and the vice of laziness both have forms that mimic the virtue of faith.

travel and 'sentiment recollected in tranquillity'

the capacity of storytelling to turn evil to good, by embedding it in a greater context

The martyrs refusing to sacrifice to the emperor were the ultimate repudiation of 'Believe as you will, but obey,' which underlies all modern government.

the liturgical commonwealth & the obediences of the Western Schism

the fourfold aspect of the Kingdom of God: Christ, Scripture, Church, Heaven

the baptism of John as a figure of catechesis

No one can rightly recognize the goodness of God who does not also recognize the power and wisdom of God.

"the sense is essential to our knowledge of the truth, but the words indifferent" Augustine, on divergences in wording among the Gospels

Claims about the roles of moral principles are moral principles.

"For every sin, and more particularly impurity, pride, and worldly interest, is a prejudice that shuts out the light of truth, keeps men obstinate in error, and hardens their minds against conviction." Astell (CR 258)

People do not revolt because things are bad; they do not even revolt because things are continually bad. They revolt because amid bad things, it seemed that improvement was begun, but that promise of better things was taken away. People revolt not at present bad, however bad, but out of the frustration of a future good, apparently in hand, that is suddenly denied.

omnipresence and providence and the antecedent credibility of the Incarnation (cp. some of Athanasius' arguments against the Gentiles)

evasion of miracles by feigning hypotheses

Much of contemporary Biblical scholarship is merely an exercise in historical epistemology masquerading as an exercise in investigation of historical events. That is to say, it never gets beyond (often muddled and weakly considered) epistemological questions except by a leap that is never justified, or justified entirely by unsupported hypotheses, or justified in a dubious and patchwork way.

Science fiction more properly involves representations of science than science itself.

Music on My Mind

Chisu, "Yksinäisen keijun tarina". A keiju is a fairy; the song's title is something like "Tale of the Lonely Fairy". The basic plot of the story is that the fairy has had difficult times; but when she tries to express her sorrow, she's dismissed -- she can fly, she has it good, how can there possibly be a miserable fairy? So she dies, and other mythical creatures regret not having been more neighborly. It's very upbeat for a Finnish story, actually.

Hurricane Harvey

Here in Texas we are currently preparing for Hurricane Harvey, which is driving directly for the Texas coast and recently was upgraded to a Category 3 on the Saffir-Simpson scale (wind speeds of 111-129 miles per hour). It will likely land near Corpus Christi tonight, although, of course, the outermost bands of the storm have already begun progressing inland in waves. Austin is deep enough in the Heart of Texas that we're not likely to get worse winds than 30-35 miles per hour; what we can expect is flooding for several days and perhaps some downed power lines. Since I live near the top of a ridge, the flooding is unlikely to be a serious problem for me -- most of Austin would have to be under water before it became a problem -- but as I live on the edge of Austin, power outages of uncertain duration are a real possibility, so I've been doing some minor preparation for that. If I lived in Houston or along the coast, I'd frankly be going on a weekend vacation right now. Fortunately, this is not Texas's first rodeo when it comes to major hurricanes, and we have none of the obvious engineering problems that made Hurricane Katrina such a disaster for New Orleans, so the infrastructure should hold up -- to the extent that it can, since we can still expect at least a couple of billion dollars in damage even at the very most optimistic. The big worry, of course, is oil; if the oil refineries are hit badly enough, there will be a cascade of further bad effects through the entire American economy. Really serious flooding could require months of recovery. We will just have to see.

UPDATED LATER (6:10 pm): And Harvey just got upgraded to Category 4, winds over 130 miles per hour.

UPDATED LATER (8/26, 1:40 pm): Harvey has been dropping in intensity all morning, and is now a tropical storm. This is what always happens with hurricanes, especially those that drive straight over land as Harvey did, and (despite how it might sound) does not actually reduce the danger -- hurricane-force winds can damage a lot, but with hurricanes the most serious damages, and often the most serious fatalities, tend to be from flooding, and the danger of flooding increases when hurricanes begin losing force. This storm is still long from over; it will be wandering over South Texas for a while yet.

The Thomistic Account of Rationality (Re-Post)

This is a slightly revised re-posting of a post from 2013.

The Thomistic account of rationality -- I'm not talking about its philosophical psychology, but its account of rational thought -- is an interestingly nuanced one. It is famously summarized in Aquinas's preface to his unfinished commentary on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics (although there are other places in which it comes up). In this preface, he is talking about logic, of which the Posterior Analytics considers the summit or peak (namely, demonstrative reasoning, the kind that gives real knowledge). And he notes that logic is structured according to the various acts of reason, and on the basis of this gives a very famous account of the books of the Organon, the foundation of most medieval logic. We start with a general division:

There are three acts of reason, of which the first two belong to reason insofar as it is some kind of understanding (intellectus).

(1) One act of intellect is the understanding (intelligentia) of indivisibles or simples, according to which it conceives what the thing is. And this action is called information of the understanding or intellectual imagination. And to this action of reason is ordered the teaching that Aristotle hands down in the book of Predicaments (= Categories).

(2) The second action of understanding is intellectual composition or division, in which the true or the false is found. And this act of reason is served in the teaching that Aristotle hands down in the book of Perihermeneias (= De Interpretatione).

(3) The third act of reason concerns that which is proper to reason, to wit, discursively going from one thing to another (discurrere ab uno in aliud), such that from what is known one comes to cognition of what is unknown. And this act is considered in the remaining books of logic.

So here we have the basic structure of logic as a rational science: reason starts from basic objects of understanding, organizes these into things that can be true or false, and uses these to discover even more. The first part of logic, then, concerns what we might call concepts or terms; the second, what we might call propositions; and the third what we might call inferences or deductions.

So far, so good. But the third part of logic ends up being more complex than one might have originally assumed, because the act of reason it considers can be necessary, or probable, or fundamentally flawed. If we consider the necessary kind, we have what Aquinas calls logica judicativa, which is also called analytics because it analyzes or resolves things into their principles. This has two parts:

(3a1) The certitude of the judgment, which is had by resolution, is either from the form of the deduction as such, and to this is ordered the book of Prior Analytics, which is about deduction simply speaking;

(3a2) or it is also from the matter, because the propositions posited are self-evident and necessary (per se et necessariae), and to this is ordered the book of Posterior Analytics, which is about demonstrative deduction.

Prior Analytics is the logical discipline concerned with what it means to say that one claim definitely follows from another; whereas Posterior Analytics concerns what it means to say that we come to know, in the most proper sense, conclusions on the basis of their premises. Thus both of these have to do with knowledge: conditional knowledge in the case of the former and knowledge simply speaking in the latter.

If we consider the kind of reasoning that can be called, in a broad sense, probable, Aquinas calls this logica inventiva -- 'inventiva' primarily means 'having to do with discovery'. The word is usually translated in this context as 'investigative', but this doesn't quite capture it: this part of logic doesn't merely look into things -- it actually discovers them. Discovery is not all about necessities and certainties; we are at a level less than knowledge here. We are often not in the realm of knowledge but of belief (fides) or opinion:

(3b1) ...and to this is ordered topics or dialectics. For the dialectical deduction that Aristotle considers in the book of the Topics comes from the probable.

But sometimes calling it belief or opinion is a little strong: what we get is not a definite, albeit imperfect, acceptance of one side of the question, but rather a leaning or inclination to one side. This act of reason Aquinas calls 'suspicion'; as in 'I suspect that the answer is such-and-such'. This gives us a second part of logica inventiva:

(3b2) Sometimes, however, belief or opinion is not completely formed, but a kind of suspicion, because it is not wholly inclined to one part of a contradiction, but more inclined to that one than this one. And to this is ordered Rhetoric.

We can have an even more tenuous result of our inquiry, though:

(3b3) Sometimes a mere estimation according to some representation inclines toward some part of a contradiction, in the way that food is made to be abhorred by a man if it is represented under the likeness of something abhorrent. And to this is ordered Poetics, for the poet is drawing to some virtue by some wholesome representation.

It is not customary with us to consider rhetoric and poetics as part of the rational sciences, or as concerned with deduction, but it was commonplace in the Middle Ages. In rhetoric and poetics, as in analytics or dialectics, we move from one thing to another in such a way as to discover the unknown on the basis of the known. This is a process subject to some uncertainty, and thus in itself only deals with probabilities, in a large sense of the term. Dialectics deals with the probable in the strict sense: the things that happen for the most part, the conclusions where we have almost eliminated all the possible alternatives, etc. But we can also have reasoning that deals with the probable in a looser sense. In rhetorical deduction we are determining whether things fit with general opinion, whether they seem like they might be likely, and so forth. And in poetic deduction we are concerned with imaginative representation -- what is imaginatively plausible, what is attractive and repulsive, and so forth. Both rhetoric and poetics have an especially practical aspect, and the very fact that the reasoning they consider are the weakest kinds of reasoning is the source of their practical strength. They don't strictly have to consider truth or falsehood in the usual sense. Rhetoric is realm of reasoning where we are concerned with 'good enough for practical purposes'; poetic is the realm of reasoning where we are concerned with 'good enough for imaginative representation'.

Aquinas doesn't develop the idea of poetic deduction or inference at length, but he is almost certainly thinking of Avicenna here. In Avicenna's account, we are all very familiar with poetic deductions or syllogisms: that is what metaphors are. Metaphors are the enthymemes of poetics. And Avicenna argues at some length that you can expand every metaphor to a syllogistic deduction. The premises of these syllogisms may well be false in the strict sense, but Avicenna also holds that this is not an impediment here: what poetic syllogism requires is imaginative assent, what we might call acceptability of the representation; and this is true of the conclusion, as well. For whatever reason, Avicenna always uses a particular Sufi example, which certainly livens up his discussion of poetic syllogisms: "A rose is a mule's anus with dung in the middle." The point of this is not that this is some scientific account of a rose. The point rather is that this is a representation of the rose as worthless, and it is the kind of representation that will be acceptable if, for instance, you are a Sufi discussing the value of transient and earthly things in comparison to the value of eternal and divine things.

Aquinas never commits to anything as elaborate as Avicenna, and one suspects that if he had ever commented on the Poetics he would have made some modifications. But it does seem that the general idea is operative here, and it's almost inevitable that it would be: both Avicenna and Averroes treat Aristotle's Poetics as a logical book. Borges has a famous little short story in which he depicts Averroes trying to figure out the Poetics without any knowledge of what drama is. It's not a very accurate depiction of the Averroist approach to the Poetics, but it is certainly true that the approach of the commentators is very different from what we would think the obvious one. We approach Aristotle's Poetics as about creating and performing dramatic situations. But the Islamic commentators thought that this was a secondary feature of the work; for them, what the Poetics primarily describes is the way in which a mind manifests ideas, to itself or another mind, in and through imaginative representation. Avicenna might conceivably take liberties, but Averroes is a very literal commentator. If he reads it as a text on reasoning, it's because the work really can be read as a text on reasoning. It certainly is the case that this reading require some generalization of Aristotle; but this easily done, since all it requires is that we read Aristotle as discussing general truths through the specific examples provided by Greek culture. Arabic culture is in many ways radically different, but you can see that some of what Aristotle says about tragedy would obviously carry over to Arabic poetry. Further, we have scattered comments from Aristotle himself that encourage this kind of reading, such as his discussion of metaphor, or the famous claim that poetry is more philosophical than history because it is more universal.

In any case, we need rhetoric and poetics both for the full Thomistic account of rationality. We are still missing one part, though. That is, full accounting of rationality requires us to diagnose fundamentally flawed reasoning.

(3c) The third process of reasoning is served by that part of logic that is called sophistics, which Aristotle considers in the book of Elenchuses (= Sophistical Refutations).

And this gives us our complete set, which is, to recap:

1. Logic as concerned with understanding: Predicaments or Categories
2. Logic as concerned with judgment or propositions: Interpretation
3. Logic as concerned with discursive reasoning
   
   • Necessary / Judging
     1. Formal knowledge: Prior Analytics
     2. Formal and material knowledge: Posterior Analytics
   • Probable / Discovering
     
     1. Belief or opinion: Topics or Dialectic
     2. Suspicion: Rhetoric
     3. Imaginative representation: Poetics
   • Defective: Sophistical Refutations

These aren't found hermetically sealed off from each other in actual reasoning. To achieve demonstration (analytics) requires extensive dialectical reasoning (dialectics), which itself may have originally grown out of thinking with imaginative representations (poetics) filtered according to social commonplaces and common opinions (rhetoric), and may require extensive diagnosis of flawed reasoning (sophistics). In fact, putting it this way shows something of the power of reading Aristotle's surviving works this way, because this is precisely how Aristotle operates: he takes ideas whose origin in Greek culture is the theological poets (as Aristotle himself recognizes), who influenced common opinion (which Aristotle considers), which was manipulated by the Sophists (whose arguments and persuasive speeches thus have to be addressed) and which serves as part of Aristotle's dialectical method of considering the major opinions on a subject before working to sort them out, all to the end of achieving knowledge. And one has only to look at Aquinas's discussion of Aristotle's historical accounts in the Metaphysics to see that he is certainly aware of this kind of multi-layered investigation in Aristotle.

The Thomistic account of rationality is thus:

(a) pluralistic: It does not reduce rational thought to one kind of thinking, but recognizes that one may be rational in very diverse ways.

(b) systematic: The pluralism does not lead to a hodge-podge, but is highly structured, both as to its principles, which are the kinds of rational activity themselves, and as to its intrinsic end, which is demonstrative knowledge.

(c) practical as well as theoretical: The rational sciences cover both practical reason and speculative reason; there is no sharp division here, and practice can be as logical as pure reason. This is most obvious in cases like rhetoric or poetics, where the practical is always important, but there are practical and speculative forms of all of them.

(d) an account of inquiry itself: All parts of inquiry have some place in the logical scheme; none are left out. This is a result of the inclusion of constructive and corrective, as well as probative, parts.

Making the Punishment Fit the Crime

There are some limits to what ordinary men are likely to say that an ordinary man deserves. But there are no limits to what the danger of the community may be supposed to demand. We would not, even if we could, boil the millionaire in oil or skin the poor little politician alive; for we do not think a man deserves to be skinned alive for taking commissions on contracts. But it is by no means so certain that the skinning him alive might not protect the community. Corruption can destroy communities; and torture can deter men. At any rate the thing is not so self-evidently useless as it is self-evidently unjust and vindictive. We refrain from such fantastic punishments, largely because we do have some notion of making the punishment fit the crime, and not merely fit the community.

G. K. Chesterton, "The Mercy of Mr. Arnold Bennett", Fancies Versus Fads.

Evening Thought for Tuesday, August 22

Thought for the Evening: Apaideusia

In the Eudemian Ethics, Aristotle has an interesting passage on people engaging in fake philosophy:

...because to say nothing at random but use reasoned argument seems to mark a philosopher, some people often without being detected advance arguments that are not germane to the subject under treatment and that have nothing in them (and they do this sometimes through ignorance and sometimes from charlatanry), which bring it about that even men of experience and practical capacity are taken in by these people, who neither possess nor are capable of constructive or practical thought. And this befalls them owing to lack of education—for in respect of each subject inability to distinguish arguments germane to the subject from those foreign to it is lack of education. (1217a)

The word translated here as 'lack of education' is ἀπαιδευσία; one can indeed translate it as 'lack of education' or 'lack of training', but this often makes it sound as if it were just a claim that those who have it are ignorant, when in reality something deeper is certainly meant. Paideia was the cultivation of those qualities that made one suitable for civilized life. To lack paideia is not mere ignorance, but the kind of ignorance we might call barbarism. The person Aristotle is criticizing in the above passage is someone who has learned the philosophical knack for argument-giving, but uses it in what we might call a cargo-cult way; they have no real sense of good and bad argument, or of relevance in argument, because this is something that can only be had by cultivation -- and, indeed, can only be had fully by cultivation that involves participation in a community. They do not put forward arguments as participants in a community of inquirers; they put them forward because they are ignorant of how such a community works or because they are trying to ape the effects of being in such a community, without the actual work required to be so. Their imitation may be very good; but they are imitating the outward appearance, and not the internal character, of real rational argument.

Aristotle uses the term elsewhere. It shows up in the Rhetoric (1391a), where Aristotle talks about nouveaux riches, and how there vices with regard to money are often greater than those of old money because they are apaideutic with respect to wealth. I think this is arguably more than just a happenstance of using the same word; new-money people in Aristotle's example haven't learned to restrain themselves so as to be respectable in society, whereas the old-money aristocrats have. Likewise, those doing the imitation philosophy, having come into the wealth of reasoned argument, have not cultivated the habits of restraint that make one part of the community of inquirers.

The most important use of the term, however, is in the Metaphysics. Aristotle notes that order requires paideia (1005), and then goes on to give his most famous example of the kind of person who exhibits apaideusia: the person who demands that one prove the principle of noncontradiction:

But we have just assumed that it is impossible at once to be and not to be, and by this means we have proved that this is the most certain of all principles.Some, indeed, demand to have the law proved, but this is because they lack education; for it shows lack of education not to know of what we should require proof, and of what we should not. For it is quite impossible that everything should have a proof; the process would go on to infinity, so that even so there would be no proof....And I say that proof by refutation differs from simple proof in that he who attempts to prove might seem to beg the fundamental question, whereas if the discussion is provoked thus by someone else, refutation and not proof will result.The starting-point for all such discussions is not the claim that he should state that something is or is not so (because this might be supposed to be a begging of the question), but that he should say something significant both to himself and to another (this is essential if any argument is to follow; for otherwise such a person cannot reason either with himself or with another);and if this is granted, demonstration will be possible, for there will be something already defined. (1006a)

The person who demands that the principle of noncontradiction be proven does not understand how proof actually works. If he says nothing in support of his claim, Aristotle tells us that it's absurd to argue against him, because for all that he's actually contributed to reasoned discussion, you might as well be arguing with a plant; on the other hand, if he does say something in support of the claim, then, as quoted above, one can give a proof by refutation based on the fact that he says "something significant both to himself and to another", without which no one can reason. I think both prongs here flow directly from Aristotle's diagnosis of such people as apaideutic: they are either not reasoning (and thus might as well be a vegetable) or, in reasoning, they are not really familiar with what reasoning requires -- the importance of things like meaningfulness and relevance and communicability for it, and the things that follow from these. They have not developed the habits required to participate in the community of reasoners. They are barbarians in the land of reasoning.

There are also a number of passages in which he does not use the word apaideusia, but does talk about paideia in ways that are clearly relevant -- such as the famous passage in the Nicomachean Ethics (1094b) in which he says that it belongs to the trained to recognize the right amount of exactness to seek in inquiring into different topics. And he goes on almost immediately with an illuminating explanation:

To criticize a particular subject, therefore, a man must have been trained in that subject: to be a good critic generally, he must have had an all-round education. Hence the young are not fit to be students of Political Science. For they have no experience of life and conduct, and it is these that supply the premises and subject matter of this branch of philosophy. And moreover they are led by their feelings; so that they will study the subject to no purpose or advantage, since the end of this science is not knowledge but action. And it makes no difference whether they are young in years or immature in character: the defect is not a question of time, it is because their life and its various aims are guided by feeling; for to such persons their knowledge is of no use, any more than it is to persons of defective self-restraint. But Moral Science may be of great value to those who guide their desires and actions by principle. (1095a)

This passage puts together the bits we've already seen. To make good judgments in a particular field requires paideia in that field, to make good judgments generally requires good general training. You must, in particular, be familiar with the materials that "supply the premises and subject matter" and must have a sort of discipline, a self-restraint, that makes study advantageous by letting it be guided by principle rather than the passions.

Various Links of Interest

* Kenneth Pearce, George Berkeley and the power of words, at the OUP blog

* Miriam Burstein, Mill's Inaugural Address and the Contemporary University (or Not), at "The Little Professor"

* Richard Marshall interviews Michail Peramatzis about the notions of dependence and priority in Aristotelian metaphysics

* Geoffrey K. Pullum, Fear and Loathing of the English Passive, discusses the many wrong and misleading things said about passive voice in English

* A. C. Thompson, Sikhs in America

* Pius XI, Mit brennender Sorge

Currently Reading

Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji
Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness
Gaven Kerr, Aquinas's Way to God
Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity
George R. R. Martin, A Feast for Crows
George R. R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

Music on My Mind

Ajda Pekkan, "Bambaşka Biri".

Three Poem Drafts

The River

A long and ashen river runs
in caverns never touched by sun,
where sorrows sleep and dream of death
in darkness never touched by breath,
and hope is lost, and vernal grass
will never grow as ages pass;
the fish are blind, the waters cold,
the air is chill and stale and old,
and to a lake of murky deep
the river stealthily will creep
until the world has met its end
and flames upon the earth descend.
I sailed that river long ago.
Its wending course I fully know,
and there I lost my beating heart,
where cold and darkness never part.

Human Power

The fake omnipotence of men
like magician's trick is made.
The drama, spectacle, and show
is full of sound and lights that shine;
a flurry, rush, and active pace
distracts from instruments of power;
a patter, endless flow of words
a veil imposes on the work;
and where they strive to make you look
is never where the secret lies:
a spark, a crash, a showy sign,
and you are shackled, made to serve.

Summer Bezels

Honeysuckle scent,
inebriating bee-wine,
hovers, just a hint,
a wisp of beauty.

The warm evening breeze,
summerlit beneath the stars,
blows on my bare ear,
softly, like your kiss.

Bernardus Claraevallensis

Today is the memorial of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Doctor of the Church. A member of the Cistercian order, he built a reformed monastery in the Val d'Absinthe, which he named Claire Vallée, which later transmogrified to Clairvaux. He became extraordinarily influential, and was one of the earlier saints to be formally canonized by papal process, when Pope Alexander III canonized him in 1174. He was named a Doctor of the Church in 1830 by Pope Pius VIII.

From a letter to a monk named Adam:

If you remain yet in that spirit of charity which I either knew or believed to be with you formerly, you would certainly feel the condemnation with which charity must regard the scandal which you have given to the weak. For charity would not offend charity, nor scorn when it feels itself offended. For it cannot deny itself, nor be divided against itself. Its function is rather to draw together things divided; and it is far from dividing those that are joined. Now, if that remained in you, as I have said, it would not keep silent, it would not rest unconcerned, nor pretend indifference, but it would without doubt whisper, with groans and uneasiness at the bottom of your pious heart, that saying, Who is offended, and I burn not (2 Cor. xi. 29). If, then, it is kind, it loves peace, and rejoices in unity; it produces them, cements them, strengthens them, and wherever it reigns it makes the bond of peace. As, then, you are in opposition to that true mother of peace and concord, on what ground, I ask you, do you presume that your sacrifice, whatever it may be, will be accepted by God, when without it even martyrdom profiteth nothing (1 Cor. xiii. 3)? Or, on what ground do you trust that you are not the enemy of charity when breaking unity, rending the bond of peace, you lacerate her bowels, treating with such cruelty their dear pledges, which you neither have borne nor do bear? You must lay down, then, the offering, whatever it may be, which you are preparing to lay on the altar, and hasten to go and reconcile yourself not with one of your brethren only, but with the entire body. The whole body of the fraternity, grievously wounded by your withdrawal, as by the stroke of a sword, utters its complaints against you and the few with you, saying: The sons of my mother have fought against me (Cant. i. 5). And rightly; for who is not with her, is against her. Can you think that a mother, as tender as charity, can hear without emotion the complaint, so just, of a community which is to her as a daughter? Therefore, joining her tears with ours, she says, I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me (Isa. i. 2).

Charity is God Himself. Christ is our peace, who hath made both one (Eph. ii. 14). Unity is the mystery even of the Holy Trinity. What place, then, in the kingdom of Christ and of God has he who is an enemy of charity, peace, and unity?

Speed in Rather Longer than a Span

A Ballad of Abbreviations
by G. K. Chesterton

The American's a hustler, for he says so,
And surely the American must know.
He will prove to you with figures why it pays so
Beginning with his boyhood long ago.
When the slow-maturing anecdote is ripest,
He'll dictate it like a Board of Trade Report,
And because he has no time to call a typist,
He calls her a Stenographer for short.

He is never known to loiter or malinger,
He rushes, for he knows he has "a date" ;
He is always on the spot and full of ginger,
Which is why he is invariably late.
When he guesses that it's getting even later,
His vocabulary's vehement and swift,
And he yells for what he calls the Elevator,
A slang abbreviation for a lift.

Then nothing can be nattier or nicer
For those who like a light and rapid style.
Than to trifle with a work of Mr Dreiser
As it comes along in waggons by the mile.
He has taught us what a swift selective art meant
By description of his dinners and all that,
And his dwelling, which he says is an Apartment,
Because he cannot stop to say a flat.

We may whisper of his wild precipitation,
That it's speed in rather longer than a span,
But there really is a definite occasion
When he does not use the longest word he can.
When he substitutes, I freely make admission,
One shorter and much easier to spell;
If you ask him what he thinks of Prohibition,
He may tell you quite succinctly it is Hell.

Babylonian Mathematics

Daniel Mansfield and N. J. Wildberger discuss Babylonian mathematics:

Like Some Grave Mighty Thought Threading a Dream

Shelley, Leigh Hunt, and Keats once held a sonnet-writing competition in which the goal was to write a sonnet about the Nile in fifteen minutes. Hunt's was the only one published in their lifetimes. All three, interestingly, are explicitly allegorical; very difficult to do well in short space, and I think Hunt is the only one who quite pulled it off. I would give first prize to Hunt, second to Keats, and third to Shelley; Hunt is easily the least talented of the three in general, but in poetry it is the poem and not the reputation or ability that gives the laurels.

To the Nile
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Month after month the gathered rains descend
Drenching yon secret Aethiopian dells,
And from the desert’s ice-girt pinnacles
Where Frost and Heat in strange embraces blend
On Atlas, fields of moist snow half depend.
Girt there with blasts and meteors Tempest dwells
By Nile’s aereal urn, with rapid spells
Urging those waters to their mighty end.
O’er Egypt’s land of Memory floods are level
And they are thine, O Nile--and well thou knowest
That soul-sustaining airs and blasts of evil
And fruits and poisons spring where’er thou flowest.
Beware, O Man--for knowledge must to thee,
Like the great flood to Egypt, ever be.

A Thought of the Nile
by Leigh Hunt

It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands,
Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream,
And times and things, as in that vision, seem
Keeping along it their eternal stands,—
Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd bands
That roamed through the young world, the glory extreme
Of high Sesostris, and that southern beam,
The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands.
Then comes a mightier silence, stern and strong,
As of a world left empty of its throng,
And the void weighs on us; and then we wake,
And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along
Twixt villages, and think how we shall take
Our own calm journey on for human sake.

To the Nile
by John Keats

Son of the old moon-mountains African!
Stream of the Pyramid and Crocodile!
We call thee fruitful, and, that very while,
A desert fills our seeing's inward span;
Nurse of swart nations since the world began,
Art thou so fruitful? or dost thou beguile
Such men to honour thee, who, worn with toil,
Rest them a space 'twist Cairo and Decan?
O may dark fancies err!—they surely do;
'Tis ignorance that makes a barren waste
Of all beyond itself. Thou dost bedew
Green rushes like our rivers, and dost taste
The pleasant sun-rise; green isles hast thou too,
And to the sea as happily dost haste.

Maria Assumpta

Rubens's Assumption of the Virgin:



Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary

Surely the Lord raises up the lowly,
giving goodness to those who seek His ways,
for He has mercy upon all nations
from generation to generation.
From Mary the Sun of justice has dawned:
He has showered His Mother with graces,
filling us with spiritual praises,
on this her feast of exaltation.

Surely the Lord raises up the lowly,
and blessed is His Mother for all ages,
fountain of blessings, holy treasure-ship,
pure Mother of God and leaven of life,
sanctified censer and fragrant rose,
vessel of the forgiving ember,
shining temple of the Holy Spirit,
bridal chamber of the heavenly King.

Surely the Lord raises up the lowly,
so that You, O Mary, may pray for us:
beseech the Lord who has appeared from you
for pardon for sins, peace for our churches,
contemplation for our monasteries,
strength for the aged and wisdom for the young,
good education for all our children,
O fair Mother of the salvific Word.

A Mighty Word There Came

A Word
by G. K. Chesterton

A word came forth in Galilee, a word like to a star;
It climbed and rang and blessed and burnt wherever brave hearts are;
A word of sudden secret hope, of trial and increase
Of wrath and pity fused in fire, and passion kissing peace.
A star that o'er the citied world beckoned, a sword of flame;
A star with myriad thunders tongued: a mighty word there came.

The wedge's dart passed into it, the groan of timber wains,
The ringing of the river nails, the shrieking of the planes;
The hammering on the roofs at morn, the busy workshop roar;
The hiss of shavings drifted deep along the windy floor;
The heat browned toiler's crooning song, the hum of human worth
Mingled of all the noise of crafts, the ringing word went forth.

The splash of nets passed into it, the grind of sand and shell,
The boat-hook's clash, the boas-oars' jar, the cries to buy and sell,
The flapping of the landed shoals, the canvas crackling free,
And through all varied notes and cries, the roaring of the sea,
The noise of little lives and brave, of needy lives and high;
In gathering all the throes of earth, the living word went by.

Earth's giants bowed down to it, in Empire's huge eclipse,
When darkness sat above the thrones, seven thunders on her lips,
The woes of cities entered it, the clang of idols' falls,
The scream of filthy Caesars stabbed high in their brazen halls,
The dim hoarse floods of naked men, the world-realms' snapping girth,
The trumpets of Apocalypse, the darkness of the earth:
The wrath that brake the eternal lamp and hid the eternal hill,

A world's destruction loading, the word went onward still--
The blaze of creeds passed into it, the hiss of horrid fires,
The headlong spear, the scarlet cross, the hair-shirt and the briars,
The cloistered brethren's thunderous chaunt, the errant champion's song,
The shifting of the crowns and thrones, the tangle of the strong.

The shattering fall of crest and crown and shield and cross and cope,
The tearing of the gauds of time, the blight of prince and pope,
The reign of ragged millions leagued to wrench a loaded debt,
Loud with the many-throated roar, the word went forward yet.
The song of wheels passed into it, the roaring and the smoke,
The riddle of the want and wage, the fogs that burn and choke.

The breaking of the girths of gold, the needs that creep and swell,
The strengthening hope, the dazing light, the deafening evangel,
Through kingdoms dead and empires damned, through changes without cease,
With earthquake, chaos, born and fed, rose,--and the word was "Peace."

Hutcheson and the Sense of Beauty

Michael Spicher has a nice article on aesthetic taste at the IEP. It's a very large and complex topic, and I think article does a good job of getting much of it under control for the purposes of an introduction, but I think the handling of Hutcheson ends up being a bit odd, although perhaps the reason is that conciseness is creating a misleading impression of the intended meaning. For instance, he says that Hutcheson does not clearly define the internal sense. However, Hutcheson does, I think, clearly define it:

Those Ideas which are rais’d in the Mind upon the presence of external Objects, and their acting upon our Bodys, are call’d Sensations. We find that the Mind in such Cases is passive, and has not Power directly to prevent the Perception or Idea, or to vary it at its Reception, as long as we continue our Bodys in a state fit to be acted upon by the external Object.

Families of these sensations linked by resemblance, he goes on to say, are attributed to unified powers of receiving them, which we call 'senses'. The distinction between external and internal senses, Hutcheson takes to be a non-essential issue; it is based on a point that Spicher notes, namely, that they seem in some way linked to senses like sight and hearing, although not reducible to them because they can generate the relevant ideas in matters not involving them.

Thus Hutcheson's definition of a sense is a power that originates an idea to the reception of which the mind is passive, and the distinction between internal and external senses is a matter of convenience based on the relations of senses to each other. The idea of beauty is the kind of idea that designates a sense, and it is distinguishable from senses like sight, hearing, etc.; and this idea of beauty applies to things exhibiting Uniformity amidst Variety. Nothing here seems obscure. Conceivably Spicher could mean that Hutcheson does not give a mechanism for it, but this is not the natural way to read the claim.

Later he says, in discussing Gerard:

Gerard divided up his study into seven principles of the internal sense (or powers of the imagination), not only a sense of beauty like Hutcheson. The seven principles are novelty, sublimity, beauty, imitation, harmony, oddity (humorousness), and virtue.

But Hutcheson himself distinguishes the senses of grandeur (=sublimity) and novelty from the sense of beauty; he has another treatise on the sense of virtue. Harmony is a more borderline case, since Hutcheson sometimes speaks of the 'sense of beauty and harmony' as if it were one thing, and sometimes speaks of the sense of beauty and the sense of harmony as if they were distinguishable. Perhaps the idea is that Hutcheson's study focuses only on beauty (so that, for instance, grandeur and novelty are mentioned only to be set aside as not the topic under discussion)? But this seems a misleading way to put it.

Fortnightly Book, August 13

The next fortnightly book will be The Tale of Genji, by Murusaki Shikibu. Since it's a long work, it might end up being a three-week 'fortnight'.

We don't actually know the author's name; 'Shikibu' is derived from her father's official title, and 'Murasaki' appears to be a nickname borrowed from one of her characters. We do know that she was a lady-in-waiting of Empress Shoshi. Her education was unusual; women were not usually taught literary arts, but she helped her brother study and turned out to be have more talent than he did. According to a common literary story, she first conceived of the tale of Genji while watching the moon at Ishiyama Temple; we do not know if this is really true, but it is a scene that has often been depicted, as in this painting by Hiroshige III, from the 1880s:



Two other works are attributed to her, her court diary and a collection of poetry, but it is easily The Tale of Genji that has most inspired imaginations since the eleventh century when it was written.

The work is a long fictional prose narrative, probably written in installments, that is unified not by plot but by character. Famously, almost no one is named in it; most of the time people are referred to by their official title. Given that the narrative of the book spans a very long period of time, people's titles change over time, leading to complications in keeping track of the characters. The reason for this peculiarity was Japanese court custom at the time, the same court custom leaving us uncertain what Shikibu's personal name was: to use a person's personal name in a public matter was considered very rude and excessively familiar. Readers have often made up the gap by supplying their own nicknames. The work was also written in a very high literary diction, already archaic in its time; annotated editions have existed at least since the twelfth century.

Hikaru Genji is the son of the Emperor and a low-born concubine; his father, however, removed him from the line of succession, and so he is forced to make his way through the world as an Imperial official. A handsome playboy, he has a long string of affairs which will eventually lead to him being exiled -- and then to being pardoned and raised to a very high rank in the Imperial court. His story ends very abruptly, and scholars argue back and forth whether this abruptness of ending was intentional or not.

I will be reading Royall Tyler's unabridged translation, which seems to have good reviews. The entire work is 1120 pages, not counting the supplementary appendices, although it also is fairly generously supplied with illustrations and footnotes.

Katharine Burdekin, Swastika Night

Introduction

Opening Passage:

The Knight turned towards the Holy Hitler chapel which in the orientation of this church lay in the western arm of the Swastika, and with the customary loud impressive chords on the organ and a long roll on the sacred drums, the Creed began. Hermann was sitting in the Goebbels chapel in the northern arm, whence he could conveniently watch the handsome boy with the long fair silky hair, who had been singing the solos. He had to turn towards the west when the Knight turned. He could no longer see the boy except with a side-long glance, and though gazing at lovely youths in church was not even conventionally condemned, any position during the singing of the Creed except that of attention-eyes-front was sacrilegious. (p. 5)

Summary: Centuries into the Third Reich, the triumph of Nazi ideology seems to be complete. Its enemies are almost all crushed; the subject races have converted to the Hitlerian religion, which proclaims that Hitler, not born of woman, exploded from the head of God the Thunderer. Society has become highly stratified according to a creed of blood: the Fuehrer on top, the Knights who are the quasi-priestly military aristocracy next, then the ordinary German Nazis, then foreign Hitlerians, then, lowest of all, the outcast Christians refusing to recognize Hitler as God, without the right to buy or sell. The whole society has been reduced to a principle found in the Hitlerian Creed:

And I believe in pride, in courage, in violence, in brutality, in bloodshed, in ruthlessness, and all other soldierly and heroic virtues. (p. 6)

And 'reduced' is the right term. The emphasis on brutal heroism led to a movement, under a man named von Wied, to eliminate records of prior civilizations and reduce women to nothing but subservience to men, a movement that also ultimately succeeded. Women are property who cannot refuse a man. It is a great shame to give birth to a girl, and boys are taken from their mothers at a year and a half. The result is that the population of the German Empire is dwindling; too few girls are born, which leads to too few boys being born, and there is no way to counter the trend.

At the beginning of the rise of von Wied's movement, a century and some decades into the Reich, he had alone been opposed by a Knight named von Hess. Realizing that his opposition was futile, von Hess submitted publicly, thus allowing himself to be branded as a coward in a society in which that was one of the most shameful things, and instead turned to preserving the truth about the history that was systematically being eradicated. In a time of endless bookburning, at great risk to his own life, he wrote a book, and this book passed from father to son, in continual danger, until the time of the story, when the last von Hess, whose sons have all died, must decide what to do with it to preserve the one surviving candle-glimmer of the past through the centuries-long night.

One of the things that the book does very well is capturing the heroism of the characters. We tend to think of heroism as a pure and bright thing, untouched by any stain, but in the real world such heroes are rare indeed. The ordinary state of heroism is murky, flawed, as people entangled in error and wrong nonetheless recognize one truly good thing and sacrifice everything to preserve it. The men of the tale struggle to think outside a box that is all Reich and nothing but Reich, in which women are nothing and Hitler is all, and even with the help of the book, it is a difficult struggle, and one at which they are not always completely successful. The original von Hess was a firm believer in the importance of German ascendancy; but, an honest man, he burned his reputation and risked his life for the truth. The von Hess of the tale, far more a freethinker, does the same, as his fathers had done before him. Alfred, an Englishman who comes into contact, is part of a resistance movement that has no hope of any military victory against the all-dominant Germans who control the entire military infrastructure, and he still struggles with some of the ideas to which von Hess exposes him, particularly the recognition that women are part of the key. Heroism is not, in fact, a shiny and polished thing, any more than it is the brutal and savage thing of the Hitlerian Creed; it is a habit of doing some genuine good even at great risk to oneself. And whatever other flaw and fault men may have, it does not erase that habit, if they have it.

Burdekin's dystopia has more hope than most dystopias. By the end of the tale, the German Empire is as strong as ever, the Hitlerian Creed as ascendant. The night of barbarism is not overcome. Centuries of its dominance, at least, still remain. All that has been accomplished is that something of the truth about the past has been preserved for one more generation. But therein lies the hope.

Favorite Passage: The Hitlerian Creed has a line in which it speaks of Hitler as having crushed the four arch-devils, Roehm, Lenin, Stalin, and Karl Barth. The Knight is asked who Karl Barth was:

"Karl Barth is a mystery," said the Knight, sighing. "One we can never clear up. He may have been an ordinary man like Roehm, or a great leader such as Lenin and Stalin undoubtedly were, or he may have been another such great man as von Hess, a man of soul. On the other hand, he may have been a really evil fellow. I never say the Creed without wondering about Karl Barth." (p. 138)

Recommendation: Recommended.

******
Katharine Burdekin, Swastika Night, Feminist Press (New York: 1985).

Baroness de Chantal

Today is the feast of St. Jeanne-Françoise Frémyot, Baronne de Chantal. She was born in 1572 to an important political family in Burgundy; she married the Baron of Chantal in 1592 and became active in helping him to manage his estate. He died in a hunting accident nine years later, and she took on the burden of managing the estate and raising their children as a widowed mother. A few years later, she met St. Francis de Sales and convinced him to become her spiritual director. They corresponded regularly, and St. Francis often shared parts of various treatises he was working on.

She eventually began working with St. Francis to build a new religious order, the Visitation of Holy Mary; it was a new kind of order, because the nuns were not intended to be cloistered, but active in the world, since part of the intent was for them to minister to people who could not leave their homes; unlike many religious orders, its rules were designed on the assumption that the elderly and the disabled might join. The problem, however, was that in an attempt to rein in the wild proliferation of religious orders, many of which were poorly thought out, the Counter-Reformation was cracking down on religious orders that did not have a clear structure and that deviated very far from the standard pattern. The Archbishop insisted on cloister; St. Jane Frances and the nuns protested; it went all the way up to the Pope, who sided with the Archbishop. So the nuns gave in. (It's a very good example of the trade-offs that inevitably arise in such matters; the rules being imposed on religious orders were very much needed, and yet St. Francis and St. Jane Frances were certainly right that there was a need for the religious order that they proposed. Two perfectly legitimate, perfectly reasonable lines of motivation, both of them truly concerned with the good of the Church, and both of them right in their way. But they were inconsistent with each other, and, as the ingenuity required to work around the inconsistency was lacking, one of them had to give.)

As superior general of the Visitationists, however, St. Jane Frances was active both in the order and in the convent by her correspondence, which became massive. We only have a tiny portion of it, but hundreds of her letters have survived, and they are virtually all very much worth reading. She was beatified in 1751 and canonized in 1767, and one of the reasons for it was her devotion through all states of life -- as a maiden, as a wife, as a mother, as a widow, as a nun.

Dashed Off XVI

If factual statements can tell us what is possibly and necessarily true, they can tell us what is permissibly and obligatorily true.

Exact resemblance is not an ontological free lunch; it requires conditions for possible comparison (e.g., to distinguish it both from mere identity and mere resemblance).

As field values in physics may be scalar, vectorial, or tensor, there seems reason to deny that 'field' is strictly univocal.

Tropes always make more sense as part of a theory of the phenomenal than as a theory of the real or mind-independent.

compresence as teleological

tropes : terms :: compresence : syntax

the Transfiguration as the emblem for iconography (it raises the question of whether similar emblem-isms are possible for other sacred artforms; it seems plausible to take the Ascension as emblem for music, for instance,and Annunciation or Nativity for painting or sculpture)

The sacredness of art in any medium is directly related to its suitability for public prayer.

the internalization of honor as converging on virtue

The central concept of honor is victory in the sense of overcoming.

"The word of God is addressed to all people, in every age and in every part of the world, and the human being is by nature a philosopher." John Paul II

It is an error to treat philosophy of language as if it were epistemology.

The final end of things is a convergence of equitable justice, restoring grace, ordering providence, and sovereign creation.

Church Militant : Tabernacle :: Church Triumphant : Temple

Law should favor widespread ownership: (1) universal destination of goods; (2) subsidiarity; (3) human dignity.

the inherent tendency of philosophical inquiry to universal community
the inherent tendency of philosophical inquiry to reason-based morality

sequential vs. spiraling curricula of philosophy

Antiquities are preserved through long ages by accident or by tradition.

Democracy is most attractive to those who cannot imagine any reasonable and honest person disagreeing with their most cherished beliefs.

anticipatory trial and error as a mark of skill

the Eightfold Path and knowing happiness by remotion

Nobody starts with experience; experience must be built on a basis of prior capacities and resources, which themselves only come to be known in learning other things.

ceremony & the principle that one should do good things on receiving good things

Medicine is of all areas of human life the one in which everyone is most naturally inclined to think in ways leading to superstition. (Indeed, one sees this even in religion itself -- superstitious practices are most likely to grow up where religion meets matters of health and sickness.)

Etiological accounts of function only give us a species-function -- to wit, the function of the thing in preventing the traited population from going extinct.

Given a function, one can always distinguish esse from bene esse with respect to that function.

The wetness of water is not just 'there'; it is an internal activity of water, composed of interacting smaller internal activities, involving the causal capacities of water-components.

Life functionally incorporates drift and chance.

luck as a component of inquiry

Truth is sign of itself.

the intrinsically deontic character of truth -- the true as partially characterizable in terms of what ought not to be regarded as false

the obligatory character of the principle of noncontradiction

Zwinglianism is implicit liberal Christianity.

In a fully democratic society, checks and balances mean nothing more than people stopping other people.

Anything can look epiphenomenal to one who has only a partial causal explanation.

Anticipation of nature can distort our experimental reasoning, but it is our capacity to anticipate nature that makes experiment possible.

language (vestment of thought) // clothing (vestment of body)
sincerity of speech // modesty of clothing

The background of every experiment is an abstract classification of possibilities.

shared beauty as the root of the importance of fine art

"Symbolic figures are a valuable adjunct to philosophy: they help men to integrate and bear in mind the essential meaning of complex issues." Rand

component strictly necessary for function (esse)
component quasi-necessary for function (bene esse)
component redundant under strict necessity
component redundant under quasi-necessity
component incidental for function
-- is quasi-necessity indirect strict necessity? (i.e., the result of strict necessity for a related function)

Newton's argument against vortices
(1) Celestial motions are (a) more regular than if they arose from vortices and (b) observe other laws so that vortices do not regulate but would disturb celestial motions.
(2) All phenomena of the heavens and the sea follow precisely from gravity acting in accordance with the laws of gravity.
(3) Nature is simple.
Therefore: (4) Other causes than the laws of gravity are to be rejected.
Therefore (5) The heavens are to be considered without matter as far as possible, lest the celestial motions be impeded or rendered irregular.

Descartes's discussion of gravitas can be turned upside down to form an analogical argument for final causes.

Arguments tend to have a certain symmetry -- ponens can be tollensed, apparent demonstration parallels apparent reductio, etc. Truth breaks the symmetry. But even abstracting from truth, asymmetries can arise through differences in generality or in circumstances. Genus-species introduces a privileged direction of relation, and circumstances can introduce exceptions (the things that do not fall under 'for the most part'). (Perhaps there are also asymmetries linked to the privilege of First Figure and analogously of modus ponens?)

change as a precondition of testing
actuality and potentiality as preconditions of testing

Statistical sampling is used to cross modal differences: different times & places, counterfactual possibilities

one-or-many as a transcendental disjunction (ST 1.30.3)

icons as memorials of real presence and anticipations of sacramental presence

structural works of mercy (hospital, school, recovery house, hospice) -- the infrastructure of alms

a mereotopological analysis of food entering a city from outside its circumference and distributing over its area

"he who prefers the common good before what is proper to himself is above all acceptable to God." Josephus

To translate well into English requires that English be able to bear what is translated, and this cannot always be guaranteed. Sometimes one must wait centuries for the right fashion, the right consensus, , the rediscovery that builds the right vocabulary to translate some aspect of a text. And sometimes, having had it, one loses it and must endure the inadequate again.

Philo on the doctrine of the mean: Migr xxvi.147; Immut. xxiv.163-164

"What is commonly asserted by all, cannot wholly be false." Aquinas (De etern 2.34)

It is an error to assume that mind and body are only related in one way.

Aquinas's probable arguments against the eternity of the world:SCG 2.38; SCG 1.3; SCG 2.31

Hume and Malebranche on pride

Chrysostom's contrasts between the apostles and the Cynics (in Ep I Cor 35.4)

academia and the collection of career-tokens

It makes little sense to treat the human body the way Kant treats the physical world; the body is, as it were, not mere phenomenon, but already in some fashion transcendental subject.

"the church is the primary work of the Holy Trinity" Turretin

colors as actions (flavors would also obviously be analogous)

It seems there has to be a level of authority between individual bishops and the college of bishops; this is synodal, and in particular is a local gathering of bishops representing, formally and functionally, the whole college. This contrasts with (for instance) episcopal conferences, which do not have this representation of the whole, being administrative conveniences for the parts.

Rights of conscience are indirect rights of God.

(1) Heaven and earth are finite.
(2) What is finite cannot have infinite force.
(3) Infinite force is required for infinite duration.
(4) Therefore heaven and earth have beginning and end.
(Saadia Gaon)

The greater the love, the less changeable it is.

A republic, more than any other government, must insist on the value of deliberation if it is to avoid fatal corruption.

"Comedy is music. It has a rhythm and a melody." Sid Caesar

All love strives toward impassibility. (Thus the lover's emphasis on stability, purity, eternity, certainty, the impossiblity of lessening; thus also the attributes of I Cor 13.)

Grace is our personhood reflecting divine personhood.

Family always suggests something of the eternal.

Reasons for polytheistic competition naturally drive polytheism toward henotheism; reasons for polytheistic cooperation naturally drive polytheism toward theomonism (although the latter tendency seems weaker, or at least slower, than the former).

the conditions for interpretatio graeca

the analogue of the Euthyphro dilemma for mathematical necessity
-- Note that there are several strong modalities (Always, Everywhere) in which it would make sense to say that they are so because God makes them so.
-- Note that we can even find such for ourselves (Proven, which is so because we have made it so). - Cartesian creation of eternal truths as constructivism at the limit.

love is makrothymei (cp Ex 34:6; Nm 14:18)
love is chresteuta
love is not zeloi or perpereuetai, nor physioutai
aschemonei, paroxyneta ou logizetai to kakon (It does not log/inventory what is bad)
sygchairei te aletheia (it celebrates the right)
panta stegei (it is restrained with all)
panta pisteuei (it has faith in all)
panta epizei (it has hope in all)
panta hypomenei (it endures all)

Literacy can be partly domain-specific because part of reading a text is recognizing its rhetorical features, which can often vary from domain to domain.

To think of belief entirely in terms of external action is to lose sight of the functioning of belief under conditions of abeyance of action.

Arguments usually convince only by clarification.

the responsibility for mutually beneficial discussion

mereological fusion and transcendental unity

shared humanity and the right to ask for reasons

Love hopes because the one who loves treats those he loves aspirationally.

Exchanges are externalizations of reasoning.

The Fallacy of Special Pleading

'Special pleading' was a system used in British common law by which the precise point of dispute would be established for a trial. In other systems, this is done by the court, which looks at the arguments on both sides, filters out the irrelevant, looks at how one side's arguments relate to each other, and takes into account what has already been established by the evidence, as opposed to requiring the determination of the court. In special pleading, this was done by the plaintiff and defendant themselves through a very rigid and complicated process. The plaintiff would declare his complaint; then the defendant would plead; then the plaintiff would respond; then the defendant would respond; all according to special rules. This would continue until one of the parties could not proceed under the rules, and the point at which it stopped was the issue of special pleading, and the point that particularly needed to be considered by the court. A clever system -- it forces the parties to be precise without having to rely on the critical capacities of the judge to identify correctly what the parties are, in fact, actually arguing about. But it was also liable to abuses; the rules governing it grew to an extraordinary degree of complexity; you had to hire a special pleader to navigate it all and even then your plea might be dropped for very strange legal technicalities; and through much of the nineteenth century, when the vocabulary often used to talk about fallacies consolidated, it was a point of intense controversy whether the system should be abolished. It is thus perhaps not surprising that special pleading, often being associated with reasoning that often gets by on mere technicalities rather than substance, is often mentioned in association with fallacy, and ended up giving a term to the fallacy lists, although the process of how this happened is very difficult to trace.

The theory of fallacies is merely partially systematized folklore; as one would expect from folklore, it is a weird brew of logical tidbits, practical advice, ethical admonition, historical detritus of exploded or doubtful theories, things people thought clever or neat at some point, and misunderstandings. I've given a number of examples over the years. A very obvious example is that of faulty analogy; the 'fallacy of faulty analogy' was put on fallacy lists by utilitarians, to whom it meant 'you are using an analogy that would suggest that utilitarianism is wrong', given a somewhat more rigorous, and less obviously tendentious, account by Mill on the basis of a theory of analogy almost nobody has ever accepted, and from there was copied from text to text, most often uncritically and sometimes with mutations when you get to an author of a critical thinking text who actually engages in critical thinking and starts wondering what explains this being on a list of fallacies. The 'fallacy of special pleading' is another good example of this mess. If you look at serious work in informal logic over the past forty or fifty years, one gets a farcical comedy of baffled intelligent people trying to make sense of its status as a fallacy. Giving an account of it that fits the examples to which it is typically applied seems to make inexplicable why it is treated as a fallacy; giving an account of it that makes it definitely a fallacy suddenly leaves it orphaned, since almost nothing to which it has ever applied then turns out to be an example of it.

As one might expect in these circumstances, there are quite a few different things called 'special pleading', and which one a person is using typically depends on whatever third-rate informal logic manual they got the concept from, or even on a person's vague impression of how the term is used in ordinary conversation.

A very common way of trying to make sense of it is by treating it as a form of double standard: an exception to a general rule is given and not justified. At this level of generality, it's useless; we need more precision about this 'general rule'. For instance, is it a generally accepted rule or a rule that the person in question is accepted. If the latter, that could possibly be a case of someone reasoning fallaciously, but then it just seems to be ordinary contradiction put inexplicably in fancy dress, since the actual fallacy is just self-contradiction. If the former, that would suggest reasons to have a particular category called 'special pleading', but also makes it not a fallacy -- it cannot be an error of reasoning to insist that there is an exception to a rule that only people other than oneself take to be general. The fact that justification is required also seems to suggest that it has to be the person's own rule; but if that's the case, and you are not just contradicting itself, it seems like the only other possibility is that the other party is mistaken in thinking that the rule is in fact a relevantly general rule -- perhaps it is only a rule for a specific domain and was never formulated for the domain of the exception, or perhaps it is a crude rule of thumb, or the like.

Older books often classify it as a particular form of fallacy of accent, which notoriously makes no sense whatsoever and has baffled logicians ever since -- fallacy of accent is an ambiguity arising through prosody (for instance, change of stress), but the older authors seem to be treating it as a confusion of aspects. As near as we can tell today, it seems that the idea was that they were taking it to cover any kind of difference in emphasis. Out of this line of thought comes the account on which special pleading is one-sided argument. Thus if you only give the reasons for something and not the reasons against it, you are special pleading. This actually has an advantage of making sense of the label itself, but as has been pointed out for years and years now, this is not a fallacy, it's just ordinary argument.

As usual, the mess becomes even more obvious when one looks at examples. Here is Nizkor's best example:

The person committing Special Pleading is claiming that he is exempt from certain principles or standards yet he provides no good reason for his exemption. That this sort of reasoning is fallacious is shown by the following extreme example:

Barbara accepts that all murderers should be punished for their crimes.
Although she murdered Bill, Barbara claims she is an exception because she really would not like going to prison.
Therefore, the standard of punishing murderers should not be applied to her.

This is obviously a blatant case of special pleading. Since no one likes going to prison, this cannot justify the claim that Barbara alone should be exempt from punishment.

This is a very odd example. Nizkor takes the fallacy to be one "in which a person applies standards, principles, rules, etc. to others while taking herself (or those she has a special interest in) to be exempt, without providing adequate justification for the exemption". 'Punishment' and 'going to prison' are not synonymous, so the 'exception' would not, strictly speaking, be an exception to this rule in particular. If you go with one or the other, though, Barbara has merely contradicted herself. If the rule is actually general, no exception could have justification; if we are considering whether there are exceptions, then it is an open question whether the rule is actually general, and therefore one should not simply be assuming that it is. Barbara explicitly gives a justification for her conclusion, so the final comment puts all the emphasis on the adequacy of her justification. But why is her justification inadequate? Only because it is irrelevant. But this means that to determine that this is special pleading, we had first to identify a different fallacy that is usually given a different name, and then we called that fallacy 'special pleading' for reasons that are unclear. This latter kind of thing would be possible if, for instance, 'special pleading' were a label for an ethical fallacy, since another fallacy could also be an ethical fallacy in a particular context, but that is not how the fallacy was characterized, and it is not how the example is set up.

Nizkor goes on to claim that the fallacy of special pleading is a violation of the principle of relevant difference -- things can only be treated as differently if they have a relevant difference -- (and this seems to be what FallacyFiles has in mind, as well, although since their primary example is not even a fallacy, it's less clear) but Barbara is identifying what she takes to be a relevant difference. So the problem must be that it's not actually relevant, which means that either she's really committing an ignoratio elenchi (which is a very plausible diagnosis here), or is just wrong -- and it's not a fallacy to be wrong. So, again, it seems that we determine that something is special pleading by first determining that it is, in fact, another fallacy, and then we call it 'special pleading'. A different example just confirms this:

Bill and Jill are married. Both Bill and Jill have put in a full day at the office. Their dog, Rover, has knocked over all the plants in one room and has strewn the dirt all over the carpet. When they return, Bill tells Jill that it is her job to clean up after the dog. When she protests, he says that he has put in a full day at the office and is too tired to clean up after the dog.

This is a very plausible violation of the principle of relevant difference. But while Bill's reason is relevant to why he should not clean up after the dog, it is not relevant to why Jill should do it, because Jill has the same reason. So again, we seem to have ignoratio elenchi.

Perhaps one could say that 'special pleading' is in fact an ignoratio elenchi applied to oneself? But it's not clear why applying to oneself would be an important classificatory factor here. It might be if 'special pleading' is, again, an ethical criticism. And this would explain some things. In practice people tend to use 'special pleading' like they use 'straw man' -- it looks like a neutral term but over and over again one finds that people use it to insinuate bad motives. You are treating yourself as special by not holding yourself to standards to which you hold others! It is always presented as a formal and objective criticism of the argument, but it gets its bite from being treated as if it were an ethical criticism of motivations. Perhaps, then, it's strictly speaking an ethical criticism presupposing a formal inconsistency; but it's difficult to find cases in which people actually use it this way -- the ethical criticism would require information beyond the argument, whereas people treat special pleading as diagnosable from the argument itself.

The IEP gets a much cleaner account at the cost of just making 'special pleading' another name for logical inconsistency, or perhaps for logical inconsistency on matters that interest the arguer, which seems pointless and useless.

If we attempt to think through fallacies critically rather than in the uncritical way most people do, a question that immediately comes to mind is, "How does one determine that something is an example of this particular fallacy and not something that merely looks like it?" If the answers you get amount to, "Prove that another fallacy is committed, or prove that it's wrong," this should be an immediate red flag: the former seems to reduce your fallacy to another fallacy, and the latter makes it not a fallacy, since merely being wrong is not a fallacy. This is exactly the situation with 'special pleading'; the answers are almost always, "Because the person contradicted themselves" or "Because their reason isn't relevant" or "Because they are wrong". If they are contradicting themselves, why not say that? If they are wrong, why not say that? On the other hand, if the complaint is that they are arguing dishonestly, why are you phrasing a complaint about their motives as if it were a complaint about their argument? It's not that you couldn't have good answers to these questions in particular cases; but they don't seem to apply generally. Likewise, maybe a particular instance of 'special pleading' is used meaningfully -- but it looks much like you can't assume that everyone will understand your use in the same way, and it will always be unclear how much of your use is just rhetorical flourish. The whole practice of classifying reasoning as 'special pleading' continues to be problematic.