Dashed Off V

 triple end of music: diagoge, paideia, catharsis

poetic existimation

Of all the arts, music has the most analogies with angelic speech.

"We are the end of all artificial things, for all such things are for the use of man." Aquinas

Mystery is made credible by sign.

the Church as a 'great and perpetual motive of credibility'

Garrigou-Lagrange's division of motives of credibility
I. External to the consciousness of the inquirer
--- --- A. Extrinsic to revealed religion
--- --- --- --- 1. Miracles
--- --- --- --- 2. Prophecies
--- --- B. Intrinsic to revealed religion
--- --- --- --- 1. Sublimity of Doctrine
--- --- --- --- 2. Miraculous Life of the Church
II. Internal to the consciousness of the inquirer
--- --- A. Universal
--- --- --- --- 1. Miraculous fulfillment of humanity's aspirations
--- --- B. Individual
--- --- --- --- 2. Individual experience of profound peace which the world cannot give

People have neither wish nor need to work only interchangeable jobs, and in fact have wish and need for the opposite; from which inequalities unavoidably arise, of reputation, of network connection, of income, of satisfaction.

A legal system inevitably rules in application of a rough picture of natural inclination and normal duty, which serves to guide the default assumptions in how the laws are to be applied.

Everyone decides to believe whether they will follow this or that plan for the day.

the phenomenon of wishful thinking (and our capacity to avoid it) --> doxastic voluntarism

We regularly believe p regardless of whether p is true, just not where the truth of p is obvious.

We often believe where the connection between the belief and its truth is that (1) its truth is not ruled out and (2) we wish to find evidence for its truth.

Our experience of beliefs shows that believes become entrenched, not that they intrinsically are.

We can recognize some of our believings as being willed by us during the time we believe them; the experiences of clinging to a belief or holding onto a belief in the face of doubt or wanting to reject evidence against a belief are all common.

Some of the evidence doxastic involuntarists point to, ironically can be interpreted as cases in which we easily believe voluntarily and then cannot voluntarily disbelieve while we are easily voluntarily believing. In this sense, the 'involuntariness' is like trying to get out of a warm, comfortable bed to do something dull or unpleasant on a bitter cold morning.

We find many cases in life in which we can voluntarily do something but only if we work ourselves up and prepare ourselves first.

Every human being in practice takes the question of whether a belief is good to have to have some bearing, even if only loose and uncertain, on the question of whether it is true.

erotetic voluntarism
inquisitive voluntarism
self-critical voluntarism
-- all three of these imply that we have quite broad at least indirect doxastic control

Conspiracy theories are a byproduct of people thinking for themselves in much the same way that scams are a byproduct of people making their own financial decisions; it is however an error, in both cases, to assume that this is the only way they arise, or that removing the autonomy would make people less vulnerable.

Psalm 119 is a psalm not merely of obeying but of studying: to delight in the law of the Lord is to take joy in earning from the key instrument of discipleship to God.

category mistakes as use of wrong kind of classification

Bodily agency presupposes bodily integrity and bodily self-respect, the body not as a mere thing to use but as an object of personal responsibility and care.

the body as a received part of the gift of self

Natural law being natural to us, our consistent and coherent self-interest requires upholding it.

That something is in our self-interest does not imply that it is easy for us.

As we are civilizational beings, our self-interest always involves the interest of a civilization and society of which we can be a part.

The fundamental divide in theories of human rights is among
(1) theories grounding human rights in human nature, or in what is connatural to it
(2) theories grounding human rights in human will
(3) theories grounding human rights in what is neither human nature nor human will

"If the necessity of science arises per se from perseity, perseity itself arises from the immateriality of intellect which alone causes openness to being as such." Chastek

Christ and the Apostles did not merely initiate the Church as a social body; they created a social ontology for it.

examples as illustrations vs examples as argument foci/lenses

GNS theory of role-playing games
-- three forms of player engagement: Gamism, Narrativism, Simulation
three forms of task resolution: drama/destiny (participants decide), fortune/chance (chance mechanism decides), karma/fate (fixed value decides)
-- five elements of role-playing: character, color/atmosphere, setting, situation, system
-- four decision stances: actor (what character would want), author (what player wants, with rationalization), director (what environment.gamemaster decides), pawn (what player wants, no rationalization)

system, story, challenge

Radoff's player motivations: immersion, cooperation, achievement, competition

"The moral law is holy (inviolable). A human being is indeed unholy enough but the humanity in his person must be holy to him." Kant

Kant sometimes gets plausibility only by equivocating between genus and species.

'For all S knows, p' vs 'given what S knows, p is not impossible'
-- the first is actually a statement of what S does not know

A useful fiction is not an error.

culture (language, mythology, fashion, ritual, etc.) as a shared reserve of signs for intellectual and volitional use

Moral life is a field in which the composite integrates to become noncomposite; this latter is called integrity. Likewise, in moral life the mutable grows immutable; we call this latter constancy or steadfastness. The two together make for what we call the principled life.

-- the implicit criticism fo utilitarianism in Oliver Twist and Hard Times

We shape experiences only by shaping signs.

principal exemplars (productive -- e.g., idea in artisan's mind) vs. ministerial exemplars (objective -- e.g., blueprint or recipe)

sketching: scaffolding marks, test marks, confirmed marks, correction marks

maintenance of anything as a system of cycles

practical intellect : goodness of being :: speculative intellect : goodness of truth

generosity as creating a mutual gain

"The intellect -- much more than the imagination -- can form the natures of things that have never come before the senses." Aquinas

Close reading is the skill of good readers; literary critics doe not have proprietary claim to it, nor is there usually evidence of literary critics being better at it than other readers. Kramnick claims that close reading is not reading but writing, but in fact this is no better; writing is the skill of good writers, and there is no evidence that literary critics are as such better at it than other reader-writers. It's just a basic form of liberal art, not something specific to literary critics. We should perhaps not dismiss the idea that literary critics in fact are liberal artisans specializing in an elementary -- but important -- set of tools that are not distinctive to them; this is perhaps not what many literary critics think, but there is much more evidence of this.

Only very few literary critics produce literary works of note in writing literary criticism.

the co-suggestivity of signs

The Gospels make clear that fishers of men will have very few fish in their nets until Christ gives them more fish than they can manage.

the coloring or nuancing of one sign by another

undesigned coincidences (in multiple testimonies)
(1) noncontradictorily differing details as to event
(2) mutually confirming different details as to event
(3) detail in one confirming the other as to acount/authority
(4) convergent accounts as to event
-- the 'undesigned' requires reason to reject collusion or copying

Evil by its nature is something endured by good.

Loanwords and Calques

 Languages are dynamic and permeable, and they need to be for their functions as language. The notion of a language in which every word is exactly definable and used in exactly the same way all the time quickly breaks down in the face of real world problems. Mercantile markets are forced to create pidgin-versions, institutions create jargonized versions, scientific inquiry and communication requires regularized naming-extension practices suitable to the inquiry. And, of course, human beings are inveterate figurators; we analogize, make metaphors, speak obliquely, in almost everything we do.

One of the ways we keep language flexible enough to be practically useful is by making use of other languages. One way we do this is by using other languages as a neologistic reserve; this is commonly done with classical languages, and English primarily uses Latin and Greek for this. In this use we borrow words with some regard for their meaning in the original language, but loosely for our own purposes. But sometimes we just borrow them directly. Two common ways of doing this are calques and loanwords.

A calque is a loan-translation. Given a word in another language, we just translate it into ours and use it in the same sense. When computers began to be common, Spanish calqued the English word 'mouse', to indicate the device, by translating it as the word for 'mouse' in Spanish, ratón, and this has happened in multiple other languages. This happens very often with easily identifiable compound words. The English word 'skyscraper' has been calqued into literally dozens of languages, each of which translates it by translating 'sky' and 'scraper'. 

A loanword is a direct borrowing. Déjà-vu is in English a loanword from French. When the word is borrowed, it is often done in a very specific way, so sometimes the words will only carry over part of their original spread of meaning. This is very common with food terms. 

These two methods of borrowing have led to an amusing bit, which is actually why I've been thinking about this. 'Calque' is a loanword from French, not a calque. 'Loanword' is a calque from German (the original word was Lehnwort), not a loanword.

In any case, I've often thought that these points of dynamism in language should be taken more seriously by philosophers of language than they usually are. Philosophers of language have tended to focus on the relatively static features of language, but it's these dynamic features that arguably show how language actually works.

Habitude XXIV

 To the third one proceeds thus. It seems that craft is not intellectual virtue. For Augustine says, in De Libero Arbitrio, that no one uses virtue badly. But some use craft badly. For a craftsman is able to work badly according to the knowledge of his craft. Therefore craft is not virtue.

Further, there is no virtue of virtue, but there is some virtue of craft, as is said in Ethic. VI. Therefore craft is not virtue.

Further, crafts of the free person [artes liberales] are more excellent than crafts of the engineer [artes mechanicae]. But as crafts of the engineer are practical, so crafts of the free person are reflective [speculativa]. Therefore if craft were intellectual virtue, it would have to be enumerated as reflective virtue.

But contrariwise is that the Philosopher, in Ethic. VI, posits craft to be virtue, yet he does not number it with speculative virtues, which he places in the knowing part of the soul.

 I reply that it must be said that craft is nothing other than right reason for making some works. However, the good of these things does not consist in that human striving [appetitus] has itself [se habet] in some way but in that the work itself that is done is in itself good. For it does not pertain to the praise of the craftsman inasmuch as he is a craftsman, that he willingly does the work but what kind of work he does. Therefore craft, properly speaking, is working habitude. And yet in some ways it converges on [convenit cum] reflective habitudes because it also pertains to reflective habitudes how they have themselves to the things they consider, but not how human striving has itself to them. For provided that the the geometer demonstrates the true, it does not matter how he has himself in his striving part, whether he is glad or angry, just as it does not matter in the craftsman, as was said. And so in this way craft has the notion of virtue in the same way as reflective habitudes, inasmuch as neither craft nor reflective habitude produce good work with respect to use, which is proper to virtue completing striving, but only with respect to the faculty of acting well.

To the first therefore it must be said that when someone who has craft works bad craftsmanship, this is not a work of craft but is contrary to craft, just as when someone who knows the true lies, what is said is not according to knowledge but contrary to knowledge. Thus, just as knowledge always has itself to good, as was said, so also craft, and in this respect it is called virtue. In this, however, it is lacking the complete notion of virtue, because it does not do the good use itself, but something else is required for it, although good use without craft is not able to be.

To the second it must be said that because good will, which is completed by moral virtue, is required for a human being to make good use of craft, therefore the Philosopher says that craft is virtue, namely moral, inasmuch as some moral virtue is required for its good use. For it is manifest that the craftsman is inclined by justice, which makes the will right, to make the work faithfully. 

To the third it must be said that even in reflective matters there is something by way of a sort of work, such as construction of a deduction or a suitable sentence or the work of counting and measuring. And thus whatever habitudes are ordered to such works of reflective reason, are called by a kind of likeness crafts, but for the free person, in distinction from those crafts which are ordered to works exercised through the body, which are in a way for slaves, inasmuch as the body is subject slavishly to the soul, and man is free according to soul. But those kinds of knowledge which are not ordered to any such work, are simply called kinds of knowledge, not crafts. Nor is it needful, if crafts of the free person are more noble, that the notion of craft be more suitable to them.

[Thomas Aquinas, ST 2-1.57.3, my translation. The Dominican Fathers translation is here, the Latin is here.]

Here Twilight Is and Coolness

 Inscription for a Fount
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

 This Sycamore, oft musical with bees,--
Such tents the Patriarchs loved! O long unharmed
May all its agéd boughs o'er-canopy
The small round basin, which this jutting stone
Keeps pure from falling leaves! Long may the Spring,
Quietly as a sleeping infant's breath,
Send up cold waters to the traveller
With soft and even pulse! Nor ever cease
Yon tiny cone of sand its soundless dance,
Which at the bottom, like a Fairy's Page,
As merry and no taller, dances still,
Nor wrinkles the smooth surface of the Fount.
Here Twilight is and Coolness: here is moss,
A soft seat, and a deep and ample shade.
Thou may'st toil far and find no second tree.
Drink, Pilgrim, here; Here rest! and if thy heart
Be innocent, here too shalt thou refresh
Thy spirit, listening to some gentle sound,
Or passing gale or hum of murmuring bees!

Links of Note

 * Sarah Catherine Byers, Trinitarian Metaphysics in Confessions 13: Marius Victorinus and the Neoplatonic Triad 'Being, Understanding, Life' (PDF)

* Gregory B. Sadler, The Stoic Metaphor of Inner Citadels

* Jacob Allee, The Consolation of Philosophy, at "Study the Great Books"

* Flame & Light, Four General Approaches to Fictional Entities

* Neil Tennant, Aristotle's Syllogistic and Core Logic (PDF)

* TJH, Love & Justice in Anselm's Soteriology, at "Caput Mundi"

* Ben Holloway, A Defense of 'Extreme' Intentionalism (PDF)

* Peter Graziano, On Studiousness and Curiosity, at "Mercurial Thomist"

* Russell Sprout, Gilmore Girls as a Greek Tragedy, at "Sproutstack"

* Medieval Cookery

* John Dickson reviews T. C. Schmidt's Josephus and Jesus, at "The Gospel Coalition"

* Edward Feser, No, AI does not have human-level intelligence

* Brian Kemple's Aquinas Lecture: "Broken Minds: Artificial Intelligence, Digital Technology, and the Enslavement of Humankind":

Fortnightly Book, February 8

 'Gilgamesh' is the Akkadian version of the name for a king of Uruk; in Sumerian sources he is sometimes called 'Bilgames'. Our stories of him probably go back to various Sumerian poems, perhaps originally from the Third Dynasty of Ur, in the 21st century BC, of which a few late recensions here and there survive, but the earliest extant text of the tale of Gilgamesh is known as the Old Babylonian version, which survives in a few tablets, and is from the 18th century BC. A Hittite version, rather different in parts from the main stream, was worked up a few centuries afterward. A newer version, the Standard Babylonian version, was put together in perhaps the 11th or 12th century BC, and survives in fragments that have come to us through the rediscovery of the Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh in the 1850s. There are many other fragments, however, across this expanse of time. The destruction of the Assyrian Empire seems, however, to have mostly swallowed the Gilgamesh tale, as it did much more of the cuneiform literature; its resurrection is one of the great achievements of modern archeology.

I will be reading The Epic of Gilgamesh in the Penguin Classics edition translated and edited by N. K. Sandars. Like all other versions, it is a reconstruction, following the Assyrian collation in great measure, but drawing on other sources, such as the Old Babylonian; when Sandars first worked up a version in the 1950s she drew more heavily on the scattered Sumerian fragments than was common at the time. 

Homer, The Odyssey

 Introduction

Opening Passage:

Tell me the tale of a man, Muse, who had so many roundabout ways
To wander, driven off course, after sacking Troy's hallowed keep;
Many the people whose cities he saw and whose ways of thinking he learned,
Many the toils he suffered at sea, anguish in his heart
As he struggled to safeguard his life and the homecoming of his companions.
But he did not save his companions even so, though he longed to,
For their heedlessness destroyed them, theirs and nobody else's--
Fools that they were, like children, who devoured the sun-god Hyperion's
Cattle, and so he took from them the day of their homecoming.
Goddess, start where you will; daughter of Zeus, share the tale with us too. (p. 73)

Summary: The obvious story of The Odyssey is that of Odysseus, but this is merely the dominant of three interwoven stories.

The first, and most encompassing, is a tale of Athena. We begin the poem with Athena authorized by Zeus to begin the process of allowing Odysseus to return home. We end the poem with Athena, again authorized by Zeus, bringing to an end the bloodshed that threatens to flood over everything after Odysseus's return. Odysseus is her favorite, but he is opposed by Poseidon, and thus we have the story of Athena threading the needle as she works to bring Odysseus successfully home while not directly opposing her uncle Poseidon. (It is somewhat tempting to see her as being especially careful because some of her actions in The Iliad got her into trouble with the major gods, including Zeus himself.) She plays an active role, constantly showing up in disguises to advise heroes at opportune times, putting thoughts into mortal hearts, pouring divine splendor on people when they need to impress, bringing Odysseus ever closer to home. She also, as he returns, intensifies his difficulties, hardening the hearts of the Suitors trying to take his wife and his home and repeatedly provoking them to more extreme action. This is certainly in order to make his homecoming more splendid and definitive, but may also be a sort of sop to her uncle, making sure that Odysseus endures trouble not merely as he comes home but precisely so that he can come home despite being under Poseidon's wrath. She is a goddess, so she has no character arc; rather, she forms the story successfully to her satisfaction.

The second tale is that of Telemakhos. Twenty-ish years ago his father had gone off to war, so long ago that he does not really remember his father. When his father did not return ten(-ish) years ago with the other heroes of the Trojan War, his nightmare began, as men from all over descended on his homestead, nominally to woo the lovely Penelope, his mother, and they have stayed as guests, devouring the substance of his father's household. Telemakhos, of course, was too young to do anything about it, and now that he has recently become of age where he might do something, he finds that his options have diminished almost to nothing. The Suitors outnumber any forces he can command, and he is inexperienced, having no inkling of how he might extricate himself and his mother from their intrusion. We learn that he is quite clever, being a true son of his shrewd father and prudent mother, but he lacks his father's self-confidence and boldness, because he has never had an opportunity to develop them. The first five books of the poem follow Telemakhos as Athena guides him through this maze. He mounts an expedition, with her help (although unbeknownst to him, because she is disguised as Mestor), to discover news of his father. They visit Pylos and Sparta, where the mission is successful, in that Telemakhos does learn something about what happened to his father, and then return home in Book Fifteen, avoiding, with Athena's guidance, a fleet sent by the Suitors to kill Telemakhos on the way. This part of the story teases what has happened with Odysseus, and gives Telemakhos the preparation he needs for when his father actually arrives. However, there is arguably a third function that it fulfills, namely, that it buys Penelope and Telemakhos more time. Part of the host of Suitors is away from Ithaca in the attempt to assassinate Telemakhos; those at home therefore have incentive to await the results of that mission; Telemakhos gets away from the Suitors for a while, which lets him get a clearer view of the situation; and what is gained is exactly what is needed to allow Odysseus the time to arrive. In Book Sixteen, his story begins intersecting with his father's, and we find Telemakhos well prepared to assist his father in restoring the rightful order of things.

And, of course, there is the tale of Odysseus. Mendelsohn notes that the poem starts out without telling us his name (we only get it in passing after twenty lines), and that this is not an accident, because Odysseus is repeatedly associated with namelessness and disguises. The most famous case is his interaction with Cyclops, to whom he says his name is Outis, No-one. But throughout the tale we find a constant blurring between Odysseus and Outis. Whenever he meets someone, Odysseus presents himself as someone else; plays on words involving ou tis and similar phrases keep recurring; his identity is often in question, his whereabouts often uncertain, his very existence repeatedly called into question. This is because Odysseus is wandering in the Anti-Home. All of the troubles he faces are in one aspect or another the opposite of what it is to be home: the inertness of the Lotos-eaters, the savagery of the Cyclopeans, the strange seductions of tempting goddesses, all of the forms of uncivilized madness. Lost in such things, can a man have a name? Can he have that for which the name is a metonymy, a self? What is worse, this Anti-Home has laid siege to his own household, and he cannot stop being Outis, the Stranger, until he is in a position to restore Home. Then, and only then, can Odysseus fully be Odysseus. As he says when he finally stands forth to take his home back:

'Here at home I am, truly myself!' (p. 399)

Favorite Passage:

And so, when she saw the corpses and the endless rivers of blood,
She launched into the victory cry, so great was the deed she beheld,
But Odysseus kept her back and restrained her, though she was eager,
And addressed her then with words that flew toward her like arrows:
  "Rejoice in your heart, old woman, but hold back--don't sound the cry.
It is an unholy thing to gloat over men who have been slain.
What vanquished these men was a god-sent fate and their own wicked deeds,
For they never showed respect to anyone on earth
Who happened to cross their path, whether wicked or good at heart.
And so, through their heedlessness, they have come to a shameful end...." (p. 419)

Recommendation: It's The Odyssey, and the translation is quite good, so obviously, Highly Recommended.

*****

Homer, The Odyssey , Daniel Mendelsohn, tr., The University of Chicago Press (Chicago: 2025).