The Works of George Berkeley Including Many of His Writings Hitherto Unpublished. With Prefaces, Annotations, His Life and Letters, and an Account of His Philosophy By George Berkeley, Alexander Campbell Fraser
But marriage – we mean, of course, marriage as the free bond of love – is sacred in itself, by the very nature of the union which is therein effected. That alone is a religious marriage, which is a true marriage, which corresponds to the essence of marriage – of love. And so it is with all moral relations. Then only are they moral, – then only are they enjoyed in a moral spirit, when they are regarded as sacred in themselves. True friendship exists only when the boundaries of friendship are preserved with religious conscientiousness, with the same conscientiousness with which the believer watches over the dignity of his God. Let friendship be sacred to thee, property sacred, marriage sacred, – sacred the well-being of every man; but let them be sacred in and by themselves.
The point here might not be immediately obvious; Feuerbach is an atheist, of course, and he thinks religion, taken on its own terms, is inherently self-contradictory. But he thinks that there is an underlying set of anthropological truths that have been misrepresented as theology. This position allows him to propose an atheism that is (as he says) not merely negative but critical: it takes religion and, rather than just cutting it out, subjects it to critique and uses it as a set of moral building blocks. (We get some sense of how this works in practice, in a less heavy-handed way than we ever find in Feuerbach himself, in the novels of George Eliot, who is a Feuerbachian -- although, of course, she was influenced by other atheists and freethinkers as well.) So he suggests a sort of transposition of terms: morality requires taking friendship, marriage, human beings, as sacred, but "sacred in and by themselves" rather than in the derivative way he argues religion makes them. This sort of transposition (or, as I would put it, attempted transposition) is part of what makes Feuerbach very interesting reading.
Sir B. Brodie, after observing that man is a social animal ('Psychological Enquiries,' 1854, p. 192), asks the pregnant question, "ought not this to settle the disputed question as to the existence of a moral sense?" Similar ideas have probably occurred to many persons, as they did long ago to Marcus Aurelius. Mr. J. S. Mill speaks, in his celebrated work, 'Utilitarianism,' (1864, p. 46), of the social feelings as a "powerful natural sentiment," and as "the natural basis of sentiment for utilitarian morality;" but on the previous page he says, "if, as is my own belief, the moral feelings are not innate, but acquired, they are not for that reason less natural." It is with hesitation that I venture to differ from so profound a thinker, but it can hardly be disputed that the social feelings are instinctive or innate in the lower animals; and why should they not be so in man? Mr. Bain (see, for instance, 'The Emotions and the Will,' 1865, p. 481) and others believe that the moral sense is acquired by each individual during his lifetime. On the general theory of evolution this is at least extremely improbable.
Darwin, Descent of Man (1871), p. 71n5. Darwin on moral sense is actually quite interesting; he is taking a position in a very fierce nineteenth century dispute between the moral intuitionists (who believed in an innate moral sense) and the utilitarians (or inductivists, as Mill sometimes calls them), of which this footnote is only one part. In Descent of Man Darwin discusses at length the possibility of an evolutionary account of morality and, in particular, argues that evolutionary biology strongly suggests that there is an innate moral sense (derived from social sentiments). Like all intuitionists of the time, he seems to hold that utilitarians are not completely wrong: but what utilitarianism gets right is to be explained by moral sense theory (which is in turn explained by an evolutionary account of the development of the underlying emotional basis of social life), not vice versa. Part of the reason Darwin thinks it can't be the reverse is that principles of utility are too intellectual; they occur too far downstream in evolutionary history to be the real foundation of moral life, rather than just a derivative branch of it. (This would separate Darwin from some intuitionists, too; intuitionism was a much less unified philosophical camp than utilitarianism.)
Well, what I mean by Education is learning the rules of this mighty game. In other words, education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those laws. For me, education means neither more nor less than this. Anything which professes to call itself education must be tried by this standard, and if it fails to stand the test, I will not call it education, whatever may be the force of authority, or of numbers, upon the other side.
* Michael Flynn's excellent little short story, Quaestiones Super Caelo et Mundo, has been made available online by Analog (because it was nominated for a Nebula). It's an alternative history science fiction story in which the great fourteenth-century medieval philosophers, working together rather than apart, manage to combine real fourteenth-century philosophy in a way that initiates the Scientific Revolution considerably earlier than it actually did begin.
* At "Logismoi" there's an interesting post on the Synaxis of the Three Holy Hierarchs; I hadn't realized how Trinitarian the Feast is.
* A new Philosophy of Sport blog. For an example of the sort of thing studied in philosophy of sport, you might try reading the post on whether blowouts are sporting.
* A huge scandal has erupted around Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legion of Christ, who, it turns out has fathered illegitimate children, squandered the order's money, and possibly more. American Papist is keeping track of things. The natural solution is for the Church to conduct an investigation into how far the problems went, then dissolve the order entirely, as it did with the Templars. The Templars are actually an interesting precedent: their dissolution established that religious orders exist only insofar as they are useful to the mission of the Church, and when scandal -- and in the Templar case the scandal wasn't based on much more than rumor with some scattered and dubious evidence gathered by people everyone recognized to be out to get the order -- or, indeed, anything else, clearly interferes with its ability to do so, it no longer has any purpose for existing. I think it's time that religious orders and institutes start taking seriously the fact that they are instruments of the Church to teach and further the work of charity, and have no value outside of that. I think the reasonable order here would be: investigate the matter to know how far the corruption actually extended, tear it down, let its members enter other orders and societies, distribute its property. In any case, an interesting point has been made that it is difficult to pin down what the Legion was supposed to do. Religious orders and societies exist to be schools and research institutions for charity; but because charity is in a sense as vast as God's love, it is impossible for them to devote themselves to charity in general. That would be as absurd as saying that what we should teach in schools is knowledge, leaving it at that; any school that can't get more specific and practical about its curriculum than saying it is for conveying 'knowledge' is a sham and a mockery. Rather, healthy religious orders and societies are set up to do very particular, very practical things in the pursuit of charity: preach to the heretics, help the sick, protect pilgrims, aid the poor, teach children, pray in solitude, and so forth and so on. Pursuit of these very particular things may branch out into other things -- e.g., the Hospitallers set out to help the sick, and that led to protecting the sick, and that led in certain cases to protection of pilgrims, and so forth. But when a religious order forgets its particular, practical mission in charity, it has lost its way and needs to be dissolved. Religious orders with only vague aims are worse than useless.
* I have, for various reasons, recently been reading Chester Alan Arthur's State of the Union addresses; they make interesting reading, not least because in them he actually informs Congress of the state of things in these United States. If you want to read what a real State of the Union address is (and none of the fluff that we've had in recent decades meets that description), read Arthur's (at the very least, read the first, where he discusses foreign policy, lays out government revenues, summarizes some notable events, recommends topics to Congress's attention, and asks them to deliberate on specific Constitutional questions):
I think I've noted before that it is easy to identify the culprit that has led to such a deterioration in quality of the State of the Union address: the fact that the President gives the address in person, a cause of deterioration that has become massively aggravated once the practice began of televising it. While Washington and Adams gave their addresses in person, Jefferson concluded that it was too monarchical, and therefore in 1801 simply sent his address to Congress to be read in session by the clerks. From that point on everyone followed the Jefferson practice until Wilson revived the personal address in 1913. The Jeffersonian practice is better; there will, no doubt, be times and occasions where a personal address would be reasonable, but the State of the Union address fulfills its function more adequately when it is not tailored to a propagandistic television extravaganza. It would be nice if Obama would return us to the Jeffersonian practice of real State of the Union addresses after almost a century of mere advertising; but I confess that I have no great hopes of this.
Identitas does not translate straightforwardly as 'identity'; it's perhaps important to insist on this because a lot of people seem to be under the impression that Thomas Aquinas is committed to the position that everything in God as identical to everything else. Identity is a relation that is at least minimally (1) reflexive; (2) symmetrical; (3) transitive; (4) antisymmetric. (I say at least minimally because, as far as I am aware, we have no non-circular account of identity; these four characteristics leave identity indistinguishable from equality, but there are good reasons to deny that equality is always identity, although identity may be one kind of equality. Intersubstitutability is a plausible fifth characteristic, but it very quickly runs into all sorts of difficulties and puzzles; indiscernibility runs into different troubles and may presuppose identity in any case, for reasons too long to get into here.) But identitas is only transitive and antisymmetric when certain conditions are met. In particular, on Aquinas's account, these things arise only when two things are the same secundum rem and secundum rationem. If two things are idem secundum rem they can be referred to as one thing, but if they are still idem secundum rationem there will be contexts where transitivity and antisymmetry fail. For instance, the road from Thebes to Athens and the road from Athens to Thebes are the same secundum rem, because they are the same road. But they are different secundum rationem, and therefore there are ways in which they are not equal, and there are relations and properties that they do not share (e.g., one may be uphill and the other downhill, and one may be the route you follow to visit the Grove of Akademos while the other is entirely the wrong direction) and the fact that they share some things doesn't imply that they share everything (for instance, they might not share modal properties). Nor does it suffice to response that, say, the Athens-Thebes road is uphill traveled one way and downhill traveled another; that just says that they are the same secundum rem, which was already conceded; we still have to deal with the fact that they are obviously different secundum rationem, which the response, in recognizing that direction makes a difference at all, has itself just conceded.
Part of the reason for this disparity is that we draw our notion of identity (which, we must recognize, is actually in some ways very obscure and not at all as precisely characterized as some seem to think) from a very particular set of uses. But Aquinas couldn't do that. Rather, he's taking a very broad and often colloquial idea, idem, and making distinctions with regard to how it is used, in order to make it more precise. Identitas can indeed indicate something reflexive, symmetric, transitive, and antisymmetric. But sometimes it indicates something even weaker than either an equivalence relation or a partial order. Idem is not used univocally in every situation.
I was thinking recently about some of the best examples of online comics (I'm thinking about single-strip comics rather than story-arc comics like Girl Genius).
One example would be xkcd's "Duty Calls," which perfectly summed up internet culture in a single panel. And obviously xkcd has a lot of potential examples.
Another would be Saint Gasoline's "The Allegory of the Trolley Problem Paradox," which is a nearly perfect philosophy comic.
An interesting interview with James Cone (it's also occasionally funny, because he has a good sense of humor):
I like Cone's God of the Oppressed quite a bit; I tend not to be thrilled by most theology written in the twentieth century by academics, but this is one of the books I regularly recommend. Regardless of whether you agree with everything in it, it makes some serious points worthwhile for anyone and everyone to consider.
As no party, in the present age, can well support itself, without a philosophical or speculative system of principles, annexed to its political or practical one; we accordingly find, that each of the factions, into which this nation is divided, has reared up a fabric of the former kind, in order to protect and cover that scheme of actions, which it pursues. The people being commonly very rude builders, especially in this speculative way, and more especially still, when actuated by party-zeal; it is natural to imagine, that their workmanship must be a little unshapely, and discover evident marks of that violence and hurry, in which it was raised.
Hume, Of the Original Contract. The particular 'rude buildings' he has in mind are passive obedience (Tory) and original contract (Whig) theories of government.
Today is the Feast of St. Scholastica, the twin sister of St. Benedict. She played an important role in Anglo-Saxon life, inspiring some notable literary works. Here's from a poem about St. Scholastica by Aldhelm of Schireburn (Source):
The poem goes on to discuss the most famous story about her, the legend of St. Scholastica and the storm.
The 86th Philosopher's Carnival is up at the webcomic "chaospet". It's one of the more interesting ones that I've seen in a while.
Keith Parsons at "The Secular Outpost" has a list (ht) of twenty "stupidest things philosophers have said over the millennia". With a few exceptions, it reads more like a list of twenty common myths about what philosophers believe; and, except for #19, which really was stupid, most of them were not stupid things to say at all, even if wrong. (I'm also a little puzzled that stupid claims about women are included, but no stupid claims about blacks, e.g., Hume's "There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation," which was an extraordinarily stupid thing to say, as Beattie pointed out at the time.) Some notable misunderstandings that are just obvious from first glance:
(1) Berkeley does say that matter doesn't exist; but by 'matter' he is quite clear that he means something very specific, namely, the "something, I know not what" of Locke and others. Matter in the sense studied by physics is something different; and Berkeley recognizes that there are other senses in which you could take the term.
(2) Locke doesn't say anything that commits him to the claim that atheists are untrustworthy; he is committed to the related, but still somewhat different, claim that they have no consistent reason to be where promises, contracts, and oaths are concerned -- not that they don't keep their promises, which would depend entirely on the individual atheist, but that 'promises have no hold on them'. Locke does in fact think you can have a society of atheists; it is implausible to suggest that he thinks you can have a society of people who are in fact always untrustworthy. He would just be committed, at least in the terms he uses in A Letter Concerning Toleration to saying that such a society had no rationally consistent ground for promising.
(3) Zeno, contrary to popular belief, does not argue that change is impossible. He argues that either change is impossible or it is not really possible for physical things to be infinitely divisible -- that is, he argues that if physical space is infinitely divisible, change is impossible. There is some (although perhaps not completely conclusive) reason to think that the infinite divisibility claim is the conclusion he actually wanted people to reject.
(4) Leibniz says that this world is the best of all possible worlds, but not in the sense Voltaire attributed to him, since he meant something very precise, namely, that it is impossible for God to create a world that involves both simpler means and richer diversity of effects than this one.
(5) Spinoza holds that things could not be otherwise than they are for a reason, namely, that he argues that the claim that there are contingent things (as opposed to the claim that everything logically implies everything else) requires affirming a doctrine of final causes, since efficient causes are purely necessary and only final causality is slippery enough to leave possibilities not ruled out. I think he's wrong (about the nonexistence of final causes) but it's not a stupid argument.
(6) Wittgenstein does not say that we can't know pains; he says that we can't know pains if we have to think of them in terms of a "model of 'object and designation'" or, to put it in other terms, if they are purely private objects designated by language. Obviously the conclusion is that we should not think of them in that way.
(7) The Churchlands don't say that there are no pains; eliminative materialism is not the claim that we aren't referring to anything when we talk about pains (or mental phenomena). If you're an eliminative materialist about pain, your view is that there is no particular phenomenon referred to by the term 'pain'; this doesn't mean that we never refer to anything using the term, only that 'pain' is not a class in a completely natural classification of things in the world. If you are an eliminative materialist about belief, you think that 'belief' is just a crude and approximate way of talking about the brain, good enough for practical purposes now, but not something you will find in a completely adequate scientific account of the things we're referring to when talking about belief. And so forth.
(8) Quine does not say that "When someone speaks in a native tongue that is historically unrelated to yours, you can never know what he or she means." Again, a number of conditions and qualifications have been dropped. He claims that linguistic behavior underdetermines meaning. This is a very different claim; he holds that you can know what other people mean, but it's not by picking out a unique and uniquely determinable meaning that the words must be conveying.
(9) It is absolutely absurd, absolutely absurd, to attribute the claim "You cannot learn from experience" to Hume. Hume is an empiricist! He thinks that everything we learn is learned from experience (and yes, he does think we learn things)! If someone is going to say something like this, one is tempted to start a list of stupid things they have said, with this at the top of the list.
But lists like these are useful in any case; they help us historians of philosophy to know where we have to do a better job communicating.
[ADDED LATER: I should say as well that not only is #20 not obviously false, it is arguably the most reasonable position on the subject; the only other coherent account of evil is one in which good is a privation of evil, which is problematic for all sorts of reasons. No other account that has been proposed has ever withstood as much serious scrutiny. Whether you are atheist or theist, Aristotelian or not, a broadly Augustinian account appears to be the most reasonable account of evil. (I say 'broadly Augustinian' because one can argue -- it is a question that gets into fields in which I am not competent to say whether the arguments are successful -- that Mencius also takes evil to be a privation, and if so, he obviously does so independently.)]
Most of the time, the government is spending money in order to accomplish something specific like build an aircraft carrier or give food to a poor family or maintain a national park or run a prison. If you can build that carrier cheaper, you’re saving the taxpayers money. And that money is thereby freed up for private consumption or investment, and the economy as a whole will thank you. But when you’ve got a substantial output gap and conventional monetary policy can’t pick up the slack, so you decide to try fiscal expansion, then you’re looking at a different situation. Safeguarding taxpayer dollars can’t be the priority when your policy objective is to spend money in order to encourage idle resources to be put to use. In the present circumstances, spending less money just means more unemployment.
The point of the stimulus bill is to stimulate the economy. It would be fine to ask whether the present bill is the best way to do that. Does it get the multipliers as high as it could? Does it deliver stimulus quickly? But it is another thing entirely to ask whether we couldn't manage to scrape by for another year without resodding the capitol mall.
Kierkegaard once wrote: if you are given a task and a certain amount of time to complete it, normally it is a good thing if you complete the task ahead of time. But this is not true when the task is: to occupy yourself productively for a day. In that case, if you appear at noon, saying: look, I finished ahead of schedule!, you only show that you have missed the entire point. Likewise, if your task is to get as much money into the economy as quickly as possible, it is not a good thing to say: look! I got all the things you asked for at half the price!
That is the thing that is seen. What is not seen is everything you could have gotten if you hadn't been wasting money like a profligate. If you get all the things that you asked for at half the price, then you have just as much as you have already spent still left over to spend on other useful things. The same money, a wider range of stimulus, more useful results. Instead, on the Yglesias-Hilzoy view of the world, we would develop the same amount of debt but through a narrower selection of stimulus projects and would therefore have received fewer definite benefits. If you want to spend, you want to spend; but waste is waste whatever you want to spend. To take the Kierkegaard example, if your goal is really to occupy yourself productively for the day, you've failed if you only occupy yourself till noon. But you've also failed if you spend much of your time occupying yourself unproductively.
This is all basic Bastiat (PDF). Napoleon tried to stimulate the economy by having people dig ditches then fill them in again. Pretty much all he really did was waste the time of a lot of hard-working ditch-diggers who could have been doing serious projects rather than being alienated from their now-useless labor.
I've seen talk here and there of Jerry Coyne's foray in The New Republic, Seeing and Believing, on the subject of "science and religion". I always cringe when I find someone about to launch into that subject, because ten to one I'm about to be subjected to the combined irritations of pedantry and inability to think through the ramifications of the argument put forward. And there's some of that here, too, although I've come across much worse. But Coyne's argument seems shot through with a more serious set of flaws. This is Coyne's characterization of creationism:
But regardless of their views, all creationists share four traits. First, they devoutly believe in God. No surprise there, except to those who think that ID has a secular basis. Second, they claim that God miraculously intervened in the development of life, either creating every species from scratch or intruding from time to time in an otherwise Darwinian process. Third, they agree that one of these interventions was the creation of humans, who could not have evolved from apelike ancestors. This, of course, reflects the Judeo-Christian view that humans were created in God's image. Fourth, they all adhere to a particular argument called "irreducible complexity." This is the idea that some species, or some features of some species, are too complex to have evolved in a Darwinian manner, and must therefore have been designed by God. Blood clotting in vertebrates, for example, is a complex sequence of enzyme reactions, involving twenty proteins that interact to produce the final clot. If any were missing, the blood would not clot. How could something this sophisticated have blindly evolved?
His argument requires that these four be necessary and sufficient conditions. If they are not necessary then (1) his claim that they apply to all creationists (Coyne makes no distinction between the terms 'creationists' and 'intelligent design proponents') is false; and (2) he can't make his 'convergence' argument later on, at least in a way where it still remains clearly relevant (since, no doubt, everyone including Coyne himself 'converges' with the views of creationists on irrelevant points). If they are not sufficient, he can't make his 'convergence' argument, either, since they wouldn't suffice to make the general claims about religion that he gets out of that argument. But they definitely are not necessary conditions; I've personally met IDers who are pantheists and would firmly reject (2). This requires little to no modification of standard ID arguments; they just take the intelligence to be built-in rather than distinct. And even if such people did not exist, we know that (2) & (3) are not logically necessary to the position because standard ID arguments are consistent with the position of Hume's Philo in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, who holds that there is an intelligent designing principle of some sort, who knows what, that one could call 'God' if one felt the need. Thus if (as is plausible) (2) and (3) are commonly accepted by IDers, this is more reasonably explained in sociological terms than in terms of the position itself. Likewise, Coyne never considers that someone like Miller might well consider his later convergence argument to be itself a proof that these are not sufficient conditions, i.e.: Miller's not an IDer (because his conception of science is not the same, whatever his convergence on 'religion' -- which Miller, of course, would not grant is quite so close as Coyne thinks, in part because I don't think he would understand the term in the same way), so if Coyne's characterization of ID makes it difficult to distinguish Miller from it, this is due to the failure of Coyne's characterization to draw essential distinctions. And it is noteworthy that, despite the fact that Coyne recognizes the essential issue is how science is to be understood (devoting a considerable portion of the essay to the question), out of these four conditions only (4) even reaches the vicinity of giving us any inkling of what the creationist view of science is -- and it doesn't give us all that much of an inkling, either.
Thus the conclusion Coyne reaches is not surprising at all; given the way that Coyne has set up the problem -- ID is contrary to science, ID is accounted for in purely 'religious' terms, 'religion' generally converges on ID as accounted for in such a way -- the conclusion derived is virtually inevitable. But the set-up of the problem is so artificial that one suspects it was derived from the conclusion to be reached rather than vice versa. That is, the essay works very well if it is taken to be an account of how someone might find claims about the incompatibility of science and 'religion' (however the latter is understood) plausible; if taken as an actual argument for that conclusion, however, it is poorly constructed, since it begs the question early on. We get the conclusion Coyne believes, in nice detail, but we never actually see any sustainable argument for it.
It's interesting to consider how standard lists of 'best Presidents' would change if this were used consistently as the criterion (they would certainly become more complicated).
It's a little late in Advent for this, but if, like me, you had a hectic early Advent, it might still be worthwhile. I've previously recommended Africa Windmill Project as a candidate for Advent giving, and still do:
Africa Windmill Project focuses on educating and supporting rural farmers as they work to feed and care for their families. We do this by working directly with the farmers and by supporting other organizations as they work with farmers. Currently Africa Windmill Project is focused in the Central Region of Malawi.
The Africa Windmill Project has a blog where they occasionally post notices about the status of projects; lots of interesting things there. (For those who prefer to review financial data before donating, that can be found by registering with GuideStar.)
I have also in the past had fairly good experiences with International Justice Mission, although you should know beforehand that they are rather assertive mailers:
International Orthodox Christian Charities, which is, as it says on the tin, an Orthodox organization but is devoted entirely to humanitarian activities, has also been a charity with which I've had good experiences in the past. It has a number of programs.
The Kalevala is one of the world's most remarkable works of literature. Compiled by Elias Lönnrot in the early nineteenth century from Karelian folk songs, it is the national epic of Finland. What Lönnrot was attempting to do had been attempted before with much less scholarly skill, in particular by James MacPherson in his 1760 Ossian, an attempt to pull together Highland folksongs into a national epic.* But Lönnrot's masterpiece is in another league entirely.
Väinämöinen is the sky-god/hero who is the protagonist of most of the Kalevala. According to Bosley's notes the line 'who will put down the mighty' might be more literally translated as 'who will have power over power itself'. But back to Marjatta: she needs that sauna, and it doesn't seem to be forthcoming; so she sends her servant-girl Piltti find a sauna at Sedgeditch; when Piltti asks who she will ask for one, Marjatta replies that she should ask for Herod's bath at Saraja's gates.
Piltti returns to Marjatta with this bit of helpful counsel. Poor Marjatta bursts into tears and goes to the stall on Tapio hill, praying as she goes:
The story goes on from there, with a confrontation between the little boy and Väinämöinen. It's an interesting set of legends, forming a sort of mythological symbol of the life of Christ that plays on the association of Marjatta and marja; one thinks of the common medieval play on the association of Maria and Latin maris, as in Stella Maris, Star of the Sea, a popular title for Mary.
[*] The Ossianic question, namely, whether MacPherson had forged the poem, was one of the major literary disputes and scandals of the eighteenth century, with most of the period's literary intellectuals in Britain lining up on one side of the question or another, e.g., Hugh Blair argued that it was genuine, David Hume and Samuel Johnson that it was not. My understanding is that current folklore scholarship holds it to be based in actual Highland folksongs, but massively re-worked.
We owe absolutely nothing to $%#! elfs or wizards who clutch secret "wisdom" (what we moderns call "useful information about the world") to themselves for thousands of years, leaving men and women to flounder in miserable ignorance, when they might have opened a college in Lothlorien Forest, so we'd have flush toilets and palantirs on every desktop. Oh, thank God such creatures are mythological, because Tolkien himself opined that they were - in truth - the enemies of humankind.
Too true, because a society in which the Eye of Sauron has direct access to every desktop would be quite splendid, and flush toilets will necessarily be the highest priority of all rational people when they are engaged in a struggle with Morgoth. But the level of literary sophistication in the post does explain why I always find Brin's stories to be extraordinarily tedious characters used for implausible developments of ideas that are occasionally mildly interesting.
* The Symbolism Survey. A sixteen-year-old in 1963 did a project in which he sent a survey on symbolism to 150 authors; seventy-five responded, and these are some of the notable ones. The Ayn Rand one has caught the most attention, being very Ayn-Randish -- but it is noticeable, and also Ayn-Randish, that she thought it important enough to reply. Ray Bradbury's response is somewhat interesting, too.
* Geza Vermes on early Jewish Christianity. I'm glad to see him pointing out that the Patriarchs of Jerusalem up to the time of Hadrian were, as Eusebius puts it, "of the circumcision."
* Bill Witt has some Anglican Reflections on Justification by Faith, in which he corrects some common misunderstandings of the Reformation view.
* Janet Smith clarifies her argument on lying. I find it very unhelpful; it leaves me more baffled than ever about how the different parts of her argument are supposed to work (particularly her discussions of purposes of speech). But I thought I should point to it. In any case, nothing she says here persuades me to modify my quodlibetal question on lying.
* There are rumors that the Pope will name St. Hildegard von Bingen a Doctor of the Church at some point in 2012. (ht) If so, I'll end up having to modify my Doctors of the Church post again.
* An interesting post on the Carolingian argument for why the Frankish Emperors could call themselves Emperors of the Romans.
Fr. James Schall has an interesting post on the eschatological myth with which the Gorgias ends. I'm not sure I fully follow the line of argument in the essay, but I read the myth rather differently -- that is to say, the afterlife is not the point at all. When Socrates sums up, he says that Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles have failed to prove that you shouldn't live the sort of life that the myth says you should. Thus I don't think the justice or injustice of the world is Socrates's primary concern; it comes up, but is not discussed extensively. Rather, what Socrates is doing is showing that Callicles's trump card -- the claim (entirely true as far as it goes) that Socrates's philosophizing will result in his being brought before a jury and condemned to death -- is just a story, and other stories can be told. And what matters is that Callicles and the others have been unable to refute Socrates's contentions that those who do wrong are always worse off for doing it, that nothing bad really happens to the just person, and that being good is always better than seeming good; these are all contentions woven into the story. What the gods do in the story is bring the question back to truth: Zeus sets up a situation in which no soul can hide behind rhetoric, in which every soul stands naked and unadorned for its judgment. Souls scarred with injustice are seen as scarred; souls beautiful with justice are seen as beautiful. The myth is not chiefly about eschatology, what will happen after you die, although that is the framework of the story; the myth is about reality, how things are now, even if we ourselves, not being gods, cannot always see them.
I was looking at something in Tooley's SEP article on the problem of evil, which is one of those SEP articles that makes an interesting paper without being very good as an encyclopedia article, and stopped to read his "Concrete, Deontological, and Direct Inductive Formulation" of the PoE. Evaluating it he goes through each of the nine premises and concludes, "So all of the premises seem fine"; I don't actually think this is true, since several of the premises seem to me to be ambiguous as formulated. But this premise in particular just baffled me:
(10) An action is morally wrong, all things considered, if it has a wrongmaking characteristic that is not counterbalanced by any rightmaking characteristics.
It reminds me of Campbell's cutting comments (in his critique of Hume on miracles) about the bizarreness of Hume's principle of counterpoise. Clearly if we are accepting this principle as "by virtue of the concepts of rightmaking and wrongmaking characteristics, together with the concept of an action's being wrong, all things considered," we can't be using the phrase "wrongmaking characteristic" to mean "characteristic that makes an action wrong". And the same with "rightmaking characteristic". In every other discussion I've come across in which phrases like these have been used, 'wrongmaking' was the adjectival form of 'making wrong'. So what, then, are these wrongmakers and rightmakers that don't necessarily make actions wrong or right? What general features do they have?
When he first mentions them, he says that they are properties "that determine whether an action is one that ought to be performed, or ought not to be performed, other things being equal." I take it that the ceteris paribus clause here is supposed to be doing some major work, but combining it with (10) seems to convey the idea that wrongmaking characteristics are characteristics that make an action wrong when it's not a right action, and rightmaking characteristics are characteristics that make an action right when it's not a wrong action. And then (A) we need to have a clear account of how we identify them in a non-question-begging way, which we don't have; and (B) we need to have an argument that they are universally stable and not merely functional according to circumstances -- i.e., that characteristic of type C is not wrongmaking under some circumstances and rightmaking under others; and (C)we need to know how we assess the balance of rightmaking and wrongmaking. Indeed, rather weirdly, rightmakers and wrongmakers don't make actions right or wrong; rather, what makes an action right or wrong is the higher-order characteristic of how your wrongmakers relate to your rightmakers. This is not, as far as I have been able to determine, standard usage of the terms at all; in standard usage, 'rightmaking' indicates something that makes your action right. It's not normally used to talk about what makes your action right assuming it isn't "overbalanced" by the sort of thing that makes your action wrong (if it's not "overbalanced" by the sort of thing that makes it right...); or, to put it in other terms, we don't usually talk about oughts in such a roundabout, vague, and wishy-washy way.
Setting aside the unnecessarily confusing nature of the terminology, part of the weirdness is that this is a principle of the kind that usually indicates a consequentialist view, but it is stated in terms that are usually used to indicate a deontological view. (Tooley seems to want to get away from a consequentialist view in order to avoid certain controversies, but this sort of principle is not a usual part of deontological views, and so it's difficult to see how it avoids the problem of controversy.) We can make sense of:
(10') An action is morally wrong, all things considered, if it has disutility that is not counterbalanced by any utility.
But (10) is not obviously even coherent, and even if we assume it coherent, it isn't clear how we'd identify our wrongmaking and rightmaking characteristics as they'd have to be understood here (without begging any questions), and even if we assume we could, it isn't clear how we'd determine whether (say) 'letting Pinocchio become a real boy' was counterbalanced by (say) 'letting Bambi's mother die', and by what measure. Under what moral theory does it actually make sense to analyze actions this way?
Today is the feast of St. Lucy, Virgin Martyr; she is one of the saints who is often easily picked out because she is usually represented as carrying her eyes on a plate, like so:
The reason is that the stories of her martyrdom tell that her eyes were gouged out during the Diocletian persecution.
She was extraordinarily popular. She has an important, although mostly offstage, role in Dante's Divine Comedy (Dante, who had eye troubles, was highly devoted to her); she is the saint that the Virgin Mary sends to Beatrice, telling her to send Virgil as Dante's guide through hell; or so we are told by Virgil himself:
This poem is usually thought to have been written in 1627, a year in which Lucy Donne, his daughter, and Lucy, Countess of Bedford, a close friend, both died. The reference to the 'year's midnight' is to the fact that St. Lucy's feast was at one time more-or-less the Winter Solstice (in England in Donne's day, and for quite some time before it, St. Lucy's would have been the closest major saint's day to the Winter Solstice -- you need to keep in mind, of course, the difference between the Julian and the Gregorian calendar). St. Lucy's as liturgical Winter Solstice creates an interesting series of juxtapositions given that her name is derived from the word for 'light'; exactly suitable to the poetic conceits of a metaphysical poet like Donne.
I've recently finished grading one of the take-home tests I give for my Intro courses; it's a test on the history of philosophy, and is a rather difficult two-part test, so I throw in a lighter question or two. One of them is simply to name something they learned from the course that is not on the test. As you might expect, there's a wide variety of answers, but one answer I've come to expect, which is virtually always mentioned by one or two students, is that they were surprised to discover that there were any Christian philosophers. That is to say, any Christian philosophers ever. Sometimes I get a more generalized form, expressing surprise at the existence of religious philosophers of any sort.
They learn that such people have existed, of course, because I always have a medieval philosophy segment to the course, and all the philosophers there are Christian, Jewish, or Muslim and, because it is convenient for giving some order to the period, explicitly labeled as such. I think of this as being to some extent a vindication of teaching Introduction to Philosophy with a historical approach, despite the difficulties it introduces: had I not taught this course several times, and if I taught it by problem-units (free will, skepticism, etc.) rather than by historical sweep, it would never have occurred to me even to raise the point explicitly -- it's the sort of thing I ordinarily take completely for granted. And, whatever one may think about the interest of that point in general, this is a matter that is undeniably a point of interest to many students: I mean, there are students whose minds are seriously just blown by it, and all their preconceptions of philosophy smashed into bits by it.
One wonders what the background causes are that lead so many students to disassociate the concepts of philosophy and religion, but it's not an uncommon thing. The number of people who, on discovering (usually through different channels) that I'm both Christian and teach philosophy, have actually been taken aback, and puzzled about how that could possibly work, is extraordinary. It can't be any well-defined conception of philosophy. I find that most people, that is, most ordinary people going about business that has nothing to do with academia and have never taken a philosophy class before, have difficulty keeping philosophy and psychology straight. And (for instance) it's not difficult to find people whose conception of philosophy is that it is a sort of koan meditation; in their mind philosophy works by coming up with questions that have no possible answer -- not many possible answers that can't be narrowed down but no possible answers at all. (This is, incidentally, worth keeping in mind when one teaches philosophy, because such students can go through philosophy courses without ever being disabused of it, since they have no problem with saying that such questions can look like they have answers, or that people can think they are giving answers to them. But a lot that is puzzling about the way students respond to, say, trolley problems or skeptical scenarios suddenly makes sense if you assume that some of the students are assuming from the beginning that posing a trolley problem or skeptical scenario is like asking about the sound of one hand clapping. To them it's a category mistake to think that one can really get any farther than merely posing it.) But it is very, very common. Perhaps the heavy emphasis on skepticism that has been such a common staple of the modern undergraduate philosophy class is a contributing factor; but, again, we are talking about people who have never had an undergraduate philosophy class before, and whose acquaintance with the very term consists entirely of pop culture references and whatever might come up in ordinary conversation.
->cf. Suarez: "we have a general rule that distinctions are not to be multiplied without sufficient reason (seeing that a distinction does not occur in anture without a sufficient cause or without necessity)."
We should avoid both mortal sin and venial sin, but our reason for avoiding them is not the same: we avoid mortal sin so that we may love God and neighbor, and we avoid venial sin so that we may love them better, and not defectively.
Faith, being an infused virtue, has a twofold analysis, one human that concerns itself with motives of credibility and one divine that is spritiual discernment through divine illumination; and a twofold synthesis, one human that concerns itself with the beauty of the whole world and one divine that is intimacy with glory.
We can only appropriate ideas of the Mysteries, never the Mysteris themselves; but they can appropriate us.
The vocation of a writer is to bear witness; and it is perhaps the very distinguishing mark of the good writer, as opposed to the bad, that the good writer bears witness to what is definitely something.
We learn our true worth through humility; and one thing we learn through humility is that the beatitude or happiness worth having is a very great thing.
People who see the world as it is but cannot give different priorities to what they see will inevitably become depressives.
Analysis of argument is fundamentally analysis of means and ends; formal structure becomes relevant insofar as it makes arguments suitable or unsuitable for their ends.
adapting belief revision models to argument revision (some are at least primitive versions of the latter already)
It is a mistake to confuse acting without a principle and acting in violation of it. People violate noncontradiction all the time; it is still the first principle of all reasoning, without which nothing makes sense....Just as it would be follish to assume that inconsistency, which is mere violation, means either that we are free from noncontradiction or that noncontradiction is not a norm of consistency,m, to too with bonum faciendum, mutatis mutandis.
If you are not wrong often, you are not thinking enough. (But being wrong often is rather different from being wrong always, or even being wrong about most things; both of these are dysfunctional in a way that being wrong often is not.)
Human beings are often at their best when humbly attempting great things and earnestly doing simple things well.
intense emotion concentrating itself into an image in which the subjective is expressible by the objective
In art as well as science even failures can be progress (for this is a feature of reason that learns).
Analytic philosophy of the more formal sort is like cubism in its focus on the abstract and inorganic structures of concrete and living forms; it is like impressionism in its more intuition-peddling sorts. This philosophical cubist impressionism has its place, but the museum of philosophical art, even the museum of modern philosophical art, is not chained to one such style. The same can be said of the philosophical tachisme of certain continental schools.
The philosopher has a responsibility to take even false and dubious positions seriously, to the extent that they raise points that may indeed need to be resolved.
Some contributions to a nation, or to humanity, are so great that ar eword or honor that can be confined to a lifetime is not adequate; this was one reason for heritable titles.
'Observation' as used in different scientific fields is an analogical term, not a univocal one. Observing double stars is not the same as observing bird song, and neither is the same as observing subatomic particles.
In at least some cases (e.g., solution of proportional equations) analogical reasoning is fully rigorous. So the question becomes: under what condtions are analogical inferences so rigorous?
It is true that truth does not contradict truth, but it is also true that the coherence of truth with truth may be subtle.
Reasonable gadflies and intelligent kooks have always performed inestimable services for the intellectual world.
We are beggars in the face of grace in exactlyt eh saem sense we are beggars before nature, and just as we must panhandle for air to breathe, we must panhandle for divine light. But these are all loose metaphors; they capture nothing but our dependence on things that do not depend on us.
Polytheism tends to monotheism by two routes: henotheism (this god is more deserving of my worship, at least, than other gods) and theomonism (all gods are in some way one).
Bentham's methods of paraphrasis and archetypation are valuable if freed from Benthams complete incapacity to understand the human mind, and the inevitable self-parodying crudeness that results.
Paraphrasis naturally tends to abstraction, not concretion; where concreteness is increased there is generally implicit modification in which concrete things are treated as if they were themselves abstract (i.e., the paraphrasis is by figure of speech), or else information and meaning is definitely lost.
"To try wrong guesses is, with most persons, the only way to hit the right. The character of a true philosopher is, not that he never conjectures hazardously, but that his conjectures are clearly conceived, and brought into rigid contract with facts." Whewell
Because hypocrisy is chiefly a matter of motivation, and becaus ethe values and ideas the hypocrite chooses as whitewash are often genuinely good, we should not forget that the arguments & criticisms made by hypocrites can be right.
To make human beings means to the ends of technology rather than vice versa is inconsistent with human dignity and therefore with justice.
As Christ's redemption comes under natural signs, so His body and blood under signs of bread and wine.
Some kinds of prayer, like exercise, require good form. (Hence Acts of Contrition, Faith, Hope, Love, and so forth.)
Money in the broad sense is a system for comparing, prioritizing, and rationing in a broader system of exchange.
All intellectual insults, however specific, approximate over time to synonymy with 'stupid', i.e., to indefinite and generalized denigration of intellectual & reasoning abilities. Since any intellectual criticism can be turned into insult simply by being used that way, critical vocabulary has a sort of natural tendency to degeneration and impoverishment.
We have in Scripture not one voice but a consonance of voices, and they do not sing all the same notes, but harmonize different notes in polyphonic song.
It is the grace of the young tnot to be terrified of the precipice on which they stand; we have all been there and we all barely noticed.
- note significance of branches of argument (one branch to C can take longer than another branch to C, and two lines of argument can be non-simultaneous or simultaneous)
Conversions that are not moral miracles always build on some kind of intellectual curiosity or some kind of natural piety, and, indeed, often a mix of both.
-> Indeed, thinking of this further, how many of the obviously unconvertible are so wholly because they are incapable of even basic intellectual curiosity about what they are rejecting? Rational curiosity doesn't guarantee conversion; but deadness of intellectual interest is deadness to all but miraculous persuasion.
Lists being natural or rational in character, no infinite list of numbers can ever include all real numbers. This suggests the possibility of superlists, pertaining to higher cardinalities: the real superlist, etc.
Equality between human beings necessarily has to take many different forms; any account of human equality failing to recognize this will fail to attain certain needful kinds of equality. For equalities are as diverse as relations between people, and while these fall into kinds, there are many kinds; and there are equalities that pertain to unequal incidentals, as with employers and employees, or parents and children, that are distinctive to those relationship and easily lost through an attempt to reduce all equality down to one kind.
The Eucharist is not merely Passion and Resurrection extended to us; it is also Pentecost extended to us.
Since sin consists of dwelling on lesser goods to the exclusion of greater goods, the key practice that must be learned in moral life is looking beyond good to greater good.
Means of communication that allow swift transmission of ideas do not always do the best job of establishing them; and vice versa.
The most dangerous kind of person who presents himself as an intellectual is the one who will not allow others room to be wrong.
Error theories are not merely useful but necessary when otherwise the existence of a concept or term is itself reason or evidence for the opposing position. That is, when you can say, "But how could we have had the concept/term X at all, if we didn't somehow get it from X?" So Descartes (at least) showed that this is so for God (qua the infinite) & the rationalists extended this in their anti-empiricist arguments; other examples would be things like 'contingency', 'good', and so forth. That is, there is an actual argument from our having that very idea that would need to be addressed by the opposing side (or else it stands).
People who tell no stories of darkness and light, in stark black and white as we say, cannot see shades of gray as gray.
Religious liberty protects the supremacy of the Faith from neglect, fraud, and discord insinuated into society by political interests.
The pretense that all other men contribute equally to the common good as good fathers do is a dangerous one for both societies and men.
An advantage of the mathematician over the logician is that in some/many areas of logic the lgoician cannot take advantage of the power of massively iterated operations.
The pursuit of wisdom is necessary for a government; it is the only way to be both consistent and flexible enough to stay just in the face of the world's mutability.
Like ocular blindspots, mental blindspots can be identified by inference. Doing so, however, requires being open to such inferences in the first place.
To study philosophers requires appreciating the interest of philosophical experiments that didn't work out.
(2) Of two regions of influence, a region A mediately influences a region C when there is some region B such that there is a path through B from a node in A to a node in C.
(3) A region A includes a region B as a subordinate region of influence if every path of influence to a node in B includes at least one node in A, and there is at least one node in A not in any path in B.
(4) Region A and region B overlap when there is some region C that is a subordinate region of both A & B.
bridge influence can be represented by cuts, on assumption that all relevant influences are considered
Laity are not simply subordinate to clergy but functionally interordinate with them, by each being subordinate to the ends of the other in certain respects. The two errors in ecclesiology to avoid are that in which the clergy do not serve their flocks and that in which the laity have no real shepherds.
Society can only reliably be ruled by philosopher-kings when society is filled with potential candidates for philosopher-kings.
If the Seventh Letter hadn't been written by Plato, we would still have to say that its anonymous author was one of the most remarkable minds of ancient Greece.
rhetoric as the art of persuading many by means of mythology rather than instruction (Plato Polit. 304d).
The best thing for good government is prudence in the authorities; the second best thing is for law to be sovereign; the latter is easier to guarantee.
Just as virtue in a person is not merely knowledge, so justice in a city is not merely the knowledge of those in charge.
One of the things writing cannot convey is the massiveness of true dialectic, both its scope and detail; take a text as long as you please, it is merely one surface of the rational discourse that created it.
An understudied area is how much philosophy depends on the mild approval or even mere toleration of large numbers of people who are otherwise largely indifferent to it.
The caricature of fortitude will seem more like fortitude than fortitude itself to those who have little acquaintance with fortitude. And so with all other virtues.
The extent of hypocrisy in a society is an indirect (and somewhat unfortunate) measure of the excellence of its moral standards.
The amount people are willing to pay for something is usually less than their estimate of its value; people like bargains, and want things at bargain price.
Lending markets are generally markets involving asymmetric information; they rarely even approach ideal symmetry.
Political parties are expressions of practical reason; many of their quirks & abuses chiefly arise when practical reason is severed from speculative reasoning.
"Faith is the intellect's instrument and enables it to elevate its understanding through belief." (Lull)
(note that scruples is often caused by meticulous-mindedness combined with confusions about principles, and failure to distinguish sentiment and consent)
As there are many kinds of assent (imaginative, opinion, knowledge), so there are many kinds of inference (in Newman's sense) corresponding to each.
Holidays and festivals, however vulgar, give nourishment to imaginative and poetic life in people who otherwise may get little.
Latin & Greek as treasuries of alternative conceptual vocabularies (obviously any language shaped by robust interplay of philosophical traditions could serve -- classical Chinese and Sanskrit have similar value)
For one who has done wrong but retains a living and well-formed conscience, judgment is itself a punishment or at least partial expiation. Hence purgatory: the just find judgment a vindication, the honest wrongdoer under mercy finds it expiation; for both it is salvation.
Participation is another way to talk about final causes (directly or indirectly, depending on the kind of participation).
Every premise set establishes not just conclusions strictly deduced by also conclusions apt to be drawn.
What makes fideism a coherent kind of position is that (1) we often find ourselves believing things without knowing why and (2) we take at least some beliefs to be themselves evidence of their own truth (the act of believing is itself evidence of the belief). Thus the general logical type, fideism, is possible: We could indeed find ourselves believing something on no discernible evidence but reasonably take the believing itself as evidence of the belief's truth, and this just is fideism. (You will note the similarity of this to taking something to be self-evident; which is no doubt why fideists not uncommonly make the mistake of conflating fides and intelligentia.) Things get trickier when it comes to specific fideistic positions, especially in areas in which the belief in question is not somehow self-reflexive.
All formal systems explicitly representing identity necessarily require the assumption that at least some intensional or modal contexts are irrelevant. Consider X=Y. But as labeled, X is X, and not Y, and Y is Y, and not X, and X is on the left and Y is on the right; thus if this is identity, these must be considered irrelevant.
Our discourse about time is modally complex, including not just time-ordering modalities, but also alethic, epistemic, incipit/desinit, and perhaps even deontic. It is a stew of modalities.
Religious rituals are in effect dialectical negotiations of vaiorus kinds, and thus exhibit on a large scale the features we recognize on a small scale in argument, persuasion, courtesy, and otehr interactions with human beings.
Courtesy is the natural expression of respect, whether we speak of respect for another person, or resepect for truth or justice, or respect for the natural world. Courtesies just are what human beings do in expressing respect.
We often require of people a rational account of how they avoid the problems of not believing something.
Much of analytic philosophy is voodoo philosophy: to attack or support reasoning you attack or support toy models of it.