Kamm on the Enlightenment

Oliver Kamm on the Enlightenment:

And there is an essential continuity among the national variants of the Enlightenment in their secularism.

By secularism, I don't mean atheism. Atheism is a philosophical position. I hold to it, and I regard the spread of atheism over the long term as both likely and overwhelmingly beneficial. But for cultures born of the Enlightenment, private religious belief is not so much an enemy as an irrelevance. What matters is that religion should not intrude into the public sphere. It must make its accommodation, however it chooses to get there, with modern mores, liberal values and secular education. If it won't, then it makes itself an enemy.

In fact, however, it is very difficult to show that this is the case: to a very large degree this is an anachronistic imposition. The major thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, for instance, split clearly into people who might be called secularists (Hume, Reid, Gibbon) and people who can in no serious sense of the term be called secularists, despite clearly being Enlightenment thinkers (Reid, Campbell, Witherspoon, Beattie). The French Revolution created what was literally a state religion of Reason. Enlightened Orthodoxy in Geneva was hardly secularist. The famous English 'Moderation' was largely furthered by people like Warburton, who was very far from thinking that private religious belief was an "irrelevance" or that it should not intrude into the public sphere: their Moderation was the middle way of the Church of England (between the two extremes of priest-dominated Catholics and visionary Quakers and Methodists). Actual advocates of separation of church and state, outside of certain religious groups like the Baptists, were relatively rare if all of Europe is taken into account; some on the secularist side, in fact, proposed establishmentarianism as the means for de-fanging religion (Hume is an example), and a major French Enlightenment document like the Civil Constitution of the Clergy is not at all something that banishes religion from the public sphere, despite secularizing it. There are no doubt particular thinkers of whom Kamm's summary would be a reasonable summary. But the 'Enlightenments' were hardly one-note music boxes, and on the topic of religion the notes make for extraordinarily diverse polyphony. (I think David Sorkin's The Religious Enlightenment does a fairly decent job of looking at some strands of the Enlightenment that are often overlooked.) And even the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which Kamm holds up as a key example, doesn't lay down the public/private distinction the way Kamm does: "all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities" is not a recipe for banishing religion from public view, and it protects public religious expression as much as it limits it. This is one of the possible effects of religious liberty and separation of church and state: no longer enforceable by government, religion still pervades the public sphere because impediments preventing it from participating in the arguments of the public sphere are removed, and therefore it becomes something that regularly has to be dealt with by politicians in their attempts to persuade their fellow citizens. You can take away the force of law from every religion; but if the mind of man is free, that includes being free to bring up religious claims in civic and political arguments. And Americans, to take just the obvious example, always have.

Kamm opens by proposing the Virginia Statute as the most significant document of the Enlightenment. My vote for the most (historically) significant document of the Enlightenment: Rousseau's Emile, the novel that launched a thousand educational reform movements.

Arnhart on Hume on Ought and Is

Larry Arnhart gets Hume right on ought and is:

Like many of the proponents of "evolutionary psychology," Thayer assumes that biological science cannot explain moral experience because science is concerned with factual claims rather than value judgments, and he attributes this fact/value distinction to David Hume. But Thayer misses Hume's point. Hume distinguishes is and ought in order to show that moral assessments are derived not from pure reason alone but from moral emotions. Yet far from denying that moral judgments are judgments of fact, Hume claims that moral judgments are accurate when they correctly report what our moral judgments would be in a given set of circumstances. Correct moral judgments are factual statements about the species-typical pattern of moral sentiments in specified circumstances.

There are, of course, a number of complications; but as a three-sentence summary of Hume's rather complex view of moral judgments, the end of this paragraph is quite good. As I noted in a previous post, Hume is quite clear that the distinction is to show that "moral assessments are derived not from pure reason alone" but from moral sentiments; although, due to complexities in Hume's theory of taste, things are not as straightforward as the second sentence makes it sound, it is still pretty much right, and Hume does treat moral judgments as a kind of factual statement about moral taste; and Hume is quite clear about the "species-typical" part. And Arnhart seems to be right, too, when he says that Darwin recognized that "the ethical naturalism of Smith and Hume allowed morality to become an object of scientific study, because scientists could study the natural roots of moral judgment in the evolved moral emotions of the human animal."

I hadn't originally intended to blog more on this subject, but I'm thinking at present of writing a post on my own view of the ought/is question -- the things I think Hume gets quite right, the points at which my view diverges from his, etc. If I do, in fact, write it, it will probably be up at some point in the next week.

Proper Place

It's been a while since I've posted the result of a meaningless online quiz. Here's my result from Mark Vernon's My Philosophy Guru Quiz:

Your recommended philosophy-guru is ARISTOTLE.

Key fact: The star pupil of Plato.

Must have: A desire to study the world and see what it reveals.

Key promise: The good life, which comes from living a virtuous life.

Key peril: The virtuous life can be tough.

Most likely to say: "Everything has its proper place."

Least likely to say: "Science is where humanity went wrong."

Even as a Dragon's Eye

Even as a dragon's eye that feels the stress
by William Wordsworth

Even as a dragon's eye that feels the stress
Of a bedimming sleep, or as a lamp
Suddenly glaring through sepulchral damp,
So burns yon Taper 'mid a black recess
Of mountains, silent, dreary, motionless:
The lake below reflects it not; the sky,
Muffled in clouds, affords no company
To mitigate and cheer its loneliness.
Yet, round the body of that joyless Thing
Which sends so far its melancholy light,
Perhaps are seated in domestic ring
A gay society with faces bright,
Conversing, reading, laughing; — or they sing,
While hearts and voices in the song unite.

Flowers

Today is the feast of St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897), also known as the Little Flower; she has the liturgical title, Doctor of the Church, which is given to teachers of great importance. Here is S. L. Emery's 1907 translation of one of her poems. The flowers, of course, are little acts of love, like a kind word, or a small sacrifice for someone else's sake.

To Scatter Flowers

O Jesu! O my Love! Each eve I come to fling
Before Thy sacred Cross sweet flowers of all the year.
By these plucked petals bright, my hands how gladly bring,
I long to dry Thine every tear!

To scatter flowers! — that means each sacrifice,
My lightest sighs and pains, my heaviest, saddest hours,
My hopes, my joys, my prayers, — I will not count the price.
Behold my flowers!

With deep, untold delight Thy beauty fills my soul.
Would I might light this love in hearts of all who live!
For this, my fairest flowers, all things in my control,
How fondly, gladly I would give!

To scatter flowers! — behold my chosen sword
For saving sinners’ souls and filling heaven’s bowers.
The victory is mine: yes, I disarm Thee, Lord,
With these my flowers!

The petals in their flight caress Thy Holy Face;
They tell Thee that my heart is Thine, and Thine alone.
Thou knowest what these leaves are saying in my place;
On me Thou smilest from Thy throne.

To scatter flowers! — that means, to speak of Thee, —
My only pleasure here, where tears fill all the hours;
But soon, with angel hosts, my spirit shall be free,
To scatter flowers!

June 28, 1896

Material Conditionals in Natural Language

Bill Vallicella has a post up on an argument by Errol Harris on material implication. I don't have much to say about his objection to the argument; since I haven't read the work in question, I can only go on the excerpt given, and based on that, the Maverick Philosopher seems to be quite right. But he takes the example, "If the earth is flat, I am the Pope" and says of it:

I submit that this conditional is at once both a material conditional and a piece of ordinary language. Thus here we have an ordinary language example of a material conditional. So although the material conditional is a theoretical construct for logical purposes, it is exemplified in natural language.

But I think it's worth our time to press this somewhat. In order to be a material conditional, this conditional must meet two conditions:

(1) Its behavior for logical purposes must be describable using the entire material implication truth table.
(2) Its behavior for logical purposes must be entirely describable using the material implication truth table.

And by 'behavior' here I mean nothing more than the way the conditional is used in natural language reasoning, since we are discussing whether this can be both a material conditional and a piece of ordinary language. In order to be both, it must be a piece of ordinary language whose usage is entirely describable entirely by the right truth table.

But there is some reason to doubt that this is the case, because one might argue in the following way. I am not the pope whether the earth is flat or not. There is nothing about the earth being flat that would make it necessary for me to be pope, and there is nothing about my not being pope that makes it necessary that the earth is not flat. Therefore it would be logically consistent state of affairs if I were not the pope and the earth were flat. But if it is logically consistent for 'I am not the pope' and 'The earth is flat' to be true, then the truth table for the the conditional, 'If the earth is flat, I am the pope," is not the truth table of the material conditional, since it is inconsistent with that truth table for the truth of the antecedent and the falsehood of the consequent to be consistent with each other. To be sure, it happens to be a fact about the actual world that both antecedent and consequent are false, and this is the reason we are using the conditional in the first place. But it seems odd to say that whether or not this conditional is a material conditional depends on contingent facts about how the world is; and given that a true antecedent and false consequent are logically possible, it seems that we would have to say this in order to say that Condition (2) is not violated. The conditional has a modal behavior that would allow it to deviate, in principle if not in practice, from the behavior it would have to have as a material conditional. [ADDED LATER: Re-reading this, I don't find it to be adequately clear. The point boils down to this: If there is any modal or probabilistic component to the conditional, it is not a material conditional, since the material conditional truth table has no modal or probabilistic components. But the conditional as usually used doesn't rule out the combination of the truth of the antecedent and the falsehood of the consequent -- it merely relies on the fact that they both happen to be false, the consequent to a very high degree of certainty, and the antecedent to a degree of certainty that is being put on a level, for practical purposes, with the degree of certainty for the consequent. It is, in fact, what we would usually take it to be: a figure of speech classifying one possibility's likelihood of being false with another possibility that everyone is certain is false. Thus there is nothing about it that strictly rules out the compossibility of true antecedent and false consequent; it merely treats this as an extraordinarily unlikely possibility.]

Moreover, there is the difficult of showing that any piece of natural language exemplifies an entire truth table rather than only some fragment of it. That is, it's difficult to show that Condition (1) is met. In a formal language, where connections are defined in terms of truth tables, there is no problem. One can tell, simply by looking, that p → q has the truth table of a material conditional in standard propositional logic, because that is how → is defined in propositional logic. But natural language connections like 'if' are not defined in this way, and one might well hold that the conditional "If the earth is flat, I am the pope," was composed solely for the purpose of allowing modus tollens, and for no other reason. Can it then be represented by any part of the material implication truth table that does not deal with a false consequent? It isn't clear that it can. The behavior of 'if' in general isn't represented by the material implication truth table, because (to take just one example) common usage takes it in such a way that the counterpart of modus ponens in natural language is defeasible; so we can't take the right truth table to be built into 'if' itself. Therefore the missing parts of the truth table can't be supplied from the way 'if' is generally used. Perhaps there is some way around it, but it seems to be difficult to establish that any piece of natural language meets Condition (1).

This is not to say that there might not be cases of the material conditional being exemplified in natural language. But we run into the same problems here that Jennings has noted with regard to finding exclusive disjunction in natural language: matching natural language usage to truth tables is very tricky, because you have to use the entire truth table and that truth table has to be wholly sufficient for describing behavior for logical purposes. If either of these are violated, we don't have a material conditional exemplified in natural language but merely a conditional that is not a material conditional but sufficiently analogous to it that we can sometimes pretend that it is. And that's a different thing.

The Thrones of the Seven Days

The most famous production of the Mercury Theatre on the Air founded by Orson Welles and John Housman was the notorious War of the Worlds broadcast; but they had a number of other classics too. Kim Scarbrough has a webpage where you can find a number of them. I just finished listening to the broadcast of The Man Who Was Thursday, one of the best they made (and all there work is already among the best of the best), which first went to air two weeks before the War of the Worlds broadcast. It is quite interesting because the radio version, by cutting out much of information about the Days, makes Chesterton's strange story even stranger (but still quite good). Welles was apparently a fan of the book, saying it had shamelessly beautiful prose. The transcript is also online.

The Dracula broadcast also brings out some of the stranger features of its original source material.