Linkabilia

 * Daniel R. Siakel, Hume's Appendix Problem and Associative Connections in the Treatise and Enquiry (PDF)

* Alexander Englert, How a Kantian Ideal Can Be Practical (PDF)

* Nick Huntington-Klein, The Effect: An Introduction to Research Design and Causality, a very nice online book.

* Hamid Taieb, Acts of the State and Representation in Edith Stein (PDF)

* Megan Halteman Zwart, Forget philosopher kings. We need philosopher folks,  a rare case of an America article that I largely agree with.

* Candice Malcolm, Six things the media got wrong about the graves found near residential schools. Canadian journalists have always been notoriously bad when it comes to reporting on matters concerned with the Catholic Church, but they seem to have outdone themselves this time around. The entire program of residential schools, as conceived under the policies of the Canadian government, was in many ways very bad, but there is no excuse for lack of journalistic diligence and care in reporting on it.

* Deborah Casewell, A just and loving gaze, and Becca Rothfeld, Principled to a Fault, discuss Simone Weil, who seems to be having a minor revival at the moment.

* Ryan Burge, The curious case of born-again Catholics. I'd be interested in seeing how these numbers are distributed across converts and cradles; while I wouldn't usually use the label, I myself would have no problem with it at all. I grew up evangelical Southern Baptist; I don't consider my Catholicism to be a fundamental change, as opposed to a completion. If comfort with the label is linked to conversion (perhaps spreading a bit among communities with lots of converts), it would perhaps explain most of the peculiarities -- its widespread and very diverse character, the political divergence (which might be due to not being Catholic partly for ethnic reasons), the greater tendency to attend church. But I don't know.

* Lee Trepanier, Scholasticism confronts illiberalism, on Jacques Maritain

* Rachel Aviv, The German experiment that placed foster children with pedophiles. It's very easy to forget just how much influence pro-pedophilia movements built up in the sixties and seventies.

* Jorge J. E. Gracia, Racisms: Racial, Ethnic, and National (DOC). Gracia, who recently died and was one of my favorite philosophical authors in graduate school, did a lot of excellent work on medieval philosophy, metaphysics, and philosophy of race.

* Colorized Math Equations.

* Ryan Miller, Thomistic Foundations for Moderate Realism about Mathematical Objects (PDF)

Dashed Off XVII

 naive acceptance -> reaction and criticism -> rational conviction
-- the same ideas have different aspects in these three different atmospheres

Reasons concern the man who believes already as well as the man coming to believe.

interpretant as grasp on sign, sign-registering

Chance as well as proper causation are in the divine cause eminenter.

Love by its nature classifies, that things may be loved well.

Understanding is represented in decompression as well as compression of information.

"Any proposition whatever concerning the order of Nature must touch more or less upon religion." Peirce

Testing presupposes classification. (cp Peirce)

Everything pride touches, it destroys and replaces.

potential-to-be-bounded as a prerequisite for experimental phenomena

the experimentable

To have an experiment, you need a manipulable boundable changeable.

seven individual notes forma, figura, locus, tempus, stirps, patria, nomen

subsemiotic communication

divine title of creation, divine title of long possession, divine title of current possession, divine title of covenant
--divine title to sovereignty does not require conquest but unconquerable possession should perhaps be included
-- the Incarnation makes possible a divine title of succession that would otherwise no be possible

Much propaganda is concerned not with persuading but with overwhelming.

restaurant ambiences: bistroesque, cafe-like, formal, fast service, dive-ish, publike, cafeteria-like, picnic-like
-- ambience as an architecture of experienceables

the patience of just rule

the 'vegetative' processes of the Church: conversion, natural increase, ordinary tradition
the 'animative' processes of the Church: general prayer, charitable works
the 'rational' processes of the Church: preaching/proclamation, sacramental union

kinds of messaging: proclamation, representation, exemplification, evocation, vicinity

co-repentance

usury + promiscuous wage contract practices + general living by credit + entertainment-style advertising
vs.
non-usurious lending practices + just wage contract practices + generalized ownership of means of production + communal sponsorship

end : major premise :: means : minor premise

Denying the distinction between killing and letting die seems to require assuming that 'doing' is always univocal.

starting points: experience, [testimony, sign], concept, prior arguments
means of extension: combination (of starting points), analogy, implication
scaffolding: literal calculi, diagrams, illustrations & examples

A true liberation theology would have to put virtue at its center, with the politics and economics subservient to this; there is no genuine liberation except that which involves virtue, that supports virtue, that reaches up to God through virtue.

Christ sends a sword (Mt 10:34), but the sword does not exist for its own sake; it is the dividing of those who confess Christ and those who do not.

ptochos, the poor, means the beggarly (literally or figuratively); the root idea is laid-low-ness, prostrateness, thus reduced or cast down to begging
-- Lk 4:18, 7:22 give the guide for understanding; cf. also Lk 14:13, Rv 3:17

the Church as the sacrament of history (Gutierrez)

human tradition as the extension of the self-traditionary being of human existence

Being is the all-touching concept; all others resolve into it in some way; but this must not be confused with bare indeterminacy.

civil appropriations of humanitarian traditions

notebooks as fragment-encyclopedias

Conscience is essential to the nature of a home.

The home is one of the venues in which we stand as responsible beings.

A family is traditionary, by nature, handing itself down to itself.

the [public interest - underdog victim - nonviolent means] pattern of activism

'wokism' as anti-dialectical idealism

Formal interrogations are always designed more to express authority than to elicit information.

Human tradition cannot be understood in a way abstracted from ethics; responsibility and conscience are contributing factors that structure it. It is not a method but an interpersonal relationship.

The wrong of racism lies in its corruption of civic friendship.

situs : intrinsic :: habitus : extrinsic
(cp. Barnes's 'self-having' and 'self-having with otherwhat')

the good as that by which one can recognize the connection between being and the true

A very large amount of philosophical work consists of fine-tuning vocabulary in order to capture what is really meant.

Fighting error requires an appropriate infrastructure.

Any stable ethics implies a stable human nature.

"The members of mankind share the same basic rights and duties, as well as the same supernatural destiny. Within a country which belongs to each one, all should be equal before the law, find equal admittance to economic, cultural, civic and social life, and benefit from a fair sharing of the nation's riches." Paul VI

Mobs and tyrants both work in arbitrary ways precisely so as to be arbitrary, to show that they can.

the checklist as a fundamental technology

stage magic as attention-focus management

Karma is a naturally aristocratic way of thinking about morality.

Your righteousness is never as righteous as it feels.

the honest mistake as a central concept for justice

World-building is an inherently fragmentary expression of imagination.

logical systems as constructed by parity and a fortiori

There is no such thing as hairsplitting or nitpicking except relative to an end.

Work with dignity requires a basic friendliness and a basic ceremonious or politeness; these are its two most basic safeguards, on which all others can be built.

the principle for things cognized with certainty through experience or by the senses ut nunc (Scotus): What frequently comes from something not free has that as its per se natural cause. / What in the majority of cases comes about by a cause that is not free is a natural effect of that cause.
-- in effect, one uses this by ruling out that the cause is free or chance.

"The uncreated light is the first principle in the domain of theoretical things and the ultimate goal in the domain of practical things." Scotus

There is a difference between resembling a part and partly resembling.

People cannot long endure a view of themselves as worthless, and will eventually in response either destroy themselves, or discover a way to reclaim their worth, or manufacture a defensive counterview.

the phenomenological analysis of 'perhaps'

reasoning to discover, reasoning to persuade, reasoning to impress
(these motivations are from most conducive to good reasoning to least)

carnivals as architectures of novelty

All history is tradition.

We begin our lives immersed in traditions

We participate in a tradition by having a future.

Distributive justice is primarily about honors and only secondarily about wealth; only with capitalism and communism is this prioritization reversed.

The distinction between polis/civitas and political alliance is that the former is directly concerned with encouraging goodness.

tradition : participation :: history : objective regard :: culture : immersion

Whether a right is genuine always depends on the ends of what the right is about and of the contexts in which it could be relevant.

Athenian democracy makes citizenship depend on slavery because it requires that citizens be freed from the menial so that they may devote themselves to the life of democratic deliberation, but the menial is nonetheless necessary. (Spartan oligarchy requires helotry for analogous reasons.)

The universal is
(1) predicable of singulars as they are
(2) not identifiable with singulars
(from both of these we can conclude that universals are not apart from singulars but are 'in' them)
(3) not formally universal in the singular

hypertrophies of reasoning
(1) diachronic totalizing (conspiracy theory)
(2) synchronic totalizing
(3) nihilizing

truthwardness principles (e.g., divine veracity in Cartesianism)

grievance-addressing vs opportunity-reducing approaches to reducing rights violations

real distinction of essence and existence & finitude of being

The division of being into act and potentiality is more fundamental than the division into substance and accident; this truth is the foundation of many things.

subcooperative consent
paracooperative consent
informed cooperative consent under formal contract guaranteeing reasonable protections and mutual benefit for all parties

three elements in an accident (as pertaining to substances)
(1) aptitudinal inherence (essence of accident)
(2) actual inherence
(3) inexistence

quality as the accident of determinacy
(1) in the nature of the thing: habit/disposition
(2) in the principle of action and passion: power/impotence
(3) in the term of alteration or motion: passivity/patible quality
(4) in quantity: form and figure

"False miracles can be discerned from true miracles by their efficacy, utility, mode, end, person, and occasion." Benedict XIV (De Beat. Serv. Dei 4.7 nn 14-22)

Culture grows out of sociability.

The distinction between real and fake is a distinction of ends.

On Men Reading

 M. A. Sieghart had an essay in the Guardian a while back on the question of why men read so few women authors; it makes a number of obvious mistakes, one of which is assuming that there is any particular reluctance among men to read women authors as such. There is actually no mystery at all as to why men read so few women authors; the whole of the answer consists in the fact that (1) men do not read much at all and (2) as a result, very few genres or authors are marketed to men at all.

Let's take a basic set of comparisons. The genre that has the greatest woman-dominated readership is romance. Something like 90% of the readership of romance novels is female, most men have never read a romance novel, the genre is marketed almost entirely to women, with only occasional feelers for things that will have broader appeal. It is consistently the best-selling genre, to such an extent that most bestseller lists deliberately exclude large portions of romance, because if they did not, almost all bestsellers on every list would be from the more explicitly erotic branches of the sprawling genre.  Romance is a billion-dollar industry. The genre that has the greatest man-dominated readership is Westerns, which is about 90% male. It is a tiny genre, the nichest of niches. It mostly survives because (1) it has a steady group of hardcore fans who read most of what is available and (2) it gets occasional minor boosts from the fact that the genre is easily adaptable to movie and television and its adaptations are sometimes moderately successful. If you are not the next Louis L'Amour (and you are not), you will never make a career writing Westerns.  If you market your books to men rather than to women, you necessarily have to take a long view, which Western authors do; you are trying to craft something that endures and lasts a long time rather than something that will explode in sales this year. The entire Western genre is smaller than the romance sub-genre of Western Romance. The genre with the widest appeal across the sexes is science fiction. Almost all men read science fiction occasionally; about 80% of men who read regularly at all read science fiction regularly. A minority of women readers regularly read science fiction, but almost all indicators suggest that this minority of women readers is a large enough group to balance out the majority of men readers, so that the genre readership is about fifty-fifty.

Women generally read. Men generally do not. Women generally read widely. Men who regularly read generally have narrow reading interests. Outside very specific situations, publishers market to women because they are the primary book-buyers. Given this, let's look at Sieghart's argument:

For the top 10 bestselling female authors (who include Jane Austen and Margaret Atwood, as well as Danielle Steel and Jojo Moyes), only 19% of their readers are men and 81%, women. But for the top 10 bestselling male authors (who include Charles Dickens and JRR Tolkien, as well as Lee Child and Stephen King), the split is much more even: 55% men and 45% women. 

In other words, women are prepared to read books by men, but many fewer men are prepared to read books by women. And the female author in the top 10 who had the biggest male readership – the thriller writer LJ Ross – uses her initials, so it’s possible the guys thought she was one of them. What does this tell us about how reluctant men are to accord equal authority – intellectual, artistic, cultural – to women and men?

Notice how this argument is structured. The percentage of readers of female authors is overwhelmingly women; the percentage of readers of male authors is more or less even; therefore "women are prepared to read books by men, but many fewer men are prepared to read books by women"; therefore this is relevant to men according to less authority to women. 'Bestselling' and 'read' are not necessarily the same thing, although bestselling tends to be more easily accessible, and thus increases your chances of being read, but if we set this aside, there are at least two points to make about this argument.  First, we know that the population of women reader dwarfs the population of men readers; thus we would expect the percentage of men readers of female authors to be considerably less than the percentage of women readers of female authors. The thing that is noticeable is that a lot of women read male authors, but not enough to overwhelm (as they very well could in most genres) male readers. The obvious interpretation of the numbers here is that women are considerably less likely to read male authors than they are to read female authors. A second point is connected to this. Several of the bestselling female authors are Romance novelists, and thus are bestselling novelists who write in a genre almost no men read and is rarely marketed to men. LJ Ross, the author Sieghart mentions as being the female author with the largest male readership, is one of the world's most popular writers of mysteries and thrillers, which would be in and of itself an adequate explanation of why she has a larger male readership than Danielle Steel or Jojo Moyes. Mysteries and thrillers are relatively large genres; they are perhaps the genres after science fiction that are most read by men in general.

Sieghart continues:

Margaret Atwood, a writer who should be on the bookshelves of anyone who cares about literary fiction, has a readership that is only 21% male. Male fellow Booker prize winners Julian Barnes and Yann Martel have nearly twice as many (39% and 40%). It’s not as if women are less good at writing literary fiction. All five of the top five bestselling literary novels in 2017 were by women, and nine of the top 10. And it’s not as if men don’t enjoy reading books by women when they do open them; in fact, they marginally prefer them. The average rating men give to books by women on Goodreads is 3.9 out of 5; for books by men, it’s 3.8.

Nobody cares about literary fiction, which is a fake genre for pretentious people. Margaret Atwood is read not because she writes literary fiction because she writes science fiction that is marketed specifically to people who don't usually read science fiction, and has managed to get a lock on that relatively difficult demographic without losing much science fiction readership. She is on the bestselling authors list because she is massively more likely to be read by women than most science fiction authors are; 21% male is about what you would expect. Male readership is not large enough to push the number much higher for any author extremely popular with women; if the percentage of men readers gets very much higher, it is because fewer women are reading that author rather than that more men are. Women are large enough a population of readers that they can guarantee that an author ends up on a list of bestselling authors; men as a group could just barely do so under optimal conditions. And, of course, Sieghart's point about Goodreads tells against the entire line of thought into which Sieghart is trying to distort the data: there is no evidence that men who read regularly treat women authors as less readable or deserving to be read than men authors.

This is not to say that there might not be minor preferences of men who regularly read for men authors, but if they do exist they are minor and being moralistic about them fails to take into account both genre differences and how large a portion of books by women authors are marketed specifically toward women.

Sieghart continues:

If men don’t read books by and about women, they will fail to understand our psyches and our lived experience. They will continue to see the world through an almost entirely male lens, with the male experience as the default. And this narrow focus will affect our relationships with them, as colleagues, as friends and as partners. But it also impoverishes female writers, whose work is seen as niche rather than mainstream if it is consumed mainly by other women. They will earn less respect, less status and less money.

This is obvious nonsense. There is no sense whatsoever in which Danielle Steel is impoverished by being primarily read by women. If money is your goal, getting an unusual number of male readers is icing on the cake, never the cake. Respect and status, to the extent that they are meaningful here, have less to do with sex and more to do with genre. You don't come to understand lived experience from books -- books are, by their very nature, articulated and not lived experience. There is no such thing as 'the male experience'. And, last but not least, men as a population are not big readers and so will not generally read books by and about women because they will not generally read books, so if your solution to getting men to understand women is to have them read, it is not a solution at all.

It's an interesting question why men are so unlikely to read, and I don't have much of an idea of what the primary reason for it would be. I do know, as an unusual case of a man who reads on a scale larger than most women, that men who read a lot are penalized in various minor ways -- none serious in themselves, but very identifiable. There was a minor stir on some social media platform (probably Twitter) a while back, in which some young lady, talking about dating, noted that she stopped dating men who claimed to read a lot. Her reasoning was that a man who claims to read more than occasional science fiction and nonfiction is almost certainly lying. Despite some protests, the majority of her female commenters agreed. And it's entirely reasonable; the statistics and psychology are with them. People often exaggerate their qualities in the context of dating; a common rookie mistake is to overemphasize your reading, to make yourself look cultured or intellectual or what not; the result is an implausibly large number of men making implausibly grandiose claims about their love of reading. Pick any random man out of the crowd, and it's just not likely at all that he reads much. If you are male reader and dating, your best bet is to hide or play down your reading, and let it come out slowly as a secret; there are only very few circumstances in which this is not the case.

It's probably also the case that women in general prefer to be the primary readers in a relationship. I can absolutely assure you that, if you are a man, women are often disconcerted at discovering that they read less than you do. It sometimes becomes a kind of competitive thing for them, or else they treat it the same as if you were showing off in an attempt to make them seem less. I don't know why this is, either, but, again, I can assure you it is true.

Nor is dating the only context in which this is the case, nor are women the only ones who make judgments of this sort. The number of people who, on learning how much I read, respond as if there were something at least slightly wrong with me has been quite large in my lifetime; by no means everyone, but nonetheless it's a common thing. One reason this weblog covers so much literature is that blogging is one of only a handful of contexts in which I can seriously talk about reading, despite its being one of the major components of my life. I have no idea whether this minor bias against male readers plays a role in so few men reading, but I wouldn't be surprised. But it's absurd, in any case, to ignore the fact, whatever reason there might be for it.

Transparent as a Lake of Hyaline

Beyond the Sunset
by Charles Heavysege 

Hushed in a calm beyond mine utterance,
See in the western sky the evening spread;
Suspended in its pale, serene expanse,
Like scattered flames, the glowing cloudlets red.
Clear are those clouds, and that pure sky's profound,
Transparent as a lake of hyaline;
Nor motion, nor the faintest breath of sound,
Disturbs the steadfast beauty of the scene.
Far o'er the vault the winnowed welkin wide,
From the bronzed east unto the whitened west,
Moored, seem, in their sweet, tranquil, roseate pride,
Those clouds the fabled islands of the blest;--
The lands where pious spirits breathe in joy,
And love and worship all their hours employ.

Two Poem Drafts

Summer Garden

The fountain-trickle
spreads across the rocks;
the spider
builds its web across the pool.
The air
is balmed by leaf and summer flower,
a jungle for a cat.

Martyr Song

We who are about to die
salute you,
but in our death God Himself
refutes you.
In this world of lie
every worldly hope may die,
but in our end is love,
only love,
a holy love.

Every human love goes wrong
for we are not very strong
but God has given us His love,
a holy love.

Love divides the light from darkness,
it divides the sea from land;
build your house upon the Rock
or collapse into the sand,
for in the end, only one thing will stand:
only love, and wholly love,
a holy love.

We who are about to die
salute you,
but in our death, God Himself
refutes you.
In this world of lie
even God Himself has died
but in His death was love,
wholly love,
a holy love.

Joss Paper

 As I continue reading A Dream of Red Mansions, one of the things that I've found interesting is the regular mention of 'sacrificial money' (in the translation I am reading). This is a very common Eastern cultural practice that is almost nonexistent in the West, so I was curious about it.

The more common name for it is 'joss paper'. It is easily burnable paper that is made to look like money, in many cases, although it can take many other forms. (Very popular examples, which can be ordered from paper offering stores, are paper 'credit cards', coins, and gold and silver ingots of paper foil, but anything luxurious that you can make a paper imitation of is fair game, and people have made joss paper clothes, cars, computers, houses, etc. Many modern jurisdictions have had to impose restrictions on how big joss paper offerings can be.) Nobody knows exactly how the practice started. It had been common in China as in many other places to bury proxy money with the dead -- i.e., replicas of money; that may be the origin of the idea. It was long thought that the practice burning imitation money grew up among the poor, who could not afford the real thing, but as historical evidence has grown, it is clear that the practice has been common among the wealthy for as long as it existed. Very likely it began among the very wealthy -- who, after all, would have had the means to order large quantities of handcrafted paper items solely to burn them -- and in the common pattern we find all the world over, the merchant class and eventually the poor copied the practice of the very wealthy as best they could. It's long been considered bad luck to destroy actual money, so it may be that people started doing it so that they could have fancy offerings that would not tempt fate. Or it may be an adaptation of a Buddhist practice imported from Persia or India. In any case, its popularity became almost universal among Buddhists and Taoists in China and Chinese-influenced cultures, and there are many temples and shrines throughout the area that are able to maintain themselves almost entirely on specialized joss paper sales.

The paper is used as a sort of incense, either in the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Taoist deities; the 'joss' in 'joss paper' indicates this function. As part of the ritual, the one offering the sacrificial money folds it and then burns it, usually at the end of another ritual. Popular accounts seem to assume that people take offering (say) a wad of imitation bills to the fire 'spiritualizes' it so that the spirits can use it in the afterlife or spirit world, but in practice I'm not sure most people see it as more than a gesture expressive of their good will and devotion, and you can also offer it in other ways, like burying it.

In any case, in A Dream of Red Mansions, the practice is portrayed as very widespread and somewhat vulgar. One of the main characters, Baoyu, criticizes it as a late practice (by which he seems to mean merely that it is later than traditional Confucian practices, since the actual use of joss paper may go back to the third century, and in legend it was one of the things invented by Cai Lun, the first inventor of a reliable papermaking process in the first or second century) and contrasts it with the superior Confucian practice of using ordinary incense in traditional rites while acting with the virtue of sincerity.

And I Have Sung These Verses for My Grave

Epitaph
by Karl August Georg Max, Graf von Platen-Hallermunde
translated by Reginald Bancrofte Cooke 

I was a poet born but blows to earn
Of the ill times in which my lot was cast;
But drank of fame ere yet my youth was past,
And left my impress on the speech in turn.
Ne'er in the school of art slothful to learn,
It therefore fell to me new paths to blast,
And to pour forth my soul in rhymes, to last
To distant times, if rightly I discern.

I fashioned songs from various themes, as well
As comedies and legends of the brave,
All in a style which no one could excel.
The second prize for odes to me they gave,
Life's hopes and sorrowings my sonnets tell,
And I have sung these verses for my grave.