Links of Note

 * Ernesto Priani, Ramon Llull, at the SEP

* Kevin J. Harrelson, Richard T. Greener and the Abolitionist Moment in American Philosophy, at "Blog of the APA"

* Carlos Cortissoz, Souls Within a Soul: The City-Soul Analogy Revisited (PDF)

* Edmund Stewart, The First Universities? Ancient Greek Philosophical Schools, at "Antigone"

* Doug Campbell, Why did the ancient Greeks avoid human dissection?, at "Plato's Fish-Trap: Ancient Natural Philosophy"

* Colin Chamberlain, How to Eat a Peach: Malebranche on the Function of the Passions (PDF)

* Brendan Hodge, Is Easter actually 'late' this year?, at "The Pillar"

* Francesca Mezzenza & Gabriel Scheidecker, Hegemony and Childcare, at "Aeon"

* Marshall Bierson, Understanding Anscombe's Absolutism (PDF)

* Andreas Wimmer, Seungwon Lee, and Jack LaViolette, The Spread of Romantic Nationalism across Europe: A Case of Ideational Diffusion, at "Broadstreet"

* Theresa Tallien, What Was Courtship?

* T. Parker Haratine, Augustine on memory, the mind, and human flourishing (PDF)

* Ryan Burge, The Truth Isn't Out There: Religion and Belief in Aliens, at "Graphs About Religion"

Hyper Christou Presbeuomen

Therefore from now on, we recall no one according to the flesh. Though too we knew Christ according to the flesh, yet now we no longer know. Therefore, if anyone in Christ -- a new creature. The original has perished; see, the new comes to be. And all from God, the one having restored us to himself through Christ, and having given us the service of restoration, how God was in Christ, the world restoring to Himself, not counting their lapses against them, and having placed in us the reason of restoration.

Therefore for Christ we negotiate, as though God is summoning through us. We beg on behalf of Christ: Be restored to God! The one unknowing of sin, he made sin for us, so that we might become God's justice in him. And also, cooperating, we urge you not to receive God's grace in an empty way.

For he says: At the approved time, I heard you, and in the day of safety, I rescued you. See, now is the well-approved time; see, now is the day of safety.

[2 Corinthians 5:16-6:2, my very rough translation. Like much of 2 Corinthians, this is a bit of a tangle. The word I've translated here as 'restoration' is often translated as 'reconciliation'; it can also mean 'change' and seems sometimes to be used to mean something like 'atonement'. The word I've translated as 'negotiate' literally means 'be elders' (it is related to the word presbyter, usually translated as 'elder', which gives us the word 'priest'), but age is not the key thing; to be an elder is to have a position of responsibility and honor. Thus the verb is often translated as 'be ambassadors'; we could also translate it as 'represent'.]

No Maps of His Soul Have I Penned

 Loyalty
by Berton Braley 

He may be six kinds of a liar,
He may be ten kinds of a fool,
He may be a wicked highflyer
Beyond any reason or rule;
There may be a shadow above him
Of ruin and woes to impend,
And I may not respect, but I love him,
Because -- well, because he's my friend. 

 I know he has faults by the billion,
But his faults are a portion of him;
I know that his record's vermilion,
And he's far from the sweet Seraphim;
But he's always been square with yours truly,
Ready to give or to lend,
And if he is wild and unruly,
I like him -- because he's my friend. 

 I criticize him but I do it
In just a frank, comradely key,
And back-biting gossips will rue it
If ever they knock him to me!
I never make diagrams of him,
No maps of his soul have I penned;
I don't analyze -- just love him,
Because -- well, because he's my friend.

Berton Braley was a popular American poet in the first half of the twentieth century; he was newspaper-syndicated and was the sort of poet whose poems, often humorous or motivational, newspaper readers would clip out and share, or have their children memorize.

Beattie on Vestment

 I find that James Beattie has a brief discussion of the Aristotelian category of echein/habitus, in his work, Theory of Language, Part II, Chapter II. In context, he's looking at adverbs, and he considers a possible way that had been proposed of categorizing adverbs in terms of Aristotle's categories. He goes through the categories briefly, assigning adverbs, and notes that there's no obvious English adverbs for the category of habitus, although he recognizes that this doesn't mean you couldn't have any, and he even gives a hypothetical example of how a particular etymology, if it had gone a different way than it actually did, might have delivered one. (Our contemporary English perhaps gives an actual example, in nattily.) Then he has a slight digression discussing the category itself:

By the by, I cannot see, for what purpose Aristotle made a separate category of the tenth; for to me it seems included in some of the preceding. A crown is as really a substance, as the head that wears it, and may last a thousand years longer . Or, if it is the having of the crown, or the being crowned, that distinguishes the category, as when we say, a crowned head, then crowned denotes a quality perceived by sense, and so belongs to the third predicament. Indeed this is not the only objection that might be made to the doctrine of the categories. Whoever treats of it in the way of detail, and without prejudice, will find, if I mistake not, that in some things it is redundant, and in others defective. 

This is unsurprising -- Beattie, like many early modern philosophers, has a dislike for 'the schoolmen'. The substance argument is very much the one later given Bentham, although Beattie has perhaps more justification for it -- when he defined the category originally, he said that it "denotes something additional and exterior to a substance, but not a part of it" (pp. 159-160), whereas Bentham is purportedly deriving his discussion from Sanderson but ignores Sanderson's explicit definition of the category in terms of adjacency. 

But Beattie is also in many ways a more educated man than Bentham, and unlike (apparently) Bentham was directly familiar with Aristotle himself, and so he considers a more adequate way of thinking of it, in terms of "the having" (the literal meaning of echein) of the other substance. His suggestion that in that case it should be reduced to quality (the third predicament, counting substance and quantity as the first two) is interesting. There is of course a form of quality that shares a cognate name with the tenth category -- hexis, or acquired disposition (translated into Latin with the same word for this category, habitus), is derived from one of the forms of echein -- so this is not implausible. (And makes clear that, despite the fact he's not making a show of it, Beattie's argument is informed by his familiarity with the actual Greek.)  There is in fact a very good modern article -- Abraham Edel's 1975 "Aristotle's Categories and the Nature of Categorial Theory" (I highly recommend it) -- that proposes something of the kind, leaning very heavily on the etymology. 

Nonetheless, I think this is fairly certainly a mistake. Being crowned is not really all that much like being skilled or virtuous (the most obvious forms of habitus in the quality sense), and Beattie's particular assumption that being crowned is a 'sensible quality' is probably related to the fact that as a Scottish common sense theorist he has a very broad interpretation of what counts as a 'sensible quality'. Obviously being crowned is not immediately sensible in the way that being red is; you have to have an intellectual understanding of what a crown is to see that someone is crowned.

What is true is that we sometimes treat being skilled, or virtuous, or red, or any kind of quality possession, on the model of being clothed. This is, again, a metaphorical use, and presumably happens because vestment is more sensible and imaginable than quality possession. (And there are sometimes direct connections. We can wear utility belts and other useful things, for instance, and these are things that can be instrumental to skill, and thus, in actual use, expressions of skill.) We can use vestment as a model for any kind of having, and we especially use it as a metaphor for contingent having (i.e., where what is had is something acquired, or something that depends on particular circumstances); even though the senses of 'having' are themselves very far from being univocal.

The Sheeted Mists Like Baffled Hosts Retire

 Sunrise
by George Heath 

Slow creeps the light athwart the concave still,
Steals a low whisper on the breathless calm,
Bringing the scent of opening flowers, a balm;
Breaks o'er the earth a grand, a rapturous thrill,
The chant of waters, and the song-bird's trill;
The clouds fold up their curtains, snowy white;
The sleeping stars fade noiselessly from sight.
Bright Phoebus mounts above the crimson hill;
The sheeted mists like baffled hosts retire,
Wan Zephyr comes to wanton with the flowers,
The stream meanders on, a string of fire,
And light and music fill earth's sylvan bowers!
Bright dewdrops shine and tremble everywhere:
O Sceptic, look and blush, for God is there!

Crown of Thanksgiving

 O Lord, behold your Church, saved by your Cross, and your flock bought with your precious Blood, offers a crown of thanksgiving in faith to you, O High Priest of justice who has exalted her by your abasement. And, like a glorious Bride, she rejoices and exults in you, O glorious Bridegroom. In the strength of the Truth, raise the walls of her salvation, and establish priests within her, to be ambassadors of peace on behalf of her children.

[From the Basilica Hymn for The Week Beginning the Great Fast (Sawma/Lent), in The Book of Before and After: The Liturgy of the Hours of the Church of the East, Fr. Andrew Younan, ed. and tr., The Catholic University of America Press (Washington, DC: 2024), p. 475. The Book of Before and After is the the liturgy of the hours (Divine Office) for the churches of the Church of East, i.e., the Church that grew up east of the Roman Empire (the Church that grew up inside the Roman Empire being the 'Church of the West'). Churches in the Church of the East tradition are the Assyrian Church of the East (sometimes just called the Church of the East, which includes the Chaldean Syrian Church of India), the Ancient Church of the East (a relatively recent split-off from the former), the Chaldean Catholic Church (which is in communion with Rome), and the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church (also in communion with Rome). This particular version of The Book of Before and After is specifically designed for the use of Chaldean Catholics. 

In the churches of the Church of the East -- as almost everywhere except the Latin Church -- Lent begins today; Ash Wednesday is a Latin Church tradition, and is not celebrated in the East at all, except in Maronite and (sometimes) Syro-Malabar parishes that serve a lot of Latin Catholics. The fasting custom for Chaldean Catholics is generally that the first, middle and last days of Lent are days of fast and abstinence, where abstinence covers not only meat but also dairy and eggs, and Fridays in Lent are days of abstinence from meat; there is no fasting on Sunday. Fasting consists of eating nothing between midnight and noon and only moderately the rest of the day.]

John of St. Thomas on Vestment

 Continuing on with the previous posts on the Aristotelian category of habitus/echein, I was curious about what John of St. Thomas (a.k.a., John Poinsot) -- also from the seventeenth century, although unlike Sanderson in the thick of the final scholastic flowering of the Baroque period -- says on the subject. John's interpretation of the category is heavily influenced by the Summa totius logicae Aristotelis (Opusculum 48); it is regarded as spurious today, and was often thought to be such in the seventeenth century, with, however, John of St. Thomas as one of its major defenders. From his Cursus Philosophicus:

About the category of habitus. Its definition is: "what is the adjacency of bodies and those things which are about the body." For just as a thing is rendered located by its adjacent and surrounding place, and by its subjection to time, so from the vestment around it, it is said to be clothed. Hence that is false that some say: habitus is a certain mode which is in the human body, by which it is rendered apt to be vested, which does not apply to other bodies. However, this does not render a man vested, but capable of being vested rather than merely nude. But it is clear that the category of habitus takes away nudity, since it renders him vested: therefore it does not consist in that mode, which is compatible with actual nudity. On account of which habitus is drawn out of the adjacency of clothing, just as where is from place. Nor does it prevent vestment from being a substance in itself. For since its application is accidental, it makes an accidental denomination and an accidental category, just as a vessel is said to be golden or wooden denominatively; but it is not a pure extrinsic denomination, but is drawn from an adjacency in man, as where is drawn from place.

 And so it is said by St. Thomas “habitus is a medium between clothing and having-clothing”, v Met., lect. xx, and 1-11, qest. XLIX, art. 1. Whence it comes that animals, even if they are covered with hair or are armed with claws, are not from them denominated as vested, because they are parts of the body. But if they are surrounded by some clothing, as a horse harnessed or armed, they are denominated by this category, as man by vestment. 

 The properties of these [last six] categories can easily be seen in St. Thomas’s Opusc. XLVIII, treating of each. Almost all of them are not susceptible of more and less, and do not have a contrary, save for action and passion, which have both. Habitus is also said to be susceptible of more and less not according to intensity or remission, but according to many or fewer clothings, as St. Thomas says, cited Opuscul., treatise on habit, chap. 3. However, it does not have a contrary, because it does not have intension and remission.

(My rough translation. John of St. Thomas uses two different words for clothed here, indutum and vestitum; they are used as synonyms, but I have used 'clothed' for indutum and its cognates and 'vested' for vestitum and its cognates, just to mark them in the translation.) While very briefly stated, I take it that John is here arguing for the idea that habitus is a real mode or aspect of a human being in such a way that becoming clothed changes the one who is clothed (they are no longer nude), which is due to the adjacency/adjoining.

And a little later, talking about the 'coordination' of the category (the coordination of a category, which is, I think, a term that comes from Suarez, is the system of genera under it), Poinsot says:

Habitus, which is a supreme genus, is divided by St. Thomas, Opusc. XLVIII, into arms and vestments, Arms, into offensive and defensive, each of which has various species. Vestments, into the vestment of men and of beasts, as horses are adorned with saddle, bridle, arms, etc. Vestments, into various modes of clothing according to diverse adjacencies, such as a tunic, shoe, hat, etc., which species are not taken from the material or art by which the vestments are made, but from the diverse way in which they are vested and covered. Also reduced to this category are wall ornaments, which are not properly vestments.

John of St. Thomas diverges slightly from St. Thomas's actual view as found in the Commentary on the Physics III, lect. 5, n. 14 (322); while St. Thomas does think that vestments for beasts are reduced to this category, he seems to be implying that it is not in a strict and proper sense but insofar as they 'are brought to human use' (in hominis usum veniunt). That is, in a much later vocabulary, the vestments of beasts are vestments not 'naturally' but 'morally', i.e., by human will (in something like the way, perhaps, that corporations are legal persons and so considered on the model of substances). The category is explicitly stated to be a special category for human beings. Op. 48, which is John's major influence here, says something similar, but perhaps more ambiguously:

Hence this category is only appropriate to humans. But it is true that we also vest and arm certain animals with external vestments and arms, for we vest apes and harness horses; and in this mode the category is able to pertain to them.

One way this could be read, however, is as saying that vestment applied to apes and horses is due to human beings but is nonetheless vestment in the proper sense. Given how Poinsot describes the coordination of the category, he has to be taking it to mean this when he cites it: vestments of beasts are a species of vestment and not, as seems to be the case with Aquinas in the Physics, an extended sense arising from how we use animals.

Mark K. Spencer has a very nice article on this, The Category of Habitus: Artifacts, Accidents, and Human Nature, which situates John's view in the context of the different scholastic views on how to understand the category. (I am personally inclined to think, however, that Spencer's own account of habitus, drawing from Poinsot and Joseph Owens, is both too narrow and too wide, although interestingly for the same reason: it ties the category too tightly to human use, and therefore also includes too many things that fall under human use. It's the old proper/extended problem, a serious problem in working out this category, because, again, we use this category as a model for all sorts of other things, thus leading to a huge number of metaphorical uses. Because of this, it's difficult to draw the line appropriately between proper and extended uses.)