Thought for the Evening: Imitating Genius
Genius, etymologically speaking, is the spirit presiding over your birth; it is particularly known in inspiration, which, again etymologically speaking, is spirit flowing in. Of course, we usually take it in a more metaphorical and naturalistic sense, along the lines of Kant, "Genius is the talent (natural endowment) which gives the rule to art" or "Genius is the innate mental aptitude (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art", or Gerard, "GENIUS is properly the faculty of invention; by means of which a man is qualified, for making new discoveries in science, or for producing original works of art." It follows from the definition of genius, whether taken etymologically or metaphorically, that genius eludes all rule and method. But it does not follow from this that there could not be rules or methods that imitate genius. Quite the reverse. It follows directly that rule and method are by their nature ways in which we chase after genius, by which we build a mechanism that works a little like inspiration. There are several ways in which, lacking genius, you might make up the lack by working up an imitation of genius.
(1) Hypercombinatorial. Genius going beyond rule, it accesses unexpected possibilities. So one of the ways in which one could do an imitation of genius by brute force is by initiating an explosion of possibilities. As a chess computer can brute-force its way to victory on the chessboard by considering massive quantities of possible moves, and thus by running through many possibilities imitate the chess master who simply looks at the board and sees immediately many of the best possibilities, so we can run through massive numbers of combinations of ideas and eventually hit something that would be absolutely brilliant if we had thought of it at once.
This method is actually quite important for intellectual inquiry. Academics can occasionally be creative geniuses, although perhaps much less often than some of them think, but academia is certainly not creative. Academia is a hypercombinatorial machine. Essentially academic life works under two major pressures that affect inquiry: you are supposed to come up with something new, and this new thing is supposed to be relevant to what other people are working on. These two almost-conflicting rules, to come up with something new but to make sure that it is not too new, are together a recipe for ringing through combinations. Suppose people are working on vagueness (that was the faddish philosophical topic when I was in graduate school). Then, inevitably, the academic gears whir into motion and you get graduate students and professors running through the combinations to find something that will get published:
Vagueness and Divine Knowledge
Vagueness and the Ontological Argument
Vagueness and the Problem of Other Minds
Vagueness and Dialetheism
Vagueness and Deontological Dilemmas
Vagueness and Bayesian Epistemology
Vagueness and Feminist Standpoint Theory
And so on and so on and so on. Sometimes the field will get too crowded and you'll need to make the topics more narrow, based on previous runs through combinations,
Epistemic Accounts of Vagueness and Epistemic Injustice in Racial Contexts
There's a joke in philosophy that you can make everything more philosophical by adding the word 'epistemic' to it, and that conveys the same idea. It could be anything -- there are always lots of ideas on the table at any given time. And sometimes there's an outside disruption that shifts the possibilities that you run through; I've no doubt that we will see a few COVID-19-inspired combinations in the near future. It's this aspect of academia that sometimes makes academics sound like a parody of themselves; you are going to get absurd and strained combinations as well as promising and fruitful ones.
But there is a constraint on all of this; the explosion of possibilities is then filtered according to some standard or standards. This derives from the 'not too new'. In practice this means that you have to convince other academics that your new thing is sufficiently like what they do, or relevant enough to what they do, that you are in their vicinity. The exact requirements will vary from discipline to discipline; some will be very stringent, and some less so, depending on what they see themselves as doing. (Disciplines also differ on exactly where they apply the filter.) There needs to be some sort of constraint or you just have combinations, not anything definite. But academia as a whole accomplishes, sometimes, something like genius, because at any given time it is rolling through a vast number of possible combinations of ideas. And you could do it on a smaller scale, as well. We see this, in fact; someone of only moderate ability who obsessively spends years on something, sheer hard work in trying things out, sometimes comes up with brilliance.
(2) Hyperanalogical. There's another way that possibly might be said to imitate genius, based not on running through combinations of ideas but on repeatedly trying analogies and taking them to the breaking point. This is like the combinatorial approach, except it involves a side-step; you are running through combinations, but through combinations of apparently similar things. Finding out the point that an analogy breaks down is often an important discovery; finding out that the analogy does not break down at all is often an even more important one. Doing this with a lot of analogies is bound to get you something. And once you get that something, you can often move on to analogize from it.
I think it's fair to say that in general this is a much harder method than the first. Speaking as someone who has a natural talent for analogical reasoning, I find myself in constantly baffling (and frustrating) situations in which people naturally reach for analogies to understand things, but in which it is also very difficult to get most people to understand any particular analogy and why it breaks down or does not. And because analogical inferences are based on apparent similarities, many of which are merely apparent, there are traps for everyone everywhere, anyway. I have seen professional philosophers make absolute fools of themselves over parity arguments (which involve analogical inferences with respect to structures of arguments, and simple versions of which are one of the most fundamental things you need for accurate analysis of arguments). I have seen professional theologians completely bungle how analogies work in (say) Trinitarian theology. Perhaps you wouldn't expect consistent practice with analogical reasoning in academia, though; perhaps the hyperanalogical machines are things like science fiction publishing or such. Or perhaps it just doesn't scale as well as the hypercombinatorial approach; perhaps it needs to be done by smaller groups of people working on smaller problems, and perhaps it runs through a lot more chaff to get to the wheat.
(3) Hyperdialogical. Perhaps there is a third, although with this approach we are getting to the point where, when effective, imitation of genius perhaps sometimes blurs into and blends with real acts of genius. Instead of running through possible combinations of ideas or repeatedly finding possible analogies and pressing them until they break, you could instead look at the problem from multiple points of view simultaneously. (This is related to the notion of romantic irony, which Romantics like Schlegel in fact connected to ingenium.) Well, doing that is strictly speaking probably a major act of ingenium already, so what we're really talking about it is building in stages something like that. Instead of 'simultaneously', unfold it slowly. And the way we normally do that is by conversation, dialogue. So in addressing problems, one way to go about it is to have a discussion -- an argument, broadly speaking -- between perspectives that make different assumptions. You can do this in your own head, but of course, it can also play out between people. I suspect that the hyperdialogical machines are found in collaborative work of various kinds. But of course, the reason these are all 'hyper' is that it has to go well beyond normal; merely having a conversation is not an act of genius. It's the intensity and extent of discussion on a particular topic that matters here. Methods (1) and (2) work by expanding the possibilities and then filtering them according to some goal; but the hyperdialogical approach in a sense works in the reverse direction -- you start with a topic, which gives you the goal, and then you expand possibilities by arguing it out between different perspectives, always constrained by that goal.
There are probably more, of course. I've put this all in terms of 'imitating genius'; but arguably you could reframe it as 'exercising genius'. People often have the idea that there is a group of people out there who are 'the geniuses' by nature. This is obviously absurd if taken to be more than a figure of speech. Everyone has their native genius, a faculty of ingenium, sharp wits; and even in those who seem exemplars of ingenuity, it is sporadic in the best of times. There is in fact about genius something of the lucky; not that works of genius are sheer matters of luck but that every work of genius in part makes use of luck. I've talked about that in the context of art. To make use of luck, though, you have to be ready for it; 'lucky people' are in general not people who have better luck but people who have better preparation for lucky moments. There is a practice to it. And I think many people do starve their native genius. It needs exercise, like any other ability, if it is to make use of the right opportunities. I think Novalis says somewhere that the acuity of genius is the acute use of acuity, and I think that gets something very right: genius is the ingenious use of your ingenuity; it is the brilliant use of whatever brilliance you have; it is the inventive use of your aptitude for invention. People use their ingenuity in narrow and repetitive ways all the time; genius comes when your use of your ingenuity is itself ingenious. That requires a lot of deliberate practice in thinking about possibilities, making comparisons, and shifting points of view.
Various Links of Interest
* Adam Schwartz, What He Saw in America: G.K. Chesterton’s View of the United States
* J. E. H. Smith, The Yakut Verbal Voice System
* Paul Shakeshaft, The Via Media of George Herbert
* David Carrier, When Philosophy and Art Intersect, discusses the philosophical drawings of Maria Bussman.
* Steele Brand, The Diseases that Kill Republics: Insights from Ancient Rome's Epidemics
* I have had no extra time for podcasts or the like, but if I had, The History of the Vikings sounds like it is interesting.
* Jim Baggott, How science fails, at Aeon.co, on Imre Lakatos.
* Emma Green, Nuns vs. the Coronavirus, discusses the difficulties of the Little Sisters of the Poor as they struggle in their mission to assist the elderly and vulnerable in the midst of an epidemic.
* Sabine Hossenfelder, Predictions are overrated
* Thomas Poole, Leviathan in Lockdown
* Richard Whately: Defending Logic, at "Irish Philosophy"
* Steven Greydanus looks at the depictions of the sacrament of confession in movies.
* Donovan Cleckley, In Defense of Sex as a Category of Significance
Currently Reading
Because the shift to online teaching while trying not to disadvantage students unnecessarily has made my life much, much busier over the past couple of weeks, my reading is in an unusual state of disarray. But a few things I have been reading in chaotic bits and pieces:
Wace, The History of the Norman People
John Wright, Titans of Chaos
John Poinsot, Treatise on Signs
Saturday, May 16, 2020
Friday, May 15, 2020
Dashed Off IX
Ganesh (2108): Kant's thinning of the notion of Cosmopolitan Right has an anti-colonialist intent. 'Hospitality' is not a virtue-notion but a (quasi-)legal notion: Wirtbarkeit, innkeeping. The traditional understanding of the later is that the traveler cannot be refused, but the resident is a different matter. Innkeepers are fiduciaries of their guests and serve as a kind of (semi-)public official, because those on a journey have to rely on the good faith of innkeepers.
Emergency powers create emergencies.
Utilitarianism treats everything as if it were a drug.
the depersonification of the gods
rights of the Church as expressing its royal mission
(1) right to an independent material patrimony suitable to its needs and protecting it from subordination to secular powers
(2) right to proclaim the Gospel
(3) right to provide for those who are poor and in need
(4) right to public ornament and patronage of arts and sciences for common good and the glory of God
(5) right to institutions of private charity and devotion
(6) right to evangelism, catechesis, and provision of Christian education
(7) right to self-governance
(8) right to give first allegiance to Christ the King
The notion of culture depends on a context of traditionary being.
criticism : episode :: critique : plot
The Church has an obligation to insist that it, insofar as Christ is in it, be treated as an end and not merely as a means.
Cush on Lonergan:
"the end of humanity in respect of sexuality is to preserve the species without debasing the person" Kant
the amplitude of giving as something we must learn
While all conventions are in some sense contingent, they vary considerably in meaningfulness, plausibility, integrity, and utility.
"...it is impossible to take any particular hold of the English schism, for it is not a religion in itself, so much as a mixture composed of every heresy, excluding Catholicity, the only true religion." Liguori
the display economy of academia
three elements of inculturation:
vigilance, edification, concentration (there is a fourth, exaltation/transfiguration, but it is in divine hands)
There are no purely private obligations; even obligations of conscience do not work that way.
We assert arguments, or else do something arguments that is very like asserting.
structural, thematic, and functional comparisons of arguments
The Pyrrhonian attempts to treat all of his own arguments as hypothetical and all of his opponent's arguments as categorical.
three kinds of name (Mohist Canon A78): da (unrestricted), lei (classifying), si (private)
three general rules of analyzing business and finance
(1) conservation: nothing comes from nothing
(2) entropy: there is always deterioration (wear and tear)
(3) friction: an operating business is always in the process of solving as-yet-unsolved problems
-these can prob. be generalized to all organizations
precedential, analogical, and semiotic constraints on sacramental theology
"It [Rome] had the habit of relics, the higher way of mind and lower business organization to deal with them." Charles Williams
relics vs antiquarian curiosities
Arguments can be used literally, suggestively, or ironically; suggestive uses can be partial, concomitant, or analogical.
artificial classification // nominal definition
real : nominal :: natural : artificial
World Resource Institute "Shift Wheel"
(1) Maximize awareness: be more memorable, constrain display, enhance display
(2) Evolve social norms: inform about the issue, make socially desirable, make socially unacceptable
(3) Minimize disruption: replicate the experience, disguise the change, form habits in new markets
(4) Sell a compelling benefit: meet current key needs, deliver new compelling benefit, enhance affordability
sutras as like the alphabet or multiplication table for a system of thought
higher and lower sacramentals
- integral components of sacraments would be higher, as would the sacramentals that the Church reserves for ordained clergy
- in general dispositive sacramentals would be lower
- 'higher' and 'lower' here are of course relative to major sacraments (highest); perhaps 'proximate' and 'remote' would be better
deflationary account of truth → deflationary account of cognition
Beliefs have fuzzy borders.
"..all specialists tend so to consider humanity as divided into themselves and the mass to be affected." Williams
- an unusual design argument, Crowley's argument for the reality of Aiwass based on The Book of the LAw -- see Confessions ch. 49 and also the introduction to TBotL.
- as with other arguments of this sort, it is an appeal to the results of a kind of scholarship, in this case, Crowley's idea of Qabalah
the intertwining of the en soi and the pour soi
The body as factually given is already instrumental.
Post-medieval approaches to philosophy seem regularly to founder on taking the important to be the primary and the primary to be the sole, for almost every field. This makes them very useful for exploring things in hypothetical isolation and not so useful for anything else. You can genuinely learn a lot about the cogito from Descartes, transition of imagination from Hume, awareness of tools from Heidegger, or models from Carnap, but in each case things worth considering are explored as if they were the only thing to consider.
The Thomistic position on the unity of the substantial form has the implication that the body in itself has a character relevant to intellect and moral will.
The problem with Harman's attempt to reduce enumerative induction to inference to the best explanation is that enumerative induction is not generally to any explanation at all, but to something in a form so as to be an explanandum, or an explanans for other things entirely.
Ontological arguments // Abstract Objects
---- (1) from idea (Ideological)
---- (2) from possibility (modal)
Cosmological arguments // External World
---- (1) Primacy
---- (2) Maximality
---- (3) Purity
Design arguments // Other Minds
---- (1) Natural
---- ---- (a) Special
---- ---- (b) General
---- (2) Civil
---- ---- (a) Providential
---- ---- (b) Traditional
---- (3) Scriptural
Epistemological arguments // Knowledge
---- (1) Skepticism-breaking
---- (2) Error
---- (3) Illuminationist
Moral and Aesthetic arguments // Values
---- (1) Formal
---- (2) Final
---- (3) Coordinational
Anthropological arguments // Free Will
---- (1) Religious Experience
---- ---- (a) Personal
---- ---- (b) Testimonial
---- (2) Consensus Gentium
---- ---- (a) Summative
---- ---- (b) Natural
Pragmatic arguments
aspects of design (Derham): made with art, contrived with sagacity, ordered with design, ministering to ends
- Derham divides design for the Atmosphere into (a) Nature and Make and (b) consequent use to the world.
While the Kantian criticism that Physico-Theology confuses purpose and use often has bite and is sometimes devastating, it does not change the fact that, for reasons that they suggested, nature is a structure of usefulnesses and thus a functioning system composed of functioning systems. (This is why Kant takes it seriously as a *general* project.)
Derham considers the objection for animals & food that necessity makes the use -- that animals, hungry, just make use of what they can; he responds that the aptness of the food to the naimal is clearly part of the "very Constitution and Nature of Animals", so not chance, and that hte animals don't pick their food by accident or necessity but select it as "a proper Food, agreeable to their Constitution."
Derham on Animal Habitations:
Either (1) they have not only reason but also in a superior form (wisdom, foresight, discretion, art, and care);
or (2) they are passive, acting by instinct.
But surely not (1), therefore (2).
But the rationality of their actions must then be the reason of a superior being imprinted on their natures.
Derham: "signs of chance" -- botch, blunder, unnecessary apparatus
design arguments as arguments a fortiori
stability, beauty, scope, and subtlety as lures of inquiry
Philo on Gn 12:1-3: Land is symbol of body, kindred of sensation, father's house of speech. [De Migratione]
"It is evident that the parent must have knowledge of his offspring, the craftsman of the objects fashioned by him, the steward of the things managed by him. But God is truly the father and craftsman and steward of all things celestial and cosmic." Philo
Consciousness is necessarily a cooperation with the world.
"Materialism is...the attempt to explain what is directly given to us from what is given indirectly." Schopenhauer
Experience consists of many overlaps.
None of Tononi's arguments for the exclusion axiom of Integrated Information Theory seem adequate to the fuzziness of many experiences.
the cooperativeness of consciousness as one of the things meant by 'qualia'
Beliefs are had by way of a persona.
Most of our beliefs that things do not exist seem to be based on synousia rather than evidence. Nonexistence just fits better with other things we believe.
guesses as arising from doxastic synousia
lives of pleasure, triumph, and nobility
Memorizing poetry plays an important role in maintaining the health of a language -- even fragments are a considerable contribution, well constructed songs are even better; and a language whose speakers memorize extensive amounts of poetry is always thriving.
Emergency powers create emergencies.
Utilitarianism treats everything as if it were a drug.
the depersonification of the gods
rights of the Church as expressing its royal mission
(1) right to an independent material patrimony suitable to its needs and protecting it from subordination to secular powers
(2) right to proclaim the Gospel
(3) right to provide for those who are poor and in need
(4) right to public ornament and patronage of arts and sciences for common good and the glory of God
(5) right to institutions of private charity and devotion
(6) right to evangelism, catechesis, and provision of Christian education
(7) right to self-governance
(8) right to give first allegiance to Christ the King
The notion of culture depends on a context of traditionary being.
criticism : episode :: critique : plot
The Church has an obligation to insist that it, insofar as Christ is in it, be treated as an end and not merely as a means.
Cush on Lonergan:
| research | experience | be attentive |
| interpretation | understanding | be intelligent |
| history | judgment | be reasonable |
| dialectic | decision | be responsible |
| foundations | decision | be responsible |
| doctrines | judgment | be reasonable |
| systematics | understanding | be intelligent |
| communications | experience | be attentive |
"the end of humanity in respect of sexuality is to preserve the species without debasing the person" Kant
the amplitude of giving as something we must learn
While all conventions are in some sense contingent, they vary considerably in meaningfulness, plausibility, integrity, and utility.
"...it is impossible to take any particular hold of the English schism, for it is not a religion in itself, so much as a mixture composed of every heresy, excluding Catholicity, the only true religion." Liguori
the display economy of academia
three elements of inculturation:
vigilance, edification, concentration (there is a fourth, exaltation/transfiguration, but it is in divine hands)
There are no purely private obligations; even obligations of conscience do not work that way.
We assert arguments, or else do something arguments that is very like asserting.
structural, thematic, and functional comparisons of arguments
The Pyrrhonian attempts to treat all of his own arguments as hypothetical and all of his opponent's arguments as categorical.
three kinds of name (Mohist Canon A78): da (unrestricted), lei (classifying), si (private)
three general rules of analyzing business and finance
(1) conservation: nothing comes from nothing
(2) entropy: there is always deterioration (wear and tear)
(3) friction: an operating business is always in the process of solving as-yet-unsolved problems
-these can prob. be generalized to all organizations
precedential, analogical, and semiotic constraints on sacramental theology
"It [Rome] had the habit of relics, the higher way of mind and lower business organization to deal with them." Charles Williams
relics vs antiquarian curiosities
Arguments can be used literally, suggestively, or ironically; suggestive uses can be partial, concomitant, or analogical.
artificial classification // nominal definition
real : nominal :: natural : artificial
World Resource Institute "Shift Wheel"
(1) Maximize awareness: be more memorable, constrain display, enhance display
(2) Evolve social norms: inform about the issue, make socially desirable, make socially unacceptable
(3) Minimize disruption: replicate the experience, disguise the change, form habits in new markets
(4) Sell a compelling benefit: meet current key needs, deliver new compelling benefit, enhance affordability
sutras as like the alphabet or multiplication table for a system of thought
higher and lower sacramentals
- integral components of sacraments would be higher, as would the sacramentals that the Church reserves for ordained clergy
- in general dispositive sacramentals would be lower
- 'higher' and 'lower' here are of course relative to major sacraments (highest); perhaps 'proximate' and 'remote' would be better
deflationary account of truth → deflationary account of cognition
Beliefs have fuzzy borders.
"..all specialists tend so to consider humanity as divided into themselves and the mass to be affected." Williams
- an unusual design argument, Crowley's argument for the reality of Aiwass based on The Book of the LAw -- see Confessions ch. 49 and also the introduction to TBotL.
- as with other arguments of this sort, it is an appeal to the results of a kind of scholarship, in this case, Crowley's idea of Qabalah
the intertwining of the en soi and the pour soi
The body as factually given is already instrumental.
Post-medieval approaches to philosophy seem regularly to founder on taking the important to be the primary and the primary to be the sole, for almost every field. This makes them very useful for exploring things in hypothetical isolation and not so useful for anything else. You can genuinely learn a lot about the cogito from Descartes, transition of imagination from Hume, awareness of tools from Heidegger, or models from Carnap, but in each case things worth considering are explored as if they were the only thing to consider.
The Thomistic position on the unity of the substantial form has the implication that the body in itself has a character relevant to intellect and moral will.
The problem with Harman's attempt to reduce enumerative induction to inference to the best explanation is that enumerative induction is not generally to any explanation at all, but to something in a form so as to be an explanandum, or an explanans for other things entirely.
Ontological arguments // Abstract Objects
---- (1) from idea (Ideological)
---- (2) from possibility (modal)
Cosmological arguments // External World
---- (1) Primacy
---- (2) Maximality
---- (3) Purity
Design arguments // Other Minds
---- (1) Natural
---- ---- (a) Special
---- ---- (b) General
---- (2) Civil
---- ---- (a) Providential
---- ---- (b) Traditional
---- (3) Scriptural
Epistemological arguments // Knowledge
---- (1) Skepticism-breaking
---- (2) Error
---- (3) Illuminationist
Moral and Aesthetic arguments // Values
---- (1) Formal
---- (2) Final
---- (3) Coordinational
Anthropological arguments // Free Will
---- (1) Religious Experience
---- ---- (a) Personal
---- ---- (b) Testimonial
---- (2) Consensus Gentium
---- ---- (a) Summative
---- ---- (b) Natural
Pragmatic arguments
aspects of design (Derham): made with art, contrived with sagacity, ordered with design, ministering to ends
- Derham divides design for the Atmosphere into (a) Nature and Make and (b) consequent use to the world.
While the Kantian criticism that Physico-Theology confuses purpose and use often has bite and is sometimes devastating, it does not change the fact that, for reasons that they suggested, nature is a structure of usefulnesses and thus a functioning system composed of functioning systems. (This is why Kant takes it seriously as a *general* project.)
Derham considers the objection for animals & food that necessity makes the use -- that animals, hungry, just make use of what they can; he responds that the aptness of the food to the naimal is clearly part of the "very Constitution and Nature of Animals", so not chance, and that hte animals don't pick their food by accident or necessity but select it as "a proper Food, agreeable to their Constitution."
Derham on Animal Habitations:
Either (1) they have not only reason but also in a superior form (wisdom, foresight, discretion, art, and care);
or (2) they are passive, acting by instinct.
But surely not (1), therefore (2).
But the rationality of their actions must then be the reason of a superior being imprinted on their natures.
Derham: "signs of chance" -- botch, blunder, unnecessary apparatus
design arguments as arguments a fortiori
stability, beauty, scope, and subtlety as lures of inquiry
Philo on Gn 12:1-3: Land is symbol of body, kindred of sensation, father's house of speech. [De Migratione]
"It is evident that the parent must have knowledge of his offspring, the craftsman of the objects fashioned by him, the steward of the things managed by him. But God is truly the father and craftsman and steward of all things celestial and cosmic." Philo
Consciousness is necessarily a cooperation with the world.
"Materialism is...the attempt to explain what is directly given to us from what is given indirectly." Schopenhauer
Experience consists of many overlaps.
None of Tononi's arguments for the exclusion axiom of Integrated Information Theory seem adequate to the fuzziness of many experiences.
the cooperativeness of consciousness as one of the things meant by 'qualia'
Beliefs are had by way of a persona.
Most of our beliefs that things do not exist seem to be based on synousia rather than evidence. Nonexistence just fits better with other things we believe.
guesses as arising from doxastic synousia
lives of pleasure, triumph, and nobility
Memorizing poetry plays an important role in maintaining the health of a language -- even fragments are a considerable contribution, well constructed songs are even better; and a language whose speakers memorize extensive amounts of poetry is always thriving.
From Trembling Thoughts Relieve His Cheerless Day
Sonnet XXXV
by Alexander Thomson
Suspiciens altam lunam, sic voce precatur. -- Virgil
Fair, silver Queen! whose all pervading eye
Beholds at once whate'er the world contains!
Wilt thou in pity listen from on high,
To him whose lonely heart to thee complains?
Thou seest his soul in anxious torture lie,
Bound by suspense, in more than iron chains;
Thou know'st the cause that prompts his frequent sigh,
And fills with terror's frost his shiv'ring veins.
Oh, tell him then, and end this cruel fear,
Why the dear Youth to whom his heart is join'd,
With Friendship's voice delays to soothe his ear;
Oh tell him this and ease his frantic mind:
From trembling thoughts relieve his cheerless day,
And save his restless night from dreams of wild dismay.
Edinburgh Feb 1789
Thursday, May 14, 2020
Matthias
Today is the feast of St. Matthias, Apostle. The story about him in Acts 1 is interesting in a number of ways. It occurs between the Ascension and Pentecost; Jesus has given his disciples their mission but they have not yet received the full measure of the Holy Spirit. Because of this, it often gets skipped over. But we learn a number of things from it. The disciples are meeting regularly in fairly large groups. The eleven Apostles left are explicitly mentioned, as are Mary the Mother of Jesus, the women, and the brothers of the Lord. (The women are mentioned not as if they were just a generic bunch of women but as if they were a well-defined even if perhaps not formally defined group. This fits with a number of things said in the Gospel of Luke, e.g., Luke 8:1-3, Luke 23:54-56; cp. Mark 15:40-41.) But the gathering that chooses Matthias has about 120 disciples all told (which number may have only included the men, since Peter only addresses the men).
Peter is quite clearly the leader here; he tells them that Scripture says that Judas needs to be replaced and they do it (the word he uses is dei, i.e., 'It is required'). In fact, while it is never said, the whole thing is structured as if Peter had called the meeting specifically in order to do what they end up doing. Peter's reason is based on Scripture; he quotes Psalm 69 and Psalm 109. The latter is straightforward in its application ("May another take his place of leadership"), although the word for 'place of leadership' is 'supervision', episkopen. The other one reads a bit oddly in English: "May his place be deserted; let there be no one dwelling in it." It seems a little odd to quote that no one should dwell in his place in an argument that you should fill his place. But read in context, the verses both come from very similar passages: they are from the psalms that tend to embarrass people today, the ones in which the enemies of the psalmist are cursed. The verses in Acts 1:18-19, about what happened to Judas, are often read as parenthetical, but the thought of Peter's argument follows directly from them, not from Acts 1:17. The line of thought is: The Scripture had to be fulfilled which spoke of Judas (v. 16); Judas was one of their ministry (diakonias) (v. 17); with the payment for his injustice (adikias), he bought a field and died (v. 18); everybody in Jerusalem heard about it so called it the Field of Blood (v. 19); because Scripture says, "May his place be deserted...." and "May another take his place...." Thus Peter is reading the cursing passages of the Psalm as being about Judas. What it says about him in Psalm 69 is fulfilled by his death; so what it says about him in Psalm 109 must be fulfilled as well. I find it interesting that they don't replace him until he is dead; the word for 'dwell' here (katoikon) suggests permanent settlement, so the curse on Judas is that his apostleship is not permanent.
In any case, what Peter says is necessary to do is to make "one of these", i.e., the Apostles, from the men who accompanied the Lord Jesus the whole time from his Baptism to his Ascension and a witness of the Resurrection. This in fact ends up being the entire backstory we know about Matthias: he was with Jesus the whole time from the Baptism to the Ascension. We know nothing else about who he was. The men there pick two -- Joseph Barsabbas, also called Justus, and Matthias.
But two is not one of these. So what they do then is pray to God, knower of the hearts of all, that He will point out which one of the these two that He has chosen to take the place for this service (diakonias) and apostleship (aposteles) from which Judas traveled (the word could also mean 'die') "to his own place". Then they cast lots. Casting lots was, of course, common. It is also possible, given the comment about Judas going to his own place, that they had Leviticus 16:8 in the background. In the atonement offering, the high priest makes an atonement before the Lord with the sacrifice of a bull and two goats. The goats are split, one for the Lord and one "for azazel" (in the Hebrew; we don't know for sure what the word meant) or "sent away" (in the Septuagint), by lot, and the one "for azazel" is then sent into the wilderness. More likely, lots were the standard way in which Temple duties were assigned. Regardless, when the lots were cast, Matthias became one of the Apostles.
And that's the last we hear about him. According to the most popular tradition, after preaching in Jerusalem a while he went down into "Ethiopia" (by which is likely not meant Ethiopia but Colchis in the Caucasus, in modern-day Georgia; Herodotus claimed that the Colchians were descended from the Ethiopians). Of his death, the traditions are all over the place; he was martyred by crucifixion in Sebastopolis (in modern-day Turkey) or by stoning and beheading in Jerusalem or by stoning in Colchis, or he simply died of old age in Jerusalem.
Peter is quite clearly the leader here; he tells them that Scripture says that Judas needs to be replaced and they do it (the word he uses is dei, i.e., 'It is required'). In fact, while it is never said, the whole thing is structured as if Peter had called the meeting specifically in order to do what they end up doing. Peter's reason is based on Scripture; he quotes Psalm 69 and Psalm 109. The latter is straightforward in its application ("May another take his place of leadership"), although the word for 'place of leadership' is 'supervision', episkopen. The other one reads a bit oddly in English: "May his place be deserted; let there be no one dwelling in it." It seems a little odd to quote that no one should dwell in his place in an argument that you should fill his place. But read in context, the verses both come from very similar passages: they are from the psalms that tend to embarrass people today, the ones in which the enemies of the psalmist are cursed. The verses in Acts 1:18-19, about what happened to Judas, are often read as parenthetical, but the thought of Peter's argument follows directly from them, not from Acts 1:17. The line of thought is: The Scripture had to be fulfilled which spoke of Judas (v. 16); Judas was one of their ministry (diakonias) (v. 17); with the payment for his injustice (adikias), he bought a field and died (v. 18); everybody in Jerusalem heard about it so called it the Field of Blood (v. 19); because Scripture says, "May his place be deserted...." and "May another take his place...." Thus Peter is reading the cursing passages of the Psalm as being about Judas. What it says about him in Psalm 69 is fulfilled by his death; so what it says about him in Psalm 109 must be fulfilled as well. I find it interesting that they don't replace him until he is dead; the word for 'dwell' here (katoikon) suggests permanent settlement, so the curse on Judas is that his apostleship is not permanent.
In any case, what Peter says is necessary to do is to make "one of these", i.e., the Apostles, from the men who accompanied the Lord Jesus the whole time from his Baptism to his Ascension and a witness of the Resurrection. This in fact ends up being the entire backstory we know about Matthias: he was with Jesus the whole time from the Baptism to the Ascension. We know nothing else about who he was. The men there pick two -- Joseph Barsabbas, also called Justus, and Matthias.
But two is not one of these. So what they do then is pray to God, knower of the hearts of all, that He will point out which one of the these two that He has chosen to take the place for this service (diakonias) and apostleship (aposteles) from which Judas traveled (the word could also mean 'die') "to his own place". Then they cast lots. Casting lots was, of course, common. It is also possible, given the comment about Judas going to his own place, that they had Leviticus 16:8 in the background. In the atonement offering, the high priest makes an atonement before the Lord with the sacrifice of a bull and two goats. The goats are split, one for the Lord and one "for azazel" (in the Hebrew; we don't know for sure what the word meant) or "sent away" (in the Septuagint), by lot, and the one "for azazel" is then sent into the wilderness. More likely, lots were the standard way in which Temple duties were assigned. Regardless, when the lots were cast, Matthias became one of the Apostles.
And that's the last we hear about him. According to the most popular tradition, after preaching in Jerusalem a while he went down into "Ethiopia" (by which is likely not meant Ethiopia but Colchis in the Caucasus, in modern-day Georgia; Herodotus claimed that the Colchians were descended from the Ethiopians). Of his death, the traditions are all over the place; he was martyred by crucifixion in Sebastopolis (in modern-day Turkey) or by stoning and beheading in Jerusalem or by stoning in Colchis, or he simply died of old age in Jerusalem.
Tuesday, May 12, 2020
Power Itself Is What Must Humble Itself
...We must admit the existence of a law of nature and reason that precedes civil coexistence, and that must be respected by all civil dispositions, and that against such law no civil power can do nor attempt to do anything. If this is fully admitted, sincerely in all its consequences; if the legislative branch submits itself to natural and rational law, which -- like it or not -- overpowers it; then and only then will the legislative branch cease to be despotic irrespective of any form taken by the will of the most, the many, the few, or the one -- as these are nothing but the forms of power, and not power itself. Power itself is what must humble itself before eternal law. Civil power and civil society themselves must recognize that they have no authority whatsoever against the rights that nature assigns to man and consequently all the associations of men independently from their civil association.
[Antonio Rosmini, The Constitution Under Social Justice, Mingardi, tr., Lexington Books (2007) p. 28.]
Monday, May 11, 2020
Upon His Black Mare Riding, Girt with His Sword of Fame
Abd-El-Kader At Toulon
Or, The Caged Hawk
by William Makepeace Thackeray
No more, thou lithe and long-winged hawk, of desert-life for thee;
No more across the sultry sands shalt thou go swooping free:
Blunt idle talons, idle beak, with spurning of thy chain,
Shatter against thy cage the wing thou ne'er may'st spread again.
Long, sitting by their watchfires, shall the Kabyles tell the tale
Of thy dash from Ben Halifa on the fat Metidja vale;
How thou swept'st the desert over, bearing down the wild El Riff,
From eastern Beni Salah to western Ouad Shelif;
How thy white burnous welit streaming, like the storm-rack o'er the sea,
When thou rodest in the vanward of the Moorish chivalry;
How thy razzia was a whirlwind, thy onset a simoom,
How thy sword-sweep was the lightning, dealing death from out the gloom!
Nor less quick to slay in battle than in peace to spare and save,
Of brave men wisest councillor, of wise councillors most brave;
How the eye that flashed destruction could beam gentleness and love,
How lion in thee mated lamb, how eagle mated dove!
Availed not or steel or shot 'gainst that charmed life secure,
Till cunning France, in last resource, tossed up the golden lure;
And the carrion buzzards round him stooped, faithless, to the cast,
And the wild hawk of the desert is caught and caged at last.
Weep, maidens of Zerifah, above the laden loom!
Scar, chieftains of Al Elmah, your cheeks in grief and gloom!
Sons of the Beni Snazam, throw down the useless lance,
And stoop your necks and bare your backs to yoke and scourge of France!
Twas not in fight they bore him down; he never cried aman;
He never sank his sword before the PRINCE OF FRANGHISTAN;
But with traitors all around him, his star upon the wane,
He heard the voice of ALLAH, and he would not strive in vain.
They gave him what he asked them; from king to king he spake,
As one that plighted word and seal not knoweth how to break;
'Let me pass from out my deserts, be't mine own choice where to go,
I brook no fettered life to live, a captive and a show.'
And they promised, and he trusted them, and proud and calm he came,
Upon his black mare riding, girt with his sword of fame.
Good steed, good sword, he rendered both unto the Frankish throng;
He knew them false and fickle—but a Prince's word is strong.
How have they kept their promise? Turned they the vessel's prow
Unto Acre, Alexandria, as they have sworn e'en now?
Not so: from Oran northwards the white sails gleam and glance,
And the wild hawk of the desert is borne away to France!
Where Toulon's white-walled lazaret looks southward o'er the wave,
Sits he that trusted in the word a son of Louis gave.
O noble faith of noble heart! And was the warning vain,
The text writ by the BOURBON in the blurred black book of Spain?
They have need of thee to gaze on, they have need of thee to grace
The triumph of the Prince, to gild the pinchbeck of their race.
Words are but wind, conditions must be construed by GUIZOT;
Dash out thy heart, thou desert hawk, ere thou art made a show!
Abdelkader was an Algerian Sufi who became a freedom fighter during the French conquest of Algeria in 1830. He had extraordinary success for several years until the French army began practicing scorched earth tactics to take advantage of his supply weaknesses. The sophistication of his military tactics and the humanity with he treated prisoners made him an international name. He surrendered in December of 1847 on one condition, that he would be allowed to leave Algeria and go to Alexandria or Acre. The French agreed, he signed the treaty of surrender, and the French immediately broke their promise, arresting him and imprisoning him at Fort Lamalgue in Toulon. This led to an international outcry, of which protests like Thackeray's are but a small example. After the Revolution of 1848, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte realized that there was some propaganda value here in showing that the Second Republic was superior to the Orleans Monarchy that had preceded it, so he released Abdelkader and gave him pension on the condition that he never return to Algeria. He would later become famous again after he and those Algerians who went into exile to follow him saved several hundred Christians from rioters in Damascus in 1860.
Sunday, May 10, 2020
Fortnightly Book, May 10
The history of the Normans is a long one and hard to set down in the vernacular. If one asks who said this, who wrote this history in the vernacular, I say and I will say that I am Wace from the Isle of Jersey, which is in the sea towards the west and belongs to the territory of Normandy.
Of Wace we know very little; we don't even know how the W in his name was pronounced, because he lived on the cusp of a shift between pronouncing it as W and pronouncing it as V. What we do know is almost entirely what Wace tells us. He was born on Jersey (he is in fact the earliest known author from that Norman isle); he studied in Caen; he would have had to be born somewhere around the beginning of the twelfth century. He wrote a number of verse works, of which the most famous and important is the national epic of the Normans, the Roman de Rou, written in Old Norman:
Jo di e dirai ke jo sui
Wace de l’isle de Gersui
The Roman, written in the reign of Henry II, covers the history of the Norman people from the taking of northern France by the Viking Rollo (the Rou of the title) in the early tenth century to Henry I's ending of a civil war between Norman houses at the Battle of Tinchebrai in 1106, and particularly considers that history in light of the rivalry of the Normans with the perfidious French.
The Roman has three parts and is in many ways an oddity. The very different parts are not all written in the same kind of verse, and the work was never finished; Wace repeatedly complains about how difficult and long the work is and how little money he is given for doing it, and his last comment is a sour mention that he can't continue because the king had given the same task to Maistre Beneeit and that it isn't his fault. We don't know why that happened; perhaps the king had expected a more timely delivery, or perhaps he just got tired of Wace's complaining.
I'll be reading the Roman in Glyn Burgess's translation, entitled The History of the Norman People. I've done a few other national epics and thought it would be good to do for my Norman ancestors what I have done for my Danish and Norwegian ancestors. So here we are, something in memory of ancestor Rollo and ever-so-many-greats-grandmother Poppa of Bayeux, as well as all those in my family tree who conquered northern France, like you do if you're a Viking, and conquered England and Malta and Tunisia and Sicily and Cyprus and the Holy Land, like you do if you're a Norman.
Apostle of Andalusia
Today is the feast of St. Juan de Ávila, Doctor of the Church. From one of his letters:
After some great sorrow, God usually grants us happiness, as to Abraham He gave “Isaac, the desired,” which name signifies“ laughter.” After a while, the Almighty plunged the patriarch into grief again, by commanding him to kill the son He had' bestowed for his consolation: so does God often deprive His children of their happiness, bidding them sacrifice it and live in sadness. The Apostles felt perfectly safe and confident as they embarked with Christ in their boat; yet they were terrified when the storm arose which seemed likely to drown them, while He, on Whose protection they depended, slept, and appeared to have forgotten them. But our Lord had not forgotten them: it was His command which raised the tempest, and He was as watchful to deliver them as to place them in danger. Why then should you be troubled by the trials your Saviour sends you? Why should you dislike the medicine which has come from the hands of your tender Father? Do you think He is austere enough to grieve you, and too weak to deliver you from the afflictions sent by Him? Does He lack mercy, that He will not pardon you, and grant you greater graces than ever? Have a strong faith in God's goodness, although to your weak understanding, He seems severe. For your soul, confidence in His mercy is as far superior to distrust, as the certainty of faith surpasses the ignorance of human reason.
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles; The Valley of Fear
Introduction
Opening Passages: From Hound:
From Valley:
Summary: Dartmoor is a legend-heavy area of Britain, filled with ghost stories, including packs of spectral hell-hounds and horsemen without heads and nighttime visits by the devil; it is scattered throughout with Neolithic and Bronze Age remains, like stone circles and remains of ancient settlements; and it is a fairly rainy area of the country, with peaty soil that tends to absorb water like a sponge and then hold it, creating bogs and mires and tufts of apparently firm moss that are floating on deep laters of watery mud. Doyle will use all three to excellent effect in The Hound of the Baskervilles, the most successfully atmospheric of the Holmes novels. In the aftermath of a baronet's death from fright on the moors, Dr. Montgomery comes to Holmes and Watson for advice on what to do about the baronet's heir, Sir Henry Baskerville, who is coming from his farm in Canada. When they meet Baskerville, they find that strange events are already starting to accumulate around him, with a warning note, the theft of a boot, and a stranger tailing him. Holmes starts investigating the matter, but as Baskerville intends to go to take possession of Baskerville Hall, Holmes sends Watson to go along with him for his protection, saying that he himself cannot go due to other cases that need to be resolved.
The splitting of Holmes and Watson works extraordinarily well. Watson, thrown on his own devices, manages to uncover and partly solve certain puzzles, and leads us through the essential elements of the mystery, which are tied up with an escaped convict in the neighborhood and local legends of a terrible black hound. Carefully detailing everything for Holmes, he talks to Barrymore the butler and his wife, the neighboring Stapletons, and others, and gives us time to appreciate the spookiness of the environs before we get down to the full solution of the mystery with the reunion of Holmes and Watson, and with the help of Inspector Lestrade the two help head off a bad end for Sir Henry.
The Valley of Fear has a very different atmosphere; despite largely taking place at Birlstone House, a moated manor house, it is much more modern in its feel. Inspector MacDonald comes to Holmes with a puzzling case, but finds that Holmes already knows something about it because in his pursuit of Moriarty he has received information related to it. John Douglas of Birlstone House had been shot in his house with a sawed-off shotgun, his head practically blown to pieces. A number of additional puzzling pieces of evidence have been discovered by the locals before drawing in Scotland Yard and the famous consulting detective. At Birlstone House, Holmes will rapidly uncover the different elements of the case, including Douglas's fear of some kind of secret society from which he had been hiding, but the key to the mystery will be a missing dumbbell. Behind the whole thing will be a Freemason-like society of murderers in Pennsylvania and, of course, Moriarty's criminal network in the British Empire.
Each of the Holmes stories is essentially a melding of two stories, a Holmes framework and another story from another genre that takes us into a strange place far removed from the rationality and modernity of London -- Utah, India, Dartmoor, Pennsylvania (in all cases it is a literary version of the locale rather than a real one). Of the four, the Hound melding is easily the most successful in terms of structure; the two tales flow smoothly into each other and the Gothic genre conventions of the Dartmoor detour work very well with the detective fiction tropes of the frame. It also helps that Watson and Holmes actually go to Dartmoor and resolve parts of the case there. Of the four, I think the Valley melding is the least successful. The Pennsylvania detour is very interesting in its own right, a sort of crime-thriller gangster-tale prior to the rise of gangster tales, but it practically stands as its own story, as does the Birlstone House frame. The melding is not a complete failure; the Pennsylvania episodes explain some features of the Birlstone mystery, and there are plenty of thematic links -- criminal networks and secret identities being particularly notable ones -- but narratively one gets the sense that Doyle wanted to write a short story about Pennsylvania murder societies and, being continually pestered for more Holmes tales that he didn't particularly like for their own sake, thought that this was a way he could give the public Holmes while writing a kind of story he thought more interesting. That said, I very much enjoyed the Pennsylvania episode, which is some of Doyle's best writing, and the book I think deserves better than it usually gets in the shadow of the highly (and deservedly) popular Hound.
Favorite Passages: From Hound:
From Valley:
Recommendation: Hound is Highly Recommended and Valley is Recommended. Really, though, they are both must-reads for anyone who likes detective fiction.
Opening Passages: From Hound:
Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the breakfast table. I stood upon the hearth-rug and picked up the stick which our visitor had left behind him the night before. It was a fine, thick piece of wood, bulbous-headed, of the sort which is known as a “Penang lawyer.” Just under the head was a broad silver band nearly an inch across. “To James Mortimer, M.R.C.S., from his friends of the C.C.H.,” was engraved upon it, with the date “1884.” It was just such a stick as the old-fashioned family practitioner used to carry—dignified, solid, and reassuring.
“Well, Watson, what do you make of it?”
From Valley:
“I am inclined to think—” said I.
“I should do so,” Sherlock Holmes remarked impatiently.
I believe that I am one of the most long-suffering of mortals; but I'll admit that I was annoyed at the sardonic interruption. “Really, Holmes,” said I severely, “you are a little trying at times.”
Summary: Dartmoor is a legend-heavy area of Britain, filled with ghost stories, including packs of spectral hell-hounds and horsemen without heads and nighttime visits by the devil; it is scattered throughout with Neolithic and Bronze Age remains, like stone circles and remains of ancient settlements; and it is a fairly rainy area of the country, with peaty soil that tends to absorb water like a sponge and then hold it, creating bogs and mires and tufts of apparently firm moss that are floating on deep laters of watery mud. Doyle will use all three to excellent effect in The Hound of the Baskervilles, the most successfully atmospheric of the Holmes novels. In the aftermath of a baronet's death from fright on the moors, Dr. Montgomery comes to Holmes and Watson for advice on what to do about the baronet's heir, Sir Henry Baskerville, who is coming from his farm in Canada. When they meet Baskerville, they find that strange events are already starting to accumulate around him, with a warning note, the theft of a boot, and a stranger tailing him. Holmes starts investigating the matter, but as Baskerville intends to go to take possession of Baskerville Hall, Holmes sends Watson to go along with him for his protection, saying that he himself cannot go due to other cases that need to be resolved.
The splitting of Holmes and Watson works extraordinarily well. Watson, thrown on his own devices, manages to uncover and partly solve certain puzzles, and leads us through the essential elements of the mystery, which are tied up with an escaped convict in the neighborhood and local legends of a terrible black hound. Carefully detailing everything for Holmes, he talks to Barrymore the butler and his wife, the neighboring Stapletons, and others, and gives us time to appreciate the spookiness of the environs before we get down to the full solution of the mystery with the reunion of Holmes and Watson, and with the help of Inspector Lestrade the two help head off a bad end for Sir Henry.
The Valley of Fear has a very different atmosphere; despite largely taking place at Birlstone House, a moated manor house, it is much more modern in its feel. Inspector MacDonald comes to Holmes with a puzzling case, but finds that Holmes already knows something about it because in his pursuit of Moriarty he has received information related to it. John Douglas of Birlstone House had been shot in his house with a sawed-off shotgun, his head practically blown to pieces. A number of additional puzzling pieces of evidence have been discovered by the locals before drawing in Scotland Yard and the famous consulting detective. At Birlstone House, Holmes will rapidly uncover the different elements of the case, including Douglas's fear of some kind of secret society from which he had been hiding, but the key to the mystery will be a missing dumbbell. Behind the whole thing will be a Freemason-like society of murderers in Pennsylvania and, of course, Moriarty's criminal network in the British Empire.
Each of the Holmes stories is essentially a melding of two stories, a Holmes framework and another story from another genre that takes us into a strange place far removed from the rationality and modernity of London -- Utah, India, Dartmoor, Pennsylvania (in all cases it is a literary version of the locale rather than a real one). Of the four, the Hound melding is easily the most successful in terms of structure; the two tales flow smoothly into each other and the Gothic genre conventions of the Dartmoor detour work very well with the detective fiction tropes of the frame. It also helps that Watson and Holmes actually go to Dartmoor and resolve parts of the case there. Of the four, I think the Valley melding is the least successful. The Pennsylvania detour is very interesting in its own right, a sort of crime-thriller gangster-tale prior to the rise of gangster tales, but it practically stands as its own story, as does the Birlstone House frame. The melding is not a complete failure; the Pennsylvania episodes explain some features of the Birlstone mystery, and there are plenty of thematic links -- criminal networks and secret identities being particularly notable ones -- but narratively one gets the sense that Doyle wanted to write a short story about Pennsylvania murder societies and, being continually pestered for more Holmes tales that he didn't particularly like for their own sake, thought that this was a way he could give the public Holmes while writing a kind of story he thought more interesting. That said, I very much enjoyed the Pennsylvania episode, which is some of Doyle's best writing, and the book I think deserves better than it usually gets in the shadow of the highly (and deservedly) popular Hound.
Favorite Passages: From Hound:
He wanted to know the object of my inquiries, but I managed to satisfy his curiosity without telling him too much, for there is no reason why we should take anyone into our confidence. Tomorrow morning I shall find my way to Coombe Tracey, and if I can see this Mrs. Laura Lyons, of equivocal reputation, a long step will have been made towards clearing one incident in this chain of mysteries. I am certainly developing the wisdom of the serpent, for when Mortimer pressed his questions to an inconvenient extent I asked him casually to what type Frankland’s skull belonged, and so heard nothing but craniology for the rest of our drive. I have not lived for years with Sherlock Holmes for nothing.
From Valley:
Holmes laughed. “Watson insists that I am the dramatist in real life,” said he. “Some touch of the artist wells up within me, and calls insistently for a well-staged performance. Surely our profession, Mr. Mac, would be a drab and sordid one if we did not sometimes set the scene so as to glorify our results. The blunt accusation, the brutal tap upon the shoulder—what can one make of such a denouement? But the quick inference, the subtle trap, the clever forecast of coming events, the triumphant vindication of bold theories—are these not the pride and the justification of our life's work? At the present moment you thrill with the glamour of the situation and the anticipation of the hunt. Where would be that thrill if I had been as definite as a timetable? I only ask a little patience, Mr. Mac, and all will be clear to you.”
Recommendation: Hound is Highly Recommended and Valley is Recommended. Really, though, they are both must-reads for anyone who likes detective fiction.
Saturday, May 09, 2020
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.
Friday, May 08, 2020
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.
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.
Thursday, May 07, 2020
Wednesday, May 06, 2020
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.
← 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).]
Tuesday, May 05, 2020
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.
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.
Monday, May 04, 2020
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:
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.
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.
Sunday, May 03, 2020
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.
Saturday, May 02, 2020
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
"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
Friday, May 01, 2020
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
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
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