For the same reason that Carnap relativizes observability to organs of an organism, he should also relativize it to instruments.
Russell's 'supreme maxim in scientific philosophising' amounts to this: fictions are to be substituted for evidence.
Stipulative definitions are always for a purpose, and to be judged thereby.
The internal structure of a method is neither analytic nor empirical.
We can infer from as-if assertions just as well as from real assertions.
"All imperatives are formulae of a practical necessitation." Kant
"An obligation implies not that an action is necessary merely, but that it is made necessary; it is not a question of necessitas, but of necessitatio. Thus, while the divine will is, as regards morality, a necessary will, the human will is not necessary but necessitated."
"Every imperative expresses the objective necessitation of actions which are subjectively contingent."
exemplar : formal cause :: destiny : final cause
Confirmation of theory is just a form of analogy.
management envelope forms of quasi-property (e.g., shell corporations) and quasi-jurisdiction (e.g., titular see)
The correspondence relevant to truth occurs within our thought, given the nature of thought.
modes of the hopeful: receptive, intrusive, liminal, ambiguous
Sin taxes tend to be punishments of the poor for not choosing the recreations of the rich.
In order to begin its work, a discipline does not need to form a definite conception of the subject matter; definition is built by inquiry. It does, however, require that there be something that can assign terms.
"Everywhere the core of the knowledge process turns out to be a rediscovery." Schlick
In creativity as in all else, nest before egg.
Implicit definitions have to be traced back to reality like any other; they are just at a higher level of abstraction (or signification, if you prefer).
Judgments exist so that concepts can be made.
Schlick's account of judgments should have led him to treat them as a subset of concepts (namely those that are signs of relations as existing). This in turn should have led him to handle impersonalia differently. ('It is snowing' would best be seen as having a single term, snowing, designating a kind of relation, and the judgment be distinguished from the concept of snowing only by signifying the existence of what 'snowing' signifies'.)
regularity theory // preestablished harmony
ludics, artistic technics, and etiquette as being semi-ethical by nature
reason-seeking, reason-demanding, reason-giving
(search, challenge, argument)
'I know A as B' is not equivalent to 'I know that A is B'.
"The task of a sign is to be a representative of that which is designated, to act in its place in some respect or other." Schlick
If I say, 'Concept A is similar (almost like) concept B', the predicate is not part of the definition of the subject (if we aren't talking about shared genus or a relative concept) but similarity between concepts is not determined by sensible experience. In short, not all relations between concepts are definitional, in the sense of being part of the definition of at least one of the concepts, even if it is based on those definitions (e.g., this definitional structure has similarities to that). We see this even more clearly in more complicated cases, e.g., A is more like B than C, where 'more like B than C' is not generally part of how A is defined, although the reason for saying it is due to A's definition.
Perception is always of relations.
People will talk about justice for many reasons; but the people who have the most incentive to talk about justice are the unjust.
conflicts of interest as occasions for temptations to failures of integrity
That we have itches we scratch to satisfy does not imply that we scratch in order to get pleasure from scratching; we scratch in order to address the itch.
We draw our knowledge not from bare sensations but from familiarities.
"Marriage has God for its Author, and was from the very beginning a kind of foreshadowing of the Incarnation of His Son; and therefore there abides in it something holy and religious: not extraneous, but innate; not derived from men, but implanted by nature." Leo XIII
certain kinds of saint patronage // attributed arms
A true insight of the linguistic turn is that progress can sometimes be made by pulling back from the arguments in order to critique the problems or questions.
Every experiment, and every experimental design, has to deal with the distinction between the real and the unreal.
In pre-philosophical thought, there is no clear recognition of time as a condition of the real.
The principle of noncontradiction is a principle of both analysis and synthesis.
"A sympathetic understanding of a philosophical system...consists in picturing to oneself just exactly what sense is assumed within that system by each question or assertion of everyday life and science." Schlick
"We see again and again that the positivist directs his critique against a specially constructed concept of the thing-in-itself and then supposes that he has refuted the general idea of such a thing."
"There is no sense organ that senses time; the entire self experiences it."
Concepts are constructed takes on the real.
The phenomena can only be the noumena appearing.
Mathematical concepts must be taken to be such that they can apply to reality. But that they can in fact apply is not a matter of definition (you cannot get it by bare stipulation in the concept itself) nor is it a matter of experience (because many such concepts go well beyond anything we have experienced in actual cases to which they apply).
Conventions may be more or less appropriate.
How to apply a definition is not generally incorporated into the definition.
That something can be is at the same time evident in itself and about the real world.
felt reception vs felt resistance accounts of cause, the external world, etc.
Morale is a necessary part of military strategy because it is directly relevant to loyalty and obedience.
While Dilthey is right that it is the nature of life to attempt to fill each moment with value, it would be an error to conclude that early years are not means to mature years. This is precisely what we take to be the promise of youth.
protection-racket progressivism
When people talk about 'following where the argument leads' they tend to assume that it leads in one way and in one direction. But in fact, given that one may respond to arguments in many ways (ponens, tollens, suspend judgment while checking against other things, etc.), when we follow an argument we do so out of our entire spiritual background, and people for whom that background is different -- different experiences, different educations, different practical and moral goals -- may well take the same argument to lead in very different directions.
Christ's Baptism is not in the genus of our baptism, but it is the exemplar and template.
Johnson (1960): Both 'No synthetic propositions are a priori' and 'Some synthetic propositions are a priori' would, if true, have to be synthetic a priori truths, in the sense of about the world and such that the contradictory is self-contradictory.
Krishna (1961): Synthetic a priori is required in order to have logical derivations involving empirical truths.
Lambros (1975): Logical positivism has four distinct accounts of necessary truths, each of which is a different kind of denial of synthetic a priori. It is the denial that the a priori can inform about the world (and is instead linguistic) either (a) taking the a priori to be rule or (b) taking the a priori to be propositional; if (b), then either (b1) it is true in virtue of conceptual content or (b2) it is true in virtue of syntactic form; if (b2), either (b2a) absolutely (all languages) or (b2b) relativized to some languages. (a) is derived from Wittgenstein, found in Hans Hahn: Logic is not about objects but wholly about ways of speaking about objects. (b1) of some kind is found in Schlick. (b2a) is a standard reading of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. (b2b) is found in Carnap.
Williams (1938): A convention is a habitual way of behaving, not a proposition; an analytic proposition cannot be a convention. Nor can it be a description of a convention; such descriptions are necessarily synthetic. Nor can ti be a rule, command, resolve, etc.
Beck (1957): 'Analytic' is a logical/linguistic term; 'a priori' is epistemological. They should not be elided even if coextensive. The reasons why some people want to say that a principle is analytic *in a particular body of science* are the *same reasons* Kant held them to be synthetic a priori.
'White is this color', pointing to white, seems to be analytic a posteriori.
necessary synthetic a posteriori propositions (reachable by proper induction)
The rights of the child grow up within the ambit of the rights of the parent.
One: Rv 21:9-10
Holy: Rv 21:11, 22-23, 27
Catholic: Rv 21:24-26
Apostolic: Rv 21:12-21
habitus -> mutually reinforcing habitus among more than one person
- Call the latter a consortium. By cultivating a habitus we make possible a consortium among people with the same or corresponding habitus. Thus you can have consortium among people sharing skills, and consortium among people sharing virtues; perhaps even consortium among people sharing some vices. Friendship of excellence is perhaps the highest consortium contributing to common good and human happiness, but only the most eminent among many consortia that do so. Consortium strengthens and refines habitus (or provides opportunity for act) and makes it more consistently effective on the large scale.
Defending only saints is an excuse not to do much.
For attaining beatitude, two things are required: nature and grace." ST 1.73.1ad1
aptitude : skill :: decency : virtue
"Although there are many causes of anything, one is always the completer, which is cause above all, and it is of this that it is said that knowing is when we understand the cause." Albert, IN Post An 1tr2c1.
Friday, April 24, 2020
Thursday, April 23, 2020
Harow! St. George to Our Aid!
St. George and the Dragon
by Dinah Maria Craik
"Dieu et Mon Droit"
What, weeping, weeping, my little son
Angry tears like that great commander
Alexander –
Because of dragons is left not one
To be a new Cappadocian scourge
For your bold slaying
In grand arraying,
Mounted alone, eh?
On Shetland pony
A knight all perfect, a young St. George?
Come sit at my knee, my little son:
Sit at my knee and mend your wagon: -
Full many a dragon
You'll have to fight with ere life be done.
Come, shall I tell you of three or four --
Villanous cattle!
For you to battle,
When mother's sleeping
Where all your weeping
Will not awaken her any more?
First, there's a creature whose name is Sloth
Looks like a lizard, creeping on sleekly
Simple and weakly,
Powerless to injure however wroth:
But slay him, my lad, or he'll slay you!
Crawling and winding,
Twisting and binding:
Break from him, tramp on him
And as you stamp on him
You'll be St. George and the dragon anew.
Then there's a monster - so fair at first,
Called Ease, or Comfort, or harmless Pleasure;
Born of smooth Leisure -
On Luxury's lap delicious nurst;
Who'd buy your soul if you'd sell it — just
To catch one minute
With joyance on it
Or ward off sorrow
Until to-morrow –
Trample him, trample him into dust!
One more — the reptile yclept False Shame,.
That silently drags its feltered length on,
And tries its strength on
Many a spirit else pure from blame;
But up and at him your courser urge!
Smite hard, I trow, hard
The moral coward,
At throne or altar,
Nor once, once falter -
And be my own son, my brave St. George!
St. George and the dragon — ah, my boy,
There are many old dragons left, world-scourges,
And few St. Georges —
There's much of labor and little of joy!
But on with you — on to the endless fight -
Your sword firm buckle,
To no man truckle,
Wave your bold flag on
And slay your dragon.
St. George for ever! God and my right!
Dinah Craik is best known as a novelist, particularly for John Halifax, Gentleman, but like many successful women authors in the nineteenth century, she wrote in a very wide variety of genres, including didactic works and book-length fairy tales. I like this layered handling of the tale of St. George, which is clearly influenced, albeit not slavishly, by Spenser's The Faerie Queene.
Raphael, Saint George and the Dragon
St. George’s Day, 1904
by Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley
April 23
The annual meeting of the Guild of St. George, which was founded by John Ruskin, was held at Sheffield on Saturday.
To-day our land remembers him who fought
The Dragon, hails the Cappadocian brave
Who from the loathly thing went forth to save
Pure Innocence, and her salvation wrought.
This is the day a nation’s thanks are brought
By Avon’s shore to God, who Shakspere gave;
To-day we lay Lent lilies on a grave
In Grasmere Vale and think what Wordsworth taught.
And, gathered here in Vulcan’s town to-day,
Where the smoke dragons from their high-built towers
Plague the live air and cheat the poor of sun,
Do not our hearts in loyal memory run
To him who loved pure light and innocent flowers,
And sent us forth all dragon beasts to slay?
Rawnsley is most famous for being one of the founding members of the National Trust, although he was also involved in a number of projects for the preservation of the environment and the support of the working class. He also is one of the people who encouraged Beatrix Potter to publish her stories.
Briton Rivière, St. George and the Dragon, wherein St. George expresses how we all feel sometimes.
St. George for Merry England
This world, it is a wilding world,
a world of sin and shame;
it speaks and moans a sighing word
and hides its very name.
The dragons rise on every side,
they speak with voice of flame;
but still there rides a knight to fight
and counter dragon's claim.
And all the peasants, ground to dust,
now walk a rocky way;
all the princes forfeit trust
and flee the rightful fray,
but heaven's knight on steed of white
with cross upon his shield
will aid and save the countryside,
will fight, and will not yield.
Cowards cower in dust and mud
as serpents devour the land;
forsaking hope they drop the good,
surrender to drake's demand.
But one will fight, and when he falls
will rise and, rising, stand;
his weary face will pale and pall
but his sword is in his hand.
All people who hear, raise up his song,
the song of the man who will live;
with sound of the drum, the harp and the pipe,
high hallels and rhapsodies give.
Through moor and through forest, through fallowing field
he fights for our honor and grace,
he will fight and never will victory yield
for God shines out in his face.
Waters of life will succor him well
and raise him up from the dead
as the tree of life delivers from hell
by the power of God who bled;
and the dragon will fall, its eye grow dim,
from blade by the holy hand led.
To the dust heel, and countenace grim,
will crush the fell serpent's head.
Wednesday, April 22, 2020
Ἰφιγένεια ἐν Αὐλίδι
I don't know if I'll actually be able to, but I think I will try to watch this livestream (from Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies, lest we think that Harvard has absolutely nothing of value to contribute) live:
I really like Euripides, and Iphigenia in Aulis is a particularly interesting tragedy. The backstory, of course, is that Helen has been abducted by Paris and the Greeks are at Aulis trying to set sail and begin the Trojan War -- but Artemis is angry at Agamemnon and has used her influence on the sea to turn it into a doldrums. They can't sail. The Greeks on the shore are starting to murmur and get rebellious, and a bloody revolt might spring up if they don't get moving. The goddess must be appeased. And what Artemis wants is the sacrifice of Agamemnon's eldest daughter, Iphigenia. So Agamemnon sends to his wife Clytemnestra, telling her to send Iphigenia to Aulis because he has arranged to marry her to Achilles.
The play as it currently ends has a deus ex machina; Euripides is lavish with gods from the machine, but a lot of Euripides scholars want to see this one as a later addition. I wonder if they will include it.
ADDED LATER: That was really, really good, and makes me want to go back and look at some of the previous ones that have been done. (While they didn't do every part of the play, they did present the standard ending, but also talked about the possibility that it is not original.) Highly recommended, when they eventually put the recording in the archive.
ADDED LATER 2: The Iphigenia in Aulis discussion is now available on their YouTube channel.
Reading Greek Tragedy Online, Wednesdays at 3pm
On Wednesday, April 22 at 3:00-4:30pm ET, join us for a live reading and discussion of Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis, hosted by Joel Christensen (Brandeis) with special guests Adam Barnard and Mat Carbon (Liège). Featured actors include Tamieka Chavis, Tim Delap, Michael Lumsden, Evvy Miller, Richard Neale, Paul O'Mahony, and Eunice Roberts.
The live stream will appear on the CHS homepage. Recordings of past readings are available on YouTube.
I really like Euripides, and Iphigenia in Aulis is a particularly interesting tragedy. The backstory, of course, is that Helen has been abducted by Paris and the Greeks are at Aulis trying to set sail and begin the Trojan War -- but Artemis is angry at Agamemnon and has used her influence on the sea to turn it into a doldrums. They can't sail. The Greeks on the shore are starting to murmur and get rebellious, and a bloody revolt might spring up if they don't get moving. The goddess must be appeased. And what Artemis wants is the sacrifice of Agamemnon's eldest daughter, Iphigenia. So Agamemnon sends to his wife Clytemnestra, telling her to send Iphigenia to Aulis because he has arranged to marry her to Achilles.
The play as it currently ends has a deus ex machina; Euripides is lavish with gods from the machine, but a lot of Euripides scholars want to see this one as a later addition. I wonder if they will include it.
ADDED LATER: That was really, really good, and makes me want to go back and look at some of the previous ones that have been done. (While they didn't do every part of the play, they did present the standard ending, but also talked about the possibility that it is not original.) Highly recommended, when they eventually put the recording in the archive.
ADDED LATER 2: The Iphigenia in Aulis discussion is now available on their YouTube channel.
Tuesday, April 21, 2020
Doctor Magnificus
Today is the feast of St. Anselm, Doctor of the Church. From Cur Deus Homo 2.1:
It ought not to be disputed that rational nature was made holy by God, in order to be happy in enjoying Him. For to this end is it rational, in order to discern justice and injustice, good and evil, and between the greater and the lesser good. Otherwise it was made rational in vain. But God made it not rational in vain. Wherefore, doubtless, it was made rational for this end....Wherefore rational nature was made holy, in order to be happy in enjoying the supreme good, which is God. Therefore man, whose nature is rational, was made holy for this end, that he might be happy in enjoying God.
Monday, April 20, 2020
Music on My Mind
Michaela Anne, "Be Easy". She has an interesting short essay on what it is like to be an indie musician in a situation in which you have to cut off the tour and can't leave the house.
The Root of Schooling
People have been talking about this article in Harvard Magazine on 'the risks of homeschooling'. They've pointed out the delusional absurdity of the illustration, which has public school kids outside playing while homeschool kids are trapped inside, which in practice is usually closer to being the opposite of the truth, particularly in these days when recess is often quite restricted, and noted that the view one occasionally finds of homeschooling not being well-socialized is provably a myth. They pointed out the irony of the mistake (now fixed) the illustrator made in misspelling 'arithmetic'. They've pointed out the common experience that in homeschooling one can cover the same amount of material each day in a much shorter time than schoolteachers can because homeschooling parents don't have to shepherd twenty-five students simultaneously through the same material. There were a great many things to point out.
And all of them are right, but they are also to some extent beside the point because the anti-homeschool agenda is not expressing educational experience or even a coherent educational philosophy but a political agenda. It was not surprising to see that the article was about Elizabeth Bartholet. Bartholet is an activist against any kind of education outside of public schools (to the point of being a kook about it), and it's not surprise we get the political agenda being expressed in her comments:
Never mind, of course, that putting teachers in charge of kids rather than parents does literally nothing to stop "powerful people" (she means adults, because being an adult is what in fact gives you power over children) being put in charge of "the powerless" (she means children); we must accept a political regime that many consider a clear step toward totalitarianism in order to avoid a vaguely guessed-at possibility of authoritarianism. (And it is vaguely guessed-at. She vaguely insinuates that children are in greater danger of being abused by parents than teachers, and homeschooled students in greater danger of being abused than public school students, despite the fact that neither of these seems to be true on the evidence that exists. She does not adequately address the widespread problem of authoritarianism in the classroom, and her vague claims about homeschoolers being religious extremists are not well-founded overall -- she herself falls back on 'anecdotal evidence', as if 'anecdotal evidence' of abuse and misuse of power in schools were not also easily available.) Facts are irrelevant to this kind of argument; it is an argument about what Bartholet thinks should be, regardless of the way things are. Public schooling, Bartholet agrees, exists for specific civic ends; that she never establishes that it meets those ends so successfully that homeschooling cannot meet them as well is a side issue. The point is not whether public school is any good at meeting its purported ends, which people like Bartholet never really try to establish; the point for Bartholet is that in a regime allowing full homeschooling, parents (often uneducated parents, as she, Harvard classist to the bone, takes the trouble to insist) rather than people like Bartholet are given authority to judge for themselves whether it is or not. Letting the people decide for themselves is, she insists, anti-democratic. There is no reasoning with a loon like that, because reasoning is not how anyone gets to such a bizarre position.
The fundamental problem with almost all anti-homeschooling positions is that they tend not to recognize a fundamental point, one that is clear enough from the nature of child-raising and is generally recognized by teachers who actually teach children rather than just talk about ways to do so: all schooling is built around parental education. It has been noted since at least Damaris Masham in her arguments for women's education in the seventeenth century that parents, especially mothers, are first teachers. It's generally recognized by those who actually do the teaching in schools that schooling is most effective when education becomes an active cooperation between parents and school personnel. It is generally recognized that parents are the only figures who presumptively have the right to educate their children, even by those who recognize that the state has an interest in regulating education so that it contributes to a citizenry capable of maintaining the responsibilities of citizenship. (Bartholet tries to dance around points like that by making up a conspiracy theory she calls 'parental rights absolutism', a position that parents have and should have absolute power over their children, pushed by nefarious highly-funded ruthless organizations with extraordinary political connections. No one actually has such a view, of course; when she tries to give examples of it, it's always of people just affirming that parents have rights that must be respected. And the notion that the homeschooling movement is some massive political behemoth is actually rather funny. But, again, none of this is based on the actual views or activities of homeschoolers; it's a political agenda, so the goal is to find things said by homeschooling advocates that can be assimilated into the argument.) Schools are a subsidium; they are a back-up system and a support system, and what are they backing up and supporting? It has always been education in the home. Bartholet holds up France and Germany as models, but even setting aside that the French and the Germans allow their state authorities powers that are generally regarded as inconsistent with American principles, she fails to give adequate recognition to the fact that both France and Germany, especially the latter, also have historically treated government-supplied education as a supplement to education in the home. Indeed, you will find Germans who insist that this has always been one of the strengths of the German educational system.
The home is the root of the school. Any argument for compulsory public education that does not start with that recognition is already starting out wrong; an argument for compulsory public education needs to argue for why life in the home is not enough for educating people for civil society, and -- what is often not given -- show that public education does a good job of filling that gap, and -- what is also often not given -- show that it does so to such a degree that the state has a compelling interest in requiring public education rather than getting voluntary cooperation. That's what needs to be done. All this conspiracy-theory thinking about homeschooling as a dark and nefarious political operation reaching out from the shadows (when in reality most people homeschool just because they don't think the public school system is doing a very good job, and their 'political influence' largely just consists in the fact that they are voters in a society in which voters matter and in which other people are sympathetic to the idea that state intervention needs justification) is transparently attempting to rig the discussion so as to be immune to reasons that are actually responsive to what justifies schooling to begin with.
And all of them are right, but they are also to some extent beside the point because the anti-homeschool agenda is not expressing educational experience or even a coherent educational philosophy but a political agenda. It was not surprising to see that the article was about Elizabeth Bartholet. Bartholet is an activist against any kind of education outside of public schools (to the point of being a kook about it), and it's not surprise we get the political agenda being expressed in her comments:
“The issue is, do we think that parents should have 24/7, essentially authoritarian control over their children from ages zero to 18? I think that’s dangerous,” Bartholet says. “I think it’s always dangerous to put powerful people in charge of the powerless, and to give the powerful ones total authority.”
Never mind, of course, that putting teachers in charge of kids rather than parents does literally nothing to stop "powerful people" (she means adults, because being an adult is what in fact gives you power over children) being put in charge of "the powerless" (she means children); we must accept a political regime that many consider a clear step toward totalitarianism in order to avoid a vaguely guessed-at possibility of authoritarianism. (And it is vaguely guessed-at. She vaguely insinuates that children are in greater danger of being abused by parents than teachers, and homeschooled students in greater danger of being abused than public school students, despite the fact that neither of these seems to be true on the evidence that exists. She does not adequately address the widespread problem of authoritarianism in the classroom, and her vague claims about homeschoolers being religious extremists are not well-founded overall -- she herself falls back on 'anecdotal evidence', as if 'anecdotal evidence' of abuse and misuse of power in schools were not also easily available.) Facts are irrelevant to this kind of argument; it is an argument about what Bartholet thinks should be, regardless of the way things are. Public schooling, Bartholet agrees, exists for specific civic ends; that she never establishes that it meets those ends so successfully that homeschooling cannot meet them as well is a side issue. The point is not whether public school is any good at meeting its purported ends, which people like Bartholet never really try to establish; the point for Bartholet is that in a regime allowing full homeschooling, parents (often uneducated parents, as she, Harvard classist to the bone, takes the trouble to insist) rather than people like Bartholet are given authority to judge for themselves whether it is or not. Letting the people decide for themselves is, she insists, anti-democratic. There is no reasoning with a loon like that, because reasoning is not how anyone gets to such a bizarre position.
The fundamental problem with almost all anti-homeschooling positions is that they tend not to recognize a fundamental point, one that is clear enough from the nature of child-raising and is generally recognized by teachers who actually teach children rather than just talk about ways to do so: all schooling is built around parental education. It has been noted since at least Damaris Masham in her arguments for women's education in the seventeenth century that parents, especially mothers, are first teachers. It's generally recognized by those who actually do the teaching in schools that schooling is most effective when education becomes an active cooperation between parents and school personnel. It is generally recognized that parents are the only figures who presumptively have the right to educate their children, even by those who recognize that the state has an interest in regulating education so that it contributes to a citizenry capable of maintaining the responsibilities of citizenship. (Bartholet tries to dance around points like that by making up a conspiracy theory she calls 'parental rights absolutism', a position that parents have and should have absolute power over their children, pushed by nefarious highly-funded ruthless organizations with extraordinary political connections. No one actually has such a view, of course; when she tries to give examples of it, it's always of people just affirming that parents have rights that must be respected. And the notion that the homeschooling movement is some massive political behemoth is actually rather funny. But, again, none of this is based on the actual views or activities of homeschoolers; it's a political agenda, so the goal is to find things said by homeschooling advocates that can be assimilated into the argument.) Schools are a subsidium; they are a back-up system and a support system, and what are they backing up and supporting? It has always been education in the home. Bartholet holds up France and Germany as models, but even setting aside that the French and the Germans allow their state authorities powers that are generally regarded as inconsistent with American principles, she fails to give adequate recognition to the fact that both France and Germany, especially the latter, also have historically treated government-supplied education as a supplement to education in the home. Indeed, you will find Germans who insist that this has always been one of the strengths of the German educational system.
The home is the root of the school. Any argument for compulsory public education that does not start with that recognition is already starting out wrong; an argument for compulsory public education needs to argue for why life in the home is not enough for educating people for civil society, and -- what is often not given -- show that public education does a good job of filling that gap, and -- what is also often not given -- show that it does so to such a degree that the state has a compelling interest in requiring public education rather than getting voluntary cooperation. That's what needs to be done. All this conspiracy-theory thinking about homeschooling as a dark and nefarious political operation reaching out from the shadows (when in reality most people homeschool just because they don't think the public school system is doing a very good job, and their 'political influence' largely just consists in the fact that they are voters in a society in which voters matter and in which other people are sympathetic to the idea that state intervention needs justification) is transparently attempting to rig the discussion so as to be immune to reasons that are actually responsive to what justifies schooling to begin with.
Sunday, April 19, 2020
Daring Book
It's really more about the filters academics use to read Austen than about Austen or her novels themselves, but Janet Todd's discussion of re-reading Mansfield Park is interesting:
Mansfield Park is her most daring book. Knowing she had a great popular triumph in Pride and Prejudice, Austen deliberately created a heroine without the endearing qualities that made Elizabeth Bennet universally loved. Jane Austen liked pewter – we have it from her letters – yet not enough to repeat the winning romantic formula when she knew she had a supreme talent for fictional experiment. She wrote of Emma, that she’d created a heroine no one but herself would much like. The opinion better suits Fanny Price, through whom she provokes the reader to address the difficult truth of stubborn integrity.
Saturday, April 18, 2020
Ethics and Reasoning Index
As noted at the beginning, this was a barebones introduction to forms of reasoning in ethics, following loosely the order in my Ethics courses while stripping out most secondary readings. Doing the latter required some occasional re-organization; it also made sense to explain in a bit more detail a few things that I can usually only gesture briefly at in lectures, or that I usually explain by way of class activity or assignment rather than directly, where it was relevant to understanding the main figure in question.
Consequentialist
I (Bentham)
II (Mill)
III (Mill)
Deontological
IV (Kant)
V (Kant)
Virtue-Ethical
VI (Aristotle)
VII (Aquinas)
VIII (Aquinas)
If one were going beyond the limited range of primary topics I can cover in a term, one could certainly look at more: non-utilitarian consequentialisms, non-Kantian deontologies, non-Aristotelian virtue ethics. But the point here, of course, was not an exhaustive survey but a first look.
One thing that is perhaps worth emphasizing in general is that in no case is ethics actually seen as standalone, or even something that can be adequately addressed as a standalone field; ethics is always touching on and related with law (Bentham, Aquinas), aesthetics (Mill, Kant), and natural theology (Kant, Aquinas), in quite substantive ways, and here I've only even looked at a few of the really obvious cases -- politics and education are both topics, for instance, that are much more important to ethical reasoning than one would be able to see just from the above survey. Ethics, to be sure, is a sea that touches every shore, but it is more than just general relevance; it draws on and is strengthened by other fields. An ethics standing alone, sealed off from aesthetics, law, religion, politics, education, etc., is a malnourished ethics.
Consequentialist
I (Bentham)
II (Mill)
III (Mill)
Deontological
IV (Kant)
V (Kant)
Virtue-Ethical
VI (Aristotle)
VII (Aquinas)
VIII (Aquinas)
If one were going beyond the limited range of primary topics I can cover in a term, one could certainly look at more: non-utilitarian consequentialisms, non-Kantian deontologies, non-Aristotelian virtue ethics. But the point here, of course, was not an exhaustive survey but a first look.
One thing that is perhaps worth emphasizing in general is that in no case is ethics actually seen as standalone, or even something that can be adequately addressed as a standalone field; ethics is always touching on and related with law (Bentham, Aquinas), aesthetics (Mill, Kant), and natural theology (Kant, Aquinas), in quite substantive ways, and here I've only even looked at a few of the really obvious cases -- politics and education are both topics, for instance, that are much more important to ethical reasoning than one would be able to see just from the above survey. Ethics, to be sure, is a sea that touches every shore, but it is more than just general relevance; it draws on and is strengthened by other fields. An ethics standing alone, sealed off from aesthetics, law, religion, politics, education, etc., is a malnourished ethics.
Friday, April 17, 2020
Ethics and Reasoning VIII (Aquinas)
Moral life according to Aquinas requires not just our own self-cultivation (development of virtues exercised in ways appropriate to our state of life), but also external helps. These external helps are not external in the sense of being wholly outside us (and indeed, the most important cases are not), but in the sense that they are not things we ourselves develop; rather, we receive them in some way. There are many such helps; the most important are law and grace. Both of these will also in a number of ways overlap and support the virtues.
Altarpiece by Carlo Crivelli, showing Thomas Aquinas's association with law and grace in both sacrament (church) and teaching (book).
One of Aquinas's most famous philosophical contributions is his definition of law. According to Aquinas, law is
(1) a rational ordering
(2) to common good
(3) by one who is caretaker for what is common
(4) promulgated.
The purpose of a law is to act as guide and be a standard for rational beings, so it is necessary for it to be something that reason can use as a guide and standard. There are many kinds of rational guides and standards, though, even in practical matters. To be a law, it must be something that applies stably to everyone in the community; it must therefore deal with some stable motivation for the community. As an Aristotelian, of course, Aquinas takes this to be happiness, but it must be happiness insofar as it is shared as a goal by the community itself. Thus all law is concerned with that kind of happiness that is the totality of good in a life insofar as it is lived with others. Every community is formed around some common good, some good shared in common by the members of that community, whether that good is possessed or sought. Indeed, community just means 'the whole of what is common' or 'the state of having things in common'. This brings us to the third element of law; to have something of the authority that comes from the common good constituting a community, the law has to be put forward in a way adequate to that common good, that is to say, it can't be just anybody's rational ordering, but must be the rational ordering of a reason that is particularly connected to the common good. It must be put forward by someone who has the care (cura) for what is common. Usually the natural caretaker for a community is the whole community itself working together, but in practice it is often somebody who is designated a public person by the community and who acts as viceregent of everybody. This feature is what distinguishes law from the advice of private persons (which may be providing a rule relevant to common good but are not acting on behalf of the community whose common good it is) or the rules imposed by parents on a household (parents having the care of what is by definition only a partial contribution to common good). And finally, it must be actually applied. That is to say, if the rule is to be obeyed, it must be such that those who obey it can know it, so it must be promulgated or published.
Aquinas takes this to be a strict definition of law. Every law will have all four properties, anything that has all four properties is a law, and these are both true regardless of whether we call it a law or not. Both of them have points that are controverted by other philosophies of law. For instance, it follows from Aquinas's account that something cannot be a law at all if it is in itself inconsistent with common good -- such a thing is really a usurpation of power and an act of violence against the community, even if people call it a 'law'. And there will be quite a few different kinds of laws that will fit this definition, even if they are not what we typically call 'laws'.
The most general and encompassing kind of law is what Aquinas calls eternal law, which is the rational order of divine providence; God, being the good to which the totality of the world is directed and the source of everything in the universe, is the natural caretaker for what is common to the entire universe. The eternal law is in a sense the idea of law itself insofar as the entire world is subject to it. All other kinds of law depend on this, for the simple fact that none of the other kinds of law would exist without it.
More directly relevant to any consideration of ethics and reasoning, however, is natural law. Human practical reason operates according to practical principles, which are the standard against which one measures whether a plan or decision is a good one or a bad one, whether it 'makes sense', whether it is worth implementing, just like the principle of noncontradiction and other principles of theoretical reason are standards against which one measures whether theoretical reasoning is good or bad. These practical principles cover absolutely every practical plan and decision we make. And the most general of these, the noncontradiction of practical reasoning, so to speak, is Good is to be done and sought, bad is to be avoided. If any practical plan violates this, then to that extent it is irrational. To be rational is in part to recognize and apply principles like this.
This principle of practical reason concerns every kind of good or bad. But suppose we look in particular at good that human beings share as human beings. There is a human community; we can recognize goods that we have in common with all other human beings. Examples are things like survival, reproduction and education and care for children, or rational life. But if we focus on this kind of good, then we find that the first principle of practical reason fits the definition of law. By supposition it is being applied in a way that concerns common good; by definition it is a rational ordering to good; as all rational beings can know it, it is promulgated; and it is promulgated by all human beings, who are together the natural caretaker of the common good of all human beings. The same will be true of other principles insofar as they touch on human common good, as well as any conclusions of those principles that do the same. There is a law natural to our own reason, which is our participation in eternal law, and its existence follows from the bare fact that we are rational beings who share a rational human nature with each other. We are always already under law.
An important aspect of how Aquinas builds his account of natural law -- and it is sometimes forgotten even by natural law theorists -- is that natural law serves as a general rational standard, not a rigorous account of the full moral life. It is in fact very difficult, and sometimes impossible, to reason out precisely what natural law requires for every single situation. Natural law is linked to acquired virtue in that it obligates us to acquire each virtue and act according to it in some way. It does not obligate us to every act of every virtue, nor does natural law cover every aspect of moral life; but as our virtues all have bearing on the common good of the human race, virtues in a general way are all obligatory under natural law. Natural law cannot replace the virtue of prudence, although it does obligate us to be prudent, and most of the reasoning involved in our actual moral lives will derive from the virtue of prudence approximating and estimating and developing guidelines appropriate to circumstances, not directly by reasoning from natural law.
It is also perhaps worth recognizing that all obligation is in Aquinas's account communal. Without a common good, there is no law. Without a role in a community, there are no offices, i.e., duties based on our state of life. Private goods, goods belonging entirely to one and only one individual, obligate nobody. Obligation is something that arises out of our lives in community. But it is also important to recognize that we are all in community, and cannot function as human beings without being so. Reason is in-common by its very nature; we are social beings not merely in the fact that our natures lead us to try to be in society but in the fact that we are already in a community by the bare fact of being human. Natural law reflects this.
Natural law is a general standard; we often need something more specific. This gives us positive laws, laws that are made for specific purposes, of which there are two kinds, divine law and human law. The essential idea in both is that our moral life is a life of virtue, and acquired virtue is something we can have only by training, for which natural law provides only general guidance. Some of this is training we ourselves develop. But none of us are sufficient of ourselves to determine all the training that must be done in order to be virtuous. We need in part to be trained by others. Advice and admonition will sometimes be enough, for at least some things, but their implementation still depends entirely on our choosing to take them into account, and in matters of common good, it's not possible for everybody just to make their own decision about what should be done, particularly given that some people will choose in ways that are utterly inconsistent with virtue. So we need additional laws that give us specific guidance going beyond natural law. If this comes from God, like the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) or the precepts of Christ, it is divine law; if it comes from the human community, it is human law. Human law has no legitimate rationale other than to make it easier for us to become and to be virtuous people living with others who are becoming and being virtuous people.
All genuine human law by definition has to be consistent with natural law. However, because human means of enforcement cannot cover everything practical reason can, not every precept of natural law can be legislated by human law. For instance, if in addition to recognizing that lying is against natural law, we made it illegal ever to lie by human law, the enforcement of this would be so difficult that we certainly could not enforce it without violating natural law ourselves. So it makes sense simply to endure the fact that people will violate natural law by lying, and confine ourselves only to those things we can morally enforce. This is called the doctrine of toleration: human law must sometimes tolerate violations of natural law. On the other side, though, it is often necessary for us to be in agreement about particular matters that natural law does not on its own decide, so human law gives us a way to work together on particulars that are not rationally necessary but have to be determined if we are to act as we should.
Besides law, the other major factor of our moral lives that enters from outside is grace. 'Grace' is used in three different ways, all connected with the root meaning of the word in Latin, which is freedom. It can mean the love or favor of another person (this is the sense in which you are in someone's 'good graces'). It can mean a gift that is freely given. And it can mean a response to such a gift that is appropriate (this is the sense in which we are grateful or gracious). These are all interlinked: the first gives rise to the second, which gives rise to the third. The second, however, is the primary kind of thing Aquinas has in mind, and the most important thing fitting this description is the quality of the soul, which makes us worthy of God, added to our very being by God in order to lead human beings to God. Such grace can either be a gift directly leading someone to God (sanctifying grace), or a gift helping someone to lead someone else to God (gratuitous grace).
Grace, of course, is the foundation of the infused virtues, which raise human beings to a higher degree of society. However, Aquinas also thinks that we cannot fulfill the obligations of natural law without grace -- we have a tendency toward wrongdoing, so we need grace to compensate for this, and even if we did not, we would still need grace in order not just to conform to the law but to do so in a way that is appropriate to it. We cannot fully act well without divine help; our freedom needs a free gift from God in order to come to the end suitable for it.
In practical life, the notion of grace is generally (although not always) linked with the notion of sacrament, which is also a point at which law and grace intermingle. A sacrament is a sensible sign of something holy insofar as it contributes to our being holy, like sacrifices and tithes. Prior to any specification by divine law, in a regime of natural law, our sacraments our determined by our own vows or (at times) by special divine inspiration; these sacraments have only the most indirect connection with grace, in that we hope that God will give grace to help us because we are recognizing explicitly that we need it. When God gives the Law through Moses, however, He institutes a new regime, one that both gives a divine specification of the sacraments and a greater assurance of divine grace. These sacraments, like circumcision or Old Testament sacrifices, signify grace more consistently and accurately than other sacraments could, and convey a sort of promise that grace will be given. However, as a Christian, of course, Thomas holds that these sacraments are merely preparatory to a more complete form of sacrament, given in the New Law received from Christ; this New Law is itself given by grace, and its sacraments, like baptism, are signs of grace that both contain and cause grace directly to those who are properly disposed. It is in the sacrament of baptism, for instance, that we receive the infused virtues, and it is by the sacrament of penance that the infused virtues are restored if we act so as to lose them. And since, of course, law is by its very nature a communal thing, and determines the nature of sacrament, our primary form of expressing our readiness for grace, and in the case of the New Law, the primary form of receiving it, grace, like law, makes clear that our moral life is a communal life.
Both law and grace, Aquinas thinks, are ultimately founded on divine providence, and thus the moral life can only be fully lived when it is lived in a way appropriate to the broader context established by this divine providence, which is like a higher prudence -- 'prudence', in fact, is just a short form of the word 'providence'. We are not isolated individuals, and cannot be moral as isolated individuals. Our moral life presupposes others, whether by law or by grace or by some lesser assistances like these, and it is done in community with others, both God and other human beings, and it is diversified according to the communities of which we are part and our roles in those communities, and the goal of that life, whether the incomplete goal of peaceful and harmonious felicity or the higher goal of beatitude, is a goal shared in common. And understanding that Thomas sees life as structured in this way by community is essential to understanding his virtue ethics.
Altarpiece by Carlo Crivelli, showing Thomas Aquinas's association with law and grace in both sacrament (church) and teaching (book).
One of Aquinas's most famous philosophical contributions is his definition of law. According to Aquinas, law is
(1) a rational ordering
(2) to common good
(3) by one who is caretaker for what is common
(4) promulgated.
The purpose of a law is to act as guide and be a standard for rational beings, so it is necessary for it to be something that reason can use as a guide and standard. There are many kinds of rational guides and standards, though, even in practical matters. To be a law, it must be something that applies stably to everyone in the community; it must therefore deal with some stable motivation for the community. As an Aristotelian, of course, Aquinas takes this to be happiness, but it must be happiness insofar as it is shared as a goal by the community itself. Thus all law is concerned with that kind of happiness that is the totality of good in a life insofar as it is lived with others. Every community is formed around some common good, some good shared in common by the members of that community, whether that good is possessed or sought. Indeed, community just means 'the whole of what is common' or 'the state of having things in common'. This brings us to the third element of law; to have something of the authority that comes from the common good constituting a community, the law has to be put forward in a way adequate to that common good, that is to say, it can't be just anybody's rational ordering, but must be the rational ordering of a reason that is particularly connected to the common good. It must be put forward by someone who has the care (cura) for what is common. Usually the natural caretaker for a community is the whole community itself working together, but in practice it is often somebody who is designated a public person by the community and who acts as viceregent of everybody. This feature is what distinguishes law from the advice of private persons (which may be providing a rule relevant to common good but are not acting on behalf of the community whose common good it is) or the rules imposed by parents on a household (parents having the care of what is by definition only a partial contribution to common good). And finally, it must be actually applied. That is to say, if the rule is to be obeyed, it must be such that those who obey it can know it, so it must be promulgated or published.
Aquinas takes this to be a strict definition of law. Every law will have all four properties, anything that has all four properties is a law, and these are both true regardless of whether we call it a law or not. Both of them have points that are controverted by other philosophies of law. For instance, it follows from Aquinas's account that something cannot be a law at all if it is in itself inconsistent with common good -- such a thing is really a usurpation of power and an act of violence against the community, even if people call it a 'law'. And there will be quite a few different kinds of laws that will fit this definition, even if they are not what we typically call 'laws'.
The most general and encompassing kind of law is what Aquinas calls eternal law, which is the rational order of divine providence; God, being the good to which the totality of the world is directed and the source of everything in the universe, is the natural caretaker for what is common to the entire universe. The eternal law is in a sense the idea of law itself insofar as the entire world is subject to it. All other kinds of law depend on this, for the simple fact that none of the other kinds of law would exist without it.
More directly relevant to any consideration of ethics and reasoning, however, is natural law. Human practical reason operates according to practical principles, which are the standard against which one measures whether a plan or decision is a good one or a bad one, whether it 'makes sense', whether it is worth implementing, just like the principle of noncontradiction and other principles of theoretical reason are standards against which one measures whether theoretical reasoning is good or bad. These practical principles cover absolutely every practical plan and decision we make. And the most general of these, the noncontradiction of practical reasoning, so to speak, is Good is to be done and sought, bad is to be avoided. If any practical plan violates this, then to that extent it is irrational. To be rational is in part to recognize and apply principles like this.
This principle of practical reason concerns every kind of good or bad. But suppose we look in particular at good that human beings share as human beings. There is a human community; we can recognize goods that we have in common with all other human beings. Examples are things like survival, reproduction and education and care for children, or rational life. But if we focus on this kind of good, then we find that the first principle of practical reason fits the definition of law. By supposition it is being applied in a way that concerns common good; by definition it is a rational ordering to good; as all rational beings can know it, it is promulgated; and it is promulgated by all human beings, who are together the natural caretaker of the common good of all human beings. The same will be true of other principles insofar as they touch on human common good, as well as any conclusions of those principles that do the same. There is a law natural to our own reason, which is our participation in eternal law, and its existence follows from the bare fact that we are rational beings who share a rational human nature with each other. We are always already under law.
An important aspect of how Aquinas builds his account of natural law -- and it is sometimes forgotten even by natural law theorists -- is that natural law serves as a general rational standard, not a rigorous account of the full moral life. It is in fact very difficult, and sometimes impossible, to reason out precisely what natural law requires for every single situation. Natural law is linked to acquired virtue in that it obligates us to acquire each virtue and act according to it in some way. It does not obligate us to every act of every virtue, nor does natural law cover every aspect of moral life; but as our virtues all have bearing on the common good of the human race, virtues in a general way are all obligatory under natural law. Natural law cannot replace the virtue of prudence, although it does obligate us to be prudent, and most of the reasoning involved in our actual moral lives will derive from the virtue of prudence approximating and estimating and developing guidelines appropriate to circumstances, not directly by reasoning from natural law.
It is also perhaps worth recognizing that all obligation is in Aquinas's account communal. Without a common good, there is no law. Without a role in a community, there are no offices, i.e., duties based on our state of life. Private goods, goods belonging entirely to one and only one individual, obligate nobody. Obligation is something that arises out of our lives in community. But it is also important to recognize that we are all in community, and cannot function as human beings without being so. Reason is in-common by its very nature; we are social beings not merely in the fact that our natures lead us to try to be in society but in the fact that we are already in a community by the bare fact of being human. Natural law reflects this.
Natural law is a general standard; we often need something more specific. This gives us positive laws, laws that are made for specific purposes, of which there are two kinds, divine law and human law. The essential idea in both is that our moral life is a life of virtue, and acquired virtue is something we can have only by training, for which natural law provides only general guidance. Some of this is training we ourselves develop. But none of us are sufficient of ourselves to determine all the training that must be done in order to be virtuous. We need in part to be trained by others. Advice and admonition will sometimes be enough, for at least some things, but their implementation still depends entirely on our choosing to take them into account, and in matters of common good, it's not possible for everybody just to make their own decision about what should be done, particularly given that some people will choose in ways that are utterly inconsistent with virtue. So we need additional laws that give us specific guidance going beyond natural law. If this comes from God, like the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) or the precepts of Christ, it is divine law; if it comes from the human community, it is human law. Human law has no legitimate rationale other than to make it easier for us to become and to be virtuous people living with others who are becoming and being virtuous people.
All genuine human law by definition has to be consistent with natural law. However, because human means of enforcement cannot cover everything practical reason can, not every precept of natural law can be legislated by human law. For instance, if in addition to recognizing that lying is against natural law, we made it illegal ever to lie by human law, the enforcement of this would be so difficult that we certainly could not enforce it without violating natural law ourselves. So it makes sense simply to endure the fact that people will violate natural law by lying, and confine ourselves only to those things we can morally enforce. This is called the doctrine of toleration: human law must sometimes tolerate violations of natural law. On the other side, though, it is often necessary for us to be in agreement about particular matters that natural law does not on its own decide, so human law gives us a way to work together on particulars that are not rationally necessary but have to be determined if we are to act as we should.
Besides law, the other major factor of our moral lives that enters from outside is grace. 'Grace' is used in three different ways, all connected with the root meaning of the word in Latin, which is freedom. It can mean the love or favor of another person (this is the sense in which you are in someone's 'good graces'). It can mean a gift that is freely given. And it can mean a response to such a gift that is appropriate (this is the sense in which we are grateful or gracious). These are all interlinked: the first gives rise to the second, which gives rise to the third. The second, however, is the primary kind of thing Aquinas has in mind, and the most important thing fitting this description is the quality of the soul, which makes us worthy of God, added to our very being by God in order to lead human beings to God. Such grace can either be a gift directly leading someone to God (sanctifying grace), or a gift helping someone to lead someone else to God (gratuitous grace).
Grace, of course, is the foundation of the infused virtues, which raise human beings to a higher degree of society. However, Aquinas also thinks that we cannot fulfill the obligations of natural law without grace -- we have a tendency toward wrongdoing, so we need grace to compensate for this, and even if we did not, we would still need grace in order not just to conform to the law but to do so in a way that is appropriate to it. We cannot fully act well without divine help; our freedom needs a free gift from God in order to come to the end suitable for it.
In practical life, the notion of grace is generally (although not always) linked with the notion of sacrament, which is also a point at which law and grace intermingle. A sacrament is a sensible sign of something holy insofar as it contributes to our being holy, like sacrifices and tithes. Prior to any specification by divine law, in a regime of natural law, our sacraments our determined by our own vows or (at times) by special divine inspiration; these sacraments have only the most indirect connection with grace, in that we hope that God will give grace to help us because we are recognizing explicitly that we need it. When God gives the Law through Moses, however, He institutes a new regime, one that both gives a divine specification of the sacraments and a greater assurance of divine grace. These sacraments, like circumcision or Old Testament sacrifices, signify grace more consistently and accurately than other sacraments could, and convey a sort of promise that grace will be given. However, as a Christian, of course, Thomas holds that these sacraments are merely preparatory to a more complete form of sacrament, given in the New Law received from Christ; this New Law is itself given by grace, and its sacraments, like baptism, are signs of grace that both contain and cause grace directly to those who are properly disposed. It is in the sacrament of baptism, for instance, that we receive the infused virtues, and it is by the sacrament of penance that the infused virtues are restored if we act so as to lose them. And since, of course, law is by its very nature a communal thing, and determines the nature of sacrament, our primary form of expressing our readiness for grace, and in the case of the New Law, the primary form of receiving it, grace, like law, makes clear that our moral life is a communal life.
Both law and grace, Aquinas thinks, are ultimately founded on divine providence, and thus the moral life can only be fully lived when it is lived in a way appropriate to the broader context established by this divine providence, which is like a higher prudence -- 'prudence', in fact, is just a short form of the word 'providence'. We are not isolated individuals, and cannot be moral as isolated individuals. Our moral life presupposes others, whether by law or by grace or by some lesser assistances like these, and it is done in community with others, both God and other human beings, and it is diversified according to the communities of which we are part and our roles in those communities, and the goal of that life, whether the incomplete goal of peaceful and harmonious felicity or the higher goal of beatitude, is a goal shared in common. And understanding that Thomas sees life as structured in this way by community is essential to understanding his virtue ethics.
Thought Laboratory
Comparing how one perfection or another (life, knowledge, language, love) is achieved in a pure spirit and in a human being allows us to determine simultaneously the analogically universal stable nucleus of this perfection and the particular features that it assumes in man. The specificity of the human condition stands out all the more clearly as a result. For example, the study of such an exotic topic as the language of the angels allows us to sort out the fundamental structures of all communication and to identify the things in our experience of language that depend on specifically human modalities. Moreover, an examination of the metaphysical structure of an angel reveals, like a photographic image chemically developed in a darkroom, the fundamental truth of the composition of being and essence in every creature. In short, angelology is a "thought laboratory" that allows the philosopher to distill and refine his metaphysical or noetic concepts and to define further what is properly human.
Serge-Thomas Bonino, O.P., Angels and Demons, Miller, tr. The Catholic University of America Press (Washington, DC: 2016), p. 2.
Thursday, April 16, 2020
But Even Mine Own Long-Lost Abandoned Home
Knowledge
by Richard Chenevix Trench
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. -- Wordsworth.
True knowledge is the waking up of powers
To conscious life, which were already ours.
What now is mine in leaf and flower and fruit,
Was mine before in blossom, bud, and root.
The writing that had faded quite, again
By chymic art comes out distinct and plain.
Springs that were stopped, when that is cleared away
Which choked them, bubble forth in open day.
The stars look forth at eve, which yet have been
All day in heaven, although till now unseen.
The dawn lights up the landscape; the great Sun
Shows, but not makes, the world he looks upon.
I found a rich pearl flung upon my coast,
Which yet no other than myself had lost.
I entered a large hall--no foreign dome,
But even mine own long-lost abandoned home.
In what at first appeared a stranger's face,
An ancient friend I daily learn to trace.
I am at rest--my centre I have found,
The circle's edge I had been wandering round.
Tuesday, April 14, 2020
Evening Note for Tuesday, April 14
Thought for the Evening: The Landscape of Possible Arguments
Scott Aikin and Nicholaos Jones had a paper a few years back called "An Atheistic Argument from Ugliness". In that paper they put forward a few claims of interest: (1) teleological arguments for God's existence have 'evil twins'; (2) that there is a specific teleological argument for God's existence based on beauty; (3) that (from the prior two points) there is an atheistic argument from ugliness, combining the evil twin of the argument from beauty with the premise that God must be good; (4) that there is a generally exportable way to reverse 'theodicies' addressing the 'problem of ugliness'; and (5) that this suffices for at least an 'agnostic tie'. I find the paper interesting in part because I have an interest in 'abstract history of philosophy', one element of which is looking at the landscape of possible argument that is traveled in the development of actual arguments, and I think the paper exemplifies a very common failure in metaphysics and philosophy of religion to understand how the possible-argument landscape relates to real argument, and it does so in several ways.
Is there an 'evil twins' problem for theistic teleological arguments? We have to be somewhat careful here; 'teleological argument' is a very broad and loose category. Aikin and Jones mean a very specific kind of teleological argument, which they characterize as having a particular structure:
[a] a premise assigning a property X to the universe or parts of it;
[b] a premise attributing X at least usually to purposive action creating something to be X;
[c] a premise ruling out that the purposive action for X attributed to the universe or parts of it can be human;
[d] a conclusion that the universe is due to purposive action creating to be X.
At least this is what they start out purporting to discuss; they immediately then explain further what they mean by giving a brief historical survey that jumbles it together with arguments that do not have this structure. But their argument is stronger if we stick with this structure, so let's ask about this structure whether it allows 'evil twins'.
The answer is obviously yes; this is trivially true, given that you can plug in anything into X and get a new argument. 'Twins' underplays the combinatorial possibilities. For instance,
(1) The universe is cool.
(2) Coolness usually requires purposive action creating something to be cool.
(3) Human action can't be what makes the universe cool.
(4) Therefore the universe is likely the product of a purposive agent creating it to be cool, namely, God.
(1) The universe is uncool.
(2) Uncoolness usually requires purposive action creating something to be uncool.
(3) Human action can't be what makes the universe uncool.
(4) Therefore the universe is likely the product of a purposive agent creating it to be cool, namely, God.
We can get infinitely many possible arguments this way, using whatever property you want for X: big, orange, wicked, round, up someone's nostril, whatever. So obviously, you can have arguments from beauty and ugliness both. You can have arguments from anything.
But we don't, and this is because human beings don't reason with the bare landscape of possible argument. And the reason we don't is that truth distorts the landscape. For instance, if we plug 'up my nose' for X, then 'The universe is up my nose' is obviously false given the understanding of noses and the universe had by virtually everyone outside the madhouse; you have but to look up my nose to see that the universe is not up it. What's more, 'The universe is up my nose' is probably necessarily false: that is to say, my nose is probably necessarily a finite part of the universe, and therefore cannot have the universe as a part bounded by it. Add any truth at all, and like a star warping space and time, it makes the landscape of possible arguments non-flat. Once truth is in the mix, not all possible arguments are equal. Shift in terms yields an argument with the same structure but not an argument by parity.
The same point arises again for their theodicy reversals. Can you turn every beauty-based theodicy into an ugliness-based theodicy? Yes, and again trivially: it follows directly from the fact that theodicies have a logical structure detachable from the content of their terms. But this too does not establish parity of argument.
This is of significance to their argument because you can only get an 'agnostic tie' on grounds of parity, not on grounds of the multiple realizability of logical structure. It is irrational to treat arguments equally merely because they have the same logical structure. I mean, literally irrational; one would have to be insane to do it.
When they actually make their 'atheistic argument', Aikin and Jones come close to recognizing that replacing terms is not the only thing that must be considered. The 'evil twin' of the theistic argument from beauty is, of course, a theistic argument itself. The atheistic argument is a very different argument that treats the theistic argument from ugliness as a reductio when added to the premise, assumed true, that God could not possibly love ugliness nor be ugly nor torture us with ugliness. It's analogous to atheistic arguments from 'bad design'; these are not 'twins' of theistic arguments from design, because they can't possibly have the same logical structure. Whether something is (really, as opposed to merely apparently) designed badly or well brings one to the same conclusion: there is a designer. To get an atheistic argument, you have to treat 'There is a designer who designed this badly' as conflicting with a more fundamental assumption about what's true, either your own (if you are putting it forward categorically) or that of the person with whom you are arguing (if you are arguing ad hominem in the Lockean sense). To get the atheistic argument, you have to know something about God that the original argument does not require you to know. And so here. But the point is that treating something as a reductio already requires recognizing that the landscape of possible arguments twists around truths, so that assuming something to be true changes the acceptability or cogency of arguments. What really does their work in the 'agnostic tie' conclusion is the assumption, which they never establish for any of the evil twins or reverse theodicies, that the premises are equally supportable given the way the world is. This is where the real action is.
And there are reasons why people do not in general treat arguments and their 'evil twins' as on a level: they usually aren't. The Pyrrhonists used to draw agnostic conclusions from the isosthenia of arguments, the sameness of strength on opposing sides; but sameness of strength is actually very difficult to get -- you can usually only get it if you are assuming an even larger-scale agnosticism to begin with, one concerning everything else that's relevant to the arguments and thus could possibly change their supportability. Start assuming things and the symmetries begin to be broken. This is a major reason, arguably, why Pyrrhonist skepticiam is not a popular position, why it is, in fact, easier to be a dogmatist than a Pyrrhonist: equilibrium requires that all the forces balance, and that requires a very specific set-up.
In the actual history of philosophy, a lot of the dynamics of arguments comes about through this sort of symmetry-breaking -- something is taken as true, and the possible arguments are no longer equally possible; something else is taken as true, and the possible arguments that can be made shift again. What historians of philosophy often are doing is looking at (1) the factors introducing assumptions and (2) the effects that these introductions have on the salience and viability of possible arguments. But it is in fact essential to understanding and comparing arguments to recognize that the landscape of possible arguments for us is never flat, and that the bare fact of using arguments, rather than merely contemplating them, requires that more than logical structure be considered.
Various Links of Interest
* Why is the sky green before a tornado? at "Science Notes"
How to subsitute baking powder and baking soda
Make hot ice from baking soda and vinegar
* Lydia Moland, The Philosophical Activism of Lydia Maria Child
* J. D. Vance, How I Joined the Resistance
* Lucie Levine, Was Modern Art Really a CIA Psy-Op? The evidence that a significant portion of modern art's success was funded by intelligence agencies is quite undeniable. How much the intelligence agencies pushing an anti-Soviet (and thus in part anti-Soviet-propaganda) propaganda campaign were the engine of modern art movements, as opposed to simply taking advantage of what was already working on its own, is a more tricky question.
* A.-S. Barwich, It's hard to fool a nose
* Mark Csikszentmihalyi, Confucius, at the SEP
Thomas Szanto and Dermot Moran, Edith Stein
* Udo Schuklenk, Health Care Professionals Are Under No Ethical Obligation to Treat COVID-19 Patients. A very rare instance of my agreeing with Schuklenk on an ethical matter (although he ruins it by detouring into a rant on political policy that at most optimistic assessment has only indirect bearing on the immediate ethical question of personal medical obligations). It's of course undeniably good for health care professionals to do so if they can genuinely help (but this is not the same as an obligation); there are particular situations in which particular health care professionals might be obligated to care for particular COVID-19 patients (but this is not the same as a general obligation); it is in principle possible to draft health care professionals for a medical emergency in the same way we draft soldiers for war (but we have not done so, and healthcare professionals are not organized as a soldiery under command). One sometimes finds people arguing about a duty to care; but the duty to care that healthcare professionals have is just the same duty to care that we all have, allowing for the fact that their skills give them an expanded range of action. Doctors and other practitioners in the medical tradition have rights; and just as there is a legitimate space for both technical objection and conscientious objection, so there is legitimate space for personal safety objection. And it is very important to recognize the degree to which doctors risking themselves for others is voluntary and not something simply to be expected, as well as to recognize that if you want them to take such risks as a consistent thing, you need to support them properly for it.
People are always trying to rig ethics to get the results they want; you have to be careful about assuming that because a result is tragic that the actions to avoid it are obligatory rather than just good, and even more so that they are obligatory on particular people rather than being the responsibility of all of us. There is such a thing as obligation creep, in which things that are not obligations are treated as such because people like the results, or in which responsibilities that are really shared are fobbed off on particular people as 'their' obligations. I think people especially tend to conflate these matters when talking about 'healthcare', and it is a very dangerous moral habit.
* Christiaan Kappes, Transubstantiation: Maybe Dositheos Got It Right
* Ben Zion Katz, The Breadth of Rabbinic Opinion Regarding Mosaic Authorship of the Torah in the Middle Ages
* Loebolus. All the public domain Loeb editions, available for download.
* Dan Solomon and Paula Forbes, The Inside Story of How H-E-B. Planned for the Pandemic. For those who don't know, H-E-B is the major local grocery chain here in Texas. There is no question that its handling of recent events has been exemplary.
* The mathematician John Conway, most famous for his Game of Life and surreal numbers, has recently died due to COVID-19.
Currently Reading
Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers
Stephen Jarvis, Death and Mr. Pickwick
Ed Peters, tr., The 1917 Pio-Benedictine Code of Canon Law
John C. Wright, Count to a Trillion
Scott Aikin and Nicholaos Jones had a paper a few years back called "An Atheistic Argument from Ugliness". In that paper they put forward a few claims of interest: (1) teleological arguments for God's existence have 'evil twins'; (2) that there is a specific teleological argument for God's existence based on beauty; (3) that (from the prior two points) there is an atheistic argument from ugliness, combining the evil twin of the argument from beauty with the premise that God must be good; (4) that there is a generally exportable way to reverse 'theodicies' addressing the 'problem of ugliness'; and (5) that this suffices for at least an 'agnostic tie'. I find the paper interesting in part because I have an interest in 'abstract history of philosophy', one element of which is looking at the landscape of possible argument that is traveled in the development of actual arguments, and I think the paper exemplifies a very common failure in metaphysics and philosophy of religion to understand how the possible-argument landscape relates to real argument, and it does so in several ways.
Is there an 'evil twins' problem for theistic teleological arguments? We have to be somewhat careful here; 'teleological argument' is a very broad and loose category. Aikin and Jones mean a very specific kind of teleological argument, which they characterize as having a particular structure:
[a] a premise assigning a property X to the universe or parts of it;
[b] a premise attributing X at least usually to purposive action creating something to be X;
[c] a premise ruling out that the purposive action for X attributed to the universe or parts of it can be human;
[d] a conclusion that the universe is due to purposive action creating to be X.
At least this is what they start out purporting to discuss; they immediately then explain further what they mean by giving a brief historical survey that jumbles it together with arguments that do not have this structure. But their argument is stronger if we stick with this structure, so let's ask about this structure whether it allows 'evil twins'.
The answer is obviously yes; this is trivially true, given that you can plug in anything into X and get a new argument. 'Twins' underplays the combinatorial possibilities. For instance,
(1) The universe is cool.
(2) Coolness usually requires purposive action creating something to be cool.
(3) Human action can't be what makes the universe cool.
(4) Therefore the universe is likely the product of a purposive agent creating it to be cool, namely, God.
(1) The universe is uncool.
(2) Uncoolness usually requires purposive action creating something to be uncool.
(3) Human action can't be what makes the universe uncool.
(4) Therefore the universe is likely the product of a purposive agent creating it to be cool, namely, God.
We can get infinitely many possible arguments this way, using whatever property you want for X: big, orange, wicked, round, up someone's nostril, whatever. So obviously, you can have arguments from beauty and ugliness both. You can have arguments from anything.
But we don't, and this is because human beings don't reason with the bare landscape of possible argument. And the reason we don't is that truth distorts the landscape. For instance, if we plug 'up my nose' for X, then 'The universe is up my nose' is obviously false given the understanding of noses and the universe had by virtually everyone outside the madhouse; you have but to look up my nose to see that the universe is not up it. What's more, 'The universe is up my nose' is probably necessarily false: that is to say, my nose is probably necessarily a finite part of the universe, and therefore cannot have the universe as a part bounded by it. Add any truth at all, and like a star warping space and time, it makes the landscape of possible arguments non-flat. Once truth is in the mix, not all possible arguments are equal. Shift in terms yields an argument with the same structure but not an argument by parity.
The same point arises again for their theodicy reversals. Can you turn every beauty-based theodicy into an ugliness-based theodicy? Yes, and again trivially: it follows directly from the fact that theodicies have a logical structure detachable from the content of their terms. But this too does not establish parity of argument.
This is of significance to their argument because you can only get an 'agnostic tie' on grounds of parity, not on grounds of the multiple realizability of logical structure. It is irrational to treat arguments equally merely because they have the same logical structure. I mean, literally irrational; one would have to be insane to do it.
When they actually make their 'atheistic argument', Aikin and Jones come close to recognizing that replacing terms is not the only thing that must be considered. The 'evil twin' of the theistic argument from beauty is, of course, a theistic argument itself. The atheistic argument is a very different argument that treats the theistic argument from ugliness as a reductio when added to the premise, assumed true, that God could not possibly love ugliness nor be ugly nor torture us with ugliness. It's analogous to atheistic arguments from 'bad design'; these are not 'twins' of theistic arguments from design, because they can't possibly have the same logical structure. Whether something is (really, as opposed to merely apparently) designed badly or well brings one to the same conclusion: there is a designer. To get an atheistic argument, you have to treat 'There is a designer who designed this badly' as conflicting with a more fundamental assumption about what's true, either your own (if you are putting it forward categorically) or that of the person with whom you are arguing (if you are arguing ad hominem in the Lockean sense). To get the atheistic argument, you have to know something about God that the original argument does not require you to know. And so here. But the point is that treating something as a reductio already requires recognizing that the landscape of possible arguments twists around truths, so that assuming something to be true changes the acceptability or cogency of arguments. What really does their work in the 'agnostic tie' conclusion is the assumption, which they never establish for any of the evil twins or reverse theodicies, that the premises are equally supportable given the way the world is. This is where the real action is.
And there are reasons why people do not in general treat arguments and their 'evil twins' as on a level: they usually aren't. The Pyrrhonists used to draw agnostic conclusions from the isosthenia of arguments, the sameness of strength on opposing sides; but sameness of strength is actually very difficult to get -- you can usually only get it if you are assuming an even larger-scale agnosticism to begin with, one concerning everything else that's relevant to the arguments and thus could possibly change their supportability. Start assuming things and the symmetries begin to be broken. This is a major reason, arguably, why Pyrrhonist skepticiam is not a popular position, why it is, in fact, easier to be a dogmatist than a Pyrrhonist: equilibrium requires that all the forces balance, and that requires a very specific set-up.
In the actual history of philosophy, a lot of the dynamics of arguments comes about through this sort of symmetry-breaking -- something is taken as true, and the possible arguments are no longer equally possible; something else is taken as true, and the possible arguments that can be made shift again. What historians of philosophy often are doing is looking at (1) the factors introducing assumptions and (2) the effects that these introductions have on the salience and viability of possible arguments. But it is in fact essential to understanding and comparing arguments to recognize that the landscape of possible arguments for us is never flat, and that the bare fact of using arguments, rather than merely contemplating them, requires that more than logical structure be considered.
Various Links of Interest
* Why is the sky green before a tornado? at "Science Notes"
How to subsitute baking powder and baking soda
Make hot ice from baking soda and vinegar
* Lydia Moland, The Philosophical Activism of Lydia Maria Child
* J. D. Vance, How I Joined the Resistance
* Lucie Levine, Was Modern Art Really a CIA Psy-Op? The evidence that a significant portion of modern art's success was funded by intelligence agencies is quite undeniable. How much the intelligence agencies pushing an anti-Soviet (and thus in part anti-Soviet-propaganda) propaganda campaign were the engine of modern art movements, as opposed to simply taking advantage of what was already working on its own, is a more tricky question.
* A.-S. Barwich, It's hard to fool a nose
* Mark Csikszentmihalyi, Confucius, at the SEP
Thomas Szanto and Dermot Moran, Edith Stein
* Udo Schuklenk, Health Care Professionals Are Under No Ethical Obligation to Treat COVID-19 Patients. A very rare instance of my agreeing with Schuklenk on an ethical matter (although he ruins it by detouring into a rant on political policy that at most optimistic assessment has only indirect bearing on the immediate ethical question of personal medical obligations). It's of course undeniably good for health care professionals to do so if they can genuinely help (but this is not the same as an obligation); there are particular situations in which particular health care professionals might be obligated to care for particular COVID-19 patients (but this is not the same as a general obligation); it is in principle possible to draft health care professionals for a medical emergency in the same way we draft soldiers for war (but we have not done so, and healthcare professionals are not organized as a soldiery under command). One sometimes finds people arguing about a duty to care; but the duty to care that healthcare professionals have is just the same duty to care that we all have, allowing for the fact that their skills give them an expanded range of action. Doctors and other practitioners in the medical tradition have rights; and just as there is a legitimate space for both technical objection and conscientious objection, so there is legitimate space for personal safety objection. And it is very important to recognize the degree to which doctors risking themselves for others is voluntary and not something simply to be expected, as well as to recognize that if you want them to take such risks as a consistent thing, you need to support them properly for it.
People are always trying to rig ethics to get the results they want; you have to be careful about assuming that because a result is tragic that the actions to avoid it are obligatory rather than just good, and even more so that they are obligatory on particular people rather than being the responsibility of all of us. There is such a thing as obligation creep, in which things that are not obligations are treated as such because people like the results, or in which responsibilities that are really shared are fobbed off on particular people as 'their' obligations. I think people especially tend to conflate these matters when talking about 'healthcare', and it is a very dangerous moral habit.
* Christiaan Kappes, Transubstantiation: Maybe Dositheos Got It Right
* Ben Zion Katz, The Breadth of Rabbinic Opinion Regarding Mosaic Authorship of the Torah in the Middle Ages
* Loebolus. All the public domain Loeb editions, available for download.
* Dan Solomon and Paula Forbes, The Inside Story of How H-E-B. Planned for the Pandemic. For those who don't know, H-E-B is the major local grocery chain here in Texas. There is no question that its handling of recent events has been exemplary.
* The mathematician John Conway, most famous for his Game of Life and surreal numbers, has recently died due to COVID-19.
Currently Reading
Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers
Stephen Jarvis, Death and Mr. Pickwick
Ed Peters, tr., The 1917 Pio-Benedictine Code of Canon Law
John C. Wright, Count to a Trillion
All Eyes Outside
Self-Knowledge
by John Holland
"A man can never understand himself till he make a right estimate of his knowledge; till he examine what kind of knowledge he values himself most upon, and most diligently cultivates: how high a value he seta upon it; what good it does him; what effect it hath upon him; what he is better for it; what end it answers now; or what it is likely to answer hereafter."—Mason.
Most men by instinct, interest, or caprice,
Or by the current of the crowd, are led;
Perchance their aims wide as the world are spread,
Their vigorous mental motions never cease
During their waking hours; yea, of a piece
With daylight duties, are their dreams a-bed:
Wealth is their wisdom; and full oft they shed
On those around, glad proof of wealth's increase:
But never pause they one short hour to trace
The secret source of action or of thought;
Nor, meeting their own spirits face to face,
By introspection are they warn'd or taught:
All eyes outside--they scape life's dangerous shelves,
And know--base Knowledge! all things, but--themselves.
Sunday, April 12, 2020
Ubi Est Mors Victoria Tua?
Christ is risen!
Now after the sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the sepulchre. And behold, there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone, and sat upon it. His appearance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow. And for fear of him the guards trembled and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid; for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead, and behold, he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him. Lo, I have told you.”[RSVCE]
Sonnet 68
by Edmund Spenser
Most glorious Lord of life, that on this day
Didst make thy triumph over death and sin,
And having harrowed hell, didst bring away
Captivity thence captive, us to win:
This joyous day, dear Lord, with joy begin,
And grant that we, for whom thou diddest die,
Being with thy dear blood clean washed from sin,
May live forever in felicity:
And that thy love we weighing worthily,
May likewise love thee for the same again;
And for thy sake, that all like dear didst buy,
May love with one another entertain.
So let us love, dear love, like as we ought,
Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught.
An Easter Carol
by Christina Rossetti
Spring bursts to-day,
For Christ is risen and all the earth’s at play.
Flash forth, thou Sun,
The rain is over and gone, its work is done.
Winter is past,
Sweet Spring is come at last, is come at last.
Bud, Fig and Vine,
Bud, Olive, fat with fruit and oil and wine.
Break forth this morn
In roses, thou but yesterday a Thorn.
Uplift thy head,
O pure white Lily through the Winter dead.
Beside your dams
Leap and rejoice, you merry-making Lambs.
All Herds and Flocks
Rejoice, all Beasts of thickets and of rocks.
Sing, Creatures, sing,
Angels and Men and Birds and everything.
All notes of Doves
Fill all our world: this is the time of loves.
Saturday, April 11, 2020
Dashed Off VI
This starts the notebook that was begun December 2018.
Philo's pancratist as a model for the true politics
criminal confessions as gap-filling evidence sources (their primary value is filling gaps from other evidential sources)
case-building vs truth-discovering evidence
the gradival aspect of confirmational character
baptism : Greek (mystery religion) :: confirmation : Latin (Roman soldier) :: ordination : Hebrew (priesthood)
Mathematical excellence requires more than technical ability; it also requires contextualizing ability.
deciphering as a causal inference from effect to final cause (pattern of effect to why that pattern is the pattern)
Through law and through grace we may possess by anticipation what we do not have in actual possession.
Forensic accounts of justification assume that title by grace works very much like title by law.
Baptism on the human side always involves water, blood, intention, Spirit, but sometimes one is more obvious.
(1) water, proper intention: adult sacramental baptism
(2) water, vicarious intention: infant sacramental baptism
(3) blood, proper intention: martyrs
(4) blood, vicarious intention: Holy Innocents
(5) desire, proper intention: St. Dismas
(6) desire, vicarious intention: infants intended to be baptized
-- Note that this explains why the Holy Innocents are poss. unique -- only God could be the source of vicarious intention in cases of baptism of blood.
-- On the divine side is Spirit. Perhaps one could distinguish two cases, baptism-relevant, in a way exemplar and preconditional, for baptism:
(7) Spirit, proper intention: Christ's Baptism
(8) Spirit, vicarious intention: Immaculate Conception
"The essence of sportive hunting is not raising the animal to the level of man, but something much more spiritual than that: a conscious and almost religious humbling of man which limits his superiority and lowers him toward the animal." Ortega y Gassett
Every freedom has a kallipolitical, a timocratic, an oligarchic, and a democratic interpretation.
forms of superpower in superheroes
(1) natural talent: Superman, Wonder Woman
(2) artificial/acquired talent: Spider-Man, Daredevil, Flash, Fantastic Four, Black Panther
(3) honed skill: Green Arrow, The Shadow
(4) suit/vestment: Iron Man, Ant Man, Ralph Hinkley
(5) tool: Green Lantern, Michael Knight
--perhaps patronage should be on this list as well
MacIntyre & virtue aesthetics: While looser than things like sports, arts and crafts are coherent and complex forms of human activity, etc.
If probability is tied to frequency, it makes sense to measure it between 0 and 1 (by fractions); if it is tied to subjective assessment of some kind, however, there is good reason to think that there can be surplus in either direction.
-- an interpretation of Sartre's Being and Nothingness as about the phenomena of reading, writing, being read
two means of storytelling: re-enacting performance, narration
Esther obtains by title of grace salvation for her people that goes beyond title by law.
Boole takes = for secondary propositions to be synchrony.
x(1-x)=0
(1) It is impossible that there be a class of members who have a quality and do not have it at the same time.
(2) It is impossible for a proposition to be at the same time true and false.
(3) It is impossible for an argument to be both sound and unsound at the same time.
co-soundness of arguments
A is co-sound with B, B is co-sound with C, therefore A is co-sound with C.
(A=B), (B=C), therefore (A=C)
"Piety and love of man are related virtues." Philo
"The lives of those who have earnestly followed virtue may be called unwritten laws."
modalities as characterizing ways of being the same
titles of right to govern (Rosmini)
(1) Arising from prior right of ownership and dominion
---- (a) title of absolute being
---- (b) title of fatherhood
---- (c) title of seigniory (lordship)
---- (d) title of ownership
(2) Not arising so
---- (a) arising from unilateral action
-------- (i) peaceful occupancy
-------- (ii) forced occupancy
------------ (a) out of just self-defense
------------ (b) out of just defense of others
---- (b) arising from combined act
Russell gives an other minds account of external world in ABC of Relativity ch. 2.
baptism : Word as Son :: confirmation : Word as Christ :: ordination : Word as Savior
rights following directly from the adoptive aspect of baptism in itself: right to express thanks to God, right to give first honor and submission to God in all things without exception, right to acts of piety
A difference in measurement is due to a difference in either the measured, or the means of measuring, or the act of measuring.
difference-difference principles
Poisson takes 'probability' to mean the reason we have for thinking an event has taken place; this is measured by the standard ratio.
"As the realms of day and night are not strictly conterminous, but are separated by a crepuscular zone, through which the light of the one fades gradually off into the darkness of the other, so it may be said that every region of positive knowledge lies surrounded by a debateable and speculative territory, over which it in some degree extends its influence and its light." Boole
materiality as travel-resistance
While there is a conventional aspect to coordinates, the theory of tensors as used in physics establishes that they involve using a convention to describe real facts, even if only in a limited or relative way.
"When the most important subjects are investigated by insignificant men, they typically make these men important." Augustine
"Pro veris probare falsa turpissima est." Cicero
Every human person is a sublime catastrophe.
due process as a moral notion and detraction, calumny
knowledge as that cognition such that error is ruled out and it does not vacillate under rational opposition
Augustine's recommendations among Platonists (De Civ 8.12): Plotinus, Iamblichus, Porphyry, Apuleius
"various saints in various ways excel one another in applications of the various virtues." Aquinas (Sent 3d36q1a2ad1)
To search for the truth is already to have a first glimmering participation in the truth, even if that truth is far distant.
Promises and gifts overlap; one may give by promising.
Vows are simultaneously moral and ceremonial.
academic prose and anodyne tone -- much academic prose is concerned with dampening the ability to dispute points (nonprovocation in presenting the disputable, to minimize dispute except along certain channels)
principle, beginning, origin, source, font, spring, cause, author
elements of a political stance in democratic politics
(1) badge of superiority (marks Us off from Them)
(2) disaster to avoid (associated with Them)
(3) enemy (Them)
(4) consumption practices (how We buy and support as Good People)
(5) propaganda practices (how We communicate the Truth)
(6) slogan content (the Truth We communicate, which only They fail to see as obvious)
We only respect teachable doubt; unteachable doubt, doubt involving a refusal to learn, is an object of annoyance, contempt, and dismissal.
ekas demos, remote from the people
Augustine plays on this for the Akademeia; cp. Diogenes Laertius, who holds that the original name was Ekademia in Lives 3.7-8.
followable claims [ plausible claims [ probable claims
A shadow is a form of causation (hence the need for an obtruder).
shadow-casting & light-blocking
puzzlement stance and empty question
-- one sees this with self-standing ? in comics etc.
the difference in comics between ?, !, and ...
'authors to whom the laws of words are attributed by the consent of all'
Grammatical rules arise not directly out of the language but out of how language is used to talk about itself.
We speak for the sake of teaching or bringing to mind.
"The use of words should itself already be preferred to words: words exist so that we may use them. Furthermore, we use them in order to teach." Augustine
The use/mention distinction is a distinction between two kinds of use.
words as signs, as instruments, as expressions
While relevant evidence can make the plausible probable, relevant evidence can make the implausible probable, as well. Does this still involve a significant distinction (of kind of relevant evidence, of kind of probability)?
the value of a jury as being a nonmonolithic perspective
No form of inquiry considers all evidence promiscuously; part of the structure of inquiry is its admissibility conditions for evidence, for the kind of inquiry it is.
evidence // diagram in geometry
admissibility of evidence // postulates (admissibility of diagrams)
propositional force as a form of usability in reasoning
One of the difficulties that faced logical positivism in general is the sheer volume of things that had to be assumed even to get it off the ground, because it is in fact not based on a few select shared principles but on a general impression (of how science works) for which principles were sought.
All terms in any actual scientific theory seem to be both theoretical and observational (as Whewell had suggested to begin with). 'Empirical laws' like PV=rT require a lot of prior theory; 'theoretical laws' require a lot of empirical grounding.
Formalizing should always be for a specific purpose.
the Rocky movies and 'chin' as a moral quality
the allegorizability of sports as an important part of their character
"To give them as much credit as possible, words have force only to the extent that they remind us to look for things; they don't display them for us to know." Augustine
sense : reference :: intellect : will
Ambiguity is not something that wanders into expressions; it is something squeezed out of them.
William of Sherwood's rule for supposition of subject: The subjects are such as the predicates have allowed.
The meaning of a statement lies in its interrelation of signs as terms, not in its 'expression of a state of affairs'.
There is no single 'simplest sentence form' in which a word can occur. If we take Carnap's 'stone' example, we get not only 'x is a stone' but 'a stone is F', 'Use a stone', 'Stone!', 'That is a stone' (which is different from 'x is a stone'), 'A stone exists', 'What is a stone?' and endless others.
Suppose that someone invents in an artificial language the new word 'x', a word of the class 'variable', and proposes a sentence, 'Everything is x or not x'. How would you trace the meaning of 'x' to observations. Its meaning is based on what you want to do with it, not on observation. And no, do not be so stupid as to tell me that variables in artificial languages are not words.
Artificial languages primarily express attitudes, and only secondarily describe anything, a feature that they derive from the combination of natural language within which they are constructed and the specific task to which they are put.
Let us grant to metaphysicians the freedom to use any form of expression that seems useful to them; the work in the field will sooner or later lead to the elimination of those forms for which people have no real use. Let us be cautious in making metaphysical assertions and critical in examining them, but tolerant in permitting linguistic forms.
'There is an n such that n is a number' does not follow from 'Five is a number' unless there is understood 'There is a five and five is a number'.
Truth in fiction is a sign of truth in understanding of things.
There is no particular reason to think that the set of 'observation sentences' (in Hempel's sense) that pass a given empirical test would be consistent.
Carnapian explication and the synthetic a priori
The empiricist criterion of meaning does not provide a reasonably close analysis of the commonly accepted meaning of 'intelligible assertion' or 'sentence that makes an intelligible assertion', nor does it provide a consistent and precise restatement and systemization fo the contexts in which 'intelligible assertion' is actually used.
Philo's pancratist as a model for the true politics
criminal confessions as gap-filling evidence sources (their primary value is filling gaps from other evidential sources)
case-building vs truth-discovering evidence
the gradival aspect of confirmational character
baptism : Greek (mystery religion) :: confirmation : Latin (Roman soldier) :: ordination : Hebrew (priesthood)
Mathematical excellence requires more than technical ability; it also requires contextualizing ability.
deciphering as a causal inference from effect to final cause (pattern of effect to why that pattern is the pattern)
Through law and through grace we may possess by anticipation what we do not have in actual possession.
Forensic accounts of justification assume that title by grace works very much like title by law.
Baptism on the human side always involves water, blood, intention, Spirit, but sometimes one is more obvious.
(1) water, proper intention: adult sacramental baptism
(2) water, vicarious intention: infant sacramental baptism
(3) blood, proper intention: martyrs
(4) blood, vicarious intention: Holy Innocents
(5) desire, proper intention: St. Dismas
(6) desire, vicarious intention: infants intended to be baptized
-- Note that this explains why the Holy Innocents are poss. unique -- only God could be the source of vicarious intention in cases of baptism of blood.
-- On the divine side is Spirit. Perhaps one could distinguish two cases, baptism-relevant, in a way exemplar and preconditional, for baptism:
(7) Spirit, proper intention: Christ's Baptism
(8) Spirit, vicarious intention: Immaculate Conception
"The essence of sportive hunting is not raising the animal to the level of man, but something much more spiritual than that: a conscious and almost religious humbling of man which limits his superiority and lowers him toward the animal." Ortega y Gassett
Every freedom has a kallipolitical, a timocratic, an oligarchic, and a democratic interpretation.
forms of superpower in superheroes
(1) natural talent: Superman, Wonder Woman
(2) artificial/acquired talent: Spider-Man, Daredevil, Flash, Fantastic Four, Black Panther
(3) honed skill: Green Arrow, The Shadow
(4) suit/vestment: Iron Man, Ant Man, Ralph Hinkley
(5) tool: Green Lantern, Michael Knight
--perhaps patronage should be on this list as well
MacIntyre & virtue aesthetics: While looser than things like sports, arts and crafts are coherent and complex forms of human activity, etc.
If probability is tied to frequency, it makes sense to measure it between 0 and 1 (by fractions); if it is tied to subjective assessment of some kind, however, there is good reason to think that there can be surplus in either direction.
-- an interpretation of Sartre's Being and Nothingness as about the phenomena of reading, writing, being read
two means of storytelling: re-enacting performance, narration
Esther obtains by title of grace salvation for her people that goes beyond title by law.
Boole takes = for secondary propositions to be synchrony.
x(1-x)=0
(1) It is impossible that there be a class of members who have a quality and do not have it at the same time.
(2) It is impossible for a proposition to be at the same time true and false.
(3) It is impossible for an argument to be both sound and unsound at the same time.
co-soundness of arguments
A is co-sound with B, B is co-sound with C, therefore A is co-sound with C.
(A=B), (B=C), therefore (A=C)
"Piety and love of man are related virtues." Philo
"The lives of those who have earnestly followed virtue may be called unwritten laws."
modalities as characterizing ways of being the same
titles of right to govern (Rosmini)
(1) Arising from prior right of ownership and dominion
---- (a) title of absolute being
---- (b) title of fatherhood
---- (c) title of seigniory (lordship)
---- (d) title of ownership
(2) Not arising so
---- (a) arising from unilateral action
-------- (i) peaceful occupancy
-------- (ii) forced occupancy
------------ (a) out of just self-defense
------------ (b) out of just defense of others
---- (b) arising from combined act
Russell gives an other minds account of external world in ABC of Relativity ch. 2.
baptism : Word as Son :: confirmation : Word as Christ :: ordination : Word as Savior
rights following directly from the adoptive aspect of baptism in itself: right to express thanks to God, right to give first honor and submission to God in all things without exception, right to acts of piety
A difference in measurement is due to a difference in either the measured, or the means of measuring, or the act of measuring.
difference-difference principles
Poisson takes 'probability' to mean the reason we have for thinking an event has taken place; this is measured by the standard ratio.
"As the realms of day and night are not strictly conterminous, but are separated by a crepuscular zone, through which the light of the one fades gradually off into the darkness of the other, so it may be said that every region of positive knowledge lies surrounded by a debateable and speculative territory, over which it in some degree extends its influence and its light." Boole
materiality as travel-resistance
While there is a conventional aspect to coordinates, the theory of tensors as used in physics establishes that they involve using a convention to describe real facts, even if only in a limited or relative way.
"When the most important subjects are investigated by insignificant men, they typically make these men important." Augustine
"Pro veris probare falsa turpissima est." Cicero
Every human person is a sublime catastrophe.
due process as a moral notion and detraction, calumny
knowledge as that cognition such that error is ruled out and it does not vacillate under rational opposition
Augustine's recommendations among Platonists (De Civ 8.12): Plotinus, Iamblichus, Porphyry, Apuleius
"various saints in various ways excel one another in applications of the various virtues." Aquinas (Sent 3d36q1a2ad1)
To search for the truth is already to have a first glimmering participation in the truth, even if that truth is far distant.
Promises and gifts overlap; one may give by promising.
Vows are simultaneously moral and ceremonial.
academic prose and anodyne tone -- much academic prose is concerned with dampening the ability to dispute points (nonprovocation in presenting the disputable, to minimize dispute except along certain channels)
principle, beginning, origin, source, font, spring, cause, author
elements of a political stance in democratic politics
(1) badge of superiority (marks Us off from Them)
(2) disaster to avoid (associated with Them)
(3) enemy (Them)
(4) consumption practices (how We buy and support as Good People)
(5) propaganda practices (how We communicate the Truth)
(6) slogan content (the Truth We communicate, which only They fail to see as obvious)
We only respect teachable doubt; unteachable doubt, doubt involving a refusal to learn, is an object of annoyance, contempt, and dismissal.
ekas demos, remote from the people
Augustine plays on this for the Akademeia; cp. Diogenes Laertius, who holds that the original name was Ekademia in Lives 3.7-8.
followable claims [ plausible claims [ probable claims
A shadow is a form of causation (hence the need for an obtruder).
shadow-casting & light-blocking
puzzlement stance and empty question
-- one sees this with self-standing ? in comics etc.
the difference in comics between ?, !, and ...
'authors to whom the laws of words are attributed by the consent of all'
Grammatical rules arise not directly out of the language but out of how language is used to talk about itself.
We speak for the sake of teaching or bringing to mind.
"The use of words should itself already be preferred to words: words exist so that we may use them. Furthermore, we use them in order to teach." Augustine
The use/mention distinction is a distinction between two kinds of use.
words as signs, as instruments, as expressions
While relevant evidence can make the plausible probable, relevant evidence can make the implausible probable, as well. Does this still involve a significant distinction (of kind of relevant evidence, of kind of probability)?
the value of a jury as being a nonmonolithic perspective
No form of inquiry considers all evidence promiscuously; part of the structure of inquiry is its admissibility conditions for evidence, for the kind of inquiry it is.
evidence // diagram in geometry
admissibility of evidence // postulates (admissibility of diagrams)
propositional force as a form of usability in reasoning
One of the difficulties that faced logical positivism in general is the sheer volume of things that had to be assumed even to get it off the ground, because it is in fact not based on a few select shared principles but on a general impression (of how science works) for which principles were sought.
All terms in any actual scientific theory seem to be both theoretical and observational (as Whewell had suggested to begin with). 'Empirical laws' like PV=rT require a lot of prior theory; 'theoretical laws' require a lot of empirical grounding.
Formalizing should always be for a specific purpose.
the Rocky movies and 'chin' as a moral quality
the allegorizability of sports as an important part of their character
"To give them as much credit as possible, words have force only to the extent that they remind us to look for things; they don't display them for us to know." Augustine
sense : reference :: intellect : will
Ambiguity is not something that wanders into expressions; it is something squeezed out of them.
William of Sherwood's rule for supposition of subject: The subjects are such as the predicates have allowed.
The meaning of a statement lies in its interrelation of signs as terms, not in its 'expression of a state of affairs'.
There is no single 'simplest sentence form' in which a word can occur. If we take Carnap's 'stone' example, we get not only 'x is a stone' but 'a stone is F', 'Use a stone', 'Stone!', 'That is a stone' (which is different from 'x is a stone'), 'A stone exists', 'What is a stone?' and endless others.
Suppose that someone invents in an artificial language the new word 'x', a word of the class 'variable', and proposes a sentence, 'Everything is x or not x'. How would you trace the meaning of 'x' to observations. Its meaning is based on what you want to do with it, not on observation. And no, do not be so stupid as to tell me that variables in artificial languages are not words.
Artificial languages primarily express attitudes, and only secondarily describe anything, a feature that they derive from the combination of natural language within which they are constructed and the specific task to which they are put.
Let us grant to metaphysicians the freedom to use any form of expression that seems useful to them; the work in the field will sooner or later lead to the elimination of those forms for which people have no real use. Let us be cautious in making metaphysical assertions and critical in examining them, but tolerant in permitting linguistic forms.
'There is an n such that n is a number' does not follow from 'Five is a number' unless there is understood 'There is a five and five is a number'.
Truth in fiction is a sign of truth in understanding of things.
There is no particular reason to think that the set of 'observation sentences' (in Hempel's sense) that pass a given empirical test would be consistent.
Carnapian explication and the synthetic a priori
The empiricist criterion of meaning does not provide a reasonably close analysis of the commonly accepted meaning of 'intelligible assertion' or 'sentence that makes an intelligible assertion', nor does it provide a consistent and precise restatement and systemization fo the contexts in which 'intelligible assertion' is actually used.
Friday, April 10, 2020
Good Friday
The Battle
God came to me, rebuked me for my life of sin
and showed to me a way in which we both could win;
I heard His offer out, but in the summit of my pride
I chose to win alone. God I crucified.
I hanged Him on the tree, and on the tree He died.
But God does not just die; He must rise to live again,
and soon returns, rebuking me for my life of sin.
Frustrated with His returning, that He does not simply die,
I choose myself again, and Him I crucify.
I hang Him on the tree again; on the tree He dies.
He returns and comes again, each time so vital, bold,
that I can only crucify by growing yet more cold.
Where our ending finds us is where we did begin;
we either taste of glory's grace or we crucify with sin,
crucify forever or someday just give in.
God came to me, rebuked me for my life of sin
and showed to me a way in which we both could win;
I heard His offer out, but in the summit of my pride
I chose to win alone. God I crucified.
I hanged Him on the tree, and on the tree He died.
But God does not just die; He must rise to live again,
and soon returns, rebuking me for my life of sin.
Frustrated with His returning, that He does not simply die,
I choose myself again, and Him I crucify.
I hang Him on the tree again; on the tree He dies.
He returns and comes again, each time so vital, bold,
that I can only crucify by growing yet more cold.
Where our ending finds us is where we did begin;
we either taste of glory's grace or we crucify with sin,
crucify forever or someday just give in.
Thursday, April 09, 2020
We Rush with a Speed that Is Lightning Indeed
To the Shadowy Land
by Thomas Sarsfield Carter
To the shadowy land--to the shadowy land,
We nearer, nearer go;
Like a gallant barque thro' the midnight dark,
O'er the ocean's billowy flow.
O'er the surging tide of stormy life,
'Fore the hurricane breath of Fate,
We rush with a speed that is lightning indeed,
To Eternity's ebony gate.
By the breath of Prosperity wafted serene,
From billow to billow we wing;
Till shooting afar like the meteor-star,
To the realms of ether we spring.
Or lashed by Adversity's arrowy wind,
We draggle athro' the fierce surge;
Till weary and worn, grief-laden, forlorn,
We sink on Eternity's verge.
To the shadowy land--to the shadowy land,
Be the day brightly flashing or dark,
We are hurrying on, with no harbour but one
To shelter the storm-shattered barque!
I know practically nothing about Carter, but in preface of the Hours of Illness (1870), in which this poem is found, he notes that the poems in the book were all written around the age of seventeen or so when he was confined to "the rather unpoetic and dreary atmosphere of a sick-chamber"; he was trying the relieve the monotony of an incurable illness.
Lent XXXVIII
Since then Christ's Ascension is our uplifting, and the hope of the Body is raised, whither the glory of the Head has gone before, let us exult, dearly-beloved, with worthy joy and delight in the loyal paying of thanks. For today not only are we confirmed as possessors of paradise, but have also in Christ penetrated the heights of heaven, and have gained still greater things through Christ's unspeakable grace than we had lost through the devil's malice. For us, whom our virulent enemy had driven out from the bliss of our first abode, the Son of God has made members of Himself and placed at the right hand of the Father, with Whom He lives and reigns in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God for ever and ever. Amen.
Leo, Sermon 73.
Wednesday, April 08, 2020
Examples of Analogical Predication
This is mostly for my own use: some common examples used in discussing analogical predication, with locations. Some of the examples are from Domenic D'Ettore's Analogy after Aquinas; he notes that the examples used sometimes matter for conclusions drawn -- there was an active dispute post-Thomas, for instance, between those who held that analogical predication primarily worked like the health example and those who held that it primarily worked like the principle example.
| Predicate | said of | found in (e.g.) |
|---|---|---|
| wise | God and man | ST 1.13.5 |
| healthy | medicine, urine, body, food | ST 1.13.5; SCG 1.34 |
| being | substance and accident | ST 1.13.10, SCG 1.34 |
| God | God and idol | ST 1.13.10 |
| animal | animal and painted animal | ST 1.13.10ad4 |
| seeing/vision | act of eye and act of intellect | DV 2.11; Defensiones 1.35 (Capreolus) |
| military | sword and soldier | In Eth 1.7 |
| body | terrestrial and celestial body | I Sent. 19.5.2ad1 |
| Hercules | Hercules and statue of Hercules | Defensiones 1.2.1.1 (Capreolus) |
| principle/source | unit, point, heart, axiom | Quaestiones de div. praed. 18 (James of Viterbo) |
| principle/source | heart, river | Quaestiones Ordinariae 33 ad 5 (Thomas Sutton) |
| mover | God and creatures | Quaestiones Ordinariae 33 ad 24 (Thomas Sutton) |
Lent XXXVII
It was necessary for Christ to rise again, for five reasons.
First of all, for the commendation of divine justice, to which belongs exaltation of those who humble themselves for God's sake, according to Luke 1: "He deposes potentates from their seats and exalts the humble." Therefore because Christ, according to charity and obedience to God, humbled himself even to death on the cross, it was needful that he be exalted by God even to glorious resurrection, as it is said in His Person in the Psalm (138:2) as the Gloss expounds it, "You have known," that is, approved, "my sitting down," that is, humility and passion, "and my rising up," that is, glorification in resurrection.
Second, for our instruction in faith. Because through his resurrection our faith about Christ's divinity is confirmed, because, as is said at the end of II Corinthians, "Although he was crucified from our infirmity, he lives from God's power." And likewise, it is said in I Corinthians 15, "If Christ did not rise, our preaching is empty, and our faith is empty." And in the Psalm (29:10), "What profit is in my blood," that is, in the shedding of my blood, "while I descend," as it were through various grades of evil, "into corruption?" As though He were to answer, "None, If therefore I do not rise again at once, an my body be decayed, I shall bring news to no one, I shall profit no one," as the Gloss expounds.
Third, for the uplifting of our hope. Because, while we see Christ, who is our Head, rise again, we also hope in our own resurrection. Wherefore it is said in I Corinthians 15, "If Christ is preached that He rises from the dead, how is it said among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?" And in Job 19 it is said, "I know," that is, through the certainty of faith, "that my redeemer," that is, Christ, "lives," having risen from the dead, and therefore "in the last day, I shall rise out of the earth; this my hope is stored in my bosom."
Fourth, for the structuring (informationem) of the lives of the faithful, according to which [it is said in] Romans 6, "As Christ is risen from the dead through the glory of the Father, even so may we walk in newness of life." And further down, "Christ, rising from the dead, therefore no longer dies; so also recognize that you are dead to sin, but living to God.
Fifth, for the completion of our salvation. Because just as for this reason he endured evil things in dying so that he might liberate us from evil, so he is glorified in rising again so that he might promote us to good, according to Romans 4, "He was delivered for our sins, and he rose for our justification."
Thomas Aquinas, ST 3.53.1, my translation.
Tuesday, April 07, 2020
Satispassion Guaranteed
I've long been interested in the notion of satispassio (satispassion; we could also translate it, and I think it would sometimes be more intuitive to translate it, as satispatience). It is an idea that is remarkably difficult to find a good explanation for, although there is also good reason to take it seriously.
Satispassion is contrasted with satisfaction. Satisfaction in this sense is, as Aquinas says, "medicine curing past sins and preserving from future sins". It compensates for lapses and uproots the causes of wrongdoing. The debt is paid, the balance restored. And it is very much a doing; that's in the name itself, doing-enough. By it we deliberately take on a penalty for common good. The most eminent example of this is martyrdom.
Purgatory is also a medicine curing past sins and preserving from future sins; it also compensates for lapses and uproots the causes of wrongdoing; the debt is paid, the balance restored. So it seems natural to talk about it in terms of satisfaction. But in the strict sense, it has always been the doctrine of the Church that the patient souls of Purgatory engage in no satisfaction. And the issue is that what is done in purgatory is not really something done by the soul that undergoes it. It is not a doing; it is an undergoing. Hence the name: enduring-enough. They endure the penalty of waiting until the waiting is enough.
I think this is a little difficult for us to grasp, particularly when it is combined with a crucial additional point, which is that souls in Purgatory are in a higher spiritual state than souls on earth generally are. Church Patient is a higher manifestation of the Church than Church Militant. And this is linked to another difficulty with which people often have difficulty, namely, that we can merit divine reward but the souls in purgatory cannot because they are better than we are. I don't think most people actually manage to reconcile with this; when Catholics talk about souls in Purgatory, they constantly talk as if souls in purgatory were poor cousins in dire need of our intercession and largesse. But by the nature of the case, this is backwards. Unlike us, they have absolute guarantee of Heaven. They are not worse off than we are; they are infinitely better off. They have a wealth in store for which we can only hope. They don't need our help. Praying for them is the sort of thing that could very well be seen as a bit of presumption on our part, except that we are allowed it. We are allowed to help them by prayer as a privilege graciously granted to us.
I think a possible way forward in understanding this is by recognizing that the contrast with satisfaction, although right, is also potentially misleading. It makes it sound as if there were satisfaction and then satispassion, and the two were simply separate things never coming together. But this is not, I think right. We too have satispassion; it's just that for us, we can only have it by its being a subordinate part of satisfaction. In a sense this is what is going on when we 'give it up to God'; one of the general grants of (partial) indulgence is for those who, carrying out their duties and enduring the hardships of life, raise their minds in trusting prayer to God with a pious invocation. This is effectively taking the enduring of difficulty and, as part of satisfaction, making it an act of prayer to God. That is satispassion, and is the sort of thing attributed to the souls in purgatory. But there is a key difference here. The souls in Purgatory are already united to Christ's passion in an intimate way; the attitude of humble trust in the enduring of penalty as part of this union with Christ's Passion is what they do by being souls in Purgatory. Their enduring is already itself trusting prayer to God, a penitential exercise for the purpose of becoming more closely united to Him. We, on the other hand, wavering and faulty, have to make our enduring an act of union with Christ's Passion. Our patience becomes satispatience only in the context of our satisfaction. Theirs is guaranteed. We must deliberately act in order to endure in a way that makes us one with Christ; but the patient souls in Purgatory simply endure and are one with Him.
Ultimately, satispassion, like satisfaction, is rooted in Christ's Passion; for the purposes of Heaven, a satispassion not so rooted, like a satisfaction not so rooted, is not relevant. The Cross is the only bridge to Heaven. But satispassion is the higher part, not the lower; it is like the prayer of quiet compared to verbal prayer, like the mature soul enduring aridity to the beginner in an ebullience of consolations. It is something toward which we must reach. But the patient souls of Purgatory are satispatient; they need not reach, but simply wait, being one with Christ who suffered for our sins. And as no one receives Heaven without learning how to receive, so no one reaches Heaven save by being one with Christ on the Cross, enduring until the enduring is enough.
This is all approximation and extrapolation. It is something about which we know little enough that it is almost impudent to babble on about it as I have. But I am put in mind of it by current events. As Lent draws to its close and Good Friday draws near, a great many Catholics are in a desert of sacraments, perhaps locked inside their houses due to conditions whose end is as yet unknown. That is patience of a sort. On its own it is not a medicine curing past sins nor preserving from future sins. But we may make it so by prayer and penitence. When we do, we are in our crude way approximating a higher state. And in that crude approximation we may know a little better the life of Purgatory.
Satispassion is contrasted with satisfaction. Satisfaction in this sense is, as Aquinas says, "medicine curing past sins and preserving from future sins". It compensates for lapses and uproots the causes of wrongdoing. The debt is paid, the balance restored. And it is very much a doing; that's in the name itself, doing-enough. By it we deliberately take on a penalty for common good. The most eminent example of this is martyrdom.
Purgatory is also a medicine curing past sins and preserving from future sins; it also compensates for lapses and uproots the causes of wrongdoing; the debt is paid, the balance restored. So it seems natural to talk about it in terms of satisfaction. But in the strict sense, it has always been the doctrine of the Church that the patient souls of Purgatory engage in no satisfaction. And the issue is that what is done in purgatory is not really something done by the soul that undergoes it. It is not a doing; it is an undergoing. Hence the name: enduring-enough. They endure the penalty of waiting until the waiting is enough.
I think this is a little difficult for us to grasp, particularly when it is combined with a crucial additional point, which is that souls in Purgatory are in a higher spiritual state than souls on earth generally are. Church Patient is a higher manifestation of the Church than Church Militant. And this is linked to another difficulty with which people often have difficulty, namely, that we can merit divine reward but the souls in purgatory cannot because they are better than we are. I don't think most people actually manage to reconcile with this; when Catholics talk about souls in Purgatory, they constantly talk as if souls in purgatory were poor cousins in dire need of our intercession and largesse. But by the nature of the case, this is backwards. Unlike us, they have absolute guarantee of Heaven. They are not worse off than we are; they are infinitely better off. They have a wealth in store for which we can only hope. They don't need our help. Praying for them is the sort of thing that could very well be seen as a bit of presumption on our part, except that we are allowed it. We are allowed to help them by prayer as a privilege graciously granted to us.
I think a possible way forward in understanding this is by recognizing that the contrast with satisfaction, although right, is also potentially misleading. It makes it sound as if there were satisfaction and then satispassion, and the two were simply separate things never coming together. But this is not, I think right. We too have satispassion; it's just that for us, we can only have it by its being a subordinate part of satisfaction. In a sense this is what is going on when we 'give it up to God'; one of the general grants of (partial) indulgence is for those who, carrying out their duties and enduring the hardships of life, raise their minds in trusting prayer to God with a pious invocation. This is effectively taking the enduring of difficulty and, as part of satisfaction, making it an act of prayer to God. That is satispassion, and is the sort of thing attributed to the souls in purgatory. But there is a key difference here. The souls in Purgatory are already united to Christ's passion in an intimate way; the attitude of humble trust in the enduring of penalty as part of this union with Christ's Passion is what they do by being souls in Purgatory. Their enduring is already itself trusting prayer to God, a penitential exercise for the purpose of becoming more closely united to Him. We, on the other hand, wavering and faulty, have to make our enduring an act of union with Christ's Passion. Our patience becomes satispatience only in the context of our satisfaction. Theirs is guaranteed. We must deliberately act in order to endure in a way that makes us one with Christ; but the patient souls in Purgatory simply endure and are one with Him.
Ultimately, satispassion, like satisfaction, is rooted in Christ's Passion; for the purposes of Heaven, a satispassion not so rooted, like a satisfaction not so rooted, is not relevant. The Cross is the only bridge to Heaven. But satispassion is the higher part, not the lower; it is like the prayer of quiet compared to verbal prayer, like the mature soul enduring aridity to the beginner in an ebullience of consolations. It is something toward which we must reach. But the patient souls of Purgatory are satispatient; they need not reach, but simply wait, being one with Christ who suffered for our sins. And as no one receives Heaven without learning how to receive, so no one reaches Heaven save by being one with Christ on the Cross, enduring until the enduring is enough.
This is all approximation and extrapolation. It is something about which we know little enough that it is almost impudent to babble on about it as I have. But I am put in mind of it by current events. As Lent draws to its close and Good Friday draws near, a great many Catholics are in a desert of sacraments, perhaps locked inside their houses due to conditions whose end is as yet unknown. That is patience of a sort. On its own it is not a medicine curing past sins nor preserving from future sins. But we may make it so by prayer and penitence. When we do, we are in our crude way approximating a higher state. And in that crude approximation we may know a little better the life of Purgatory.
Lent XXXVI
The fact, therefore, that at the time appointed, according to the purpose of His will, Jesus Christ was crucified, dead, and buried was not the doom necessary to His own condition, but the method of redeeming us from captivity. For "the Word became flesh" in order that from the Virgin's womb He might take our suffering nature, and that what could not be inflicted on the Son of God might be inflicted on the Son of Man. For although at His very birth the signs of Godhead shone forth in Him, and the whole course of His bodily growth was full of wonders, yet had He truly assumed our weaknesses, and without share in sin had spared Himself no human frailty, that He might impart what was His to us and heal what was ours in Himself. For He, the Almighty Physician, had prepared a two-fold remedy for us in our misery, of which the one part consists of mystery and the other of example, that by the one Divine powers may be bestowed, by the other human weaknesses driven out. Because as God is the Author of our justification, so man is a debtor to pay Him devotion.
Leo, Sermon 67, on the Passion.
Monday, April 06, 2020
Declaration of Arbroath
Today is the 700th anniversary of the Declaratio Arbroathis, also known as the Tiomnadh Bhruis, the Declaration o Aiberbrothock, and, of course, the Declaration of Arbroath. Pope John XXII had recognized the claim of Edward I of England over Scotland. Robert the Bruce had been excommunicated due to killing a rival in a church (the circumstances under which this happened are extremely unclear and we do not know exactly what led to that happening), and, when the excommunication was lifted, he was warned that he must make peace with England or be excommunicated again. War, however, was pretty much unavoidable at that point, and due to the fact that it continued, Robert the Bruce was excommunicated again in 1320. In response, Robert and the Scottish barons wrote a letter to the pope defending their independence from England, their right to self-defense, and the legitimacy of Robert's rule. This is the Declaration.
(It has been noted by historians that the conception of government found in the document is heavily influenced by Sallust's Conspiracy of Cataline.) The Declaration was sent to the Pope, who wrote Edward asking him to do more to make peace with the Scots, but otherwise did not much in his position. Scottish independence was only recognized by England in the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton in 1328, after which the excommunication was lifted. The Declaration itself fell largely out of sight until republication in the seventeenth century, but has since been regarded as one of the central documents of Scottish heritage.
From these countless evils, with His help who afterwards soothes and heals wounds, we are freed by our tireless leader, king, and master, Lord Robert, who like another Maccabaeus or Joshua, underwent toil and tiredness, hunger and danger with a light spirit in order to free the people and his inheritance from the hands of his enemies. And now, the divine Will, our just laws and customs, which we will defend to the death, the right of succession and the due consent and assent of all of us have made him our leader and our king. To this man, inasmuch as he saved our people, and for upholding our freedom, we are bound by right as much as by his merits, and choose to follow him in all that he does.
But if he should cease from these beginnings, wishing to give us or our kingdom to the English or the king of the English, we would immediately take steps to drive him out as the enemy and the subverter of his own rights and ours, and install another King who would make good our defence. Because, while a hundred of us remain alive, we will not submit in the slightest measure, to the domination of the English. We do not fight for honour, riches, or glory, but solely for freedom which no true man gives up but with his life.
(It has been noted by historians that the conception of government found in the document is heavily influenced by Sallust's Conspiracy of Cataline.) The Declaration was sent to the Pope, who wrote Edward asking him to do more to make peace with the Scots, but otherwise did not much in his position. Scottish independence was only recognized by England in the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton in 1328, after which the excommunication was lifted. The Declaration itself fell largely out of sight until republication in the seventeenth century, but has since been regarded as one of the central documents of Scottish heritage.
Lent XXXV
And now, my soul, consider how the One who is, over all things, God blessed forever, is submerged in a flood of suffering from the sole of the foot unto the top of the head. He permits the waters of affliction to flow even unto His soul, in order to save you from all such afflictions. He is crowned with thorns; He is forced to stoop under the load of the cross, bearing the instrument of His own disgrace; He is led to the place of execution and stripped of His clothes, so that the scourge-inflicted bruises and wounds exposed on the back and the sides of His body, make Him appear like a leper. Then, He is transfixed with the nails. All to show that He is your Beloved, martyred wound by wound for the sake of your healing.
Bonaventure, The Tree of Life II.26.
[Bonaventure, The Works of Bonaventure I: Mystical Opuscula, José de Vinck, tr., Martino Publishing (Mansfield Centre, CT: 2016), p. 123-124.]
I just realized that I dropped an X a while ago; I went from XVIII to IX and then kept counting from IX instead of XIX as I should have. In fairness, there has been a lot going on.
Sunday, April 05, 2020
A Little Bit of Cribbin' from the Works of Edward Gibbon
Jack Butler has a very odd review of Asimov's Foundation series:
This is odd because the things being criticized are standard science fiction patterns. Many important science fiction works have a serialistic structure -- e.g., A Canticle for Leibowitz, arguably the greatest science fiction novel of all time, is serialistic in structure. Asimov's characters are lightly sketched, but none of them are "stock" -- a stock character is a character structured as a literary stereotype who doesn't rise above a stereotype, but most of the characters in the first three Foundation novels are fairly distinctive if you compare them with characters in other texts. And science fiction is not typically character-focused. I think it may have been C. S. Lewis who noted that science fiction stories often suffer from excessive character-work. This is not to say, of course, that there aren't great characterizations in science fiction -- Miller's Canticle or Stapledon's Sirius come to mind as novels that do well in this regard -- but in the Aristotelian elements of story, science fiction is primarily distinguished by Thought, not Character, and there are major science fiction works, like Stapledon's Starmaker, that can only be said to have characters at all in the very broadest sense. And, of course, the early Foundation novels by their very topic necessarily share more with sweeping-history science fiction like Starmaker than with character tales. It was conceived as a science-fictional Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, after all.
Likewise, it's odd to criticize the characters as passive when this is the point -- it is in fact explicitly the point of the first part of Foundation and Empire, in which the characters are quite active trying to subvert the Empire, all of which is entirely irrelevant, because they fail to understand until it's too late that the Empire's weakness is the combination of economic deterioration and unavoidable civil-military instability. Asimov's stories are very often puzzle-stories of one kind or another, and that was precisely the solution to the puzzle presented by Bel Riose: How do you stop the Empire's most talented and incorruptible generals from invading you? You don't have to do anything, because the Empire will stop him the moment he begins to look too successful; from the perspective of an Empire in decline, a successful general is always a more obvious danger to the Empire than barbarians beyond the borders. It all reminds me a bit of when some feminists attacked Ursula K. LeGuin's works for having female characters who were too passive -- LeGuin was, in broad terms, a Taoist, so the whole point of the stories that were being attacked was that being too eager to act and achieve was a poisonous temptation that often leads to self-destruction. The characters -- even characters like Bel Riose who are fairly well rounded for the brief time they are on the stage -- are not the point of the story.
Butler likes The Mule best of the characters in the original trilogy; that's a defensible taste, although my preference would be for Preem Palver. But he claims that he gets the fullest backstory of any character in the trilogy, which is again odd, since we get only a very sketchy backstory about him. Ducem Barr probably has the "fullest motivation and backstory of any character in the Foundation series", at least if we are talking about the original trilogy. (Of course, if you had the prequels, Seldon gets the fullest motivation and backstory.)
Though Asimov wrote more Foundation novels, the first three books won a Hugo Award (an Academy Award equivalent for sci-fi and fantasy) in 1966 for best all-time series. But more than 50 years later, it’s hard to see why (especially when it was up against The Lord of the Rings). The novels do not rise above their serialized origins, with the individual parts of each book so distinct from one another as to seem like separate works crudely collated. They burn through a succession of stock characters, only a few of whom register in any meaningful way, and who are easily forgotten once they serve their purpose in advancing the narrative. Ultimately helpless in the face of psychohistory’s plan, most of them are rendered passive and interchangeable actors, mostly mere witnesses to the Foundation’s triumphs. As Seldon states in one of his pre-recorded messages, he has engineered their fates such that they “will be forced along one, and only one, path.”
This is odd because the things being criticized are standard science fiction patterns. Many important science fiction works have a serialistic structure -- e.g., A Canticle for Leibowitz, arguably the greatest science fiction novel of all time, is serialistic in structure. Asimov's characters are lightly sketched, but none of them are "stock" -- a stock character is a character structured as a literary stereotype who doesn't rise above a stereotype, but most of the characters in the first three Foundation novels are fairly distinctive if you compare them with characters in other texts. And science fiction is not typically character-focused. I think it may have been C. S. Lewis who noted that science fiction stories often suffer from excessive character-work. This is not to say, of course, that there aren't great characterizations in science fiction -- Miller's Canticle or Stapledon's Sirius come to mind as novels that do well in this regard -- but in the Aristotelian elements of story, science fiction is primarily distinguished by Thought, not Character, and there are major science fiction works, like Stapledon's Starmaker, that can only be said to have characters at all in the very broadest sense. And, of course, the early Foundation novels by their very topic necessarily share more with sweeping-history science fiction like Starmaker than with character tales. It was conceived as a science-fictional Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, after all.
Likewise, it's odd to criticize the characters as passive when this is the point -- it is in fact explicitly the point of the first part of Foundation and Empire, in which the characters are quite active trying to subvert the Empire, all of which is entirely irrelevant, because they fail to understand until it's too late that the Empire's weakness is the combination of economic deterioration and unavoidable civil-military instability. Asimov's stories are very often puzzle-stories of one kind or another, and that was precisely the solution to the puzzle presented by Bel Riose: How do you stop the Empire's most talented and incorruptible generals from invading you? You don't have to do anything, because the Empire will stop him the moment he begins to look too successful; from the perspective of an Empire in decline, a successful general is always a more obvious danger to the Empire than barbarians beyond the borders. It all reminds me a bit of when some feminists attacked Ursula K. LeGuin's works for having female characters who were too passive -- LeGuin was, in broad terms, a Taoist, so the whole point of the stories that were being attacked was that being too eager to act and achieve was a poisonous temptation that often leads to self-destruction. The characters -- even characters like Bel Riose who are fairly well rounded for the brief time they are on the stage -- are not the point of the story.
Butler likes The Mule best of the characters in the original trilogy; that's a defensible taste, although my preference would be for Preem Palver. But he claims that he gets the fullest backstory of any character in the trilogy, which is again odd, since we get only a very sketchy backstory about him. Ducem Barr probably has the "fullest motivation and backstory of any character in the Foundation series", at least if we are talking about the original trilogy. (Of course, if you had the prequels, Seldon gets the fullest motivation and backstory.)
Fortnightly Book, April 5
Robert Seymour was perhaps the greatest illustrator of his day. He was skillful in almost every form of book illustration and his sporting caricatures were immensely popular. This led him to make the fateful decision to suggest to his publisher a series of comic sporting illustrations with some sort of descriptive text to unify them as a series -- little anecdotes to add a little extra fun to the humorous depictions. Since the illustrations would be of things going wrong, he suggested that it could be packaged as the misfortunes of a 'Nimrod Club'. Seymour had recently done very well publishing a work, Sketches by Seymour, that had these kinds of illustrations, so the publisher was definitely interested. The kind of writing work that this required was what was known as 'hack' work. ('Hack' was a shortened form of 'hackney', i.e., a riding horse.) It was a routine kind of gig but required a certain kind of short-writing skill, like writing ad copy in our day. The publisher, apparently busy with other projects, decided to hire an outside hack, and eventually hired (according, later, to Seymour's wife, due to her own recommendation) a young writer who had made a modest name for himself in short-writing through a series called Sketches by Boz. Boz (long o), of course, was his pen-name. Boz, while in need of the money, noted that as he was not a sporting person, he was probably not the best person to do anecdotes for sporting illustrations. He proposed instead that he should write humorous literary sketches that Seymour could then illustrate; they would be about a club, but one Boz could write about. The publisher liked the idea, and Seymour found himself second fiddle on his own creative project, and not on very good terms, either, because he was never paid for the idea and was only commissioned for a limited number of illustrations per magazine edition. And when it was being published, it came out under the title, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club – containing a faithful record of the perambulations, perils, travels, adventures and Sporting Transactions of the corresponding members. Edited by 'Boz'. With Illustrations. 'With Illustrations'! That's it. Seymour was not even given a byline.
The first edition came out and was immensely popular. In April of 1836, as part of work on the second edition, Seymour met up with Boz for drinks to discuss artwork for one of the stories. They argued vehemently over something (we do not know what), then Seymour went home and at some point afterward took his sporting rifle out into his garden and shot himself.
An emergency illustrator was commissioned to finish the second installment, Robert William Buss, a highly talented artist; but Buss was not familiar with the particular process, and didn't yet have a knack for knowing what would look good or bad with etched steel printing. His illustrations were lackluster and rushed by his own admission, and he was fired -- Buss took it in good humor and held no grudges. The unlucky commission passed to Hablot Knight Browne who did his illustrations first under the name 'Nemo' and then, to go better with 'Boz', under the name 'Phiz'. Boz and Phiz happened to get along quite well with each other, and Phiz became the go-to illustrator for Boz's works. Although, of course, by then Boz was no longer writing under the pen name 'Boz' but under his real name, Charles Dickens.
The Pickwick Papers was published in book form in 1837, becoming one of the bestselling books of the nineteenth century and making Dickens's name as one of the greatest authors of the day. And, of course, it is the next fortnightly book.
Looking around, it looks like an adaptation was made by Orson Welles for Mercury Theater on the Air, so I will try to find time to listen to that, as well. In addition, a while back I picked up at the Dollar Store a book called Death and Mr. Pickwick: A Novel by Stephen Jarvis. It's a highly fictionalized account of the issues between Dickens and Seymour in the publication of the work. It's a big book to put on top of a big book, so I don't know if I'll be able to fit it in, but I will be reading it as well.
Robert William Buss, Dickens' Dream. A painting that Buss started working on after Dickens's death; he died before he could finish it, but somehow the unfinished character works well for it.
The first edition came out and was immensely popular. In April of 1836, as part of work on the second edition, Seymour met up with Boz for drinks to discuss artwork for one of the stories. They argued vehemently over something (we do not know what), then Seymour went home and at some point afterward took his sporting rifle out into his garden and shot himself.
An emergency illustrator was commissioned to finish the second installment, Robert William Buss, a highly talented artist; but Buss was not familiar with the particular process, and didn't yet have a knack for knowing what would look good or bad with etched steel printing. His illustrations were lackluster and rushed by his own admission, and he was fired -- Buss took it in good humor and held no grudges. The unlucky commission passed to Hablot Knight Browne who did his illustrations first under the name 'Nemo' and then, to go better with 'Boz', under the name 'Phiz'. Boz and Phiz happened to get along quite well with each other, and Phiz became the go-to illustrator for Boz's works. Although, of course, by then Boz was no longer writing under the pen name 'Boz' but under his real name, Charles Dickens.
The Pickwick Papers was published in book form in 1837, becoming one of the bestselling books of the nineteenth century and making Dickens's name as one of the greatest authors of the day. And, of course, it is the next fortnightly book.
Looking around, it looks like an adaptation was made by Orson Welles for Mercury Theater on the Air, so I will try to find time to listen to that, as well. In addition, a while back I picked up at the Dollar Store a book called Death and Mr. Pickwick: A Novel by Stephen Jarvis. It's a highly fictionalized account of the issues between Dickens and Seymour in the publication of the work. It's a big book to put on top of a big book, so I don't know if I'll be able to fit it in, but I will be reading it as well.
Robert William Buss, Dickens' Dream. A painting that Buss started working on after Dickens's death; he died before he could finish it, but somehow the unfinished character works well for it.
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