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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Siris' LiveJournal:
| Saturday, January 4th, 2014 | |
| 11:26 pm | Press Briefing PRESS SECRETARY: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for coming to this daily briefing. Before we get to questions, I want to lay out the basic ideas behind the new defense policy. This policy does represent a major change from previous approaches, so it's important to get the rationale for it. As you know, there has been considerable worry recently about the percentage of the budget going to defense, so we've been looking for programs that are more easily sustainable, but still quite effective. At the same time, it is absolutely imperative that we send a message to the entire world that the United States is still the elite military power on this globe, and that, no matter how serious anyone else may be about their military capabilities, they simply cannot be more serious than the United States is. We have also been looking into shovel-ready military projects, that can be quickly developed because the groundwork has already been established in local industries. I am pleased to be able to let you know that the first phase of this exciting new project has already begun to show serious promise. We are breeding giant destructo-lobsters as big and heavily armored as tanks. Initial worries were that with that much armor the lobsters would be unable to move and would just sit on the bottom of the seafloor, but it turns out that this was a very easy method to solve, since we just fitted them out with hydraulics when we put in the ballistic missiles. What is especially exciting about this program is the relatively foolproof character of it; we can reasonably guarantee that in any deployment we would lose no more than two and a half percent of the local civilian population, and to maintain this guarantee of safety we've only had to put the coast of Maine under naval quarantine. A similar program, a bit behind schedule but nonetheless under budget, is underway for the West Coast using Alaskan snow crab. I don't have to tell you all that there is no other nation in the world that is even close to being able to wield an army of giant destructo-lobsters. Even our allies are not this seriously in the forefront of modern-day military technology. The closest are the British, of course, but it's well known that they've been having difficulty getting the project finished since the board of the Scottish company in charge of the project suddenly and without warning took a vacation at one of those vacation resorts in Syria. Our speed and efficiency in developing this project will certainly show the world that we mean serious business when it comes to defense policy. This is really what we want to highlight today: The United States is serious about defense, more serious than anyone else, and we have the lobsters to prove it. I'll now take any questions. Q. You mentioned the budget before. How are you paying for this project? PRESS SECRETARY. That's an excellent question. My understanding is that the President and the Vice President are each funding about twenty-five percent of it out of pocket, and most of the rest comes from selling obsolete lobsters to restaurants. We are also planning on holding Ireland hostage, and our economic experts tell us that we can probably get three or four thousand dollars from that. This Administration is committed to making the population of giant destructo-lobsters self-sustaining. Q. You said that this was phase one. What is phase two? PRESS SECRETARY. Ah, that's very exciting. We've already begun it, although certain aspects are still years away from their final stages. Phase two consists of weaponizing seagulls with stealth technology and nuclear missiles. Initial testing shows that the basic idea is sound, but obviously there are certain environmental concerns that will require further research and development. We are confident about our ability to surmount those obstacles, of course; nothing in the world can outpace American ingenuity. Q. Is there any truth to the rumors of a phase three? PRESS SECRETARY. Obviously I cannot go into details about the kind of national security deliberations occurring behind the scenes, but we do want to put to rest recent scurrilous reports by Republicans that we are planning on hurling American bison through the air into the path of oncoming missiles. This is certainly not true, and it's sad that people will make up stories like this. We are very much in favor of protecting the American bison population, and I would like to point out that it was Republicans in Congress, not this Administration, that killed the bill that would have let us establish no-fly zones for buffalo. This Administration is strongly committed to the development of a rational, consistent defense policy based on the principle of shock and awe. What is shocking and awful about bison soaring through the air? Absolutely nothing. What is really shocking and awful is that anybody believes such obvious fictions. Q. On a separate issue, reports today that the U.S. has halted all nonlethal aid to Quebec -- I’m wondering, is the U.S. losing faith in the ability of rebels to fight without Francophone extremist interference or participation? PRESS SECRETARY. Well, Dave, as you know, most of our approach to Canada is geared toward supporting those terrorists who are moderately committed to respecting basic human rights. So that's really our goal when it comes to the provision of nonlethal aid. We have seen the reports that the NDP has seized the maple syrup warehouses belonging to Quebec, and we’re obviously concerned by those reports. We’re still gathering intel, but we have suspended all further deliveries of nonlethal assistance to Quebec. At the same time it's important to to understand that any aid distributed through international and nongovernmental organizations is unaffected by this decision. Likewise, certain military assistance programs are unaffect, so the government of Quebec will still be getting their supply of shrieking parakeets. Q. The President said last week that he had a plan for reducing the deficit that would be declared this week; but so far there hasn't been any word of it. PRESS SECRETARY. Let me stop you right there, because I know exactly what you're talking about. There was a bit of a snag due to the President's attention being taken up by the threats of a disgruntled NSA employee to leak state secrets -- you've certainly heard of this -- but as this happily resolved itself when his plane went down in flames due to pilot error, we are now back on track and should have it for you next week. I can't tell you the details, but I can tell you that it involves blackmailing all the politicians in the free world. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that will better show this Administration's commitment to reducing the deficit, and it will also show the naysayers that the money being spent on NSA surveillance is money well spent. Thanks, everybody. Have a good Friday. Q. Does the President have anything on his schedule the rest of the week? PRESS SECRETARY. Aside from visiting his volcano lair, I don't think so, but there's some possibility that something else will be coming up a bit later. As we get some more details, we’ll let you know. Thanks, everyone. |
| 6:00 pm | Dashed Off II dependent origination of ideas (1) The human person is a single whole with a plurality of attributes. (2) The human person is not infinitely divisible. (3) The human person is a subsisting agent in relation to others. (4) The human person is a possibility of experience, an active existent, and a necessary condition of a kind of life and thought. how we derive apodeictic knowledge from experience -- the empirical apodeictic ->Aristotelian epistemology is precisely the epistemology of the empirical apodeictic -> phenomenology as also concerned with the empirical apodeictic The unity of thought lies not in its representations but in its character as immanent action. Note Kant's abstraction point A355, which is a good one. Categories are not deduced but reached by division. T(p or q) iff (Tp or Tq) This is a modal fallacy if we are considering all T-style modalities, for exactly the same reason that [](p or q) iff ([]p or []q) is fallacious for some interpretations of []. Predication requires the introduction of being or not being. We are all only dialecticians in any field we have not made our own a Buridanian account of endoxa: They are important because people, following their natural inclination to the true, accept them, having found no counterexample. ends as endpoints consistent with nature vs as endpoints consistent with the functioning of nature enthymeme as the body of persuasion but its aim is judgment which requires preparation of audience & presentation of oneself as an appropriate kind of person; this requires the study of character and of the kinds of soul and of the passions and dispositions of mind. Poetic catharsis is a civic or political end; it has to be understood as something involving our sociality, as bearing directly on social life. note Iamblichus on inborn knowledge of the gods Extended practice of prayer nurtures our mind, enlarging its receptivity to truth, revealing to us a more-than-human order and divine life and light, elevating our mind to good things, stimulating trust, communion, friendship, making us to be familiar with divine things. Schrodinger's anschaulichkeit has less to do with literal visualizability than with concreteness of explanation, the discernible unfolding of identifiable processes in space and time. Schrodinger's two principles of science: intelligibility of nature, objectivity. Instrumental rationality qua coherence of intention and belief is different from instrumental rationality qua appropriateness of means-taking, which are both different from instrumental rationality qua means-construction. climacteric ideas rhetoric as consensus-building "In the products of his activity man beholds himself as in a mirror." Susan Blow mutual aid, inventive thrift, structured sociability, just exchange The Holy Spirit is the purest traditionalist and the agent of holy tradition; He is, in truth, the only full evangelist. Metaphor is a way of thinking with the world as one's cognitive instrument. In becoming we recognize both being and nothingness. The quality of an argument is partly determined by context. The finite is that which admits of the infinite as a possibility. the precursive character of the Holy Spirit's work the Virgin Mary as instrumental part of the mission of the Son and the Spirit (Mary as Seat of Wisdom) the body as itself an economic system money as expansion of exchange vs money as a restriction of exchange (note that flexibility of money disappears for those without a surplus to use in a system in which everything requires money; in a less restrictive system they would not be so confined, but could barter or service-borrow and steward their money for more general exchanges) -> it follows from this distinction that a money-only system loses much of the benefit of money -> No economic system currently in existence is strictly money-only; but there are subsystems of major economies that are. It follows directly from Thomas Reid's account of the sense of sublimity that the experience of the sublime in nature is evidence for an intelligent Author of nature. Lent as a giving of firstfruits to God (and thus asceticism generally as the same) Who apprehends the genus apprehends the species potentially -- indistinctly and confusedly. That which is sensible may also be taken intelligibly. Something's being a fallacy is not a fact about its formal structure. measurement as the uniting of quantity and quality The primary mechanism of democratic debate is not reasoned argument but sympathy. existence as relative necessity categorical judgment (1) of inherence: accidental quality of its substance (2) of reflection: essential property of its substance (3) of necessity: essence of its substance think about Hegel's association of 2nd Figure with induction & 3rd Figure with analogy Nothing can be identified as an explanatory mechanism except in terms of its tendencies. mockery as concerned with wrongness having such weak support or defensibility as to be incongruous play and playthings as mediating between inner and outer worlds "Comparisons are always favorable to the promotion and application of truth." Froebel Personal need is a form of obligation. It is a dangerous one to consider, however, in the sense that there are many ways to go wrong in one's assessment of it, not least because we tend to be confused about what we genuinely need. forms of deontic [] to be done always to be done everywhere to be done by everyone necessarily to be done Experimentation is in a sense merely greater attention to the instrumental element of cognition. original justice as not being a merely personal justice but a justice of the human race itself Nothing prevents us from knowing as object what must be presupposed in order to know any object; for there is no contradiction between something having each character in different moments of cognition. Remission of powers is not remission of substance. "Grace and virtue imitate the order of nature." ST 2-2.31.3 As Lent in some sense joins Epiphany and Easter, so Penance joins Baptism and Eucharist. Aristotelian place as containment with orientation To the extent that anyone is a tool prior to other tools, existing instrumentally to impart instrumental purposes to instruments, they are slaves. seven causes considered by rhetoric: chance, nature, compulsion, habitus, reason, passion, desire (appetite) Language arises out of rational cooperation (cf how Deaf languages develop automatically if you just have enough Deaf in one place). Leibniz's law of continuity: "In any supposed transition, ending in any terminus, it is permissible to institute a general reasoning in which the terminus may also be included." -> This is where Whewell must (directly or indirectly) have found the idea for his principle for Limit. -> Robinson took the transfer axiom (Every real statement holding for all real numbers holds for all hyperreal numbers) as a specification and precisification of this. Law can only legitimately approach rights by remotion, recognizing causation and eminence, however. marriage as a tradition of oneself and one's body The sacramentality of marriage is an extension of that of baptism. (cp Familiaris Consortio no. 13) genius as superassociation picturesque : eye :: expressive : ear The general structure of defensive war is to impede and that of offensive war is to overcome impediment. The military art is a casuistic art. the military as representative, as advisory, and as instrumental Origen on Joshua: "the book does not so much indicate to us the deeds of the son of Nun, as it represents for us the mysteries of Jesus my Lord" (Hom 1 in Jos) Josiah // Joshua 2 Kg 22:2 // Josh 1:7; 23:6 Term functor logic needs to be supplemented with an account of ampliation, and it needs something suitable for reduplication. (Note that Englebretsen's dispute with Angelilli seems to turn partly on E's ignoring of any reduplicatively modulated predication.) The unity of the Trinity is the principle of the unity of the Church. The Notes of the Church are Christ unifying, sanctifying, catholicizing, and apostolocizing the community of the faithful. The unity of the Church is Christ communicating His life to the Church; the holiness of the Church is Christ giving Himself for the Church; the catholicity of the Church is Christ present in the Church; the apostolicity of the Church is Christ present through the Church. There is a sense in which chemistry is the science most natural to human beings, the one we all dabble and progress in, although rarely beyond the two paths of recipe and trial-and-error; thus it is unsurprising that mixing, boiling, sampling things to find out something is almost the universal image of natural science itself. Only in our own case do we derive our notion of possible experience from actual experience, and even that is arguably not exceptionless. We rather determine conditions for possible experience and then establish what would be a possible experience for any hypothetical experiencer. The causality of the cause needs to have come into being only if causality in itself is temporal. Sublimity is involved in the larger branch of each of Kant's antinomies. The intelligible appears, and appearances are intelligible: the intelligibility of appearances themselves. To test is to cause to produce an effect, or else to register some effect. The sum-total of all possibility contains itself as a possibility. the sum-total of all possibility as branching or 'chunked' The possibility of the sum-total of possibilities could only have an actual ground in an intellect. The Christian theologian may draw from all myths and religions insofar as they reflect on the common principle and ultimate end of the human race, insofar as they are shadows and images that prepare for truth. Existence proofs of any kind may start from determinate experience, or from indeterminate experience, or from something abstracted from any and all experience. NB: Kant has no adequate answer to Malebranche, for whom 'the thought, which is in us, is the thing itself', i.e. God The principle of causality does not apply to the world precisely as sense but rather as intelligible. Postulation is the attempt to reach by hypothesis what is or must be presupposed. Kant's primary problem is his uncritical and naive acceptance of the empiricist account of experience. Before his critique of pure reason he needed a critique of experience. (The Critique of Judgment partly, but only partly, remedies this.) arguments that prove vs arguments that prepare (give a natural leaning) The Beatific Vision is precisely the doctrine that God is a possible object of experience, and may appear as given to (intelligible) intuition. Kant's account of intuition in the Aesthetic is so abstract that nothing prevents it from including things we do not usually regard as sensation. The Transcendental Ego, Freedom, and God should all have been considered the same thing: the rationalists did not take the soul or the will to have the particular unconditional Kant draws upon; only divine substance and will did. Thus the three are really just divine substance, divine intellect, and divine will. The Church participates the mission of Son and Spirit; and the Holy Spirit is the principal agent of her as missionary. The Church is apostolic as being called to be with Christ and to be sent out to preach. (Mk 3:13-14) Winnowing out error is the fasting and temperance of the mind. |
| 3:42 pm | Kernel and Husk Probably the most significant work on religious epistemology from a liberal Christian perspective written in the nineteenth century (and perhaps ever) is Edwin Abbott Abbott's The Kernel and the Husk, subtitled 'Letters on Spiritual Christianity'. Slow-witted as I am, I only realized just last night that the title is probably Augustinian in origin: To run over it briefly: by the five loaves are understood the five books of Moses; and rightly are they not wheaten but barley loaves, because they belong to the Old Testament. And you know that barley is so formed that we get at its pith with difficulty; for the pith is covered in a coating of husk, and the husk itself tenacious and closely adhering, so as to be stripped off with labor. Such is the letter of the Old Testament, invested in a covering of carnal sacraments: but yet, if we get at its pith, it feeds and satisfies us.... Of course, the difference is that Augustine thinks such moral doctrines are interpretations of miraculous events, which were all done not merely to show a wonder but to teach truth, and Abbott's thesis is that all the stories of the miracles are cases where moral stories were mistakenly taken literally. |
| 1:41 am | 'Occurrent Belief' It is a curious feature of contemporary analytic philosophy, which takes some getting used to, that its practitioners tend to explain things in terms of the more poorly understood. Thus, for instance, they like explaining things in terms of propositions, even though there is no generally accepted account of what propositions are; and they like appealing to intuitions, even though there is no particularly illuminating account in contemporary analytic philosophy of what intuitions are; and they like analyzing things in terms of their properties despite the fact that there is no widely accepted account of what properties are; and they like boiling things down to justification even though they can't agree on what justification is or implies; and they like bringing in identity despite the well-known puzzles concerning it; and so forth. I see that Andrew Moon has recently been puzzling about one of these curious terms, 'occurrent belief', in a recent "Certain Doubts" post. It's worth thinking a moment about the history of the phrase, which shows exactly why it falls into this category. 'Occurrent belief' arose from the dispute over the nature of beliefs in the middle of the twentieth century, which was regularly -- especially by dispositionalists -- put in terms of occurrentism vs. dispositionalism. Roughly speaking, dispositionalists took 'belief' to mean a state one is in over a period of time, not any kind of happening or doing. Pretty much any account of belief that did not make belief a disposition was labeled occurrence theory of belief, since the dispute was mostly ginned up by dispositionalists to build arguments for dispositionalism, and they just stuffed all their very different opponents in one box to do it. The dispute faded, more or less, although dispositionalism won to the extent of getting to set the default terminological assumptions among philosophers, but the terms remained; when people talked about 'occurrent belief' they meant simply 'belief as it would be understood in some occurrence theory or other'. 'Occurrent belief', in other words, never did more than signal that the person using it was not using 'belief' as a dispositionalist would use the term; it never indicated anything about what that belief was. Of course, in particular cases we can find particular accounts of belief in play, further specifications from context, or because people wanted to be clear what they meant when using the phrase. But such cases simply show that 'occurrent belief' largely meant whatever people wanted it to mean. A common early view was that occurrent beliefs were acts of some kind; e.g., acts of assent or taking an attitude toward propositions. We find trace of this, for instance, from a dispositionalist perspective, in Price's influential Gifford Lectures. Another, later, example of this view would be Amelie Rorty's definition of it as the assertion or denial of propositional content. A different view that sprang up, somewhat later, but now quite common, was the one that occurrent beliefs were just beliefs-we-are-conscious-of-somehow; David-Hillel Ruben says somewhere, for instance, that as far as he can tell it's the only plausible meaning of the phrase. The two are obviously going to be capable of having radically different implications. In reality, of course, people just use the phrase with occasional clarification when necessary, to mean whatever it is convenient for it to mean at the point when they are using it. |
| Thursday, January 2nd, 2014 | |
| 3:01 pm | Rosmini on Uprightness of Judgment We can see wonderful uprightness of judgment in children, and often in the honest, just judgments of peoples (taken as a whole) free from agitators. Children's uprightness derives from their lack of passions, or lack of subjection to them, as we ll as from their freedom from bad habits, prejudices, and so on; the uprightness of a people depends necessarily on their being free from sophisticated passions, and from the considerations and sophistries of cultural human beings, which find their source and development in the possibilities open to the powerful. However, uprightness of judgment on the part of children and peoples does not prevent their falling into error. It is different for the truly wise, who unite virtue and experience of human affairs with the search for knowledge. Prudent persons of this kind are more easily on their guard against error because they have no love for it. Using reflection illuminated by experience, which has informed them about the danger of error, they put a brake on their passions and at the same time rule the natural instinct drawing them towards hasty judgment. As a result, they form a habit of suspending their judgment when necessary, and of examining matters coolly and accurately before pronouncing on them. Antonio Rosmini, Certainty, Denis Cleary and Terence Watson, tr., Rosmini House (Durham: 1991) p. 196n. |
| 12:59 am | What Charity Is Not What charity is not, therefore, is looking after others by telling them how to live. This is Mrs. Elton's idea of charity, and it is clearly shown to be misguided, as her officious exertions on behalf of Jane Fairfax demonstrate. In addition to directing the lives of the less fortunate, Mrs. Elton also sees charity as a matter of style. In her estimation, charity is what those in power offer to those without power: it both assists the beneficiary, and increases the positive social image and self-image of the benefactor. Early in the novel, Emma is guilty of conceiving of charity in just this way, and the introduction of Mrs. Elton to Highbury is a reminder to her of how charity should not be conducted. For example, Emma feels for Jane when Mrs. Elton insists that her servant will pick up Jane's mail, or when she insists on arranging a governessing position for Jane. Even when Mrs. Elton is planning her part in the strawberry party, her focus is on her image, and her ability to make Jane over in her own image.... Sarah Emsley, Jane Austen's Philosophy of the Virtues, p. 135. Later Emsley characterizes this by saying that Emma is "concerned with the difference between charity as love and charity as image" (p. 138). |
| Tuesday, December 31st, 2013 | |
| 9:32 pm | Howard-Snyder on Panmetaphoricism Daniel Howard-Snyder has a forthcoming paper (PDF) arguing against what he calls 'panmetaphoricism', which is to say, the position that all language about God must be metaphorical (in a broad sense of the term). Unfortunately, I think his argument clearly fails at several points due to a lack of clarity about figurative language. The first and basic argument Howard-Snyder gives, and then presupposes throughout the paper, is this: Panmetaphoricism possesses an unenviable property: if it is true, then it is false. For if our speech about God can only be metaphorical, then the predicate “can be talked about by us only metaphorically” applies to God literally. But in that case, our talk about God cannot only be metaphorical, contrary to panmetaphoricism. Panmetaphoricism is self-refuting. Unfortunately this is much too fast, and, indeed, it becomes clear when one considers the peculiarities of this predicate; Howard-Snyder begins to consider this point, but does not press it hard enough. If I say that something 'applies to X literally', the only thing I can mean is, 'when taken literally applies to X'. But the panmetaphoricist simply does not have to take the predicate in question literally; the panmetaphoricist doesn't -- and indeed cannot -- think that talking about God is talking about God in the sense we take the phrase when taking it literally; so all our talking about God is talking about God involving at least some kind of figurative element. Howard-Snyder tries to block this move with a further argument: She says that no predicate of ours can apply literally to God. When we remind her of the predicate “cannot be talked about literally by us,” she replies, “And that one doesn’t either”. But if that’s the case, there must be something about God in virtue of which no predicate of ours can apply literally to God, not even the predicate “cannot be talked about literally by us”. It isn’t just magic, or an inexplicable brute fact. But then we can introduce a new predicate into our lexicon—say, “is illiterable”—and we can stipulate that it signifies literally whatever that something is, from which it follows that some predicate of ours can apply literally to God after all. This, however, is simply question-begging; if we stipulate that 'is illiterable' applies when taken literally, we are doing nothing other than stipulating the success of a kind of language the panmetaphoricist denies. The panmetaphoricist will say that 'is illiterable' applies when taken figuratively; it cannot apply when taken literally. Obviously it is true that if you stipulate that panmetaphoricism is wrong then it will follow that panmetaphoricism is wrong. But this is not a refutation. What Howard-Snyder needs, and does not give, is an argument for why the panmetaphoricist herself cannot say that there is at least some metaphoricity, some figurative aspect to such predicates. And the seriousness of this lapse becomes worse when we consider more closely the possible panmetaphoricist response that Howard-Snyder himself considers. He imagines the panmetaphoricist saying that first-order speech about God is only metaphorical, leaving open the status of second-order speech (language about our language about God). But the fact that we are able to make any such distinction intelligible at all shows the problem with Howard-Snyder's argument: the kinds of predicate his arguments use (like 'can be talked about by us only metaphorically') involve transfers from one domain to another. Speech about God and speech about speech about God are not talking about God in the same sense of 'talking about God'. And all cross-domain transfer is metaphor in the broad sense. Far from establishing that panmetaphoricism is self-refuting, Howard-Snyder's predicates make it more secure. The problem appears very much to be a bad theory of metaphor. We see this in another of his arguments: One concern is this: according to Abrahamic religion, God exists, really exists. However, if our first-order speech about God can only be metaphorical—as our panmetaphoricist insists—then no first-order speech of ours can be used literally of God, including the predicate “exists”. But if the predicate “exists” cannot be used of God literally, then there is nothing about God in virtue of which the predicate “exists” can apply to him literally. And if there is nothing about God in virtue of which the predicate “exists” can apply to him literally, then the statement “God exists, really exists” is false, which is to say that God does not exist, not really. But this is simply false. If there is nothing about God in virtue of which the predicate 'exists' can apply to him literally, all that follows is that the statement 'God exists, really exists' is false when taken strictly literally. But the panmetaphoricist has every reason to accept this. She will simply say that God does exist, does really exist, if we take those phrases metaphorically. Howard-Snyder does consider this, but argues: If our panmetaphoricist replies that she means for her use of these predicates to be merely metaphorical, she will fail to solve the problem for which she invoked them. For if they don’t apply to God literally, and if “exists” and the like don’t either, God won’t show up anywhere on the ontological map, not as an existent or a non-existent object, not as a denizen of reality or unreality—which, on the terms of the ontology she invokes, is incoherent. But this again is simply false; the panmetaphoricist will obviously reply that they do show up on the ontological map in such a way that only metaphorical expressions can describe them. Howard-Snyder is assuming that reality -- and thus ontology -- is literal. But neither reality nor ontology have any intrinsic connection to literalness; literalness is a matter of the language we use, not reality or ontology. We can talk about reality in expressions to be taken literally, but we can also talk about reality in expressions to be taken metaphorically. Our ontological map can be drawn using expressions that are literal or expressions that are figurative. The panmetaphoricist is saying that God does show up 'on the ontological map' -- but that there are parts of the ontological map that can only be drawn with metaphors and God shows up there. Or, indeed, the panmetaphoricist may say that there are really several different ontological maps that human beings lack the means to reconcile into a single map; and God is on an ontological map only metaphorical expressions are robust enough to trace. 'Really' and 'literally' are not synonyms; nor do they mutually apply each other. They don't even belong to the same domain. The more disastrous issue is that Howard-Snyder is begging the question in every step of the argument, because subject terms are talk about things, too. Consider an analogy. Suppose I were to say, "Colloquial, conversational English can only talk about black holes metaphorically." Is this self-refuting in the way Howard-Snyder had suggested? No. If we use the predicate 'can only be talked about metaphorically' of something we are already metaphorically calling 'black holes', we are still only talking about it metaphorically. The same is true if we say, 'black holes are illiterable'. The same is true if we say 'black holes exist'. In order for Howard-Snyder's argument to work, he must first assume that 'God' in 'God can only be talked about metaphorically' involves no implicit metaphor -- that is, he must first assume that panmetaphoricism is false. (But even if we set this aside, we run into the cross-domain transfer problem noted above, once the panmetaphoricist makes a distinction between first-order and second-order language.) And the same is true of 'God exists'. But suppose we even ignore this. Consider our analogy again, ignoring the fact that the subject term is a metaphor. Is there anything inconsistent about saying that 'Black holes really exist' is true only if we take the predicate to apply metaphorically? There is not; whether or not it is true, it is entirely possible to have a version of English in which the words 'really exist' only apply literally to things very different from black holes. Does this claim commit us to saying that black holes are not on our 'ontological map'? It does not. At the very least, Howard-Snyder needs an argument to show that it does, and he has provided no such argument. He is merely assuming it. And in the same way, if we say, "Human languages can only talk about God metaphorically," we seem neither to have any inconsistency, nor to have any problem with saying that God exists -- if understood in the right way. We see the same problem later when Howard-Snyder considers a version of panmetaphoricism using Thomistic language: if , as my friends insist, his doctrines of analogical predication and divine simplicity imply that the predicate “is personal” can only be predicated analogically of God and humans, and if, as my friends insist, that implication itself implies that the predicate “is personal” cannot apply literally to God, then God is not personal, not really. Howard-Snyder's friends are simply wrong about Aquinas, but it doesn't really matter, anyway, since Howard-Snyder is simply not justified in drawing th econclusion. If the predicate 'is personal' cannot apply literally to God, but it does apply to God, then God is personal, really, when 'is personal' is not taken literally but in the appropriate figurative way, in the same way that when we rightly say that 'Such and such astronomical phenomenon is a black hole', the astronomical phenomenon is a black hole, really, as long as we take 'is a black hole' in the appropriate figurative way. And, indeed, this is the whole problem of Howard-Snyder's argument: it involves a shoddy understanding of the distinction between the literal and the figurative that lets Howard-Snyder slide back and forth between between treating the distinction as linguistic and treating it as somehow ontological. This is quite easily visible in Howard-Snyder's continual sliding between 'literally' and 'really'. This is simply untenable, and cannot be seriously maintained after a moment's thought. Howard-Snyder's argument, however, depends crucially on it: it repeatedly comes up, and can't be eliminated from the argument without eliminating the argument. Of course, the panmetaphoricist view fails, but for precisely the reason Howard-Snyder's argument against it fails: it's based on a false view of the literal/figurative distinction. But that's another argument. |
| 11:58 am | Music on My Mind Regina Spektor, "My Dear Acquaintance". It's a good rendition, but it would be very, very hard to beat Peggy Lee's original version. A happy New Year to all that is living, to all that is gentle, kind, and forgiving.... |
| Monday, December 30th, 2013 | |
| 3:35 pm | Desolation of Smaug I went to see The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug yesterday. I don't have all that much to add to what everyone else says, and the most obvious problem with the movie is precisely what everyone says it is -- the pacing is completely off. We keep lingering on side issues and speeding through essentials. I think a great deal of the problem is that Jackson has sliced the movies badly, plus let too much filler be added to the script. If you really had to make a movie for The-Hobbit-plus-background-to-LOTR, the second movie should really have involved two things: the dwarves making their way to Smaug and the Council of the Wise assaulting Dol Guldur. We barely got anything related to the latter here, which means that the third movie is going to have to see the death of Smaug, the assault on Dol Guldur, the Battle of the Five Armies, and everyone getting home, which is far too much even for three hours -- something is going to get shortchanged. And, frankly, from the all the made-up action sequences here, it's quite clear that something like the assault on Dol Guldur was needed here. It would also have been able to take care of a lot of what the filler was thrown in for. Need a strong female character? Have Galadriel direct troops in person. Need spectacular special effects? Let's see Saruman's magnificent assault weapons. And it would have been more faithful -- Galadriel might well have been there in person, and LOTR explicitly tells us that Saruman's machinery was a major part of the assault. The filler is also getting to be a bit much. I don't have much of a problem with modification for cinema, but it's a problem when the filler is starting to choke out the original -- it begins looking like bad fan fiction. The filler needs justification. It makes sense that we would get more Legolas here than in the book, since he would have been there doing something anyway, and the movie is a prequel to the Lord of the Rings trilogy; it's reasonable to set things up, then, for the Legolas-Gimli interaction. Tauriel, on her own, is a not-unreasonable kind of character. But the Legolas set-up is a secondary matter, and invented characters should either simplify the story (e.g., by summing up what would otherwise require several characters or complex scenes) or add nice touches, not require their own entirely fabricated storylines. We spend a ridiculous amount of time on Tauriel here, and we already have the Azog filler spilling over from the first movie. We aren't just dealing with added storylines here; we're being subjected to major divergences at significant points, since they are starting to interfere with the main story. Other weaknesses: Smaug is too talky -- yes, he's a vain dragon, but he just never shuts up. We never get any sense of why the Master celebrates the dwarves, perhaps because the reason is that he wants to get them out of town as fast as he can and the script leaves a third of them in town for no good reason. Almost the entire Lake-town portion is botched, in fact. We don't get enough of the mirkiness of Mirkwood. The strengths: Martin Freeman is such a good Bilbo Baggins that he deserves a better Hobbit movie. In fact virtually all the acting is quite good, even for the made-up characters. Despite an endless number of liberties being taken, the barrel sequence was done well (it helped that the liberties taken actually make some sense in terms of cinematic structure, since it made sense to have a bit more action at that point, and that it was done with a sort of zany zest without any pretentiousness, and that it was better done than the mountain sequence in the previous movie). I liked seeing the dwarven forges, which are the single best scenic part of the movies so far. Many of the smaller touches of the movie are just splendid -- it baffles me how so much obvious love and care can be lavished on little details when the seams of the main story are so sloppily stitched together, but the detail-work is often excellent, whether it's Beorn's bees, Gloin's portrait of Gimli, Bilbo's first introduction to the treasure under the mountain, or the scenery in Esgaroth which manages to tell us more about what's really going on than the script does. |
| Sunday, December 29th, 2013 | |
| 3:44 pm | Austen Unfinished Virginia Woolf on what might have happened had Austen lived past 42: She would have stayed in London, dined out, lunched out, met famous people, made new friends, read, travelled, and carried back to the quiet country cottage a hoard of observations to feast upon at leisure. And what effect would all this have had upon the six novels that Jane Austen did not write? She would not have written of crime, of passion, or of adventure. She would not have been rushed by the importunity of publishers or the Battery of friends into slovenliness or insincerity. But she would have known more. Her sense of security would have been shaken. Her comedy would have suffered. She would have trusted less (this is already perceptible in Persuasion) to dialogue and more to reflection to give us a knowledge of her characters. Those marvelous little speeches which sum up in a few minutes' chatter all that we need in order to know an Admiral Croft or a Mrs. Musgrove forever, that shorthand, hit-or-miss method which contains chapters of analysis and psychology, would have become too crude to hold all that she now perceived of the complexity of human nature. She would have devised a method, clear and composed as ever, but deeper and more suggestive, for conveying not only what people say, but what they leave unsaid; not only what they are, but (if we may be pardoned the vagueness of the expression) what life is. She would have stood further away from her characters, and seen them more as a group, less as individuals. Her satire, while it played less incessantly, would have been more stringent and severe. She would have been the forerunner of Henry James and of Proust—but enough. Vain are these speculations: she died “just as she was beginning to feel confidence in her own success.” It's dangerous to disagree with Woolf on a matter of writing, but I think she is partly misled here by her reading of Persuasion and by the error of thinking that dining in London and meeting famous people is much of a way to gain a new appreciation for the complexities of human nature. While Woolf does have some interesting and plausible things to say about Persuasion if read as a transitional book, which it certainly is, a number of features Woolf attributes to Persuasion are found much earlier; and some of the harshness of the work, assuming it is not due to the fact that Austen never had time to put a final polish on it, is due to the fact that Persuasion, more than the other books, is about how human beings can be a detriment, intentionally or unintentionally, to other human beings. When we look at Sanditon, the unfinished novel, we find that the satire is indeed more stringent and severe -- but it is in fact more incessant, becoming a sort of subtle atmosphere. I do think it likely that Woolf is right about Austen trusting less to dialogue and using the suggestive more, since this seems to be something of a trend within The Six themselves. But all the signs are that this makes Austen more satirical, not less. There seems to be another trend in her heroines, a trend toward more intense virtue; or, perhaps, it would be better to call it 'sophistication of virtue'. And, with all respect to Woolf, the kind of people one meets when dining and lunching out and meeting famous people and staying in London show up worse, not better, against such a heroine. We see this in Sanditon, as well, for all that we get only a very limited glimpse of the heroine; she seems on the way to being a wittier Anne, and everyone looks even more ridiculous in comparison, because she sees through them. It makes her the perfect heroine for a work that looks like it would probably have been, among other things, a commentary on the moral hypochondria and convalescence of the day -- that is, on excuses for not doing the right and sensible thing. And this is almost certainly what Austen would have seen in Woolf's scenario: more excuses, more hypocrisies, more superficialities masquerading as sophistications. It does seem that as The Six progress we get more of a sense of people in groups, so it's likely Woolf is right that this would continue; but the result, contrary to Woolf's suggestion, is more individuality, not less. By seeing them in groups, Austen sees more of the heart of each character, not less. An Austen novel about London would be worth reading; and all indications are that such a novel would be harsh, ruthless, and devastating. But even that, of course, assumes that Austen would have found London interesting enough to write about; she might well not have. She spent time at Bath and in the novels we only occasionally get there; Austen as we know her likes more scenery and less artificiality than that. Bath ends up being a contrast to human nature, or a device for mixing things that wouldn't ordinarily be mixed. There's no reason to think London would have been different. And I think Sanditon shows us that she would probably have gone a different direction even if she wanted to write about London. Londoners in their native habitat can hide their quirks, or pass them off as reason; get them into new situations, let their fads and fashions carry them out of their element, and that is where an author like Austen would give us her telling of what London is. And the danger of it is that there might not be a novel's worth there. While Woolf, no doubt, would give us an excellent account of London that explores subtleties too nuanced for a hit-and-miss method, Austen herself might well have found it precisely the sort of thing to sum up in a few devastating lines and dismiss forever. |
| Saturday, December 28th, 2013 | |
| 7:37 pm | The Third Kind of Martyr The holy days immediately after Christmas are a curious mix. We start with St. Stephen the Proto-Martyr, the first specifically and explicitly Christian martyr, and whose martyrdom is a sort of template for other martyrdoms. We then move to St. John the Evangelist, who is according to tradition the only apostle who wasn't martyred (he was exiled, not killed). And today we meet the Holy Innocents, who are the martyrs least like anything we expect martyrs to be. The mix did not escape our predecessors. Aquinas mentions somewhere a sermon by St. Bernard of Clairvaux arguing that there were three kinds of martyrdom: martyrdom in will but not in physical death, as with St. John; martyrdom in will and in physical death, as with St. Stephen; and martyrdom in physical death but not in will, as with the Holy Innocents. Genuine martyrdom is an act of witness; but to be the sort of martyrdom celebrated by the Church it must be an act of God. As typically understood, this is by the way of the infused virtue of fortitude, which is to say, inspired fortitude, whose most encompassing act is witness in violent death. In St. Stephen we see this full complete sense of martyrdom: God acts as principal agent of the witness, Stephen through inspired fortitude is the instrumental agent of witness, and the act is able, in context, to be a complete act of witness in violent death. The relation of this to St. John is easy to see: God still acts as principal agent of John's witness, John through inspired fortitude is still instrumental agent of the witness, but as it happens the fortitude is only ever expressed in acts less than full martyrdom. With the Holy Innocents, on the other hand, we seem to have a somewhat different situation. Nothing absolute prevents an infant from receiving inspired fortitude, but this is in a sense incidental to the question, since an infant is not in a position to be an instrumental agent through such an infused virtue but only, at best, an instrumental patient. Thus God is principal agent of the witness of the Holy Innocents, and the act of witness in violent death is complete, but the Holy Innocents are not agents of witness in the way Stephen and John are. Yet they are no less martyrs and saints. One importance of the Holy Innocents is that they show that the witness of martyrdom, if genuine, must be very much an act of God. (The medieval theology of the Holy Innocents ends up being more complicated than this makes it sound, because, of course, the Holy Innocents were Jewish boys who were circumcised. Circumcision already made them signs of Christ and is the anticipatory sign of baptism into Christ. Thus their witness to Christ is an expression of the covenant between God and Israel that is fulfilled in Christ. Thus they were already going to be saints -- but because of their deaths they participate in the victory of martyrs as well and merit the veneration of the Church. Contrary to what some mis-attribute to medieval theologians, they weren't bothered by the fact that unbaptized children could be saints in heaven, since this was actually easily accommodated, but puzzled by the sense in which they were martyrs. Yet they were also clear that not only are they martyrs, they are an important kind of martyr, as well; all martyrs in some sense die in the place of Christ, for instance, but the Holy Innocents are the only martyrs who literally died in the place of Christ.) Pusey has a famous sermon, entitled, "God's glories in infants set forth in the Holy Innocents," in which he notes that one of the clear lessons of the feast is the dignity of children: even an infant may be a saint of God, a witness to truth, and a temple of the Holy Spirit; and we are not just called to life everlasting, but born to the call. And this dignity does not depend on their being able to engage in great projects or elaborate choices; it does not depend on their autonomy or their consciousness of their place in this world or their ability to attribute to their own existence some basic value; it does not depend on sophisticated cognitive capabilities or having identifiable interests. Their deaths are not merely of moral interest; their deaths are things to make a man tremble; their deaths show that their lives are infinitely precious. It is in the greatest of human deaths that we see the full greatness of human life; and in Christian terms, the greatest of human deaths is martyrdom, the victory that is most victorious, and infants can have it. Some infant boys who had no idea what was going on were martyred once; and thereby they showed that their lives were capable of being, in witness, the expression of the greatest goods in the world. The Feast of Holy Innocents is a feast that says a lot. |
| 5:47 pm | Classical and Popular Both from Frank Baum's The Patchwork Girl of Oz: "The only record I have with me," explained the phonograph, "is one the Magician attached just before we had our quarrel. It's a highly classical composition."(Chapter Seven) "It's the latest popular song," declared the phonograph, speaking in a sulky tone of voice.(Chapter Eleven) And the phonograph would seem to be a sort of expert on the subject. |
| 4:53 pm | Dashed Off I As always, what it says on the tin: dashed off; so take with a grain or two of salt. I'm very behind on these, so this will be a series. collective vs distributive interpretations of each modality Treating logic in a purely syntactical way increases rather than reduces interpretive assumptions, because inference and proof are not a kind of syntax. Rigid & nonrigid designation show that there is a modal component in every term. If you take seriously Hume's claim that his account of causation covers matter & form, you get something like a process ontology. You can tell the philosophers whose arguments are most dangerous to Nietzsche's claims: they are the ones with whom his responses become most epigrammatic and scathing, without consideration of details. This is the Nietzschean cunning: to pass lightly over what is dangerous. the promissory sacraments: Baptism, Confirmation, Matrimony, and Orders -- all involve promising God something. Note that these are the three character sacraments plus the quasi-character covenant of Matrimony (all the character sacraments involve the sealing of a covenant, just as Matrimony does; they only differ in the covenantal structure) Pictures are capable not merely of denoting but of quasi-exemplifying (cp Goodman on metaphorical exemplification). vagueness as superposition of at least apparent possibilities Exemplification, as in swatches and paint chips, is quasi-conventional, relative to a classification and conventions of use or regard. Nothing seems actually to fit Goodman's criteria for a notational system; the closest one gets is practical equivalence for certain functions. A musical score is a recipe. The composer's score is an authoritative recommendation, not definitive of works or performances. The performer plays in the tradition of the composer. monomane and yugen in the hana of the Christ-like life; the myo of the saints, the rojaku of the ascetics "A trading country is the habitat of Socinianism." Newman entropy as a measure of distinguishability the iconic economy and its relation to the sacramental economy II Nicaea bases Tradition on the promise of Christ II Nicaea lists as examples of the lawful traditions: the Book of the Gospels, the image of the Cross, the pictorial icons, the holy relics of martyrs; it specifically and explicitly attributes the same account to the first three The Church in its Tradition is a seal of the righteousness of faith, in testimony of God's grace towards us, to the confirming of faith and the imprinting of the promises of God on our hearts; it is a testimony of God's love, founded on the promise of Christ, to be with us always. Scripture as evangelical proclamation, icon of Christ, and sacramental whose office is to prepare one for any and all sacraments (thus being part of the catechetical/doctrinal/magisterial, iconic, and sacramental economies of the Church, and binding them all together) possible world semantics & the problem of modal overdetermination. We see the meaningfulness of the universe reflected in human beings around us as the image of God; without the latter, we have no clear sight of the former. Affability is the virtue of speaking the language of friendship in deed and word. the passage of time itself as playing a role in cognition symbolic participation in divine providence the Sabbath as a day for cultivating affability curation of ideas The tendency to act and accomplish is more fundamental than the tendency to self-preservation. Aristotle's eleven virtues as a template for civilized life a political community shares (1) money: liberality, magnificence (2) honors: ambition, magnanimity (3) social interaction: truth, eutrapelia, affability (this leaves courage, mildness, justice, & temperance; c, m, and temp all deal with basic aspects of human passional life: fear, anger, pleasure and pain; justice has a regard for the political structure itself) modality -> mereotopology -> geometry Pain is an entire portfolio of responses to the world. Baptism is the primary and principal means of transmitting the faith; indeed, in a sense the entire Christian life is the sacrament of Baptism, the rippling out in sign and thing of the rite of sign and thing. plausibility ..by coherence (direct) ....internal ....external (including inference to best explanation) ..by analogy (derivative) ....precedent ....metaphor (both of these show that plausibility is a consistency with cognitive consequences) mortal apings of immortality "Counterpart theory" is applicable whenever we can talk about a topic entirely in terms of similarity, quantification, and mereology. Formally it applies just as much to organizational counterparts in organizations as individuals in worlds. Aesthetics needs something like a doctrine of the mean that allows us to evaluate beyond the capacities of our language. Clearly there is a sort of mean in art, but it doesn't seem to be stable, in the way that virtues are stable means, i.e., grounded in definite and consistent features of the agetn as such. It seems to be now in this, now in that. Causes as we usually think of them are able to specify the initial conditions of a system; laws as we usually think of them are not. Causes pertain to being, laws to order. Dt 30:10-14 & the purpose of Torah The fear of the Lord is His law in us and in our actions. The purpose of the parable of the Good Samaritan is to block attempts to justify oneself. Governments, more than any other institutions, are in danger of becoming parasitic on fears and hopes when they should be reducing the harm of them. Hell is being unable to get past Good Friday, Purgatory is waiting through Holy Saturday, and Heaven is the Paschal Day of Resurrection. "every effect is a sigh of the cause, an exemplate of the exemplar, and a path to the end" Bonaventure effects lead to causes (Bonaventure) (1) by proper representation (natural similitude) (2) by prophetic prefiguration (Scriptural type) (3) by angelic operation (mediated theophanic works) (4) by superadded institution (sacrament) "to the Church is entrusted the care of all the sacraments, but in a special way of matrimony, because of the variations which may occur in relation to it, and because of the concomitant disease." Bonaventure Scripture as four-dimensional: breadth (canon), length (salvation history, creation->judgment), height (theological scope, God-creatures), depth (manifold sense) Gandalf before Black Rider V.4 // Gandalf before Balrog II.5 the structural principles of Aquinas's account of virtues (1) acquired vs infused (the Summa discusses infused virtues) (2) doctrine of the mean (3) the seven major virtues (4) the mereology of virtue accessibility relations as representation relations (possible world semantics as a system of signs) Every sign is an exemplate effect tending to an end. Internal structure is not sufficient for distinguishing natural kinds. laws as identifying exemplar causation: exemplate as that which follows according to intrinsic law Natural selection is primarily a matter of differential chemical response; everything else follows from this. We should think of it less on the biological level (which over-assimilates it to artificial selection) and think of it more as a statistical feature of chemical interaction with a complex environment. It is not mere measurement but recorded organizations of measurements that scientific inquiry uses. Economic transaction is built out of the products of the liberal arts. Nobody who does not recognize that the natural end of sex is friendship can do justice to the evil of rape; part of what makes rape a perversion is that it is an intimate betrayal. OT:nature :: NT:character (cp Schelling) The baptism-chrismation link is the Easter-Pentecost link. The syllogism is not the structure of discovery but of scientia in the soul. Reinach's pure law is to natural law as Platonic forms are to Aristotelian forms. The Church receives Scripture as a gift and imposes it canonically by promulgating it, by continually interpreting it, and in and through preaching, prayer, and practice of it, and also by upholding it in matters of dispute. money as a form of hypothetical honor Stein's account of the state shows its weakness in her discussion of international law The criteria used in historical Jesus studies establish firmness of historicity; none of the standard ones are suitable for determining non-historicity. Money does not make things commensurable strictly, but it makes them commensurable enough for exchange. liturgy as combinatorial symbolism intelligibility, verifiability, provability value, exchange, market node, edge, graph agent, relation, network grace, sacrament, sacramental economy combinator, combination, combinatorial set term, proposition, argument claim, inference, inferential system intending, inferring, narrating "a sign is something knowing which we know something more" Peirce the consensus gentium of philosophical tradition When people talk about pragmatics, they really mean modes of practice. Grice's conversational maxims are maximal propositions or topoi for specific kinds of means-end reasoning, based on four ends of communication. Gricean pragmatics is a teleology. Vico's languages of gods, of heroes, and of men are in fact the three layers of all human language. the Sacred Heart as synecdoche of the Word made flesh, and thus metaphor for all that pertains to the Incarnation "The implicit philosophy of any phenomenology of religion is the renewal of a theory of reminiscence." Ricoeur Pr 8:7 // Cant 2:3 Ps 19:10 // Cant 4:11 One must beware of attempts to appeal to 'Ockham's Razor' to argue that looking at a thing stupidly is better than looking at it with one's whole mind. Real knowledge is always layered. abduction as recognition of phenomena as an icon of a symbol (a likeness of a general conception) (Peirce EP 2:287) abduction leading to conclusions in interrogative mood abduction as concerned with economy of money, time, thought, and energy (Peirce CP 5.600) abduction : inference through icon :: induction : inference through index :: deduction : inference through symbol abduction as divine: NEM 3.206; CP 8.212; CP 6.476-477 MS 843.7 (cp Peirce on agapistic evolution) abduction as guided by the notion of good Tropes are all ways of keeping to the conversational maxims as much as literal language is; tropical intent is often posited to preserve relevance, informativeness, etc. the sacraments as objective correlatives The mimetic theory of art, properly understood, is a theory of art as a generative power of the mind. We think the mirror inverts only by a sort of mental sympathy with our own image. What we have in a mirror is not inversion, properly speaking, but reflected congruence. All of Eco's arguments for saying that mirrors do not produce signs are wrong, being based on an equivocation with presence and absence and a false assumption, or at least a dubious one, about the contingency of signification. remote-view & close-view examinations of philosophical problems corrective & restorative duties The periodic table is in essence a combinatorial analysis, although slightly complicated by principles governing electron orbits. Human remembering is not in itself an ordering process, although we can order events in light of it. superposition as indicative of real possibility using the good things that pass to hold fast to the good things that endure forever relics as indicators of saints-as-icons Arguments can be coded into other arguments by analogy. Humean virtue ethics is semiotic: acts as signs of character Humean virtue ethics already includes everything considered by situationism in its account of artificial virtues and utility; but it diversifies situations rather than considering them as fi they were all the same kind of thing. Old works in philosophy are often full of eccentric arguments on curious topics; but in working out their underlying rules one often finds treasures. prayer as the breath of the Church, both inspiration and expiration Confirmation gives us not just grace within, but an atmosphere or ambience of grace (all anointing sacraments do so in their own way). the counterparts of Aristotle's eleven virtues for the Republic of Letters forms of inquiry that require an ambience of reason to survive judgments about character as necessary to testimonial evidence Marriage is constituted not by vow but by consent. closely binding contexts vs loosely binding contexts (the need for positive reason to generalize out of closely binding contexts) more generalized forms of Gricean maxims as maxims of charitable interpretation Syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics are all abstracted from original intelligibility; each is that one intelligibility considered in a particular light. "A verse is never freed from its peshut." Rashi the Decalogue as a guide to Scriptural interpretation More obviously than any other virtues, temperance and its secondary virtues must be *grown*. partial lending & borrowing of virtue (this is most obvious with prudence, through counsel, but temperance and fortitude both require cultural effort and can in some sense be communicated or participated in at remote) type of existence proof // type of argument for God's existence necessary rational posit // ontological I probable rational posit // ontological II direct empirical presentation // religious experience indirect empirical presentation by causal inference // cosmological indirect empirical presentation by implication of confirmed model // teleological pragmatic requirement // moral A good liturgy intimates wisdom (tablets of law, lamps), power (rod, altar), goodness (pot of manna, shew-bread). They are most suitable to being moved by the Spirit through Scripture who strive through reason to know themselves. "Opposition not only enlarges the soul; but the soul, when full of courage and magnanimity, in a manner seeks opposition." Hume SBN 434 mimesis, catharsis, and rhaumaton as the elements or dimensions of plausibility Historical scholarship begins with principles of evidence and paradigms thereof, not with skepticism; if it did not, it would never get either to history or to scholarship. sophological vs eschatological makarisms (both concern kinds of trust) Prophetic oracle is by its nature a riot of connections, a flood of weighty interrelations. liturgy as covenant festival memorializing theophany under the supervision of cultic officials The reasonable question with documentary evidence is not, "Do these agree or disagree?" but "How dot he causal lines resulting these relate to each other?" The rise of written tradition does not kill off oral tradition, but it does make it possible for it to be assimilated into a tradition of reading. tradition 1 Cor 11:23ff; 15:1ff Ascension as accession Sins of lust are such that even being uncovered is often a natural punishment for them. (This uncovering has to be distinguished from indirect revelation; they can be distinguished by how evidences are handled.) Shame is an imagination of disgrace. chastity as an 'integrity of the powers of love and life' It is straightforward nonsense to expect people to maximize communicative efficiency. Gricean pragmatics is really concerned with deriving principles of communication from more general principles of cooperative activity. Grice's maxim of manner is defective: it should be 'be appropriate', thus subsuming Gricean manner, style, and Leech's principle of politeness. (1) be truthful (2) be helpful/just (3) be relevant (4) be appropriate (3):(4)::end:means; i.e., have the appropriate subordinate subordinate ends, have the appropriate means to all the ends. ->public vs private ends of communication ->justice generically structures cooperation, truthfulness specifically structures rational communication Divine knowledge exceeds any enunciable specification. distortions of finite time limits for moral reasoning To consider: The diffusion of innovations is related to teh structure of the innovations themselves. Julian of Norwich: the privation theory of evil implies that evil cannot be recognized "except by the pain caused by it" (13.27.406) 4th Lateran Council on privation theory of evil Depravity springs from deprivation. In Julian's account, divine immutability is absolutely central to atonement. the paradox of tragedy and the problem of evil The extent to which religions have converged historically is quite remarkable given the sheer diversity of them. Part of this is moral, since moral principles are grounded in reason; part of it is aesthetic, since symbolisms expand and human beings pursue beauty; part of it is dialectical, since the arguments of others cannot always simply be ignored; and part of it is metaphysics, since reality constrains the mind in all things, however roomy the space for mental freedom may be. Cryogenic freezing would freeze one's interests in an unfrozen world. A great deal of consensus in any fast-moving inquiry or discipline is negotiated as a way of sustaining research interests -- the beginning, so to speak, and not the result, of inquiry. Consequentialism is either circular or based on self-evident moral principles of reason. problem mitosis Human experience again and again shows that despair is a greater evil than pain. Civilizations degrade by trying to compensate for sin with sin. pain "purifies, and makes us to know ourselves and to ask mercy" (Julian 11.27) prophetic discourse as discourse in direct address contending against the spirit of the age, particularly as found in structures of power, in light of God's ends (cp Westphal) 'Health' is necessarily a moral term, grounding obligations to others as well as moral excellences. Depending on the method of analysis, a change can be analyzed into objects, actions, capabilities, relations, parts and boundaries, and any number of other things; this does not mean, of itself, that change is any of these things. Hume's causal relation has to be temporal because temporal contiguity is the only directional kind of association in his account (resemblance and spatial contiguity are both symmetric) similitude and order terms in a broader mereology the metaphysical foundations of the preconditions for explanation politics as the personation of diagnoses and treatments Hobbes's Trinitarian personations as symbolic appropriations based on mission Coming-to-know may be a cultural artifact without what is known being so. |
| Friday, December 27th, 2013 | |
| 2:29 am | Circumfultus Undique In This Vale of Wretchedness |
| Wednesday, December 25th, 2013 | |
| 2:10 pm | The Charter A Christmas Song for Three Guilds Merry Christmas to you all, and remember that today is the day in the calendar that proclaims that all human beings are so to be loved that it would be fitting for even God to live and die to save them, if that be the price. |
| 2:02 am | Men Seem Men so Suddenly The Truce of Christmas |
| Tuesday, December 24th, 2013 | |
| 3:38 pm | A Poem Draft Snow on Pine Outside the window, snow on pine is swiftly falling, forming line along each bough in purest white; the day is dim, the tree is bright. The day is dim, the tree with light on every limb leaps out to sight as flakes that fall will glint and shine outside the window: snow on pine. |
| 1:53 am | The Nativity in Paintings IV (Re-post)  This is a painting by Conrad von Soest, from about the early fifteenth century; it is a small panel on the Niederwildungen Altarpiece, which, thanks to the joy that is Flickr, you can see in full here. This altarpiece is in a Protestant church in Bad Wildungen in Germany. One of the big issues in any painting of the Nativity is what to do with St. Joseph. He doesn't have a big role to play; obviously all eyes are on Virgin and Child. And the Gospels don't actually tell us much about him. We know he was a carpenter (actually a tekton, which is a skilled artisan, but taking it as indicating a woodworker goes back at least to the second century). We know some of his dreams (which should have more paintings devoted to them than they do, although Rembrandt has a very lovely one and Daniele Crespi another). He never speaks -- not one word is attributed to him. What we do know is that he travels like crazy; every time we see him he is either in the middle of a journey, or about to start one, or has just finished one. He travels from Nazareth to Bethlehem, Bethlehem to Jerusalem, down to Egypt, up to Nazareth, and the last we hear of him directly, he and Mary are taking yearly trips to Jerusalem for Passover. That's a lot of moving. But the Bible doesn't give much to paint when it comes to Joseph and the Nativity; and unlike most of the other details that are left open, you can't really do anything you want with him, although painters sometimes do get creative. Usually we find Joseph holding a candle, and sometimes sleeping. This is one of those Bridgettine details; in Birgitta's vision, Joseph is holding a candle, whose light is obliterated, swallowed up, in the light from the Christ Child. It's a feature often found even in paintings that are otherwise not all that Bridgettine; the candle was in the Flémalle painting. Joseph is cut out of the Nativity at Night painting; but the painting on which it is based certainly had him, and almost certainly had him holding a candle. There are other things he can do. In the Hohenfurth painting he is pouring water. von Soest's painting, however, is the only painting I have ever seen in which Joseph is cooking a meal. Somehow I like that very much -- it shows Joseph as a practical man of action. With so much travel he must have been an excellent organizer. Because we are never told Joseph's age in the Bible, there are two different traditions in painting: the Old Man tradition and the Young Man tradition. The Old Man tradition has going for it the fact that Joseph disappears from the scene relatively early; he was certainly alive when Jesus was twelve, but beyond that we are told very little. Third- and fourth-century legends, most notably the Protevangelium of James, always portray him as old, though. The Panarion of St. Epiphanius of Salamis, which is perhaps the first to give an age, goes so far as to claim he was about eighty (with four sons and two daughters) when he was betrothed to Mary. And overwhelmingly this is what we overwhelmingly get until about the seventeenth century, although most painters paint him as rather younger than eighty. But here and there in very, very early representations he is portrayed as a much younger man, and this has become more common in the modern era. |
| Monday, December 23rd, 2013 | |
| 1:59 pm | To the Place Where God Was Homeless The House of Christmas |
| 1:51 am | The Nativity in Paintings III (Re-post)  This is an early fifteenth-century painting by the Master of Flémalle, who has come to be identified with Robert Campin. Campin was something of a pioneer; he took realism in painting farther than most of his contemporaries (although, as you can see in the painting above, he also is considerably influenced by the conventions of manuscript illumination), and was one of the first to experiment with the switch from egg-based tempera to oil. In paintings we find two major traditions for the location of the scene: the Cave or the Shed. Both are usually highly stylized, with the animal shed, for instance, often being little more than a canopy. The Nativity at Night appears to be in the Cave tradition, while the Hohenfurth painting is very definitely in the Shed tradition. Here we have a remarkably realistic, and very rickety, old animal shed; the fact that the shed is virtually falling apart does multiple duty here by creating a contrast with both the Christ Child in the foreground and the castle representing the centers of power in the background, and also by opening up more space for painting, thus allowing us to get the ox and (behind the ox) the ass. The Cave vs. Shed option is an interesting one. Of course, when we talk about Christ in the stable, in our sense of the word, we are appealing to the Shed tradition. In fact, neither Matthew nor Luke give us any indication beyond Luke saying that there was a manger available. It could very well have been simply an adjoining room of the house dug in a little lower than the main room to keep the animals out of the latter; or, if the house was near a cave, a cave is certainly a possibility; it's unlikely to have been an out and out shed, but a sort of crude approximation to one adjoined to a house can't be wholly ruled out, either, since the word for 'manger' can also sometimes indicate an animal pen or stall. The Cave tradition, however, seems to have the longest history; Justin Martyr in the second century states unequivocally in the Dialogue with Trypho (chapter 78) that Jesus was born in a cave just outside of Bethlehem: Joseph took up his quarters in a certain cave near the village; and while they were there Mary brought forth the Christ and placed Him in a manger, and here the Magi who came from Arabia found Him. And Origen writing a little bit later also states it. The Church of the Nativity itself is in this tradition: the Basilica of the Nativity (the Orthodox portion of the Church of the Nativity) is built over the Grotto of the Nativity, an underground cave that by long tradition is the place where Jesus was born, and, even if not, has for over a millenium and a half done as a proxy for it. As far as painting goes, of course, artists will paint according to customs and times; and paintings will tend to paint Jesus as where the animals are in the culture in which the painter lives. The rise of the standalone Nativity creche has probably also given a boost to the Shed tradition since the thirteenth century, since it is easier to have a standalone stable than a standalone cave. In painting, the Shed tradition allows one to have a richer background than the Cave tradition; as with the painting above, the Shed tradition allows one to paint the Christ Child as situated within a much more vast world, while the Cave tradition instead puts greater emphasis on the foregrounded figures. |
