Thought for the Evening: Probability as a Measure
When we measure something of type X, it's fairly common for us to do it by comparison to something else of type X as a reference point. So, for instance, our most basic way of measuring length is to use an extension to measure an extension. Likewise, time-measurement is the measurement of changes by a change, which latter we often call generically a 'clock'. Weight, at least as a measure, is ordinarily measured by comparison of mass to mass, as on a balance scale. And so forth. This isn't universal, by any means, and you can do all sorts of more complicated kinds of measurements (measuring length by clock, for instance). But these are often derivative or else depend on complicated theory that needs already to be in place; and, at the very least, the most commonly accessible kind of measurement is to measure things of type X by relating them to a thing of type X.
If we are thinking in these terms, and think of probability as a measure of something, it makes sense to think of a probability as using a possibility to measure possibilities. Take for instance the standard dice roll example. We have identified a possible event -- the upfacing result of a roll -- and use that to measure a possible kind of state, the sides of the die that can face up. And thus each gets a measure of 1/6, all other things being equal, just as a length might get the measure of being 1/6 of the standard ruler.
This raises an interesting question. In most cases of using a thing of type X to measure things of type X, it looks like the comparison opens the possibility of some kind of relativity, for lack of a better term; the measurement can change given on how the measuring thing is related to the measured. Thus length and time measurements depend on how the measuring thing and the measured thing are moving with respect to each other; weight measurements depend on the gravitational field, so your measurements will depend on the gravitational forces acting on the measuring mass and the measured mass -- if there is a disparity between the two, it will directly affect your measurement. So is there something like this for probability, as well?
Here is a reason to think that measuring possibility and measured possibility can come apart due to an external factor in a way that at least makes room for this. If we roll two dice, we are usually trying to add the numbers assigned to each dice, which is more complicated than simply considering the single die. But we can easily handle this to calculate that the probability of rolling a 2 is a bit under three percent, the probability of rolling a 3 is a tad over three and a half percent, the probability of rolling a 4 is somewhat over eight percent, and so forth. But consider St. Olaf's Roll. St. Olaf rolls two six-sided dice and rolls a thirteen, because one of the dice shows a 6 and the other die, when it hits the ground, splits in two and leaves its 1 and 6 faces up. What is the probability of rolling a 13 with two normal six-sided dice? People will sometimes get into complicated accounts of physics and what not in an attempt at least to gesture at some finite probability, but in fact this is all handwaving. The probability of rolling a 13 with two normal six-sided dice, as measured by the sides in the normal way, is zero, just as you would have expected beforehand. But regardless of the exact relation between possibility and causation, measurement of possibilities by possibilities depends on a presumed causal set-up, and modifying that causal set-up in a way that affects the measuring and the measured differently alters things -- just as measurements of length, time, and weight depend on some causal set-up which, if modified, modifies the measurements.
So St. Olaf's Roll seems to suggest that there are causal presuppositions in place for probability as well as for length, time, and the like, that at least allow for the possibility of relativity. The implications of this are, I think, well beyond my capacity to sound. In particular, you can have a fairly precise account of what the causal conditions are for length, time, and weight. I don't know what the corresponding account for probability would look like.
Various Links of Interest
* "Men" Is Not A Group Capable of Taking Action at "DarwinCatholic"
* Margee Kerr, Why is it fun to be frightened?
* Patrick McKenzie, Japan's Hometown Tax
* The homily Oscar Romero gave at the Mass at which he was killed.
* Charlotte Allen, Peter Damian's Counsel.
* The Record Acting Game with Vincent Price. ht: MrsD.
* Sortes Vigilianae
* Lauren N. Ross, Causal Explanation and the Periodic Table (PDF)
* Jeanne Peijnenburg and David Atkinson, “Till at last there remain nothing”: Hume’s Treatise 1.4.1 in contemporary perspective (PDF)
* I really like this story by Owen Stephens about when a British Lieutenant who had never played a Role Playing Game sat down for a Star Wars RPG (ht: Christopher Lansdown):
Currently Reading
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Tim Button and Sean Walsh, Philosophy and Model Theory
G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention
Mary Midgley, Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay
Jules Verne, The Adventures of a Special Correspondent
Saturday, October 20, 2018
Friday, October 19, 2018
Dashed Off XXIV
A bit long, but I wanted to get through this notebook. This finishes the notebook that was itself finished on July 11, 2017.
A right is an element of higher perspective from which it can be seen that you and I, although distinct, are one.
Inference is built on some immutability or invariance (vyapti).
Human moral life is instrumental to a greater moral providence.
necessarily truth-preserving vs necessity-preserving
Easter : love :: Ascension : joy :: Parousia : peace
NB the Maronite qolo on the new priesthood beginning with the Ascension.
Assessment of evidence depends in part on prior assessment of possibilities.
the face as the resume of the person
Free will structures practical reason.
Expeditionary military action is, by the very fact of being expeditionary, structured by logistics.
Frustration is normal in politics; vindictiveness is a sign of corruption.
(1) If there are mathematical relations, they are necessary.
(2) MR's are possible.
(3) If MR's are necessary, there are MR's.
(4) Either MR's are necessary or they are not necessary.
(5) If MR's are not necessary, they are necessarily not necessary.
(6) Thus: Either MR's are necessary or they are necessarily not necessary.
(7) If MR's are necessarily not necessary, they necessarily do not exist.
(8) Thus: Either MR's are necessary or they necessarily do not exist.
(9) Thus: MR's are necessary.
(10) Thus: There are MR's.
The ancient hearth is a sign of common good.
It is noteworthy that Beowulf prevails against Grendel in the hall because he does not use weapons. Grendel is immune to weapons, but Beowulf wounds him by pulling his arm off.
Beowulf's end is foreshadowed by the linking of his name to that of Sigemund son of Waels.
Note that Romanos takes the Baptism of Christ to be what makes John greater than other prophets.
the aspirational and the personalist aspects of magnanimity
Music gets its character in part from the fact that it is very much both in the world and in the mind, and both aspects are clearly part of our acquaintance with music.
Music has a literal sense, consisting of its melody, harmony, and the like in interplay, and immense array of figurative senses, arising out of music as performed in context or for a purpose.
Dance is heavily structured by different kinds of withness.
A facial expression, in and of itself, cannot say profound things, but it can be profound; so too with music.
emotional expression is to music as a character of instrumentality
Doppler shift shows auditory space linked to visible and tangible space.
It is their withness-structures that make dance and ritual analogous.
The fundamental principle of the diplomatic game is to give symbolic concession to gain substantive progress.
All potential parts of justice have a combined aspect of dignity and justice. (Cp. Soloviev on truthfulness.) This structures the moral debt, etc.
Note that Hume's rejection of the double existence view depends entirely on his account of cause (T 1.4.2.47, SBN 211-212).
We may aim at pleasure itself as something pleasant, bu this is a reflexive action, not the normal tendency of acting.
The Tao is, as it were, the reflection of the Word of God on the world and the human heart, the Way reflecting the Way.
Since perceptions may not exist separately, either the conceivability principle or the separability principle or both must be incorrect.
Two objects are not necessarily distinguishable, as we know that the latter can depend on things like quality of perception and fineness of discriminatory ability. And likewise we know that one object can be considered under two distinct descriptions, reduplicatively -- the fact that we reduplicate at all establishes this.
analogy between positions on modality and metaethical positions (J. Chandler)
the focus of trust (designated task, behavior, or role)
All punishments are imitations of death.
A pile of Maybes is a large Unlikely.
noumenal citizenship (Kant's pure juridical legislative reason)
(1) In principle, capital punishment is licit for egregious crimes against the community.
(2) In practice, there are reasons to be cautious about states resorting to it.
(3) It is admirable for Christians to refrain from, and work for the reasonable abolition of, such punishments, where this can be done justly and honestly.
(4) It is an obligation for Christians to be merciful where ever this is not confusable with injustice.
"...the law, not the judge, puts to death so long as the punishment is imposed, not in hatred, nor rashly, but with deliberation." Innocent III
respect for the majesty of law
The mgaisterial authority of the Church can be exercised in its fullness or in a more partial manner, and likewise, even in plenary exercise, can be exercised more or less solemnly, and likewise more or less explicitly. (This follows just from the character of teaching itself.) These three modes -- plenitude, solemnity, and explicitness -- are too often confused, to the detriment of analysis.
Tradition is not, generally, something superadded to reason, but that within which it is formed to be what it is.
Extraordinary action creates ordinary precedent.
Hume's theory of belief as capturing something important about reinforcement of suspicion (I suspect that...).
diagrams as dependent on modal analogies (particularly to spatial modalities)
One determines the points of an opponent's attack by disposition of one's own defenses, with two matters of concern depending on the subtlety of one's opponent: obviousness of target and weakness of defense.
memorative tradition vs recollective tradition vs speculative tradition
Worn-out traditions revive in stylized form as fashions; some of these fashions congeal as traditions. A forest of deadwood burns, but seeds restore a forest. Cells die but some generate new cells on their own template, and the body heals. Decay and revival interlace.
To reform, one must begin with the way things are.
The Tower of Babel is an attempt to make the builders immune to all possible punishment.
Newman's notes of development should apply not only from time to time but also, mutatis mutandis, from place to place; that is to say, they should still approximately apply if you are the one moving -- there should be constant principle, anticipation, etc.
spiritual authority vs spiritual credit
oddness minimization in everyday explanation
Freedom of religion must include, among other things, the freedom to exercise one's rights in a specifically religious way.
symbolic deference as part of checks and balances
-- An advantage of the British system is that the one who in practice exercises power must do so in a state of symbolic deference to one who in principle represents the greater whole.
"Society and government have two needs: justice and utility. If the government is so organized as to truly render justice to all, and at the same time it promotes the utility of all, then it is perfect." Rosmini
"The Catholic religion does not need dynastic protections, but freedom. It needs its freedom protected and nothing else." Rosmini
rites as moral entities in something like Pufendorf's sense, on analogy with time
"Caprice is the characteristic vice of miscellaneous assemblies." Bagehot
"A Parliament is nothing less than a big meeting of more or less idle people. In proportion as you give it power, it will inquire into everything, settle everything, meddle in everything." Bagehot
The Bayesian approach to evidence, taken as an account of all evidence, is nothing other than a new form of attempt to construct a universal rational language.
few/many/most as ordering of modal operators that are otherwise structurally similar
In perceiving something we generally already recognize it as becoming past.
The families of possible objections to any given argument are necessarily very limited.
empiricist account of ideas // ostensive account of language
-- a detective story involving elaborate and incredible disguises, unpredictable motives, the supernatural, discoveries made by mad scientists, elaborate and bizarre machinery, and a superhuman detective
detective fiction as narrative causal inference
In detective fiction, the primary action is a system of inferences.
Interviews in detective fiction work like letters in epistolary fiction.
- confession in detective fiction as primary confirmation (hence the often elaborate methods for inducing it)
- opportunity as causal access (contiguity in space and time)
"What is done by rule must proceed form something that understands the rule." Berkeley
(1) Divinely revealed principles
(2) Defined articulation
(3) Intrinsic principles of liturgy and catechesis
(4) Patristic consensus
(5) Common positions in liturgy, catechesis, or the Fathers
(6) Rigorous implications of common positions or principles
(7) Probable implications of common positions or principles
(8) Useful plausibilities
"The ceremonial law itself is a kind of living script, rousing the mind and heart, full of meaning, never ceasing to inspire contemplation and to provide the occasion and opportunity for oral instruction." Mendelssohn
In politics as well as art, to observe and see how it is done is one thing; to do, is another.
Infinite dabbling will eventually stumble on something substantive.
Murder is always by instrument, even if organic like a hand. Thus:
(1) Instrumental Possibility
--- (A) Formal: Access ('Opportunity')
--- (B) Material: Relevant possession ('Means')
(2) Agential Possibility ('Motive')
* One must consider motive, at least in investigation, because agents with access and possible possession of means are often legion. One needs to know which to consider first, and how closely.
In practical undertakings, ends reasonable individually may be unreasonable in combination.
Three linked doctrines -- Creation, Incarnation, Judgment -- combine to make all human history a family history.
Republics are often stingy in rewarding good, when they reward it at all.
Some things can only be approached by multiple lines of inquiry.
verbal etiquette and the implicit morality of language
It is a moral error to judge guilt by effect alone, and yet it is one of the most common things.
A crime is a violation of the rights of the community.
Linguistic structure requires sameness across time and causal interaction.
Every political position whatsoever allows the possibility for irrational excess and defect. Many stupidities in politics arise from refusing to accept that a given position does not and cannot confer immunity from this.
A man must have an Idea if he is to live greatly.
There is no fullness of love without memory, for love must dwell.
To evangelize the world properly, we must evangelize it many times over.
miracles of saints as symbols of holiness and its characteristics
Perception has a sort of dual referentiality, to self and world.
It's best not to think of our consciousness of ourself as a feeling of ourselves but as the referentiality of perception itself.
In transition from evidence to conclusion, risks of error are of different kinds, making it difficult to reduce the risk of error to a single probabilistic measure.
infallible teaching authority as structured according to the gifts of the Holy Spirit
The gift of understanding is the highest form of remotion.
penitential practice as the warfare of the Church
Translation is a form of commentary.
the human delight at inversion
What kind of evidence, or whether any evidence, shows up for 'updating one's prior' depends entirely on the kind of inquiry being conducted. Bayesians often talk about evidence as if it just showed up at one's doorstep; in fact, it is always formed within distinct lines of inquiry.
responses to argument from desire for immortality
(1) realism
(2) anti-realism
-- (a) expressivism
-- (b) illusionism (error theory)
(3) skepticism of the existence of such a desire
From every fact a great many necessities may be deduced, for every fact depends on many necessities for its existence.
Arguments from desire really conclude immediately to possibilities, and only thereby to actualities making those possibilities to be.
markets as the sensoria of society
Evolutionary explanations, outside purely physiological cases, too often do not properly adequate cause and effect.
Sanctity carries with it a sort of sovereignty.
Too much emphasis on expression turns poetry into pompous opinion-giving.
You do not understand what is attributed to God when we attribute power, wisdom, and goodness to Him, unless you can understand that any two of them necessarily entails the third.
Human inquiry always takes place in fragmented form, and there are many fragments.
Sometimes one must try out an idea before one comes to understand it.
Who thinks that prophecies have only one sense does not believe in prophecy.
the transmarine argument and breakaway Catholics
Separation of Church and State only works in the US to the extent that citizens are given considerable scope for self-governance.
the three post-medieval blows against the Church: Renaissance secularization, Reformation, French Revolution
Eco's account of the interpretant loses all sense of the "to something".
Heraldic symbolism involves the use of icons and symbols to perform an indexical function.
Eco's attach on iconism repeatedly confuses the actual signifying factor with the interpretant modalities (like conventions of stylization, conventions of expectation, convential salience), which do not constitute but only modulate.
Understanding may be informed by convention, and draw on conventions, without appealing to convention.
Death by its nature involves eternity, whether positive or negative, whether ever or not ever.
Labeling presupposes reference and thus cannot ground it. We use a lable to communicate a reference we recognize.
Science, art, and religion all share the principle that the surface appearance is neither all nor enough.
Every attempt to build a utopia is blocked by a confusion of tongues.
the simurgh as a metaphor for the Church
interpretivist, constructivist, and realist accounts of the external world
Much historical change seems to involve drift of ideas into uselessness -- subtle changes until they are unintelligible or (more often) inadequate for their primary function, or too difficult to teach given the infrastructure, or an impediment to highly incentivized practice.
We do not suppose substance to be something besides extension, etc., but what is extended, etc.
In argument, nothing comes from nothing; it must come from something that formally or eminently is adequate to it. This is obvious in formal logic, but should also be a leading principle in informal logic.
Whenever Hume speaks of fiction, think less skeptically of 'forming a hypothesis' or 'constructing a concept'.
The magisterium in the extraordinary magisterium and ordinary magisterium is a different exercise, not a different magisterium. Kleutgen, who gives us the terminology, understood the constitutive act of extraordinary magisterium to be definition, and the constitutive act of ordinary magisterium to be organic transmission. The former is ecumenical-conciliar or papal; the latter is more broadly ecclesial. This is the distinction to which Pius IX appeals in Tuas liberiter.
line as path not considering width
signs made by/in: cognition, recognition, ostension, replication, evocation
a possible sign situation:
painting -- model object -- purport object -- alluded object
(for instance, a painting of a local model to represent Justinian as embodiment of law)
Freedom of speech is to deliberative self-governance as protection of legislators from penalty for what they say in the legislature is to deliberative lawmaking.
Etiquette is an inevitable part of the structure of language because language is used to address other people. (Philosophers of language rarely consider language as addressing anyone at all.)
Rationality must involve the subject as well as the objective, the sketchy as well as the thorough, the holistic as well as the specifically defeasible, the obscure as well as the clear.
relations between philosophical problems: common origin, shared solution, structural analogy, consequential analogy, inclusion
Even the extremely biased are right on occasion, which is one reason why biases can be difficult to eliminate; by a sort of consequentialism of inference, people give credit even to accidental results, or results only slightly better than chance, and ignore method, means, and intrinsic end.
"The love of system, and of that unnatural kind of uniformity to which system is so much attached, as done immense mischief in the theory of evidence." Wilson
"Much of the evidence in natural philosophy rises not higher, than that which is derived from analogy."
general pressures on the reasoning of an age
(1) logical (e.g., arguments available)
(2) ethical (e.g., what is shameful to say)
(3) pathetical (e.g., normal human passions and cultural avenues for their expression)
(4) infrastructural (e.g., what time, money, manpower is available for various ends)
Even those who know better often speak of molecules as if they were solid little motes linked extrinsically, when in reality they are intrinsically integrating when they combine.
History does not vindicate; it only moves on.
What is dependent is dependent on another, with respect to: change, being, enduring, causing, measure, order.
In the Meno, the slave boy shows a more rational and teachable mind than Meno does.
Ex 18 as type of papacy
Christian love does not depend on prior relationship-building; it must be prior to it in finality and is itself only a source of relationships, while it must also be applied to those with whom one can't form a relationship.
genus-species approach to defining modal operators vs causal approach to defining modal operators
The modern era of rights-thinking began when rights were no longer seen as particular solutions to particular problems but as general solutions to problems hypotheticalized to all limits that could be imagined. That is, it began on the transition from factual response to full-scale counterfactual response, from local reaction to problems to the attempt at complete global anticipation of problems.
Berkeley's Siris as concerned with primacy of mind (cp. John Russell Roberts)
It took a thousand years for the Church to stamp out dueling, more or less, in Christendom,, using its most extensive means of pressure and persuasion, and even then progress was achieved only by combination with other factors that changed the incentive-structure.
It is easier to criticize oneself as We than as I -- and easier to evade criticism, as well.
A right is an element of higher perspective from which it can be seen that you and I, although distinct, are one.
Inference is built on some immutability or invariance (vyapti).
Human moral life is instrumental to a greater moral providence.
necessarily truth-preserving vs necessity-preserving
Easter : love :: Ascension : joy :: Parousia : peace
NB the Maronite qolo on the new priesthood beginning with the Ascension.
Assessment of evidence depends in part on prior assessment of possibilities.
the face as the resume of the person
Free will structures practical reason.
Expeditionary military action is, by the very fact of being expeditionary, structured by logistics.
Frustration is normal in politics; vindictiveness is a sign of corruption.
(1) If there are mathematical relations, they are necessary.
(2) MR's are possible.
(3) If MR's are necessary, there are MR's.
(4) Either MR's are necessary or they are not necessary.
(5) If MR's are not necessary, they are necessarily not necessary.
(6) Thus: Either MR's are necessary or they are necessarily not necessary.
(7) If MR's are necessarily not necessary, they necessarily do not exist.
(8) Thus: Either MR's are necessary or they necessarily do not exist.
(9) Thus: MR's are necessary.
(10) Thus: There are MR's.
The ancient hearth is a sign of common good.
It is noteworthy that Beowulf prevails against Grendel in the hall because he does not use weapons. Grendel is immune to weapons, but Beowulf wounds him by pulling his arm off.
Beowulf's end is foreshadowed by the linking of his name to that of Sigemund son of Waels.
Note that Romanos takes the Baptism of Christ to be what makes John greater than other prophets.
the aspirational and the personalist aspects of magnanimity
Music gets its character in part from the fact that it is very much both in the world and in the mind, and both aspects are clearly part of our acquaintance with music.
Music has a literal sense, consisting of its melody, harmony, and the like in interplay, and immense array of figurative senses, arising out of music as performed in context or for a purpose.
Dance is heavily structured by different kinds of withness.
A facial expression, in and of itself, cannot say profound things, but it can be profound; so too with music.
emotional expression is to music as a character of instrumentality
Doppler shift shows auditory space linked to visible and tangible space.
It is their withness-structures that make dance and ritual analogous.
The fundamental principle of the diplomatic game is to give symbolic concession to gain substantive progress.
All potential parts of justice have a combined aspect of dignity and justice. (Cp. Soloviev on truthfulness.) This structures the moral debt, etc.
Note that Hume's rejection of the double existence view depends entirely on his account of cause (T 1.4.2.47, SBN 211-212).
We may aim at pleasure itself as something pleasant, bu this is a reflexive action, not the normal tendency of acting.
The Tao is, as it were, the reflection of the Word of God on the world and the human heart, the Way reflecting the Way.
Since perceptions may not exist separately, either the conceivability principle or the separability principle or both must be incorrect.
Two objects are not necessarily distinguishable, as we know that the latter can depend on things like quality of perception and fineness of discriminatory ability. And likewise we know that one object can be considered under two distinct descriptions, reduplicatively -- the fact that we reduplicate at all establishes this.
analogy between positions on modality and metaethical positions (J. Chandler)
the focus of trust (designated task, behavior, or role)
All punishments are imitations of death.
A pile of Maybes is a large Unlikely.
noumenal citizenship (Kant's pure juridical legislative reason)
(1) In principle, capital punishment is licit for egregious crimes against the community.
(2) In practice, there are reasons to be cautious about states resorting to it.
(3) It is admirable for Christians to refrain from, and work for the reasonable abolition of, such punishments, where this can be done justly and honestly.
(4) It is an obligation for Christians to be merciful where ever this is not confusable with injustice.
"...the law, not the judge, puts to death so long as the punishment is imposed, not in hatred, nor rashly, but with deliberation." Innocent III
respect for the majesty of law
The mgaisterial authority of the Church can be exercised in its fullness or in a more partial manner, and likewise, even in plenary exercise, can be exercised more or less solemnly, and likewise more or less explicitly. (This follows just from the character of teaching itself.) These three modes -- plenitude, solemnity, and explicitness -- are too often confused, to the detriment of analysis.
Tradition is not, generally, something superadded to reason, but that within which it is formed to be what it is.
Extraordinary action creates ordinary precedent.
Hume's theory of belief as capturing something important about reinforcement of suspicion (I suspect that...).
diagrams as dependent on modal analogies (particularly to spatial modalities)
One determines the points of an opponent's attack by disposition of one's own defenses, with two matters of concern depending on the subtlety of one's opponent: obviousness of target and weakness of defense.
memorative tradition vs recollective tradition vs speculative tradition
Worn-out traditions revive in stylized form as fashions; some of these fashions congeal as traditions. A forest of deadwood burns, but seeds restore a forest. Cells die but some generate new cells on their own template, and the body heals. Decay and revival interlace.
To reform, one must begin with the way things are.
The Tower of Babel is an attempt to make the builders immune to all possible punishment.
Newman's notes of development should apply not only from time to time but also, mutatis mutandis, from place to place; that is to say, they should still approximately apply if you are the one moving -- there should be constant principle, anticipation, etc.
spiritual authority vs spiritual credit
oddness minimization in everyday explanation
Freedom of religion must include, among other things, the freedom to exercise one's rights in a specifically religious way.
symbolic deference as part of checks and balances
-- An advantage of the British system is that the one who in practice exercises power must do so in a state of symbolic deference to one who in principle represents the greater whole.
"Society and government have two needs: justice and utility. If the government is so organized as to truly render justice to all, and at the same time it promotes the utility of all, then it is perfect." Rosmini
"The Catholic religion does not need dynastic protections, but freedom. It needs its freedom protected and nothing else." Rosmini
rites as moral entities in something like Pufendorf's sense, on analogy with time
"Caprice is the characteristic vice of miscellaneous assemblies." Bagehot
"A Parliament is nothing less than a big meeting of more or less idle people. In proportion as you give it power, it will inquire into everything, settle everything, meddle in everything." Bagehot
The Bayesian approach to evidence, taken as an account of all evidence, is nothing other than a new form of attempt to construct a universal rational language.
few/many/most as ordering of modal operators that are otherwise structurally similar
In perceiving something we generally already recognize it as becoming past.
The families of possible objections to any given argument are necessarily very limited.
empiricist account of ideas // ostensive account of language
-- a detective story involving elaborate and incredible disguises, unpredictable motives, the supernatural, discoveries made by mad scientists, elaborate and bizarre machinery, and a superhuman detective
detective fiction as narrative causal inference
In detective fiction, the primary action is a system of inferences.
Interviews in detective fiction work like letters in epistolary fiction.
- confession in detective fiction as primary confirmation (hence the often elaborate methods for inducing it)
- opportunity as causal access (contiguity in space and time)
"What is done by rule must proceed form something that understands the rule." Berkeley
(1) Divinely revealed principles
(2) Defined articulation
(3) Intrinsic principles of liturgy and catechesis
(4) Patristic consensus
(5) Common positions in liturgy, catechesis, or the Fathers
(6) Rigorous implications of common positions or principles
(7) Probable implications of common positions or principles
(8) Useful plausibilities
"The ceremonial law itself is a kind of living script, rousing the mind and heart, full of meaning, never ceasing to inspire contemplation and to provide the occasion and opportunity for oral instruction." Mendelssohn
In politics as well as art, to observe and see how it is done is one thing; to do, is another.
Infinite dabbling will eventually stumble on something substantive.
Murder is always by instrument, even if organic like a hand. Thus:
(1) Instrumental Possibility
--- (A) Formal: Access ('Opportunity')
--- (B) Material: Relevant possession ('Means')
(2) Agential Possibility ('Motive')
* One must consider motive, at least in investigation, because agents with access and possible possession of means are often legion. One needs to know which to consider first, and how closely.
In practical undertakings, ends reasonable individually may be unreasonable in combination.
Three linked doctrines -- Creation, Incarnation, Judgment -- combine to make all human history a family history.
Republics are often stingy in rewarding good, when they reward it at all.
Some things can only be approached by multiple lines of inquiry.
verbal etiquette and the implicit morality of language
It is a moral error to judge guilt by effect alone, and yet it is one of the most common things.
A crime is a violation of the rights of the community.
Linguistic structure requires sameness across time and causal interaction.
Every political position whatsoever allows the possibility for irrational excess and defect. Many stupidities in politics arise from refusing to accept that a given position does not and cannot confer immunity from this.
A man must have an Idea if he is to live greatly.
There is no fullness of love without memory, for love must dwell.
To evangelize the world properly, we must evangelize it many times over.
miracles of saints as symbols of holiness and its characteristics
Perception has a sort of dual referentiality, to self and world.
It's best not to think of our consciousness of ourself as a feeling of ourselves but as the referentiality of perception itself.
In transition from evidence to conclusion, risks of error are of different kinds, making it difficult to reduce the risk of error to a single probabilistic measure.
infallible teaching authority as structured according to the gifts of the Holy Spirit
The gift of understanding is the highest form of remotion.
penitential practice as the warfare of the Church
Translation is a form of commentary.
the human delight at inversion
What kind of evidence, or whether any evidence, shows up for 'updating one's prior' depends entirely on the kind of inquiry being conducted. Bayesians often talk about evidence as if it just showed up at one's doorstep; in fact, it is always formed within distinct lines of inquiry.
responses to argument from desire for immortality
(1) realism
(2) anti-realism
-- (a) expressivism
-- (b) illusionism (error theory)
(3) skepticism of the existence of such a desire
From every fact a great many necessities may be deduced, for every fact depends on many necessities for its existence.
Arguments from desire really conclude immediately to possibilities, and only thereby to actualities making those possibilities to be.
markets as the sensoria of society
Evolutionary explanations, outside purely physiological cases, too often do not properly adequate cause and effect.
Sanctity carries with it a sort of sovereignty.
Too much emphasis on expression turns poetry into pompous opinion-giving.
You do not understand what is attributed to God when we attribute power, wisdom, and goodness to Him, unless you can understand that any two of them necessarily entails the third.
Human inquiry always takes place in fragmented form, and there are many fragments.
Sometimes one must try out an idea before one comes to understand it.
Who thinks that prophecies have only one sense does not believe in prophecy.
the transmarine argument and breakaway Catholics
Separation of Church and State only works in the US to the extent that citizens are given considerable scope for self-governance.
the three post-medieval blows against the Church: Renaissance secularization, Reformation, French Revolution
Eco's account of the interpretant loses all sense of the "to something".
Heraldic symbolism involves the use of icons and symbols to perform an indexical function.
Eco's attach on iconism repeatedly confuses the actual signifying factor with the interpretant modalities (like conventions of stylization, conventions of expectation, convential salience), which do not constitute but only modulate.
Understanding may be informed by convention, and draw on conventions, without appealing to convention.
Death by its nature involves eternity, whether positive or negative, whether ever or not ever.
Labeling presupposes reference and thus cannot ground it. We use a lable to communicate a reference we recognize.
Science, art, and religion all share the principle that the surface appearance is neither all nor enough.
Every attempt to build a utopia is blocked by a confusion of tongues.
the simurgh as a metaphor for the Church
interpretivist, constructivist, and realist accounts of the external world
Much historical change seems to involve drift of ideas into uselessness -- subtle changes until they are unintelligible or (more often) inadequate for their primary function, or too difficult to teach given the infrastructure, or an impediment to highly incentivized practice.
We do not suppose substance to be something besides extension, etc., but what is extended, etc.
In argument, nothing comes from nothing; it must come from something that formally or eminently is adequate to it. This is obvious in formal logic, but should also be a leading principle in informal logic.
Whenever Hume speaks of fiction, think less skeptically of 'forming a hypothesis' or 'constructing a concept'.
The magisterium in the extraordinary magisterium and ordinary magisterium is a different exercise, not a different magisterium. Kleutgen, who gives us the terminology, understood the constitutive act of extraordinary magisterium to be definition, and the constitutive act of ordinary magisterium to be organic transmission. The former is ecumenical-conciliar or papal; the latter is more broadly ecclesial. This is the distinction to which Pius IX appeals in Tuas liberiter.
line as path not considering width
signs made by/in: cognition, recognition, ostension, replication, evocation
a possible sign situation:
painting -- model object -- purport object -- alluded object
(for instance, a painting of a local model to represent Justinian as embodiment of law)
Freedom of speech is to deliberative self-governance as protection of legislators from penalty for what they say in the legislature is to deliberative lawmaking.
Etiquette is an inevitable part of the structure of language because language is used to address other people. (Philosophers of language rarely consider language as addressing anyone at all.)
Rationality must involve the subject as well as the objective, the sketchy as well as the thorough, the holistic as well as the specifically defeasible, the obscure as well as the clear.
relations between philosophical problems: common origin, shared solution, structural analogy, consequential analogy, inclusion
Even the extremely biased are right on occasion, which is one reason why biases can be difficult to eliminate; by a sort of consequentialism of inference, people give credit even to accidental results, or results only slightly better than chance, and ignore method, means, and intrinsic end.
"The love of system, and of that unnatural kind of uniformity to which system is so much attached, as done immense mischief in the theory of evidence." Wilson
"Much of the evidence in natural philosophy rises not higher, than that which is derived from analogy."
general pressures on the reasoning of an age
(1) logical (e.g., arguments available)
(2) ethical (e.g., what is shameful to say)
(3) pathetical (e.g., normal human passions and cultural avenues for their expression)
(4) infrastructural (e.g., what time, money, manpower is available for various ends)
Even those who know better often speak of molecules as if they were solid little motes linked extrinsically, when in reality they are intrinsically integrating when they combine.
History does not vindicate; it only moves on.
What is dependent is dependent on another, with respect to: change, being, enduring, causing, measure, order.
In the Meno, the slave boy shows a more rational and teachable mind than Meno does.
Ex 18 as type of papacy
Christian love does not depend on prior relationship-building; it must be prior to it in finality and is itself only a source of relationships, while it must also be applied to those with whom one can't form a relationship.
genus-species approach to defining modal operators vs causal approach to defining modal operators
The modern era of rights-thinking began when rights were no longer seen as particular solutions to particular problems but as general solutions to problems hypotheticalized to all limits that could be imagined. That is, it began on the transition from factual response to full-scale counterfactual response, from local reaction to problems to the attempt at complete global anticipation of problems.
Berkeley's Siris as concerned with primacy of mind (cp. John Russell Roberts)
It took a thousand years for the Church to stamp out dueling, more or less, in Christendom,, using its most extensive means of pressure and persuasion, and even then progress was achieved only by combination with other factors that changed the incentive-structure.
It is easier to criticize oneself as We than as I -- and easier to evade criticism, as well.
Thursday, October 18, 2018
Voyages Extraordinaires #10: Le Pays des fourrures
On the evening of the 17th March 1859, Captain Craventy gave a fête at Fort Reliance. Our readers must not at once imagine a grand entertainment, such as a court ball, or a musical soirée with a fine orchestra. Captain Craventy’s reception was a very simple affair, yet he had spared no pains to give it éclat.
The Fur Country is the tale of a Canadian expedition, led by Lieutenant Jasper Hobson to establish a fort north of the Arctic Circle in anticipation of the probable sale of Alaska to the Americans by Russia, which would make a northerly fort useful to the Hudson's Bay Company. With them goes Thomas Black, an astronomer, who hopes to study the corona of the sun during total eclipse. They succeed in establishing the fort and braving the extraordinarily dangerous winter of northern Canada, but a freak earthquake seems to throw the world into a strange disorder -- the landscape changes, and Hobson notes that the tide is not fitting the predictions of the almanac. The truth is established by astronomy: Black discovers (to his horror) that the eclipse is not, as predicted, total, which can only mean one thing: they are in fact drifting on a large ice floe. Their only hope is if their floating fort drifts close enough to land to hop off and possibly be rescued by a passing ship. It is a thin hope indeed, but they are an intrepid group.
[With this Voyage, I have gone through 2/3 of the entire series of the Voyages Extraordinaires, and have thus met my minimal goal. We'll see how close I can get to 3/4 by the end of the year -- that would require four or five more works.]
A Fallen Race
From Elizabeth Anscombe's article, "Why Have Children?":
G. E. M. Anscombe, "Why Have Children?", Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, Volume 63 (1989), pg. 48.
This very title tells of the times we live in. I would like you to imagine a title for a lecture eighty years hence: "Why digest food?" I leave it to the reader to imagine -- or think of -- the technology already with us; and the 'scientific advance' and its practicalities, including the resultant apparatus ending in tubes with needles and switches in every house. Also the successful propaganda denigrating the "merely biological" conception of eating and the hostility -- known to have prevailed in the Catholic church for many centuries -- towards its pleasure and thereby towards its spiritual meaningfulness and civilized quality. As whole peoples in our time have regarded feeding their babies at the breast as something rather for savages, so might people of the future regard nourishment by digesting the lovely food we eat in the same way.
Don't think it inconceivable. The human race is a fallen race. It has fits of madness, sometimes merely local, sometimes nearly global....
G. E. M. Anscombe, "Why Have Children?", Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, Volume 63 (1989), pg. 48.
Wednesday, October 17, 2018
The Aesthetic Value of a Duet
But is the aesthetic value of a duet really equal to the sum of the values of its parts played separately? No such thing. The query of one instrument may indeed be in itself a beautiful phrase, independently of the answer given by the other; but as seen in relation to that answer it acquires a totally different emphasis, a meaning which we never suspected. The accompaniment part, or even the solo part, played by itself, is simply not the same thing that it is when played in its proper relation to the other. It is this relation between the two that constitutes the duet. The performers are not doing two different things, which combine as if by magic to make a harmonious whole; they are cooperating to produce one and the same thing, a thing not in any sense divisible into parts; for the "thing" itself is only a relation, an interchange, a balance between the elements which at first we mistook for its parts. The notes played by the piano are not the same notes as those played by the violin; and if the duet was a merely physical fact, we could divide it into these two elements. But the duet is an aesthetic, not a physical whole. It consists not of atmospheric disturbances, which could be divided, but of a harmony between sounds, and a harmony cannot be divided into the sounds between which it subsists.
Robin George Collingwood, Religion and Philosophy, p. 113.
Tuesday, October 16, 2018
A Poem Re-Draft
October Night
I stood at dusk and looked around the garden small and dim;
the fountain dry was cracked, with dust and vines around the rim.
The roses dead were long and spare, the weeds were rising high;
then ghosts from ancient worlds arose and said that I would die.
In long and spectral robes they swept along the garden ways
and sang the songs no longer sung, the songs of distant days.
A Templar march I thought I heard, a troubadour's sad plea,
a hymn of love to loves long gone, a shanty rasped at sea.
Like breezes drifting, softly sped those tunes, like secret sigh.
And 'midst it all a whisper sang; it sang that I would die.
The darkness fell, it drifted down, a-float like falling shawl;
it settled over roses dead and draped across the wall.
I strained my ears to hear again that gently whispered word,
but silence through the darkness fell, so nothing then was heard,
and nothing felt by rising hairs, and nothing met my eye,
until at midnight down the way I heard that I would die.
A maiden walked like water's wave along the crumbling wall
and here and there an elegy from out her lips would fall.
A hint, a clue, a fragile thread, the song would drift my way
with meaning barely out of reach and sense just out of play,
but here and there it rose to reach the keen of sobbing cry,
and then no doubt remained at all: it said that I would die.
The moon was silver on the road, but stars were hid by clouds
that, dark and thunder-mutter-thick, were gathered up in crowds
like ghosts in endless number in some graveyard in the sky,
and somehow in the thunder's tones I heard that I would die.
On far and distant hills the wolves began to raise a howl
and down the moonlit road I saw a figure in a cowl
as black as night in color so that scarce could seeing see
where ended figure and the night; it clearly came for me,
and in its hand a scythe was held, that swept through air with ease,
and at its heels a hound did walk, as pale as death's disease.
The crows in murder raised their wings, all croaking out a cry,
and clear I heard it in their noise: they said that I would die.
The wind was blowing in the leaves and rustled roses dead
and mingled with the panic that was buzzing in my head,
till time itself with nausea was turned upon its ear
and death itself was manifest to brain enmeshed in fear.
I sought to turn, like trembling bird in pit I sought to fly,
but dizzy chills sped up my spine that said that I would die.
A hand was clamped upon my mouth; I could not scream or cry;
a voice was snarling in my ear, and told me I would die.
I stood at dusk and looked around the garden small and dim;
the fountain dry was cracked, with dust and vines around the rim.
The roses dead were long and spare, the weeds were rising high;
then ghosts from ancient worlds arose and said that I would die.
In long and spectral robes they swept along the garden ways
and sang the songs no longer sung, the songs of distant days.
A Templar march I thought I heard, a troubadour's sad plea,
a hymn of love to loves long gone, a shanty rasped at sea.
Like breezes drifting, softly sped those tunes, like secret sigh.
And 'midst it all a whisper sang; it sang that I would die.
The darkness fell, it drifted down, a-float like falling shawl;
it settled over roses dead and draped across the wall.
I strained my ears to hear again that gently whispered word,
but silence through the darkness fell, so nothing then was heard,
and nothing felt by rising hairs, and nothing met my eye,
until at midnight down the way I heard that I would die.
A maiden walked like water's wave along the crumbling wall
and here and there an elegy from out her lips would fall.
A hint, a clue, a fragile thread, the song would drift my way
with meaning barely out of reach and sense just out of play,
but here and there it rose to reach the keen of sobbing cry,
and then no doubt remained at all: it said that I would die.
The moon was silver on the road, but stars were hid by clouds
that, dark and thunder-mutter-thick, were gathered up in crowds
like ghosts in endless number in some graveyard in the sky,
and somehow in the thunder's tones I heard that I would die.
On far and distant hills the wolves began to raise a howl
and down the moonlit road I saw a figure in a cowl
as black as night in color so that scarce could seeing see
where ended figure and the night; it clearly came for me,
and in its hand a scythe was held, that swept through air with ease,
and at its heels a hound did walk, as pale as death's disease.
The crows in murder raised their wings, all croaking out a cry,
and clear I heard it in their noise: they said that I would die.
The wind was blowing in the leaves and rustled roses dead
and mingled with the panic that was buzzing in my head,
till time itself with nausea was turned upon its ear
and death itself was manifest to brain enmeshed in fear.
I sought to turn, like trembling bird in pit I sought to fly,
but dizzy chills sped up my spine that said that I would die.
A hand was clamped upon my mouth; I could not scream or cry;
a voice was snarling in my ear, and told me I would die.
Monday, October 15, 2018
Man's Yesterday May Ne'er Be Like His Morrow
Mutability
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly!—yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:
Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.
We rest.—A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise.—One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:
It is the same!—For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.
This poem is quoted and alluded to several times in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Teresa of Avila
Today is the feast of St. Teresa of Avila, Doctor of the Church. From her Life:
O my Lord! how Thou dost show Thy power! There is no need to seek reasons for Thy will; for with Thee, against all natural reason, all things are possible: so that thou teachest clearly there is no need of anything but of loving Thee in earnest, and really giving up everything for Thee, in order that Thou, O my Lord, might make everything easy. It is well said that Thou feignest to make Thy law difficult: I do not see it, nor do I feel that the way that leadeth unto Thee is narrow. I see it as a royal road, and not a pathway; a road upon which whosoever really enters, travels most securely. No mountain passes and no cliffs are near it: these are the occasions of sin. I call that a pass,—a dangerous pass,—and a narrow road, which has on one side a deep hollow, into which one stumbles, and on the other a precipice, over which they who are careless fall, and are dashed to pieces. He who loves Thee, O my God, travels safely by the open and royal road, far away from the precipice: he has scarcely stumbled at all, when Thou stretchest forth Thy hand to save him. One fall—yea, many falls—if he does but love Thee, and not the things of the world, are not enough to make him perish; he travels in the valley of humility. I cannot understand what it is that makes men afraid of the way of perfection.
May our Lord of His mercy make us see what a poor security we have in the midst of dangers so manifest, when we live like the rest of the world; and that true security consists in striving to advance in the way of God! Let us fix our eyes upon Him, and have no fear that the Sun of justice will ever set, or suffer us to travel to our ruin by night, unless we first look away from Him. People are not afraid of living in the midst of lions, every one of whom seems eager to tear them: I am speaking of honours, pleasures, and the like joys, as the world calls them: and herein the devil seems to make us afraid of ghosts. I am astonished a thousand times, and ten thousand times would I relieve myself by weeping, and proclaim aloud my own great blindness and wickedness, if, perchance, it might help in some measure to open their eyes. May He, who is almighty, of His goodness open their eyes, and never suffer mine to be blind again!
Sunday, October 14, 2018
Fortnightly Book, October 14
1816 was a year without a summer. A massive volcanic eruption in Indonesia the year before poured volcanic ash into the air, filling the atmosphere with so much dust that at times the sun looked an angry red, and blocked enough of the light that you could even at times see sunspots like a pox upon the sun. Snow fell in June in temperate places, and tropical countries had their first winter snow in centuries. Frosts nipped flowers in the bud. Crops collapsed. Livestock grew sickly and died. In rural Europe, Famine held a ruthless sway. In India, cholera took life after life as the monsoon season stretched longer and longer as if it would never end. In China, the fertile Yangtze River valley was under water for most of the year. In the midst of it all, Byron wrote a poem about the end of the world:
In Switzerland, Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin (later Shelley), and a few friends spent much of the summer huddled indoors. "It proved a wet, ungenial summer," Mary Shelley would later say, "and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house." To pass the while, they would write and read stories, and (when the rain would part for a while) do some light boating on Lake Geneva. Having enjoyed a collection of German ghost stories, Byron proposed that they each write their own. It seemed like fun, but Mary Godwin agonized over it. Finally, a few nights later, after a philosophical discussion about what made living things alive, Mary in a bout of insomnia had a ghastly vision of someone animating a corpse, and she had her story idea. Percy liked it so much that he encouraged her to develop it, so what started as a short story became a novel, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, which was a hit from the beginning, and is the next fortnightly book.
Frankenstein was undergoing a surge of popularity during the Golden Age of Radio, so there are quite a few radio adaptations of it. If I have time, I will probably listen to some, as points of comparison.
There was a nice reading group on Frankenstein a few years back at "Shredded Cheddar" that covered a lot of the book (and particularly the ins and outs of the drama-queen-ishness of Victor Frankenstein himself); it was a worthwhile discussion, and worth mentioning here:
107
108
109
110
111
112
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light....
In Switzerland, Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin (later Shelley), and a few friends spent much of the summer huddled indoors. "It proved a wet, ungenial summer," Mary Shelley would later say, "and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house." To pass the while, they would write and read stories, and (when the rain would part for a while) do some light boating on Lake Geneva. Having enjoyed a collection of German ghost stories, Byron proposed that they each write their own. It seemed like fun, but Mary Godwin agonized over it. Finally, a few nights later, after a philosophical discussion about what made living things alive, Mary in a bout of insomnia had a ghastly vision of someone animating a corpse, and she had her story idea. Percy liked it so much that he encouraged her to develop it, so what started as a short story became a novel, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, which was a hit from the beginning, and is the next fortnightly book.
Frankenstein was undergoing a surge of popularity during the Golden Age of Radio, so there are quite a few radio adaptations of it. If I have time, I will probably listen to some, as points of comparison.
There was a nice reading group on Frankenstein a few years back at "Shredded Cheddar" that covered a lot of the book (and particularly the ins and outs of the drama-queen-ishness of Victor Frankenstein himself); it was a worthwhile discussion, and worth mentioning here:
107
108
109
110
111
112
Mary Midgley (1919-2018)
Mary Midgley died on October 10 at the age of 99. From a letter to the Guardian, in which she talked about the remarkable generation of women philosophers coming out of Oxford soon after World War II:
To be sure, 'putting each other down' is very different from philosophical criticism, and Mary Midgley, perhaps more than the others she names, was a master of sharp and pointed criticism. But for her it was always about the argument, not about outmaneuvering anyone. Despite her brilliance, she never got her doctorate, which she would later note probably helped to keep her from being boxed into the standard narrow questions people learn to discuss in graduate school. She only started writing books on philosophy at the age of fifty-nine -- she would joke that it was a good thing, because before then she didn't know what she thought. They are all excellent and rather different from the usual fare.
It was clear that we were all more interested in understanding this deeply puzzling world than in putting each other down. That was how Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, Mary Warnock and I, in our various ways, all came to think out alternatives to the brash, unreal style of philosophising – based essentially on logical positivism – that was current at the time. And these were the ideas that we later expressed in our own writings.
To be sure, 'putting each other down' is very different from philosophical criticism, and Mary Midgley, perhaps more than the others she names, was a master of sharp and pointed criticism. But for her it was always about the argument, not about outmaneuvering anyone. Despite her brilliance, she never got her doctorate, which she would later note probably helped to keep her from being boxed into the standard narrow questions people learn to discuss in graduate school. She only started writing books on philosophy at the age of fifty-nine -- she would joke that it was a good thing, because before then she didn't know what she thought. They are all excellent and rather different from the usual fare.
Saturday, October 13, 2018
Jules Verne, Family Without a Name
Introduction
Opening Passage:
Summary: Simon Morgaz sold out his fellow patriots for a fortune and, when discovered, insisted on his innocence so vehemently that his wife and two young sons believed him. They went into hiding. But after his death they discover clear proof that the rumor was true. The two boys, Jean and Johann, and their mother, Bridget, repudiate the name of Morgaz. Jean and Johann each in their own way set out to make amends, Johann going into the priesthood and Jean into fighting for the independence of Quebec; but it is hard when your father has left you a debt that cannot be repaid and a stain that cannot be washed out. Jean becomes known as Jean Sans-Nom, Jean Without-Name, a freedom fighter feared by the British, public enemy number one, and the British will stop at nothing to hunt him down and execute them. Jean is clever, but it is only a matter of time before either he is unmasked as the son of the infamous traitor, thus losing the love and respect of those around him, or caught and put in front of a firing squad. Can anything other than self-sacrifice wash away the traitor's stain of blood?
Verne is not really recounting history. The early rebellion, and the Simon Morgaz who sold it out, are entirely fictional, as is, of course, Jean Sans-Nom and most of the characters in the story; Verne deliberately depicts Huron Indians fighting for the patriotes, despite the fact that they did not actually do so; several events from the real rebellion are so fictionalized as to be hardly recognizable. This is a work of storm and fire, buffoonery and melodrama, designed not to characterize the course of a rebellion but to depict, in fictional form, the hope that burns inside the fight for independence from an oppressive government. Verne wrote the book after the Franco-Prussian War, during which France had lost the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany, and there is a real sense in which this book about an entirely different continent is about that more than anything else. It is a call to the people of Alsace-Lorraine not to surrender and not to lose hope; the sacrifices may be great but freedom from the oppressor can be obtained.
Favorite Passage:
Recommendation: Recommended.
*****
Jules Verne, Family Without a Name, Edward Baxter, tr., NC Press Limited (Toronto: 1982).
Opening Passage:
"What a sorry sight the human race is," remarked the philosophers at the end of the eighteenth century, "cutting each other's throats for the sake of a few ice-covered acres of land." It was not their wisest observation, for they were referring to Canada, over which the British and French were then at war.
Although France was unable to maintain her hold on this splendid North American colony, its population, by and large, has remained as French as ever, despite treaties and boundary changes. (p. 13)
Summary: Simon Morgaz sold out his fellow patriots for a fortune and, when discovered, insisted on his innocence so vehemently that his wife and two young sons believed him. They went into hiding. But after his death they discover clear proof that the rumor was true. The two boys, Jean and Johann, and their mother, Bridget, repudiate the name of Morgaz. Jean and Johann each in their own way set out to make amends, Johann going into the priesthood and Jean into fighting for the independence of Quebec; but it is hard when your father has left you a debt that cannot be repaid and a stain that cannot be washed out. Jean becomes known as Jean Sans-Nom, Jean Without-Name, a freedom fighter feared by the British, public enemy number one, and the British will stop at nothing to hunt him down and execute them. Jean is clever, but it is only a matter of time before either he is unmasked as the son of the infamous traitor, thus losing the love and respect of those around him, or caught and put in front of a firing squad. Can anything other than self-sacrifice wash away the traitor's stain of blood?
Verne is not really recounting history. The early rebellion, and the Simon Morgaz who sold it out, are entirely fictional, as is, of course, Jean Sans-Nom and most of the characters in the story; Verne deliberately depicts Huron Indians fighting for the patriotes, despite the fact that they did not actually do so; several events from the real rebellion are so fictionalized as to be hardly recognizable. This is a work of storm and fire, buffoonery and melodrama, designed not to characterize the course of a rebellion but to depict, in fictional form, the hope that burns inside the fight for independence from an oppressive government. Verne wrote the book after the Franco-Prussian War, during which France had lost the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany, and there is a real sense in which this book about an entirely different continent is about that more than anything else. It is a call to the people of Alsace-Lorraine not to surrender and not to lose hope; the sacrifices may be great but freedom from the oppressor can be obtained.
Favorite Passage:
In all the St. Lawrence Valley, Thomas Harcher could not have found a better companion than his wife Catherine. She was forty-five years old, as sturdily built as her husband and, like him, still young in mind and body. Although her face and general appearance were rather plain, she was good-hearted and not afraid of hard work. In short, she was the mother of the family, as he was the father. They made a fine couple, so hale and hearty that they looked as if they could live to be a hundred, as many do in the wholesome Canadian climate.
There was perhaps one criticism that could be made of Catherine Harcher, but it applied equally to every woman in the country, public opinion to the contrary. The fact is, Canadian women are good housekeepers because their husbands do the housework: they make the beds, set the table, pluck the chickens, milk the cows, churn the butter, peel the potatoes, light the fire, wash the dishes, dress the children, polish the furniture, hang out the laundry. Catherine, however, did not carry this domineering attitude to the point of making her husband a slave, as many Canadian housewives do. Far from it! To do her justice, it must be acknowledged that she did her share of the daily work. Yet Thomas willingly did her bidding and indulged her whims. And what a fine family Catherine had given him -- twenty-six children, from their first-born, Pierre, the skipper of the Champlain, to the youngest, only a few weeks old, whose christening was shortly to be celebrated. (pp. 130-131)
Recommendation: Recommended.
*****
Jules Verne, Family Without a Name, Edward Baxter, tr., NC Press Limited (Toronto: 1982).
Thursday, October 11, 2018
Evening Note for Thursday, October 11
Thought for the Evening: Saturated Phenomena
Kant makes a distinction between intuition and concepts; both are thoughts present to the mind, but intuitions are singular, referring to objects as such, while concepts refer to objects indirectly by way of characteristics that they have in common. The intuition gives the object, and the concept thinks it. Thus the object cannot be linked to a concept except by intuition (which Kant associates with the senses and the imagination), but at the same time, we could not think about objects without concepts. In Kant's famous saying, "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind." Kant also recognizes, however, that our concepts in some sense can be said to exceed our intuitions; we have concepts for which we have no intuitions, indeed, cannot possibly have intuitions. This raises the question: Is there some sense in which intuitions can be said to exceed concepts? And Kant gives some reason to think that this is so, as well: the aesthetic idea is one in which we have an imaginative intuition that cannot receive an adequate concept.
This serves as part of the background of Jean-Luc Marion's exploration of the saturated phenomenon, that which is experienced as being in a sort of excess of our ability to conceive it. Using Kant's categories, Marion gives an account of the saturated phenomenon as having four aspects:
(1) Quantity: It is invisable, beyond what can be pre-determined so as to be aimed at. You can reduce it to pre-established parts; there is always more to it. He gives the example of cubist painting, in which the painter tries to show you all at once all the sides of a thing, and thereby shows you that there is more to the thing than you would expect, and also that the sides proliferate perhaps uncontrollably when we try to capture a single thing from all points of view at once.
(2) Quality: It is unbearable. It is blinding or bedazzling; trying to capture it is overwhelming in some way. In Plato's Allegory of the Cave, the person who stands up and turns from the shadows to the light is dazzled, confused and blinded, until he gets used to it.
(3) Relation: It is absolute, which means here that it goes beyond what can be captured by analogy to other experiences. It stands out with a sort of uniqueness, so that if we try to capture it by comparison with other experiences, we end up with an 'infinite hermeneutic' -- to capture it by its relation to other things, we in a sense have to make our comparisons in a never-ending variety of ways.
(4) Modality: It is irregardable: while we can experience it, we can't hold the experience. We can glance but not stare, so to speak.
It is important to grasp, and is often missed by Marion's critics, that Marion is not describing a kind of rare and special experience; his whole argument is that saturated phenomena are quite common. It is unsaturated phenomena that are rare, because most of them are artificial. When do our concepts completely capture the experience they cover, giving it in its parts and in such a way that it can be clearly recognized and exactly compared with other things, so that it can be carefully and thoroughly examined? Usually only in cases like mathematics, or rigorous scientific experiment, or precise taxonomic classification, where we have carefully restricted -- impoverished -- the experience so that it fits the concept exactly. Mathematics is indeed the preeminent case, in which we have attenuated experience so much that we can clearly and exactly capture it.
Saturated phenomena, on the other hand, are found throughout common experience and show up regularly in philosophy. We can touch but not comprehend the infinite, says Descartes; Kant discusses the experience of the sublime; Husserl looks at our internal consciousness of temporal flux as something eluding precise conceptualizing. Historical events, and in literature fictional events, are experienced as saturated phenomena; so are paintings and sculptures. We often experience faces this way. So too, our bodies are experienced in this way in many of our experiences, and likewise in erotic encounters the body of the other. The uncanny, the horrific, the numinous, the suspenseful, are all saturated, and so also are objects of religious experience. A common feature of all of these is that they are cases where it's not so much our acting so as to perceive things, but our being acted upon so as to be made witness to something. It is not so much that we grasp them as that we are in the grip of them, in one way or another. (Obviously, it is not all in the same way because they each exceed relation.)
Thus human thought has a sort of double superabundance: concepts going beyond intuitions and intuitions going beyond concepts. But the Kantian dictum which I noted at the start is perhaps overly simplistic. Concepts ranging beyond intuitions are perhaps not wholly empty (e.g., flickering intuitions or connections to intuitions that, while very attenuated, are nonetheless real), and intuitions exceeding concepts are perhaps not wholly blind (e.g., if they have many concepts, or if there are intuitions that we can only sometimes and briefly grasp conceptually at the utmost wavering edge of our ability to conceive).
[Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, Kosky, tr., Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA: 2002).]
Various Links of Interest
* Dean McCartney, The Problem with Reinforced Concrete
* A letter by Galileo was recently discovered, but Thony Christie notes that it probably doesn't really affect much in our interpretation of events.
* Devon Zuegel, North American vs Japanese Zoning
* A fascinating summary of the problems local campaigns in the U.S. have to face (from a Democratic perspective).
* China is having problems with young Communists. They didn't learn that they were supposed to treat it as a symbolic way of saying, "Leave things to the state."
* Laura Booth interviews Donna Strickland, who recently won a Nobel Prize in Physics for her experimental work:
* Michael Brendan Dougherty, The Case Against Pope Francis. Dougherty is a bit harsh, but I think it is true that, if reform is the standard of success (and it was the success most people have been taking him to be trying to reach), the pontificate of Pope Francis is already a failure; there were warning signs in the fact that the people he was clearly trusting in the reform were all under various levels of suspicion for wrongdoing, and it became clear during the fiasco in Chile, when Pope Francis, ignoring the highly visible protests of the laity, installed a bishop widely recognized to have covered up child abuse, then sharply scolded people for 'calumny' when they continued to protest, then was forced by events to reverse course and investigate, through which it was discovered that the laity's accusations and protests had been mild and restrained as responses to the actual corruptions in the Chilean hierarchy. The McCarrick episode has established that he learned not a single thing from Chile, and that neither he nor his advisers really listen even now, so there does not seem to be a shift of policy in the foreseeable future. It looks very much like his tenure will turn out to be an endless series of squandered opportunities. So it goes; it's far from being an unprecedented thing in the history of the papacy.
* Ed Peters, The cerberus of clerical sexual misconduct: a canonical overview
* Michael Pakaluk, On Needing God -- and the Teaching on Hell
Currently Reading
Jules Verne, Family Without a Name
John W. O'Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council
G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention
Jules Verne, The Fur Country
Kant makes a distinction between intuition and concepts; both are thoughts present to the mind, but intuitions are singular, referring to objects as such, while concepts refer to objects indirectly by way of characteristics that they have in common. The intuition gives the object, and the concept thinks it. Thus the object cannot be linked to a concept except by intuition (which Kant associates with the senses and the imagination), but at the same time, we could not think about objects without concepts. In Kant's famous saying, "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind." Kant also recognizes, however, that our concepts in some sense can be said to exceed our intuitions; we have concepts for which we have no intuitions, indeed, cannot possibly have intuitions. This raises the question: Is there some sense in which intuitions can be said to exceed concepts? And Kant gives some reason to think that this is so, as well: the aesthetic idea is one in which we have an imaginative intuition that cannot receive an adequate concept.
This serves as part of the background of Jean-Luc Marion's exploration of the saturated phenomenon, that which is experienced as being in a sort of excess of our ability to conceive it. Using Kant's categories, Marion gives an account of the saturated phenomenon as having four aspects:
(1) Quantity: It is invisable, beyond what can be pre-determined so as to be aimed at. You can reduce it to pre-established parts; there is always more to it. He gives the example of cubist painting, in which the painter tries to show you all at once all the sides of a thing, and thereby shows you that there is more to the thing than you would expect, and also that the sides proliferate perhaps uncontrollably when we try to capture a single thing from all points of view at once.
(2) Quality: It is unbearable. It is blinding or bedazzling; trying to capture it is overwhelming in some way. In Plato's Allegory of the Cave, the person who stands up and turns from the shadows to the light is dazzled, confused and blinded, until he gets used to it.
(3) Relation: It is absolute, which means here that it goes beyond what can be captured by analogy to other experiences. It stands out with a sort of uniqueness, so that if we try to capture it by comparison with other experiences, we end up with an 'infinite hermeneutic' -- to capture it by its relation to other things, we in a sense have to make our comparisons in a never-ending variety of ways.
(4) Modality: It is irregardable: while we can experience it, we can't hold the experience. We can glance but not stare, so to speak.
It is important to grasp, and is often missed by Marion's critics, that Marion is not describing a kind of rare and special experience; his whole argument is that saturated phenomena are quite common. It is unsaturated phenomena that are rare, because most of them are artificial. When do our concepts completely capture the experience they cover, giving it in its parts and in such a way that it can be clearly recognized and exactly compared with other things, so that it can be carefully and thoroughly examined? Usually only in cases like mathematics, or rigorous scientific experiment, or precise taxonomic classification, where we have carefully restricted -- impoverished -- the experience so that it fits the concept exactly. Mathematics is indeed the preeminent case, in which we have attenuated experience so much that we can clearly and exactly capture it.
Saturated phenomena, on the other hand, are found throughout common experience and show up regularly in philosophy. We can touch but not comprehend the infinite, says Descartes; Kant discusses the experience of the sublime; Husserl looks at our internal consciousness of temporal flux as something eluding precise conceptualizing. Historical events, and in literature fictional events, are experienced as saturated phenomena; so are paintings and sculptures. We often experience faces this way. So too, our bodies are experienced in this way in many of our experiences, and likewise in erotic encounters the body of the other. The uncanny, the horrific, the numinous, the suspenseful, are all saturated, and so also are objects of religious experience. A common feature of all of these is that they are cases where it's not so much our acting so as to perceive things, but our being acted upon so as to be made witness to something. It is not so much that we grasp them as that we are in the grip of them, in one way or another. (Obviously, it is not all in the same way because they each exceed relation.)
Thus human thought has a sort of double superabundance: concepts going beyond intuitions and intuitions going beyond concepts. But the Kantian dictum which I noted at the start is perhaps overly simplistic. Concepts ranging beyond intuitions are perhaps not wholly empty (e.g., flickering intuitions or connections to intuitions that, while very attenuated, are nonetheless real), and intuitions exceeding concepts are perhaps not wholly blind (e.g., if they have many concepts, or if there are intuitions that we can only sometimes and briefly grasp conceptually at the utmost wavering edge of our ability to conceive).
[Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, Kosky, tr., Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA: 2002).]
Various Links of Interest
* Dean McCartney, The Problem with Reinforced Concrete
* A letter by Galileo was recently discovered, but Thony Christie notes that it probably doesn't really affect much in our interpretation of events.
* Devon Zuegel, North American vs Japanese Zoning
* A fascinating summary of the problems local campaigns in the U.S. have to face (from a Democratic perspective).
* China is having problems with young Communists. They didn't learn that they were supposed to treat it as a symbolic way of saying, "Leave things to the state."
* Laura Booth interviews Donna Strickland, who recently won a Nobel Prize in Physics for her experimental work:
There's been a lot of attention on your position as an associate professor and not a full professor. What has been your response to that.
That I'm very sorry for the university because it's not their fault.
This is what people I don't think get, a full professor although it's a different name it doesn't carry necessarily a pay raise and I don't lose my job (if I don't apply to be a full professor). So I never filled out the paper work.
* Michael Brendan Dougherty, The Case Against Pope Francis. Dougherty is a bit harsh, but I think it is true that, if reform is the standard of success (and it was the success most people have been taking him to be trying to reach), the pontificate of Pope Francis is already a failure; there were warning signs in the fact that the people he was clearly trusting in the reform were all under various levels of suspicion for wrongdoing, and it became clear during the fiasco in Chile, when Pope Francis, ignoring the highly visible protests of the laity, installed a bishop widely recognized to have covered up child abuse, then sharply scolded people for 'calumny' when they continued to protest, then was forced by events to reverse course and investigate, through which it was discovered that the laity's accusations and protests had been mild and restrained as responses to the actual corruptions in the Chilean hierarchy. The McCarrick episode has established that he learned not a single thing from Chile, and that neither he nor his advisers really listen even now, so there does not seem to be a shift of policy in the foreseeable future. It looks very much like his tenure will turn out to be an endless series of squandered opportunities. So it goes; it's far from being an unprecedented thing in the history of the papacy.
* Ed Peters, The cerberus of clerical sexual misconduct: a canonical overview
* Michael Pakaluk, On Needing God -- and the Teaching on Hell
Currently Reading
Jules Verne, Family Without a Name
John W. O'Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council
G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention
Jules Verne, The Fur Country
Wednesday, October 10, 2018
Radio Greats: Mrs. Stanford's Angina Pectoris (Dr. Kildare)
Dr. James Kildare was a character invented in the mid 1930s by Max Brand. Brand was most famous for his Westerns, but the modern doctor Dr. Kildare has probably been his most enduring character. Shortly after the publication of the first Dr. Kildare short story, a movie was based on it, Internes Can't Take Money, which did well enough that a whole series of Dr. Kildare movies were made. Two characters in particular became associated with the series: the curmudgeonly Dr. Gillespie, played by Lionel Barrymore, and, of course, the idealistic Dr. Kildare himself, played by Lew Ayres.
In 1949, The Story of Dr. Kildare, often just known as Dr. Kildare, was put together by MGM, starrying both Barrymore and Ayres. It had an all-star cast, including the always-solid Virginia Gregg as Nurse Parker, with whom Dr. Gillespie has a perpetual (but still largely friendly) feud of words. The series did very, very well, but it was late in the Age of Radio, and it was cheaper and easier for radio stations to make their own radio series than to buy fancy packages from third parties, so it only lasted about two years, despite its popularity.
Each episode, Dr. Kildare handles crazy patients (or sometimes crazy administrators) while Dr. Gillespie makes curmudgeonly and sarcastic wisecracks; but he always wins through to heal the sickness or triumph over mere bureaucracy. A good one for October, as we gear up for Halloween, is "Mrs. Stanford's Angina Pectoris", from July 1950. Medicine meets love meets ghosts meets butcher knives meets shenanigans about a will and testament. But Dr. Gillespie knows human nature and will bring everything to a happy ending. Well, perhaps Dr. Kildare will suffer a bit from a bruised heart, but, as Dr. Gillespie likes to point out, he's young yet and will certainly recover.
You can listen to "Mrs. Stanford's Angina Pectoris" online at the Internet Archive (number 24).
In 1949, The Story of Dr. Kildare, often just known as Dr. Kildare, was put together by MGM, starrying both Barrymore and Ayres. It had an all-star cast, including the always-solid Virginia Gregg as Nurse Parker, with whom Dr. Gillespie has a perpetual (but still largely friendly) feud of words. The series did very, very well, but it was late in the Age of Radio, and it was cheaper and easier for radio stations to make their own radio series than to buy fancy packages from third parties, so it only lasted about two years, despite its popularity.
Each episode, Dr. Kildare handles crazy patients (or sometimes crazy administrators) while Dr. Gillespie makes curmudgeonly and sarcastic wisecracks; but he always wins through to heal the sickness or triumph over mere bureaucracy. A good one for October, as we gear up for Halloween, is "Mrs. Stanford's Angina Pectoris", from July 1950. Medicine meets love meets ghosts meets butcher knives meets shenanigans about a will and testament. But Dr. Gillespie knows human nature and will bring everything to a happy ending. Well, perhaps Dr. Kildare will suffer a bit from a bruised heart, but, as Dr. Gillespie likes to point out, he's young yet and will certainly recover.
You can listen to "Mrs. Stanford's Angina Pectoris" online at the Internet Archive (number 24).
The Power to Prevent Bad Things
Peter Singer's "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" [Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Spring, 1972), pp. 229-243] has been subjected to a number of common criticisms, for instance that it is too demanding (which has to be formulated very carefully in order not to be question-begging, although Singer does jump too quickly from reasonable to obligatory) or that there are problems with Singer's attempt to dismiss distance as relevant (which is right, although 'distance' here has to be at least partly concerned with difficulty and uncertainty of action rather than just geographical distance). But there is a problem with his argument that I have not seen anybody point out, one which I think is fairly significant: there is a significant gap between the principle to which Singer appeals and the supposed result of the application.
Singer's principle is (in the weaker form he gives), "if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything else morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it." Now, as I noted before, this moves too quickly to obligation -- that we can prevent something very bad from happening without sacrificing anything else morally significant is obviously in and of itself a reason to do it, but it is much less obvious that it is in and of itself a reason to treat it as morally obligatory -- and, indeed, this will depend on what theory of obligation you espouse. Most people would regard a principle like Singer's as true for certain kinds of domain, namely, domains for which you have direct responsibility, but would be more skeptical for other domains (domains for which you have only indirect responsibility and domains for which you are not generally regarded as responsible at all); if that is right, we need to add some principle(s) of responsibility to get it to work, but Singer wants and needs his principle both to be absolutely general and to yield obligation immediately. This is a tall order, but let's set this aside for the moment. A question that should be asked here is about the prevention.
Preventing evils requires making it so that they do not happen. Singer seems to hold that a lot of things count as prevention. Some of his examples are cases in which anyone could agree that you are preventing an evil -- for instance, saving a child from drowning in a pond. But for other examples (and, indeed, the cases to which Singer wants actually to apply his principle), the matter is not so clear, and sometimes it is not clear that there is any sort of power-to-prevent at all. Take the most obvious case: people starving to death in East Bengal is very bad. The action for which Singer argues is donating to the Bengal Relief Fund. But donating to the Bengal Fund is not, in fact, preventing people from starving in East Bengal. To be sure, some of the actions supported by money from the Bengal Relief Fund do (one hopes), but if I support the Bengal Relief Fund, I am not doing any of those things at all; I'm just giving the Bengal Relief Fund a bit of money so that (I am trusting) they will give it to people who (I am trusting) will do those things. Singer's principle is irrelevant to the case: the reason I'd be giving money to the Bengal Relief Fund (one would usually think) is that it is not, in fact, in my power to prevent the very bad thing at all; so I am transferring some of my power (buying power, in this case) to other people in the hope that, when it pools with power provided by other people, someone else will then have the power to prevent it. When you donate to prevent an evil, you are not, in general, preventing the evil; while there are exceptions, when you donate you are usually doing so precisely because you yourself don't have the power to prevent the evil; and the most common point of donation (besides, perhaps, showy appearance, which can be set aside here as irrelevant) is that we, lacking individually the power to prevent the evil, are trying collectively to create the power to prevent the evil.
Singer's argument proceeds as if the power to prevent bad things were an easy thing to find in the world and easy to use when you had it. But neither of these is true. Even for things within our immediate and ordinary sphere of action, for instance, many bad things are hard to prevent. A good example is keeping young children out of trouble, since a lot of things that for older children and adults would not be a problem can turn very bad for very young children; parents and caretakers have to put a lot of time and investment to preventing bad things from happening. While it is very difficult for us to accept it, a lot of bad things that happen to young children were not preventable given what was actually known and feasible at the time. And the more people we end up having to watch over, and the more evils we end up having to prevent, the less and less we ourselves could actually prevent. To be sure, there might always hypothetically have been someone who could have known the right things, or someone who could have been in the right place at the right time to prevent it, but hypothetically is sometimes merely hypothetically. If we are talking about ourselves, we are remarkably limited in the range of evils we have the actual power to prevent.
And even when we have the power, we might only just barely have the power, or might have it only maybe. Even if we might technically in fact have the power to prevent an evil, it might be close enough to the boundaries of what we know that we can do that it might be more reasonable to say that we have the power to do something that would be worth trying, which might prevent it.
Most of the time when we deal with bad things, we do not have the power to prevent them. Indeed, an immense amount of our time, money, and effort goes into just trying to create the power to prevent bad things, because we don't have it in the first place. Donating to a charity is not usually preventing bad things; it is trying to work with other people to create a power to prevent bad things. Volunteering time and effort is often the same. Most bad things are not like the child in the pond; the power to prevent them is not already in place to use. It has to be made, and that itself is not always easy.
Because of this, Singer's principle has a far narrower scope than he assumes (and, for that matter, than most of those reading him have tended to assume).
Singer's principle is (in the weaker form he gives), "if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything else morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it." Now, as I noted before, this moves too quickly to obligation -- that we can prevent something very bad from happening without sacrificing anything else morally significant is obviously in and of itself a reason to do it, but it is much less obvious that it is in and of itself a reason to treat it as morally obligatory -- and, indeed, this will depend on what theory of obligation you espouse. Most people would regard a principle like Singer's as true for certain kinds of domain, namely, domains for which you have direct responsibility, but would be more skeptical for other domains (domains for which you have only indirect responsibility and domains for which you are not generally regarded as responsible at all); if that is right, we need to add some principle(s) of responsibility to get it to work, but Singer wants and needs his principle both to be absolutely general and to yield obligation immediately. This is a tall order, but let's set this aside for the moment. A question that should be asked here is about the prevention.
Preventing evils requires making it so that they do not happen. Singer seems to hold that a lot of things count as prevention. Some of his examples are cases in which anyone could agree that you are preventing an evil -- for instance, saving a child from drowning in a pond. But for other examples (and, indeed, the cases to which Singer wants actually to apply his principle), the matter is not so clear, and sometimes it is not clear that there is any sort of power-to-prevent at all. Take the most obvious case: people starving to death in East Bengal is very bad. The action for which Singer argues is donating to the Bengal Relief Fund. But donating to the Bengal Fund is not, in fact, preventing people from starving in East Bengal. To be sure, some of the actions supported by money from the Bengal Relief Fund do (one hopes), but if I support the Bengal Relief Fund, I am not doing any of those things at all; I'm just giving the Bengal Relief Fund a bit of money so that (I am trusting) they will give it to people who (I am trusting) will do those things. Singer's principle is irrelevant to the case: the reason I'd be giving money to the Bengal Relief Fund (one would usually think) is that it is not, in fact, in my power to prevent the very bad thing at all; so I am transferring some of my power (buying power, in this case) to other people in the hope that, when it pools with power provided by other people, someone else will then have the power to prevent it. When you donate to prevent an evil, you are not, in general, preventing the evil; while there are exceptions, when you donate you are usually doing so precisely because you yourself don't have the power to prevent the evil; and the most common point of donation (besides, perhaps, showy appearance, which can be set aside here as irrelevant) is that we, lacking individually the power to prevent the evil, are trying collectively to create the power to prevent the evil.
Singer's argument proceeds as if the power to prevent bad things were an easy thing to find in the world and easy to use when you had it. But neither of these is true. Even for things within our immediate and ordinary sphere of action, for instance, many bad things are hard to prevent. A good example is keeping young children out of trouble, since a lot of things that for older children and adults would not be a problem can turn very bad for very young children; parents and caretakers have to put a lot of time and investment to preventing bad things from happening. While it is very difficult for us to accept it, a lot of bad things that happen to young children were not preventable given what was actually known and feasible at the time. And the more people we end up having to watch over, and the more evils we end up having to prevent, the less and less we ourselves could actually prevent. To be sure, there might always hypothetically have been someone who could have known the right things, or someone who could have been in the right place at the right time to prevent it, but hypothetically is sometimes merely hypothetically. If we are talking about ourselves, we are remarkably limited in the range of evils we have the actual power to prevent.
And even when we have the power, we might only just barely have the power, or might have it only maybe. Even if we might technically in fact have the power to prevent an evil, it might be close enough to the boundaries of what we know that we can do that it might be more reasonable to say that we have the power to do something that would be worth trying, which might prevent it.
Most of the time when we deal with bad things, we do not have the power to prevent them. Indeed, an immense amount of our time, money, and effort goes into just trying to create the power to prevent bad things, because we don't have it in the first place. Donating to a charity is not usually preventing bad things; it is trying to work with other people to create a power to prevent bad things. Volunteering time and effort is often the same. Most bad things are not like the child in the pond; the power to prevent them is not already in place to use. It has to be made, and that itself is not always easy.
Because of this, Singer's principle has a far narrower scope than he assumes (and, for that matter, than most of those reading him have tended to assume).
Tuesday, October 09, 2018
Newman
Today is the memorial for Bl. John Henry Newman, and the anniversary of his conversion from Anglicanism. A few brief passages from An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent to celebrate:
(Chapter 5)
(Chapter 9)
****
(Chapter 10, Section 1)
(Chapter 5)
Religion has to do with the real, and the real is the particular; theology has to do with what is notional, and the notional is the general and systematic. Hence theology has to do with the Dogma of the Holy Trinity as a whole made up of many propositions; but Religion has to do with each of those separate propositions which compose it, and lives and thrives in the contemplation of them. In them it finds the motives for devotion and faithful obedience; while theology on the other hand forms and protects them by virtue of its function of regarding them, not merely one by one, but as a system of truth.****
(Chapter 9)
There are those, who, arguing à priori, maintain, that, since experience leads by syllogism only to probabilities, certitude is ever a mistake. There are others, who, while they deny this conclusion, grant the à priori principle assumed in the argument, and in consequence are obliged, in order to vindicate the certainty of our knowledge, to have recourse to the hypothesis of intuitions, intellectual forms, and the like, which belong to us by nature, and may be considered to elevate our experience into something more than it is in itself. Earnestly maintaining, as I would, with this latter school of philosophers, the certainty of knowledge, I think it enough to appeal to the common voice of mankind in proof of it. That is to be accounted a normal operation of our nature, which men in general do actually instance. That is a law of our minds, which is exemplified in action on a large scale, whether à priori it ought to be a law or no. Our hoping is a proof that hope, as such, is not an extravagance; and our possession of certitude is a proof that it is not a weakness or an absurdity to be certain.
****
(Chapter 10, Section 1)
Conscience is a personal guide, and I use it because I must use myself; I am as little able to think by any mind but my own as to breathe with another's lungs. Conscience is nearer to me than any other means of knowledge. And as it is given to me, so also is it given to others; and being carried about by every individual in his own breast, and requiring nothing besides itself, it is thus adapted for the communication to each separately of that knowledge which is most momentous to him individually,—adapted for the use of all classes and conditions of men, for high and low, young and old, men and women, independently of books, of educated reasoning, of physical knowledge, or of philosophy. Conscience, too, teaches us, not only that God is, but what He is; it provides for the mind a real image of Him, as a medium of worship; it gives us a rule of right and wrong, as being His rule, and a code of moral duties. Moreover, it is so constituted that, if obeyed, it becomes clearer in its injunctions, and wider in their range, and corrects and completes the accidental feebleness of its initial teachings. Conscience, then, considered as our guide, is fully furnished for its office. I say all this without entering into the question how far external assistances are in all cases necessary to the action of the mind, because in fact man does not live in isolation, but is everywhere found as a member of society; I am not concerned here with abstract questions.
Monday, October 08, 2018
Thou Seest the Gardener of the Stars
A Dead Astronomer
(Father Perry, S.J.)
by Francis Thompson
Starry amorist, starward gone,
Thou art—what thou didst gaze upon!
Passed through thy golden garden’s bars,
Thou seest the Gardener of the Stars.
She, about whose moonèd brows
Seven stars make seven glows,
Seven lights for seven woes;
She, like thine own Galaxy,
All lustres in one purity:—
What said’st thou, Astronomer,
When thou did’st discover her?
When thy hand its tube let fall,
Thou found’st the fairest Star of all!
Protector de Indios
Helen Andrews has an interesting article on Bartolomé de las Casas, at "First Things":
As Andrews notes, Las Casas was a complicated man in a complicated situation, and, an immensely and sometimes irrationally stubborn man, did not always show himself a shining paragon; but he is a fascinating figure, for all that.
The Controversy of Valladolid of 1550 was one of the great dramatic set pieces of the Spanish Conquest. For six days straight, two men debated the morality of Spain’s treatment of the Indians in the New World. On one side was Bartolomé de las Casas, age sixty-five, then at the climax of a lifetime of humanitarian advocacy on behalf of the Indians. On the other was Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, former history tutor to the heir to the throne and a staunch defender of the conquistadors. Judging their arguments was a panel of Spain’s most distinguished minds, and behind them loomed the figure of Charles V, ruler of the greatest empire the world had ever seen. The emperor had put a moratorium on all new expeditions in America while the morality of the conquest was being settled. Whether that moratorium would be lifted, and under what terms, was to be decided by this titanic battle.
Amazingly, the outcome of the debate is unknown....
As Andrews notes, Las Casas was a complicated man in a complicated situation, and, an immensely and sometimes irrationally stubborn man, did not always show himself a shining paragon; but he is a fascinating figure, for all that.
Sunday, October 07, 2018
This Deed of Peerless Valor's Highest Strain
Sonnet on Lepanto
by Fernando de Herrera
tr. by E. Churton
Deep sea, whose thundering waves in tumult roar,
Call forth thy troubled spirit, — bid him rise,
And gaze, with terror pale, and hollow eyes,
On floods all flashing fire, and red with gore.
Lo! as in lists enclosed, on battle-floor
Christian and Sarzan, life and death the prize,
Join conflict: lo! the battered Paynim flies;
The din, the smouldering flames, he braves no more.
Go, bid thy deep-toned bass with voice of power
Tell of this mightiest victory under sky,
This deed of peerless valor's highest strain;
And say a youth achieved the glorious hour,
Hallowing thy gulf with praise that ne'er shall die, —
The youth of Austria, and the might of Spain.
So Winged, So Vortical
To A Modern Poet
by G. K. Chesterton
Well,
What
about it?
I am sorry
if you have
a green pain
gnawing your brain away.
I suppose
quite a lot of it is
gnawed away
by this time.
I did not give you
a green pain
or even
a grey powder.
It is rather you, so winged, so vortical,
Who give me a pain.
When I have a pain
I never notice
the colour.
But I am very unobservant.
I cannot say
I ever noticed that the pillar-box
was like a baby
skinned alive and screaming.
I have not
a Poet's
Eye
which can see Beauty
everywhere.
Now you mention it,
Of course, the sky
is like a large mouth
shown to a dentist,
and I never noticed
a little thing
like that.
But I can't help wishing
You got more fun out of it;
you seem to have taken
quite a dislike
to things
They seem to make you jump
And double up unexpectedly -
And when you write
like other poets,
on subjects
not entirely
novel,
such as, for instance,
the Sea,
it is mostly about
Sea-sickness.
As you say -
It is the New Movement,
The Emetic Ecstasy.
A relatively rare bit of Chestertonian free verse -- to make fun of free-versifiers, of course. 'Vortical' is a mocking reference to Vorticism, an artistic movement that in poetry is most closely associated with Ezra Pound.
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