Dashed Off XXVI

This completes the notebook finished in September 2023. 

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"The unity of the world, before being posited by knowledge in a specific act of identification is 'lived.'" Merleau-Ponty

One of the modes of human sexuality is consecration to something higher, whether in honor, or in moral integrity, or in sanctity.

Quality of evidence is relevant to reasoning with the evidence but is neither reducible to probability nor any strict quantity at all; how good the evidence is for being evidence is distinct from both its own probability and the probability of that for which it is evidence.

time: measured by change (=clock) according to before and after of number
place: measured by boundary (=containing limit) according to inside & outside of direction
probability: measured by kinds of possibility (=classification) according to ratio of membership in whole

simultaneity, co-location, equiprobability (relations allowing us to extend one set of measurements to another)

prettiness as small & contained beauty

the theology of Scripture in Sirach 24

the aesthetic dignity of the human person

The Zohar associates Gn 1:1 with the fear of the Lord & Gn 1:2 with the punishments of those who reject it; Gn 1:3 it associates with love of God.

Making assumptions for practical reasons is essential to investigating.

All serious exegesis derives from & is based on a mix of reason and tradition.

People are at their most beautiful in doing; 'passive beauty' is active beauty, so to speak.

What the material conditional interpretation of indicative conditionals fails to capture is inferential dependence.

The theology of divine names is itself a way of covering everything in theology, the method of names touching on every theological field in precisely the way in which it is theological.

As in chess, power serves to protect not power but the only thing that matters.

the method of winning by forcing the accumulation of mistakes (the OODA loop would be an example)

Historically very powerful legislatures have tended to be slow to act.

Modern synods are often less synods than contiones.

militia as exercitus, militia as comitia centuriata

The electromagnetic field at a given location is the time-delayed effect/representation of the position, velocity, and acceleration of a charge in the past.
--> Related to this, electric fields and magnetic fields neither interact nor cause each other, but are mathematical patterns of charge-charge interaction.

shared text as integral to the structure of the Church as Church
-- Scripture, preaching, correspondence, etc.

The basic political strategy of the Church is to outlast.

The corruption of rights discourse arises from attempts to use it to shirk moral responsibility, when in reality a right is in itself a region of responsibility.

A remarkable amount of 'gender identity' involves taking jokes made by previous generations to deal with embarrassment and treating them as serious, literal statements of truth.

A truth that cannot be shared among inquirers cannot be known.

Locked inside every virtue is a way to God.

Morality itself has a divine quality, regardless of how you choose to explain the fact.

It is part of the human lot that what we want or what makes us happy regularly involves or presupposes things we have not considered.

One of the essential requirements of moral maturity is recognizing that you yourself are capable of great evil.

Reason is expressed in the possibility of friendship. All acts of reason that are appropriate to reason are possible grounds of friendship or friendly acts, or else express friendly acts or friendship themselves.

problem space (David Scott): a historically contingent ensemble of questions and answers around which a horizon of identifiable stakes hangs

The Souls of Black Folks as in part a study of virtue-signaling as a sociological phenomenon

Catherine of Siena, Dialogues, ch. 47: no one can observe the commandments fully and properly without observing the counsels 'at least in thought'

modes of passions
(1) simple anger (sorrow, joy, etc.)
(2) anger (etc.) with another
(3) anger (etc.) on behalf of another
(4) abstract anger (etc.)

the long percolation of thought

elements of experience
--- direct perception
--- --- sensation
--- --- sentiment
--- --- immediate apprehension
--- indirect perception
--- --- memory
--- --- anticipation
--- --- sympathy
--- classification
--- inference
--- testimony

Many people enjoy works of art less on aesthetic grounds and more on social or empathetic grounds. Most enthusiasms or fandoms are built on the latter.

love : good :: joy : true :: peace : beautiful

"We exist in a social reality which has been made by others and which we make for others....Speech is the way that we reorganize the universe." Rosenstock-Huessy

Any action norms are valid that are rationally appropriate to the general form of the rational discourse involved; we always have a wide selection of possible discursive norms.

People who ask how God can permit evil have a tendency never to ask how God can permit them.

To imagine a just society is to imagine a society whose actions are oriented to a common good to which one may subordinate one's private good.

custom --> honor & shame --> law

In many areas of thought, human guesses, while not consistently right, are also not consistently wrong, and that we sometimes get what is true by guess plays an important role in human inquiry.

It is precisely the task of human reason to go beyond what merely appears.

"that long experiment called common sense" (Duhem)

what the signifier suggests vs. what the object suggests

Charity humbles its possessors, and often those receiving it.

Signs suggest co-signs.

Occasional (as opposed to systematic) writing has a tendency both sometimes to concede too much and sometimes to claim too much.

The strength of experiment is in matters of mediating causes; it presupposes final effects and first causes, and mostly tells us of the network in between.

"The physicist does not choose the hypotheses he will base his theory on: they germinate in him, without his assistance." Duhem

Duhem's historical work is in part to show that great scientific ideas are not created ex nihilo but grow over long periods from seeds that sometimes look very different from themselves.

Prophet, priest, and king all involve a relation to God; in Christ this relation occurs within Christ Himself, in His very person.

The teachings of Jesus touch on the fundamental preconditions of ethics.

Talk of a 'conserved quantity' presupposes (1) changes with measurable features (2) the negative thesis that proper causes of those changes do not also change the given measurable feature. We cannot identify anything as genuinely conserved unless we have identified it as not subject to modification by a relevant moving cause; a conserved quantity is the same even given that things are caused to change. The notion therefore presupposes causation.

Scripture and Tradition are two modes of being Apostolic.

The standard for quality in  education is how well it contributes to our roles in fundamental moral communities: humanity, family, civil society, Church, etc.

Porphyry and Simplicius both attest that Aristotle's Categories was sometimes called Pro ton Topikon (Before-the-Topics).

The New Testament makes reasonably clear that divine revelations in the Old Testament involved angels even when angels are not explicitly mentioned as such.

"All things are full of angels." Origen

signs with respect to sensory interpretants, with respect to discursive interpretants, with respect to intellectual interpretants

"Nothing comes to be from nothing within the order of nature." Albert

An organic body is constantly flowing in and out in various ways.

conserved quantities as consistent signates

Humans seem to have evolved under pressure to philosophize; dialectical skill was, from all that we can tell, necessary to navigate some kinds of constant problems, both social and natural.

protection, respect, and audience for the common people

"Magic is the the art of using the world of sense arbitrarily." Novalis

The Church as pillar of truth has both load-bearing and space-organizing functions.

A sitcom is a set of stable characters united by a stable location that carries the potential for recurring but varying trouble whose disruptions can consistently be overcome, anchored in a humorous lead character or a humorous relationship between lead characters.

All taxes restrict the freedom of action of those who are taxed.

eshet chayil  -- Ruth 3:11b, Pr 12:4, Pr 31:10; cp. also Pr 31:29
LXX: gyne andreia Pr 31:10, 12:4), gyne dynameos (Rt 3:11); cp also Sir 26:2 (gyne andreia)

Every particular truth is a sign of a larger intelligibility to which it is subordinate.

A sacred text demands of our interpretations that they become more tightly interwoven.

defensive, regulative, and unitive functions of sovereignty

Compatibilists are often really argue that determinism is consistent with teleology.

Human ethics cannot reach to impairments of will except very indirectly; but Christ can.

"The whole order of events that the Gospel narrative fully describes must be received by the faithful hearing it, so that, by a saving faith in the actions then completed during the time of our Lord's Passion, we should understand not only the forgiveness of sins to have been accomplished in Christ, but also the pattern of justice to have been set forth." Leo the Great
"One faith justifies the holy people of all times."
"Although the rigor of that figurative law has been revoked, the benefit of voluntary observance has increased nonetheless."

Human beings discover truth by filtering the world in many different ways; it is important not to confuse the filter and the truth, although people often do.

Scientific investigations cannot be fully methodized because nature itself, despite its regularities, is not methodical.

The need to eat and drink is a biological form of obligation; there are other kinds, like pregnancy or stress.

Repetition is not a mechanism of cultural reproduction but an effect; this is a fundamental flaw in the work of Judith Butler, and why so many attempts to implement Butler's ideas have a cargo-cult quality.

Every baptism -- sacramental, blood, desire, vicarious desire -- is a death.

picturesque : painting :: romantique : literature

"The episcopate is one order with the presbyterate, but in genus, not in species. For orders are derived from the relation they have to the Eucharist, and because the highest power concerning the Eucharist is the power of consecrating it." Bellarmine

What is not distributed through a money-based market will tend to be distributed through a favor-based market.

Being actual implies not just being possible but also being possible with respect to other things in various ways, possibilities of acting and receiving, possibilities of being related.

affinity, focus, channel

Through the image of God we are in principle capable of being His representatives, personating Him to the universe.

Necessity does not merely imply actuality; it implies the possibility of being actual to and with and for other things in some way, and it implies being necessary for other things.

Understanding is a way of living.

The citizenry as a body and moral person is under an obligation to promote just institituions in the manner available to it as a body, because this is true of all moral persons. This obligation induces a derivative set of obligations on citizens as participants in the citzenry, first, to act in ways that do not directly impede the fulfillment of that obligation, and second, to act in reasonable ways that contribute to the possible success of fulfilling that obligation.

Consciousness is a species of interlinking between memory and anticipation.

normativity-in-an-inquiry (or in-a-model) -- plays an important role in scientific inference

Whose Speech Fed Rome Even as the Tiber's Flow

 Tiber, Nile, and Thames
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The head and hands of murdered Cicero,
 Above his seat high in the Forum hung,
 Drew jeers and burning tears. When on the rung
Of a swift-mounted ladder, all aglow,
 Fulvia, Mark Antony's shameless wife, with show
 Of foot firm-poised and gleaming arm upflung,
 Bade her sharp needle pierce that god-like tongue
Whose speech fed Rome even as the Tiber's flow.
 And thou, Cleopatra's Needle, that hadst thrid
Great skirts of Time ere she and Antony hid
 Dead hope! -- hast thou too reached, surviving death,
 A city of sweet speech scorned, -- on whose chill stone
Keats withered, Coleridge pined, and Chatterton,
 Breadless, with poison froze the God-fired breath?

Conviction and Illustration

  But the point, to which I chiefly advert, is the necessity of thoroughly understanding the distinction between analogous, and metaphorical language. Analogies are used in aid of Conviction: Metaphors, as means of Illustration. The language is analogous, wherever a thing, power, or principle in a higher dignity is expressed by the same thing, power, or principle in a lower but more known form. Such, for instance, is the language of John iii. 6. That which is born of the flesh, is flesh; that which is born of the Spirit, is Spirit. The latter half of the verse contains the fact asserted; the former half the analogous fact, by which it is rendered intelligible. If any man choose to call this metaphorical or figurative, I ask him whether with Hobbes and Bolingbroke he applies the same rule to the moral attributes of the Deity? Whether he regards the divine Justice, for instance, as a metaphorical term, a mere figure of speech? If he disclaims this, then I answer, neither do I regard the words, born again, or spiritual life, as figures or metaphors. I have only to add, that these analogies are the material, or (to speak chemically) the base, of Symbols and symbolical expressions; the nature of which is always tautegorical, that is, expressing the same subject but with a difference, in contra-distinction from metaphors and similitudes, that are always allegorical, that is, expressing a different subject but with a resemblance.

[Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aphorisms on Spiritual Religion, Aphorism VII, p. 136.]

I have been juggling quite a few things the past week and a half, and it looks like I will still be doing so for the next week at least, so things are likely to be light around here.

Deducing Claims from Claims

 ...whereas it has become a commonplace that one cannot legimitately deduce an 'ought' from an 'is', cannot prove a moral conclusion purely on the basis of some factual claim, it has been forgotten that this is only an instance of a wider principle. That wider principle is that one cannot legimtately deduce any claim simply from another: that Zebedee is married to Rahab does not, of itself, imply that Rahab is married to Zebedee nor that Zebedee is not married to Tamar. To reach such conclusions we need additional premisses, about the institution of marriage. If one claim were enough to establish what had seemed to be a different claim, that would be reason to consider that the second claim really was no other than the first, under some disguise.

[Stepen R. L. Clark, From Athens to Jerusalem, Clarendon Press (Oxford: 1984) p. 11.]

Fortnightly Book, November 10

 Diu Crône is a curious work. We know exactly who wrote it -- Heinrich von dem Türlin. We know nothing else about him, beyond his name; all attempts to trace down anything further have failed or led to doubtful results. We know it was written between about 1220 and 1240, but nothing about the circumstances. It is an Arthurian work that draws on a wide range of other Arthurian works; but its Grail story is unique in that it is Gawein (as it is spelled here) who achieves the Grail. (In the main traditions, as represented by, for instance, The Quest of the Holy Grail, Gawain fails because despite his promise he continually does not follow through.) The title, which means The Crown, refers to the poem itself, which compares itself to a crown full of gems. Like many works of its day, but perhaps more than most Arthurian works, the book has a reputation for trying to stuff everything and the kitchen sink into the story.

The Crown is, of course, the next fortnightly book. I will be reading J. W. Thomas's 1989 translation. It was somewhat difficult to find. Mine is a used library discard from Pine Manor College, which no longer exists, as such -- after some rocky years it was assimilated into Boston College in 2020, and then repurposed within Boston College under the name 'Messina College' earlier this year. I mention this, because I find it sometimes interesting to know the routes a book took to me, particularly when it's very much not the kind of book you can just grab off of Amazon at any time.

Euripides, Medea; Hippolytus; Helen

 Introduction

Opening Passages: From Medea (not counting the translator-added stage instructions):

NURSE. How I wish the Argo never had reached the land
Of Colchis, skimming through the blue Symplegades,
Nor ever had fallen in the glades of pelion
The smitten fir-tree to furnish oars for the hands
Of heroes who in Pelias's name attempted
The Golden Fleece! For ten my mistress Medea
Would not have sailed for the towers of the land of Iolcos,
Her heart on fire with passionate love for Jason;
Nor would she have persuaded the daugthers of Pelias
To kill their father, and now be living here
In Corinth with her husband and her children.... (p. 26)

From Hippolytus (not counting stage instructions):

APHRODITE. Strong am I among mortals, not without a name,
the goddess Cypris, who in heaven too is known.
And of those who live and look upon the light of the sun
from Pontus to the boundaries that Atlas set,
I give honour to the ones who reverence my power,
and those whose thoughts of me are arrogant I crush. (p. 78)

From Helen (not counting stage instructions):

HELEN. These are the shining virgin streams of the river Nile
who, with the white snow melting, takes the place of rain
from heaven and waters all of Egypt's level fields.
Proteus was, while he lived, the ruler of this land
King of Egypt, though he lived in Pharos' isle.
He for his wife took one of the numphs of the sea,
Psamanthe, who had once been the wife of Aiacus. (p. 131)

Summary: In Medea, we find Jason and Medea settled in Corinth with their young children, years after their fateful meeting during the quest of the Golden Fleece. Just before the beginning of the play, however, Jason came to an agreement with the ruler of Corinth, Kreon, for Jason to marry Kreon's daughter, Glauce.  Medea, fiery in temperament due to being the granddaughter of the Sun, is in a raging fury over it. Hearing of Medea's threats against Glauce, Kreon, and Jason, Kreon comes to her to inform her that she will be exiled. Medea, however, begs him to give her one day to make arrangements; he notes that he is likely making a mistake, but he grants it to her out of mercy for her children. Jason comes to Medea next, in order to promise her that he will make provision for her and the children, and to try to explain himself. Jason argues that she fails to appreciate her true position, how she was brought from a barbarian land to Greek civilization; he has not agreed to the marriage in order to have another woman but in order to gain the political protections for himself and the children that would come with such a marriage, and he hoped, and still hopes, that over time the two families would be united together properly, the children of his wife, Glauce, and the children of his mistress, Medea simply dismisses him as a coward. Medea then meets an old friend, Aigeus, the king of Athens, and gets a promise from him that if she can make it on her own to Athens, he will provide protection for her and her children.

The preliminaries all done, Medea springs her plan into action. Convincing Jason to lend his support, she sends her children with a robe and a coronet to Glauce, purportedly to ask Kreon to spare the children from exile. They turn out to be poisoned with a terrible poison, and Glauce dies soon after she puts it on; Kreon also dies trying in desperation to tear the robe off of his screaming daughter. Medea then kills her children. Jason attempts to confront her, but Medea has a trump card; she rises above the house, which she has set on fire, in a chariot from her grandfather Helios. Saved by the deus ex machina -- which, in a remarkable twist, is herself -- she is entirely out of his reach, and escapes to Athens.

We are inclined to take Jason's defense of his actions as mere bluster, and certainly he is trying to spin the situation; but I think it's important to recognize that within the framework of the story, Jason is not obviously wrong. Their position in Corinth is precarious, and being on Kreon's good side is seen to be essential, given that Kreon can exile anyone he pleases. But he has also, as Medea's exit shows, meddled in divine things, crossing a boundary that was not his to cross. Ironically, it is Kreon's willingness to show mercy that leads to the deaths of his daughter and himself; he falsely thought that Medea could not be a serious threat in only a day. In the end, in fact, none of the Greeks really understood the powers with which they were dealing; they saw in Medea a barbarian woman with a reputation as a witch, and thus utterly underestimated the real power Medea held. 

In Hippolytus we find ourselves in Troezen, where Theseus is enduring a temporary exile with his son Hippolytus. Aphrodite tells us that Hippolytus has sworn himself to chastity in devotion to Artemis and spurned her interests, and that she is bringing disaster upon him. Phaedra, Theseus's wife and Hippolytus's stepmother, is in Athens, and when Hippolytus previously visited her, Aphrodite made her subject to a powerful and overmastering passion for him. Recognizing this as wrong, Phaedra is attempting to starve herself to death to avoid disgracing herself. Phaedra's nurse attempts to rectify the situation by telling Hippolytus of the problem, but this is what precipitates the disaster. Ashamed that her secret is known, Phaedra hangs herself. Theseus on his return to Athens discovers her body and a letter on it accusing Hippolytus of raping her. Theseus is furious; he has received from his father, Poseidon, the power to apply three terrible curses to anyone he wishes, and he uses one of them against Hippolytus. Hippolytus protests his innocence, but Theseus sends him to exile. He is barely even out of the city when the curse takes effect, and a bull roars out of the sea, violently startling his horses so that Hippolytus is fatally wounded. At the end, Artemis appears to Theseus and tells him that Hippolytus was innocent and fated to die by Aphrodite; no god can interere with the firm purpose of another god, but she will revenge herself by harming one of Aphrodite's favorites. The dying Hippolytus has his last meeting with his father, forgiving him, and thus it all ends.

In Helen, Helen is in Egypt, having been whisked away by the goddess Hera, who replaced her with an eidolon. The idol-Helen was the Helen for whom the Trojan War was taught; Helen, meanwhile, has been stuck in Egypt, powerless to change the fact that her name everywhere is that of an adulteress responsible for endless deaths. The king of Egypt who had protected her, Proteus, has recently died and been replaced by his son, Theoclymenus, who intends to marry Helen and has a policy of killing any Greek man on sight. A man named Teucer happens to come to Egypt and gives Helen news of the Trojan War. I find it fascinating that he's the character who is chosen to give Helen this news. The Trojan War was especially brutal for Teucer; he was related to people on both sides, being the half-brother of Ajax on the Greek side and the nephew of King Priam on the Trojan side. He was particularly successful, killing at various times at least twenty of the top Trojan heroes, and narrowly avoided being killed by his cousin Hector twice. The Trojan War was brutal for everyone, but no one knew the brutality of it better than Teukros. From Teucer, Helen learns that Menelaus and his wife Helen have vanished; they may well be dead. She also learns that her brothers, Castor and Pollux have either become gods or committed suicide. We see here one of the fascinating things about the play -- all the major characters have a double story. Helen both is and is not guilty of precipitating the Trojan War; Menelaus both has and has not reclaimed her; Helen's brothers both are and are not gods. Theoclymenus's sister, Theonoe, is a prophetess; Helen goes to see her to learn the fate of Menelaus.

Menelaus and idol-Helen meanwhile have shipwrecked nearby and Menelaus learns from an old woman, to his astonishment, that there is someone living there who claims to be Helen. This is literally incredible to him, but everything he learns about her matches up. Helen meanwhile has learned from Theonoe that Menelaus is still alive, and while she is wishing for him to come to her, they run into each other. They cannot deny each other's resemblance to their spouse, but it's an easier sell for Helen, who has just had divine word that he is alive, than for Menelaus, who has just left his wife sheltering in cave after having been journeying with her since the end of the war he fought to retrieve her. Menelaus's final word as he turns to leave is interesting:

MENELAUS. My sufferings at Troy convince me. You do not.

Menelaus has literally suffered to reclaim Helen at Troy; many great Greek and Trojan warriors died in the attempt to reclaim Helen at Troy; the Greeks found themselves at times contesting with gods to reclaim Helen at Troy; so, regardless of how she looks and sounds, regardless of what people say, regardless of how many baffling mysteries are left in the air, how can Helen possibly have been in Egypt the entire time? Having made his choice, Menelaus begins to return to idol-Helen, but fortunately for him the gods are not quite done messing with events, as a messenger meets him with the astounding news that idol-Helen has ascended into the sky after having told everyone that she was not the real Helen. This is about as good a proof as one could get of such strange events, so Menelaus returns to Helen.

Interestingly, this is not the end of the story, because Menelaus and Helen have to escape from Egypt. Helen actually tries to get Menelaus to flee, since Theoclymenus will kill him if he learns that he is in the land, but Menelaus refuses. Instead, they swear to live and die together. Since death seems the only option left to them, they consider how to face their deaths. But Theonoe meets them and, of course, knows immediately what the situation is. The problem Theonoe faces is that she too has a double story of sorts. Hera wishes Menelaus and Helen to return home together. Aphrodite opposes their return. She has an obligation to her brother to tell him of the situation, but this would lead to their deaths. Since she knows what will happen, her choice is the one that will decide matters: either she must rule for Hera and against her brother and Aphrodite, or for her brother and Aphrodite but against Hera. She is inclined to tell her brother, but Helen begs her in the name of justice, and Menelaus in the name of honor, and she agrees to cast her vote for Hera and hope that Aphrodite will be satisfied with prayer. What she does not tell them, but certainly knows, is that by doing so she has agreed to her own death, because her brother will certainly put her death when he finds out, which he will.

Now protected from discovery for a time, Helen and Menelaus form a plan. Helen tells Theoclymenus that a messenger arrived bringing news of the death of her husband at sea. She will marry him, but before she can do so, she must symbolically bury him at sea, so that despite the circumstances, funeral rites may be properly done; she'll do that with the help of the 'messenger', who is Menelaus himself. Theoclymenus agrees, but, of course, now that they have a boat, the two escape. Theoclymenus realizes what must have happened and tries to order his sister's execution. His servants balk somewhat at this, risking their own lives, but before things can spiral out of hand, Helen's brothers, Castor and Pollux, appear as gods, and, faced with divine revelation that he should neither pursue Helen nor kill his sister, Theoclymenus is at least intelligent enough to concede. His concession speech perhaps indicates that his concession is a bit grudging:

THEOCLYMENUS. ... Let me rejoice with you in Helen's noble mind,
a thing that in most women is not found at all. (p. 192)

With the interference of The Twins, the double stories finish snapping back into one final story. Helen is innocent. Menelaus has his wife. Castor and Pollux are gods. Theonoe fulfilled her responsibilities. The play is a tragedy. But the tragedy is what was there all along, in the double paths, which brought endless suffering; resolved back to one, Menelaus and Helen have come through to the other side. For now, at least. As Euripides always reminds us, you can never tell with the gods. If there's one thing that the tales teach us, it is that the gods are never giving us the story we think they are giving us.

Favorite Passage:

HELEN. And are the sons of Tyndarus alive or not?

TEUCER. Alive and not alive. There are two stories here.

HELEN. Which is most likely? [aside] Oh, the pain that I go through.

TEUCER. The brothers are made gods, they say, and turned to stars.

HELEN. Good news indeed! What does the other story say?

TEUCER. That for her sister's sake they stabbed themselves and died.... (pp. 135-147)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended, all. If I had to rank them, I would rank Medea as most recommended, followed by Helen (I was very impressed this reading by the handling of the double-story theme), then Hippolytus. But these are fine distinctions.

*****

Euripides, Three Great Plays of Euripides, Rex Warner, tr., (Meridian: 1994).

Links of Note

 * Jake Meador, Against Syncretism, for Christians Building like Christians, at "Mere Orthodoxy"

* Evan O'Donnell, Aenesidemus Was Not an Academic (PDF)

* Enrico Terrone, On Fictional Characters as Types (PDF)

* Brian Klaas, The forces of chance, on chaos theory and social sicences, at "Aeon"

* Alva Noë, Rage against the machine, on AI, at "Aeon"

* Miren Boehm, Hume's Definitions of 'Cause': Without idealizations, within the bounds of science (PDF)

* Vasiliki Christopoulou and Theodore Arabatzis, Control Strategies in the Discovery of Argon, at "Jargonium" (a blog for history and philosophy of chemistry)

* Robert Lawrence Kuhn, A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications

* Thomas M. Osborne, The Good as Telos in Cajetan, Banez, and Zumel (PDF)

* Marcel Weber, Modeling the Biologically Possible: Evolvability as a Modal Concept (PDF)

* Clare Coffey, The Natural History of Prayer, at "Plough"

* Patrick Flynn, From Necessary Being to God: Why the Gap Problem Doesn't Exist for Classical Theists, at "The Journal of Absolute Truth"

* Ryan Miller, The Irreducibility of Chemistry to Everettian Quantum Mechanics (PDF)

* Jeroen Boeterse, Otto Neurath and the things that unite us, at "3 Quarks Daily"