The Parable of the Knaves and the Brahmin

A pious Brahmin, it is written, made a vow that on a certain day he would sacrifice a sheep, and on the appointed morning he went forth to buy one. There lived in his neighbourhood three rogues who knew of his vow, and laid a scheme for profiting by it. The first met him and said, “Oh Brahmin, wilt thou buy a sheep? I have one fit for sacrifice.”

“It is for that very purpose,” said the holy man, “that I came forth this day.” Then the impostor opened a bag, and brought out of it an unclean beast, an ugly dog, lame and blind. Thereon the Brahmin cried out, “Wretch, who touchest things impure, and utterest things untrue, callest thou that cur a sheep?” “Truly,” answered the other, “it is a sheep of the finest fleece, and of the sweetest flesh. Oh Brahmin, it will be an offering most acceptable to the gods.”

“Friend,” said the Brahmin, “either thou or I must be blind.”

Just then one of the accomplice’s came up. “Praised be the gods,” said this second rogue, “that I have been saved the trouble of going to the market for a sheep! This is such a sheep as I wanted. For how much wilt thou sell it?” When the Brahmin heard this, his mind waved to and fro, like one swinging in the air at a holy festival. “Sir,” said he to the new comer, “take heed what thou dost; this is no sheep, but an unclean cur.”

“Oh Brahmin,” said the new comer, “thou art drunk or mad!”

At this time the third confederate drew near. “Let us ask this man,” said the Brahmin, “what the creature is, and I will stand by what he shall say.” To this the others agreed; and the Brahmin called out, “Oh stranger, what dost thou call this beast?”

“Surely, oh Brahmin,” said the knave, “it is a fine sheep.” Then the Brahmin said, “Surely the gods have taken away my senses;” and he asked pardon of him who carried the dog, and bought it for a measure of rice and a pot of ghee, and offered it up to the gods, who, being wroth at this unclean sacrifice, smote him with a sore disease in all his joints.

Thomas Babington Macauley, "Mr. Robert Montgomery (I)" (Edinburgh Review, April 1830), Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays, Volume 2. Macauley attributes the story to Pilpay, i.e., the Panchatantra. In the version translated later by Ryder, the story works in reverse: the priest has a nice clean animal and the rogues con him out of it by convincing him that it is unclean; but there are many different versions of the work.

Of Discourses About Fascism

I do not have a high opinion of Jason Stanley's work -- any of it at all, I'm afraid; one tries to be openminded but this sort of thing happens nonetheless -- and much of his recent work on fascism seems to me largely to be repackaged and warmed over work by other people, mangled into strained shapes by analogies in his head rather than serious analysis. (It all reminds me a bit, actually, of Peter Singer's book, The President of Good and Evil, which was not so much a book as a grift, reassuring partisans of a particular type that, yes, they are the insightful and intelligent ones, and see more deeply than their opponents, and in the process both fleecing them and putting himself in a convenient spotlight for his career. The book is, unsurprisingly, of very poor quality; if you've never read Singer's reflections on passages in the speeches of George W. Bush, you have done better at avoiding pages and pages of bad analysis and meandering argument than I have.) But I did find this New Yorker profile on his classes interesting, although in part because it captures very clearly a common desire among the intellectually inclined: to see the current events of any given moment in terms of an identifiable pattern of past action that gives them deep insight into the course of history. The same desire, I think, is why academics have a very bad track record on political questions; the desire creates the temptation to think that they already know what is going on. But the patterns of history, while they do exist, do not fall so neatly or easily into our laps. In reality, there is no more sense to seeing fascism in every bit of bullying, corruption, and abuse of power one sees in a political opponent than to seeing Marxism in the same; fascism is a kind of programmatic policy, namely one of unifying all forces in the control of the state, not a specimen-collection of political wrongdoings and corrupt rhetorical appeals. The mistake seems to be quite common across the board, though, as the "it's-not-big-enough" critics show; 'fascism' is not a name for a size of badness. Gentile was not a Fascist because he did horribly bad things; he was a Fascist because he thought politics should extend through the whole realm of human thought. And one sees a similar problem when people speak as if not regarding every abuse of power as fascism would be somehow not to regard it as an abuse.

We should be skeptical of this label-slapping, for one of the perennial reasons why we should consider whether to be skeptical: it tempts us to think we understand more than we do. We recently had a situation in which a bunch of well-placed academics were discovered by the broader public to be fomenting against homeschooling; they thought it unacceptable that parents could educate their parents without thorough regulation by the state and one in particular even stated that families only exist because they are legally recognized by the state. Now, it is entirely reasonable to think of this as advocating a step toward totalitarianism; it is exactly the sort of view of education that fascists historically have had. Would we learn anything from calling it fascism? All we would actually be doing is shortcircuiting understanding, substituting a pre-determined classification for an actual causal analysis. Of course, one does this for polemical purposes, or to express disapproval; that's fine, I suppose, but it's not an actual understanding of the situation.

Or take another example, from the Singer book I mentioned above. Singer, responding to Bushian comments about giving taxpayers back their money, puts forward the theory, common among a certain set of academics, that it's not their money; that since all pay depends on government distribution, taxation is not taking from people what they already own. Setting aside the fact that this theory is inconsistent with how almost every tax system in the world is actually set up, this is also quite clearly inconsistent with every serious account of labor's right to pay; it posits that the state has a non-obvious totality of authority in economic transactions, and it is exactly the kind of view of taxation that is consistent with a fascist view of the state. Have we actually understood the underlying situation giving rise to this view if we call it fascist? Do we really know how it will unfold? We do not. That can't be done by a classification.

Fascism, again, is not a collection of bad things; it is a policy of unified states governing 'totalitarianly'. One opposes actual fascism by supporting the rational pluralism of societies, that is, the actively and practically implemented view that human beings are members not merely of one society but of many distinct societies -- family, church, profession, civil society, humanity -- each of which has claims on them that must be respected, and none of which has the right to treat itself as the sole society; that these societies are not mere instruments of the state but that membership in these multiple societies constitutes the power and freedom of the person; that a society appropriate to a human being is one negotiating peace with these other societies, so that no one society has supremacy over everything. Human good is too vast a thing for any one society wholly to capture. The great political evil is the all-devouring maw.

We lose sight of this if we try to identify fascism by collecting specimens of corruption and failure. Anyone who knows human nature can see exactly where such an approach will lead: there will be plenty of cases of pareidolia, seeing things that aren't there due to vaguely similar shapes from one particular perspective; there will be plenty of cases of putting the fascist-color lens on the camera to make one's political opponents seem a little more fascist-like; there will be a lot of caricature-versions of fascism blended with caricature-versions of current events; and there will, of course, be lots of genuine evils that will be misclassified on the principle that if it is this or that it must be fascism. You'll get the kinds of the things you got from some Marxists in the Cold War, in which every corruption and failing of the Western powers was a sign that those powers were fascist. What will certainly not happen is that anyone will have a genuinely better understanding of the situation at large, or even, in many cases, the specimens. And what will even more certainly not happen is anything that would actually stand in the way of anything like fascism.

Music on My Mind

Melodicka Bros, "Take On Me".

Pagnan Notation

As I've noted before, Ruggero Pagnan in a handful of articles* has introduced an interesting semi-diagrammatic method for handling syllogisms. He calls it SYLL (or SYLL+ when subalternation is added, or SYLL++ when both subalternation and an identity rule are added); I'll call it Pagnan Notation, since I'm less interested in logical systems qua systems than qua instruments for reasoning. Pagnan Notation has terms, represented by letters, and the following symbols:

← left arrow
→ right arrow
• bullet

Arrows must link terms or bullets; they cannot stand on their own. The basic categorical propositions are as follows:

All A is B
A → B

No A is B
A → • ← B

Some A is B
A ← • → B

Some A is not B
A ← • → • ← B

In addition, for purposes of manipulation, these each has a reversed form that is equivalent to it, but switches the positions of the terms:

All A is B
B ← A

No A is B
B → • ← A

Some A is B
B ← • → A

Some A is not B
B → • ← • → A

Because I and E are symmetrical diagrams, allowing reversals directly gives us two rules of immediate inference:

(1) I-Conversion: From A ← • → B, you can conclude B ← • → A, and vice versa.
(2) E-Conversion: From A → • ← B, you can conclude B → • ← A, and vice versa.

For obvious reasons, we can likewise recognize,

(3) Identity: You may at any time add A → A

which is equivalent to "All A is A"; and we can also have,

(4) Subalternation: You may at any time add A ← • → A

which is equivalent to "Some A is A". Combining reversal with Subalternation lets us have conversion per accidens for A propositions.

When two propositions share terms at the extremes, they can be concatenated. So, for instance, A → B and B → C can be superposed at the 'B' in order to get A → B → C. And we can delete any term (but not a bullet) if it occurs between two arrows going the same way. This is enough to start getting syllogisms.

Barbara:
All B is C: B → C
All A is B: A → B
concatenate to get A → B → C
delete to get A → C, All A is C.

Celarent:
No B is C: B → • ← C
All A is B: A → B
concatenate to get A → B → • ← C
delete to get A → • ← C, No A is C.

Darii:
All B is C: B → C.
Some A is B: A ← • → B
concatenate to get A ← • → B → C
delete to get A ← • → C, Some A is C

Ferio:
No B is C: B → • ← C
Some A is B: A ← • → B
concatentate to get A ← • → B → • ← C
delete to get A ← • → • ← C, Some A is not C.

Thus all the First Figure syllogisms are simple cases of concatenation and deletion. For other figures we will sometimes need to use the equivalent reverses (once for Second Figure and Third Figure, twice for Fourth Figure); for all weakened syllogisms, we will need also to use our Subalternation rule. Subalternation effectively functions as a bullet-introduction rule.

The notation tracks distribution of terms. If a term is at the tail of an arrow, it is distributed; if it is at the head of an arrow, it is not. Thus if we look at one of the standard distribution rules for syllogisms, The middle term must be distributed at least once, we see immediately that a middle term allows concatenation; but it needs to have an arrow proceeding away from it if it is to be deleted and not show up in the conclusion. The second distribution rule, Terms distributed in the conclusion must be distributed in the premises, forbids just flipping arrows on their own. Pagnan notes that it's thus also possible to look at the syllogisms within the system by considering the facts that bullets cannot be deleted and that any bullets in the conclusion have to come from the premises. Then:

(a) You can only get S → P, which has no bullets, if there are no bullets in the premises; only the universal affirmative categorical proposition has no bullets. Therefore a universal affirmative conclusion requires universal affirmative premises.
(b) A universal negative conclusion, S → • ← P, is only possible if our premises have one bullet total and both arrows directed toward it. So one premise has to be universal affirmative, and the other has to be universal negative.
(c) A particular affirmative conclusion, S ← • → P, is only possible if our premises have one bullet total and both arrows directed away from it. So one premise has to be universal affirmative, and the other has to be particular affirmative.
(d) A particular negative conclusion, S ← • → • ← P, is a little trickier. But it will require two bullets that get us the arrows pointing the right alternating way. If each bullet in the conclusion comes from a different premise, one has to be universal negative and the other has to be particular affirmative to get two bullets and alternating arrows. If the two bullets come from one premise, that premise has to be particular negative (the only categorical proposition with two bullets) and the other premise has to be universal affirmative (which has none).

From (a), (b), (c), and (d) together we can see that every possible combination has one affirmative premise; none of the possibilities has two negative premises. Likewise, every possible combination has one universal proposition; none of them has two particular propositions. Every possibility with a negative premise has a negative conclusion. This is enough to get us the standard 'rules for syllogisms' in any of the usual forms that you find.

Pagnan also notes that you can build the square of opposition with what we have, if you add one additional consideration, namely,

(5) Noncontradiction: A ← • → • ← A may never be either a premise or a conclusion.

This, of course, reads as "Some A is not A". Any propositions that put together would yield a proposition of this form cannot be combined. So let's take

A → B
A ← • → • ← B

Concatenating gives us the contradiction (with B instead of A). The same will happen with

A → • ← B
A ← • → B

That's enough to get us a Boolean square of opposition; adding our Subalternation rule gets us the rest of the classical square of opposition.

Given that, we could also prove the validity of the Second, Third, and Fourth Figures by Aristotelian reduction to First Figure syllogisms. Take Datisi:

M → P
M ← • → S
Therefore S ← • → P

It's a Third Figure in which we can reverse the minor, concatenate, and delete; it is valid on the grounds we've noted. But, of course, by reversing the minor, we have turned it into a Darii syllogism. They're usually not that easy, of course. Let's take a Baroco syllogism:

P → M
S ← • → • ← M
Therefore, S ← • → • ← P

Baroco is converted to Barbara by contradiction, as the nasty little 'c' in its mnemonic tells us. Assume the contradictory of the conclusion, which would thus be S → P, since putting that with the actual conclusion would violate Noncontradiction. If you concatenate this with the major premise, P → M, we get S → P → M, which is equivalent to S → M, which is the contradictory of the minor premise (S ← • → • ← M), since if you put those together you violate Noncontradiction. So when we assume the opposite of the conclusion and use it for a Barbara syllogism, we get a conclusion that is inconsistent with the other premise; from which we can know that the conclusion does follow from the premises and Baroco is valid.

We have not considered two immediate inference rules, obversion and contraposition. Obversion of E and of O are extremely easy. "No S is P" is:

S → • ← P

The obverse is "All S is non-P"; but you can get this if you see • ← P as a negative and then read it all as one term. Using parentheses to make it a bit easier to see:

S → (• ← P)

Moving from "Some S is not P" to "Some S is non-P" works exactly the same way -- the obverses of the negative are already built in. Obversion of A and I require a new rule:

(6) Double Negation: → A and → • ← • ← A are equivalent.

Then we can see that "All S is P", S → P, is equivalent to S → (• ← • ← P), and that "Some S is P", S ← • → P is just like S ← • → (• ← • ← P).

Double Negation also allows us to do contraposition for A, since contraposition is the conversion of the obverse. S → P becomes S → • ← • ← P this is then reversed to get P → • → • ← S, "No non-P is S". With contraposition for O, we don't need Double Negation, we just reverse: "Some S are not P", S ← • → • ← P becomes P → • ← • → S, "Some nonP is S".

On this basis we can give translations for propositions with complemented terms:

All nonA is B
A → • → B

All nonA is nonB
A → • → • ← B

Some nonA is B
A → • ← • → B

Some nonA is nonB
A → • ← • → • ← B

No nonA is B
A → • → • ← B

No nonA is nonB
A → • → • ← • ← B

Some nonA is not B
A → • ← • → • ← B

Some nonA is not nonB
A → • ← • → • ← • ← B

If we wanted to, we could add parentheses to make the negated terms easier to pick out, but this wouldn't affect anything.

****

Since we can do complemented terms, it also follows that we could use Pagnan notation to do propositional logic that can be simulated by syllogism (although we have to drop Subalternation). For instance, "All A is B" is like "If p, q", so the latter can be p → q, and then a hypothetical syllogism would work exactly like a Barbara syllogism. For something like modus ponens or modus tollens, we would need to allow bullets to be terminal; that is p → • is "It is not true that p" and • → p is "It is true that p". Given this, we can always turn p into • → p; that is to say,

Assertion: p and • → p are equivalent.

Then modus ponens is:

p → q
• → p
by concatenation and deletion we get • → q.

Disjunction 'p v q' would be p → • → • ← • ← q. Disjunctive syllogism would be

p → • → • ← • ← q
p → •
Reversing the first premise and concatenating, we get q → • → • ← • ← p → •
But by Double Negation, → • ← • ← p is equivalent to → p, so
q → • → p → •
But then p can be deleted to get
q → • → •
But then by Assertion we have, • → q → • → •
but then by double negation that is equivalent to • → q.

And so it goes. In any case, this is all just a side effect of the fact that syllogisms can simulate propositional logic; we could do the same with any other logical fragment that can be simulated by syllogisms, like basic mereology (A → B for "A is part of B" and A ← • → B for "A overlaps B"), or binary modal logic (e.g., we could take A ← • → B to mean "A is compossible with B"), or (as Pagnan does in one of his articles) rudimentary linear logic. Syllogistic is an extraordinarily powerful thing, so a notation that can handle syllogistic fairly easily can do a lot with only minor modifications.

****

* Ruggero Pagnan, "A Diagrammatic Calculus of Syllogisms", Journal of Logic, Language, and Information, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Summer 2012), pp. 347-364; "Syllogisms in Rudimentary Linear Logic, Diagrammatically", Journal of Logic, Language, and Information, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Winter 2013), pp. 71-113; see also "Ologisms", Logical Methods in Computer Science, Volume 14, Issue 3 (August 31, 2018), arXiv:1701.05408.

Common Good and Public Good

The common good must be distinguished from the public good. These two matters are confused with consequent serious harm to the science of public Right and to humanity which, because of this confusion of concepts, searches in vain for a suitable social constitution. The common good is the good of all individuals who make up the social body and are subjects of rights; the public good is the good of the social body taken as a whole or, according to some opinions, taken in its organisation.

[Antonio Rosmini, The Philosophy of Right, Volume 6; Rights in Civil Society, Cleary & Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham: 1996), p.33 (sect. 1644).]

Cinco de Mayo

Zaragoza

Zaragoza looks out on the fields wet with rain,
the mud that flows over the trampled terrain.
The wind in the face is now humid and hot.
He sighs, for he knows that his army is caught;
though at Puebla is safety, at least for a while,
defense on defense to weather the trial,
two forts newly linked by a trench laid in haste,
yet the French are now coming to lay all to waste.
Of the greatness of France, no word need be said,
the might of its force writ in soldiers now dead;
but here -- draw a line for its ruthless demand,
and let it be bitten as it stretches its hand.

Now hearken -- artillery booms out its cry;
insistent with tremor, the cannons let fly.
Too quick and too late have the French made advance,
and, seeking swift winning, they lost their best chance.
Their horses now turn in the sigh of retreat,
but soon are they met by hooves steady and fleet
as the Mexican cavalry swoops on their flanks
and troops in their ambush pour out their ranks.
The rain is now falling like heavenly grace
and all the French army is sliding in place,
and, frantic in flight, slip here and now there
as blood like to rust is incensing the air.

Zaragoza looks out on the field, lost in thought,
and sighs, for he knows that his army is caught,
and speaks the words hardest for commanders to say,
and tells his sure troops to stop now and stay:
Defeat may be birthed by a win stretched too far;
repair and look well on the night filled with stars
that fortune with favor has made you to see
with eyes yet alive and spirits yet free.
The French are defeated, at least for a breath,
and now is the time to retreat from more death.
'The national arms have been covered with fame';
immortal shall be Zaragoza's own name.

Zaragoza looks out on the fields he has won.
Perhaps he thinks back on the course he has run.
Perhaps he hears pipers rejoicing in tune.
Perhaps he foresees that his death will be soon.

Four Species and Metonymic Symbolism

Brown Judaic Studies is putting up open access versions of its monographs. They are on all sorts of different topics. I can highly, highly recommend Jeffrey L. Rubinstein's A History of Sukkot in the Second Temple and Rabbinic Periods; if the Feast of Tabernacles is a topic that interests you, this is definitely a book to read.

I did have a thought about one thing he says. In Chapter 7 (Sukkot in the Amoraic Midrashim), starting on p. 305, Rubinstein has a discussion of the Four Species (arba'at ha-minim), which are used in Sukkot celebrations. The Four Species come from a rabbinical interpretation of Leviticus 23:40, which says that should take something from four things:

es hadar, goodly trees, which rabbis usually interpret as the etrog
temarim, palm trees, usually interpreted as the date palm
es abot, leafy trees, usually interpreted as the myrtle
arbe nahal, willows of the brook

Rubinstein considers a brief discussion by Rabbi Akiba of these:

Rabbi Akiba says:

[A1] Fruit of goodly (hadar) trees (Lev. 23:40). This is the Holy One blessed be He, since it says about Him, You are clothed in glory and majesty (hadar) (Ps. 104:1).

[A2] Palm branches. This is the Holy One blessed be He, since it says about Him, The righteous bloom like a palm (Ps. 92:12).

[A3] Branches of leafy trees. This is the Holy One blessed be He, And He stood among the myrtles (Zech. 1:8).

[A4] Willows ('arvei) of the brook. This is the Holy One blessed be He, since it says about Him, Extol Him who rides the clouds ('aravot) (Ps. 68:4).

Rubinstein summarizes this, reasonably, as "R. Akiba proposes the mystical notion that each of the four species symbolizes God" (p. 306). Given things that he says elsewhere, though, it seems that he takes this to mean that R. Akiba literally thinks that each of the Four Species stands for God in some way. But, thinking through the actual verses to which Rabbi Akiba appeals, I don't think this can be quite right. It seems much more likely that R. Akiba is taking the link to be more indirect than this suggests. What the Four Species represent are four things that are closely associated with God, what we might call His appurtenances, rather than (directly) God Himself; they symbolize God not by direct symbolism but by symbolic metonymy.

Psalm 104, for instance, talks about God by associating Him with several things -- light, heavens, wind, fire, earth -- and thus is taking an indirect approach to description of God. What the hadar trees, the trees of splendor, directly symbolize is the hadar, splendor, that God wears as a vestment. Your vestments or clothes are things very closely associated with you that are nonetheless not you; splendor is not the divine being but something very closely associated with it. Likewise, Psalm 92:12-13 does not directly talk about God but about how the righteous are palm trees in the divine court. Looking at Zechariah 1, the one standing among the myrtles of the ravine is literally the Angel of the Lord -- again, closely associated with God as His messenger, but distinct. Psalm 68 does talk directly about God, but 'willows' only comes in because the word for 'willow' and the word for 'cloud' is the same word. And the clouds here are the divine chariot. So in each case what is directly symbolized is not God but something closely associated with God: the divine vestment, the divine court, the divine messenger, the divine chariot. However, because of this close association these things can in turn be used as a metonymic description for "the Holy One blessed be He" and thus can symbolize God indirectly.

This fits, of course, with a common pattern in how the rabbis tended to talk about God. We could indeed say, allowing for the fact that there are obviously many exceptions, that Christian discourse about God tends to diverge from Jewish discourse about God because Christians usually have preferred to talk about God by metaphor whereas Jews usually have preferre to talk about God by metonymy. One can think of the difference between, say, Philo of Alexandria and Dionysus. But in any case, it's worth keeping in mind that metaphoric symbolism and metonymic symbolism are distinct, and can sometimes operate in very different ways.

And Worthy of the Sunlight and the Stars

Reflections
by Paul Elmer More

Right often as I gazed upon the sea
And over all the billows far and wide,
Meseemed each passing wave but rose and died,
To murmur in the air some mystery
Learned in the solemn depths where such may be;
And once when the broad wind rose from the tide
And with the gathered burden louder sighed,
Meseemed I caught their utterance thus to me:--
Live in the heart of things where warnings sleep
That tears and laughter are not idle farce;
Live, not ashamed for honest pain to weep,
Still conqueror through sorrow's many wars,
Glad in the universal joys that keep,
And worthy of the sunlight and the stars.

Dashed Off VIII

"Every classification has reference to a tendency toward an end. If this tendency is the tendency which has determined the class characters of the objects, it is a natural classification." C. S. Peirce
"Every unitary classification has a leading idea or purpose, and is a natural classification in so far as that same purpose is determinative in the production of the objects classified."

Peirce on the 'longitude' of final causes: "By this I mean that while a certain ideal end state of things might most perfectly satisfy a desire, yet a situation somewhat different from that will be far better than nothing; and in general, when a state is not too far from teh ideal state, the nearer it approaches that state the better." (CP 1.207)

typological classification and the longitude of final causes
cp. "clustering distributions will characterize purposive classes" (Peirce, CP 1.207).

"the fact that classes merge is no proof that they are not truly distinct classes" Peirce

Dave Oswald Mitchell on protest organizing
(1) Put target in a decision dilemma.
(2) Do the media's work for them (give them the story).
(3) Lead with sympathetic characters.

"Unjust and unlawful is any monopoly, educational and scholastic, which, physically or morally, forces families to make use of government schools contrary to the dictates of their Christian conscience." Pius XI

When we say that something works in a lawlike fashion, we mean that it does so as if its possibilities were constrained and weighted so as to select a result; that is final causation.

Roberts (2008): While theories may draw on laws, the function of being a law is not part of a scientific theory.

pseudonymous persona and quasi-property

"Not everyone who imagines something is also aware and judges that he has imagined." Avicenna

Steinkrüger (2015): Aristotle's logic is a relevance logic in the sense that (a) premises and conclusion must in some way share content and (b) premises must be used to derive the conclusion.

God as the truthmaker for 'Good is to be done and sought, and bad avoided'

natural a priori (mind prior to any experience), structural a priori (mind in making sense of experience to begin with), conceptual a priori (mind drawing on experience and going beyond it)
sensory a posteriori, memorial or memorative a posteriori, introspective a posteriori

Everybody accepts some philosophical claims on testimony.

felt alienness accounts of the external world
(perhaps more general as felt alterity, with alienness as an extreme form)

Because of the way utilitarianism is structured, utilitarianism tends toward catastrophe-mining.

Philosophical rhetoric studies possible means of persuasion -- the 'possible' is important.

Whewellian superinduction of concepts and the synthetic a priori

"We have a human need to pray in a way that overwhelms our senses, and the human need to have that experience interpreted to us so that it becomes even richer and fuller and more significant, because worship is not an individual act but a communal event." Cat Hodge

Ganeri (2003): Nyaya logic as case-based reasoning

"Even plants have things done to them that are harmful or beneficial, and what does them good must be related in some way to their living and dying." Philippa Foot

Goldman's account of sexual desire in "Plain Sex" ("desire for contact with another person's body and for the pleasure which such contact produces") massively oversexualizes the desire for bodily contact and fails to recognize the distinctness of it from the desire to give pleasure and similar desires.

What we usually call political parties are not parties as such but organizational shells for them.

A philosophical system is a unified interpretation of arguments.

Some subarguments are within the universe of the main argument (direct reasons for premises); others are in a universe modally related (reductio & hypothetical 'suppose x' arguments generally).

The spirit of moral laws is not confined to some purely interior disposition but is a matter of the disposition of one's whole life.

"No man can possibly be righteous without having the hope, from the analogy of the physical world, that righteousness must have its reward." Kant

The very idea of making suggests the question of whether the world is made and what, if it is, makes it.

Spatial metaphors typically capture modal information.

"All men are certain that there is an external world: and yet they have not this certainty from their consciousness, for consciousness is limited to phenomena purely internal; nor do they know the fact by evidence, because, even supposing the possibility of a true demonstration, many would be incpaable of comprehending it, and because the majority have never thought, and never will think, of such demonstrations." Balmes

Balmes's common sense is a sense of the extravagantness of a possibility; by it we recognize that some possibilities, despite being possibilities, are too extravagant to be true, that something seems too unlikely to be taken seriously. This is fallible, he thinks, unless four features are found in it:
(1) the impulse is irresistible
(2) it is plausible to treat it as common to the whole human race
(3) it endures tests of reason
(4) it bears on the satisfaction of some fundamental need of all human life.

four kinds of impossibility (Balmes)
(1) metaphysical: implies contradiction
(2) physical: violates law of nature
(3) ordinary/moral: violates ordinary course of things
(4) of common sense: too improbable by its very nature ever to be verified

"In reading, there are two essentials: to select good books, and to read them well." Balmes

"It is only when perception fails us that we have to ask the question whether a thing is so or not." Aristotle

"Love, recognizing germs of loveliness in the hateful, gradually warms it into life, and makes it lovely." Peirce

Law does not govern external action only; it also gives people a guideline to keep in mind in relating to others.

moral regards: self-reflective, cooperative, abstract, regulative

each idea a silkworm for the magnaneries of reason

Representations are activations.

The brain is an organ of sensory representation.

Whether logical truths exclude possibilities depends on the specific modalities being considered.

(1) paradigmatics
(2) formal model construction
(3) history of philosophy
(4) evidential analysis
(5) socratics

Jurisprudence does not ignore internal disposition; its means of taking it into account are limited, but they are important. (Consider, for instance, the roles of 'malice', 'insanity', 'sincerity', 'mental anguish', and the like.)

term contradiction

syllogistic reduction as a practice for students on the way to doing proofs fully

Martin (1993): "To fathom the nature of etiquette, one must realize that etiquette plays at least three distinct, conceptually separable social functions: a regulative, a symbolic, and a ritual function."
-- law cannot be justly administered without etiquette
-- "In its symbolic function, etiquette provides a system of symbols whose semantic content provides for predictability in social relations, especially among strangers."

(1) There are no degrees of belief, properly speaking.
(2) The language usually used to suggest there are does not, and could not, support degrees of belief being real-valued.
(3) There is no reason to think that degrees of belief would have to correspond to odds for betting on propositions.

'Popular antiquities' should have been kept as a subgenus of 'folklore'.

'personal brand' as quasi-property

person ) persona ) personal brand (persona instrumentality)

natural religion as seal of ethics

Liguori on baptism of desire: Moral Theology Bk 6 nn 95-97
-- note that he takes it to be de fide (Council of Trent session 6, chapter 4: 'sine lavacro regenerationis aut ejus voto')

fluminis, flaminis, sanguinis

grace as that whereby we imitate God and converse with him.

"A benevolent judge is unthinkable." (Kant)
-- a great deal about Kant in this one sentence

Democracy obscures the courses of power by allowing power to be exercised anonymously through intermediary networks built for that purpose; thus with it, one always has to consider the behind-scenes.

If 'best scientific view' includes our best scientific accounts of all major domains, our best scientific view is at any given moment incoherent.

reason's title to inquire

Even the most prudent people require advice, and even at times clarification of principles and moral concepts, or morally relevant concepts, that another can more easily provide.

freedom as "that faculty which gives unlimited usefulness to all other faculties" (Kant)

the duty of ordering one's life so as to be fit for the performance of moral duties

consciousness of one's life as a trust

moral luck // intellectual luck

We use metaphors not only to get people to notice things, but also to get them not to notice things, i.e., to obscure things. One can perhaps treat the latter as sleight-of-indication, misdirecton taht is trying to get people to notice something else, but these are also not exhaustive, and also shared with literal discourse.

mathematical insulation: there is no way to unite all of math into a single system without insulating some parts from some other parts

Rigor is a relation of means to end.

"All nations begin with theology and are founded by theology." Maistre

"The beautiful, in all imaginable genres, is that which pleases enlightened virtue. Any other definition is false or insufficient." Maistre

Secularization proceeds by active resource denial on one side and active retreat on the other.

NB Xiong's argument that we assume external objects because we become accustomed to relying on things for nourishment.

genuine liberal Christianity vs. neochristianity

a mind rich with folds

While Wittgenstein talks about 'hinge' propositions, it would perhaps be more reasonable to talk of envelope propositions.

subject, world, and God as postulates of philosophical inquiry

The notion of cause is at the heart of our notion of the world; without causes there is no world.

"Observation and experience show that a worthless man values his life more than his person." Kant

philosophical problems as loci for debates

Evidence-collection is structured by choices.

the rights of refuge of victims of wreck (shipwreck, plane crashes, storms and other catastrophes forcing to shelter) vs the rights of refuge of people in flight

Evening Note for Friday, May 1

Thought for the Evening: Modes of Reference in Rituals

In a paper that should be better known, "Modes of Reference in the Rituals of Judaism" [Religious Studies, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Mar., 1987), pp. 109-128], Josef Stern applied some ideas of Nelson Goodman's theory of symbols in art to various Jewish rituals (as you might expect from the title). I'm not especially impressed by Goodman's account in general, but Stern, I think, does a good job of capturing what is of value in it.

Goodman takes symbols to be primarily constituted by reference, in which they stand for something; but there are different ways things can stand for something. There are several, but two notable ones are denotation, in which something like a description or a word attributes something to something as the possession of the latter, and exemplification, in which the symbol possesses that to which it refers and thus exhibits it, like a sample of something.

What Stern does is take this and apply the ideas to "ritual gestures", by which he means "all actions and objects that achieve ritual status" (p. 109). Judaism, of course, is very ritual-rich. The ritual gestures of Judaism do not merely act as symbols, but they do act as symbols of various kinds. When we look out how these ritual gestures refer, we get several varieties, which are sometimes found in simple forms but sometimes mixed in complex ways.

(1) Representation, which is essentially denotation. A typical case of this is the ritual gesture that is a commemoration. Circumcision, for instance, commemorates the covenant of Abraham by way of Scriptural authority; there is nothing particularly about circumcision itself that suggests Abraham or covenants, but Scriptural authority sets a precedent and a standard for its use as a way to refer to the Abrahamic covenant in order to bring it to mind. Others might do so in a way that's more 'pictorial', like haroset at Passover, which commemorates slavery in Egypt; a paste of fruits and nuts, its muddy color and texture is a sort of pictorial representation of mortar for bricks. Yet others might do so more metaphorically or metonymically, by depicting or suggesting something related to or like that to which they refer.

(2) Exemplification. Exemplification is not complete reiteration; as a symbolic mode of reference it generally takes a little something (we might say) that is of the same type as what it refers to. Stern's example is that Israel is commanded (Dt 26:2) to bring every first fruit; given that this is, if taken hyperliterally, usually impracticable, and given that offering first fruits is by its nature a symbolic offering anyway, the Rabbis have generally taken this to mean that you should bring first fruits capable of representing every first fruit, namely, the seven specifically mentioned in Deuteronomy 8:8. All of these are actually first fruits, but they also stand for all first fruits whatsoever.

(3) Expression, which is a form of exemplification that works figuratively. Bowing at the beginning of the benedictions of the Amidah expresses homage. It does not do so because the person bowing has feelings of homage. In fact, it is the reverse: the point of the bowing is to put the person bowing in a state of mind that is at least suitable to such feelings.

All three of these are often found in combination. Take representation and exemplification. "While denotation is the preponderant mode of reference for (verbal) languages, and exemplification is more central to the arts, the two frequently function in tandem in ritual gestures" (p. 112). The bitter herbs of Passover both exemplify the bitter herbs used in the ancient Passovers and also commemorate the sudden flight from Egypt, and this is quite common; indeed, the interaction between these two modes of reference often lead to further symbolizations associated with them. This leads to the forming of symbol-chains, which give to ritual a living flexibility.

While these three are in some way fundamental, there are other kinds of reference in which ritual gestures refer to other, parallel ritual gestures.

(4) Allusion. One ritual may have reference to another; Stern notes that the rabbis will sometimes explain a Sukkot ritual by a Shavuot ritual. Another example that he doesn't use is that there's a lot of evidence that early Hanukkah rituals were modeled on Sukkot rituals; Hanukkah, the feast of dedication, was a relatively new celebration, and as it was a joyful celebration for the people, it was done by partial imitation of the major festival that was both joyful and popular in its actual celebration, namely, Sukkot, the festival of tabernacles. But it's not as if the early ritual gestures were just direct copies; they were adaptations to different purposes, and the rituals were modified accordingly, sometimes quite heavily.

(5) Re-enactment. A re-enactment is a token of the same type as that to which it refers, so as to be a successor to it in a series. Thus a Sabbath ritual gesture, which commemorates Creation, is also a re-enactment of previous Sabbath ritual gestures. A Passover seder is both a commemoration of the Exodus and a re-enactment of past Passover seders going back to the original.

(6) However, perhaps the most important way in which a ritual gesture would refer to others, is one for which Stern doesn't settle on a name but which we might call Co-participation. In the Passover seder there is a recitation of the Haggadah. The Haggadah commemorates the Exodus both by description and by dramatic portrayal; it is an exemplification of the kind of thing that is commanded to be done for Passover in Exodus 13:8; it re-enacts previous recitations; but it does something more. The Haggadah represents those participating in the seder as in some way involved with the Exodus itself. This goes beyond commemoration in the ordinary sense. The way Stern tries to explain this is by suggesting that this is tied up to the nature of the ritual as a story, and in particular as a story of stories. Storytelling of the sort that is expected in the seder is not simply a description, but an imaginative appropriation; but the Haggadah doesn't simply tell the participants to do this, it walks the participants through it, in going through samples of how prior generations did this. And in participating in the recitation in this way, the participant is also participating in the community of all those who have done this in the past. "Through this mode of symbolization, the Exodus thus serves, not only as the historical beginning of the nation of Israel, but as an imaginative origin by which the Jewish community is regularly recreated through its performance of ritual" (p. 128).

This is not necessarily a perfectly exhaustive list, although obviously it covers a great deal. But the strength of it lies in its generalizability.

Various Links of Interest

* A Close Look at the Frontrunning Coronavirus Vaccines As of April 23

* At the Journal of the History of Philosophy:
Anselm Spindler, Politics and Collective Action in Thomas Aquinas's On Kingship
Deborah Boyle, Mary Shepherd on Mind, Soul, Self
Edward Slowik, Cartesian Holenmerism and Its Discontents
Lawrence Pasternack, Restoring Kant's Conception of the Highest Good
Dario Perinetti, Hume at La Flèche
Terry Echterling, What Did Glaucon Draw?

* Étienne Brown, Kant’s Doctrine of the Highest Good: A Theologico-Political Interpretation

* Tyler Hildegrand, Non-Humean Theories of Natural Necessity

* Nathan Pinkoski, How Not to Challenge the Integralists

* Charles De Koninck, The End of the Family and the End of Civil Society

* Gordon Graham, Scottish Philosophy in the 19th Century, at the SEP

* Snail salves, waters, & syrups at "Early Modern Medicine"

* Gray Connolly, The Geopolitical Lessons of 2020

* Thomas Pink, Suarez on Authority as Coercive Teacher

* The Impossibility of Language Acquisition, an interesting semi-interview with language research pioner Lila Geitman, was a really enjoyable look at the issues in studying language acquisition.

* Kelsey Donk looks at some of the likely effects of the shutdowns on our food supply. Briefly and roughly: most of what we have seen so far has been due simply to adjustment problems, given that we have distinct commercial and grocery food distribution systems and it is very difficult to switch from one to the other; we are not anywhere near a real shortage, since the problem is that we are actually having gluts that we can't sell because we can't distribute them to the people who are buying. These problems will slowly be solved by various sorts of improvised solutions. But food production has to be planned about a year ahead based on what we can do now; as what farmers can do now massively contracts due to distribution problems and the like, we will likely see the effects starting in February of next year. If the lockdowns don't last a long time, the problems will likely be minor disruptions in the U.S. -- milk might become very expensive, bacon might be almost impossible to get, some things might have roller coaster prices or go in and out of availability. Food distribution brownouts, so to speak. The reason they will be minor, however, is that the U.S. is a massive agricultural exporter; what is likely to happen is that we will use domestically what would usually be sold abroad. Since other exporting nations will likely do the same, nations that are less agriculturally self-sufficient -- and there are a lot -- will find their domestic production stretched very thinly. Of course, a lot depends on decisions made between now and next year as to how serious that will become.

Currently Reading

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
Matthew C. Briel, A Greek Thomist: Providence in Gennadios Scholarios
Stephen Jarvis, Death and Mr. Pickwick

Some Poem Drafts

Sons and Daughters

I never had much to begin with.
I never knew the road to take.
All of my plans are seed ungrowing,
crumbled to dust all things I made.
I've laughed and cried
in much the way of mortal men;
I've smiled and sighed,
again, again, again.
Looking back I see an endless road
of errors made, mistakes uncaught,
with all those failures bricks in Babel
that never reached the sky I sought.

But this I know, my sons and daughters:
I fought with valiant heart and true.
Though many things I did not understand,
I did my honest best for you.

My wishes somehow turned to ashes,
my hopes would rarely bear their fruit.
So many treasures lost in shadows!
So many dreams withered at root!
I've closed my ears
to voices all around me;
I was so blind
for I did not wish to see.
When I repent, my tears well up like a river.
I took my chance on where the coins would fall,
my every deed was reckless as a gamble;
I did not win. Perhaps I lost it all.

But this I know, my sons and daughters:
though my works fade, I leave to you
the mountains, heavens, fields, and waters
which your fresh eyes may see anew.

Fragment of an Epic

Speak, O music Spirit, of the high Moon
and, bursting into legend out of life,
the ways and doings of the starward men
who rose like eagles to the argent light
and drove the black star-road to lunar lands;
of the twelve who walked, the Earth in their sky,
in deserts where no air nor water flows,
but also of those patient men who sailed
around the moon in never-ending fall
and, too, of those who aided them in flight.

Interplay

She laughed,
a dancing fountain
liquid with joy
light sunray-ballerinas
glittering in golden beam
and full of fluid smiles.

His heart
in aquiline sunrise
took wing in fiery blaze,
each feather sparking
at each exalting beat.

Story

First Day
Long Kiss
Fun Months
Wedding Bells
Crying Kids
Hard Times
Little Wins
Old Age
Final Hours
Endless Hopes

Du Fu's Spring View

the empire is fallen
mountains and rivers stand

the city is in spring
it is thick with grass and tree

one feels the time
the flowers drop tears

distressed by distance
the birds alarm the heart

the beacons are aflame
lasting for three months

a letter from home
costs ten thousand gold

my white hair
is scratched ever shorter

the whole thing soon
will not hold a hairpin

Osborne on Aquinas's Ethics

Thomas Osborne's Aquinas's Ethics, in the Cambridge Elements series, is available online for free until May 18. It's a pretty decent introduction to the topic. One thing I saw that I think is not quite right:

The efficient cause provides some difficulty for Aquinas’s appropriation of Lombard’s definition. An efficient cause is the agent that brings about the act. According to Aquinas, Lombard’s definition identifies the efficient cause with God in the part that reads, “which God works in us without us.” Aquinas does not apply this part of the definition to an Aristotelian definition of virtue. The Christian thinkers who preceded Aquinas developed a distinction between the traditional moral virtues that are discussed by philosophers and the theological virtues, which exceed human abilities and are directly about God (Bejcvy 1990). Influenced by this tradition, Aquinas distinguishes between virtues that are described by the philosophers and those that are known and acquired through divine help. Aquinas holds that this part of the definition applies only to those Christian virtues that are caused directly by God and are described as “infused virtues.” Since they exceed natural powers, they cannot be acquired; their acts cannot be performed without divine help.

Osborne seems to be assuming that if we remove the clause, we are removing the need for divine help, but I don't think this is what Aquinas means. Aquinas is quite clear that we need divine help for all virtue, including acquired virtue. If we remove the phrase, “which God works in us without us”, from the Augustinian definition as brought together in Lombard, what we get is the genus that includes both infused and acquired virtue. The difference is really in Osborne's "caused directly by God"; or, in other words, in the "without us" part of the Augustinian definition. As he puts it (ST 2-1.55.4ad6), in acquired virtue God still works in us, but in the way in which He works in every will and nature, i.e., as first mover or remote efficient cause, not as proximate or immediate cause. But it's tricky to be precise about such a matter in a brief space, since we don't have a convenient ethical vocabulary for discussing the infused/acquired virtue distinction, so this might just be inadvertence.

Laughing Over the Gold Sunflower

Three Flower Petals
by Archibald Lampman

What saw I yesterday walking apart
In a leafy place where the cattle wait?
Something to keep for a charm in my heart--
A little sweet girl in a garden gate.
Laughing she lay in the gold sun's might,
And held for a target to shelter her,
In her little soft fingers, round and white,
The gold rimmed face of a sunflower.

Laughing she lay on the stone that stands
For a rough hewn step in that sunny place,
And her yellow hair hung down to her hands,
Shadowing over her dimpled face.
Her eyes like the blue of the sky made dim
With the might of the sun that looked at her,
Shone laughing over the serried rim,
Golden set, of the sunflower.

Laughing, for token she gave to me
Three petals out of the sunflower.
When the petals are withered and gone, shall be
Three verses of mine for praise of her,
That a tender dream of her face may rise,
And lighten me yet in another hour,
Of her sunny hair and her beautiful eyes,
Laughing over the gold sunflower.

A Tale of Signs and Trust

Then on the third day a wedding took place in the Galilean Cana, and the mother of Jesus was there, so Jesus and his disciples were invited to the wedding. Then, the wine having run out, the mother of Jesus says to Him, "They have no wine."

Then Jesus says to her, "What is it to me and you, ma'am? My hour is not yet."

Says His mother to the servants, "Whatever He might tell you, do."

Now there were standing there six stone water-jars for purification in the Judean style, with room for two or three metetes. Says Jesus to them, "Fill the water-jars with water." Then they filled them to the brim.

He says to them, "Draw some out and carry it to the one presiding over the feast."

And they took it, and when the one presiding had tasted it, the water having become wine and he not knowing whence it was -- though the servants knew, having drawn the water -- he calls the bridegroom and says to him, "Every man sets out the good wine at first and the worse after they have drunk freely; you have kept the good wine until now."

This Jesus did in Galilean Cana, the beginning of signs. Then He manifested His glory and His disciples trusted in Him.

After this He went down to Capernaum, He and His mother and His brothers and His disciples, and they stayed there a few days.

Then the Judean passover was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Then He found in the holy place those those selling oxen and sheep and doves, and the moneychangers were sitting down. Then, having made a whip out of ropes, He drove it all out of the holy place, the sheep and the oxen, and poured out the coins of the moneychangers, and overturned the tables. Then to those selling doves, He said, "Take these away; do not make my Father's house a mercantile house."

His disciples remember that is written: Jealousy for your house will consume me.

Thus the Judeans answered and said to Him, "What sign do you show, that you may do these things?"

Jesus answered and said to them, "Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it."

Thus the Judeans said, "This temple was forty-six years in the building and in three days you will raise it!"

Yet He was speaking about the temple of His body. When therefore He had risen from the dead, His disciples remembered that He had said this. Then they trusted Scripture and the word Jesus had spoken.

And when He was in Jerusalem at the passover, at the festival, many trusted in His name, seeing the signs He was doing. But Jesus did not trust them, because He knew them all, and because He had no need for evidence about man, for He knew Himself what was within man.

John 2, my rough translation. I was struck by a few things. First, which I've thought before, the wedding story is rather funny. Jesus' mother essentially ignores His entirely reasonable protest, a phenomenon every mother's son has experienced at some point. And the architriclinius (presider over the feast) is quite clearly implying that the bridegroom (who can't possibly know what he's talking about) is an idiot who hadn't figured out something everyone knows.

Second, these two stories together have some interesting interplay between evidence and trust. In both the people technically in charge don't have a clue what's going on; in both it is emphasized that the disciples trusted Jesus after signs that made things obvious. And then we have the interesting bit at the end, in which many people trust Jesus because they see the signs -- in the context of a festival, the verb seems often to suggest being a spectator -- but Jesus does not reciprocate the trust because He does not need to draw His conclusions on the basis of things, like signs, that serve as evidence ('testify', as the translations usually have) -- He already knows.

The word for testifying or serving as evidence has been used before (John 1:7-8), in talking about John the Baptist, who came to serve as evidence of the Light. Later (also in the temple) he will get into an argument again with the Judeans, and says that if He gives evidence for Himself, the evidence is not true; another is giving evidence for Him and the evidence that one gives is true -- John had previously given evidence, but now His evidence is not from man but from the Father, and seen in the works He does and in Scripture. Still later (again in the temple) Jesus will identify as the Light in question (John 8:12), after which the Pharisees will attempt to turn his prior claim against Him, telling Him He is trying to serve as evidence for Himself; Jesus replies that even if that were so, such evidence can still be true because He recognizes whence He comes and whither He goes, or more exactly, He says, "I am the evidence for Myself" (John 8:18), because His Father is giving evidence in having sent Him. (Naturally, they then want to speak to his dad to get this supposed evidence.)

Much of the Gospel of John is concerned with the theme of people trying to get evidence while being completely oblivious of what's going on right in front of them; evidence keeps being given, but even the disciples don't see it until Jesus makes it obvious. But of course, immediately after the above stories from John 2, we get the discussion with Nicodemus, in which Jesus flatly says that no one can see the kingdom without being born from above. (The expression is often translated as 'reborn' or 'born again', but it's literally 'from above'. While the 'from above' was often an expression for 'again', given other things Jesus says, it is clear he does mean it literally, but Nicodemus, as if to make Jesus' point for Him, takes the 'from above' in the figurative sense, so asks how the elderly can be born.)

In John 6, the crowds are following Him because of His signs (around passover again); then He performs the miracle of feeding the five thousand. This causes Him more trouble with the crowds, and He accuses them of following Him because of the food rather than the signs; they should instead trust the one God has sent. At which point they demand that He give them a sign, like manna, so they could trust Him, as if He had not just recently done so. Jesus was right not to trust their trust, not to believe their belief. It's not an accident that John has the episode in which God literally speaks from the heavens and some of the people say it was just thunder (John 12:28-29).

Doctor Providentiae

Today is the feast of St. Caterina di Giacomo di Benincasa, better known as St. Catherine of Siena, Doctor of the Church. She was the twenty-fourth of twenty-five children. From a letter to her brother, whose name seems to have been Benincasa di Benincasa:

Dearest brother in Christ Jesus: I Catherine, a useless servant, comfort and bless thee and invite thee to a sweet and most holy patience, for without patience we could not please God. So I beg you, in order that you may receive the fruit of your tribulations, that you assume the armour of patience. And should it seem very hard to you to endure your many troubles, bear in memory three things, that you may endure more patiently. First, I want you to think of the shortness of your time, for on one day you are not certain of the morrow. We may truly say that we do not feel past trouble, nor that which is to come, but only the moment of time at which we are. Surely, then, we ought to endure patiently, since the time is so short. The second thing is, for you to consider the fruit which follows our troubles. For St. Paul says there is no comparison between our troubles and the fruit and reward of supernal glory. The third is, for you to consider the loss which results to those who endure in wrath and impatience; for loss follows this here, and eternal punishment to the soul.

From her most influential work, The Dialogue:

The soul, who is lifted by a very great and yearning desire for the honor of God and the salvation of souls, begins by exercising herself, for a certain space of time, in the ordinary virtues, remaining in the cell of self-knowledge, in order to know better the goodness of God towards her. This she does because knowledge must precede love, and only when she has attained love, can she strive to follow and to clothe herself with the truth. But, in no way, does the creature receive such a taste of the truth, or so brilliant a light therefrom, as by means of humble and continuous prayer, founded on knowledge of herself and of God; because prayer, exercising her in the above way, unites with God the soul that follows the footprints of Christ Crucified, and thus, by desire and affection, and union of love, makes her another Himself. Christ would seem to have meant this, when He said: To him who will love Me and will observe My commandment, will I manifest Myself; and he shall be one thing with Me and I with him.

The 'another Himself' phrase is, of course, an allusion to the common saying that a friend is another self.

A Mousetrap for the Devil

The Devil exulted when Christ died, and by that very death of Christ the Devil was overcome: he took food, as it were, from a trap. He gloated over the death as if he were appointed a deputy of death; that in which he rejoiced became a prison for him. The cross of our Lord became a trap for the Devil; the death of the Lord was the food by which he was ensnared.

This passage, from one of St. Augustine's Ascension sermons, has had an interesting history. The translation above, which I take it is Sister Mary Sarah Muldowney's, is a very sober translation, but you can easily translate this more flamboyantly. The word for 'trap' here is muscipula, which literally means a mousetrap. And the image of the Cross as a mousetrap for the devil, the theme of muscipula diaboli, crux Christi, is one that you find in a number of places. One of the more famous is the Mérode Altarpiece, which has St. Joseph making mousetraps while the Annunciation is going on (you can click through for a better view):



In reality, while the word does literally and etymologically mean 'mousetrap', it had become a very common word for all kinds of traps. If you read a lot of Augustine, you know that he usually doesn't invent things like this, although he will sometimes employ them creativity; the image actually comes from Scripture. The Latin of the Psalter Augustine knew uses muscipula a lot for any kind of hunting snare; for instance, in Psalm 124:7 (or 123:7 in the old numbering) it is used for a bird-snare: "We have escaped like a bird from the fowler’s snare; the snare has been broken, and we have escaped." It's the common Scriptural image of the wicked laying a snare for others; and as in Psalm 9:16, it is sometimes presented as the wicked falling into their own snare. And this, of course, is something like Augustine's idea, which he mentions explicitly earlier in the sermon:

But if He had not been put to death, death would have not died. The Devil was overcome by his own trophy, for the Devil rejoiced when, by seducing the first man, he cast him into death. By seducing the first man, he killed him; by killing the last Man, he lost the first from his snare.

Probably the most accurate translation for it would be 'pitfall', i.e., a trap consisting of a baited hole in the ground; Adam is thrown into the pit (death) and throwing Adam into the pit (bringing death upon humanity) leads to throwing Christ into the pit (Christ as man also dies on the Cross); but Christ rises and ascends out of the pit (Resurrection and Ascension), bringing Adam with him. And because of it, the Devil himself is toppled into a pit (hell, the second death) because he was greedy for the bait (death for all human beings, which includes Christ).

But the mousetrap makes for a very vivid image.

Fortnightly Book, April 26

There should be no combination of events for which the wit of man cannot conceive an explanation.

The next fortnightly books will be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's most popular Holmes novel and his least read Holmes novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of Fear.

Hound, which is widely regarded as one of the great detective stories of all time, was serialized in The Strand Magazine in 1901 and 1902. Benefiting from the extraordinary success of the Holmes short stories and building on Doyle's strengths and interests, unleashed on a public that was hungry for more Holmes after Doyle had killed him off eight years earlier, it took the world by storm, and its success was what convinced Doyle to try to write more Sherlock Holmes tales.

Valley, which is the Holmes novel people are least likely to have read, was serialised in The Strand Magazine in 1914 and 1915. As with his first two novels, Doyle combines Holmesian detection with an exotic foreign locale, this time the strange and wild land of Pennsylvania, where coal miners are legion and struggles between miners and owners have come to a boiling point, with the latter bringing in the Pinkertons. However, there's more here than meets the idea; offstage, in the shadows, Professor Moriarty is spinning a complicated and dangerous web. Despite everyone knowing Moriarty as his witness, this is the only story other than "The Final Problem" in which Moriarty is definitely involved (although Moriarty is mentioned briefly in five other late stories). Indeed, part of Valley's purpose seems to be to fill in a bit of the backstory about the enmity between Holmes and Moriarty.

While both Hound and Valley are written after Holmes's death in "The Final Problem", they are both a return to the pre-death Holmes. (Valley, in fact, creates one of the well-known puzzles for enthusiasts of the Great Game, since in "The Final Problem" Watson seems to be completely ignorant of Moriarty, whereas here, despite the story being set earlier, Watson knows him very well.

Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

Introduction

Opening Passage:

The first ray of light which illumines the gloom, and converts into a dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history of the public career of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved, is derived from the perusal of the following entry in the Transactions of the Pickwick Club, which the editor of these papers feels the highest pleasure in laying before his readers, as a proof of the careful attention, indefatigable assiduity, and nice discrimination, with which his search among the multifarious documents confided to him has been conducted.

Summary: Samuel Pickwick was a very successful businessman who has retired; like many retire, he has to manufacture something to occupy his time, which he does by getting together with friends. This is the origin of The Pickwick Club, whose reason for being is to uncover and tell quaint and curious stories from all over. A good-natured, generous individual driven by interest in the curious and peculiar will inevitably have some difficulty with others taking advantage, so Pickwick ends up in a wide variety of complicated situations, including at one point getting sued for breach of promise due to the cunning machinations of some slippery lawyers and ending up in debtor's prison, despite being extraordinarily rich, because he refuses to give a penny to such dishonest lawyers.

The primary mode of storytelling here is episodic, and thus is character-driven rather than plot-driven. Since it draws on comedy conventions, courting and marriage come up a lot. Besides Pickwick, we follow his three close friends (the Pickwickians) and his manservant.

(1) Nathaniel Winkle: Winkle is the only remnant of the original proposal of comic stories about a sporting club; he is a sporting enthusiast but also consistently inept with a gun. He has a flirtatious relationship with Arabella Allen.

(2) Augustus Snodgrass: A poet who never finishes any poetry, he tries to marry Emily Wardle.

(3) Tracy Tupman: A good-natured, fat, middle-aged man who thinks of himself has something of a ladies' man, he gets outmaneuvered in his attempt to marry Rachael Wardle (Emily's spinster aunt) by a smooth-talking con artist, Alfred Jingle.

(4) Samuel Weller: A clever, cockney all-purpose handyman, Weller is hired by Pickwick early on as a manservant, and becomes central to helping Pickwick get out of his scrapes. He is actually what Tupman thinks of himself as being, and one of the key questions of his storyline is whether his flirtation with the pretty maid Mary (who is essential to getting Winkle and Arabella together) will ever amount to more than a flirtation.

To the extent that there is a unified story, it is structured by the indirect battle between the Pickwickians and their nemeses, Alfred Jingle and his manservant Job Trotter. Jingle and Pickwick are equal-and-opposite; their courses of life parallel each other almost exactly, but their personalities take them in different directions. Since Pickwick is innocent and inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt, and Jingle is cunning and always scheming for advantage, Jingle generally has the upper hand when they cross paths, and, as you might expect, a key issue in the story is how Pickwick's innocent goodwill toward people will win out over the apparent advantages of Jingle's machinations.

The Pickwick Papers is very much about friendship, and I suspect one element in its enduring popularity is how well Dickens captures the combination of the absurd and the admirable that so often constitutes friendship-adventures that become stories worth telling, combined with his talent for exaggerating to comic effect. The episodic nature of the story, combined with its length, makes it the sort of book, however, that's probably best taken in small portions. We forget that these big nineteenth-century books weren't usually written to be read altogether but as serials; this is certainly true of The Pickwick Papers. Trying to read it all at once is a bit like trying to marathon through four or five seasons' worth of sitcom episodes. Repetitions that are charming recurring jokes when partaking serially can become merely repetitive in the marathon; details that are striking and enjoyable in serial can start blurring into the background in marathon; goofiness in small sips becomes a bit much in vast quantities; and so forth. With Dickens's skill, you still get something worth reading in large gulps, but it's still a work designed to be taken by the shot glass rather than by the beer stein.

Some of the most interesting parts of the book, in my opinion, were the occasional digressions, as the Pickwickians come across characters with their own odd stories, giving us a digression and a bit of a rest from the Pickwickian humor. "The Stroller's Tale" (Chapter 3), "The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton" (Chapter 29), and "The Story of the Bagman's Uncle" (Chapter 49) are all excellent short stories in their own right. The Christmas chapters (Chapter 28 and following) were enjoyable as well, since Dickens really pulls out the descriptive stops, and Dickens is hilariously funny whenever lawyers are involved. I particularly appreciated Serjeant Buzfuz's attempt to argue that Pickwick had obviously been leading Mrs. Bardell on, given a note that said "Dear Mrs. B.—Chops and tomata sauce", since 'chops' and 'tomata sauce' could only be interpreted as affectionate nicknames, as well as the cunning with which Mrs. Bardell's establish the truth of the proverb that, come what may, the lawyers get their pay.

I also listened to the Mercury Theater on the Air's radio adaptation of The Pickwick Papers, which can be found here, here (#18), and here. It's quite faithful, since the episodic narrative means you can select which episodic events to use, but it likewise shows some of the difficulties of adapting the episodic narrative -- things just kind of go in random directions. It's really obvious, though, that the actors were enjoying themselves (the exaggerated features of Dickensian characters give radio actors a lot to work with, especially in a story like this that differentiates the characters by manner of speech) and once we get a coherent stretch, namely the breach of promise trial, things start picking up. Welles unsurprisingly plays a fast-talking Mr. Jingle, but given the structure of the work and the limits of adaptation, there's much less of him than you'd expect.

Favorite Passage:

‘An abstruse subject, I should conceive,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Very, Sir,’ responded Pott, looking intensely sage. ‘He crammed for it, to use a technical but expressive term; he read up for the subject, at my desire, in the “Encyclopaedia Britannica.”’

‘Indeed!’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘I was not aware that that valuable work contained any information respecting Chinese metaphysics.’

‘He read, Sir,’ rejoined Pott, laying his hand on Mr. Pickwick’s knee, and looking round with a smile of intellectual superiority—‘he read for metaphysics under the letter M, and for China under the letter C, and combined his information, Sir!’

Recommendation: Highly Recommended, although, again, you should probably take it in small portions.

Dashed Off VII

For the same reason that Carnap relativizes observability to organs of an organism, he should also relativize it to instruments.

Russell's 'supreme maxim in scientific philosophising' amounts to this: fictions are to be substituted for evidence.

Stipulative definitions are always for a purpose, and to be judged thereby.

The internal structure of a method is neither analytic nor empirical.

We can infer from as-if assertions just as well as from real assertions.

"All imperatives are formulae of a practical necessitation." Kant
"An obligation implies not that an action is necessary merely, but that it is made necessary; it is not a question of necessitas, but of necessitatio. Thus, while the divine will is, as regards morality, a necessary will, the human will is not necessary but necessitated."
"Every imperative expresses the objective necessitation of actions which are subjectively contingent."

exemplar : formal cause :: destiny : final cause

Confirmation of theory is just a form of analogy.

management envelope forms of quasi-property (e.g., shell corporations) and quasi-jurisdiction (e.g., titular see)

The correspondence relevant to truth occurs within our thought, given the nature of thought.

modes of the hopeful: receptive, intrusive, liminal, ambiguous

Sin taxes tend to be punishments of the poor for not choosing the recreations of the rich.

In order to begin its work, a discipline does not need to form a definite conception of the subject matter; definition is built by inquiry. It does, however, require that there be something that can assign terms.

"Everywhere the core of the knowledge process turns out to be a rediscovery." Schlick

In creativity as in all else, nest before egg.

Implicit definitions have to be traced back to reality like any other; they are just at a higher level of abstraction (or signification, if you prefer).

Judgments exist so that concepts can be made.

Schlick's account of judgments should have led him to treat them as a subset of concepts (namely those that are signs of relations as existing). This in turn should have led him to handle impersonalia differently. ('It is snowing' would best be seen as having a single term, snowing, designating a kind of relation, and the judgment be distinguished from the concept of snowing only by signifying the existence of what 'snowing' signifies'.)

regularity theory // preestablished harmony

ludics, artistic technics, and etiquette as being semi-ethical by nature

reason-seeking, reason-demanding, reason-giving
(search, challenge, argument)

'I know A as B' is not equivalent to 'I know that A is B'.

"The task of a sign is to be a representative of that which is designated, to act in its place in some respect or other." Schlick

If I say, 'Concept A is similar (almost like) concept B', the predicate is not part of the definition of the subject (if we aren't talking about shared genus or a relative concept) but similarity between concepts is not determined by sensible experience. In short, not all relations between concepts are definitional, in the sense of being part of the definition of at least one of the concepts, even if it is based on those definitions (e.g., this definitional structure has similarities to that). We see this even more clearly in more complicated cases, e.g., A is more like B than C, where 'more like B than C' is not generally part of how A is defined, although the reason for saying it is due to A's definition.

Perception is always of relations.

People will talk about justice for many reasons; but the people who have the most incentive to talk about justice are the unjust.

conflicts of interest as occasions for temptations to failures of integrity

That we have itches we scratch to satisfy does not imply that we scratch in order to get pleasure from scratching; we scratch in order to address the itch.

We draw our knowledge not from bare sensations but from familiarities.

"Marriage has God for its Author, and was from the very beginning a kind of foreshadowing of the Incarnation of His Son; and therefore there abides in it something holy and religious: not extraneous, but innate; not derived from men, but implanted by nature." Leo XIII

certain kinds of saint patronage // attributed arms

A true insight of the linguistic turn is that progress can sometimes be made by pulling back from the arguments in order to critique the problems or questions.

Every experiment, and every experimental design, has to deal with the distinction between the real and the unreal.

In pre-philosophical thought, there is no clear recognition of time as a condition of the real.

The principle of noncontradiction is a principle of both analysis and synthesis.

"A sympathetic understanding of a philosophical system...consists in picturing to oneself just exactly what sense is assumed within that system by each question or assertion of everyday life and science." Schlick
"We see again and again that the positivist directs his critique against a specially constructed concept of the thing-in-itself and then supposes that he has refuted the general idea of such a thing."
"There is no sense organ that senses time; the entire self experiences it."

Concepts are constructed takes on the real.

The phenomena can only be the noumena appearing.

Mathematical concepts must be taken to be such that they can apply to reality. But that they can in fact apply is not a matter of definition (you cannot get it by bare stipulation in the concept itself) nor is it a matter of experience (because many such concepts go well beyond anything we have experienced in actual cases to which they apply).

Conventions may be more or less appropriate.

How to apply a definition is not generally incorporated into the definition.

That something can be is at the same time evident in itself and about the real world.

felt reception vs felt resistance accounts of cause, the external world, etc.

Morale is a necessary part of military strategy because it is directly relevant to loyalty and obedience.

While Dilthey is right that it is the nature of life to attempt to fill each moment with value, it would be an error to conclude that early years are not means to mature years. This is precisely what we take to be the promise of youth.

protection-racket progressivism

When people talk about 'following where the argument leads' they tend to assume that it leads in one way and in one direction. But in fact, given that one may respond to arguments in many ways (ponens, tollens, suspend judgment while checking against other things, etc.), when we follow an argument we do so out of our entire spiritual background, and people for whom that background is different -- different experiences, different educations, different practical and moral goals -- may well take the same argument to lead in very different directions.

Christ's Baptism is not in the genus of our baptism, but it is the exemplar and template.

Johnson (1960): Both 'No synthetic propositions are a priori' and 'Some synthetic propositions are a priori' would, if true, have to be synthetic a priori truths, in the sense of about the world and such that the contradictory is self-contradictory.

Krishna (1961): Synthetic a priori is required in order to have logical derivations involving empirical truths.

Lambros (1975): Logical positivism has four distinct accounts of necessary truths, each of which is a different kind of denial of synthetic a priori. It is the denial that the a priori can inform about the world (and is instead linguistic) either (a) taking the a priori to be rule or (b) taking the a priori to be propositional; if (b), then either (b1) it is true in virtue of conceptual content or (b2) it is true in virtue of syntactic form; if (b2), either (b2a) absolutely (all languages) or (b2b) relativized to some languages. (a) is derived from Wittgenstein, found in Hans Hahn: Logic is not about objects but wholly about ways of speaking about objects. (b1) of some kind is found in Schlick. (b2a) is a standard reading of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. (b2b) is found in Carnap.

Williams (1938): A convention is a habitual way of behaving, not a proposition; an analytic proposition cannot be a convention. Nor can it be a description of a convention; such descriptions are necessarily synthetic. Nor can ti be a rule, command, resolve, etc.

Beck (1957): 'Analytic' is a logical/linguistic term; 'a priori' is epistemological. They should not be elided even if coextensive. The reasons why some people want to say that a principle is analytic *in a particular body of science* are the *same reasons* Kant held them to be synthetic a priori.

'White is this color', pointing to white, seems to be analytic a posteriori.

necessary synthetic a posteriori propositions (reachable by proper induction)

The rights of the child grow up within the ambit of the rights of the parent.

One: Rv 21:9-10
Holy: Rv 21:11, 22-23, 27
Catholic: Rv 21:24-26
Apostolic: Rv 21:12-21

habitus -> mutually reinforcing habitus among more than one person
- Call the latter a consortium. By cultivating a habitus we make possible a consortium among people with the same or corresponding habitus. Thus you can have consortium among people sharing skills, and consortium among people sharing virtues; perhaps even consortium among people sharing some vices. Friendship of excellence is perhaps the highest consortium contributing to common good and human happiness, but only the most eminent among many consortia that do so. Consortium strengthens and refines habitus (or provides opportunity for act) and makes it more consistently effective on the large scale.

Defending only saints is an excuse not to do much.

For attaining beatitude, two things are required: nature and grace." ST 1.73.1ad1

aptitude : skill :: decency : virtue

"Although there are many causes of anything, one is always the completer, which is cause above all, and it is of this that it is said that knowing is when we understand the cause." Albert, IN Post An 1tr2c1.

Music on My Mind

Patty Gurdy's Circle, "Kalte Winde".