The Fire-Flies Come Stagg'ring Down the Dark

 A Summer's Night
by Paul Laurence Dunbar 

 The night is dewy as a maiden's mouth,
The skies are bright as are a maiden's eyes,
Soft as a maiden's breath, the wind that flies
Up from the perfumed bosom of the South. 

 Like sentinels, the pines stand in the park;
And hither hastening like rakes that roam,
With lamps to light their wayward footsteps home,
The fire-flies come stagg'ring down the dark.

Wallingford on Embryos

 John Wallingford in "Aeon" has an article, Building Embryos, which unfortunately involves a number of historical fictions and philosophical confusions about the subject. Wallingford says:

In the modern debate over abortion, the doctrine that ‘life begins at conception’ is now so constantly repeated that it’s often assumed to have an ancient, perhaps even scriptural origin. It does not. 

 In fact, in Catholic canon law, the doctrine dates precisely to 12 October 1869, when Pope Pius IX declared excommunication as the penalty for anyone involved in obtaining any abortion. For the nearly 2,000 years that had gone before, however, many Christian thinkers held the embryo to acquire its humanity only gradually. This concept, linked to the ‘animation’ or ‘ensoulment’ of the embryo, arose in laws first set down more than 3,000 years ago that imposed increasingly harsher penalties for causing the loss of a pregnancy as it progressed.

This is entirely muddled. It has never been controversial to claim that 'life begins at conception', because 'conception' has always been the term for the generation of a living thing. What Wallingford is doing is confusing multiple different things. One strand in the tangle is the debate between preformation and epigenesis (which is the immediate context of this passage in the article); another is the contrast between two different accounts of conception, the ancient one in which conception is seen as a sort of cooking process extending through time and the modern one in which conception is seen as the (for practical purposes) near-instantaneous fertilization of egg by sperm; a third is the legal question of when in the calendar one should set the cut-off for murder as opposed to other kinds of homicide and homicide-related crimes. All three of these are completely different matters, and they are jumbled here as if they were the same issue. 

Pius IX also did not, contrary to what is claimed, make some massive change in Church doctrine; he removed the dividing line between treating abortion as deserving lesser penalties or greater penalties in canon law. This did not affect any matter of "doctrine"; it was a purely legal decision. It's sometimes thought that one of the motivations in the decision was that biological discoveries in the previous century had made the sharp dividing line previously used look too arbitrary and unsupported, but the point would have been practical, not doctrinal. It is certainly not the case -- which Wallingford seems to imply -- that there was any denial that there is a progressive development in embryos; indeed, it was likely the reverse -- the fact that there was a progressive development made less defensible any sharp line (a point Wallingford himself makes). It also didn't suddenly "reverse" (as Wallingford later claims) any doctrinal point. As far back as we can manage to trace the point one way or another, we can find prohibitions against using any means of abortion at any time in the process; this is what we find in the Didache, in the Church Fathers, in the penitential handbooks, and the like. Whenever theologians talk about the matter at all, they are quite consistent on this particular point. What has changed over time are various penalties under canon law, civil law, criminal law, etc., and the legal classifications that are used to assign those penalties. 

Wallingford is also confused about words like 'progressive' and 'gradualist' in the context of talking about 'becoming human', which he confuses with the notion of progressive and gradualism in which there are stages leading up to becoming human. For instance, he calls 'progressive' and 'gradualist' views that actually are not progressive or gradualist about becoming human (which would require that there be a movement from human-ish to less perfectly human to more perfectly human) but instead hold that the embryo or fetus or infant becomes human suddenly, not gradually, after a process. This is, I think, related to his confusion of matters concerned with the preformation/epigenesis controversy with matters concerned with one's account of conception.

What is perhaps most disturbing is that Wallingford doesn't grasp that the most immediate ethical issues are not associated with any of these things he has discussed but with how to treat things that are human or closely linked to humans, in such a way as to uphold human dignity; he seems to have the notion that ethical worries on the subject are all tied to purely arbitrary religious decisions, when in reality they would obviously arise anyway because human embryos are closely linked to human beings by various continuities, even on the gerrymandering assumption that they should not be considered themselves 'human'.  That assumption might change assessments of seriousness or urgency, but it does not in fact eliminate most of the ethical questions, because there is no way to deal with embryos that does not at least imply things about the moral value of human beings.

Links of Note

 * Aslam Farouk-Alli reviews Ahmed Vall Dine's novel, Danishmand, at "New Lines Magazine".

* Michael Dickson, Musical Notation

* Brad East, Mother of the Unborn God, at "Commonweal"

* Nathan Rockwood, Two (Failed) Versions of Hume's Argument Against Miracles (PDF)

* Robert Keim, A Reader's Guide to the Mystical Writings of Julian of Norwich, at "New Liturgical Movement"

* Cruz Davis, Non-Spatial Matters: On the Possibility of Non-Spatial Material Objects (PDF)

* Clifton Stringer, Apologia Pro Fido: Rationalist Platonism in and for Herbert McCabe's Proof of God, at "Eclectic Orthodoxy"

* Alberto Oya, Unamuno’s Religious Faith in San Manuel Bueno, mártir (PDF)

* Céline Leboeuf interviews Colin Chamberlain at "Why Philosophy?"

* Francesca Bellazzi, The Gene as a Natural Kind (PDF)

* Dan Williams, Debunking Disinformation Myths, Part 1: This is not the "disinformation age", and Debunking Disinformation Myths, Part 2: The Politics of Big Disinfo

* Alexandre Guay and Quentin Ruyant, Lagrangian possibilities (PDF)

Good Prose and Good Poetry

 The definition of good prose is—proper words in their proper places;—of good verse—the most proper words in their proper places. The propriety is in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault. In the very best styles, as Southey's, you read page after page, understanding the author perfectly, without once taking notice of the medium of communication;—it is as if he had been speaking to you all the while. But in verse you must do more;—there the words, the media, must be beautiful, and ought to attract your notice—yet not so much and so perpetually as to destroy the unity which ought to result from the whole poem. This is the general rule, but, of course, subject to some modifications, according to the different kinds of prose or verse. Some prose may approach towards verse, as oratory, and therefore a more studied exhibition of the media may be proper; and some verse may border more on mere narrative, and there the style should be simpler. But the great thing in poetry is, quocunque modo, to effect a unity of impression upon the whole; and a too great fulness and profusion of point in the parts will prevent this.

[Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk, July 3, 1833.]

Matthias

Today is the feast of St. Matthias, Apostle. He's one of the more intriguing apostles. Below is a revised post from 2022 for the day.

***********

The story about Matthias in Acts 1, which is the only Biblical information we have about him, is interesting in a number of ways. It occurs between the Ascension and Pentecost; Jesus has given his disciples their mission and ascended into heaven, but they have not yet received the full measure of the Holy Spirit. Because of this, it often gets skipped over. But we learn a number of things from it. The disciples are meeting regularly in fairly large groups. Of the leaders, the eleven Apostles left are explicitly mentioned, as are Mary the Mother of Jesus, the Women, and the Brothers of the Lord. (The Women are mentioned not as if they were just a generic bunch of women but as if they were a well-defined and perhaps even formally defined group; they seem clearly to be part of the leadership. This fits with a number of things said in the Gospel of Luke, which suggests that they supported the other disciples materially and financially, e.g., Luke 8:1-3, Luke 23:54-56; cp. also Mark 15:40-41. This is something we find done by the virgins and the widows a bit later, so it's likely that they were the origin or model of those groups.) The gathering that chooses Matthias has about 120 disciples all told (which number may have only included the men, since Peter may have only addressed the men).

Peter is quite clearly the leader here; he tells them that Scripture says that Judas Iscariot needs to be replaced (the word he uses is dei, i.e., 'It is required') and they do it. In fact, while it is never explicitly said, the whole thing is structured as if Peter had called the meeting specifically in order to do what they end up doing. Peter clearly takes the replacement of an Apostle to be something requiring a more-than-ordinary justification; it's not a mere modification of church order, but something requiring divine support. Peter's reason is based on an interpretation of Scriptural prophecy; he quotes Psalm 69 and Psalm 109. The latter is straightforward in its application ("May another take his place of leadership"), although the word for 'place of leadership' is actually 'supervision', episkopen. The other one reads a bit oddly in English: "May his place be deserted; let there be no one dwelling in it." It seems a little odd to quote a passage that no one should dwell in his place in an argument that you should fill his place. But read in context, the verses both come from very similar passages: they are from the psalms that tend to embarrass people today, the ones in which the enemies of the psalmist are cursed. The verses in Acts 1:18-19, about what happened to Judas, are often read as parenthetical, but the thought of Peter's argument follows directly from them, not from Acts 1:17. The line of thought is: The Scripture had to be fulfilled which spoke of Judas (v. 16); Judas was one of their ministry (diakonias) (v. 17); with the payment for his injustice (adikias), he bought a field and died (v. 18); everybody in Jerusalem heard about it, so called it the Field of Blood (v. 19); because Scripture says, "May his place be deserted...." and "May another take his supervision...." Thus Peter is reading the cursing passages of the Psalms as being about Judas. What it says about Judas in Psalm 69 is fulfilled by his death; so what it says about him in Psalm 109 must be fulfilled as well. 

I also find it interesting that they don't replace him until it is known that he is dead; the word for 'dwell' here (katoikon) suggests permanent settlement, so the curse on Judas is for his apostleship not to be permanent. This at least suggests very strongly, I think, why the Twelve did not keep replacing themselves as they died; they seem to have regarded the position as something distinctly attaching to each, each permanently 'dwelling' in it. (And this would fit with Jesus' comments about the twelve thrones of judgment, for instance.) Thus I think it's important to emphasize that Judas cannot be replaced except under divine authority. The quotations are not rhetorical decorations, in other words; they are divine warrant for an action that Peter thinks would normally not be allowable. Acts shows us other people with apostolic ministry; but none of them ever becomes one of the Twelve. Paul clearly regards his divine commission as giving him apostolic authority; but he is not one of the Twelve, and never claims to be.

In any case, what Peter says is necessary is to make "one of these", i.e., the Twelve, from the men who accompanied the Lord Jesus the whole time from his Baptism to his Ascension. This is interesting for indicating what Peter thinks of the Twelve, namely, that one of their major functions is specifically to be familiar with Christ's ministry so as to witness properly to the Resurrection. It also indicates why Luke begins by retelling the Ascension; it establishes the link to what immediately follows. The men in the assembly pick two -- Joseph Barsabbas, also called Justus, and Matthias. 

Peter's requirement ends up being the entire backstory we know about Matthias: he was with Jesus the whole time from the Baptism to the Ascension. Later in Acts there is a figure named Judas Barsabbas, who is probably Joseph's brother; later tradition suggests Joseph was one of the Seventy in Luke 10 and afterward became bishop of Eleutheropolis, but as with Matthias, all we certainly know is that he was with Jesus the whole time from the Baptism to the Ascension.

But two is not "one of these". So what the disciples do then is pray to God, knower of the hearts of all, that He will point out which one of the these two that He has chosen to take the place for this service (diakonias) and apostleship (aposteles) from which Judas traveled (the word could also mean 'die') "to his own place" (which obviously is an allusion to the 'place' mentioned in the Psalms mentioned by Peter). Then they cast lots. Casting lots was, of course, common for making decisions, as it is even now. Perhaps more likely on general grounds, lots were the standard way in which Temple duties were assigned. It is also possible, given the comment about Judas going to his own place, that they had Leviticus 16:8 in the background. In the atonement offering, the high priest makes an atonement before the Lord with the sacrifice of a bull and two goats. The goats are split, one for the Lord and one "for azazel" (in the Hebrew; we don't know for sure what the word meant) or "sent away" (in the Septuagint), by lot, and the one "for azazel" is then sent into the wilderness.  Regardless, when the lots were cast, Matthias became one of the Twelve Apostles.

And that's the last we hear about him in Scripture. According to the most popular tradition, after preaching in Jerusalem a while he went down into "Ethiopia" (by which is likely not meant Ethiopia but Colchis in the Caucasus, in modern-day Georgia; Herodotus claimed that the Colchians were descended from the Ethiopians). For his death, the traditions are all over the place; he was martyred by crucifixion in Sebastopolis (in modern-day Turkey), or by stoning and beheading in Jerusalem, or by stoning in Colchis, or he simply died of old age in Jerusalem. 

Romance and Pride and Passion Pass

 A Second Childhood
by G. K. Chesterton 

When all my days are ending
 And I have no song to sing,
 I think I shall not be too old
 To stare at everything;
 As I stared once at a nursery door
 Or a tall tree and a swing. 

 Wherein God's ponderous mercy hangs
 On all my sins and me,
 Because He does not take away
 The terror from the tree
 And stones still shine along the road
 That are and cannot be. 

 Men grow too old for love, my love,
 Men grow too old for wine,
 But I shall not grow too old to see
 Unearthly daylight shine,
 Changing my chamber's dust to snow
 Till I doubt if it be mine. 

 Behold, the crowning mercies melt,
 The first surprises stay;
 And in my dross is dropped a gift
 For which I dare not pray:
 That a man grow used to grief and joy
 But not to night and day. 

 Men grow too old for love, my love,
 Men grow too old for lies;
 But I shall not grow too old to see
 Enormous night arise,
 A cloud that is larger than the world
 And a monster made of eyes. 

 Nor am I worthy to unloose
 The latchet of my shoe;
 Or shake the dust from off my feet
 Or the staff that bears me through
 On ground that is too good to last,
 Too solid to be true. 

 Men grow too old to woo, my love,
 Men grow too old to wed:
 But I shall not grow too old to see
 Hung crazily overhead
 Incredible rafters when I wake
 And find I am not dead. 

 A thrill of thunder in my hair:
 Though blackening clouds be plain,
 Still I am stung and startled
 By the first drop of the rain:
 Romance and pride and passion pass
 And these are what remain. 

 Strange crawling carpets of the grass,
 Wide windows of the sky:
 So in this perilous grace of God
 With all my sins go I:
 And things grow new though I grow old,
 Though I grow old and die.

The 'cloud that is larger than the world' is, of course, the Milky Way. 

Evening Note for Sunday, May 12

 Thought for the Evening: Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

Last year and into this year, there had been a lot of buzz about the first season of Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, as an unusually good anime series. I recently had the chance to watch it and I can confirm that it is extremely good. It adapts the popular manga, Sōsō no Furīren ('Funerary Frieren'), up into about volume six of the current run, which is at present a little over thirteen volumes. Part of the reason for the quality is that it has an extremely good first episode, which introduces us very quickly and very well to a set of characters. But it's also a series that puts a great deal of thought into characterization and theme and mood, and gives plenty of occasion for thought.

The story is about Frieren, an elf mage. Frieren at one point had joined a party of adventurers, consisting of Himmel the Hero, Heiter the Priest, and Eisen the Dwarf. (All of the names of characters and places, and some of the cultural elements, are German in inspiration.) They successfully defeated the Demon King after ten years. But the series is not that story; it begins after their success. Their little party disbands, and Frieren goes off journeying while each of the others does their own thing. But this is where the key point lies: Frieren, being an elf, is immortal. When she goes off wandering, she does for fifty years. For her, being over a thousand years old, that is nothing. But Himmel and Heiter are mortal men, and even a dwarf like Eisen, although much longer lived than a human being, is not immortal. Himmel dies not long after she returns, and Frieren finds herself profoundly affected without knowing why. Adventuring with someone for ten years was for her like knowing someone for a few weeks, but she finds herself wishing that she had put more effort into knowing Himmel, and eventually, after Heiter's own death, Heiter as well. She sets out to revisit a few of the sites of their old trials and successes, eventually joined by two young human orphans, Fern, a mage who had been adopted and trained by Heiter, and Stark, a warrior whom Eisen (himself still alive but getting too old for heavy adventuring) had trained. Part of the adventure is looking for the semi-mythical land of Aureole, the land where souls rest, just in case it exists and Frieren can talk to Himmel one last time. (Thus the 'Beyond Journey's End' in the English version of the title is cleverly ambiguous: the whole story takes place after the original journey to defeat the Demon King, but the journey they are on at present is itself colored by the possibility of what might happen after its end.) The whole series, then, is about death, but also about how people we know only briefly can still matter even when they are gone.

It is also about the importance of small, brief things; it could hardly be otherwise, since human lives are also small, brief things. One of the things Frieren has always done as she wanders around is collect spells. Many of these spells are simple or silly, like a spell to make grapes sour, although we often discover that some of the weirder and sillier ones have some deeper personal significance for Frieren. The most important of these, which keeps coming up, is the spell to make a field of flowers, a seemingly useless and ephemeral spell, particularly for a battle-mage who spends centuries fighting demons, that nonetheless turns out to have a surprisingly immense power to bring people together and unite them in personal connection. The spell parallels in some ways Himmel's tendency to do small acts of helping others. The story shows us that the memory even of heroes fades, and eventually vanishes, among human beings, but some of the strongest memories of Himmel and the rest of the party have very little to do with the Demon King and a lot to do with these small deeds in out of the way villages. Such small almsdeeds are themselves like the spell to make a field of flowers. All of civilization is woven out of spells to make a field of flowers.

The series also has a good depiction of evil, which is something that anime in particularly often struggles with. The demons are not, as they are in many fantasy stories today, just another race of monster; they are what we might call sociopathic psychopaths. They are cunning predators and we are their prey.  Because of this, the anime manages to depict one of the greatest moral dangers to human beings, the person who treats words as nothing but tools of manipulation. I would actually put the depiction here in the highest tier of treatments (a tier in which I would put Milton's Satan, Austen's Lady Susan, and Tolkien's Saruman); Frieren is particularly good at showing how dangerous this perversion of language can be even when you know that it's happening.

And the characterization is extraordinarily well done. Frieren herself could have seemed a rather blank character, but the series is very good at showing us how she is not, like the demons, devoid of real personal emotion; her emotions are just on a very different clock than ours, and many things that affect us very deeply are very light and glancing things in her millenium of life, the matter of a moment. Nor is she the only one; over and over we are introduced to characters in ways that immediately connect us to them.

In short, if you have a chance to see this quiet, melancholy, and very enjoyable series, I recommend it quite highly, and it joins Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and Puella Magi Madoka Magica as one of the most thought-provoking anime series I have seen.

Various Links of Interest

* A. J. Barker, The Division of Sacred Scripture

* Gregory Salmieri, Aristotle on Selfishness: Understanding the Iconoclasm of Nicomachean Ethics ix.8 (PDF)

* William F. Vallicella, Four Kinds of Ontological Argument, at "Philosophy in Progress"

* Takuay Niikiwa, Consciousness is Sublime (PDF)

* A previously unknown poem by C. S. Lewis was recently discovered.

* Sergio Cremaschi, Descartes's Philosophical Novel and the Scottish Enlightenment (PDF)

* Freddie deBoer, The Modern Curse of Overoptimization

Currently Reading

Blind Harry, The Wallace
Eusebius, The Church History
Stanley L. Jaki, Neo-Arianism as Foreseen by Newman
C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century

In Audiobook

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
Agatha Christie, The Seven Dials Mystery
C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet

Two Poem Drafts

 I Am Not the Sort of Man Who Can Be Known, O Beautiful One

I am not the sort of man who can be known, O beautiful one;
you can study a thousand years and not be nearly done,
and when at the end of a long and memory-forgotten age
you will have reached to the last volume's final page,
you will look back, and all the former books will be but dust
and those in steel covers will be fragmented to rust.
In that far future, amid great cities ruined and past,
perhaps you may think that you know me at last,
but the libraries of my volumes are like the heavens and their stars,
and you will have but begun on a journey long and far.
I am not the sort of man who can be known, O beautiful one,
though your study last the lifetime of a young and blazing sun.

Middle Age

The day of life is bright and clear
but drowsy is the air;
the breeze at times is cool on skin
but hot the sunlight-flare.
With half a day of work to do
I barely keep awake,
and all the energy I draw,
the laughing sunray takes.
When back I look to dewy dawn,
I wonder at the time
when breezes cool with vigor blessed
auroral lights sublime.
When futureward to evening dim
I look to day grown old,
I wonder at my lassitude
in brilliant noonday gold.
But noon is now, and over-hot;
I sweat and want to sleep,
and wonder how to last the day
and fall into a heap.

Apostle of Andalusia

 Today is the feast of St. Juan de Avila, Doctor of the Church. An always timely point from one of his letters:

The Israelites who journeyed through the desert had appetites so disordered that they could not enjoy the manna "containing in itself all sweetness," which God sent them. Their blindness was so great that they did not find fault with themselves, or with the evil condition of their health, but with the food, which was of the most savoury kind. They asked for some other sort of viand with which they thought they would be better satisfied and pleased:—it was given them, but at the cost of their lives. We are to learn by this that even if the things of God are not always agreeable to us, still we must not wish for what is contrary to them, however delightful it may seem to us, for without doubt it would poison our souls. We should rather rid ourselves of the disgust we feel for religion, and then, when the appetites of our soul are healthy, we shall feel a right and pleasant relish for the food God gives His children.

[St. John of Avila, Letters of Blessed Juan de Avila, pp. 90-91.]

Dashed Off XI

 resemblance, contiguity, and causation as elements of design (cp. Morehead)

It is almost always the worst people who spend time dwelling in detail on the sins of others.

Metaphors are possible due to our ability and need to think of one thing on the model of another, so that the term 'metaphor' is sometimes used for the latter.

When Nietzsche says that truth is a "mobile army of emtaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms", it is natural to focus on the depreciation of truth, but Nietzsche is primarily intending the exaltation of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms as the coin of thought, with truth as their residual trace when their nature is forgotten, the bones of departed metaphors.

"Literal meaning" and "literal truth" are both figures of speech.

The universe itself transcends human understanding because there is so much to its intelligibility. This is the reason for the temptation to pantheism, for in this the universe is like God.

Here in the region of dissimilitude, our understanding of ourselves is always imperfect and defective.

To be done in a Christian way, physical and spiritual almsdeeds must be done as expressions of or as symbols of Christian truth and salvation.

Missionary work seems often like a capacitor; it must 'build up' and then 'leap across'.

It is a mistake to confuse reserve with insincerity.

spinning coin analogy for quantum phenomena

"There is no Appetite in human Nature more prevalent, nor more universal, than that for Honour and Respect. And the Pleasure arising from it is of the most refined Kind; Honour and Respect being by Nature, a voluntary Tribute paid to intrinsic Merit. Hence it is, that no other Passion is more friendly to Virtue. But tho' all Men are fond of Respect, the Bulk of Mankind, unable or unwilling to purchase it at such a Price as that of real Merit, endeavour to secure it to themselves at a cheaper Rate." Henry Home

In everything human beings desire naturally, they seek an order and system, and where they do not find one naturally or even not sufficiently consistent to their need and taste, they create an artificial order an system.

honors annexed to office, estate, family, person

(1) What ceases to exist does so either from a destructive cause or the removal of a sustaining cause.
(2) What is influenced receives the act of what influences.
(3) What coheres does not cease to cohere save by a difference of causes.

In narratives, we fit people to story-roles, and these story-roles are sometimes inherited and sometimes formed within the story.

When scripture speaks of God's knowledge of the heart, it often uses the concept of testing, which is not a passive reception but a kind of making. (For instance, Dt. 8:2, 2 Chr 32:31.)

unction & undischarged obligations to God

In Philemon 8-9, Paul identifies three grounds for his appeal on the basis of love: that he is Paul, that he is an elder, and that he is a prisoner for Christ Jesus.

The fugitive slave interpretation of Philemon first clearly arises in Chrysostom's argument against the view that the letter is on a trifling matter.

slavery as natal alienation and human natality

As the rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night's Dream represent the subreal theatrical, the fairies represent the superreal theatrical: the artificial and the fay, between which is found the natural theatrical of romance, and all going awry as theatricals do.
-- We are the audience for the fairies, who are the audience for the gentles, who are the audience for the mechanicals, all within one play.

In politics as in other things, it is the dose that makes the poison.

Cowering in a bunker will not actually make you feel safe.

Fewer communities, fewer rights.

'Impossible worlds' are possible logical objects; what makes such logical objects 'impossible' is their being associated with truth-valued propositions of a kind, just as the case with 'possible worlds', not their being logical objects. What motivates distinguishing possible and impossible worlds is aligning existential quantifier and possibility operator for purposes of modeling one on the other.

If one models worlds as sets of propositions, one can model propositions as sets of worlds -- the latter takes individual propositions to have meaning within systems of propositions.

Almost all puzzles and paradoxes about possible worlds can be resolved simply by recognizing that possible worlds are not possibilities but beings of reason we use in models of them.

goodness : final cause :: truth : objective cause :: beauty : exemplar cause

incipit/desinit : immutability :: proper part : simplicity :: before/after : atemporality :: boundary : nonlocality

commission to The Adam // Great Commission

What is contingent is necessarily compossible with what is necessary.

What is adiaphoric is necessarily compossible with what is obligatory.

Designed objects often involve relative coincidences, i.e., things that are coincidental, if you focus only on the power of the parts.

"Wherever a relation such as that of *signifying* holds, tehre is a basis for reasoning." Stebbing
"... *to signify* requires (1) what is signified, (2) the signifying sign, (3) the interpreter of the sign as signifying."
"It is impossible to think without using signs, for to think is to go beyond what is sensibly presented."

The only reason we take 'energy' to refer to one thing (have uniqueness of reference) is our belief in the conservation of energy.

The use of metaphor is no more or less 'emotive' than the use of literal language.

While facts are neither true nor false, purported facts may be.

Where bivalence fails is in conditional truth values, truth values as inferred from something (as when I proposition's being true make E false, but leaves O undetermined).

Possible worlds are not merely possible objects, but actual (logical) objects representing the merely possible.

relevant logic as a logic of information flow

Systems that are highly unified are represented as if they were substances, on the model of substances.

The change in the changed is the act of the changer.

creation as the sphere of influence, jurisdiction, and templum of God

sacred proper
sacred by contiguity to sacred
sacred by resemblance to sacred
sacred as effect of sacred

Logicism, formalism, and intuitionism each have portions of mathematics to which they apply well.

the history of philosophy as the phenomenology of bounded ideality

"The sacred is always manifested through something...the sacred expresses itself through soemthing other than itself...." Eliade

"The works of human art are imitations of those of divine art." Aitareya Brahmana 6.27

Phenomenology of religion often weakens itself by not actually looking at religion or religion's objects but at subjective effects of them; it tends to be a phenomenology of religious penumbra.

the readiness to appear-through

the phenomenological method of free variation as a study of the possible and the necessary

exemplary prophecy vs emissary prophecy (Weber)

"A causal uniformity is an abstraction since it connects sets of recurrent characteristics belonging to events which do not recur." Stebbing
"Every hypothesis springs from the union of knowledge and sagacity."
"Measurement is the process of manipulating objects in order to assign ratios to represent some property of these objects."
"The result of the operation of measuring is, then, expressed as a ratio of the measuring object to the measuring appliance, and hence, ultimately to the standard unit."

Constant conjunction is not a causal relation but an effect.

principative and ministrative modes of virtue

"Prudence and politics are the same virtue, but they have different being." Aristotle NE 6.8, 1141b25

"The efforts of the poetic fancy to represent to itself the nature and development of things divine and human precede, excite to, and prepare the way for philosophical inquiry." Ueberweg

The ultimate state of involuntary servitude is to have to die for someone else's convenience.

Every law has to be interpreted (a) in light of reason (b) in light of the good of the community (c) in light of the originating intent (d) in light of the manner in which it formally becomes law. To ignore any of these four is to distort the law.

Constant conjunction, as an effect, requires a cause, and it is not possible to interpret constant conjunction as a causal relation without implicitly taking the cause to be in the antecedent; without such an assumption, nothing about constant conjunction even looks like a cause-and-effect squence.

"A demand for justification is normally taken to imply a *discrepancy with some acceptable standard*. And a satisfactory justification is one which neutralizes the apparent discrepancy by showing it to be consistent with or deducible from, the relevant standard." Max Black

Part of our certainty in deduction is inductive; the logical forms do not change on us.

We can deductively prove the viability of induction for simple cases of simple enumeration: There are three things, A, B, C; A is X, B is X, C is X; therefore all of these are X.

When Newton speaks of evanescent quantites, he literally means they are in the process of vanishing. Newton's unique contribution -- and it is unique, because mathematicians did not follow him in this in developing the calculus -- was to think of mathematical objects as kinds of motion. Lines were literally motions of points, limits were literally final motions, and so on.

Rites may be treated as words, and words as rites.

propositional vs. predicate incipit and desinit

Lewis Carroll's Game of Logic

 I was amused to see this video of two mathematicians trying for an hour to figure out from scratch how to play Lewis Carroll's Game of Logic:

They struggle a lot, in part because they are pretty clearly rusty with syllogisms, although they begin slowly to make serious headway once they realize that Carroll's literal diagrams are square Venn diagrams. This is an important aspect of them; one reason why Carroll developed literal diagrams is that he wanted diagrams that would do what Venn diagrams but scale better to larger problems, leading to the famous Octoliteral Diagram in Symbolic Logic:

That's for a Sorites with eight distinct terms.

However, the Game of Logic is played only with Triliteral Diagrams (for premises) and a Biliteral Diagram (for the conclusion); the goal of the game is to take a pair of premises on the Triliteral Diagram and reduce it to a conclusion on the Biliteral Diagram. In other words, you are doing basic syllogisms; you'll have three terms (x, y, and m), which can have either positive or negative forms (Carroll prefers to designate negative forms with an apostrophe, like x', y', and m'). Your premises will share a middle term (m) and in effect you get the Biliteral Diagram by pulling out the middle term from the Triliteral Diagram.

The Triliteral Diagram looks like this (if we mark what terms each compartment covers):

The whole Diagram is the universe of discourse, and we are just dividing the universe of discourse according to the positive and negative versions of the terms. If the Universe is "Dogs", then in the upper left outer corner we have X Y Not-M Dogs; in the upper left inner corner we have X Y M Dogs, in the lower right outer corner we have Not-X Not-Y Not-M Dogs, and so forth, whatever our terms X Y and M may be.

To actually play, we use two counters. One counter is a DOESN'T EXIST counter (Grey, in the Game); the other counter is a DEFINITELY EXISTS counter (Red, in the Game). Those are my terms, rather than Carroll's, but they are accurate, because one counter something definitely exists in the universe, while other says something definitely doesn't exist in the universe, given your premises.

Suppose you have a premise, No X are M. If no X are M, we have to put a DOESN'T EXIST counter in any box that has both X and M. That would be the upper inside boxes in the center. If you had a different premise, Some X are M, however, that tells you that there is definitely an X that is M in this universe, BUT it doesn't tell you whether this is Y or Not-Y. So the DEFINITELY EXISTS counters get put on lines -- if Some X are M, then it has to go on the line between the two upper inside boxes, because we know there is something in the X M boxes, but we don't know yet whether it should go in the Y or the Not-Y box.

This is where the dynamics of the game come in, because the DEFINITELY EXISTS counters like sitting on the fence, but the DOESN'T EXIST counters are bullies, and are always knocking the DEFINITELY EXISTS off the fence into a box. If I have

No X are M

then, as said, before, that will put DOESN'T EXIST counters in the upper inside boxes. If I add to this the premise

All Y are M,

this will do two things: it will put DOESN'T EXIST counters in all Y Not-M boxes, but, according to the Game rules, it will be a DEFINITELY EXISTS counter on a line between Y M boxes (because it doesn't tell us anything about X or Not-X). The Y Not-M boxes are the left outside boxes, and we'll put DOESN'T EXIST counters in those. The Y M boxes are the left inside boxes; we put a DEFINITELY EXISTS counter on the fence between the two.

But the first premise told us that the upper left inside box had a DOESN'T EXIST counter in it. DOESN'T EXIST counters are bullies; they knock DEFINITELY EXISTS counters off the fence, so we move our DEFINITELY EXIST counter from the line between the two Y M boxes into the Not-X Y M box (i.e., the lower left inside box).

To get our conclusion, we turn this Triliteral Diagram into a Biliteral Diagram. A Biliteral Diagram looks like the Triliteral Diagram with the center boxes (M and M') taken out, leaving only the big quadrants. The rules for reducing a Triliteral Diagram to a Biliteral Diagram are simple:

(1) If both parts of a quadrant in the Triliteral Diagram have DOESN'T EXIST counters, put a DOESN'T EXIST counter in the same quadrant of the Biliteral Diagram.

(2) If a DEFINITELY EXISTS counter is definitely in one of the quadrants (not on the fence between two quadrants), put a DEFINITELY EXISTS counter in the same quadrant of the Biliteral Diagram.

(3) All other counters (DOESN'T EXIST counters that only cover part of a quadrant, DEFINITELY EXISTS counters that are on a fence between two quadrants) disappear.

Thus the whole Game of Logic is just ordinary syllogisms, where the Game rules have the same effect that rules of syllogisms do, although Carroll has his own particular interpretation of categorical propositions. In Carroll's interpretation, in the Triliteral Diagram:

"All S are P" gives you two DOESN'T EXIST counters and one DEFINITELY EXISTS counter;
"No S are P" gives you two DOESN'T EXIST counters;
"Some S are P" gives you one DEFINITELY EXISTS counter;
"Some S are not P" gives you one DEFINITELY EXISTS counter.

You can also get completely coherent games if you change these interpretations so that "All S are P" only gives you two DOESN'T EXIST counters (this makes the Game work a bit more like how syllogisms are treated in predicate calculus, by removing affirmative subalternation), or so that "No S are P" gives you two DOESN'T EXIST counters and one DEFINITELY EXISTS counter (this makes the Game work a bit more like traditional Aristotelian syllogisms, by adding negative subalternation). 

You can learn more about the Game of Logic from Carroll's own book on it (the one that the mathematicians were having trouble with in the video above), The Game of Logic.

Their Gray Thoughts, Their Strange Thoughts

 "I Know the Stars"
by Sara Teasdale 

I know the stars by their names,
 Aldebaran, Altair,
 And I know the path they take
 Up heaven's broad blue stair. 

 I know the secrets of men
 By the look of their eyes,
 Their gray thoughts, their strange thoughts
 Have made me sad and wise. 

 But your eyes are dark to me
 Though they seem to call and call
 I cannot tell if you love me
 Or do not love me at all.

I know many things,
 But the years come and go.
 I shall die not knowing
 The thing I long to know.

Seasons of the Soul

I am currently mired in the first stages of end-of-term grading, but one thing that I have been thinking about recently is what might be called 'seasons of the soul'.

We have what are called passions, things that we undergo on particular occasions because something moves us to undergo them. There are many different kinds of passions, but an old tradition recognizes a list of four principal passions, called so because they are those passions to which other passions tend, and therefore mark general categories of passion or of the kinds of processes that unfold in passions: hope, fear, joy, and sorrow. They are usually distinguished according to possession versus anticipation of object on the one hand and goodness or badness of object on the other:

hope: anticipated good
fear: anticipated bad
joy: possessed good
sorrow: possessed bad

'Hope' in this scheme is sometimes replaced by 'desire'; whatever the term one uses, the essential idea is being moved toward an anticipated good. Again, there are other passions besides these four -- love, hatred, daring, anger, despair being commonly mentioned ones -- but these are the ones that are in some sense most directly related to any possible object of passion.

Passions are, as the name implies, passive, forms of being-affected by something. When the passions are involved in active responses to things, we call this passion-action complex an 'emotion', although in practice English does not distinguish passions and emotions at all, resulting in what I think is an almost universal confusion about human motivation on every single topic to which it is relevant. 

Passions and emotions are occurrent and occasional. But we also speak of 'moods'. A 'mood' literally is a way the mind is; in Germannic languages, the word and its cognates were always originally associated with something like what the Greeks called thymos, the heart, the natural courage, the capacity for zeal, but in English this has been generalized. It is very difficult to pin down, but I think we can see it as the overall tenor of an entire extended process of passions and emotions. A melancholy mood will cover many different kinds of passions and emotions; it can even include joyful passions and celebratory emotions. But the overall movement of the passions and emotions in a melancholy mood carries a theme of sedateness tending to sorrow. In a melancholy mood, you might expect sorrow to be recurring and joy, while possible, to be dampened. In an irascible mood, you would expect anger, at least incipient anger, to be recurrent and joys and hopes to be dampened. A pleasant mood would tend toward passions associated with good objects and have dampened versions of any passions with bad objects. And so forth.

But it seems that there is something beyond moods, which is what I am calling 'seasons'. As moods are the overall tenor of an entire extended process of passions and emotions, seasons are the overall tenor of a somewhat coherent process of passions, emotions, and moods for an extended part of our lives.  Human beings have lives with joyful seasons and sorrowful seasons, irritable seasons and hopeful seasons, seasons of fear and of love and of hatred. Some seasons are tempestuous, some are quiet. Because they last relatively long periods -- anything from weeks to decades -- I think seasons play a significant role in our life-choices. The kinds of choices we tend to make in a joyful season are very different from the kinds of choices we tend to make in a sorrowful season. Tempestuous seasons result in different patterns of choice than quiet seasons, and hopeful seasons in different patterns than fearful seasons. And, of course, since seasons are the overall tenor of very complex things, they can have all sorts of variations and subtleties that over a period affect our choices. For that reason, getting a sense of the season you are currently living through plays a significant role in making prudent decisions.

A Very Concise Demonstration

 The Mathematician in Love
by William Rankine 

I. A mathematician fell madly in love
With a lady, young, handsome, and charming:
By angles and ratios harmonic he strove
Her curves and proportions all faultless to prove.
As he scrawled hieroglyphics alarming. 

 II. He measured with care, from the ends of a base,
The arcs which her features subtended:
Then he framed transcendental equations, to trace
The flowing outlines of her figure and face,
And thought the result very splendid. 

 III. He studied (since music has charms for the fair)
The theory of fiddles and whistles, --
Then composed, by acoustic equations, an air,
Which, when 'twas performed, made the lady's long hair
Stand on end, like a porcupine's bristles. 

 IV. The lady loved dancing: -- he therefore applied,
To the polka and waltz, an equation;
But when to rotate on his axis he tried,
His centre of gravity swayed to one side,
And he fell, by the earth's gravitation. 

 V. No doubts of the fate of his suit made him pause,
For he proved, to his own satisfaction,
That the fair one returned his affection; -- "because,
"As every one knows, by mechanical laws,
"Re-action is equal to action." 

 VI. "Let x denote beauty, -- y, manners well-bred, --
"z, Fortune, -- (this last is essential), --
"Let L stand for love" -- our philosopher said, --
"Then L is a function of x, y, and z,
"Of the kind which is known as potential." 

 VII. "Now integrate L with respect to d t,
"(t Standing for time and persuasion);
"Then, between proper limits, 'tis easy to see,
"The definite integral Marriage must be: --
"(A very concise demonstration)." 

 VIII. Said he -- "If the wandering course of the moon
"By Algebra can be predicted,
"The female affections must yield to it soon" --
-- But the lady ran off with a dashing dragoon,
And left him amazed and afflicted.

William Rankine was one of the primary nineteenth-century contributors to thermodynamics, developing a unified theory of heat engines, creating the Rankine temperature scale, establishing the first widely accepted definition of 'energy', coining the term 'potential energy', and more. He was apparently also a very good musician and singer, and sometimes wrote his own songs, of which this comic example is the most famous. 

Links of Note

 * Dwayne Moore, The Argument from Reason and the Dual Process Reply (PDF)

* Santiago Chame, The Non-kinetic Origins of Aristotle's Concept of Ἐνέργεια (PDF)

* Edmund Waldstein, The So-Called 'New Natural Law Theory', at "The Josias"

* Mark Fisher, What would Thucydides say?, at "Aeon"

* James Chamberlain, Hume's 'General Rules' (PDF)

* The Stone of Destiny was a doorstep, at "The History Blog"

* Diane Mantagna interviews Edward Feser on Dignitas Infinita, at "The Catholic Thing"

* Mark Agrios, A Very Elementary Introduction to Sheaves (PDF)

* Hedda Hassel Mørch, Phenomenal Powers (PDF)

* Freddie deBoer, Why Doesn't AI Want to Show Me Jesus Washing the Feet of His Disciples?

* Elle Griffin, No one buys books, at "The Elysian"

[ADDED LATER: John Michael Greer has an interesting post on Griffin's essay, Lenocracy in Extremis: The Case of Publishing, at "Ecosophia".]

* Francesca Bellazzi, Biochemical functions (PDF)

* Christine Norvell, Work and Leisure: A Pieper Primer, at "Front Porch Republic"

* Nicholas Colgrove, Defending the Doctrine of the Mean Against Counterexamples: A General Strategy (PDF)

Three Petals Out of the Sunflower

 Three Flower Petals
by Archibald Lampman 

 What saw I yesterday walking apart
In a leafy place where the cattle wait?
Something to keep for a charm in my heart--
A little sweet girl in a garden gate.
Laughing she lay in the gold sun's might,
And held for a target to shelter her,
In her little soft fingers, round and white,
The gold rimmed face of a sunflower. 

Laughing she lay on the stone that stands
For a rough hewn step in that sunny place,
And her yellow hair hung down to her hands,
Shadowing over her dimpled face.
Her eyes like the blue of the sky made dim
With the might of the sun that looked at her,
Shone laughing over the serried rim,
Golden set, of the sunflower. 

 Laughing, for token she gave to me
Three petals out of the sunflower.
When the petals are withered and gone, shall be
Three verses of mine for praise of her,
That a tender dream of her face may rise,
And lighten me yet in another hour,
Of her sunny hair and her beautiful eyes,
Laughing over the gold sunflower.

Dashed Off X

 In the Church, one individual subject, Christ, becomes a coexistent community of persons, by moral, juridical, and sacramental incorporation.

"Just as the eye looking forth in every direction does not see itself, so the intellect, attentive to and occupied with external objects, escapes notice of itself. The intellect scarcely ever, or not without supreme effort and difficulty, turns its keen vision to itself and its own operations." Reid (Oration IV (1762))

Richard Hooker's modes of preaching: catechism, public reading of Scripture, reading of Apocrypha and Homilies

The Eucharist, through the concurrence of divine power, is the instrumental cause of a mystical participation in Christ for all of the prayerful faithful participating in the Mass, even those who do not receive, because Christ actually is in the Eucharist by both Body and Blood.

Hooker's degrees of ecclesiastical honours:
(1) titles
(2) place
(3) ornament of dress
(4) attendance by ministers
(5) privilege
(6) endowment

Kings may be able to summon bishops under their authority to council, by means of their monarchical power to convene, but they cannot make them episcopate in council.

"The miserys of Men are many; yet many things we esteem evil very generally are found good without taking a larger view than of Mankind itself." Colin Maclaurin (to Hutcheson, 22 Oct. 1728)

A manor is a legal construct consisting of demesnes and services both customary and contractual, organized over time by a customary law inherent in the manor itself, arising from time and usage.

the Church as 'imagined community' (as objective cause)
the Church as matrix for experience
the Church as divine instrument
the Church as the destination of its members

possible solutions to problems of pluralism
(1) imposed framework
(2) common framework
(3) improvised frameworks

intrinsically narrative goods

The world necessarily has vast numbers of repeating patterns. -> use of analogy as path of discovery

Very precise inquiry can get you very precise results, but is assumption-sensitive: slight errors at the beginning can throw everything off. Messy inquiry is not as assumption-sensitive -- you can discover even if your starting point is wrong -- but has difficulty getting nonmessy results. Inquiry needs to oscillate between the precise and the messy.

kinds of interpretation of QM
(1) classical-quantum dualism
(2) quantum reduced to classical (broadly understood)
(3) classical reduced to quantum
-- These roughly correspond to Copenhagen, hidden variables, and many worlds, although the details of each are heavily adapted to particular problems.

The key question of QM: Are there real irreducible probabilities?
quantum mechanics and the private life of measurables

Abner Shimony on entanglement: 'passion at a distance'

(1) Only that which is circumscribable by a definite boundary has a location.
(2) Only what is definably matchable to a change has a time.

The state is the governance of the people, incorporated.

Legal positivism is the position that treats legal obligations as magically separate from other obligations.

communions or associations relating to religion or piety as instrumental parts of the Church as a society

The most salient fact about methods of inquiry is that there are extraordinarily vast numbers of them, of many different kinds.

whole-or-partial as transcendental distinction

merely partial -> derivatively whole -> whole in se -> whole a se

light and being as interlinked complements
formal object quo: natural light
formal object quod: being

"The prophetic office of Christ consists in teaching, prophesying, and working miracles." Schleiermacher
"The priestly office of Christ includes his perfect fulfillment of law (i.e., His active obedience), His atoning death (i.e., His passive obedience), and His intercession with the Father for believers."
"The kingly office of Christ consists in the fact that everything which the community of believers requires for its well-being continually proceeds from Him."
-- The weakness of the latter two is palpable.

The liturgical commonwealth takes shape within the Church through the coming-together of the baptized and confirmed to form a system of mutual interaction and cooperation, a sharing of Christ, of the gospel, of Scripture, and of the sacraments as common good, an interchange fo kindred impulses of spirit and faith, a common will oriented to the Kingdom of God.

The Old Testament scriptures share normative dignity and inspiration with the New Testament; they are not only respected as references for the New Testament nor as way sof indicating the historical continuity of the Jewish and Christian worship, but because Christ is in them by anticipation. The Old Testament is not a mere supplementary appendix. We do not cease to value the premonition in having the foretold; the allusion is not the less for the alluded; the things in our premonitinon are very much for our benefit, and provide a vocabulary and a platform for understanding the foretold.

"By reason of its coexistence with the world there exists in the Church a legislative and an administrative power, which is an essential effluence from the kingly office of Christ." Schleiermacher

high-end ready-to-wear, made-to-measure, bespoke

-- The Clacton Spear is the world's oldest extant worked wooden implement (about 420,000 years old).

"An idea is a composite entity, for it exists when the mind sets up as present to itself a sensation that has pre-existed in the body, and it is a represented sensation." Amo
"Every idea pertains to the mind as regards representation, to the body as regards sensation."

Pascal's "Man is but a reed..." and sublimity

"To compare an effect in my head with its wholly unknown cause does seem to be an impossible feat." Stebbing
"In order that physics as a science should be possible, it is necessary that we should be able to consider some characteristics in isolation from other characteristics."
"To admit responsibility is to admit both that something is brought about (i.e., is caused) and also that what is brought about is good, or is evil."
"There is no sense in speaking of compulsion unless there is a compeller and compelled."
"But if increase of entropy is the criterion of the distinction of earlier from later, how was it discovered that entropy increases *as time goes on*?"

To think in terms of 'Science vs. Religion' or 'Left vs. Right'  or similar things, is to think in allegories.

'The right to command' and 'the right to be obeyed' are not exact correlatives.

Raz's definition of authority: 
'X has authority to Phi' = there is some X, Y, Z, such that
(1) Y permitted X to Phi or gave him power to do so
(2) Y has power to do (1)
(3) X's Phi-ing will affect the interests of Z and Y has authority over Z.
-- Raz is not assuming that X, Y, and Z are different persons.
-- This is obviously untenable, as it requires an infinite regress, and as 'affect the interests' is useless for practical purposes since anything may 'affect interests' of anyone depending on what the interests are, and one cannot have an account in which the only Y's are those with unrestricted authority over everyone. In addition, 'permission' presupposes reference to authority, not vice versa (this is true even with usurped permission, as seen in how we analyze cases in which someone gives permission beyond their authority).

Commands are selections of possible orderings; counsels are selections of characteristics for possible orderings.

Social facts have moral elements, just by being social.

Many legal positivist arguments seem tob e based on the false assumption that you have shown systems to be separate if you have shown them to be distinguishable. I suppose it does make sense that they would tend to assume some kind of separability principle. Are there analogues of other empiricist principles? For instance, is the emphasis on social facts really just an analogue of the copy principle?

Raz's account of law seems to make laws components in a judicial system.

"If law is a social institution of a certain type, then all the rules which belong to the social type are legal rules, however morally objectionable they may be." Raz
-- The conditional is false -- the antecedent does not require the consequent unless you hold that all rules belonging to a social institution are rules in the same sense, which is false even in ordinary institutions like workplaces. (Social institutions are not genera of rules, but complexes of rules of different kinds.)
-- However, even if we assume it is true, it is question-begging in import, because it assumes that any rules, however morally objectionable, could belong to the social institution, when in fact it is clear that social institutions can be inconsistent with some rules, so that you get incoherence or category mistakes if you try to introduce them. Some rules are simply foreign to given types of social institution. Thus 'belonging to' is where the moral claim is introduced.

In many forms of natural law theory, laws are attached to institutions, and ultimately to natural institutions like basic communities.

What Raz calls 'sources' are merely titles, and presuppose obligations for being titles specifically rather than random irrelevant facts.

While assessing appointments to the bench, we take intellectual honesty to bear on legal skill, and essential to establishing actual legal skill, although not determinative solely on its own.

We distinguish assessment of legal acceptability in human laws and assessment of moral goodness because we are talking about two distinct kinds of law; it would be absurd to say that, because constitutional acceptability and statutory acceptability are distinct, that the latter does not depend on the former.

In general, legal postivist arguments would make nonsense of any conception of higher and lower law.

Traditionally, the justification for judges developing law in cases where laws were unsettled is that they were applying a higher law. This is often explicitly stated.

"...marking a rule as legally binding is marking it as an authoritative ruling." Raz

Everybody wants to be a connoisseur.

'Efficacy of law' is a metaphor for objective causality.

The family is both a norm-creating and a norm-applying institution.

Most legal systems are not primarily structured around courts.
Most legal systems do not claim authority to regulate any and every type of behavior; in fact, outside of totalitarian systems, there is no legal system that does not reject that claim -- they all recognize behaviors over which they have no authority.
As legal systems can include legal systems, most legal systems do not claim to be supreme.

Father of Orthodoxy

 Today is the feast of St. Athanasius the Great of Alexandria, Doctor of the Church. From On the Incarnation (Chapter 3):

He deals with them as a good teacher with his pupils, coming down to their level and using simple means. St. Paul says as much: "Because in the wisdom of God the world in its wisdom knew not God, God thought fit through the simplicity of the News proclaimed to save those who believe." Men had turned from the contemplation of God above, and were looking for Him in the opposite direction, down among created things and things of sense. The Savior of us all, the Word of God, in His great love took to Himself a body and moved as Man among men, meeting their senses, so to speak, half way. He became Himself an object for the senses, so that those who were seeking God in sensible things might apprehend the Father through the works which He, the Word of God, did in the body. Human and human minded as men were, therefore, to whichever side they looked in the sensible world they found themselves taught the truth. Were they awe-stricken by creation? They beheld it confessing Christ as Lord. Did their minds tend to regard men as Gods? The uniqueness of the Savior's works marked Him, alone of men, as Son of God. Were they drawn to evil spirits? They saw them driven out by the Lord and learned that the Word of God alone was God and that the evil spirits were not gods at all. Were they inclined to hero-worship and the cult of the dead? Then the fact that the Savior had risen from the dead showed them how false these other deities were, and that the Word of the Father is the one true Lord, the Lord even of death. For this reason was He both born and manifested as Man, for this He died and rose, in order that, eclipsing by His works all other human deeds, He might recall men from all the paths of error to know the Father. As He says Himself, "I came to seek and to save that which was lost."

And Grass-Roots Mingle with His Hair

 Song of a Maid Whose Love Is Dead
by Thomas Lovell Beddoes 

 Merry, merry little stream,
Tell me, hast thou seen my dear?
I left him with an azure dream,
Calmly sleeping on his bier --
But he has fled!

 "I passed him in his church-yard bed --
A yew is sighing o'er his head,
And grass-roots mingle with his hair."
What doth he there?
O cruel! can he lie alone?
Or in the arms of one more dear?
Or hides he in that bower of stone,
To cause and kiss away my fear? 

 "He doth not speak, he doth not moan --
Blind, motionless he lies alone;
But, ere the grave snake fleshed his sting,
This one warm tear he bade me bring
And lay it at thy feet
Among the daisies sweet." 

 Moonlight whisperer, summer air,
Songster of the groves above,
Tell the maiden rose I wear,
Whether thou hast seen my love.
"This night in heaven I saw him lie,
Discontented with his bliss;
And on my lips he left this kiss,
For thee to taste and then to die."

Caterina da Siena

 Today is the feast of St. Catherine Benincasa of Siena, Doctor of the Church. From a letter to Messer Ristoro Canigiani:

You know that God is supremely good, and loved us before we were: and is Eternal Wisdom, and His Power in virtue is immeasurable: so for this reason we are sure that He has power, knowledge, and will to give us what we need. Well we see, in proof, that He gives us more than we know how to ask, and that which was not asked by us. Did we ever ask Him that He should create us reasonable creatures, in His own image and likeness, rather than brute beasts? No. Or that He should create us by Grace by the Blood of the Word, His only-begotten Son, or that He should give us Himself for food, perfect God and perfect Man, flesh and blood, body and soul, united to Deity? Beyond these most high gifts, which are so great, and show such fire of love toward us, that there is no heart so hard that its hardness and coldness would not melt by considering them at all: infinite are the gifts and graces which we receive from Him without asking. 

 Then, since He gives so much without our asking—how much the more will He fulfil our desires when we shall desire a just thing of Him? Nay, who makes us desire and ask it? Only He. Then, if He makes us ask it, it is a sign that He means to fulfil it, and give us what we seek.

Links of Note

 * David Torillos-Castrillejo, Philosophical Reflection on Beauty in the Late Middle Ages: The Case of Jean Gerson (PDF)

* Marius Ion Benta, The Multiple Realities of Paul's Mystical Experience: A Phenomenological Perspective in the Anthropology of Religion (PDF)

* Patrick J. Casey, What is 'lived experience'?, at "Aeon"

* Mark Vernon, The enchanted vision, on love as a cosmic quality, also at "Aeon"

* Alexandre Billon, "The only organ of contact with reality is love", on love as a sense of reality, at "Le Substack de Alexandre"

* Alberto Oya, Religious Fictionalism and the Ontological Status of God (PDF)

* John Michael Greer, The Secret of the Sages, at "Ecosophia"

* William H. Harwood & Paria Akhgari, Heroes and Demigods: Aristotle's Hypothetical "Defense" of True Nobles (PDF)

* Matthew Duncombe, Diodorus Cronus, at the SEP

* Gregory Salmieri and Benjamin Bayer, How We Choose Our Beliefs (PDF)

* William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature

* Sinan Dogramaci, Evolutionary Explanations of Our Reliability (PDF)

* William F. Vallicella, Intentionality in Locks and Keys?, at "Philosophy in Progress"

* Don Garrett, Hume's Geography of Feeling in A Treatise of Human Nature (PDF)

* William L. Bell, Rights Reclamation (PDF)

* Edmund Waldstein, He Misses Someone He's Never Even Met, on David Foster Wallace, at "Humanum"

Dashed Off IX

 The practical and theoretical sciences interpenetrate, each a means to the ends of the other.

Treating humanity as an end in itself requires treating human beings as united by a moral world.

The natural human being is already a human being who is being morally formed.

Sympathy is morally effective mostly as a bound rather than as the substance.

Human reason is naturally rhapsodic and only becomes systematic with much effort; and, given a system, it becomes rhapsodic again.

To say that the past is necessary is just to say that, for the present and future, they cannot be understood without the past; present and future cannot have an exemption or exception with respect to the past; the past is, so to speak, with the present and future, without exception.

Free will is an expression of a particular kind of intellectual goodness.

The success of science at providing unifying explanations for differing domains is a sign of infinite intelligibility as a final cause of intellect.

Actuality intrinsically suggests possibility and necessity.

Any actual thing doing anything suggests other things it could be doing.

Our ability to use experiments to understand the world depends on our ability to recognize the values (for theory, for confirmation, for research, for discovery) a given experiment exhibits.

No theory of sublimity is adequate that cannot include the sublimity of love.

Hooker's four tests of ceremony
(1) intrinsic reasonableness
(2) antiquity
(3) Church Authority
(4) dispensation in dispensable matters

Much of both learning and teaching is trying to find ways to do small things well.

S4.2 and Minkowski spacetime

Classification is a large part of the logic of discovery; we classify then fill gaps, classify and identify anomalies, classify and test membership, classify and compare classifications.

"Conscience and self-love, if we understand our true happiness, always lead us the same way. duty and interest are perfectly coincident, for the most part in this world, but entirely and in every instance if we take in the future and the whole; this being implied in the notion of a good and perfect administration of things." Butler

sench, sink; quench, quink; drench, drink
and thench him until he thinks

"No regularity will ever be found which can make a true substance out of several beings by aggregation." Leibniz

The argument from fulfilled prophecy is essentially a kind of argument from coherence.

objective causation as disposing to end

Human beings generally feel a craving for incorporation into a greater humanity, as if we are missing an integration that we feel should be there.

We may fall in love aesthetically or romantically or socially.

No particular possible worlds model can capture all possibilities.
(1) Different interpretations, different questions/propositions, different truth values;
(2) Something like a diagonal argument representing possible worlds by binary strings (if lists are finite)?
(3) Superpossibles
-- quantum uncertainty and the limits of our precision in forming possible worlds models?

Many universalist arguments only establish that heaven is a higher-order perpetuity than hell, as transfinite to infinite, as plane to line. They then jump to the conclusion that the lower-order perpetuity is not a perpetuity at all.

the palaetiological problem and historical Jesus studies

forms of testimonial evidence of Resurrection
(1) empty tomb stories
(2) appearance stories
(3) ecclesial power stories

the parabolic method in Trinitarian theology

Acts of the Apostles as a work on baptism

Paul mentions baptism in Romans, 1 Corinthians, Galatians, Colossians, Ephesians; it is also mentioned in Hebrews and 1 Peter.

The Father together with the Son brings forth the Spirit.
Reading 1: {The Father together with the Son} brings forth the Spirit.
Reading 2: The Father {together with the Son brings forth the Spirit}.
The 'Greek' view is something like 2-only; the 'Latin', taking the Son as mediate principle, accepts both.

The brief mentions of prophets in the New Testament seem to suggest that their role in the early Church was primarily to facilitate and ease conversion.

If we think of searches (or tests) that can be organized into ensembles of searches, then every ensemble allows us to identify 'search necessity' and 'search impossibility' for the ensemble. Suppose ensemble is e. Then Diamond-e(p) = p comes out true given at least one search in the ensemble; Box-e(p) = p comes out true for every search in the ensembles. We can then iterate modalities. Suppose set of ensembles S that includes e. Then Diamond-sBox(p) = p is the result of every search in at least one ensemble in S; Box-sDiamond(p) = p is the result of at least one search in every ensemble in S. We can perhaps relate this to probabilities.

A possibility: possible worlds frameworks cannot adequately model cases where Diamond -> Box is verified.

The intellect finds peace in what is immutable.

Seeing-as is selective; it implies other possibilities.

figures of speech as recraftings of language suitable for particular purposes

8:27-8:33 as the central idea of Mark's Gospel

Of Mark's fourteen uses of 'Son of Man', two refer to humanity in some fashion, three directly allude to Daniel, nine directly connect the term to the Passion.

"A citizen must always be regarded as a colegislative member fo the state (that is, not merely as a means, but at the same time as an end in himself...." Kant

We live in an ocean of grace, like fish in the sea.

The Book of Odes plays the role it does in Confucianism in part because an unpoetic people are poorly adapted to coherent participation in rites.

All of Kelsen's argument for disentangling justice and law is based on an absurdly defective, even laughable, understanding of justice. This is quite a regular feature of legal positivist arguments on these matters; legal positivism seems often motivated by caricatures of ethics.

Law is a regulative order; some of regulation is correction; some of correction is punishment; some of punishment is coercive use of force.

An account of law that does not recgonize legislative declarations of holidays as laws is already highly defective.

Most human-made laws are concerned with classification rather than coercion.

If only juristic persons existed in law, there would be no connection to social facts such that law could be anything more than a kind of fiction on paper.

Law hypostatizes.

Nothing prevents there being two states to a single territory except a common taste for orderly boundaries and distinct boxes.

It is necessary to see the state as a particular mode of cooperation.

The behaviors of states clearly assumes that there are tacit interstate obligations and rights.

Rhetoric is the field devoted to operationalizing and realizing logical principles.

A system of norms can only function as a system of norms when recognized as such by reason, under rational principles; nothing is a norm except in the context of reason.

Society cannot be sustained by only deserved good; it requires undeserved good.

Our usual experience of positive law is not as coercive but as a shared standard for coordination.

Humanity itself forms the framework of law.

When churchmen think of themselves as 'dialoguing with the world', they are more often dialoguine with phantoms in their heads.

Physicists often have to use colloquial terms analogically.

Scientific explanations often cannot use terms univocally because they have to order colloquial versions of terms to more rigorously defined versions of terms that are treated as more fundamental.

thought experiments as "distillations of practice" (David Gooding)

Civil Disobedience

 Rupert Read has an article at Aeon on climate-related civil disobedience. Its argument is somewhat difficult to follow because Read is never very precise about what one would be disobeying, but it also, I think, shows some sloppiness in Read's understanding of civil disobedience:

The classic philosophical debate around civil disobedience (or nonviolent direct action) asks: is there a right to engage in this form of conscientious law-breaking, under circumstances of deep wrong, where conventional methods of addressing that wrong have failed or are unavailable? It’s widely accepted among philosophers that there is such a right: it is virtually unknown for philosophers to argue against it; even an extremely mainstream liberal individualist such as John Rawls argues for it. And the climate crisis fits the bill for the exercise of this right. Because it is a case of a huge and urgent injustice – a threat to the very viability of ongoing human civilisation, an existential risk – where conventional methods have been tried and failed, and moreover where vulnerable unborn future generations are not able to stick up (let alone vote) for themselves to try to redress the matter. 

All of this is an argument that there is no need to debate this particular matter, which is "basically settled". It is, I think, clear that appeal to "vulnerable unborn future generations" is not anything about which anything has been "basically settled at all"; this, despite the fact that I probably have a view closer on this particular to Read's than most philosophers. But, that aside, Read seems to  misconceive the role of injustice in civil disobedience. The two (relatively) uncontroversial rights to engage in civil disobedience are (1) when a law requires you, yourself, to do something morally wrong and (2) when a law is inconsistent with your specific rights and responsibilities as a citizen. Anything beyond these is certainly controversial, regardless of the injustice in question, and, indeed, has to be, because of the 'civil' part of 'civil disobedience', which essentially means 'as a citizen'. If you disobey a law, it doesn't matter what injustice you claim is associated with it; you aren't engaging in civil disobedience unless you are doing so in your capacity as a citizen. In a case where this is not so, disobedience could, perhaps, still be justifiable -- that is itself controversial -- but it wouldn't be civil disobedience. 

Marchers in Birmingham, for instance, were specifically trying to call attention to provable violations of the rights of citizens in Birmingham, and the law they specifically disobeyed -- the law governing parade permits -- was being deployed to prevent the exercise of their freedom of assembly and speech, by being used in such a way as specifically to prevent them from calling attention to the violations. The protest was also, as Martin Luther King, Jr., noted in the "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", for the explicit purpose of trying to force the city to negotiate over its continued imposition of segregation; also in view (more indirectly and less immediately) was its failure to provide reasonable protection to citizens against the racist domestic terrorism that had earned Birmingham the nickname of "Bombingham". This kind of disobedience is clearly civil disobedience. The whole point was citizenship; the whole action was an attempt to act as citizens; the actions taken were carefully calibrated to leave open alliance and cooperation with other citizens; the whole problem was the failure of the city to take citizenship seriously, and the response was specifically to hold the structures of government responsible to the power of citizens; the intent was at least in part to uphold rights and protections that in the long term would also benefit all citizens, not incidentally, but precisely as citizens.

It is very difficult to fit most climate-oriented disobedience of laws into this kind of model. The laws disobeyed are often not being used specifically to harm anyone's role as a citizen and do not, in themselves or as applied, require anyone themselves to do something unjust; the injustice to which activists point is often diffuse and not specifically tied to citizenship; the actions are often not defending citizens against government action but bullying other citizens. To the extent that these are the case, one can call into question how much the disobedience is civil disobedience at all. This is not, of course, to say that civil disobedience is impossible on climate-related topics; but civil disobedience is an action of citizens, as citizens, on behalf of all citizens, and something can only be justified as civil disobedience to the extent that it is so.

Universal Capacity to Wonder

 I argue that philosophy is a universal intellectual activity that has been pursued by peoples of all cultures and that the propensity to raise fundamental questions about human experience can be found in peoples belonging to different cultures, even though the answers may be different, despite our common humanity, and may not all be equally compelling. Yet, our common humanity, which inclines human beings to adopt similar (or nearly similar) responses to experiences of various kinds, tends to lead thinkers to be exercised about fairly similar questions or puzzles and to reflect on them in search of answers or explanations. The human capacity to wonder is not only boundless but universal. The context of our wonder is of course human experience. We wonder about the nature of the universe and our place in it, about who or what we are, the existence of some ultimate being, the nature of the good life, and about many other aspects of our experience that are beyond our ken and are, thus, not immediately rationally explicable by us. Wonder leads some individuals in various cultures to raise fundamental questions and, in this way, to engage in philosophical reflections.

[Kwame Gyekye, An Essay on African Philosophical Thought, Temple University Press (Philadelphia: 1995) pp. xiv-xv.]

Philosophers and Poets, Bores and Murderers

 “I’ve had the most interesting talk of my life!” she exclaimed, taking her seat beside Willoughby. “D’you realise that one of your men is a philosopher and a poet?” 

 “A very interesting fellow—that’s what I always say,” said Willoughby, distinguishing Mr. Grice. “Though Rachel finds him a bore.” 

 “He’s a bore when he talks about currents,” said Rachel. Her eyes were full of sleep, but Mrs. Dalloway still seemed to her wonderful. 

 “I’ve never met a bore yet!” said Clarissa. 

 “And I should say the world was full of them!” exclaimed Helen. But her beauty, which was radiant in the morning light, took the contrariness from her words. 

 “I agree that it’s the worst one can possibly say of any one,” said Clarissa. “How much rather one would be a murderer than a bore!” she added, with her usual air of saying something profound. “One can fancy liking a murderer. It’s the same with dogs. Some dogs are awful bores, poor dears.”

Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out, Chapter IV.

Links of Note

 * Emily FitzGerald, How to Practice Embodied Pedagogy, at "The APA Blog"

* David A. Ciepley, Beyond Public and Private: Toward a Political Theory of the Corporation (PDF)

* Peter West, Philosophy is an art, on Margaret Macdonald, at "Aeon"

* T. Parker Haratine & Kevin A. Smith, Anselmian Defense of Hell (PDF)

* Chris Matarazzo, The Tao of the 80s Girl, at "Hats and Rabbits"

* Mark Sentesy, Are Kinetic and Temporal Continuities Real for Aristotle? (PDF)

* Daniel Dennett has died. His early work was always interesting; I think around about Freedom Evolves it became much more hit-and-miss. He was always one of the great philosophical communicators of his generation, though.

* Hao Dong, Leibniz as a virtue ethicist (PDF)

* Jeremy Skrzypek, Objects and Their Parts: The Problem of Material Composition, at "1000-Word Philosophy"

* Eric L. Hutton, On Ritual and Legislation (PDF)

* Richard Y Chappell, Utopian Enemies of the Better, at "Good Thoughts"

* Gregory Salmieri, David Bronstein, David Charles, & James G. Lennox, Episteme, demonstration, and explanation: A fresh look at Aristotle's Posterior Analytics (PDF)

* Freya Möbus, Socrates on Cookery and Rhetoric (PDF)

Annotation

 Passer Mortuus Est
by Edna St. Vincent Millay 

Death devours all lovely things;
 Lesbia with her sparrow
 Shares the darkness,--presently
 Every bed is narrow.  

Unremembered as old rain
 Dries the sheer libation,
And the little petulant hand
 Is an annotation. 

 After all, my erstwhile dear,
 My no longer cherished,
 Need we say it was not love,
 Now that love is perished?

Doctor Magnificus

 Today is the feast of St. Anselm of Canterbury, also known as Anselm of Aosta and Anselm of Bec, Doctor of the Church.

For injustice is not the kind of thing which infects and corrupts the soul in the way that poison infects and corrupts the body; nor does it do something in the way that happens when a wicked man does evil deeds. When a savage beast breaks its bonds and rages about wildly, and when a ship—if the helmsman leaves the rudder and delivers the vessel to the wind and the waves—strays and is driven into dangers of one kind or another, we say that the absence of chains or of a rudder causes these events. [We say this] not because their absence is something or does something but because if they had been present they would have caused the wild animal not to rage and the ship not to perish. By comparison, when an evil man rages and is driven into various dangers to his soul, viz., evil deeds, we declare that injustice causes these deeds. [We say this] not because injustice is a being or does something but because the will (to which all the voluntary movements of the entire man are submitted), lacking justice, driven on by various appetites, being inconstant, unrestrained, and uncontrolled, plunges itself and everything under its control into manifold evils—all of which justice, had it been present, would have prevented from happening. 

 [Anselm of Canterbury, De Conceptu Virginali, Chapter 5, Jasper Hopkins, tr.]

A Coronet I'll Weave

"Oh, Deck Me Not with Gems"
A Song
by Caroline E. R. Parker

"Oh, deck me not with gems," she said,
 "Oh, deck me not with gems;
 I care not, for the princely light
 Of jewelled diadems,
 But give me flowers, the fresh, the fair,
 Oh, give me fairy flowers
 To deck my robe, to deck my hair,
 From my own garden bowers."

 "I know where gleam bright gems," she said,
"Bright gems in emerald set,
 Fair rose-buds glistening in the dew,
 And blue-eyed violet.
The jasmine stars, like orient pearls,
 I'll twine amid my hair,
 And lilies of the valley sweet
 Upon my bosom wear." 

 "Nay, let me go," the fair girl said,
 "Nay, let me go and wreathe
 A chaplet of my garden flowers,
 A coronet I'll weave.
 You'll say 'tis fairer far than gems,
 You'll say it is more fair,
 My coronet of garden flowers,
 Than gems of beauty rare." 

 "I care not for bright gems," she said,
 "I care not for bright gems,
 I care not for the jewelled light
 Of princely. diadems.
 My heart is with its early home,
 And its dear garden bowers;
 Oh, deck me not with gems,” she said,
"But give me sweet home-flowers."

Holy High Elf

 Today is the feast of St. Aelfheah of Canterbury, more commonly known in English as St. Alphege or Alfege. He was born in the tenth century somewhere around Bath and became first a monk and then an anchorite, and in 984 was appointed Bishop of Winchester. He was a competent bishop, doing a fair amount to build up and maintain the local churches, but his claim to fame began to develop when a Viking raid in 994 went in an unexpected direction. Viking raids could be very, very nasty, but Vikings were also sometimes willing to listen to better offers, if you had any. The locals offered to negotiate so that the Vikings could go away wealthy without the hard work of seizing the wealth themselves, and it just so happens that one of the Viking leaders was a man named Olaf Tryggvason. Tryggvason's beloved wife had recently died, which is why he was out raiding in an attempt to get away from home and its memories, and he had some unusual experiences that led him to think that Christianity might actually be true. We don't know the exact timeline here. It's possible that Tryggvason was already baptized and was mostly just winding up his raiding voyage, or it might be that he was still considering it and saw this as a good opportunity to take the final leap. There's fairly good reason to think that St. Alphege was the bishop who gave him confirmation. In any case, Tryggvason received danegeld, was either baptized and confirmed or at least confirmed, and promised never to raid England again. Tryggvason, of course, would go home and begin the Christianization of Norway.

In 1006, St. Alphege became Archbishop of Canterbury, succeeding St. Aelfric. In 1011, a raiding party of Danes sacked Canterbury. He and several others were taken hostage, the Danes hoping to squeeze a ransom out of him. So he stayed a prisoner for seven months. As he refused to allow anyone to pay a ransom for him, however, the Danes saw no particular reason to keep him around. So one day, when they were drunk, they played the game of throwing rocks and bones at him and then finished him off by smashing his head in with the butt of an axe. Stories diverge on whether the axe-blow was part of the sport or a mercy-killing when he was already at the ragged edge. According to some stories, Thorkell the Tall, who was the leader of the Vikings, tried to protect Alphege, but it's hard to control a bunch of bored drunk Vikings; this may have contributed to Thorkell eventually joining the fleet of Aethelred the Unready, defending England from Viking invasion.

Aelfheah literally means 'High Elf', 'high' indicating either status (noble) or height (tall). 'Elf', of course, is a word used in Anglo-Saxon for spiritual beings, so we could perhaps also translate it as 'Noble Spirit'.