Drunks Staggering Home

But I think that the mind is not to be so easily dismissed, and although it can sometimes be clouded and confused, still, what it wants is its proper good; but, like some drunk on his way home, it cannot remember which is the right path. Are those who are trying not to want for anything really wrong? It certainly is conducive to happiness to have plenty, to need no one's help, and to be entirely self-sufficient. Are those who want reverence and respect altogether wrong? The effort of men to obtain respect is by no means base or contemptible. Is power a bad thing? Surely, it is better than weakness. And is fame always bad? Nobody can argue that most things that are excellent are also famous. And it hardly needs to be said that happiness is not possible for one who is worried, or depressed, or afraid of pain or trouble.

Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, Slavitt, tr. Harvard (Cambridge, MA: 2008) p. 63.

Excommunicating Comets

Jim at "Quodlibeta" has a post on the widespread story that Pope Callistus III excommunicated Halley's comet. Of course, the story doesn't even make any sense in its own right; Halley's comet is presumably not a regular partaker of Eucharistic communion, and therefore is not even the sort of thing that could be excommunicated. (Take that, comet! You are no longer allowed to participate in the Mass!) But, then, people don't always think stories through. He suggests the probable history of this curious little anecdote. It sounds very similar to the excrement-in-heaven story, which started out as a joke and began to be taken seriously.

'Religion'

John Wilkins points to this essay by Pascal Boyer on religion as a natural phenomenon. It's quite an interesting essay, although to some extent I have the same issues with it that Razib does: 'religion' is not a univocal term, nor (I would say) even a very useful one. It used to have a very clear use; it was a moral virtue, i.e., a disposition relating to will, allied to justice, in which one attempts to pay due honor to the divine. It was a matter of being disposed to a certain sort of stable practice. As such it would make little sense to talk of particular beliefs, for instance, as 'religious', except in the loose sense that they might have something to do with the performance of religious actions (which would cast a very wide net indeed); institutions would be 'religious' only in the sense that they were in some way specially devoted to this sort of practice (as in the phrase 'religious orders', which are bound by special vows to certain features of a life devoted to religious practice); and so on and so forth. But as time has gone on the term has bloated to massive scope, so that the only thing that keeps it from being purely useless is the fact that we associate certain things with it as paradigmatic examples. Ande ven these are quite diverse: beliefs, practices, feelings, and more are all jumbled together. Thus I don't think there is any sort of generalization about 'religion' that will stand serious examination, although (of course) there are many sorts of generalization that are true of particular things that we might call 'religious'. Talking about 'religion' without any clarification is like talking about 'respectability' or 'custom' without any clarification; it's an extraordinarily sloppy mental habit that we should all fight.

I think it's also important to recognize (and tends to be overlooked by people who favor the claim that religion will always be with us) that this doesn't automatically mean that the sort of 'religion' (however it is understood in context) that we're stuck with is a good thing. There are plenty of things that appear to be 'always with us' that are not good: slavery, for instance, which goes on every day even in countries like the United States. And there are certainly plenty of things that go by the name 'religion' that, we can all agree, are hard to stamp out and are dubious by their very nature. What is needed, here as elsewhere, is clear-headed rational thought, not people jumping in and trying to push the conclusion to one that they like.

It's interesting reading some of the comments to the Evolving Thoughts post, though; to take just one for-instance, some of the comments bring home clearly just how far a certain type of atheist is willing to go toward simply rigging the argument from the get-go in favor of his preferred conclusion. Of course religion (left undefined, of course) will be stamped out, they say, of course it's thoroughly superfluous and due entirely to irrationality; and to support it they will give some extraordinarily implausible analogy, or cherry-pick examples, or some other absurdity. It's a common enough failing, of course; but it's salutary to be reminded (since most* atheists will not remember themselves) that atheists are not immune to it.

---------------------

* I say 'most' because there are some thoughtful exceptions. One of the most misquoted passages on this sort of subject that I've come across is Richard Lewontin's "divine foot in the door" passage:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

I have seen this quoted as if Lewontin were giving his own view of materialism here; but, of course, he is not. He is reviewing Carl Sagan, and his point is not that this is the way materialism really is, but that this is how Sagan argues against 'religious' views -- and that this type of argument is so indiscriminate that it would be extremely difficult to defend, to the standard of argument to which Sagan holds such views, even Sagan's own materialism against it. All the charges Sagan brings against religion and the like are charges that can be (and have been) brought against science and materialism. And so when we appreciate just how much effort has to be put into arguing against this type of argument, regardless of the position against which it is applied, we realize that the deployment of this argument against a position tells us very little about whether that position is rational or not; it's the kind of argument that even a moderately clever sophist can easily deploy against any position, thus tangling up proponents of that position in endless slippery little quibbles. Or in other words, Lewontin's argument is not that this is what materialism is, and certainly not what his own materialist position is, but that materialists should see the futility of trying to rig the argument in their favor by using reasoning like this (whatever truth it may contain) against the positions they oppose. It's the type of argument people use to rig any argument in favor of any position they support.

Dashed Off

It has been a while since I've done one of these posts. Semi-random thoughts from the notebook I carry around everywhere, some interesting, some silly, some somewhere in between.

the triple solidarity of the Church
(1) solidarity by similitude (each in the Image of Christ)
(2) solidarity by division of labor (the organic Body of Christ)
(3) solidarity by equability (the bond of charity and peace)

principium exclusae collisionis officiorum

reason that is lively & mixed with some propensity

doxastic uneasiness ("uneasiness arises from the opposition of two contrary principles" T 206)
(1) sacrifice one principle to the other
(2) oscillating assent
(3) palliative hypothesis (we muddle the matter up so the opposition is less obvious)
(4) restrict one or both of the principles

"Not being able to do the work of the angels in choir, we can at least write about them." Thomas Aquinas

networks of influence vs. hierarchies of prestige

ethics works on the basis of an infrastructure, which it requires; but it has little infrastructure of its own & so borrows political, social, & religious infrastructure

the use of associative correlatives (Treat. SBN 107) in poetry & art (description by associative correlatives)

In the Vision at Ostia, the conversation of Monica and Augustine adumbrates the conversation of the saints in heaven.

For Hume's "calm passion" substitute "settled principle of action" (cf. T 419)

Education is indeed an artificial cause, & its maxims are frequently contrary to reason, & even to themselves at different times & places; but it is not, for all that, a fallacious ground of assent, merely an incomplete one. It grounds assent together with the grounds for the doctrine itself; those grounds remain as they are whether we are aware of them or not. In education, then, we witness an intellectual division of labor (sometimes this division is merely temporary & provisional, sometimes not), and see how being rational involves, and does not merely suggest, being social.

the philosophical Grand Tour

networks of personal acquaintance
vs. networks of philosophical influence
vs. networks of infrastructure
vs. networks of opposition

"Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time." Schlegel

We act according to our rational natures when we desire virtue, strive for virtue, and contemplate what is.

Sophists always prove themselves wrong by showing how they are right.

exclusive or as exclusive some

It is part of human nature to be joined together in a bond of peace.

sagacity: scent of the truth in advance

Nota notae rei est nota rei ipsius.
Repugnans nota notae rei, repugnat rei ipsi.
->it would seem that these both need qualification

Faith as a capacity for invention, by which we are qualified for transfiguring & divinizing in new ways the elements of our lives

the horse-taming Trojans tamed by a horse

Thought experiments & intuition pumps & counterexamples presuppose univocity (this is because they are abbreviated inductions & inductions require an adequate division).

One may describe through the ratio or analogy of two vocabularies what neither vocabulary on its own can describe.

We sing not merely with voice but with human reason.

"For there is in me a lamentable darkness in which my latent possibilities are hidden from myself, so that my mind, questioning itself upon its own powers, feels that it cannot rightly trust its own report." Augustine Conf. X.xxxiii.48

Defeasible reasoning may be provably undefeated.

philosophy: common sense :: poetry : natural language

a system in which people vote for candidates not to be in office

It was written, it is written still,
but you never knew me, you never will.
Thus now speaks the Lord your God:
In the vineyard the grapes are trod,
the cup of wrath to fill.

the visceral pedagogy of rhetoric

A church unable to reabsorb schismatics (consistently) is defective. (Cf. Donatism)

"A Spell for Inducing Genius"
Ring the world around with reason,
and reason's reason, and pile again
reason unto the highest of heights;
for madness is but flooding reason
and madness and genius are allied.
Place the lunar sphere within the mind,
the fickle, changing rays of moon,
to deal out dreams until dreams pour out
and live in waking as in nightly sleep;
this is madness, to genius near allied.
But add to all that single steel-born thread
we call the common sense that, rarely forged,
can chain the Fenris-wolf with silken touch,
and hang the earth, with triple-wrought thread
from the very throne of Zeus;
and anchor it to solid earth and life,
for genius is to madness allied,
but, through that unsplit thread, only allied!
And reason pressed to madness,
and dream let loose like madness,
and common sense giving sane anchor,
reforged as one, make genius.

Rites are an agreed-upon language within a community; this comm. is its communicative context.

In poetic syllogism we can convert A & O?

The most pernicious hypocrisy: To call rational merely whatever seems good to one.

"Nothing is so destitute as a mind philosophizing about God when it is without Him." Diadochos of Photiki (On Spiritual Knowledge 7:254)

The first step in metaphysics is the poetry of reason as the mind makes its first attempts to express its wonder at things, to formulate in the best terms the puzzles that have begun to strike it, and to set its experiences in a rational and intelligible order.

my heart is writ with a mapamound

"Yo he visto en la noche oscura / llover sobre mi cabeza / los rayos de lumbre pura / de la divina belleza." Martí

The three laws of intellectual survival: save it, use it, make it do

Every human being is at once a moral agent and a social instrument.

The difference between Heaven and Hell is that in Heaven utility presupposes morality, without which it cannot properly be defined. But Hell is based on the violation of fundamental moral obligations, thus rendering null and void any apparent obligation contingent on those; but an imperfect utility transaction can still exist, morally null and void as to normative force, but still able to give purposeful structure to action. In Hell, utility substitutes for morality, and utility is itself a shadow of the utility of Heaven, just as cosmetic good looks are a shadow and imitation of the good looks of cheerful good health, just as flattery is a shadow and imitation of evaluation, just as sophistry is a shadow and imitation of philosophy.

naturalist drawing as science and art at once
->indeed natural history generally can be seen as such
Naturalist drawing is the attempt to interpret evidence artistically (w/ drawing utensils) in such a way that the artistic result is itself useful for scientific reasoning.
->cf. also uses of photography & 3D models & diagrams

One of the most difficult things to learn is how to distinguish good sloppiness from bad sloppiness (and, conversely, good precision from useless precision).

One of the things philosophy is: the Long War against the sophists of every age and every nation, a war to last until the end of time.

And the mice eat all our bowstrings,
and the mice bring madness down,
and the angel of the Lord, still mocking,
casts the army to the ground.

curiositas : studiositas :: superstitio : religio

"the living clockwork of the State must be repaired while it is still striking" Schiller

moral obligations that are affected by observation

etiquette as a package of protections against ethical crises, a set of compensations to reduce ethical risks

That etiquette, however much a lesser morality, is relevant to morals can be seen in many extreme situations (e.g., suicidal callers to emergency hotlines).

"Men never do evil so completely & cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." Pascal (#895)

Boethius begins to write his lament & complaint; but is prevent by Philosophy, who makes him feel foolish, although he cannot yet see that it is Philosophy that prevents him. This is a figure that captures well how Philosophy often works: exposed to Philosophy in our educations, she whispers in our ears elsewhere, whether we recognize her voice or not.

"Every person is the seed of an infinite genius." Novalis NRE #63

fantastics: invention :: logic : ratiocination

lux pulchrificat, quia sine luce omnia sunt turpia

Ex divina pulchritudine esse omnium derivatur.

outsit, outperform, & divide

Human interaction is the infrastructure of thought.

Not all that is water eases your thirst.

"Torah and wisdom are twin sisters." Isaac Satanow (Mishlei 'Asaf II p. 70a)

Derash, unlike peshat, is constrastive, and thus requires not merely understanding of the words but reasonings about their use.

the importance of rational play

Make no arguments unless they can be prayed.

The poet lacks technical precision not from a defect in poetry but from the fact that all technical precision on the topics (s)he discusses is necessarily rationally downstream from the point at which (s)he speaks the experience for reason to consider.

Teaching Logic at the Most Basic Level

My brain is currently being anesthetized as I grade logic take-home quizzes for my Intro Phil course. One of the things this extraordinarily dull and slow exercise (and it is very slow, because in philosophical logic, unlike mathematical logic, there can be different acceptable answers depending on exactly what interpretive moves that are made, so you have to look at each attempt on its own) -- I say, if you have lost the thread of my sentence, as I almost have, that one of the things this extraordinarily dull and slow exercise does is confront you with the perpetual question of what you could have done differently in teaching it. For instance, despite my best attempts to make clear to students that a string of letters and symbols is not an argument until it is clear what the letters and symbols are supposed to mean, a number of students (some bright ones, too) simply wrote down letters without giving me the slightest clue how they are interpreting them. So, for instance, when I ask them put the following in a literal diagram,

All philosophy is a footnote to Plato,

They will give me the diagram marked with the letters Ph and Pl and never tell me whether they take Pl to mean "Plato" or "footnote to Plato" or, for that matter, "the twenty-third pavement stone in front of the City Hall of Timbuktu". I did insist on the importance of making clear how things are to be interpreted, but the regularity of the problem suggests that in future classes I'll need to be even more insistent. (And, I suspect, make sure actually to write every little thing on the board, since I suspect some of them are here and there looking at a few problems we did in class where I had identified the letters verbally but they didn't write them down in their notes because, oddly, they seem to think that their notes should copy exactly what's written on the board and nothing else. So when they go back to look at their notes, they don't pick up the interpretations.)

In any case, it occurred to me that one of the problems I'm constantly struggling with -- and constantly adapting the little logic sections I teach in Intro classes in order to overcome -- is providing simple, very clear and clean ways of teaching logic. So I use Carroll's literal diagrams -- the students hate it, but it forces them to look at all the right things in order to analyze arguments -- and some basic Sommers notation -- which has the advantage of getting across the basic idea of a syllogism without sending us on the hopeless of quest of getting the students to understand figure, mood, and distribution of terms in a few weeks. And I also teach a few basic inference rules (modus ponens, modus tollens, disjunctive syllogism, etc.). But there are bound to be other means that people use to get across the basic ideas of logic to people who simply cannot, for the life of them, figure out what subcontrariety is, no matter how much you explain it, and whose minds boggle at sorites. Have any of you come across such things -- particular ways of teaching some point of logic that are simple, clean, and effective (or as much so as could reasonably be hoped)?

Thought for the Day

If you never feel stupid, you're an idiot.

Last of the Romans

In many local calendars, today is the memorial for the martyrdom of Boethius.

bella bis quinis operatus annis
ultor Atrides Phrygiae ruinis
fratris amissos thalamos piauit;
ille dum Graiae dare uela classi
optat et uentos redimit cruore,
exuit patrem miserumque tristis
foederat natae iugulum sacerdos.
fleuit amissos Ithacus sodales,
quos ferus uasto recubans in antro
mersit immani Polyphemus aluo;
sed tamen caeco furibundus ore
gaudium maestis lacrimis rependit.
Herculem duri celebrant labores:
ille Centauros domuit superbos,
abstulit saeuo spolium leoni,
fixit et certis uolucres sagittis,
poma cernenti rapuit draconi
aureo laeuam grauior metallo,
Cerberum traxit triplici catena,
uictor immitem posuisse fertur
pabulum saeuis dominum quadrigis,
Hydra combusto periit ueneno,
fronte turpatus Achelous amnis
ora demersit pudibunda ripis,
strauit Antaeum Libycis harenis,
Cacus Euandri satiauit iras,
quosque pressurus foret altus orbis
saetiger spumis umeros notauit;
ultimus caelum labor inreflexo
sustulit collo pretiumque rursus
ultimi caelum meruit laboris.
ite nunc, fortes, ubi celsa magni
ducit exempli uia. cur inertes
terga nudatis? superata tellus
sidera donat.