Love of the Righteous

"What are you studying? inquired Zevchiel.

"One of the books of Schiller."

"Who is this Schilner?"

Finalia laughed inside and said, "He is one of the great German authors, and his name is praised by all of the educated."

"And why should a daughter of Israel read through worthless books as these and what will she find in them?"

"Everything is found in it; wisdom, ethics and proper conduct."

"You make me laugh, that in a heathen book, which is an abomination to every man who calls himself by the name Israel, is found wisdom, ethics and proper conduct." Finalia didn't know whether or not to disabuse this fool on his foolishness, but to her relief her father came and rescued her from this disgusting man.

Foner books has an online translation of Sarah Faigan Menkin's The Love of the Righteous (or, as they translate it, A Righteous Love). The Love of the Righteous, published in 1880, appears to have been the first novel written in Hebrew by a woman; it was one of the important works of the Russian phase of the Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment. Her children's story, The Path of the Children is also worth reading.

Carnivalesque Call for Submissions

This post will be at the top for the whole of this week. For newer posts, see below.



The next Carnivalesque (Ancient/Medieval edition) will be hosted here at Siris. The deadline for submissions is 9 pm (CDT = UTC/GMT-5), May 21st. (This means that, depending on where in the world you are, the carnival will be up either May 21st or the early morning of May 22nd.) If at all possible, please send your nominations and submissions before the deadline.

Send submissions and nominations using the Blog Carnival submission form, or by sending them to one of the following addresses:

carnivalesque[at]hotmail[dot]co[dot]uk
branemrys[at]yahoo[dot]com

with @ for [at] and . for [dot], of course.

The posts should have something to do with ancient or medieval history, and should have been posted since the last Ancient/Medieval Carnivalesque (on March 13). They do not have to be academic posts, nor do they have to be heavyweight scholarship; in fact, this carnival is for anyone who has a genuine interest in ancient or medieval history, whether acadamic or not. Posts may take a wide variety of approaches to the subject matter, but they should exemplify basic standards of factual accuracy. The host reserves the right to restrict or limit the submissions actually chosen for the carnival on the basis of factual accuracy, the number of submissions, fit with the tenor or theme of the carnival, and similar criteria; but if you have doubts, please submit it.

To help make the creation of this edition of the carnival easier, please put "Carnivalesque" somewhere in the title of the email, and when possible provide the following information:

Title of post
Post Permalink
Title of blog
Blog URL

A brief description of the post (1 or 2 sentences) would also be helpful. Multiple submissions are allowed, and, in fact, encouraged; you may submit your own writing or another's, but please try not to submit more than one post by any individual blogger (unless they are multi-part posts on one topic).

Please pass the word!

Happy Birthday, J.S. Mill

Today is the anniversary of John Stuart Mill's birthday.

Anthony Skelton has a good article at The Globe and Mail, while Roger Scruton reflects critically on Mill's views at the Wall Street Journal.

The SEP article on Mill, by Fred Wilson, is worth reading as well. Much of Mill's work should be contrasted with that of William Whewell, Mill's major philosophical opponent.

Mill was a prolific writer, but an important sample of Mill's works can be found online:

Auguste Comte and Positivism
Autobiography
Considerations on Representative Government
The Contest in America
Essays on Some Unsettled Questions in Political Economy
Utilitarianism
On Liberty
The Principles of Political Economy (Book 1)
Three Essays on Religion (first two essays)
The Subjection of Women

However, the Online Library of Liberty has done the rather hefty work of putting all 33 volumes of Mill's Collected Works online in PDF.

One of my favorite passages in Mill has to do with my own field of early modern philosophy:

Every tiro in metaphysics is familiar with the name of Berkeley, and thinks himself perfectly well acquainted with the Berkeleian doctrines: but they are known, in most cases, so far as known at all, not from what their author, but from what other people, have said of them, and are consequently, by the majority of those who think they know them, crudely conceived, and their most characteristic features misunderstood. Though he was excelled by none who ever wrote on philosophy in the clear expression of his meaning, and discrimination of it from what he did not mean, scarcely any thinker has been more perseveringly misapprehended, or has been the victim of such persistent ignoratio elenchi; his numerous adversaries having generally occupied themselves in proving what he never denied, and denying what he never asserted.

From here (PDF). Too true, even today. Berkeley is just not properly taught. (But Mill doesn't move us forward much, I'm afraid. For instance, Mill later in the same essay makes the odd claim that Berkeley probably knew no freethinkers or freethinking arguments in writing Alciphron. But Berkeley is very clear that the freethinkers he has in mind are coffeehouse strongheads, and he would have had plenty of opportunity to come across such creatures whiling he was hanging out with Jonathan Swift and Richard Steele. It's a common error: Mill is right that only a handful of people had tried to set out the case for the atheistic side if you are thinking of canonical or near-canonical works. But it does not follow from this that it never came up in coffeehouse arguments; Berkeley says it did, and what he says seems to fit with other things we know about coffeehouse philosophy, as well as fitting with the complicated mix of arguments he sees the need to answer. This, alas, is an error that plagues history of philosophy: we rely so much on standard and semi-standard texts of influential thinkers that we forget that these are only one carefully crafted product of philosophical thinking, and that there was philosophy being done in the period that did not take this form. See also the SEP article on Anthony Collins; Collins was one of the coffeehouse 'minute philosophers' that we know Berkeley had in mind.)

---
ADDED LATER

Other posts for the occasion in the blogosphere. Posts added as I find them. If you come across interesting ones not listed, let me know in the comments.

Mill at 200 at "The Elfin Ethicist"
Happy Birthday JS Mill at "Matthew Mullins"
John Stuart Mill at "I Want to be a Muso"

"Catallarchy" is having a Mill-fest for the occasion. You can access it through the introductory post.

Thanks to Matt of "I Want to be a Muso" for pointing out that the BBC (Radio 4) has a special program devoted to Mill, which can be downloaded until May 25 and afterward should be streamed online.

Links for Noting

* Stephen Palmquist has some papers well worth reading on Kant's view of academics as agents for peace:
-> Philosophers in the Public Square: A Religious Resolution of Kant's Conflict of the Faculties
-> Kant's Ideal of the University as a Model for World Peace
-> The Philosopher as a "Secret Agent" for Peace: Taking Seriously Kant's Revival of the "Old Question"

The focus is philosophers, but, of course, 'philosophy' even in Kant's time was a broader term than it is today, and much of what is said can be applied to intellectuals of any type.

* "Non Skeptical Essays" has an interesting four part series on tradition. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. "Towards God is our journey" has a post pointing to other online discussions of tradition from a Muslim perspective.

* An interesting argument about how to interpret the infamous veils and angels passage in 1 Cor. 11, defending the ISV translation.

* Scott McLemee discusses the always interesting Athanasius Kircher at Inside Higher Ed. (HT: Cliopatria)

* The Elfin Ethicist has a great post on Marsilius of Padua.

* "A distinguished symbologist", "an alluring cryptologist" (and how!), "a legendary bloodline", "a secret code": you can see it all in The Norman Rockwell Code. Be sure to view the trailer, if you can; it's good. The best line is "Well, history was one of my favorite subjects. I got a C- in it." I'll definitely be looking out for the full version; the trailer is actually better than any trailers I've seen for that other Code. [I think they're replacing the trailer on the website with the movie itself, so you can watch the trailer at YouTube.]

* Alejandro continues the discussion of NOMA at "Reality Conditions"

* What we have usually been told about lactic acid and muscles -- that it is a waste byproduct that causes fatigue and makes us sore -- appears to be largely wrong. (HT: The Buck Stops Here) Apparently it can cause muscle fatigue if it builds up, but it can also be burned up by the muscle as fuel before it reaches that point (and in athletes it apparently is). Of course, there's more research to be done; but it's interesting how something that has been taught as fact for about eighty years now may turn out to be so wrong, simply because it was never properly investigated in the first place. Brooks, the scientist who has done the most work to overturn the old view, attributes this to the fact that the original experimenters were Nobel laureates and that the experimental ground was never seriously gone over again, using new methods, by those who followed them. So it kept getting taught, it became difficult to get funding or have one's papers published if the research tended in another direction, and it settled in for a long stay.

----
ADDED LATER

* An interesting Calvinist discussion of the relation between the image of God and total depravity. (HT: Rebecca Writes) Calvin's own position on this is not very clear. He holds that the image of God was destroyed (which seems like position #1), but holds that obscure lineaments remain (which seems like position #2); but says that it is so obscure that we might as well say it has been destroyed. However, it remains enough that we should consider harming another human being to be next door to harming God (which makes it seem like position #3); to the objection that it has been obliterated, he agrees (like position #1) but says something of it remains (like position #2) and that even if it didn't, we were created for this end, and that fact remains even if the image itself does not. See my post on passages about the imago Dei in Calvin. Perhaps we should regard Calvin's doctrine as being something like this: he does not hold that the image is any one thing -- there are several (related) things that can be called the image of God. But that which is most properly called the image of God was lost at the Fall, and needs to be restored in Christ; what is left is, as it were, a disposition to the image, a sort of negative imprint or seed of the possibility of original righteousness, which is not perfected, or indeed perfectible, without redemption. That is, properly speaking the imago Dei is the rectitude of the whole soul -- which we have lost -- but by metonymy it is our created disposition to this rectitude we no longer have. I don't know if this is actually Calvin's view, but it would allow one to reconcile all the things he says -- and Calvin says these things right after another, so he clearly thinks there is a way to reconcile them all.

* Frank Wilczek's light and readable critique of Popper's falsificationism deserves to be a reading in every introductory philosophy of science class. (HT: Macht@TT)

* Roger Scruton criticizes Mill.

A Poem Draft

When My Days are Spent

When my days are spent
may you mourn me thus:
he was the mountain of Tabor,
gently rising,
seeking light and dawn.

The twigs and boughs make tabernacles
that wait for a conversation,
discourse of light and fire,
two witnesses to merciful truth.

See Tabor in her rising;
she remembers glory,
two far-seers meeting their hope;
she trembles, lamb-like, for return.

Even so was he:
lamb trembling for the light,
hesychast of mind,
meditation in human form,
hoping for transfiguration.

Kant on the World's Beginning, and Alphabet Soup

There are, I think, five possible positions on the beginning of the world (novitas mundi).

(1) The world necessarily had a beginning.

(2) The world necessarily lacked a beginning.

(3) The world is such that it could have a beginning or lack a beginning; but as a matter of fact it did have a beginning.

(4) The world is such that it could have a beginning or lack a beginning; but as a matter of fact it did not have a beginning.

(5) The world is not such that it could have a beginning, and it is not such that it could lack a beginning.

(1) is the sort of view one finds in Philoponus, the Kalam theologians, Saadia Gaon, al-Ghazali, and Bonaventure. The usual arguments for this are arguments for the impossibility of the relevant type of actual infinite, although there are a few others. (2) is usually associated with strong Aristotelians, e.g., Aristotle, Averroes, for reasons due to their analysis of motion; it is also Newton's view, for theological reasons (God exists necessarily; and constitutes space and time by necessarily existing always and everywhere). (3) is the view of Aquinas and probably Maimonides before him. I don't know of anyone who holds (4), although it's a possible opinion. (5) may seem self-contradictory, but it's actually a bit more clever than that. We find the position in Kant.

As I see it, this is Kant's argument. We can apparently refute both the conclusion that the world has a beginning and the conclusion that the world has no beginning. (Kant argues this at length.) Now, if this were a straightforward contradiction, reason would be in trouble; but in fact it is not. The reason the dilemma can be made to seem so serious, Kant argues, is that we tend to misread it. In particular, we tend to read

A) The world has a beginning.

as the contradictory of

B) The world does not have a beginning.

But we need not accept this assumption. Kant uses the analogy of good-smelling. We might tend to read

A') This body is good-smelling.

as the contradictory of

B') This body is not good-smelling.

But another way to read it is to read it as:

C') This body is such that it has a smell that is good.

and

D') This body is such that it has a smell that is not good.

These are not contradictories. They are contraries, which means that while they cannot both be true, they can both be false. In particular, they will both be false if this is true:

F') This body is not such that it has any smell at all.

So, Kant says, we need to distinguish the following three sets of claims:

A) The world is such that it has a beginning
B) The world is not such that it has a beginning.

C) The world is such that it has a beginning.
D) The world is such that it does not have a beginning.

E) The world is such that it either has a beginning or does not.
F) The word is not such that it either has a beginning or does not.

(A) and (B) are contradictories; but if we affirm (B), we aren't claiming that the world has no beginning (D), because (B) is also consistent with (F). Only if (E) is true will (B) imply (D); because only if (E) is true will (C) and (D) be contradictories. Kant famously claims that (E) is false, arguing instead for its contradictory (F): The appearances of the world are reason's synthesis in space and time; therefore, 'the world' as a total synthesis of appearances is not available to reason as an object but is presented to it as a task -- a task of continually regressing in time, as each prior moment requires another prior moment. Therefore, since 'the world' in this sense is not an actually existing object, but a task set for reason (i.e., is not a thing in itself but a representation), it is not the sort of thing that properly speaking has a beginning or lacks one. As Kant says, in this regress there can be no lack of conditions; but the synthesis never exists without regress (and further regress, ad infinitum). As he sums it up (A507/B535):

If the world is a whole existing in itself, it is either finite or infinite. But both alternatives are false (as shown in the proofs of the antithesis and thesis respectively). It is therefore also false that the world (the sum of all appearances) is a whole existing in itself. From this it then follows that appearances in general are nothing outside our representations--which is just what is meant by their transcendental ideality.

(Kemp Smith translation.) This is Kant's famous transcendental idealism.

There are whole worlds of problems with this approach, I think; but it must be admitted that it is quite clever. The ingenuity of it is typical of Kant, and enough to show why he's often considered a great philosophical mind.

[LATER NOTE: Rewrote a few sentences for clarity and to eliminate typos and revision-residue.]

Jotting on the Catholic Philosophy of Sex

An interesting article by John Corvino criticizing the Catholic view of natural law and sexuality (HT: Positive Liberty). In it he says:

But there's one implication of the "openness to procreation" premise that the Church refuses to acknowledge. If sex must be open to procreation, then it should be wrong for sterile (or postmenopausal) heterosexual married partners to have sex. Imagine a woman whose ovaries and uterus have been removed for medical reasons. Clearly, her sexual acts will never be "open to the transmission of life" in any morally meaningful way. But the Church declines to condemn such acts.

One of the things Corvino misses is that sex from the Catholic perspective has three purposes and any of these are sufficient to make sex OK if they are pursued in a way that doesn't involve deliberately interfering with the other two. The three purposes are (roughly) procreation, due remedy (what is sometimes called by the very uninspiring and somewhat misleading name of 'marital debt'), and union. The case of a sterile woman clearly can fall under due remedy (which has to do with one's partner's needs) and union (which has to do with preserving the marital bond); and ex hypothesi the fact that any particular sexual act is unable to lead to procreation is both out of the couple's hands and an incidental feature of the persons involved. If the sexual act is performed for either due remedy or marital union, in a way consistent with both, and with an attitude toward the sexual act that would welcome children if they were possible, there is no reason on the Catholic view that it should be condemned.

This is all very basic. Nonetheless, I find the argument interesting in that Corvino incidentally brushes up a genuine flaw in common attempts to build a sexual ethics out of natural law. The moral ends of sex are noticeably versions of another set of moral ends, namely, the moral ends of marriage. And it seems clear that any attempt to discuss sexual ethics can't move anywhere unless it faces squarely and clearly the moral status and nature of the marital bond. It's very clear, I think, that Catholics often think they can skip this step; and it's just not possible to do so without distortion. In particular, it's silly to assume you can pull a natural law argument against homosexual acts out of the purpose of procreation like a rabbit out of a magician's hat, without examining how procreation relates to the conjugal bond. That's not the way it works; natural law is by definition much more systematic and rational than that, and doesn't allow shortcuts. The case of sterility, for instance, shows that the issue cannot be inability to procreate as such, as many people seem to assume.