Tuesday, October 14, 2025

Proposition, Question, and Conclusion

 A proposition (propositio) is an expression (oratio) signifying what is true or false; for instance, when someone says that the heaven is revolvable, this is called a statement (enuntiatio) and an assertion (proloquium). A question is a proposition brought into doubt and uncertainty, as when someone asks whether the heaven is revolvable. A conclusion is a proposition confirmed by arguments, as when someone shows by means of other facts (rebus) that the heaven is revolvable. A statement, whether it is said only for its own sake or brought forward to confirm something else, is a proposition; if one asks regarding it, it is a question; if it is confirmed [by other facts], it is a conclusion. So a proposition, question, and conclusion are one and the same, though they differ in the way mentioned above.

[Boethius, Boethius's De topicis differentiis, Stump, tr., Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY: 2004) p. 30. Part of the point here, I take it, is to establish what it is that remains the same through dialectical inquiry -- we can have a question, which receives confirmation to be a conclusion, and then is affirmed as a proposition, and these three have to be in some sense the same thing, or you've just changed the subject, although they also have to be distinguishable.]

Monday, October 13, 2025

Two New Poem Drafts

 Exclusion

I suppose we can say, if nothing else will do,
that all things have a measure, some accounted span,
that limits make the the thing and keep its focus true,
that all things spread their being in just the ways they can.
Yet still it seems absurd, improper, even rude,
that we, so like strange gods, with reason hold full sway,
yet like some sword-kept Eden, the world dares exclude
such as us from endless life, imposing a final day.
We stamp our feet, demand the Manager give His time,
insist that we are deserving, our merit known to all,
weep at the unfairness, in anger scream and rant,
and are firmly turned away, no matter how sublime.
We feel, deep inside, that immortal regions call,
but no matter -- when it comes to evading death, we can't.


The Tie

The sun through the blinds
on the houseplants streaks lines
which then tickle the eyes;
through glass and in part
ray pours from sun's heart,
between star and my soul forming tie.

Links of Note

 * Ian J. Campbell & Christof Rapp, The Definition of Fallacies: A Defence of Aristotle's Appearance Condition (PDF)

* Robert Keim, The Poet of Assisi, at "Via Mediaevalis"

* Jared Dembrun, Mariology Is Always Christological, at "Son of St. Catherine"

* Daniel D. De Haan, The Doctrine of the Analogy of Being in Avicenna's Metaphysics of the Healing (PDF)

* Laura Caponetto, Undoing things with words (PDF)

* Ben Burgis, My Preferred Solution to the Liar Paradox, at "Philosophy for the People". There are serious problems with disquotationalism (e.g., it requires already and independently being able to assign truth values), but this is an interesting disquotationalist attempt to deal with the matter.

* Noam Hoffer, Kant's Teleology as the 'True Apology' to Leibniz's Pre-Established Harmony (PDF)

* Jessica Tizzard & Hugo Hogenbirk, The infinite divisibility and multiplicity of creatures: Conway's non-absolutist theory of space (PDF)

* Chad Engelland, Dare Students Go Amish on the Topic of AI?

Sunday, October 12, 2025

Fortnightly Book, October 12

 In working through Maurice LeBlanc's Arsene Lupin stories, we find ourselves having to make a judgment call after The Confessions of Arsene Lupin. The next published work is The Teeth of the Tiger, but it is peculiar in that it was published in English translation, in 1914, before it was published in the original French, in 1920. In 1916, LeBlanc published The Shell Shard (or The Shrapnel), which was originally a standalone tale, but which was written to be a Lupin tale and re-published as such in 1923. Then comes The Golden Triangle, serializec in 1917 and published in book form in 1918. We can set aside The Shell Shard as not being Lupinesque until later (and it may well be that, in any case, LeBlanc got the idea that he could make The Shell Shard a Lupin story from how he handled Lupin in The Golden Triangle), but we have to make a choice as to the order of the other two. After some thought, I have decided to follow the French publication order here, which means that the next fortnightly book is The Golden Triangle, also known as The Return of Arsene Lupin. This also has the advantage, in this case, of following the internal chronology of the narrative.

At the end of the tragic events of 813, Arsene Lupin left for the Foreign Legion, assumed by most of the world to be dead, and The Golden Triangle gives us a glimpse of him afterward. By all the descriptions, it seems to be in the style that would later be associated with Marquand's Mr. Moto -- that is, he is not the main character of the story but the resolving character, the one who links the essential elements so that the whole can come to a resolution. As some of the prior Lupin works gave us a bit too much of Lupin himself, showing the gentleman thief in a more indirect light could very well be showing him in a better light. We shall see.

Captain Patrice Belval rescues a woman from an attempted kidnapping. The ensuing adventure brings him into contact with a conspiracy to steal the gold reserves of France, and in opposition to a dangerous adversary. To deal with this problem, he gets help from a friend of a friend, Don Luis Perenna, but saving three hundred million francs in gold during World War I is going to require solving some difficult problems....

A Most Excellent Creator

 Let us, then, now seek the Trinity which is God, in the things themselves that are eternal, incorporeal, and unchangeable; in the perfect contemplation of which a blessed life is promised us, which cannot be other than eternal. For not only does the authority of the divine books declare that God is; but the whole nature of the universe itself which surrounds us, and to which we also belong, proclaims that it has a most excellent Creator, who has given to us a mind and natural reason, whereby to see that things living are to be preferred to things that are not living; things that have sense to things that have not; things that have understanding to things that have not; things immortal to things mortal; things powerful to things impotent; things righteous to things unrighteous; things beautiful to things deformed; things good to things evil; things incorruptible to things corruptible; things unchangeable to things changeable; things invisible to things visible; things incorporeal to things corporeal; things blessed to things miserable. And hence, since without doubt we place the Creator above things created, we must needs confess that the Creator both lives in the highest sense, and perceives and understands all things, and that He cannot die, or suffer decay, or be changed; and that He is not a body, but a spirit, of all the most powerful, most righteous, most beautiful, most good, most blessed.

[Augustine, De Trinitate XV, iv, 6.]

Saturday, October 11, 2025

John Henry Newman, Loss and Gain

 Introduction

Opening Passage:

Charles Reding was the only son of a clergyman, who was in possession of a valuable benefice in a midland county. His father intended him for orders and sent him at a proper age to a public school. He had long revolved in his mind the respective advantages and disadvantages of public and private education, and had decided in favour of the former. "Seclusion", he said, "is no security for virtue...." (p. 11)

Summary: Charles Reding comes to Oxford, and while a bright, inquisitive mind in his way, is not much different from other students, beyond the fact that he has an unusual irenic temperament that wants, where possible, to give people the benefit of the doubt. He falls in with William Sheffield, entering Oxford at the same time, who is a bit more cynical and sarcastic. Oxford University at the time was a central hub, one might say, in the Church of England, since once of its major social functions was the training of clergy, and religion is a hot topic at the time. The late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century had involved a proliferation of different views of religion in the English Church, and political disputes over Dissenters and Catholics had intensified the importance of religion as a subject, and thus everyone discusses religious matters. At Oxford, Reding comes into contact with some of this chaos. Sheffield, of course, is the sort of person destined to respectability; he thinks making a lot of fuss about religion is usually the sign of a sham, and thus dabbles in the fads but never commits to anything much. Reding meets Bateman, a ritualist Anglo-Catholic whose conception of being Catholic is wearing cassocks and making sure his Anglican church has saint-niches, which remain empty because, of course, he couldn't get away with filling them with statues of saints. He meets White, a brash young man whose Anglo-Catholicism is all big talk that will obviously never come into action. There is Freeborn, the Evangelical who thinks all these catholicizing movements are slipping toward idolatry. There is Vincent, the affable Latitudinarian who never quite opposes anyone, but never quite supports them. There is Carlton, who seems in many ways to represent the most intellectually serious forms of Anglicanism. And so forth. What we see is that there is no obvious doctrinal Anglican cores -- everybody agrees to use the same words, but the primary unity beyond that seems just to be an agreement not to be Roman Catholic.

This situation -- Anglicans being Anglicans and yet not obviously having anything in common beyond being Anglicans -- causes severe problems for Reding, particularly as he comes closer to having to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles for his degree and yet finding few answers and no agreement about how he is supposed to understand them. Charles ill-advised remarks to the effect that at least the Roman Catholics have an official position leads people to suspect him of being in danger of swimming the Tiber. Such suspicions are self-feeding -- every discussion, every question, every puzzlement gives people further reason for it. They start actively trying to prevent his flight to Rome. In vain does Charles point out that he has no intention of becoming Roman Catholic, that he has never talked to a Catholic priest, that he has never studied Catholic doctrine and only knows about it second-hand, that he doesn't understand why anyone leaves the Church of England for the Church of Rome. Everyone is very concerned about his eventual defection, and, ironically, it will be this that will create situations in which he has to make the leap. He is punished for a tendency to Roman Catholicism that he doesn't see himself as having, but it is so consistent that he begins to doubt his own assessment. Perhaps other people are seeing something about himself that he does not?

From the time that Loss and Gain was published, it has been treated as autobiographical and satirical. It is not autobiographical -- if any character in the book is like Newman, it is not Charles but the priest he briefly meets on the train when he is intending to convert. It is an essential part of Charles's story that he is not, unlike Newman, a part of the Oxford Movement; he knows very little about them, beyond respecting the Movement's willingness to take doctrine seriously. Reding's journey has none of the intellectual shifts that Newman's had; Reding, while an intelligent young man, has a conversion that does not at all proceed on intellectual ground. All they have in common, really, is what every convert to Rome would have had at the time: massive loss, as opportunities dry up and relationships rupture, and massive gain.

Calling the book satiricial is better founded. It is not a comic work, but parts are quite funny. Anglo-Catholics come in for some heavy satirizing; Newman knew them well, and his own Romeward interests being devotional, even as an Anglican he didn't always have much patience for those whose Romeward tendencies were mostly ritualistic or scholastic. And the chapter of Charles fending off the many sectaries who, hearing that he is converting to Catholicism, come to try to divert him into their own weird religious varieties, is justly regarded as hilarious by almost everyone. There is also a humorously biting edge to the fact that Charles is pushed into conversion entirely by people who are trying to keep him from being converted. Yet the book is not, I think, primarily satirical in purpose. Rather, it is a character study, a look at what, psychologically, goes into making a radical transformation, and all the loss and gain involved. It is, as its subtitle suggests, 'The Story of a Convert'. That it sees clearly the many absurdities and humorous twists that can attend conversion is just a byproduct of the great art with which it looks at the question.

While a dialogical novel, the work is not a philosophical or theological dialogue; religion is, of course, heavily discussed, but the participants in the discussions are themselves wrestling with questions. Catholic doctrines are not explored at any profound level, and Reding's own conversion is not a conversion by doctrinal arguments. It's a dialogical novel because dialogue displays for us social relations. This is one of the reasons, I think, that the novel is much better as a novel than most novels about conversions; the discussions do not serve a primarily didactic purpose but as a depiction of society and what it means to be someone who, without resentment, malice, or even dislike, nonetheless doesn't fit in it and cannot, however he tries, make himself do so. It is extremely successful at this.

Favorite Passage:

"...I hope you approve of the cassock, Mrs. Reding?"

"It is a very cold dress, sir -- that's my opinion -- when made of silk or bombazeen; and very unbecoming too, when worn by itself."


"Particularly behind", said Charles; "it is quite unshapely."

"Oh. I have remedied that", said Bateman; "you have noticed, Miss Reding, I dare say, the Bishop's short cassock. It comes to the knees, and look smuch like a continuation of a waistcoat, the straight-cut coat being worn as usual. Well, Miss Reding, I have adopted the same plan with the long cassock; I put my coat over it."

Mary had difficulty to keep from smiling; Charles laughed out. "Impossible, Bateman", he said;  you don't mean you wear your tailed French coat over your long straight cassock reaching to your ankles?"

"Certainly", said Bateman gravely; "I thus consult for warmth and appearance too; and all my parishioners are sure to know me. I think this a great point, Miss Reding: I hear the little boys as I pass say, 'That's the parson'."

"I'll be bound they do", said Charles. (p. 225)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.


*****

John Henry Newman, Loss and Gain, Lipscombe, ed., Ignatius Press (San Francisco: 2012).

But God Had Called Him Man

 The Clerk
by Charles Williams 

 The clerk sat on a stool
And added up a column,
Looking a very fool,
Staid he was and solemn.
He said: 'Nineteen and one.
Mark nought and carry two.'
And that was all that he had done
And all that he could do. 

 The clerk sat on his stool
And another line began:
The heroes called him fool
But God had called him man.
He said: 'Two fives are ten
And carry one along.'
The devil shuddered in his den
And Heaven broke forth in song.