Wild Lilies Blaze, and Bees Hum Soon and Late

 August
by Lizette Woodworth Reese 

 No wind, no bird. The river flames like brass.
On either side, smitten as with a spell
Of silence, brood the fields. In the deep grass,
Edging the dusty roads, lie as they fell
Handfuls of shriveled leaves from tree and bush.
But 'long the orchard fence and at the gate,
Thrusting their saffron torches through the hush,
Wild lilies blaze, and bees hum soon and late.
Rust-colored the tall straggling brier, not one
Rose left. The spider sets its loom up there
Close to the roots, and spins out in the sun
A silken web from twig to twig. The air
Is full of hot rank scents. Upon the hill
Drifts the noon's single cloud, white, glaring, still.

Dashed Off XVIII

 Supposition is a property of a term relative to another term in a proposition, based on the signification of the term. (Signification is what makes term able to have a role in a proposition.)
In "Running is a participle, Socrates is running, therefore Socrates is a participle", we have a fallacy of four terms, in which the major has 'running' with material supposition and the minor with personal supposition. In "Running is an activity, Socrates is running, therefore Socrates is an activity", we get the same with the major using 'running' with simple supposition.
Medieval logicians generally thought that supposition was always determined by the predicate, because at least some predicates clearly do ('is a genus', 'is a word', etc.).
"'Dog' is used to talk about some kinds of pets" shows that material supposition can clearly presuppose signification.

Hegemons dominate through alliance systems.

Because we often reduce chance by intention and plan, people mistakenly come to think that intentions or plans exclude chance. But a chance event may be intended; it, lacking complete immediate purpose that restricts its possibilities to one, may have an incomplete immediate purpose and a complete mediate purpose, like a dice roll in a game, and one may plan for all the possibilities allowed by a chance event, even bringing them in plan to an inevitable end. Intention and design by nature incorporate necessities and chances.

The same locution may have any mix of illocutionary points -- assertive, commissive, directive, declarative, expressive as illocutionary points do not exclude each other.

We owe persons not merely respect but also truth and love.

To be reasons-responsive is to be responsive to counterfactual and hypothetical possibilities.

"Precepts lead to right actions only if they meet a pliant ingenium." Seneca

elegance as the balance of the useful and agreeable

'the pleasures of friendship, of unreserved conversation, of similarity of taste and opinion'

"Herself a realist, Jane Austen recognized -- as many professed Christians do not -- that Christianity is a realistic religion, with no illusions about the fallen nature of man." David Cecil

The embryo is in the process of being made to make itself alive.

Forms are a kind of sharing of being.

"Freemen (liberales) are the sort of people who ransom prisoners of war." Cicero (Offic. 2.16)

ecclesial right to go // cosmopolitan right

NB that Kant understands 'liberty, equality, fraternity' as a TRS triad on the model of 'substance, cause, community'.

Kant's TRS triads as deliberate analogies of Newton's three laws of motion?

ius civitatis, ius gentium, ius cosmopoliticum as TRS triad

Searle takes acceptives to be commissives, which is certainly wrong (see Searle and Vanderveken)

Even those who touch the hem of the garments of the Mystical Body receive blessing.

The 'sense' in sense of humor, sense of beauty, etc., is capacity for firsthand experience.

One of our most basic experiences of truth is of things as good to know.

syneidesis: Wis 18:11, 1 Tim 1:5, 19; Rm 13:5; 2 Cor 4:2

When the Christian suffers, he can do so as a part of a sort of conspiracy with God.

The notion that feeling guilty is in itself unhealthy has been the source of many a mental illness.

physical contact as causal equivalence of forces

The phenomenological world is our life seen objectively.

Language is the psychopomp.

"Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions." CS Lewis
"What expresses or stimulates emotion directly, without the intervention of an image or concept, expresses or stimulates it feebly."

illuminative way = way of infused contemplation
illuminative way // purgatory

Growing up is a matter of learning how to love more wholly.

"The whole foundation of prayer is grounded in humility, and the more a soul abases itself in prayer, the more God exalts it." Teresa of Avila

"Truth is always precious; but all truths are not equally relevant to all persons." E. W. Dicken Trueman

Conscience transcends individual/communal divides.

sophia : Tao : phronesis : Five Constant Virtues

the Lullian method as a method for making philosophical inquiry and argument a spiritual practice

"In the order of ends, objective affirmation is inevitable." Marechal
"Since the formal object of a tendency is the measure of the amplitude of the end whither this tendency keeps striving, we know that the ultimate satiating end of the intellect must be a reality possessing no limiting determinations, that is, a transcendent object, a subsisting infinite."
"To affirm of God that he is possible is the same as to affirm that he exists, since his existence is the condition of every possibility."

When Vaihinger talks about fictions, he means merely 'expedient inventions' that 'deviate' in some way from the real as such. Thus the whole acocunt is really about deliberately constructed beings of reason. But his conception of this is so absurdly broad that anything involving any actino of mind gets counted as a 'fiction'. One falls into the fiction of a hole because of the fiction of gravity, just as what is fictionally classified as an apple falls from what is fictionally classified as a tree, a fictional event we study by the fictional system of fictions we call physics.

"By knowing of the finite as finite, I always co-know the Infinite." Donceel
"Whatever reality we know, we know as limited. But to know a limit as limit means to be, in fact or in striving, beyond this limit. Hence our mind keeps striving beyond any limited reality toward the unlimited reality, the infinitely perfect reality. This implies at least that the infinite by perfect reality is possible."

Mass, force, etc., are functions within a physical theory tied to certain general kinds of measurement.

Change
(1) divides according to complete and incomplete
(2) so as to be virtually multiple (having parts of some kind due to its capabilities)
(3) with indefinitely many parts as measurable by other changes.

before & after with respect to change of containing boundary

'Utter' is just a word for 'outer'; who utters something externalizes it, specifically in speech.

PSR as a precondition for hypothesizing (cp. Mercier) -- recognizing the need for a sufficient reason, a reason is proposed and assessed in that light.

Statistics always depends on classifications.

"For occupancy to be a title to property the following things are necessary: (1) a 'res nullius'; (2) a thing capable of being appropriated; (3) an external act performed in regard to this object and in some way bringing it under the agent's power; (4) a clear manifestation of his intention to possess it permanently and exclusively." Mercier
"Christianity opposes the pretensions of absolutism by its insistence on the rights of the individual, of the family, and of religious society."

Circumcision conferred a jural status under divine positive law, ex opere operato; baptism confers both a jural status and grace ex opere operato.

Baptism, confirmation, ordination, and matrimony confer a jural status ex opere operato; reconciliation has a jural effect (in absolution).

major effects of baptism
(1) sacred
-- (1a) regenerative grace
-- (1b) indelible character
(2) juridical: membership in the Church
-- (2a) under divine law
-- (2b) with rights and privileges under ecclesial law
(3) moral: public allegiance in the community of the Church

Moral causality is either
(1) advisory, or
(2) juridical
-- (a) either conventional, or
-- (b) authoritatively imposed; or
(3) meritorious; or
(4) objective/significant.

A mystery in Casel's sense is an objective cause in sacral order.

The Church is intended to be a holy people, so it is necessary for there to be holy orders constituting it as such. But societies have many orders and it is not required for them all to be holy orders, only those that are genuinely constitutive.

The primary line between 'organized' religion and its opposite seems to be the need for a system to certify and/or credential.

Over the course of salvation history as depicted in Scripture we see a concentration and intensification of symbols.

It's notable that when we try to imagine abstract concepts, we often imagine them as if they were fluids.
-- This could be due to the easy participability of fluids, being capable of portions without fundamental change.

The whole Christ is present in the Church as both Body and New Covenant.

A commemoration of a covenant is always a renewal of some kind, like wedding vows, but not so as to be different, also like wedding vows.

Into the Mysteries of How and Why

To Schelling -- I
by August Graf von Platen
translated by Reginald Bancroft Cooke

 Doth not he ever king in Truth's domain
 Reign too o'er Beauty's realm by kingly right?
Thou dost behold them perfectly unite
And closely fuse in one harmonious strain.
This little present thou wilt not disdain;
 These oriental throngs with true delight
Thou wilt survey, so picturesque, so bright,
And grow accustomed to their strange refrain.
 On blooms of a far land admittedly
 I poise but lightly like the butterfly,
Joying perchance in some mere vanity.
But from the brims of flowers 'neath every sky
Thou dipp'st the wing of the inviolate bee
Into the mysteries of How and Why.

August Graf von Platen's full name was Graf Karl August Georg Maximilian von Platen-Hallermunde (the 'Graf', which after the abolition of titles in 1919 is treated as the first part of the surname, was in Graf Platen's own day still usually treated as a prenominal title), but outside of titlepages he is usually referred to by some shorter form. Platen, often considered one of the greatest writers of sonnets in German history, did not get along with the literary establishment of his day, and famously got into a rather vicious public spat with Heine, which began with heated remarks about the interest in Oriental poetry and ended with Platen attacking Heine for being a Jew and Heine attacking Platen for being a homosexual. Heine got the worse of the dispute, since the comments about homosexuality (saying, for instance, that Graf Platen was more a man of rump than a man of brain) were widely regarded as a low blow (and homosexuality was, frankly, less stigmatized in some circles in Germany than being Jewish), and the spat made life difficult for both men. (Heine would later call it a 'war of annihilation'.) Graf Platen died in 1835 in Syracuse in the Two Sicilies, a lonely and isolated 'wandering rhapsodist' to the very end.

Music on My Mind

 

Tracey Hewat, "Firelands".

On LaFolette on Parenting Licenses

 Jack Maden, Should Parenting Require a License?, at "Philosophy Break" discusses Hugh LaFolette's 1980 argument that the answer is Yes. I've LaFolette's argument, or arguments that are clearly descended from it, popping up more often recently, so perhaps it's worth looking at why it is, and has always been, a worthless argument.

LaFolette doesn't make things easy for himself in "Licensing Parents", in that he intends his argument to be for the most extreme claim -- not that it would be reasonable sometimes to license parents but that everyone should in fact be required to get a license to be a parent. To get this conlusion he attempts to characterize the kinds of situations in which society requires licenses, e.g., "We require drivers to be licensed because driving an auto is an activity which is potentially harmful to others, safe performance of the activity requires a certain competence, and we have a moderately reliable procedure for determining that competence" (p. 183). Similar things, LaFolette suggests, can be said of doctors, lawyers, and the like. It is in fact a dubious claim that we license lawyers because of their potentially harmful activities rather than (e.g.) because governments wanted order on the matter of who could argue before the bar. Likewise, we know that states didn't start requiring licenses to determine competence, because the first driver's licenses didn't have a driving test. The driving exam is actually an artifact of a completely different thing -- the first driving exams were not for driving but for being a professional chauffeur, and states eventually (in some cases swiftly and in some slowly) started extending the same requirement to drivers in general. It is likewise very unclear that medical licenses were developed, or have primarily been used, in order to assess competence for the preventing of potential harm; doctors started advocating medical licensing to reduce competition and push newcomers with easily obtained medical degrees out of the market. Perhaps you could argue that, whatever the origins of these licensing systems, they are maintained to prevent potential harms, but it is more difficult, I think, when you look at some of the things that are licensed; in many states, for instance, hairstylists have remarkably strict licensing requirements. The point of saying this is that the primary justification for licensing seems never to be merely avoiding harm but the bare fact of extending regulatory powers, which might be done for any number of reasons.

LaFolette argues that it is desirable to regulate any field which meets these three conditions: potential harm, need for a certain level of competence, and moderately reliable procedure for determining that competence. He doesn't consider the many, many activities that meet these criteria for which we don't require licenses -- I teach at a college; that has requirements, but college professorship isn't a licensed profession despite meeting all three conditions. Instead, the handling of the competence issue is done by the ordinary functioning of the job market, and the potential for harm is mostly just swept aside on the general principle that everyone deserves an education. Whether or not college professors have any training to teach at all varies across the board, and most don't, or not much. Nobody, however, takes Ted Kaczynski as an argument that the academic profession should be restricted by licensing -- or, at least, nobody has yet. 

In any case, LaFolette argues that parenting meets all three requriements. Parenting allows for child abuse, which is quite harmful both to the child and society. (He ignores the fact, known even in 1980, that parents are the people least likely to abuse their children, but I assume that he would say that the tiny percentage of parents who abuse their children cause disproportionate harm. But I also suspect that he would argue that most parenting methods -- spanking but also many of the psychological methods that were beginning to be used and have become very common today -- are either physically or emotionally abusive, or both.)  He takes it to be obvious that there is a minimal competence required for raising children. (He never, however, actually says what it is, despite the fact that this seems relevant to the argument. Walking across the street is a potentially harmful activity, one that often causes wrecks, and it does require a minimal comptence, like being able to read signs and lights, and it would be pretty easy to test for this competence, but we don't have pedestrian licenses. Arguably one reason is that people think that the minimal comptence is so minimal that it's not worth the trouble of testing. It matters, if you are arguing for licensing parenting, whether you think 'minimal competence' for parenting is ordinary human decency or advanced psychological training, or something else.)

LaFolette then goes on to consider two kinds of objections against his argument to this point. Objection 1: Licensing is not theoretically desirable because, regardless of the potential for harm or the need for minimal competence, people have rights that take precedence. LaFolette's response to this seems to me to be mere handwaving; he argues that these rights are "not without limitations" (p. 186). He also gives a completely inadequate list of possible interpretations of "right to have children", and doesn't consider the possibility that people might have a right not to have longstanding customs and usages be interfered with without necessity, or that they might have a right not to be subject to regulation in matters that have traditionally not been regulated when they have not themselves shown any incapacity or turpitude. That is to say, he doesn't consider any of the arguments that individuals doing as they think best, not intervention by the state, is the reasonable default for a free society. The statist tendency of LaFolette's argument is never addressed; he simply treats it as obvious that (1) the state should at least usually get involved in anything that can potentially cause harm and requires a minimal level of competence, and likewise that (2) there are no limitations to the state's authority to require licensing except assessment of potential harm and feasibility, and (3) that state intervention in such matters does not have to be independently justified. When he does address worries about intervention, he shifts the subject. Instead of considering the intrusiveness of imposing a licensing system, he argues that there would be few further intrusions for those who have received licenses. Given how onerous the requirements of some licensing systems can get when it comes to keeping your license, this is, like most of LaFolette's naive claims about licensing, dubious, but even so, it's not the right question. The worry that matters is the intrusiveness of building an entire bureaucracy regulating whether people will be even allowed to do something, and the perpetual danger that such systems will be captured to further vested interests. This is not trivial. Even when people support licensing they usually hate having to deal with the inevitable bureaucracy and paperwork. Bureauracies like licensing systems tend to be inflexible, unintuitive, time-consuming, expensive, and, in short, burdensome, even when justified.

Obection 2: Licensing, even if theoretically desirable, is not practically implementable. This could be because (1) we do not have an adequate criterion of what counts as good parenting; or (2) there is no reliable way to know beforehand what features a person will have who will abuse their children; or (3) administration would unintentioanlly misuse any test that could be developed; or (4) administration would intentionally abuse the test; or (5) we could never "adequately, reasonably, and fairly" (p. 193) enforce such a regime. LaFolette's answer to (1) is that we only need a criterion of what counts as very bad parenting; his answer to (2) is what looks to me like a very expensive and complicated research program (one that would have to be ongoing) whose results can't actually be anticipated. LaFolette's answer to (3) I find particularly worrisome; he argues that we shouldn't worry about unintentional misuses unless we have reason to think they would be more common than in other licensing systems. This is, first of all, not the way to design a properly functioning administrative system; you need not dismissal but specific countermeasures to prevent unintentional misuse. Second, unintentional misuses are one of the things that can give you a reason to think that a licensing system should be scrapped, and every functional licensing system continually worries about this. Again, LaFolette assumes that bureaucracy does not require close vigilance but is somehow the natural default, its failures just foibles until proven more serious. Third, a perpetual worry with licensing systems is that they create moral hazard -- that is, people over-rely on the licensing for assessing the competence, with the result that they are less careful and less protected. That LaFolette doesn't even have an actual answer to this sort of problem is itself a worry. His answer to (4) is even worse, since he says that we shouldn't reject licensing parents unless it can be shown that it is more likely to be abused than other licensing systems. Since licensing systems are -- notoriously -- abused all the time, and repeatedly have to be reformed, we have LaFolette yet again arguing that the failures of the state should be ignored as just the natural and normal course of things, and treating its many and well known abuses as barely even worthy of serious consideration, despite the fact that he extends parents -- a much more respectable and highly regarded population of agents -- no such generosity.

Nor does his answer to (5) give us any hope of anything better. He admits that there could be difficulties, but thinks these can be surmounted. His example of how you might do so: "We might not punish parents at all--we might just remove the children and put them up for adoption" (p. 193). This, I think, summarizes in a sentence all that Hugh LaFolette, at least in 1980, did not understand about parenting, even bad parenting. 

The most interesting (and least objectionable) part of LaFolette's argument is an analogy he tries to draw with adoption, in which we do in fact impose prior standards on who can become a parent. But while LaFolette does a good job of addressing some objections to this analogy that are not quite adequate, he misses the fact that we do this because adoption, however important it may be, is an artificial legal construct that exists for legal convenience, and thus legislators can make the requirements for it whatever they please. The high standards, which LaFolette rightly notes are much higher than you would expect for a licensing system, are in part because making adoption too easy would cause all sorts of legal problems and in part to address known failure points specific to legal adoption (e.g., people adopting children to make them sex slaves, a rare but recurring problem even under our current system). 

One interesting thing that LaFolette says, which I have increasingly seen, is that in his view the reason people resist licensing parents because they see parents as having a "natural sovereignty over their children" (p. 196). (The way this is often put today is accusations that parents see themselves as "owning" their children.) He regards this as an "abhorrent view", but his reasons for this is are quite vague -- parents who hold this view "may well" mistreat their children and even if they treat their children well, wouldn't be treating their children as deserving good treatment but only treating them well "because they want to" and the view in any case is inconsistent with raising children to be adults. None of this is given any backing, and one suspects, given what LaFolette keeps implying about state power, that most of this is projection -- he doesn't think parents should be regarded as having "natural sovereignty" over their children because he doesn't really regard "sovereignty" as involving any responsibility. Just as the sovereign state should in his view license parenting because the state finds it "theoretically desirable" and can, he assumes that parents will do whatever they find desirable and can do. In reality, parents are the adults who are least likely to treat their children in these ways, by all the evidence we have; they are the adults who consistently show themselves to be most active in protecting the rights of their children; and by the millions they raise children to be excellent adults. LaFolette takes the "natural sovereignty" view to be common, but there is remarkably little evidence of any of the consequences he says that it brings with it.

None of this argument is any good. But there is an irony here, as for a while there used to be a general parenting license -- it was called a marriage license. The licensing system was never perfectly implemented in the way LaFolette seems to imagine his proposal would -- from practical necessity, alternative routes like common law marriage kept having to be recognized, and there were all sorts of complications about how to deal with the inevitable unlicensed children -- bastards, as they were called. The requirements were also clearly more 'minimal' and easier to implement than those LaFolette seems to have in mind. Interestingly, that system, despite an excellent reputation and results, had long started breaking down before LaFolette had penned a word, and its collapse was beginning to accelerate. The relative success of state-licensed marriage at its height might give one reason to think it possible that you could have a successful parent-licensing system of the kind LaFolette wants. But if we couldn't maintain a looser, more flexible, minimal system that people mostly liked, its unclear why we would be able to maintain a stricter, more bureaucratic, higher-requirement system that people don't even want.

Now, of course, this was all in 1980. But in 2010, LaFolette revisited the argument and mostly reaffirmed it. Unfortunately, its prospects as an argument had not improved at all in thirty years; if anything, the difficulties of preventing abuse of licensing systems, for instance, are even more widely recognized than they were. Even worse, it's quite clearly this article revisiting the argument that has led to the immensely dimwitted claims, the modernized version of his "natural sovereignty" view, that parents are generally going around thinking of children as their "property", an accusation that is inconsistent with the evidence we have and which is never backed up by anything that could possibly justify it. The harm that can be caused by an academic article is not always great; but in some cases, like LaFolette's active statism with respect to parenting, it is potentially immense. This sort of quasi-fascist and totalitarian notion that the state has right and authority to intervene everywhere where the ends justify the means is unfortunately surprisingly common among academics; and you don't have to invent a nonexistent multitude of parents treating their children like chattel to explain why ordinary people would push back against it.

*****

Hugh LaFolette, "Licensing Parents", Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 9, No. 2 (1980), pp. 182-197.

Links of Note

 * Emma Fieser, Descartes on Miracles (PDF)

* Joseph Rahi, Virtue ethics has entered the chat, at "Think Strange Thoughts"

* Daniel Nolan, Crosscultural Social Ontology: The Case of Navies (PDF)

* Gene Botkin, Effective Altruism and the Ministry of Love, at "The Swan Throne"

* Martin Lin, The Contingency of the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles in Liebniz (PDF)

* Rob Alspaugh, Dreaming vs Reasoning, at "Teaching Boys Badly"

* Kenny Easwaran, Hank Green on "Fish"

*  Alois Pichler & Sebastian Sunday Grève, Cognitivism about religious belief in later Wittgenstein (PDF)

* Mike Schramm reviews Von Hildebrand's "What Is Philosophy?", at "The Journal of Absolute Truth"

* Stefano Caputo, One but not the Same (PDF), on truth

* Edward Feser, Heeding Anscombe on just war doctrine

* Robert Keim, The Language of Holy Communion in Medieval England, at "Via Medievalis"

And Dreams of Sullen Rain and Mist

 A Dark Day of Summer
by Madison Julius Cawein   

 Though Summer walks the world to-day
 With corn-crowned hours for her guard,
 Her thoughts have clad themselves in gray,
 And wait in Autumn's weedy yard. 

 And where the larkspur and the phlox
 Spread carpets for her feet to pass,
 She stands with sombre, dripping locks
 Bound bleak with fog-washed zinnias. 

 Sad terra-cotta-colored flowers,
 Whose disks the trickling wet has tinged
 With dingy lustre, like the bowers,
 Flame-flecked with leaves, the frost has singed. 

 She, with slow feet, -- 'mid gaunt gold blooms
 Of marigolds her fingers twist, --
 Passes, dim-swathed in Fall's perfumes
 And dreams of sullen rain and mist.