Steeleye Span, "Gower Wassail".
It's we poor wassail boys, so weary and cold!
Please drop some small silver into our bowl.
And if we survive for another new year
Perhaps we may call and see who does live here.
Saturday, December 15, 2018
Music on My Mind
Steeleye Span, "Gower Wassail".
Friday, December 14, 2018
Dashed Off XXIX
This ends the notebook that was finished on November 8, 2017.
"The logic of metaphor is so organically entrenched in pure sensibility that it can't be thoroughly traced or explained outside of historical sciences, like philology and anthropology." Hart Crane
"The whole of the external cultus of God is preeminently ordered to this: that people may hold God in reverence." Aquinas ST 2-1.102.4 (ut homines Deum in reverentia habeant)
"Thinking is, as it were, talking to oneself." Erasmus
The kingly authority of Confirmation begins with self-rule.
From good that has been given by those who came before us, to make new good, that more good may be given to those who come after us.
God as producer (1) with respect to possibility (2) with respect to actuality
God as conserver (1) with respect to possibility (2) with respect to actuality
God as governor (1) with respect to possibility (2) with respect to actuality
exemplar : possible :: final : actual
"No being is completely self-actualized [autenergeton], since it is not self-caused, and whatever is not self-caused is necessarily moved by a cause, which is to say that it is actualized by being naturally moved by its cause, for which and to which it continues to move. For nothing that moves does so in any way independently of a cause." Maximos, Amb 15
Maximos Confessor
fire -- prudence -- John
air -- fortitude -- Luke
water -- temperance -- Mark
earth -- justice -- Matthew
-- It is surely odd that fortitude is not assigned to earth, but Maximos is thinking of the earth not as stable so much as he is thinking of it as life-giving, and air not so much as fluid as a stable atmosphere. John, of course, is the natural candidate for fire & prudence, beginning as it does with Logos.
The senses function in our mental life not merely in themselves but as symbols of higher things.
love as theopoetic virtue
divine wisdom, philosophy, reasoning in play, sophistry
The notion that Exodus 34:11-26 represents a distinctive 'Ritual Decalogue' has always rested on a false view of progress, and especially a false view of the relation of ethics and ritual with respect to progress.
The character of a political movement is never constituted by its promises.
"To withstand anyone in public exceeds the mode of fraternal correction." ST 2-2.33.4ad2
(the point is, public correction requires in addition some relevant ground of authority)
-- but note that public correction may also be justified by things like imminent danger
Part of our color terminology clearly arises from manipulability, colors as within our causal domain.
The defeasible requires the indefeasible. Suppose 'X is defeasible'. Either this is indefeasible or it is defeasible; if it is defeasible, there are conditions under which 'X is defeasible' is false.
real separation, real separability, relative distinction, intentional distinction, distinction of reason
No one has a right to insert themselves into a community arbitrarily, because communities are formed by common good; they have a moral responsibility to be sure they can in good faith engage in the cooperative venture of seeking and upholding that common good. And the community has the responsibility to make sure, to the extent that it can, that they come to do so, because all right and responsibility in the community as such derives from common good.
Colleges and universities present themselves as middlemen, but give themselves liberties (with both students and faculty) that middlemen usually wouldn't.
Sometimes you have proof,
sometimes only prayer;
either way, you proceed
one foot after another.
Every philosophical system faces the problem of rhetorical fouling -- the slow encrustation of associations and attributions, some of them quite foreign.
The acts of the virtue of religion are subordinations to God:
(1) of intellect: prayer
(2) of will: devotion
(3) of body: adoration
(4) of possessions
:::: (a) by renunciation
:::::::: (1) to God directly: sacrifice
:::::::: (2) to support ministers: offerings and tithes
:::: (b) by promise: vow
Each thing subordinated to God in religion can be unfittingly subordinated in superstition: divination, fanaticism, desecration of body, and so forth.
potential parts of justice
(1) rigorous debt without equality: religion, piety, observance
(2) equality without rigorous debt
:::: (a) to preserve honestas of virtue in society: gratitude, vindication, veracity
:::: (b) to preserve debt better: affability, liberality
money-related virtues
(1) to use moderately: thrift
(2) to give: liberality
(3) to do great things: magnificence
Whether something is warranted is always relative to an end.
testing arguments by: parity, retorsion, challenge (search-based, aporia-based), diagnostic, interrogating the grounds
We apply a term like 'being' to God and to creatures as we apply a term like 'man' to a man and his reflection in the mirror.
To behold virtue in her proper form is nothing other than to present morality as transfiguring what is sensuous, even things like desire for reward and self-love.
Instead of talking about an internal morality of medicine, we should think more specifically in terms of an internal morality of treatment, an internal morality of diagnosis, etc.
Nothing can be an error without being inconsistent with a norm.
Human beings are implementations of Turing machines; we can perform all Turing machine operations in principle. The question of significance is: What else are we?
Note Kant's claim in One Possible Basis that 'Nothing exists but something is possible' is contradictory.
For anything to be possible, something must exist; for anything to exist, something must be necessary.
We can infer from anything that can be a sign.
"All building naturally divides into two classes, the architecture of the beam and that of the arch." WPP Longfellow
Propositional inference is composed out of terminal inference.
relation of noumenal & phenomenal (By relation to mind-body)
monist
:::: materialism -- empiricism
:::: idealism -- intellectualism
dualist -- Platonism, Kantianism
hylomorphist -- Aristotelianism
the inherent militia powers of the people
We infer from a footprint that a foot has been there; we don't need to articulate this in a proposition: the footprint, understood as such, suffices.
Atheistic superfluity arguments violate the principle of remotion. (Chastek)
Philosophy will not get you to heaven, but saints in heaven philosophize.
Virtually no conclusion of the highest mathematical certainty can be achieved in only one way.
Existence is not a purely empirical concept.
A theory of inference must recognize that we can infer 2 from 1+1, and 3 from x+1=4, and 2+2 from 4. Given an incomplete assertion one can infer the element of completion.
The potential is in the same genus as the actual, in the way in which it is potential to the actual.
We only ever know what would have happened by causal reasoning.
cats & meal-enrichment (i.e., the practice of making food something the cat obtains by solving a problem or performing a task rather than just being given it -- some kinds of cat species are more likely to eat properly if they are given the food in the context of problem-solving)
Filangieri on the need for a censorial chamber
chief-and-council structures in government
timing considerations in inquiry (patience in waiting for adequate evidence, coordination of lines of inquiry, inquiry ordering, ethical considerations about appropriate timing)
We can draw an inference from: the universe of discourse, a physical sign, a definition, a classificatory scheme, a resemblance, and so forth. All of these are in fact quite common.
"Designated matter is nothing but matter with a capacity for this quantity, and not that quantity." Cajetan
sacrifice as part of the aesthetics of the sublimity of morality (Kant)
the Fall of the devil: power :: the Fall of man : wisdom
Faith is a light not purely of intellect but of intellect-moved-by-will.
The body is included in the proper definition of the human soul.
Torah is a symbol and as it were a vestment of the Word of God.
bindingness-preserving & obedience preserving in imperative inferences (Peter B. M. Vranas)
It makes very little sense to treat all imperatives as available for imperatival inference.
Act (in some way)! as a categorical imperative
Take the true as true!/Act in a way consistent with what is true being true as a self-evident imperative
Kantian ethics requires a logic of imperatives; the entire ethics is structured according to principles in such a logic.
remotion transcendentals (one)
relation transcendentals (good, true)
correlation transcendentals (potency/act, infinite/finite)
God as principal unifier of: possibility, truth, necessity, space, time, cosmos, intellection, sensation, volition, laws of nature, moral laws, possibility of civil laws
(all of these have been proposed)
(my mind -> other minds) -> exemplar mind
vague something accounts of the external world
add supposition -> something that could be such-and-such
add pragmatic conflation -> somethign that appears to be such-and-such
add both -> broadly Humean accounts of external world
Only the Christian faith has explored the whole range of the notion of sacrifice.
The actions of bishops should be such as are consistent with willing the apostolic faith to be catholic, that is, universal.
the internal subsidiarity of the human person
NB Maximos's argument that the doctrine of the preexistence of souls is analogous to Manicheanism.
NB Maximos's argument that we have rational souls from first conception (Amb 42).
It is remarkably difficult to discover from ethical expressivists what they mean by expression.
Something can only be considered an expression if it is considered as a sign that is a possible means of communication.
"The sacrament of matrimony can be regarded in two ways: first, in the making, and then in its permanent state. For it is a sacrament like the eucharist, which not only when it is being conferred, but also while it remains, is a sacrament; for as long as married parties are alive, so long is their union a sacrament of Christ and the Church." Bellarmine
the robur of confirmation
If we take past and future to be modal operators, presentism denies the legitimacy of a kind of subalternation.
Approximate truth is a causal concept, for approximation is a causal process.
Three elements of a limit according to Whewell:
(1) hypothetical construction
(2) indefinite extension
(3) limiting property
various virtue vocabularies as artificial classifications -> convergence on the natural classification of the virtuous -> exemplar cause of virtu emaking the knowledge of the virtuous possible
God turns our very mutability into a way to save us from the failing that arose from that same mutability.
Every inference occurs within a system of classifications.
Official statements of Church doctrine are verdictives, not effectives.
A polarity (in Whewell's sense) defines a dimension.
Formalized schooling seems to arise to prevent youths in cities with free time from becoming a disaster.
"But to a language three things are necessary: it must express reason, contain reason, and speak to reason." Fairbairn
Ruth as an allegory of the 'Church of the Gentiles'
The earth is riven by the river
roving over land and hill,
roaming through the vale and forest,
never ending, ever reaching,
down to ocean's shore forever,
down to end and all fulfilled.
To say that marriage is a life-partnership is like saying that military service is a bit of adventure -- not exactly wrong, but not particularly insightful.
Sexual customs are often like jungle palaces beginning to rot.
It was three in the afternoon on Friday. In the distance, the bell of Our Lady of Shadows rang out one long, low tone.
I wished you well
by the wishing well;
it was an age and a half ago.
A wish cannot save
and your lonely grave
is draped in the fallen snow.
at times a man must whisper,
or else he blows away
the fundamental need for states of defeasible but presumptive consent
anti-natalism and the problem of evil for consequentialist atheists
half-belief as (a) belief with cautions versus as (b) nonbelief with inclinations
Halfheartedness cannot be a mere deficiency in motivation,b ecaus enot all deficiencies in motivation are halfhearted. Halfheartedness seems to require a deficiency in consent.
Belief by its nature is something that can be shared.
While belief does not come in degrees, its role in decision does, and almost all that is salvageable from the literature on the rationality of belief is due to the latter.
Rights only exist within a hierarchy capable of structuring them.
Prior probabilities should always only be set by a method of inquiry.
Note that Hilary in his commentary on Mt. 8 links justification to absolution (remission of sins): the Law cannot justify because it cannot itself absolve; faith can absolve sins. The reason is that God alone absolves, and in faith the Word of God abides in us so that our sins may be absolved.
Note that at Jericho and Ai, some non-Israelites are saved and some Israelites are condemned; the distinction between Israelite and Canaanite is not the locus of condemnation.
the lunar movement of myth, the solar movement of rational account
Our confidence with respect to a belief presupposes the belief and does not constitute it.
arguments from evil involving direct attribution (God would be author of evil) vs those that are indirect (the evil outweighs the good)
- the latter // antinatalist arguments
PSR denial is a denial that everything is either necessary or made possible; it is the claim that there are things not necessary that are not made possible by anything.
science fiction & Margaret Cavendish's three elements: romancical, philosophical, fantastical
It is remarkable how often in religious contexts 'being welcoming is in fact just an excuse for not going out to people.
We infer that arguments are valid directly from their logical structures, not by mediation of propositions.
In mercy, something good is always sacrificed for something better. There is no mercy without such a sacrifice.
Experiments are optimally described in four-cause terms: What materials are used? How are they given experimental form, and for what end? Who organizes these materials by that form for that end?
John Case: A polity is ineffectual without virtue, as seen in
(a) matter
:::: (1) of which it consists: multitude of men united by rule of virtue
:::: (2) about which it revolves: introduction of virtue in accordance with laws
(b) form: prudent administration involving justice
(c) efficient
:::: (1) remote: God, to whom virtue is referred
:::: (2) proximate: nature with virtue's bond
(d) end
:::: (1) external: peace, honor, and prosperity due to virtue
:::: (2) internal: happiness and peace arising from virtue
Plausibility seems always relative to a universe of discourse.
fine-tuning problems for physics, ethics, epistemology, and semantics (Pruss)
postmodern-ism vs post-modernism
A philosophical movement, to endure, must adapt while cohering together; thus philosophical movements vanish by either stagnating or simplifying into an inability to adapt or else by either diffusing or factionalizing into an inability to cohere.
face-structures // phonemes
Good writing should be as polytropic as Odysseus, traveling widely, figuring cleverly.
To live in the body is to live in a symbol.
Pallavicino's topics of inductive reasoning (see Knebel) and Hume's rules by which to judge of cause and effect
co-redemptrix principle (Frangipane): Mary merits congruously what Christ merits condignly.
Christ merits for us in Himself and through His Mother.
"...it is easy to say whatever you want, if you say it without arguments." Thomas Compton Carlton
Le Grand's three unions
mind-mind: love
body-body: local presence
mind-body: mutually dependent action
topics: dialectical enthymeme
rhetoric: rhetorical enthymeme
poetics: metaphor
A people without heroes cannot easily be free.
Charity orders the acquired virtues by means of the infused virtues.
"The logic of metaphor is so organically entrenched in pure sensibility that it can't be thoroughly traced or explained outside of historical sciences, like philology and anthropology." Hart Crane
"The whole of the external cultus of God is preeminently ordered to this: that people may hold God in reverence." Aquinas ST 2-1.102.4 (ut homines Deum in reverentia habeant)
"Thinking is, as it were, talking to oneself." Erasmus
The kingly authority of Confirmation begins with self-rule.
From good that has been given by those who came before us, to make new good, that more good may be given to those who come after us.
God as producer (1) with respect to possibility (2) with respect to actuality
God as conserver (1) with respect to possibility (2) with respect to actuality
God as governor (1) with respect to possibility (2) with respect to actuality
exemplar : possible :: final : actual
"No being is completely self-actualized [autenergeton], since it is not self-caused, and whatever is not self-caused is necessarily moved by a cause, which is to say that it is actualized by being naturally moved by its cause, for which and to which it continues to move. For nothing that moves does so in any way independently of a cause." Maximos, Amb 15
Maximos Confessor
fire -- prudence -- John
air -- fortitude -- Luke
water -- temperance -- Mark
earth -- justice -- Matthew
-- It is surely odd that fortitude is not assigned to earth, but Maximos is thinking of the earth not as stable so much as he is thinking of it as life-giving, and air not so much as fluid as a stable atmosphere. John, of course, is the natural candidate for fire & prudence, beginning as it does with Logos.
The senses function in our mental life not merely in themselves but as symbols of higher things.
love as theopoetic virtue
divine wisdom, philosophy, reasoning in play, sophistry
The notion that Exodus 34:11-26 represents a distinctive 'Ritual Decalogue' has always rested on a false view of progress, and especially a false view of the relation of ethics and ritual with respect to progress.
The character of a political movement is never constituted by its promises.
"To withstand anyone in public exceeds the mode of fraternal correction." ST 2-2.33.4ad2
(the point is, public correction requires in addition some relevant ground of authority)
-- but note that public correction may also be justified by things like imminent danger
Part of our color terminology clearly arises from manipulability, colors as within our causal domain.
The defeasible requires the indefeasible. Suppose 'X is defeasible'. Either this is indefeasible or it is defeasible; if it is defeasible, there are conditions under which 'X is defeasible' is false.
real separation, real separability, relative distinction, intentional distinction, distinction of reason
No one has a right to insert themselves into a community arbitrarily, because communities are formed by common good; they have a moral responsibility to be sure they can in good faith engage in the cooperative venture of seeking and upholding that common good. And the community has the responsibility to make sure, to the extent that it can, that they come to do so, because all right and responsibility in the community as such derives from common good.
Colleges and universities present themselves as middlemen, but give themselves liberties (with both students and faculty) that middlemen usually wouldn't.
Sometimes you have proof,
sometimes only prayer;
either way, you proceed
one foot after another.
Every philosophical system faces the problem of rhetorical fouling -- the slow encrustation of associations and attributions, some of them quite foreign.
The acts of the virtue of religion are subordinations to God:
(1) of intellect: prayer
(2) of will: devotion
(3) of body: adoration
(4) of possessions
:::: (a) by renunciation
:::::::: (1) to God directly: sacrifice
:::::::: (2) to support ministers: offerings and tithes
:::: (b) by promise: vow
Each thing subordinated to God in religion can be unfittingly subordinated in superstition: divination, fanaticism, desecration of body, and so forth.
potential parts of justice
(1) rigorous debt without equality: religion, piety, observance
(2) equality without rigorous debt
:::: (a) to preserve honestas of virtue in society: gratitude, vindication, veracity
:::: (b) to preserve debt better: affability, liberality
money-related virtues
(1) to use moderately: thrift
(2) to give: liberality
(3) to do great things: magnificence
Whether something is warranted is always relative to an end.
testing arguments by: parity, retorsion, challenge (search-based, aporia-based), diagnostic, interrogating the grounds
We apply a term like 'being' to God and to creatures as we apply a term like 'man' to a man and his reflection in the mirror.
To behold virtue in her proper form is nothing other than to present morality as transfiguring what is sensuous, even things like desire for reward and self-love.
Instead of talking about an internal morality of medicine, we should think more specifically in terms of an internal morality of treatment, an internal morality of diagnosis, etc.
Nothing can be an error without being inconsistent with a norm.
Human beings are implementations of Turing machines; we can perform all Turing machine operations in principle. The question of significance is: What else are we?
Note Kant's claim in One Possible Basis that 'Nothing exists but something is possible' is contradictory.
For anything to be possible, something must exist; for anything to exist, something must be necessary.
We can infer from anything that can be a sign.
"All building naturally divides into two classes, the architecture of the beam and that of the arch." WPP Longfellow
Propositional inference is composed out of terminal inference.
relation of noumenal & phenomenal (By relation to mind-body)
monist
:::: materialism -- empiricism
:::: idealism -- intellectualism
dualist -- Platonism, Kantianism
hylomorphist -- Aristotelianism
the inherent militia powers of the people
We infer from a footprint that a foot has been there; we don't need to articulate this in a proposition: the footprint, understood as such, suffices.
Atheistic superfluity arguments violate the principle of remotion. (Chastek)
Philosophy will not get you to heaven, but saints in heaven philosophize.
Virtually no conclusion of the highest mathematical certainty can be achieved in only one way.
Existence is not a purely empirical concept.
A theory of inference must recognize that we can infer 2 from 1+1, and 3 from x+1=4, and 2+2 from 4. Given an incomplete assertion one can infer the element of completion.
The potential is in the same genus as the actual, in the way in which it is potential to the actual.
We only ever know what would have happened by causal reasoning.
cats & meal-enrichment (i.e., the practice of making food something the cat obtains by solving a problem or performing a task rather than just being given it -- some kinds of cat species are more likely to eat properly if they are given the food in the context of problem-solving)
Filangieri on the need for a censorial chamber
chief-and-council structures in government
timing considerations in inquiry (patience in waiting for adequate evidence, coordination of lines of inquiry, inquiry ordering, ethical considerations about appropriate timing)
We can draw an inference from: the universe of discourse, a physical sign, a definition, a classificatory scheme, a resemblance, and so forth. All of these are in fact quite common.
"Designated matter is nothing but matter with a capacity for this quantity, and not that quantity." Cajetan
sacrifice as part of the aesthetics of the sublimity of morality (Kant)
the Fall of the devil: power :: the Fall of man : wisdom
Faith is a light not purely of intellect but of intellect-moved-by-will.
The body is included in the proper definition of the human soul.
Torah is a symbol and as it were a vestment of the Word of God.
bindingness-preserving & obedience preserving in imperative inferences (Peter B. M. Vranas)
It makes very little sense to treat all imperatives as available for imperatival inference.
Act (in some way)! as a categorical imperative
Take the true as true!/Act in a way consistent with what is true being true as a self-evident imperative
Kantian ethics requires a logic of imperatives; the entire ethics is structured according to principles in such a logic.
remotion transcendentals (one)
relation transcendentals (good, true)
correlation transcendentals (potency/act, infinite/finite)
God as principal unifier of: possibility, truth, necessity, space, time, cosmos, intellection, sensation, volition, laws of nature, moral laws, possibility of civil laws
(all of these have been proposed)
(my mind -> other minds) -> exemplar mind
vague something accounts of the external world
add supposition -> something that could be such-and-such
add pragmatic conflation -> somethign that appears to be such-and-such
add both -> broadly Humean accounts of external world
Only the Christian faith has explored the whole range of the notion of sacrifice.
The actions of bishops should be such as are consistent with willing the apostolic faith to be catholic, that is, universal.
the internal subsidiarity of the human person
NB Maximos's argument that the doctrine of the preexistence of souls is analogous to Manicheanism.
NB Maximos's argument that we have rational souls from first conception (Amb 42).
It is remarkably difficult to discover from ethical expressivists what they mean by expression.
Something can only be considered an expression if it is considered as a sign that is a possible means of communication.
"The sacrament of matrimony can be regarded in two ways: first, in the making, and then in its permanent state. For it is a sacrament like the eucharist, which not only when it is being conferred, but also while it remains, is a sacrament; for as long as married parties are alive, so long is their union a sacrament of Christ and the Church." Bellarmine
the robur of confirmation
If we take past and future to be modal operators, presentism denies the legitimacy of a kind of subalternation.
Approximate truth is a causal concept, for approximation is a causal process.
Three elements of a limit according to Whewell:
(1) hypothetical construction
(2) indefinite extension
(3) limiting property
various virtue vocabularies as artificial classifications -> convergence on the natural classification of the virtuous -> exemplar cause of virtu emaking the knowledge of the virtuous possible
God turns our very mutability into a way to save us from the failing that arose from that same mutability.
Every inference occurs within a system of classifications.
Official statements of Church doctrine are verdictives, not effectives.
A polarity (in Whewell's sense) defines a dimension.
Formalized schooling seems to arise to prevent youths in cities with free time from becoming a disaster.
"But to a language three things are necessary: it must express reason, contain reason, and speak to reason." Fairbairn
Ruth as an allegory of the 'Church of the Gentiles'
The earth is riven by the river
roving over land and hill,
roaming through the vale and forest,
never ending, ever reaching,
down to ocean's shore forever,
down to end and all fulfilled.
To say that marriage is a life-partnership is like saying that military service is a bit of adventure -- not exactly wrong, but not particularly insightful.
Sexual customs are often like jungle palaces beginning to rot.
It was three in the afternoon on Friday. In the distance, the bell of Our Lady of Shadows rang out one long, low tone.
I wished you well
by the wishing well;
it was an age and a half ago.
A wish cannot save
and your lonely grave
is draped in the fallen snow.
at times a man must whisper,
or else he blows away
the fundamental need for states of defeasible but presumptive consent
anti-natalism and the problem of evil for consequentialist atheists
half-belief as (a) belief with cautions versus as (b) nonbelief with inclinations
Halfheartedness cannot be a mere deficiency in motivation,b ecaus enot all deficiencies in motivation are halfhearted. Halfheartedness seems to require a deficiency in consent.
Belief by its nature is something that can be shared.
While belief does not come in degrees, its role in decision does, and almost all that is salvageable from the literature on the rationality of belief is due to the latter.
Rights only exist within a hierarchy capable of structuring them.
Prior probabilities should always only be set by a method of inquiry.
Note that Hilary in his commentary on Mt. 8 links justification to absolution (remission of sins): the Law cannot justify because it cannot itself absolve; faith can absolve sins. The reason is that God alone absolves, and in faith the Word of God abides in us so that our sins may be absolved.
Note that at Jericho and Ai, some non-Israelites are saved and some Israelites are condemned; the distinction between Israelite and Canaanite is not the locus of condemnation.
the lunar movement of myth, the solar movement of rational account
Our confidence with respect to a belief presupposes the belief and does not constitute it.
arguments from evil involving direct attribution (God would be author of evil) vs those that are indirect (the evil outweighs the good)
- the latter // antinatalist arguments
PSR denial is a denial that everything is either necessary or made possible; it is the claim that there are things not necessary that are not made possible by anything.
science fiction & Margaret Cavendish's three elements: romancical, philosophical, fantastical
It is remarkable how often in religious contexts 'being welcoming is in fact just an excuse for not going out to people.
We infer that arguments are valid directly from their logical structures, not by mediation of propositions.
In mercy, something good is always sacrificed for something better. There is no mercy without such a sacrifice.
Experiments are optimally described in four-cause terms: What materials are used? How are they given experimental form, and for what end? Who organizes these materials by that form for that end?
John Case: A polity is ineffectual without virtue, as seen in
(a) matter
:::: (1) of which it consists: multitude of men united by rule of virtue
:::: (2) about which it revolves: introduction of virtue in accordance with laws
(b) form: prudent administration involving justice
(c) efficient
:::: (1) remote: God, to whom virtue is referred
:::: (2) proximate: nature with virtue's bond
(d) end
:::: (1) external: peace, honor, and prosperity due to virtue
:::: (2) internal: happiness and peace arising from virtue
Plausibility seems always relative to a universe of discourse.
fine-tuning problems for physics, ethics, epistemology, and semantics (Pruss)
postmodern-ism vs post-modernism
A philosophical movement, to endure, must adapt while cohering together; thus philosophical movements vanish by either stagnating or simplifying into an inability to adapt or else by either diffusing or factionalizing into an inability to cohere.
face-structures // phonemes
Good writing should be as polytropic as Odysseus, traveling widely, figuring cleverly.
To live in the body is to live in a symbol.
Pallavicino's topics of inductive reasoning (see Knebel) and Hume's rules by which to judge of cause and effect
co-redemptrix principle (Frangipane): Mary merits congruously what Christ merits condignly.
Christ merits for us in Himself and through His Mother.
"...it is easy to say whatever you want, if you say it without arguments." Thomas Compton Carlton
Le Grand's three unions
mind-mind: love
body-body: local presence
mind-body: mutually dependent action
topics: dialectical enthymeme
rhetoric: rhetorical enthymeme
poetics: metaphor
A people without heroes cannot easily be free.
Charity orders the acquired virtues by means of the infused virtues.
On Mount Carmel
Today is the feast of St. Juan de Yepes y Álvarez, better known in English as St. John of the Cross, Doctor of the Church. St. John was a Carmelite who, not quite satisfied with the Order, considered becoming a Carthusian -- until one fateful day he met St. Teresa of Ávila, who was trying to get support for Carmelite convents based on the original rather than the modified and mitigated rule that the Carmelites had come to follow; she was just started her second, and it was in the course of doing this that she happened by chance to meet St. John, who just happened by chance to have taken a trip to the town in which she was doing it. It shows what a chance meeting between saints can do. St. John was taken with the idea and after studying how it worked, founded the first monastery in St. Teresa's reform, and the Discalced Carmelites began to grow at a rapid pace from there. It would be a rocky road -- St. Teresa had to face the Inquisition and St. John was arrested several times, due to the instigations of Carmelites who were opposed to the reforms. But they survived all the trials and did not stop. St. John died of infection on December 14, 1591.
From St. John's Ascent of Mount Carmel (Book I, Chapter IV):
St. Edith Stein on reading St. John of the Cross:
[Edith Stein, Self Portrait in Letters, 1916-1942, Koeppel, tr., ICS Publications (Washington, DC: 1993) Letter 311 (to Sr. Agnella Stadtmüller), p. 318.]
From St. John's Ascent of Mount Carmel (Book I, Chapter IV):
All the wisdom of the world and all human ability, compared with the infinite wisdom of God, are pure and supreme ignorance, even as Saint Paul writes ad Corinthios, saying: Sapientia hujus mundi stultitia est apud Deum. ‘The wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.’ Wherefore any soul that makes account of all its knowledge and ability in order to come to union with the wisdom of God is supremely ignorant in the eyes of God and will remain far removed from that wisdom; for ignorance knows not what wisdom is, even as Saint Paul says that this wisdom seems foolishness to God; since, in the eyes of God, those who consider themselves to be persons with a certain amount of knowledge are very ignorant, so that the Apostle, writing to the Romans, says of them: Dicentes enim se esse sapientes, stulti facti sunt. That is: Professing themselves to be wise, they became foolish. And those alone acquire wisdom of God who are like ignorant children, and, laying aside their knowledge, walk in His service with love. This manner of wisdom Saint Paul taught likewise ad Corinthios: Si quis videtur inter vos sapiens esse in hoc soeculo, stultus fiat ut sit sapiens. Sapientia enim hujus mundi stultitia est apud Deum. That is: If any man among you seem to be wise, let him become ignorant that he may be wise; for the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. So that, in order to come to union with the wisdom of God, the soul has to proceed rather by unknowing than by knowing; and all the dominion and liberty of the world, compared with the liberty and dominion of the Spirit of God, is the most abject slavery, affliction and captivity.
St. Edith Stein on reading St. John of the Cross:
"Pure love" for our holy Father John of the Cross means loving God for his own sake, with a heart that is free form all attachment to anything created: to itself and to other creatures, but also to all consolations and the like which God can grant the soul, to all particular forms of devotion, etc.; with a heart that wants nothing more than that God's will be done, that allows itself to be led by God without any resistance. What one can do oneself to attain this goal is treated in detail in the Ascent of Mount Carmel. How God purifies the soul, in the Dark Night. The result, in the Living Flame and the Spiritual Canticle. (Basically, the whole way is to be found in each of the volumes, but each time one or the other of the stages is predominant.)
[Edith Stein, Self Portrait in Letters, 1916-1942, Koeppel, tr., ICS Publications (Washington, DC: 1993) Letter 311 (to Sr. Agnella Stadtmüller), p. 318.]
Thursday, December 13, 2018
The World's Whole Sap Is Sunk
A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy's Day, Being The Shortest Day
by John Donne
'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world's whole sap is sunk;
The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph.
Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.
All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;
I, by Love's limbec, am the grave
Of all that's nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown'd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.
But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)
Of the first nothing the elixir grown;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love; all, all some properties invest;
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light and body must be here.
But I am none; nor will my sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all;
Since she enjoys her long night's festival,
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.
St. Lucy's Day, which is today, is a fair way from the shortest day of the year in the Gregorian calendar, but in the Julian calendar it was always around the Winter Solstice. Because of St. Lucy's name, her feast was always a feast of light amid the winter darkness. In modern times Christmas, which exerts an irresistible gravitational attraction on celebrations in its vicinity, has assimilated some of St. Lucy's celebratory customs just as it has assimilated customs associated with St. Nicholas, Advent, St. Stephen, and Epiphany, but St. Lucy's Day is still quite important in its own right in Scandinavia, among both Catholics and Lutherans.
Wednesday, December 12, 2018
Violence and Respect
What is the exact linguistic opposite of the word "violence" if not "respect"? And everybody knows what a large role "respect" plays in the two most important works of moral philosophy of the modern age, Kant's Critique of Practical Reason and Rosmini's Principles of Ethics. Do we need to recall that according to Kant respect is a very special sentiment, because on the one hand it is awareness of our subordination to the absolute authority of the law, and on the other it is awareness of our participation in the absolute value of the law, and therefore it is what makes us recognize our own dignity? Thus, we can say that respect for the law prevents my will from becoming an absolute, and respect for the other person prevents my action from becoming violent. Likewise, do we need to recall the first principle of Rosmini's ethics, which is respect for the order of being?
Augusto Del Noce, "Violence and Modern Gnosticism", The Crisis of Modernity, Lancellotti, ed. & tr. McGill-Queen's University Press (Chicago: 2014) pp. 26-27.
Monday, December 10, 2018
Res and Aliquid
Being (ens in Latin) is a transcendental, not confinable to any single category, and a common tradition takes there to be five primary transcendental attributes of being that apply to every being in some way. The medievals used the mnemonic reubau to capture them all: res, ens, unum, bonum, aliquid, verum. (If you wanted an English mnemonic to remember the Latin words, you could use bureau instead.) Ens, of course, is being, unum is one, bonum is good, and verum is true. The usual translations for res and aliquid are 'thing' and 'something', respectively, which is how we would usually translate them in other contexts. But in this context, this is probably wrong.
Take Aquinas's account of the six. Being (ens) is first and most fundamental. We can then add the other attributes by considering being absolutely or in relation to another. Good (bonum) and true (verum) are being relative to another, good as being relative to desiring and true as being relative to knowing. These are both, however, based on correspondence -- desiring and knowing are acts that can in principle cover any kind of being. There is a different way in which being can be considered relative to another, and that is by being distinguished from another. This is aliquid, which Aquinas (and most other medieval scholastics) relates to aliud quid, more or less 'another what', i.e., something that is other than what something else is. Note that it's quite important that aliquid convey the notion of distinction or otherness, and that aliquid be related to aliud. Quite clearly neither of these are captured by 'something' as a translation. Something is aliquid insofar as it is distinct from something else.
If we take being absolutely, in itself, we can do so affirmatively or negatively. If we take it negatively, we get one (unum), that is being undivided. Res is what we get when we take being in itself affirmatively, that is, in terms of its positive content. Aquinas follows Avicenna in taking this transcendental to capture the essence or quiddity (whatness) of being. When res is a transcendental attribute of being, it is supposed to capture the quidditas, the whatness, of a thing. Now, the English word 'thing' is very flexible, which is why it's able to keep up with the very flexible res, but it does not capture the essential element here, which is the notion of positive content. And whenever you look at important uses of res in Latin, they always convey something more robust than the English word 'thing' can convey. 'Thing' captures the generality, but not the suggestion of content, the idea that we are talking about something, however generally, in a way that emphasizes what it is. Res publica is not so bland and vague as 'the public thing' makes it sound; it indicates the very content that is public, the substantively public, which is why you need something like 'the common weal' to capture it. The title of the encyclical, Rerum novarum, could be translated as 'of new things', but this anemic translation does not convey the point. It indicates the very substance of things being innovated; the correct translation of the encyclical is more like "Of Revolution(s)" or "Of Upheavals". (The first words of the encyclical, from which the title comes, are Rerum novarum semel excitata cupidine, which I would crudely translate as something like 'the now-stimulated craving for upheavals'.) Not just 'new things' but substantive novelties. And so it is with other things. Res emphasizes the very character or nature that makes it whatever it is. 'Thing', while general enough, is so general as to lose this, the key element that makes res an important concept.
Obviously we have in English no exact correspondence to res and to aliquid. But I would suggest that we would at least get closer if we translated, in discussion of transcendentals, aliquid as 'another', and res, not aliquid, as 'something'. 'Another' has the connection to otherness that aliquid has. And 'something', through the 'some', comes closer to capturing a positive notion of content. ('Substance', in the broad sense, would work better in some ways, but obviously it's always already being used in a narrower sense in these discussions from something that is not transcendental.) Possibly there are better translations, but it's certainly the case that 'thing' for res and 'something' for aliquid don't really cut it.
Take Aquinas's account of the six. Being (ens) is first and most fundamental. We can then add the other attributes by considering being absolutely or in relation to another. Good (bonum) and true (verum) are being relative to another, good as being relative to desiring and true as being relative to knowing. These are both, however, based on correspondence -- desiring and knowing are acts that can in principle cover any kind of being. There is a different way in which being can be considered relative to another, and that is by being distinguished from another. This is aliquid, which Aquinas (and most other medieval scholastics) relates to aliud quid, more or less 'another what', i.e., something that is other than what something else is. Note that it's quite important that aliquid convey the notion of distinction or otherness, and that aliquid be related to aliud. Quite clearly neither of these are captured by 'something' as a translation. Something is aliquid insofar as it is distinct from something else.
If we take being absolutely, in itself, we can do so affirmatively or negatively. If we take it negatively, we get one (unum), that is being undivided. Res is what we get when we take being in itself affirmatively, that is, in terms of its positive content. Aquinas follows Avicenna in taking this transcendental to capture the essence or quiddity (whatness) of being. When res is a transcendental attribute of being, it is supposed to capture the quidditas, the whatness, of a thing. Now, the English word 'thing' is very flexible, which is why it's able to keep up with the very flexible res, but it does not capture the essential element here, which is the notion of positive content. And whenever you look at important uses of res in Latin, they always convey something more robust than the English word 'thing' can convey. 'Thing' captures the generality, but not the suggestion of content, the idea that we are talking about something, however generally, in a way that emphasizes what it is. Res publica is not so bland and vague as 'the public thing' makes it sound; it indicates the very content that is public, the substantively public, which is why you need something like 'the common weal' to capture it. The title of the encyclical, Rerum novarum, could be translated as 'of new things', but this anemic translation does not convey the point. It indicates the very substance of things being innovated; the correct translation of the encyclical is more like "Of Revolution(s)" or "Of Upheavals". (The first words of the encyclical, from which the title comes, are Rerum novarum semel excitata cupidine, which I would crudely translate as something like 'the now-stimulated craving for upheavals'.) Not just 'new things' but substantive novelties. And so it is with other things. Res emphasizes the very character or nature that makes it whatever it is. 'Thing', while general enough, is so general as to lose this, the key element that makes res an important concept.
Obviously we have in English no exact correspondence to res and to aliquid. But I would suggest that we would at least get closer if we translated, in discussion of transcendentals, aliquid as 'another', and res, not aliquid, as 'something'. 'Another' has the connection to otherness that aliquid has. And 'something', through the 'some', comes closer to capturing a positive notion of content. ('Substance', in the broad sense, would work better in some ways, but obviously it's always already being used in a narrower sense in these discussions from something that is not transcendental.) Possibly there are better translations, but it's certainly the case that 'thing' for res and 'something' for aliquid don't really cut it.
Sunday, December 09, 2018
Jules Verne, Paris in the Twentieth Century; (with Michel Verne) The Lighthouse at the End of the World
Introduction
Opening Passages: From Paris in the Twentieth Century:
From The Lighthouse at the End of the World:
Summary: It is always dangerous to treat novels as reflecting their author's lives, particularly when the novelist is as imaginative as Jules Verne. However, in understanding Paris in the Twentieth Century, it is perhaps relevant to know that while Jules Verne wanted to write plays, his father pressured him heavily to become a lawyer, and while he was a law student, the woman he wanted to marry was married off by her family to a wealthy landowner because her family did not think it acceptable for a young woman to marry a young student without a significant income. When Verne began collaborating with the younger Dumas, he began to pursue a literary rather than a legal career, against his father's protests. However, when he began again to consider marriage, he recognized that he would need a steadier income, and became a stock broker. He was competent enough at it, and the job got him his marriage -- but he continued to aim for his literary career. Verne knew very well the difficulty of literary ambitions in a society obsessed with practicality and profit.
Michel Dufrénoy, sixteen years old, gets a degree in Classics, and everyone thinks him a fool for it, because what can you do with Latin composition? After his graduation, Michel's uncle tells him that he must have a practical job, and gets him a position as a clerk in a banking company, where he can work his way up. Unfortunately, Michel is hopelessly impractical and turns out to have no skills useful for any clerical tasks, until he is finally assigned to The Ledger. It is exactly what the name suggests: a huge ledger in which the company's financial statement is displayed to the world in gorgeous calligraphic style; Michel will be dictating for the calligrapher, Quinsonnas, an artist of thirty years old who, like Michel, has difficulty fitting in because of his artistic ambitions. They are both barely holding on in a society that sees no value except monetary value. Michel falls in love with a girl, Lucy, and Quinsonnas sourly tells him that there are no women anymore, just female careerists; unfortunately, Quinsonnas gets so caught up in his diatribe that he spills ink on The Ledger, and just like that, the last job that either could have is gone. Michel becomes a starving artist, writing his book of poetry, which is then rejected by every publisher in Paris. And then a winter comes that is so cold that there are food shortages everywhere, and little hope becomes no hope.
The Paris in which Michel Dufrénoy lives is a city of wonders. There are electric lights everywhere, trains that run on magnets and compressed air, synthetic food, calculating machines, flexible and comfortable clothes woven out of metal, and more. However, it is also dominated by money above all other things. People have sometimes suggested that The Ledger is a sign of Verne's prophetic prowess having failed, but I think this is not true in the sense that is usually meant. Large and wealthy companies have always wasted money in gaudy and conspicuous things done primarily to impress; you have only to look at some of the more successful tech companies today to see similar things, and in the actual 1960s they were likely more brazen. If anything, the implausibility of The Ledger today is not in some company paying an artist to decorate a book in larger-than-life public view but in being that transparent about its finances. The company at which Michel works, being a monopoly in its own right, is very confident of its ability to turn a profit each day. But that just underlines the point, and makes The Ledger a memorable symbol. You learn a lot about a society from what it will devote its artistic resources to, whatever those resources might be; and what captures the attention even of Paris in the twentieth century, enough to inspire them to art, is a record of financial victories. Everything else -- including entertainment, as Michel tries, and fails, to write plays according to formula -- is industrialized; but The Ledger is alone treated as a thing of beauty and value in its own right.
Michel is over-the-top impractical; he fails at literally everything except Latin nobody cares about and poetry that will never sell. It's not surprising that Hetzel, Verne's publisher, found him exasperating and asked why he couldn't get a job delivering packages or something. But part of Verne's point, I take it, is that in a society that was more balanced, Michel would find at least some place; it's the ruthlessness of society's practicality that chases him away, its unwillingness to tolerate any inefficiency and its refusal to allow that there is anything more important than what is profitable. The Paris in which Michel Dufrénoy lives is indeed a city of wonders. But it is not a city that fulfills all of human potential, and none of those wonders prevent Michel's story from being a tragedy.
The Lighthouse at the End of the World, revised and published posthumously by Michel Verne shortly after Jules Verne's death, is a different sort of tale entirely. A new lighthouse has been built by the Argentine navy at the far south reaches of the South American continent, thus opening up passages and bays that previously were too dangerous for regular use. Vasquez, Moriz, and Felipe have been assigned as the first lighthouse keepers. Unbeknownst to them, however, the island on which the lighthouse has been built is also sheltering shipwrecked pirates who are trying to find a way to leave that does not result in their capture by the navy. Their plan involves the seizure of the lighthouse once the lighthouse keepers no longer have their naval support. They put out the light, leading to the shipwreck of the American ship, The Century, from which only one sailor survivors, John Davis. Together Vasquez and Davis will have to play a dangerous game of keeping the pirates from leaving before the Argentine dispatch ship returns with soldiers who can bring the pirates to justice. It makes a solid no-frills adventure story that lays the scene slowly in the first half so that it can be fast-paced in the second half.
Verne tends to draw on two sources for his literary effects -- the romance of geography and the romance of scientific frontiers. While both are present in both of these works to some extent, Paris is very much more focused on the scientific frontiers kind; the geography is basically just that of Paris and its environs, although it plays a substantial role at important points in the novel. Lighthouse is more focused on the geographical kind, although it does get into state-of-the-art (for the early 1900s) lighthouse technology. Likewise, Verne tends to make use of two kinds of story-interest: satire and adventure. Paris is definitely on the satire side and Lighthouse is definitely on the adventure side. Between them, these two works just outside of the ordinary Voyages Extraordinaires -- the first having been turned down for the series and the second a draft manuscript published only after Verne's death with his son's revisions -- do a good job of capturing the range of Verne's overall work.
Favorite Passages: From Paris:
From Lighthouse:
Recommendation: Recommended, both. Paris is very good if you like the more technological side of Verne, and Lighthouse is quite enjoyable if you like the more adventurous side.
*****
Jules Verne, Paris in the Twentieth Century, Howard, tr., Ballantine (New York: 1996).
Jules Verne, The Lighthouse at the End of the World, Metcalfe, tr., Fredonia Books (Amsterdam: 2001).
Opening Passages: From Paris in the Twentieth Century:
On August 13, 1960, a portion of the Parisian populace headed for the many Métro stations from which various local trains would take them to what had once been the Champ-de-Mars. It was Prize Day at the Academic Credit Union, the vast institution of public education, and over this solemn ceremony His Excellency the Minister of Improvements of the City of Paris was to preside.
The Academic Credit Union and the age's industrial aims were in perfect harmony: what the previous century called Progress had undergone enormous developments. Monopoly, that ne plus ultra of perfection, held the entire country in its talons; unions were founded, organized, the unexpected results of their proliferation would certainly have amazed our fathers. (p. 3)
From The Lighthouse at the End of the World:
The sun was setting behind the hills which bounded the view to the west. The weather was fine. On the other side, over the sea, which to the north-east and east was indistinguishable from the sky, a few tiny clouds reflected the sun's last rays, soon to be extinguished in the shades of the twilight, which lasts for a considerable time in this high latitude of the fifty-fifth degree of the southern hemisphere. (p. 1)
Summary: It is always dangerous to treat novels as reflecting their author's lives, particularly when the novelist is as imaginative as Jules Verne. However, in understanding Paris in the Twentieth Century, it is perhaps relevant to know that while Jules Verne wanted to write plays, his father pressured him heavily to become a lawyer, and while he was a law student, the woman he wanted to marry was married off by her family to a wealthy landowner because her family did not think it acceptable for a young woman to marry a young student without a significant income. When Verne began collaborating with the younger Dumas, he began to pursue a literary rather than a legal career, against his father's protests. However, when he began again to consider marriage, he recognized that he would need a steadier income, and became a stock broker. He was competent enough at it, and the job got him his marriage -- but he continued to aim for his literary career. Verne knew very well the difficulty of literary ambitions in a society obsessed with practicality and profit.
Michel Dufrénoy, sixteen years old, gets a degree in Classics, and everyone thinks him a fool for it, because what can you do with Latin composition? After his graduation, Michel's uncle tells him that he must have a practical job, and gets him a position as a clerk in a banking company, where he can work his way up. Unfortunately, Michel is hopelessly impractical and turns out to have no skills useful for any clerical tasks, until he is finally assigned to The Ledger. It is exactly what the name suggests: a huge ledger in which the company's financial statement is displayed to the world in gorgeous calligraphic style; Michel will be dictating for the calligrapher, Quinsonnas, an artist of thirty years old who, like Michel, has difficulty fitting in because of his artistic ambitions. They are both barely holding on in a society that sees no value except monetary value. Michel falls in love with a girl, Lucy, and Quinsonnas sourly tells him that there are no women anymore, just female careerists; unfortunately, Quinsonnas gets so caught up in his diatribe that he spills ink on The Ledger, and just like that, the last job that either could have is gone. Michel becomes a starving artist, writing his book of poetry, which is then rejected by every publisher in Paris. And then a winter comes that is so cold that there are food shortages everywhere, and little hope becomes no hope.
The Paris in which Michel Dufrénoy lives is a city of wonders. There are electric lights everywhere, trains that run on magnets and compressed air, synthetic food, calculating machines, flexible and comfortable clothes woven out of metal, and more. However, it is also dominated by money above all other things. People have sometimes suggested that The Ledger is a sign of Verne's prophetic prowess having failed, but I think this is not true in the sense that is usually meant. Large and wealthy companies have always wasted money in gaudy and conspicuous things done primarily to impress; you have only to look at some of the more successful tech companies today to see similar things, and in the actual 1960s they were likely more brazen. If anything, the implausibility of The Ledger today is not in some company paying an artist to decorate a book in larger-than-life public view but in being that transparent about its finances. The company at which Michel works, being a monopoly in its own right, is very confident of its ability to turn a profit each day. But that just underlines the point, and makes The Ledger a memorable symbol. You learn a lot about a society from what it will devote its artistic resources to, whatever those resources might be; and what captures the attention even of Paris in the twentieth century, enough to inspire them to art, is a record of financial victories. Everything else -- including entertainment, as Michel tries, and fails, to write plays according to formula -- is industrialized; but The Ledger is alone treated as a thing of beauty and value in its own right.
Michel is over-the-top impractical; he fails at literally everything except Latin nobody cares about and poetry that will never sell. It's not surprising that Hetzel, Verne's publisher, found him exasperating and asked why he couldn't get a job delivering packages or something. But part of Verne's point, I take it, is that in a society that was more balanced, Michel would find at least some place; it's the ruthlessness of society's practicality that chases him away, its unwillingness to tolerate any inefficiency and its refusal to allow that there is anything more important than what is profitable. The Paris in which Michel Dufrénoy lives is indeed a city of wonders. But it is not a city that fulfills all of human potential, and none of those wonders prevent Michel's story from being a tragedy.
The Lighthouse at the End of the World, revised and published posthumously by Michel Verne shortly after Jules Verne's death, is a different sort of tale entirely. A new lighthouse has been built by the Argentine navy at the far south reaches of the South American continent, thus opening up passages and bays that previously were too dangerous for regular use. Vasquez, Moriz, and Felipe have been assigned as the first lighthouse keepers. Unbeknownst to them, however, the island on which the lighthouse has been built is also sheltering shipwrecked pirates who are trying to find a way to leave that does not result in their capture by the navy. Their plan involves the seizure of the lighthouse once the lighthouse keepers no longer have their naval support. They put out the light, leading to the shipwreck of the American ship, The Century, from which only one sailor survivors, John Davis. Together Vasquez and Davis will have to play a dangerous game of keeping the pirates from leaving before the Argentine dispatch ship returns with soldiers who can bring the pirates to justice. It makes a solid no-frills adventure story that lays the scene slowly in the first half so that it can be fast-paced in the second half.
Verne tends to draw on two sources for his literary effects -- the romance of geography and the romance of scientific frontiers. While both are present in both of these works to some extent, Paris is very much more focused on the scientific frontiers kind; the geography is basically just that of Paris and its environs, although it plays a substantial role at important points in the novel. Lighthouse is more focused on the geographical kind, although it does get into state-of-the-art (for the early 1900s) lighthouse technology. Likewise, Verne tends to make use of two kinds of story-interest: satire and adventure. Paris is definitely on the satire side and Lighthouse is definitely on the adventure side. Between them, these two works just outside of the ordinary Voyages Extraordinaires -- the first having been turned down for the series and the second a draft manuscript published only after Verne's death with his son's revisions -- do a good job of capturing the range of Verne's overall work.
Favorite Passages: From Paris:
"If I were absolutely free, Uncle," the young man replied, "I'd like to put into practice that definition of happiness I once read somewhere, and which involves four conditions."
"And what, without being too inquisitive, might they be?" asked Quinsonnas.
"Life in the open air," answered Michel, "the love of a woman, detachment from all ambition, and the creation of a new form of beauty."
"Well then!" exclaimed the pianist with a laugh, Michel's already achieved half his program."
"How's that?" asked Uncle Huguenin.
""Life in the open air--he's already been thrown onto the street!" (pp. 162-163)
From Lighthouse:
Without a moment's hesitation Vasquez left the watch room and hurried down the staircase into the quarters of the ground floor.
There was not a second to lose. Already the sound of the boat sheering off from the schooner to bring some of the crew ashore could be heard.
Vasquez seized a couple of revolvers, which he slipped into his belt, crammed a few provisions into a bag, which he threw over his shoulder. He then came out of the quarters and ran rapidly down the slope of the enclosure, to disappear into the darkness undetected. (p. 95)
Recommendation: Recommended, both. Paris is very good if you like the more technological side of Verne, and Lighthouse is quite enjoyable if you like the more adventurous side.
*****
Jules Verne, Paris in the Twentieth Century, Howard, tr., Ballantine (New York: 1996).
Jules Verne, The Lighthouse at the End of the World, Metcalfe, tr., Fredonia Books (Amsterdam: 2001).
Friday, December 07, 2018
Music on My Mind
Peter Hollens ft. The Hound + The Fox, "God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen".
Currently crushed under a mix of grading and not feeling well; there are things in the pipeline, but things may also be slow around here a bit.
Roman of Romans
Today is the feast of St. Ambrose of Milan, Doctor of the Church. He is unusual in having been baptized, confirmed, ordained, and consecrated a bishop all in the same week. The most Roman of the Church Fathers had been an imperial administrator in Milan. He was Christian, but still a catechumen, when Auxentius, the Arian bishop of Milan (Mediolanum), died. The Arian controversy was threatening to split Milan, so he went in person to the church to make sure that order was kept. He got up in front of everybody to give a speech about how it was important to keep the peace as a successor for Auxentius was chosen, and the crowd started shouting, "Ambrosius Episcopus!" Ambrose had to flee to a friend's house, but word had gotten back to Emperor Gratian about it and he, naturally assuming that Ambrose had actually had been chosen bishop, sent an official letter to Milan congratulating them on such an excellent choice. So he gave in and became bishop of the second most important see in the West. But Roman in his sense of duty, once he was in office, he gave away his wealth and threw himself with a will into learning everything about his role.
From his work De officiis ministrorum (Book II, Chapter IV):
From a letter to Ambrose by St. Basil the Great:
From his work De officiis ministrorum (Book II, Chapter IV):
There is, then, a blessedness even in pains and griefs. All which virtue with its sweetness checks and restrains, abounding as it does in natural resources for either soothing conscience or increasing grace. For Moses was blessed in no small degree when, surrounded by the Egyptians and shut in by the sea, he found by his merits a way for himself and the people to go through the waters. When was he ever braver than at the moment when, surrounded by the greatest dangers, he gave not up the hope of safety, but besought a triumph?
What of Aaron? When did he ever think himself more blessed than when he stood between the living and the dead, and by his presence stayed death from passing from the bodies of the dead to the lines of the living? What shall I say of the youth Daniel, who was so wise that, when in the midst of the lions enraged with hunger, he was by no means overcome with terror at the fierceness of the beasts. So free from fear was he, that he could eat, and was not afraid he might by his example excite the animals to feed on him.
There is, then, in pain a virtue that can display the sweetness of a good conscience, and therefore it serves as a proof that pain does not lessen the pleasure of virtue. As, then, there is no loss of blessedness to virtue through pain, so also the pleasures of the body and the enjoyment that benefits give add nothing to it. On this the Apostle says well: “What things to me were gain, those I counted loss for Christ,” and he added: “Wherefore I count all things but loss, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ.”
From a letter to Ambrose by St. Basil the Great:
I have given glory to God, Who in every generation selects those who are well-pleasing to Him; Who of old indeed chose from the sheepfold a prince for His people; Who through the Spirit gifted Amos the herdman with power and raised him up to be a prophet; Who now has drawn forth for the care of Christ’s flock a man from the imperial city, entrusted with the government of a whole nation, exalted in character, in lineage, in position, in eloquence, in all that this world admires. This same man has flung away all the advantages of the world, counting them all loss that he may gain Christ, and has taken in his hand the helm of the ship, great and famous for its faith in God, the Church of Christ. Come, then, O man of God; not from men have you received or been taught the Gospel of Christ; it is the Lord Himself who has transferred you from the judges of the earth to the throne of the Apostles; fight the good fight; heal the infirmity of the people, if any are infected by the disease of Arian madness; renew the ancient footprints of the Fathers.
Wednesday, December 05, 2018
Evening Note for Wednesday, December 5
Thought for the Evening: The Tacit Mechanics of Hume
Matias Slavov has a fascinating paper in the recent Hume Studies looking at what kind of mechanics, and in particular laws of dynamics, Hume assumes in some of his arguments ("Hume on the Laws of Dynamics: The Tacit Assumption of Mechanism", Hume Studies, Vol. 42, No. 1-2 (April/November 2016) pp. 113-116). He identifies five laws of dynamics that he thinks show up explicitly in Hume's discussions:
[I] A body at rest or in motion continues for ever in its present state, till put from it by some new cause.
[II] A body impelled takes as much motion from the impelling body as it acquires itself.
[III] The moment or force of any body in motion is in the compound ration or proportion of its solid contents and its velocity.
[IV] The equality of action and re-action
[V] Gravitation produces a motion from one thing to the other.
[I], of course, is the principle of inertia. [IV], which is Newton's Third Law, is mentioned only once (in the Dialogues) in order to argue against the possibility of mind affecting body; Slavov notes, however, that Hume seems to have a very different notion of force than Newton does. While Hume will occasionally talking about things that are interacting, he doesn't seem to countenance genuine interaction, in part because he takes causes and effects to be entirely separable in principle. For this to be the case, every interaction has to be something that can be broken down into two distinct happenings, each of which is attributed to one and only one thing. There is no genuinely shared action. As Slavov puts it:
(It is perhaps worth noting, to strengthen the point, that Newtonians often did interpret the Third Law as a causal law; William Whewell is in this tradition later when he uses the Third Law to argue that causation must be simultaneous. This last makes me wonder if it is not only the separability principle but also the principle that the cause must be temporally prior to the effect that makes a difference here. If one looks at Lady Mary Shepherd's causal theory, for instance, which is designed to handle interactions very well -- and in fact tends to treat all causation as interaction -- it's a theory that requires a fundamental commitment to simultaneity of causation. If cause and effect are separable, this means that interactions can be reduced to lower-order non-interactions; but one might think of them as hooking together somehow. If the cause must precede the effect in time, however, this means they are not only separable, they are actually separate. Simultaneity of causation is not enough to give you genuine interactions, but it seems to be a precondition for them.)
Slavov thus argues that Hume's view is in some sense mechanistic -- he has a mechanistic account of laws -- even though he rejects corpuscularianism, at least in the sense of being agnostic about most microstructural explanations, and so is not mechanistic in another sense. Mechanists in this latter sense treat laws as regularities of microstructure, whereas Hume treats laws as regularities of experiences that may or may not have much to do with any further microstructure. It also leads one to the conclusion that Hume, while in some sense Newtonian, is in a number of ways radically at odds with the Newtonian picture of the world. (Some things that Slavov says suggest that he thinks of Hume as lying somewhere between Cartesian physics and Newtonian physics.)
Various Links of Interest
* Aikin and Talisse have an interesting discussion of polarization and civic enmity (which they define as "the condition that prevails when democratic citizens lose the capacity to regard those with whom they disagree as entitled to an equal share of political power") at "3 Quarks Daily"
* Sandra Shapshay discusses the sublime at "Aeon"
* The Age of Metaphysical Revolution is a interesting project that looks at a letter from David Lewis each month as a way to look at his role in the transformation of analytic philosophy.
* Robert Paul Wolff on Alice Walker's The Color Purple
* Emily Thomas, Are spirits in space? Exploding spirits and absolute theories of space and time
* Thony Christie on Egnatio Danti: Cosmographer to a Grand Duke and a Pope
* Sebastian Musch, The Atomic Priesthood and Nuclear Waste Management - Religion, Sci-fi Literature and the End of our Civilization
* William Ewald, The Emergence of First-Order Logic, at the SEP
* Julien Dutant, The legend of the justified true belief analysis (PDF)
* Brian Kemple reviews Carrie Jenkins's What Love Is
* It looks like Newman is on his way toward canonization.
* John Brungardt on the possibility of a dispositional analysis for the principle of least action.
* Ricky Jay, often considered the best sleight-of-hand artist in the world and certainly its foremost historian, recently died. One of his personal assistants (not magic assistants) reflects on him.
* Rabbi Josh Yuter, "Love the Stranger" -- The Ger in Jewish Society
* Timothy Hsiao, The Moral Case for Corporal Punishment
* Megan Kimble, Austin's Fix for Homelessness: Tiny Houses, and Lots of Neighbors. It's a nice profile of Community First! Village, a charitable organization here in Central Texas. It's not a complete answer to homelessness, but it's a powerful one, because it recognizes that homelessness is not a lack of housing so much as it is a lack of community connection. I've occasionally had students who volunteered there for their service learning projects, and it seems to be a very solid idea. It's a sign of how a little ingenuity can go a long way in dealing with serious problems. Take someone off the urban street and put them in a village, with a little house and community gatherings and some ways to earn a small income, and sometimes they thrive.
* The collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, online.
Currently Reading
Jules Verne, The Lighthouse at the End of the World
Elaine Landry, ed., Categories for the Working Philosopher
Harry V. Jaffa, Thomism and Scholasticism
Gilles Emery, The Trinity
Matias Slavov has a fascinating paper in the recent Hume Studies looking at what kind of mechanics, and in particular laws of dynamics, Hume assumes in some of his arguments ("Hume on the Laws of Dynamics: The Tacit Assumption of Mechanism", Hume Studies, Vol. 42, No. 1-2 (April/November 2016) pp. 113-116). He identifies five laws of dynamics that he thinks show up explicitly in Hume's discussions:
[I] A body at rest or in motion continues for ever in its present state, till put from it by some new cause.
[II] A body impelled takes as much motion from the impelling body as it acquires itself.
[III] The moment or force of any body in motion is in the compound ration or proportion of its solid contents and its velocity.
[IV] The equality of action and re-action
[V] Gravitation produces a motion from one thing to the other.
[I], of course, is the principle of inertia. [IV], which is Newton's Third Law, is mentioned only once (in the Dialogues) in order to argue against the possibility of mind affecting body; Slavov notes, however, that Hume seems to have a very different notion of force than Newton does. While Hume will occasionally talking about things that are interacting, he doesn't seem to countenance genuine interaction, in part because he takes causes and effects to be entirely separable in principle. For this to be the case, every interaction has to be something that can be broken down into two distinct happenings, each of which is attributed to one and only one thing. There is no genuinely shared action. As Slavov puts it:
Consider the following scenario explained by Newton's third law of motion. I press the table with my hand; the table presses my hand with equal and opposite force. What is the cause, and what is the effect in this scenario? Is my pressing of the table the cause, or the pressing coming from the table? In Newtonian dynamics forces are generated through interactions. Although Newton's second law is the causal law and his third law is rather a law of co-existence, it is still difficult to separate the supposed cause and supposed effect in dynamic interactions (for forces appear between mass points). But this is what Hume's separability principle requires. (pp.124-125)
(It is perhaps worth noting, to strengthen the point, that Newtonians often did interpret the Third Law as a causal law; William Whewell is in this tradition later when he uses the Third Law to argue that causation must be simultaneous. This last makes me wonder if it is not only the separability principle but also the principle that the cause must be temporally prior to the effect that makes a difference here. If one looks at Lady Mary Shepherd's causal theory, for instance, which is designed to handle interactions very well -- and in fact tends to treat all causation as interaction -- it's a theory that requires a fundamental commitment to simultaneity of causation. If cause and effect are separable, this means that interactions can be reduced to lower-order non-interactions; but one might think of them as hooking together somehow. If the cause must precede the effect in time, however, this means they are not only separable, they are actually separate. Simultaneity of causation is not enough to give you genuine interactions, but it seems to be a precondition for them.)
Slavov thus argues that Hume's view is in some sense mechanistic -- he has a mechanistic account of laws -- even though he rejects corpuscularianism, at least in the sense of being agnostic about most microstructural explanations, and so is not mechanistic in another sense. Mechanists in this latter sense treat laws as regularities of microstructure, whereas Hume treats laws as regularities of experiences that may or may not have much to do with any further microstructure. It also leads one to the conclusion that Hume, while in some sense Newtonian, is in a number of ways radically at odds with the Newtonian picture of the world. (Some things that Slavov says suggest that he thinks of Hume as lying somewhere between Cartesian physics and Newtonian physics.)
Various Links of Interest
* Aikin and Talisse have an interesting discussion of polarization and civic enmity (which they define as "the condition that prevails when democratic citizens lose the capacity to regard those with whom they disagree as entitled to an equal share of political power") at "3 Quarks Daily"
* Sandra Shapshay discusses the sublime at "Aeon"
* The Age of Metaphysical Revolution is a interesting project that looks at a letter from David Lewis each month as a way to look at his role in the transformation of analytic philosophy.
* Robert Paul Wolff on Alice Walker's The Color Purple
* Emily Thomas, Are spirits in space? Exploding spirits and absolute theories of space and time
* Thony Christie on Egnatio Danti: Cosmographer to a Grand Duke and a Pope
* Sebastian Musch, The Atomic Priesthood and Nuclear Waste Management - Religion, Sci-fi Literature and the End of our Civilization
* William Ewald, The Emergence of First-Order Logic, at the SEP
* Julien Dutant, The legend of the justified true belief analysis (PDF)
* Brian Kemple reviews Carrie Jenkins's What Love Is
* It looks like Newman is on his way toward canonization.
* John Brungardt on the possibility of a dispositional analysis for the principle of least action.
* Ricky Jay, often considered the best sleight-of-hand artist in the world and certainly its foremost historian, recently died. One of his personal assistants (not magic assistants) reflects on him.
* Rabbi Josh Yuter, "Love the Stranger" -- The Ger in Jewish Society
* Timothy Hsiao, The Moral Case for Corporal Punishment
* Megan Kimble, Austin's Fix for Homelessness: Tiny Houses, and Lots of Neighbors. It's a nice profile of Community First! Village, a charitable organization here in Central Texas. It's not a complete answer to homelessness, but it's a powerful one, because it recognizes that homelessness is not a lack of housing so much as it is a lack of community connection. I've occasionally had students who volunteered there for their service learning projects, and it seems to be a very solid idea. It's a sign of how a little ingenuity can go a long way in dealing with serious problems. Take someone off the urban street and put them in a village, with a little house and community gatherings and some ways to earn a small income, and sometimes they thrive.
* The collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, online.
Currently Reading
Jules Verne, The Lighthouse at the End of the World
Elaine Landry, ed., Categories for the Working Philosopher
Harry V. Jaffa, Thomism and Scholasticism
Gilles Emery, The Trinity
Wild as Cowslips on the Common Land
A Party Question
by G. K. Chesterton
The golden roses of the glorious mysteries
Grew wild as cowslips on the common land
Hers, who was more humanity's than history's,
Until you banned them as a badge is banned.
The silver roses of the sorrow of Mary,
And the red roses of her royal mirth,
Were free; till you, turned petulant and wary,
Went weeding wild flowers from your mother-earth
Mother of Man; the Mother of the Maker;
Silently speaking as the flowering trees,
What made of her a striker and a breaker
Who spoke no scorn even of men like these?
She named no hypocrites a viper race,
She nailed no tyrant for a vulpine cur,
She flogged no hucksters from the holy place;
Why was your new wise world in dread of her?
Whom had she greeted and not graced in greeting,
Whom did she touch and touch not his peace;
And what are you, that made of such a meeting
Quarrels and quibbles and a taunt to tease?
Who made that inn a fortress? What strange blindness
Beat on the open door of that great heart,
Stood on its guard against unguarded kindness
And made the sun a secret set apart?
By this we measure you upon your showing
So many shields to her who bore no sword,
All your unnatural nature and the flowing
Of sundering rivers now so hard to ford.
We know God's priests had drunken iniquity,
Through our sins too did such offences come,
Mad Martin's bell, the mouth of anarchy,
Knox and the horror of that hollow drum.
We know the tale; half truth and double treason,
Borgia and Torquemada in the throng,
Bad men who had no right to their right reason,
Good men who had good reason to be wrong.
But when that tangled war our fathers waged
Stirred against her—then could we hear right well,
Through roar of men not wrongfully enraged,
The little hiss that only comes from hell.
Tuesday, December 04, 2018
Last of the Church Fathers
Today was the memorial for St. Yanah ibn Mansur ibn Sarjun, better known as St. John Damascene, Doctor of the Church. Born into Muslim-occupied Syria, his family were civil servants working in the court at Damascus; it is possible that he served for a while as a financial officer to the caliph, although we don't know for sure. He eventually became a monk, and became one of the major critics of the Iconoclast heresy -- since he lived under the Muslim caliph, the Byzantine emperor could not touch him. He died in 749. He is sometimes called the last of the Church Fathers, although there are several other people who also get that nickname, depending on what you are talking about. From his Exposition of the Faith (I.2):
We, therefore, both know and confess that God is without beginning, without end, eternal and everlasting, uncreate, unchangeable, invariable, simple, uncompound, incorporeal, invisible, impalpable, uncircumscribed, infinite, incognisable, indefinable, incomprehensible, good, just, maker of all things created, almighty, all-ruling, all-surveying, of all overseer, sovereign, judge; and that God is One, that is to say, one essence; and that He is known, and has His being in three subsistences, in Father, I say, and Son and Holy Spirit; and that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are one in all respects, except in that of not being begotten, that of being begotten, and that of procession; and that the Only-begotten Son and Word of God and God, in His bowels of mercy, for our salvation, by the good pleasure of God and the co-operation of the Holy Spirit, being conceived without seed, was born uncorruptedly of the Holy Virgin and Mother of God, Mary, by the Holy Spirit, and became of her perfect Man; and that the Same is at once perfect God and perfect Man, of two natures, Godhead and Manhood, and in two natures possessing intelligence, will and energy, and freedom, and, in a word, perfect according to the measure and proportion proper to each, at once to the divinity, I say, and to the humanity, yet to one composite person; and that He suffered hunger and thirst and weariness, and was crucified, and for three days submitted to the experience of death and burial, and ascended to heaven, from which also He came to us, and shall come again. And the Holy Scripture is witness to this and the whole choir of the Saints.
Monday, December 03, 2018
Descartes's Primitive Notion of Union
In the correspondence with Princess Elisabeth, Descartes argues that human knowledge is based on a number of primitive notions. Besides the most general such notions (being, duration, number), which apply to everything, there are certainly more specific notions that apply to particular fields of knowledge, and out of which the other notions are developed. From the notion of extension we get the further notions of shape and motion, and are therefore able to do physics. From the notion of thought we get further notions like understanding and will. And we have a third in addition to these: the notion of the union of soul and body, i.e., thought and extension, from which we have notions like the the power of the soul to move the body or the power of the body to affect the soul's sensations and passions. All of these are primitive; you can't, for instance, reduce the third to the other two. He goes on to say that we can have clear and distinct ideas of the first two, but a confused and indistinct idea of the third.
In a famously obscure passage, Descartes argues that we see this third notion at work in the Aristotelian account of weight, gravitas, because we confuse the union of soul and body with the union of body and body. In Aristotelian gravitas, a physical object is taken to have a quality directing it to its natural place at the center of the earth. The way he puts it in the Sixth Replies, when he held something like the Aristotelian theory, what he held was that gravitas was distinct from the physical object itself (he analogizes it to clothing) and carried it toward the center of the earth as if it had some awareness (cognitio) of that center. In reality, this is wrong: on Descartes's account, there is nothing to gravitas that is different from the moving body itself, and you can't have anything like this directedness without cognition, and cognition belongs to thought, not extension. As Princess Elisabeth will later respond, it's odd to explain this essential primitive notion by a theory that Descartes regards as false. But Descartes's point is that, while a mistake, it is a very easy mistake to make because it seems to make sense -- and the only reason it can be so easy to make and seem so consistently to make sense is if we actually do have some kind of basic idea in which something like it happens. This is the primitive notion of union between soul and bod, in which the mind designates a goal and the body moves in accordance with it.
An implication of this that is often not remarked enough is that Descartes's account of the union of mind and body is teleological. This is why it is relevant to Princess Elisabeth's worry. She had pointed out that in Cartesian physics, all motion of bodies is explained by initiating push, determination of the way something moves, and shape and texture; none of these explain how mind can move the body in the particular way it does. (Her worry is not, as it is often put, how the mind can move the body at all, the bare interaction, but how it can move the body in cases where the body's motion is sufficiently sophisticated that the way it moves had to have been determined by the mind.) Descartes's response is that it's a different kind of motion, one that is not reducible to extension; it is a non-mechanical motion like people under the influence of Aristotle attributed to gravitas. It's a kind of motion we have to admit, because the way our bodies move is clearly goal-directed, but goal-direction is a matter of thought, not extension; so there must here be some kind of union between thought and extension, despite the fact that thought and extension are different things.
Naturally, this still leaves open the question of how this works. Descartes's account in the Sixth Replies suggests that goal-directedness is something that can only be attributed directly to a substance, and in particular the substance of the mind. Physics, based wholly on the notion of extension, has no room for final causes. But in the motion of the body, the body's motion must somehow fall within the ambit of the mind's teleology, so that any explanation on the basis of this physics will be inadequate for explaining the motion of the body. There is never any explanation for how this works, though; the closest he comes is in the Passions, when he talks about its being a special motion instituted by nature. This is puzzling, and as Princess Elisabeth goes on to point out, it seems cleaner either to reject all teleology when it comes to bodies or else assume that bodies can have the teleology that Descartes insists only belongs to minds. It's worth pointing out, however, that it would explain why Descartes is so confident that rational behavior is a sign of other minds -- the goal-directedess of rational behavior is something that he would regard as literally impossible for a mechanical system.
In a famously obscure passage, Descartes argues that we see this third notion at work in the Aristotelian account of weight, gravitas, because we confuse the union of soul and body with the union of body and body. In Aristotelian gravitas, a physical object is taken to have a quality directing it to its natural place at the center of the earth. The way he puts it in the Sixth Replies, when he held something like the Aristotelian theory, what he held was that gravitas was distinct from the physical object itself (he analogizes it to clothing) and carried it toward the center of the earth as if it had some awareness (cognitio) of that center. In reality, this is wrong: on Descartes's account, there is nothing to gravitas that is different from the moving body itself, and you can't have anything like this directedness without cognition, and cognition belongs to thought, not extension. As Princess Elisabeth will later respond, it's odd to explain this essential primitive notion by a theory that Descartes regards as false. But Descartes's point is that, while a mistake, it is a very easy mistake to make because it seems to make sense -- and the only reason it can be so easy to make and seem so consistently to make sense is if we actually do have some kind of basic idea in which something like it happens. This is the primitive notion of union between soul and bod, in which the mind designates a goal and the body moves in accordance with it.
An implication of this that is often not remarked enough is that Descartes's account of the union of mind and body is teleological. This is why it is relevant to Princess Elisabeth's worry. She had pointed out that in Cartesian physics, all motion of bodies is explained by initiating push, determination of the way something moves, and shape and texture; none of these explain how mind can move the body in the particular way it does. (Her worry is not, as it is often put, how the mind can move the body at all, the bare interaction, but how it can move the body in cases where the body's motion is sufficiently sophisticated that the way it moves had to have been determined by the mind.) Descartes's response is that it's a different kind of motion, one that is not reducible to extension; it is a non-mechanical motion like people under the influence of Aristotle attributed to gravitas. It's a kind of motion we have to admit, because the way our bodies move is clearly goal-directed, but goal-direction is a matter of thought, not extension; so there must here be some kind of union between thought and extension, despite the fact that thought and extension are different things.
Naturally, this still leaves open the question of how this works. Descartes's account in the Sixth Replies suggests that goal-directedness is something that can only be attributed directly to a substance, and in particular the substance of the mind. Physics, based wholly on the notion of extension, has no room for final causes. But in the motion of the body, the body's motion must somehow fall within the ambit of the mind's teleology, so that any explanation on the basis of this physics will be inadequate for explaining the motion of the body. There is never any explanation for how this works, though; the closest he comes is in the Passions, when he talks about its being a special motion instituted by nature. This is puzzling, and as Princess Elisabeth goes on to point out, it seems cleaner either to reject all teleology when it comes to bodies or else assume that bodies can have the teleology that Descartes insists only belongs to minds. It's worth pointing out, however, that it would explain why Descartes is so confident that rational behavior is a sign of other minds -- the goal-directedess of rational behavior is something that he would regard as literally impossible for a mechanical system.
Sunday, December 02, 2018
Feast of the Dedication
Happy Hanukkah!
[2 Maccabees 10:1-8 NRSVACE] I particularly like the turn of phrase "Him who had given success to the purifying of His own holy place". The parallel with Sukkot here is interesting. The tale is given greater detail in 1 Maccabees 4.
Hanukkah is referred to once in the New Testament (the question of the Judeans is certainly linked to the feast, as is, of course, the reason why Jesus was in the Temple to begin with):
[John 10:22-33 NRSVACE]
Now Maccabeus and his followers, the Lord leading them on, recovered the temple and the city; they tore down the altars that had been built in the public square by the foreigners, and also destroyed the sacred precincts. They purified the sanctuary, and made another altar of sacrifice; then, striking fire out of flint, they offered sacrifices, after a lapse of two years, and they offered incense and lighted lamps and set out the bread of the Presence. When they had done this, they fell prostrate and implored the Lord that they might never again fall into such misfortunes, but that, if they should ever sin, they might be disciplined by him with forbearance and not be handed over to blasphemous and barbarous nations. It happened that on the same day on which the sanctuary had been profaned by the foreigners, the purification of the sanctuary took place, that is, on the twenty-fifth day of the same month, which was Chislev. They celebrated it for eight days with rejoicing, in the manner of the festival of booths, remembering how not long before, during the festival of booths, they had been wandering in the mountains and caves like wild animals. Therefore, carrying ivy-wreathed wands and beautiful branches and also fronds of palm, they offered hymns of thanksgiving to him who had given success to the purifying of his own holy place. They decreed by public edict, ratified by vote, that the whole nation of the Jews should observe these days every year.
[2 Maccabees 10:1-8 NRSVACE] I particularly like the turn of phrase "Him who had given success to the purifying of His own holy place". The parallel with Sukkot here is interesting. The tale is given greater detail in 1 Maccabees 4.
Hanukkah is referred to once in the New Testament (the question of the Judeans is certainly linked to the feast, as is, of course, the reason why Jesus was in the Temple to begin with):
At that time the festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon. So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, ‘How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.’ Jesus answered, ‘I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me; but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.’
The Jews took up stones again to stone him. Jesus replied, ‘I have shown you many good works from the Father. For which of these are you going to stone me?’ The Jews answered, ‘It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you, but for blasphemy, because you, though only a human being, are making yourself God.’
[John 10:22-33 NRSVACE]
Saturday, December 01, 2018
Voyages Extraordinaires #9: Aventures de trois Russes et de trois Anglais
On the 27th of January, 1854, two men lay stretched at the foot of an immense weeping willow, chatting, and at the same time watching most attentively the waters of the Orange River. This river, the Groote of the Dutch, and the Gariep of the Hottentots, may well vie with the other three great arteries of Africa—the Nile, the Niger, and the Zambesi. Like those, it has its periodical risings, its rapids and cataracts. Travellers whose names are known over part of its course, Thompson, Alexander, and Burchell, have each in their turn praised the clearness of its waters, and the beauty of its shores.
It is perhaps not surprising that Jules Verne has a novel about the metric system. As scientific correspondence became more common, it became clear to physicists and others that there was a need for a standard length measurement based on some common reference point. The two early suggestions for how to do this were to take some particular distance relative to the Equater and the Poles, or to use a pendulum set-up. The former eventually became the preferred option because it became clear that the pendular method was not giving sufficiently equivalent results (due to differences in gravity). So the French Academy of Sciences in 1790 defined the mètre as one ten-millionth the difference between the Equater and the North Pole. However, measuring a distance of this magnitude is an extraordinarily complicated undertaking, because it requires not just a measurement but an expedition of measurements -- and Verne, from his fascination with geography loves stories about scientific expeditions. It probably came to mind because in 1867 there was a big movement to regularize geodetic measurements across countries.
Not every nation, of course, joined the metric system bandwagon; the two major holdouts in Europe were England and Russia. And that gives us the background of the tale, The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa (also called Meridiana or Measuring a Meridian; note that the English translations always put the Englishmen first despite the French putting the Russians first). The essential conceit of the work is that the English and the Russians are considering joining the meter club, but they are unwilling to do anything public without establishing their own measurements. So they send a joint expedition to South Africa to measure the 24th meridian east. Three Englishmen -- William Emery, Sir John Murray, and Colonel Everest -- meet up with three Russians -- Matthew Strux, Nicholas Palander, and Michael Zorn -- and together with a half-English, half-San guide, Makoum, they set out to make their measurements and calculations. They are in dangerous territory, however. There are wild beasts a-plenty, and hostile tribes, and, perhaps worst of all, in the middle of their expedition England and Russia go to war with each other (the Crimean War), thus splitting the two groups. Forced together by necessity, however, they will fight through, and learn something about the power of scientific friendship to cross national boundaries.
Campion
Today is the memorial of St. Edmund Campion, S.J., martyr. Born in 1540, he was an extraordinarily talented student, winning prizes and honors throughout his education, the culmination of which was perhaps in 1568, when he was charged with delivering Oxford University's welcoming speech to Queen Elizabeth, and to be one of the parties in a public debate before her. As he was both scholarly and had caught the attention of the Queen, people began to say he was likely to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury. However, he became Catholic, and eventually joined the Jesuits. When in 1580 the Jesuits began their English mission, he volunteered, sneaking into England in the guise of a jewel merchant, and issued the "Challenge to Privy Council", also known as "Campion's Brag", in which he challenged Protestants to a debate. He was arrested. According to some, he was questioned by Queen Elizabeth herself, who remembered him from his welcoming speech; when asked if he regarded her as Queen of England, he answered that he did. He was offered a position if he would repudiate Catholicism, but he refused, and thus was put on trial and was executed at Tyburn on December 1, 1581, at the age of 41.
From Evelyn Waugh's Edmund Campion: A Life:
[Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Campion: A Life, Ignatius Press (San Francisco: 2005), pp. 200-201.]
From Evelyn Waugh's Edmund Campion: A Life:
He was one of a host of martyrs, each, in their several ways, gallant and venerable; some performed more sensational feats of adventure, some sacrificed more conspicuous positions in the world, many suffered crueller tortures, but to his own, and to each succeeding generation, Campion's fame has burned with unique warmth and brilliance; it was his genius to express, in sentences that have resounded across the centuries, the spirit of chivalry in which they suffered, to typify in his zeal, his innocence, his inflexible purpose, the pattern which they followed.
It was an age replete with examples of astounding physical courage. Judged by the exploits of the great adventurers of his time, the sea-dogs and explorers, Campion's brief achievement may appear modest enough; but these were tough men, ruthlessly hardened by upbringing, gross in their recreations. Campion stands out from even his most gallant and chivalrous contemporaries, from Philip Sidney and Don John of Austria, not as they stand above Hawkins and Stukeley by finer human temper, but by the supernatural grace that was in him. That the gentle scholar, trained all his life for the pulpit and the lecture room, was able at the word of command to step straight into a world of violence, and acquit himself nobly; that the man, capable of the strenuous heroism of that last year and a half, was able, without any complaint,to pursue the sombre routine of the pedagogue and contemplate without impatience a lifetime so employed--there lies the mystery which sets Campion's triumph apart from the ordinary achievements of human strength; a mystery whose solution lies in the busy, uneventful years at Brunn and Prague, in the profound and accurate piety of the Jesuit rule.
[Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Campion: A Life, Ignatius Press (San Francisco: 2005), pp. 200-201.]
Friday, November 30, 2018
Dashed Off XXVIII
All human relationships are infected by perversities, cravings, and self-blindings.
It is remarkable how unconvincing Feuerbach's criticism of Schleiermacher's account of prayer is (regardless of what you think of the latter); the sense of filial trust is not a universal feature of prayer, and cannot be by Feuerbach's own account of religion; and, what is more, the way he rejects a primary role for the sense of dependence is contrary to nearly universal phenomena, like prayer under desperation. It is a complete and utter failure as an account.
Love often commands.
The incoherence of Feuerbach, arising out of his perpetual picking-and-choosing, in a nutshell: "Did Christianity conquer a single philosopher, historian, or poet of the classical period? The philosophers who went over to Christianity were feeble, contemptible philosophers. All who had yet the classic spirit in them were hostile, or at least indifferent to Christianity." -- There were none in the classical period, and those that were, were bad philosophers, and they were not really classical-period philosophers even though they lived in the classical period, in three consecutive sentences. Nor is this, while egregious, an isolated case. I can give some allowance for the difficulty of arguing against something you think is a contradiction; I could admire a muddle arising from the desire to do justice to both sides; but some behaviors just show that you do not care about reasons.
trophic cascade
Note Feuerbach's claim that Protestantism 'confined the speciality of the Christian to the domain of faith'.
The dogmas of Christianity far exceed anything that natural desire can anticipate.
Interpreting set theory in a Cantorian way, arguments for the null set are arguments that at least some thought lacks a distinguishable, discrete object.
Most theories of analogical reasoning are too memory-intensive, being search-and-comparison theories of one sort or the other, and comprehensive rather than precisely directed. They are theories of brute-force approximation of analogical inference.
the vocabulary-extending function of analogical reasoning: e.g., there is a high-level abstract structure shared by water in channels and electricity in wires; by virtue of this, one can adapt water-vocabulary for use as electricity vocabulary
Human beings seem most easily to reason by analogy where function is involved. (Cp. Gentner's & Clement's 'Plant stems are drinking straws', which most peopleinterpret as describing conveyance of liquid rather than being long and thin.)
The meaning of a metaphor is not the same as the reasoning that leads to it, or by which it is constructed; we do not have to go through the work of building the meaning every time.
(1) What is potential cannot be actual except by what is actual.
(2) What is actual from another has its actuality as an action of that other.
(3) What is actual in what is actual from another must have an adequate reason in what is actual in that other.
complete actuality: Second Way
incomplete actuality: First Way
possible actuality: Scotus
the human heart, the tarnished mirror of the infinite
Nothing could be established to be a 'brute fact' except by ruling out all possible explanations.
we-mode and I-mode social agency
acting under the sign of with-ness
acting under the sign of for-ness
with-ness with structures of for-ness for the with-ness
The eucharistic presence is complete regardless of whether it is personally offered and accepted.
The notion that anyone ever found transfinalization or transsignification more intelligible than transubstantiation is absurd. Where the former do not exclude the latter, they may draw out this or that aspect of the Mystery in a clearer way, but that is all.
"Every fully constituted object is simultaneously a value object." Stein
"As God, He was the motivating [kinetic] principle of His own humanity, and as man He was the revelatory [ekphantic] principle of His own divinity." Maximus Confessor (Amb 5)
Part of faith is being silent when silence is appropriate.
existence arguments
(1) Given that A exists, B must also exist.
(2) In order that we may know, A exists.
(3) In order that we may act, A exists.
[one, true, good]
States grow along lines of easy taxation.
(1) explicit statement
(2) implication
(3) implicature
(4) evocation
"God is the implicit heaven; heaven is the explicit God." Feuerbach
Heaven can only be known by triplex via.
Empirical existence is never proven by the senses alone.
It is pretty clear that Feuerbach's reduction comes up short in the reduction of the Trinity (as also the theological virtues) -- to make the reduction work, he has to make up a Binitarian Christianity iwth only Faith and Love. When discussing the sacraments, eh can draw on the Protestant notion of there being only two sacraments, but on these two points, the Christianity reduced is a Christianity he has made up precisely for this purpose. The gap may be related to the fact that there is, for all practical purposes, no Church in the Christianity Feuerbach is 'reducing'.
In all his talk about alienation of our natures, Feuerbach never considers (as one would have to) the possibility that what he is describing is not alienation bu thte reintegration of what had already been alienated, a re-ligation of the bonds that had been broken.
Free will is the projected grace of God, the anticipation thereof.
mereological objections as common objections to transubstantiation -- i.e., it must still be bread because of its parts (atomic structure, etc.)
Arguments can only be used for persuasion because they have an intrinsic purpose that is not persuasion.
It is notable how vehemently Feuerbach has to attack celibacy.
Separation of Church and State inevitably leads to the attempts to separate Church and School, and Church and Hospital, and Church and Market, because states inevitably try to pervade all these things as sources of power.
'intrinsic good' understood as noninstrumental vs understood as good in se
-- Many discussions do not properly distinguish these.
Looking at history, it seems plausible to say that private revelations primarily serve to provide aesthetic vestment for the doctrines of the faith.
purgatory as convalescence
the quasi-representative function of civil service (common people in their common way making government work)
energy : length :: momentum : time
length : time :: momentum : energy
Descartes's Med IV as an argument that if the argument from evil is sound, our faculties cannot be trusted.
diachronic goods (e.g., improvement over time)
potential to the absent (change)
potential to the present (composition)
God as efficient cause
(1) producer
(2) conserver
(3) governor
exemplar causation & restoring/repairing causation
inward imitation, co-expression, complementary responsiveness
Politics being a social activity and not merely an activity of pure intellect, social coherence will exert pressure on political views quite independently of intellectual consistency; nor is there anyone of which this is not true, which is why academics so often seem to go stupid when they get into full partisan mode. It is nonetheless the case that there are means for reducing the chances that social coherence and intellectual consistency work at cross-purposes -- for instance, on the consistency side, taking a more pragmatic stance (focusing on the feasible), opening discussion to compromise, thinking through positions more fully; and, on the coherence side, allowing oneself some distance from party concerns, keeping open an attempt at rational dialogue with opponents, choosing party and political association reflectively and carefully.
Our thoughts are partly defined by the communities in which we actively take part.
aphoristic coalescence -> aphoristic interaction -> dialectic -> system
finitum/finiens -- finite/infinite
exceeded/exceeding -- exceeded/unexceeded
caused/causing -- caused/uncaused
exemplate/exemplar -- exemplate/unexemplate
measured/measuring -- measured/unmeasured
changed/change-causing -- changed/unchanged
-- These quadruples hang together because they involve an identifiable act admitting of nesting.
-- One can get from left to right by rejection of infinite regress in the nesting of the act.
A competent commander, with sufficient time and resources, can usually outmaneuver anything he can foresee. Because of this, most military success arises from denying the opponent time or resources, since one cannot usually pick the opposing commander (and thus cannot affect their competence) and creating something new (thus blocking foresight) is difficult and not always guaranteed to succeed.
computer programming as a liberal art vs. computer programming as a servile art
prose as 'poetry interrupted' (Chesterton)
rhetoric & the maximization of apologetical utility
While people may be skeptical of ancient emphasis on music as character-building, even we use music to relax or to get 'pumped up', both of which can affect character-building.
The gospel is unconditional promise in the sense that it is addressed to all without condition; it is not unconditional in the sense of requiring nothing from us.
If we say 'It seems to S that P' we are saying that P or something that mimics it must be a reason for S's experiences to be P-identifiable experiences.
If a claim is indefeasible, there must be a reason it cannot be defeated; if it is defeasible, there must be a reason it can be defeated.
wrongdoing under titulus existimatus
wrongdoing under titulus coloratus
wrongdoing under false title
wrongdoing under no apparent title
fourfold aspect of episcopal jurisdiction
(1) sacramental stewardship of divine majesty, in upholding the sacramental economy
(2) prophetic stewardship of divine majesty, in preservation and preaching of Scripture
(3) tribunal authority
(4) medicinal authority
Separation of Church and State cannot be allowed to be a usurpation of the public realm by the State, and the Church cannot accept a version of it under this interpretation without mauling itself.
A government loses trust by weakness, by foolishness, or by wickedness, and thereby loses authority.
In politics, all good positions have at least one evil ape.
posterior authority -> prior authority -> first authority
argument from religious experience // argument from poetic inspiration
The prosperity of a society arises form coherent families with robust education and opportunity for, and expectation of, work; this is the normal wealth-creation of a society.
Modern schooling is ridiculously time-consuming for the result achieved.
Law is that which opposes temptation; temptation is unlaw.
We are outlaws in an actual kingdom of ends.
common good as happiness of the body politic (Eth V,1)
Law is concerned not with happiness as such but with the ordering of happiness.
The key to changing the world is to keep the right idea alive until things tip that way.
A remarkable amount of time in a remarkable number of service occupations is spent trying to cancel out the work of other service occupations; this follows from the nature of many service jobs in a context of competition. Thus I hire lawyers to cancel out your lawyers, advertisers to cancel out your advertisers, etc.
Regulation is a remarkably poor instrument of policy; its biggest successes are always when it helps clarify other driving forces that do the actual work.
Political alliances are never wholly ideological; they are always affected by the question, "With whom are you comfortable working at this time?"
Solidarity does not arise by mere gestures but by common-good-building.
Modern historians have had difficulty distinguishing biased scholarship from solidary scholarship, in both directions, probably because the difference is ethical rather than one of method.
For every argument from evil there is a corresponding kind of skepticism.
(1) Evil requires the existence of good.
(2) Good is either good in itself or good from another (derivatively good).
(3) The latter cannot trace back infinitely, so there must be something good in itself.
(4) Good-in-itself admits of more and less.
privation theory of error
That is most possible which is most necessary.
Intelligibility admits of more and less.
Bazin's analogy: 'a poet is almost a priest'
If your ethics does not describe how to live a whole life, it is hardly an ethics at all.
As we are distracted from real good by pleasure, so too we are distracted from genuine understanding by the feeling of being clever.
It is quite obviously often inconvenient to the tribe that the pious character ends up being encouraged and preserved, because the pious character does not pick and choose according to the convenience of the tribe. History is filled with the difficulties that have arisen from pious insistence on what is inconvenient.
The middle term of a practical syllogism is a measure of action, a criterion for discerning what is worth doing.
We clearly have a lot of evidence that the unobserved can diverge considerably from the observed, in every sense in which we can have evidence of the unobserved.
"The heroes of declining nations are always the same -- the athlete, the singer, or the actor." Sir John Glubb
The eucharist, our supersubstantiation, is for the Church the daily bread, the needed bread, the bread for the coming day, the lasting and perpetual bread, the royal bread, all at once.
type specimen method of sorting philosophical positions
possible responses to fine-tuning arguments
(1) merely apparent
-- (1a) not really contingent
-- (1b) not really a precise target
(2) freak happening (chance in a small lottery, the improbable happens)
(3) chance in a sufficiently large lottery to make probable
(4) design
Gospel and Church cannot be pried apart.
One can make no sense of chance without a framework for what is chancy.
Words on a page are dead. Words read are alive. In writing a book, thought dies and is laid in the tomb so that it may rise again. Every book is a Holy Saturday tomb for the word. Every reading is Easter Sunday, when the word, which is not then dead, appears, living, to those who wait.
Scripture is prologue to Sacrament, which is the first foreshadowing part of the book of glory.
It is remarkable how unconvincing Feuerbach's criticism of Schleiermacher's account of prayer is (regardless of what you think of the latter); the sense of filial trust is not a universal feature of prayer, and cannot be by Feuerbach's own account of religion; and, what is more, the way he rejects a primary role for the sense of dependence is contrary to nearly universal phenomena, like prayer under desperation. It is a complete and utter failure as an account.
Love often commands.
The incoherence of Feuerbach, arising out of his perpetual picking-and-choosing, in a nutshell: "Did Christianity conquer a single philosopher, historian, or poet of the classical period? The philosophers who went over to Christianity were feeble, contemptible philosophers. All who had yet the classic spirit in them were hostile, or at least indifferent to Christianity." -- There were none in the classical period, and those that were, were bad philosophers, and they were not really classical-period philosophers even though they lived in the classical period, in three consecutive sentences. Nor is this, while egregious, an isolated case. I can give some allowance for the difficulty of arguing against something you think is a contradiction; I could admire a muddle arising from the desire to do justice to both sides; but some behaviors just show that you do not care about reasons.
trophic cascade
Note Feuerbach's claim that Protestantism 'confined the speciality of the Christian to the domain of faith'.
The dogmas of Christianity far exceed anything that natural desire can anticipate.
Interpreting set theory in a Cantorian way, arguments for the null set are arguments that at least some thought lacks a distinguishable, discrete object.
Most theories of analogical reasoning are too memory-intensive, being search-and-comparison theories of one sort or the other, and comprehensive rather than precisely directed. They are theories of brute-force approximation of analogical inference.
the vocabulary-extending function of analogical reasoning: e.g., there is a high-level abstract structure shared by water in channels and electricity in wires; by virtue of this, one can adapt water-vocabulary for use as electricity vocabulary
Human beings seem most easily to reason by analogy where function is involved. (Cp. Gentner's & Clement's 'Plant stems are drinking straws', which most peopleinterpret as describing conveyance of liquid rather than being long and thin.)
The meaning of a metaphor is not the same as the reasoning that leads to it, or by which it is constructed; we do not have to go through the work of building the meaning every time.
(1) What is potential cannot be actual except by what is actual.
(2) What is actual from another has its actuality as an action of that other.
(3) What is actual in what is actual from another must have an adequate reason in what is actual in that other.
complete actuality: Second Way
incomplete actuality: First Way
possible actuality: Scotus
the human heart, the tarnished mirror of the infinite
Nothing could be established to be a 'brute fact' except by ruling out all possible explanations.
we-mode and I-mode social agency
acting under the sign of with-ness
acting under the sign of for-ness
with-ness with structures of for-ness for the with-ness
The eucharistic presence is complete regardless of whether it is personally offered and accepted.
The notion that anyone ever found transfinalization or transsignification more intelligible than transubstantiation is absurd. Where the former do not exclude the latter, they may draw out this or that aspect of the Mystery in a clearer way, but that is all.
"Every fully constituted object is simultaneously a value object." Stein
"As God, He was the motivating [kinetic] principle of His own humanity, and as man He was the revelatory [ekphantic] principle of His own divinity." Maximus Confessor (Amb 5)
Part of faith is being silent when silence is appropriate.
existence arguments
(1) Given that A exists, B must also exist.
(2) In order that we may know, A exists.
(3) In order that we may act, A exists.
[one, true, good]
States grow along lines of easy taxation.
(1) explicit statement
(2) implication
(3) implicature
(4) evocation
"God is the implicit heaven; heaven is the explicit God." Feuerbach
Heaven can only be known by triplex via.
Empirical existence is never proven by the senses alone.
It is pretty clear that Feuerbach's reduction comes up short in the reduction of the Trinity (as also the theological virtues) -- to make the reduction work, he has to make up a Binitarian Christianity iwth only Faith and Love. When discussing the sacraments, eh can draw on the Protestant notion of there being only two sacraments, but on these two points, the Christianity reduced is a Christianity he has made up precisely for this purpose. The gap may be related to the fact that there is, for all practical purposes, no Church in the Christianity Feuerbach is 'reducing'.
In all his talk about alienation of our natures, Feuerbach never considers (as one would have to) the possibility that what he is describing is not alienation bu thte reintegration of what had already been alienated, a re-ligation of the bonds that had been broken.
Free will is the projected grace of God, the anticipation thereof.
mereological objections as common objections to transubstantiation -- i.e., it must still be bread because of its parts (atomic structure, etc.)
Arguments can only be used for persuasion because they have an intrinsic purpose that is not persuasion.
It is notable how vehemently Feuerbach has to attack celibacy.
Separation of Church and State inevitably leads to the attempts to separate Church and School, and Church and Hospital, and Church and Market, because states inevitably try to pervade all these things as sources of power.
'intrinsic good' understood as noninstrumental vs understood as good in se
-- Many discussions do not properly distinguish these.
Looking at history, it seems plausible to say that private revelations primarily serve to provide aesthetic vestment for the doctrines of the faith.
purgatory as convalescence
the quasi-representative function of civil service (common people in their common way making government work)
energy : length :: momentum : time
length : time :: momentum : energy
Descartes's Med IV as an argument that if the argument from evil is sound, our faculties cannot be trusted.
diachronic goods (e.g., improvement over time)
potential to the absent (change)
potential to the present (composition)
God as efficient cause
(1) producer
(2) conserver
(3) governor
exemplar causation & restoring/repairing causation
inward imitation, co-expression, complementary responsiveness
Politics being a social activity and not merely an activity of pure intellect, social coherence will exert pressure on political views quite independently of intellectual consistency; nor is there anyone of which this is not true, which is why academics so often seem to go stupid when they get into full partisan mode. It is nonetheless the case that there are means for reducing the chances that social coherence and intellectual consistency work at cross-purposes -- for instance, on the consistency side, taking a more pragmatic stance (focusing on the feasible), opening discussion to compromise, thinking through positions more fully; and, on the coherence side, allowing oneself some distance from party concerns, keeping open an attempt at rational dialogue with opponents, choosing party and political association reflectively and carefully.
Our thoughts are partly defined by the communities in which we actively take part.
aphoristic coalescence -> aphoristic interaction -> dialectic -> system
finitum/finiens -- finite/infinite
exceeded/exceeding -- exceeded/unexceeded
caused/causing -- caused/uncaused
exemplate/exemplar -- exemplate/unexemplate
measured/measuring -- measured/unmeasured
changed/change-causing -- changed/unchanged
-- These quadruples hang together because they involve an identifiable act admitting of nesting.
-- One can get from left to right by rejection of infinite regress in the nesting of the act.
A competent commander, with sufficient time and resources, can usually outmaneuver anything he can foresee. Because of this, most military success arises from denying the opponent time or resources, since one cannot usually pick the opposing commander (and thus cannot affect their competence) and creating something new (thus blocking foresight) is difficult and not always guaranteed to succeed.
computer programming as a liberal art vs. computer programming as a servile art
prose as 'poetry interrupted' (Chesterton)
rhetoric & the maximization of apologetical utility
While people may be skeptical of ancient emphasis on music as character-building, even we use music to relax or to get 'pumped up', both of which can affect character-building.
The gospel is unconditional promise in the sense that it is addressed to all without condition; it is not unconditional in the sense of requiring nothing from us.
If we say 'It seems to S that P' we are saying that P or something that mimics it must be a reason for S's experiences to be P-identifiable experiences.
If a claim is indefeasible, there must be a reason it cannot be defeated; if it is defeasible, there must be a reason it can be defeated.
wrongdoing under titulus existimatus
wrongdoing under titulus coloratus
wrongdoing under false title
wrongdoing under no apparent title
fourfold aspect of episcopal jurisdiction
(1) sacramental stewardship of divine majesty, in upholding the sacramental economy
(2) prophetic stewardship of divine majesty, in preservation and preaching of Scripture
(3) tribunal authority
(4) medicinal authority
Separation of Church and State cannot be allowed to be a usurpation of the public realm by the State, and the Church cannot accept a version of it under this interpretation without mauling itself.
A government loses trust by weakness, by foolishness, or by wickedness, and thereby loses authority.
In politics, all good positions have at least one evil ape.
posterior authority -> prior authority -> first authority
argument from religious experience // argument from poetic inspiration
The prosperity of a society arises form coherent families with robust education and opportunity for, and expectation of, work; this is the normal wealth-creation of a society.
Modern schooling is ridiculously time-consuming for the result achieved.
Law is that which opposes temptation; temptation is unlaw.
We are outlaws in an actual kingdom of ends.
common good as happiness of the body politic (Eth V,1)
Law is concerned not with happiness as such but with the ordering of happiness.
The key to changing the world is to keep the right idea alive until things tip that way.
A remarkable amount of time in a remarkable number of service occupations is spent trying to cancel out the work of other service occupations; this follows from the nature of many service jobs in a context of competition. Thus I hire lawyers to cancel out your lawyers, advertisers to cancel out your advertisers, etc.
Regulation is a remarkably poor instrument of policy; its biggest successes are always when it helps clarify other driving forces that do the actual work.
Political alliances are never wholly ideological; they are always affected by the question, "With whom are you comfortable working at this time?"
Solidarity does not arise by mere gestures but by common-good-building.
Modern historians have had difficulty distinguishing biased scholarship from solidary scholarship, in both directions, probably because the difference is ethical rather than one of method.
For every argument from evil there is a corresponding kind of skepticism.
(1) Evil requires the existence of good.
(2) Good is either good in itself or good from another (derivatively good).
(3) The latter cannot trace back infinitely, so there must be something good in itself.
(4) Good-in-itself admits of more and less.
privation theory of error
That is most possible which is most necessary.
Intelligibility admits of more and less.
Bazin's analogy: 'a poet is almost a priest'
If your ethics does not describe how to live a whole life, it is hardly an ethics at all.
As we are distracted from real good by pleasure, so too we are distracted from genuine understanding by the feeling of being clever.
It is quite obviously often inconvenient to the tribe that the pious character ends up being encouraged and preserved, because the pious character does not pick and choose according to the convenience of the tribe. History is filled with the difficulties that have arisen from pious insistence on what is inconvenient.
The middle term of a practical syllogism is a measure of action, a criterion for discerning what is worth doing.
We clearly have a lot of evidence that the unobserved can diverge considerably from the observed, in every sense in which we can have evidence of the unobserved.
"The heroes of declining nations are always the same -- the athlete, the singer, or the actor." Sir John Glubb
The eucharist, our supersubstantiation, is for the Church the daily bread, the needed bread, the bread for the coming day, the lasting and perpetual bread, the royal bread, all at once.
type specimen method of sorting philosophical positions
possible responses to fine-tuning arguments
(1) merely apparent
-- (1a) not really contingent
-- (1b) not really a precise target
(2) freak happening (chance in a small lottery, the improbable happens)
(3) chance in a sufficiently large lottery to make probable
(4) design
Gospel and Church cannot be pried apart.
One can make no sense of chance without a framework for what is chancy.
Words on a page are dead. Words read are alive. In writing a book, thought dies and is laid in the tomb so that it may rise again. Every book is a Holy Saturday tomb for the word. Every reading is Easter Sunday, when the word, which is not then dead, appears, living, to those who wait.
Scripture is prologue to Sacrament, which is the first foreshadowing part of the book of glory.
Eric Chien's Fism Act
Eric Chien's Fism Grand Prix close-up magic act is well worth seeing. It's all sleight of hand, no camera tricks:
It's also a really good example of communication without words: he tells a story, one with clear underlying rules and plot, without saying anything at all.
It's also a really good example of communication without words: he tells a story, one with clear underlying rules and plot, without saying anything at all.
Thursday, November 29, 2018
The Perlocutionary Force of Arguments
Speech act theory holds that speech acts generally can be analyzed into three acts (or aspects of the act): the locutionary, the illocutionary, and the perlocutionary. The locutionary act is the linguistic utterance itself; the illocutionary act is what you are trying to do in it; and the perlocutionary is the act of using it for a further end beyond it.*
For instance, if I say, "Let me pay your bill," in a successful attempt to persuade you that I am kind, the locutionary act is the actual utterance as understandable to an English-speaker. The illocutionary force is the offering to pay -- I'm not merely saying the words, I am saying the words as an offer of payment -- and the perlocutionary force is persuasion -- I'm not merely saying the words, nor merely offering to pay, I am also succeeding in the attempt to use the offer of payment to persuade you of my kindness. You can think of them as the layers of our use of language: we communicate with words (locutionary), those words are said as a kind of act (illocutionary), and in the attempt to achieve further results by means of that act (perlocutionary).
When people discuss this, they generally stick to talking about particular statements, but there are other kinds of speech acts, including speech acts that have statements as component parts. A formal speech, for instance, is itself a speech act, and has its locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary aspects, just as much as its component statements do. And the same is true for arguments. An argument has a locutionary aspect (the words and syntax that mean something); the argument is communicated in an act of a certain kind (e.g., as something argued for the sake of argument, or as a suggestion, or the like); and the argument is communicated in that kind of act in the attempt to achieve a result (e.g., to persuade you to agree with the conclusion, or to enlighten you as to someone's view, or to impress you with the sophistication of the argument, etc.). Historically, the illocutionary aspect has sometimes been called the dialectical part and the perlocutionary the rhetorical part.
It's very important not to confuse the illocutionary and the perlocutionary aspects of the argument, the dialectical and the rhetorical, although both can be important. The perlocutionary force -- like persuasion -- is not part of the immediate act itself but of a larger act subsuming it. You can succeed illocutionarily in the act itself, but perlocutionary success requires other things that are beyond the argument. In statements, I can promise by saying, 'I promise to do it'; I can't persuade you by saying, 'I persuade you to do it'. (That sounds like a punchline for a joke.) Arguments are no different. You can refute someone just by building an argument of the right structure on the right premises; you can't persuade someone just by building an argument, because even if you are trying to persuade someone, persuasion is a further effect in another person that you are trying to achieve by the refutation. The success conditions are entirely different.
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* There is a strain of speech act theory, due to Searle, that tries to replace Austin's three-act theory with a two-act theory, involving only the illocutionary and the perlocutionary. As with much of Searle's work in speech act theory, this is interesting but, I think, ultimately to the detriment of the theory, due to Searle's tendency to change the general theory in order to address problems that are domain-specific. For instance, Searle in a famous paper argued that the distinction of illocutionary and locutionary act was otiose because in a case like "I hereby promise to do it" the sense-and-reference meaning of the statement is such that it includes the illocutionary force: the serious and literary meaning includes that it is itself a promise. But this is false as a general matter. For instance, in a purely verbal conversation, if I say "I hereby promise to do it" and then, in response to someone asking what I said, you say, "'I hereby promise to do it'", we have performed the same type of locutionary act, and we have to be, since your action can't make any sense unless you are saying what I said. But in terms of the illocutionary act there has to be a significant difference, because in using these words you are not making any kind of promise at all, but simply reporting on my promise. Searle's condition -- that we are talking about the serious and literal meaning -- is also glossing over an important area of language in which it becomes necessary not to collapse the locutionary and illocutionary aspects of language into each other, namely figurative and poetic speech, including many of the ceremonial kinds of speech that Austin had in mind when building parts of his theory. In general, I find Austin's instincts about language are superior by magnitudes to Searle's, who tends to be at his best when looking at specific problems rather than fiddling with the overall theory.
One reason for keeping the three-act theory is that it is essential to Austin's notion that communicating with language is a practical activity, and therefore has the structure of a practical activity. Throughout discussions of practical activities one finds analogues of a three-act theory. For instance, in moral theory, if you hit someone in the face, there is the act itself (the 'locutionary' aspect), the object in the act (the 'illocutionary' aspect), and the intent of the act, that is our use of it for further ends (the 'perlocutionary' aspect, or at least the perlocutionary aspect it will have if it is successful). For instance, you might be hitting them in the face as retaliation for the fact that they look better than you in the attempt to harm their face; or you might be hitting them in the face as a form of self-defense in the attempt to deter them from doing something bad. It matters greatly that you can in some sense do the same action with a different object; entire ethical theories, like Kantianism, are built on the point.
For instance, if I say, "Let me pay your bill," in a successful attempt to persuade you that I am kind, the locutionary act is the actual utterance as understandable to an English-speaker. The illocutionary force is the offering to pay -- I'm not merely saying the words, I am saying the words as an offer of payment -- and the perlocutionary force is persuasion -- I'm not merely saying the words, nor merely offering to pay, I am also succeeding in the attempt to use the offer of payment to persuade you of my kindness. You can think of them as the layers of our use of language: we communicate with words (locutionary), those words are said as a kind of act (illocutionary), and in the attempt to achieve further results by means of that act (perlocutionary).
When people discuss this, they generally stick to talking about particular statements, but there are other kinds of speech acts, including speech acts that have statements as component parts. A formal speech, for instance, is itself a speech act, and has its locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary aspects, just as much as its component statements do. And the same is true for arguments. An argument has a locutionary aspect (the words and syntax that mean something); the argument is communicated in an act of a certain kind (e.g., as something argued for the sake of argument, or as a suggestion, or the like); and the argument is communicated in that kind of act in the attempt to achieve a result (e.g., to persuade you to agree with the conclusion, or to enlighten you as to someone's view, or to impress you with the sophistication of the argument, etc.). Historically, the illocutionary aspect has sometimes been called the dialectical part and the perlocutionary the rhetorical part.
It's very important not to confuse the illocutionary and the perlocutionary aspects of the argument, the dialectical and the rhetorical, although both can be important. The perlocutionary force -- like persuasion -- is not part of the immediate act itself but of a larger act subsuming it. You can succeed illocutionarily in the act itself, but perlocutionary success requires other things that are beyond the argument. In statements, I can promise by saying, 'I promise to do it'; I can't persuade you by saying, 'I persuade you to do it'. (That sounds like a punchline for a joke.) Arguments are no different. You can refute someone just by building an argument of the right structure on the right premises; you can't persuade someone just by building an argument, because even if you are trying to persuade someone, persuasion is a further effect in another person that you are trying to achieve by the refutation. The success conditions are entirely different.
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One reason for keeping the three-act theory is that it is essential to Austin's notion that communicating with language is a practical activity, and therefore has the structure of a practical activity. Throughout discussions of practical activities one finds analogues of a three-act theory. For instance, in moral theory, if you hit someone in the face, there is the act itself (the 'locutionary' aspect), the object in the act (the 'illocutionary' aspect), and the intent of the act, that is our use of it for further ends (the 'perlocutionary' aspect, or at least the perlocutionary aspect it will have if it is successful). For instance, you might be hitting them in the face as retaliation for the fact that they look better than you in the attempt to harm their face; or you might be hitting them in the face as a form of self-defense in the attempt to deter them from doing something bad. It matters greatly that you can in some sense do the same action with a different object; entire ethical theories, like Kantianism, are built on the point.
Catechesis
The state of Catholic catechesis in modern America can be captured in concise form by the fact that this passage from the Jesuit magazine, America, was not intended to be parody on it:
'The dual persons of Jesus'! That this establishes that Meaghan and Shea are not competent for providing advice on catechesis goes without saying, but the real garnish on the dish is that no editor caught the problem.
One gets tired, incidentally, of 'critical thinking' being used as an excuse for lazy people not to teach the actual subjects that they are supposed to be teaching. Nobody can do critical thinking in physics except to the extent they already know physics; nobody can do critical thinking in literature except to the extent they are familiar with literature; nobody can do critical thinking when faced with a problem requiring integrals if they haven't learned what an integral is and how it works. Critical thinking is about using what you have learned in order to select the right approach to a problem and the right way to evaluate your thinking about it.
I had this problem with a lot of approaches to confirmation classes, back when I was helping out with confirmation classes. People talk grandly about teaching teenagers to have a 'living faith' and 'lifelong practice' and, as Meaghan and Shea do, things like 'critical thinking and moral development'. And certainly, if you have in hand a way to teach the subject that does this, it is infinitely better than using a way that doesn't do it. But your job in a confirmation class is not actually to do any of these things, it is to make sure everyone has the minimal level of knowledge required to understand confirmation and its prerequisites. If you aren't even doing that, it is dishonest to talk about giving them a 'living faith' and 'lifelong practice' or contributing to their 'moral development'; it's nothing but words being used to hide the fact that you are not doing the task you were supposed to be doing.
Unfortunately, the muscles of learning have long been neglected in the study of theology as seen in the high-school curriculum provided by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The core curriculum, “Who Is Jesus Christ?,”dives into the dual persons of Jesus and floods students with the incredibly complex teachings of Nestorianism and monophysitism. But the curriculum does little to promote critical thinking and moral development. How can we foster faith in students with merely rote memorization and inaccessible vocabulary?
'The dual persons of Jesus'! That this establishes that Meaghan and Shea are not competent for providing advice on catechesis goes without saying, but the real garnish on the dish is that no editor caught the problem.
One gets tired, incidentally, of 'critical thinking' being used as an excuse for lazy people not to teach the actual subjects that they are supposed to be teaching. Nobody can do critical thinking in physics except to the extent they already know physics; nobody can do critical thinking in literature except to the extent they are familiar with literature; nobody can do critical thinking when faced with a problem requiring integrals if they haven't learned what an integral is and how it works. Critical thinking is about using what you have learned in order to select the right approach to a problem and the right way to evaluate your thinking about it.
I had this problem with a lot of approaches to confirmation classes, back when I was helping out with confirmation classes. People talk grandly about teaching teenagers to have a 'living faith' and 'lifelong practice' and, as Meaghan and Shea do, things like 'critical thinking and moral development'. And certainly, if you have in hand a way to teach the subject that does this, it is infinitely better than using a way that doesn't do it. But your job in a confirmation class is not actually to do any of these things, it is to make sure everyone has the minimal level of knowledge required to understand confirmation and its prerequisites. If you aren't even doing that, it is dishonest to talk about giving them a 'living faith' and 'lifelong practice' or contributing to their 'moral development'; it's nothing but words being used to hide the fact that you are not doing the task you were supposed to be doing.
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