Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Review of Coyne


In the February 2016 issue of First Things, I review Jerry Coyne’s Faith versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible.


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588 comments:

  1. laubadetristeJanuary 29, 2016 at 1:01 PM

    @Santi: "But if you had the ambition of holding reality in a single empirical vision or language, of course Occam's razor would assist you. How could it not? It would help you choose among competing hypotheses. Occam's razor assists scientists, and continues to do so, because they have a testable ambition: among the theories on offer, which one fits the data most naturally, is conservative in not multiplying assumptions, has the greatest scope, and is most fruitful (capable of predicting outcomes)? The ambition is to strive for what Hawking calls 'model dependent realism.' If the Standard Model of physics isn't the final theory of physics, it will do till the final theory gets here. For now, it beats its competitors in part because it is conservative in not multiplying assumptions beyond what is strictly necessary."

    Besides the trenchant criticisms ↑pck made regarding actual scientific practice, let me summarize a few others made elsewhere:

    1) On any of several possible ways to count, it is logically impossible to use OR to "choose among competing hypotheses" if those hypotheses offer a "complete accounting of what there is." "Imagine that we have an ontology O committed to an infinity of basic objects such as events. Our mystical friend Shirley recommends that we adopt ontology O-NO, which is just like our ontology except that it posits a guardian angel for every event. We might appeal hopefully to... quantitative parsimony as a way of rejecting O-NO in favor of O. Regrettably, it is no help at all. א‎0 events + א‎0 angels = א‎0 objects. Shirley's O-NO has no more things in it than our ontology O."
    2) Trying to use OR to eliminate some entities, in favor of other ones judged more fundamental, fails because "fundamental" is a relative term.
    3) On a nominalist account, qualitative parsimony reduces to quantitative parsimony (then see #1).
    4) The injunction "not [to] [multiply] assumptions beyond what is strictly necessary" renders OR superfluous, as "assumptions" beyond the necessary are by definition not part of any *explanation* in the first place.
    5) The idea that there is some explanatory cost to multiplying entities, used as a justification to eliminate some, relies upon OR, and so using it in defense of OR begs the question.
    6) In practice, OR is usually a red herring, and provides cover for efforts to "get rid of the suspicious stuff."
    7) As an unqualified principle, OR is false, as if applied so, it would lead us to (e.g.) prefer the Greek list of elements (4) over the Periodic Table (118). And as a qualified principle, it requires much historical research to determine whether it is true, as "the discovery of more types of particles, more biological species, and more galaxies seems the rule, not the exception."

    and...

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  2. laubadetristeJanuary 29, 2016 at 1:01 PM

    8) OR is a normative principle. Trying to use it to toss "metaphysics" out of science merely invites metaphysics in through the back door. What was that phrase from Horace...?

    "And you can't have it both ways. If you're going to quote Proclus as retort, then you're in essence making Wittgenstein's point: philosophy, unlike science and math, doesn't make progress. It has been gnawing away at problems for more than two millennia without locking down any consensus opinions among the geniuses in the history of the field (nor among philosophers today)."

    Hmn. So you went from historical and empirical falsifiability (January 25, 2016 at 6:46 AM)... to universal acceptance, arbitrariness, precision, and confidence (January 26, 2016 at 6:31 AM)... to certainty, precision, and rigor (January 26, 2016 at 7:02 AM)... to progress and rigor (January 26, 2016 at 7:18 AM)... to rigor, precision, and confidence (January 26, 2016 at 8:34 AM)... and now you're back at progress. I'll quote myself: "Let me grant for the sake of argument what you say in each of those posts--you still have not established your own point, which several people disputed."

    "Leibniz and Spinoza could agree on math, they couldn't agree on philosophy."

    Sticking with Leibniz, 'cause I've read more of him, he rather famously frequently didn't agree on math. He engaged in a number of mathematical disputes (which makes sense, when you consider that he invented a bunch of math and corresponded with a bunch of people). For example, opening a book I have at hand I find with little effort that in the *Acts of the Erudite* he published a paper in the mid 1680s entitled "On Recondite Geometry and the Analysis of Indivisibles and Infinites," in which he damns with faint praise one "Mr. Craig," who wrote "On the Measurement of Figures," in "which it clearly appears that the author has made advances that are not contemptible..." Leibniz proceeds to disagree with him about "definite quadrature," along the way also disputing with one "Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus" on the same topic.

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  3. ScottJanuary 29, 2016 at 1:11 PM

    Incidentally, the only thing (in principle) "wrong" with Ptolemy's system is that it's forbiddingly difficult to do calculations in a coordinate system centered on the Earth. In fact Ptolemy's epicycles converge mathematically on the Copernican/Newtonian model.

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  4. ScottJanuary 29, 2016 at 1:28 PM

    (I like to mention this ↑ once in a while, when the subject comes up and especially when someone tries to present it as an example of something it isn't. I saw late mathematician Paul Halmos do a nice presentation on it once. (He wasn't late at the time, of course.))

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  5. Jeremy TaylorJanuary 29, 2016 at 2:48 PM

    Santi writes,


    I say: You don't need to be bowled over. You just need to take Wittgenstein into fair consideration. Apportion your beliefs to the evidence. Wittgenstein should give you pause.

    What about arguments? Are you aware of how to analyse and construct arguments? Especially, do you know how to spot and avoid fallacies and to make sound and strong arguments?

    Why do I need to take Wittgenstein into fair consideration until you can give me a strong, succinct argument - stripped of rhetorical waffle - for doing so?

    laubadetriste writes,

    I for one still find some interest in replying to them. Don Jindra has shown a dry humor (January 28, 2016 at 8:47 AM), and Santi has shown a willingness to be corrected (January 26, 2016 at 6:02 AM). Both of them are clearly well-read. Plus, I dislike the thought of responding only to those predisposed to agree with me.

    Don is technically banned from posting here. But he does seem to have improved a lot. I think some recall when he was as bad a troll of imskeptical or worse. He still makes dire arguments (just ask him about Ross and indeterminate nature of matter), but he seems to have calmed down a lot.

    As someone with lots of experience with Santi's posts, I think you are mistaken. I don't think he is really taking on board our criticism. But I don't see anything wrong with replying to him in this thread. It is different in new threads. He tends to take over threads. It would a shame if that happened a lot to new threads. Hopefully Dr. Feser would step in then and prevent it though.

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  6. BenYachovJanuary 29, 2016 at 2:49 PM

    If anyone is wondering if the Ghost of Wittgenstein is me....sadly no it's not.

    But I am soooo jelly it isn't moi.

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  7. scbrownlhrmJanuary 29, 2016 at 4:24 PM



    Scott,

    Off topic..... any references or links for "motion" inside of "Trinity"? Abstract with lots of approaches I know but hoping.....

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  8. scbrownlhrmJanuary 29, 2016 at 4:27 PM

    Scott,

    BTW: Thanks in advance.

    Always find your comments helpful on many levels ~~~

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  9. laubadetristeJanuary 29, 2016 at 5:01 PM

    @Jeremy Taylor: "As someone with lots of experience with Santi's posts, I think you are mistaken. I don't think he is really taking on board our criticism."

    :) I wouldn't bet against you.

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  10. AnonymousJanuary 29, 2016 at 6:22 PM

    Snazzy insult indeed. But of course, if Coyne is playing tennis with himself and losing, he is also, by definition, winning. Or am I missing the metaphor?

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  11. Son of Ya'KovJanuary 29, 2016 at 8:09 PM

    >Snazzy insult indeed. But of course, if Coyne is playing tennis with himself and losing, he is also, by definition, winning. Or am I missing the metaphor?

    IThe idea being Coyne is so incompetent he can't even win playing tennis with himself & win. The only analogy here is Tennis is analogous to his argumentative skills & reasoning processes.

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  12. SantiJanuary 30, 2016 at 6:42 AM

    Whatever qualifications you guys put on Wittgenstein's thought and biography to make him more religion friendly shouldn't obscure the fact that Wittgenstein's critique of definition in his Philosophical Investigations is devastating to Thomism. Devastating.

    Why?

    Because Wittgenstein basically makes the same critique of essentialism in language as evolutionary taxonomists make of species: a word, like a species, does not stay put definitionally. It functions along a living, evolving continuum. It has family resemblances to its ancestral usages in different environments (previous sentence contexts), but it would be a mistake to read its present usage in a sentence and conclude that it is functioning in the same way that it functioned when it was alive in another context; in a different space and time.

    The word God, for example, may have family resemblances to the way Christians used it in sentences in the first century, but it does different work in sentences now. There's no essence to God, there are only family resemblances. God is a living God, absent essence, but not absent each living and fresh context in which the word is deployed.

    Think of the controversy surrounding the penis in Catholicism as an analogy. Thomists would insist on giving the penis a decontextualized and stable identity, pointing to its form and insisting that, based on its form, whenever it enters an environment, it must be used in the same way in every context. It has an essence across every usage, we can identify it, and that essence should be adhered to. The penis is designed for reproduction, and thus should only be put to use in a vagina. Otherwise, you're not using it right.

    But then along comes the evolutionary taxonomist who says the penis doesn't have an essence, it has a living environmental context in which its variant possibilities come to the fore for selection. The penis, the evolutionary taxonomist reminds us, is put to use in living situations. Sometimes it's put to use in a homosexual context, or a masturbatory context. It might in one context aid bonding between two soldiers, in another pleasure, in another display. The penis is alive; it's not an inorganic, dead, decontextualized body. It's use has family resemblances with its other usages, but there is a continuum along which it appears and functions. It has a function, not in a language game, but in the evolutionary game; in the ecosystem game.

    Likewise for Wittgenstein with the word "penis." The word "penis" should not be thought of as having an essence to which one can point, with an ostensive definition, and say, "Every time this word gets used, it always means this same thing." Instead, depending on context (on its environment) the word will function organically along a continuum of variation; it will have family resemblances to how its brothers and sisters were put to use in other sentence contexts, long ago and far away--but "penis" as used in, say, the sentences of Dark Age virgins, is not the same "penis" that is used by Cancun college students during spring break.

    Both the Dark Age virgins and the Cancun college students deploy the word meaningfully in their contexts, but it might take some translation and getting used to were one subgroup to find itself in the midst of the other. Could they understand one another right off, how they use the word penis? Wittgenstein says no.

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  13. SantiJanuary 30, 2016 at 6:42 AM

    And--to continue with the evolutionary analogy--what plays the role of natural selection in Wittgenstein? The eye of the reader. (I'm proud of myself here. I thought of this whole evolutionary/taxonomic analogy for Wittgenstein this morning, and after I type it out, I'm going to Google and see if there are any scholars of Wittgenstein who have made the connection between Wittgenstein's observations of words and the evolutionary taxonomist's observations of species.)

    So, in other words, the eye of the reader functions to select the ASPECT of the word that will give it life and meaning in its current context. The eye, like the lion culling a herd of impala, decides what will live and what will die in the swarm of possibility, both of the word and the sentence. The eye, in a flash, kills (culls!) the herd of words in the sense of fixing their definition and meaning in this particular environmental context; in deciding what the herd of words means. Decidability is thus a kind of death sentence, akin to the Copenhagen interpretation in physics. It collapses, as it were, the sentence's wave function. The sentence loses its elasticity the moment the reader decides its context, and how it will be read--exactly like the viewer of a rabbit-duck image (which Wittgenstein contemplated with fascination). Once you see the rabbit, the duck recedes into the background. Once you see the duck, the rabbit recedes. The rabbit-duck image has no essence--it's not really a rabbit, not really a duck. It's an object of selection for the eye in a very particular moment and environmental context.

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  14. laubadetristeJanuary 30, 2016 at 7:36 AM

    @Santi: "But then along comes the evolutionary taxonomist who says the penis doesn't have an essence, it has a living environmental context in which its variant possibilities come to the fore for selection. The penis, the evolutionary taxonomist reminds us, is put to use in living situations. Sometimes it's put to use in a homosexual context, or a masturbatory context. It might in one context aid bonding between two soldiers, in another pleasure, in another display. The penis is alive; it's not an inorganic, dead, decontextualized body. It's use has family resemblances with its other usages, but there is a continuum along which it appears and functions. It has a function, not in a language game, but in the evolutionary game; in the ecosystem game."

    My. That was over quicker even than I expected. Since you are back where I found you, *now* I am bored.

    "Decidability is thus a kind of death sentence, akin to the Copenhagen interpretation in physics."

    Hmn, yes. We can see hints of that in the multidimensional and nonlinear logic of fuzzy systems theory; but this approach is still heavily marked by its origins in the crisis of late-capitalist production relations..

    @Jeremy Taylor:

    You would have won. :)

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  15. BrandonJanuary 30, 2016 at 8:07 AM

    If anyone is interested in how Wittgenstein might relate to more Aristotelian views, as discussed by people who have actually read and studied Wittgenstein, both Elizabeth Anscombe's "The Question of Linguistic Idealism" and Roger Pouivet's "Wittgenstein's Essentialism" are at least interesting and not a waste of your time.

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  16. SantiJanuary 30, 2016 at 8:18 AM

    Laubadetriste:

    Well, that's uncharitable of you, because after I wrote the above, I Googled "Wittgenstein and Darwin" and realized that my intuition is a huge bingo; it's right on the money. The early Wittgenstein was anti-Darwin, the late Wittgenstein took ever greater recourse to biological metaphor (family resemblances, forms of life, etc.). He doesn't credit Darwin in his late works, but, for Wittgenstein, the reader's visual scanning of context and variation of use in sentences trumps abstraction and ostensive, Thomist-style (and Augustinian-style) definition by pointing: "This is always that." By the time Wittgenstein got to his late work, there are no essentialist abstractions in language that hold across all time and space, only family resemblances in different ecological contexts--exactly as with biological evolution.

    So it's clear that the star to which Wittgenstein was slowly gravitating throughout his life (as Wittgenstein's final cause, if you want to put it in Aristotelian terms) was Darwin. Wittgenstein starts his journey in philosophy bracketing Darwin from philosophy, rejecting Dewey's insight that Darwin changes everything in philosophy, writing this in 1921 as retort:

    "Darwin's theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other hypothesis in natural science" (4.1122).

    Wittgenstein ends his life with an almost total reversal, on his way to utterly historicizing language, taking it out of the abstract realm of the Platonic and atomistic, and embedding it as a form of life (with all the evolutionary implications of function, family variations and resemblances, selection, and ecosystem that this entails).

    Wittgenstein was on his way, in short, to exactly where Dewey landed when Dewey wrote this:

    "The conceptions that had reigned in the philosophy of nature and knowledge for two thousand years, the conceptions that had become familiar furniture of the mind, rested on the assumption of the superiority of the fixed and final...the 'Origin of Species' introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion" (from Dewey's, "The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy, pp. 1-2).

    Evolution is a universal acid--even for a genius logician like Wittgenstein, who would have liked to use his logical powers to explain language transcendentally--but couldn't. Because language is in history.

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  17. scbrownlhrmJanuary 30, 2016 at 8:23 AM


    Santi’s Confusion Part 1 of 2:

    So. Let's see.

    Context impacts definition.

    Wow.

    Who knew!

    Next thing you know and up will mean down.

    “-Cause context.”

    We point Santi to Pure Abstraction as that is where his imaginary mega-structure fatally suffers the pains of circularity (on the one hand) and absurdity (on the other hand). And his reply? Well, in a word: “Subjective!!”

    Comical.

    “While we're on the subject of people who would be surprised by claims made in these blog comments. How many evolutionary anthropologists do you think would agree to the fact that when they talk about the distinction between Homo Sapiens and Homo Erectus they are simply venting their spleen?"

    From another thread at STR, by WL, with Santi as “T”, as it were:

    Quote: "T. is shocked! SHOCKED! that the sounds and symbols we use can change in their meaning. Yes, the term "planet" changed its meaning. So before 2006, "Pluto is a planet" expressed a proposition that was (and remains) objectively true. After 2006, "Pluto is a planet" expresses a completely different proposition that is (and always was) objectively false....

    Quote: "...Tell you what T., I will concede the entire point to your superior intellect if you can give me *one* word, the definition of which cannot change...."

    Quote: "....T. seems to think that when the boundary between two distinct concepts is vague, that it is impossible to objectively define either concept. Armed with this "principle" one could argue that the Holocaust never occurred because the boundary between life and death is one of those vague boundaries, so, obviously, we cannot objectively say that Hitler made 12 million people dead. T.'s 'principle' is, of course, absurd...."

    Final Quote:

    "So, it looks as though T. and I have both posed unsolved riddles.

    His was to solve the species problem. In particular, to solve it using DNA attributes.

    Mine was to provide a single word that cannot change in meaning. We might call this The Immutable Word Problem.

    Neither of those riddles is going to be solved in a blog post. I think one of them will obviously never be solved by anyone anywhere, because it is not only unsolved, but insoluble. And that is not the species problem.

    What T. Thinks is at Stake:

    T. thinks that species distinctions are subjective if the species problem goes unsolved. This is because all the boundaries between putatively distinct species are vague.

    As for the immutable word problem, if all words can change in meaning (that is, if there is not even a single word that cannot change in meaning), then what words mean is a matter of linguistic convention adopted by the speakers of the language in which the words are used.

    T. thinks this makes a hash of all claims of objectivity. This is because mere conventions should not be able to change what is objectively true.

    What is Actually is at Stake:

    Continued…….

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  18. SantiJanuary 30, 2016 at 8:24 AM

    Brandon:

    You're not saying the late Wittgenstein was an essentialist and Aristotelian, are you? Or are you just taking sides with the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus against the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations?

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  19. scbrownlhrmJanuary 30, 2016 at 8:24 AM



    Santi’s Confusion Part 2 of 2:

    What is Actually is at Stake:

    The Stakes of the Species Problem:

    What is actually at stake if the species problem goes unsolved is this:

    We may have to consider the possibility that species distinctions, like countless other objective distinctions, do not reduce to DNA comparisons. We may have to admit that species distinctions, like countless other objective distinctions, have vague boundaries.

    What is definitely not even close to being at stake if the species problem goes unsolved is that species distinctions are subjective.

    There are all sorts of distinctions where the boundary between the concepts distinguished is vague, but the concepts are as objectively distinct as night and day. Examples:

    Acorn/Oak
    Alive/Dead
    Inside/Outside
    Bald/Hairy
    And on,
    And on,
    And on...
    ....and of course...
    Night/Day

    The Stakes of the Immutable Word Problem:

    What is actually at stake if the word with unchangeable meaning is never provided is:

    Zip
    Nada
    Zero

    What is definitely not even close to being at stake if the word with unchangeable meaning is never provided is that a hash is made of the objective/subjective distinction...that it becomes somehow impossible to utter sentences that express objective truths.

    "Ungeborene bearn béoþ eormencynn" once expressed, in the english language, the objective truth that unborn infants are human. It no longer expresses anything at all in the english language.

    These days, "unborn infants are human" expresses, in the english language, that same objective truth (that unborn infants are human).

    Perhaps at some future time, "unborn infants are human", like "Ungeborene bearn béoþ eormencynn", will express nothing at all in the english language. Perhaps it will even express an objective falsehood.

    Perhaps at that future time, you will need to say "Marklar marklar marklar marklar" with just the right tonality to express, in english, the objective truth that unborn infants are human.

    None of these eventualities imply that it is not an objective truth that unborn infants are human.

    How such changes happen is a complex matter. Such changes in meaning might occur for all sorts of reasons.

    At one extreme, some of these reasons might be good reasons that should be, and are, immediately recognized by all. The meaning change takes place swiftly as a result.

    At the other extreme, some reasons for changes in meaning may be bad reasons that should be and, are resisted for a long time by many language users..... For all that, the bad reasons may still prevail and the meaning may change.

    Every kind of reason between these extremes might also explain a meaning change.

    As I said, its a complex matter.

    One thing that is never in question, though, is whether an objective truth that, at a particular time, happens to be expressed by a certain sentence somehow becomes unobjective if that sentence ever changes in meaning.

    Surprising Results:

    T. I'd be curious to know exactly at which point in that analysis you think that we would even consider so much as voicing surprise, let alone objecting?

    While we're on the subject of people who would be surprised by claims made in these blog comments. How many evolutionary anthropologists do you think would agree to the fact that when they talk about the distinction between Homo Sapiens and Homo Erectus they are simply venting their spleen?"

    End quote.

    Pure Abstraction is the lap which all of Santi’s confidence lands upon…….. awaiting his reply as all causation collapses into irrational causation, indifferent causation, volition-less causation, intention-less causations – ad infinitum. His Imaginary Megastructure, unable to withstand the test of reality, of physics, falls into an abyss of unintelligibility at first, and absurdity at last.

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  20. BrandonJanuary 30, 2016 at 8:34 AM

    You're not saying the late Wittgenstein was an essentialist and Aristotelian, are you? Or are you just taking sides with the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus against the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations?

    Here's what I'm saying:

    If anyone is interested in how Wittgenstein might relate to more Aristotelian views, as discussed by people who have actually read and studied Wittgenstein, both Elizabeth Anscombe's "The Question of Linguistic Idealism" and Roger Pouivet's "Wittgenstein's Essentialism" are at least interesting and not a waste of your time.

    Maybe it's just me, but that really does look a lot like what I actually said.

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  21. laubadetristeJanuary 30, 2016 at 9:13 AM

    @Brandon: "If anyone is interested in how Wittgenstein might relate to more Aristotelian views, as discussed by people who have actually read and studied Wittgenstein, both Elizabeth Anscombe's 'The Question of Linguistic Idealism' and Roger Pouivet's 'Wittgenstein's Essentialism' are at least interesting and not a waste of your time."

    Thanks, Brandon.

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  22. SantiJanuary 30, 2016 at 9:44 AM

    Brandon:

    Fussy, fussy. Do you read Wittgenstein as an advocate of essentialism? If so, which Wittgenstein--early or late? Both?

    I'm curious to know how you're taming Wittgenstein for safe religious consumption--in your own words. I've heard how pck does it. He sends us to a cutesy, epidural YouTube video by an Anglican theologian, reassuringly letting us know that Wittgenstein was cozy and sympatico with with Tolstoy, and had a monkish temperament.

    But did you know that Wittgenstein explicitly claimed, not to be a follower of Tolstoy, and of course not Aquinas, but of Freud? Freud.

    Maybe Wittgenstein was just joking, but I think it's pretty clear why Wittgenstein would say this. Wittgenstein was an analyst of the latent functioning of words; how they work and "mean" in a particular context. Like words in different contexts, images in dreams are not always the same thing. They don't represent ("this is always that"); they don't announce their definitional fixity (I am always x) in advance of context. Instead, they trigger associations in interaction with the contingent existence and context of the dreamer.

    So it is with words. They trigger the historically contingent unconscious of the reader who encounters them. The connotative, not just the denotative. They trigger different apprehensions in different contexts. Wittgenstein was an interpreter, not of dreams, but of sentences; a describer of the latent functioning of words. Freud was a describer of dreams; the latent content of dreams.

    Words, when they appear in different contexts, aren't what their dictionary definition represents, but what they manifest for the reader, as if the reader were looking at images in a dream, then waking and having them analyzed by a genius like Freud. Tell me what you saw in your sleep state, then I'll tell you what the images mean. That's the contract between the analyst and patient. The meaning of the dream does not arrive in advance of context.

    Wittgenstein was also an analyst; an analyst of how sentences work; how words are functioning in different contexts, bringing out the latent content.

    So like the evolutionary taxonomist with species, and Freud with dreams, Wittgenstein did not think words have essential meanings in advance of contexts. The penis is not "for" anything in advance of a context of selection; a dream image does not mean anything in advance of a contingent dreamer; the word "penis" does not mean anything in advance of the language game into which it is inserted.

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  23. AnonymousJanuary 30, 2016 at 9:50 AM

    @Santi,

    Do you even read others' responses to you?

    Or do you just read two or three sentences of the first objector in order to subjectively interpret the meaning of a clause or even just word (like Wittgenstein) as the basis of your next post? If you're words don't reference anything, what the hell are you typing?

    Robert

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  24. SantiJanuary 30, 2016 at 10:09 AM

    Anonymous:

    Sorry I was manic this morning, getting down some (what I took to be exciting) insights on evolution and Freud in relation to Wittgenstein (before I lost them). I learn a lot from the responses. I knew this morning, however, that what I wrote would come across as barreling through without responding to what others said, and I'm sorry. I'll try to reply directly and briefly to what others have said later today or tomorrow. I usually quote someone directly, and try to respond--but I didn't do that this morning. And I know I'm too verbose. I'll "dial it back, Luther, damn." So when I respond through the rest of this thread, I'll try to be brief.

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  25. ScottJanuary 30, 2016 at 10:32 AM

    scbrownlhrm:

    I'm not sure precisely what you mean by "'motion' inside of 'Trinity'." Of course if you're using the quoted terms with their standard Scholastic meanings, then there shouldn't be any: motion is change, and God is immutable. But since I'm sure you know that, I'm also sure that's not what you have in mind.

    Good books on the "inner life" of the Trinity are available in many kinds and at many intellectual levels. Fr. Michael Gaitley has written a nice one suitable for a general readership. At the other extreme, Gilles Emery is good on the subject if you want something more deeply theological; I have this (and I believe it's freely available online somewhere in .pdf format) but not yet this.

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  26. ScottJanuary 30, 2016 at 10:33 AM

    Oops, sorry -- I meant to include a link to Gaitley's book.

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  27. scbrownlhrmJanuary 30, 2016 at 10:53 AM

    Santi,

    I'm curious.

    Is it that you think Christian metaphysics has "NOT ALREADY" revealed to the mind of man that [1] truth value is deflationary but for God and that [2] words and symbols change meaning, and that [3] knowledge is not in a stasis mode - it's growing....., and that [4] symbols and context work together within concept communique rather than standing magically separated from one another, and you're trying to inform us of all four?

    If so you can stop.

    -Cause none of that is news.

    Or, instead, is it that you know we already know but you feel that a particular author or body of knowledge must be EITHER "all friend" or else "all foe"? If so, that's just unsophisticated.

    For example, the particular author by the name of Charles Darwin and his books are very friendly to Christianity and, so, it's not some sort of intellectually sophomoric affair of "all or none" merely because of a particular author's overall background.

    It's unclear what your point is about authors. I know several who are both friend and foe in their assertions and the liberty of *reason* to weigh and employ, say, Part A but not Part B, is what knowledge, the PSR, evidence, and reasoning are all about.

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  28. scbrownlhrmJanuary 30, 2016 at 10:56 AM

    Scott,

    Excellent thank you :)

    (Yes, inner life, not change etc...)

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  29. BrandonJanuary 30, 2016 at 11:02 AM

    I'm curious to know how you're taming Wittgenstein for safe religious consumption--in your own words. I've heard how pck does it.

    Pck was quite clearly not "taming Wittgenstein for safe religious consumption" but quite explicitly was noting it as an example of a case in which Wittgenstein's position on a religious matter was not easy to interpret in terms of treating religion as nonsense. This is in fact required by the context of the comment (Taylor Weaver's comment on Wittgenstein's position not being easy to label), something you seem to like ignoring despite talking about it occasionally, and your re-writing of it is a good example of your repeated dishonest behaviors in dealing with other people's arguments.

    As for me, I have said nothing whatsoever about Wittgenstein on religion here, so you know absolutely nothing whatsoever about my views on the subject. Nor is either Anscombe's paper or Pouivet's paper on the subject of religion.

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  30. UnknownJanuary 30, 2016 at 12:59 PM

    I really wish I could remember the name and author of the book I came across. Googling didn't completely clarify. Probably because it was some obscure dissertation that had extremely limited circulation.

    It may have been this one, however, which looks rather interesting: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=4PnNtyGEyk0C&pg=PA92&lpg=PA92&dq=wittgenstein%27s+religious+life+manuscript&source=bl&ots=coB882NFzr&sig=EiEqEAI7sjSuKyQit4i21M36New&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjF-vqStdLKAhUFVBQKHY_SA0kQ6AEIPDAF#v=onepage&q=wittgenstein's%20religious%20life%20manuscript&f=false

    ReplyDelete
  31. UnknownJanuary 30, 2016 at 1:00 PM

    Ok, that was a horrible link. I am not very literate when it comes to anything tech related...

    http://www.amazon.com/Wittgenstein-Judaism-Triumph-Concealment-Studies/dp/0820472565/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1454187568&sr=8-1&keywords=Wittgenstein+and+judaism

    ReplyDelete
  32. UnknownJanuary 30, 2016 at 1:00 PM

    Well, shit. I have no clue how to make something a link, apparently. My bad!

    ReplyDelete
  33. ScottJanuary 30, 2016 at 1:36 PM

    Taylor Weaver:

    Here's how:

    <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Wittgenstein-Judaism-Triumph-Concealment-Studies/dp/0820472565">this</a>

    will appear as

    this

    (I also removed the unnecessary parts of your URL. i.e. everything after the product code.)

    ReplyDelete
  34. laubadetristeJanuary 30, 2016 at 2:18 PM

    Speaking of which, good on ya again to our more computer-literate friends. Scott, I stole the ↑up symbol from you. Glenn, I still use your last effort to explain how to make a link.

    Why, I'm dipping my toe in Python, and I can only imagine that on occasion it must take the patience of Job to review some of these things for the rest of us... :)

    ReplyDelete
  35. pckJanuary 30, 2016 at 3:16 PM

    Santi:
    I'm curious to know how you're taming Wittgenstein for safe religious consumption--in your own words. I've heard how pck does it. He sends us to a cutesy, epidural YouTube video by an Anglican theologian, reassuringly letting us know that Wittgenstein was cozy and sympatico with with Tolstoy, and had a monkish temperament.

    What Brandon said (January 30, 2016 at 11:02 AM). All of it. I posted those links for the purpose of edification, because I consider W.'s relation to religion and the transcendent to be interesting, not because I wanted to engage in advocacy for Christianity. Any such fantasies about my motives you may have hallucinated are precisely your own. The video in particular is as unbiased and non-proselytizing as it gets. Unfortunately it is hard for many Gnus to discuss theology without manifesting a constant and rabid suspicion that anyone not tearing down all religion with their every breath must automatically by a mindless zealot. (Which for the case of yours truly is particularly absurd as I grew up without religion. My goal is not to join a particular church or culture, but to acquire a better understanding of theology and faith, and to learn about the associated philosophies and histories.)

    Wittgenstein once said, "I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view." This is another very interesting statement (that needs careful unpacking in the context of his life and works). A quick and dirty approach such as favoured by the Santis of this world will yield nothing but confusion and, perhaps worse, boredom.

    As for the monkish aspects of his character, only someone with absolutely no knowledge of W.'s biography could possibly call that into question.

    But did you know that Wittgenstein explicitly claimed, not to be a follower of Tolstoy, and of course not Aquinas, but of Freud? Freud.

    This is simply nonsense. (Again.) See for example "The Myth of Psychoanalysis: Wittgenstein Contra Freud":

    "In his remarks on Freud, there is both ambiguity and ambivalence in Wittgenstein's views. The ambivalence stems from Wittgenstein's admiration of Freud combined with his staunch condemnation of psychoanalytic theory."

    Admiration, to a degree, yes. But a follower of Freud? Certainly not. How do you manage to come up so reliably with these howlers?

    It is equally false to say that "Wittgenstein explicitly claimed, not to be a follower of Tolstoy, and of course not Aquinas". To my knowledge, W. never commented on Aquinas, if you have a source for that, please post it.

    Re: Essentialism

    A link to Roger Pouivet's 'Wittgenstein's Essentialism' (thanks to Brandon for the reminder).

    You will find that the superficial conclusion you draw from "W. was not an essentialist" and "Aristotle and Thomists talk about essences" is not just without merit but hopelessly confused. The topic of essences is far more complex and important than you make it appear. Hint: Leading W. philosopher Peter Hacker has no problem integrating Aristotelian and Wittgensteinian ideas and concepts. See for example here.

    ReplyDelete
  36. ScottJanuary 30, 2016 at 3:19 PM

    Heh, I coded in Python for the better part of ten years. Welcome to the club.

    (Soon: "My grandpa can make a live link by hand! Just like in the old days!")

    ReplyDelete
  37. SantiJanuary 30, 2016 at 4:14 PM

    Brandon:

    You wrote: "Pck was quite clearly not 'taming Wittgenstein for safe religious consumption' but quite explicitly was noting it as an example of a case in which Wittgenstein's position on a religious matter was not easy to interpret in terms of treating religion as nonsense."

    Of course Wittgenstein would not treat any religious or secular language as nonsense. He would not treat any language game as nonsense, period. What he would treat it as is opaque to outsiders. You might imagine you're communicating well across language ecosystems, but you may not be. To know what "God" is in a particular religious language, or "alienation" in a Marxist language, you've got to step into the ecosystems of those languages and see how those words are actually functioning within those systems. They may seem like nonsense words, or question-begging words, to outsiders, but the words may be functioning completely coherently within the logic of this or that particular language ecosystem.

    ReplyDelete
  38. SantiJanuary 30, 2016 at 4:33 PM

    pck:

    Here's a whole book by a Wittgenstein scholar on Wittgenstein's lifelong interest in Freud. I ordered a copy, by the way. It looks interesting.

    http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691034257?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00

    And here's the first chapter of the book, pointing out that Wittgenstein called himself a "disciple" of Freud:

    https://books.google.com/books?id=1otkKRQi-CcC&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=wittgenstein+disciple+of+freud&source=bl&ots=xqd3aS9K-r&sig=6w9Okl5ELCqlZu1NweaQnUWu2RI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjC-6CV5dLKAhVLy2MKHRGKBrEQ6AEIKzAC#v=onepage&q=wittgenstein%20disciple%20of%20freud&f=false

    Wittgenstein's fascination, in part, with Freud is that Freud had created a language that was not scientific, but pretended it was. Wittgenstein, it appears, was thinking about how such languages function, and what it says about philosophy generally when philosophers aspire to mathematical or scientific levels of certainty surrounding their metaphysical claims.

    ReplyDelete
  39. GottfriedJanuary 30, 2016 at 4:57 PM

    Come with me
    And you'll be
    In a world of
    Pure imagination
    Take a look
    And you'll see
    Into your imagination

    We'll begin
    With a spin
    Traveling in
    The world of my creation
    What we'll see
    Will defy
    Explanation

    If you want to view paradise
    Simply look around and view it
    Anything you want to, do it
    Wanta change the world?
    There's nothing
    To it

    There is no
    Life I know
    To compare with
    Pure imagination
    Living there
    You'll be free
    If you truly wish to be

    ReplyDelete
  40. SantiJanuary 30, 2016 at 4:58 PM

    pck:

    You write: "Wittgenstein once said, 'I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.' This is another very interesting statement (that needs careful unpacking in the context of his life and works)."

    Yes, okay. Caution is good, but, to get one started, initial hunches and stabs at interpretation surely can't hurt.

    So I would locate Wittgenstein's statement in the context of Freud, a language that is impervious to falsification, pretending to be scientific, but actually functioning religiously (with a confident and charismatic leader and disciples, etc.).

    And Wittgenstein was fascinated by Freud's creativity in interpreting dreams. Freud's language is not a nonsense language. It has its own inner logic, and it can be sympathetically entered. One can attempt to understand it from the inside, the interesting ways that it functions.

    Thus that's what I would first think of when Wittgenstein says, "I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view." In other words, he's empathetic. He's not going to rush to dismiss Mormonism or Thomism as nonsense languages, but to, like Spinoza, seek to understand them ("non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere: not to laugh, not to lament, not to curse, but to understand"). Wittgenstein enters a language on its own terms in an attempt to understand it.

    And that's what you say of yourself: "I grew up without religion. My goal is not to join a particular church or culture, but to acquire a better understanding of theology and faith, and to learn about the associated philosophies and histories." In other words, like Wittgenstein, you "cannot help seeing every problem" of sense when encountering a language "from a religious point of view" (from the inner logic of that particular religion or non-empirical language).

    ReplyDelete
  41. pckJanuary 30, 2016 at 5:36 PM

    Santi (January 30, 2016 at 4:14 PM):
    He would not treat any language game as nonsense, period.

    This is quite possibly the falsest thing you have said about W. so far. (And that's saying something.) You could probably open a random page in any of W.'s notebooks and never be more than a few paragraphs away from some remark about sense and nonsense.

    To know what "God" is in a particular religious language, or "alienation" in a Marxist language, you've got to step into the ecosystems of those languages and see how those words are actually functioning within those systems

    This is at best half-right (and only if read charitably). The idea that words "function in a system" is precisely one of the notions about language that W. attacks (with regard to meaning). According to W., in order to understand what a Catholic means by "God", what one has to do is to share the Catholic's "form of life", i.e. walk in his shoes for a sufficient amount of time. (W.:"We do not agree or disagree in language but in form of life.") This involves the *use* of language within the *practices* of our lives, not an analysis of how language "functions". It is not possible to "see" (in the sense you use it) how meaning comes into the world (just as it is not possible to explain colours to a blind man). The question of "how those words are actually functioning within those systems" is not for philosophers to clarify but for linguists.

    With regard to W. (and philosophy in general) you are like a toddler who has just begun playing with Lego bricks but thinks he can already lecture experienced engineers on how to go about constructing a skyscraper. For your sake I hope you're still in your 20s (and not another middle-aged science-blog-reading IT guy).

    ReplyDelete
  42. SantiJanuary 30, 2016 at 5:39 PM

    pck:

    You write: "[I]f two language games are incommensurable, they can by definition not be 'competing' because they belong to different practices."

    Yes, I agree with you.

    But what if the language users themselves do not know that their languages are incommensurable? What if they both have correspondence theories of truth, and think their language is best, piss on the rest? What if they're taking their languages really, really seriously?

    Gnu atheists and Thomists, in some sense, would be an example, talking past each other, both imagining that they've got the one true language that ought to be the normative one spoken (because more in correspondence with The Truth). But Wittgenstein would probably say, "You're playing different, non-empirical, language games, with your confidence men facing off. You're not doing math. You're not doing science."

    It's like Linus standing between Lucy and Charlie Brown when they are arguing, and saying, "Has it ever occurred to you that you might BOTH be wrong?" I think that's Wittgenstein's position when standing between two non-ironic, competing, and overzealous philosophical language users, pretending to certainty.

    ReplyDelete
  43. laubadetristeJanuary 30, 2016 at 6:19 PM

    @pck: "How do you manage to come up so reliably with these howlers?"

    @Santi: "... I Googled 'Wittgenstein and Darwin' and realized that my intuition is a huge bingo...[...] Here's a whole book by a Wittgenstein scholar on Wittgenstein's lifelong interest in Freud. I ordered a copy, by the way. It looks interesting."

    My curiosity piqued, I opened that book. (Haven't read it, so I won't comment beyond some of the text.) In it, chapter 1 is entitled, "Wittgenstein: Disciple of Freud?" It quotes Rush Rhees--who would know about such things--as saying that "[Wittgenstein] would eagerly speak of himself--at the period of these discussions--as a 'disciple of Freud,' or as a follower of Freud."

    My mind spun. Outside my window, pigs took wing. *Could Santi be right?* Something about that just smelled funny. So I turned to the book from which that quote was taken, *Ludwig Wittgenstein: Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief*. Therein the quote is:

    "'Then some years later I happened to read something by Freud, and I sat up in surprise. Here was someone who had something to say.' I think this was soon after 1919. And for the rest of his life Freud was one of the few authors he thought worth reading. He would speak of himself--at the period of these discussions--as a 'disciple of Freud,' and 'a follower of Freud.' / He admired Freud for the observations and suggestions in his writings; for 'having something to say' even where, in Wittgenstein's view, he was wrong. On the other hand, he thought the enormous influence of psychoanalysis in Europe and America was harmful--'although it will be a long time before we lose our subservience to it.' To learn from Freud you have to be critical; and psychoanalysis generally prevents this. / I spoke of the harm it does to writing to bring psychoanalysis into the story. 'Of course,' he said, 'there's nothing worse.' [...] Once when Wittgenstein was recounting something Freud had said and the advice he had given someone, one of us said that this advice did not seem very wise. 'Oh certainly not,' Said Wittgenstein. 'But wisdom is something I never would expect from Freud. Cleverness, certainly; but not wisdom.'"

    So, Wittgenstein seems there to have said he was a follower of Freud either ironically, or "for the observations and suggestions in his writings; for 'having something to say' even where, in Wittgenstein's view, he was wrong." This would be the sense in which I am a follower of celebrity gossip magazines.

    Around me, pork chops fell from the sky in flames.

    ReplyDelete
  44. laubadetristeJanuary 30, 2016 at 6:44 PM

    @Gottfired:

    Heh. :)

    ReplyDelete
  45. laubadetristeJanuary 30, 2016 at 6:45 PM

    *Gottfried

    Freudian slip...

    ReplyDelete
  46. pckJanuary 30, 2016 at 6:56 PM

    laubadetriste:
    Said Wittgenstein. 'But wisdom is something I never would expect from Freud. Cleverness, certainly; but not wisdom.'"

    Thank you for supplying some proper quotations. Wittgenstein's characterization of Freud as I remembered it was "smart, but also a charlatan". All this shows very clearly that isolated gotta-win-the-argument assertions like "W. was a follower of Freud" can only ever mislead. You supplied some proper context and a proper picture emerged. And lo and behold it is not black and white.

    ReplyDelete
  47. GlennJanuary 30, 2016 at 7:10 PM

    laubadetriste,

    Speaking of which, good on ya again to our more computer-literate friends. Scott, I stole the ↑up symbol from you. Glenn, I still use your last effort to explain how to make a link.

    I thank you for the honorable mention.

    I too, in lingering with appreciation over Scott's example, thought of my last effort.

    So, I thank you also for the opportunity to refresh a 'link'. (Wink.)

    o [T]o understand is simply to apprehend intelligible truth: and to reason is to advance from one thing understood to another, so as to know an intelligible truth. ST 1.79.8

    ReplyDelete
  48. pckJanuary 30, 2016 at 7:26 PM

    Santi:
    So I would locate Wittgenstein's statement in the context of Freud, a language that is impervious to falsification, pretending to be scientific, but actually functioning religiously (with a confident and charismatic leader and disciples, etc.).

    Yes, there is no falsification in psychology, but that is a trivial consequence of W.'s argument, not its main focus. The salient point of W.'s comments about the psyche is that there is no way to reify concepts which relate to our cognitive powers. It's an argument against materialism. Psychology, because it deals with 1st person experiences, can never develop a technical, objective language like the quantifying sciences do. It can therefore not be a science. But it does not follow that it "functions religiously". You're conflating the meaning of psychological terms with the way certain people abuse psychological talk ("religious leaders") here. Your inner Gnu constantly compels you to bring up your pet peeves at every turn. What W. says is that the proverbial man on the street is as competent a user of psychological terminology as anyone, including Freud, can ever be.

    And Wittgenstein was fascinated by Freud's creativity in interpreting dreams.

    That still doesn't make him a "follower" of Freud.

    Freud's language is not a nonsense language. It has its own inner logic, and it can be sympathetically entered. One can attempt to understand it from the inside, the interesting ways that it functions.

    This seems to be your own opinion. W. certainly never said anything about "understanding language from the inside". For W., meaning (and the possibility of understanding) *never* comes from a language's internal rules. (This is what his remark that "grammar is arbitrary" is about.)

    (Note also how you now acknowledge the potential existence of a "nonsense language" when earlier you claimed that W. would call no language game nonsensical.)

    In other words, like Wittgenstein, you "cannot help seeing every problem" of sense when encountering a language "from a religious point of view" (from the inner logic of that particular religion or non-empirical language).

    His remark is actually an expression of a moral/ethical stance and thus includes another affirmation of his opposition to materialism. It has nothing to do with the "inner logic" of any religion or "encountering" a language (or personal motivations for studying theology). That is just you trying to sound smart. (And failing.) I had a pretty good reason for saying that the remark has to be evaluated in the context of his life. You did the same thing here as with the "follower of Freud" line, trying to interpret an isolated quote and make it sound as if it supports some of you favourite beliefs.

    ReplyDelete
  49. GlennJanuary 30, 2016 at 7:55 PM

    pck to Santi: How do you manage to come up so reliably with these howlers?

    Believe it or not, it looks like Aquinas provides the basis of an answer:

    "[I]n speculative matters some are good at research, through their reason being quick at arguing from one thing to another (which seems to be due to a disposition of their power of imagination, which has a facility in forming phantasms), and yet such persons sometimes lack good judgment (and this is due to a defect in the intellect arising chiefly from a defective disposition of the common sense which fails to judge aright)." ST 2-2.51.2

    ReplyDelete
  50. laubadetristeJanuary 30, 2016 at 8:40 PM

    @Glenn:

    Seemingly likely.

    (To be fair, I recognize also myself in there. People, don't let me go out like that. Too as a reader, my reach exceeds my grasp. That's what my library is for. I couldn't stand to be caught sporting erroneous allusions like spinach in the teeth. If it comes to that, if I turn Santi, put me on an ice floe and set me a drift, and remember a bad pun in memory of me...)

    ReplyDelete
  51. laubadetristeJanuary 30, 2016 at 8:49 PM

    *adrift and recite a bade pun in memory of me...

    Damnit, all the euphony of a car alarm...

    ReplyDelete
  52. laubadetristeJanuary 30, 2016 at 8:50 PM

    *bad

    What a senseless waste of a sentence.

    ReplyDelete
  53. GlennJanuary 30, 2016 at 9:03 PM

    Laubadetriste,

    if I turn Santi

    I've retrieved and dusted off my crystal ball. After a suitable period of peering, I can confidently announce: Ain't gonna happen.

    ReplyDelete
  54. pckJanuary 30, 2016 at 9:19 PM

    ST (via Glenn):
    "[...] and this is due to a defect in the intellect arising chiefly from a defective disposition of the common sense which fails to judge aright"

    My kingdom for a rational baseline. I blame Google.

    ReplyDelete
  55. pckJanuary 30, 2016 at 9:20 PM

    Santi:
    [stuff about people talking past each other which isn't very interesting or new but at least not outrageously wrong]
    [But then this:]
    It's like Linus standing between Lucy and Charlie Brown when they are arguing, and saying, "Has it ever occurred to you that you might BOTH be wrong?" I think that's Wittgenstein's position when standing between two non-ironic, competing, and overzealous philosophical language users, pretending to certainty.

    If both are wrong then they cannot be talking past each other. Being in the same language game is a necessary precondition for both to be wrong. For they must both be wrong about the same state of affairs X. Which cannot happen if they mean different things by "X". It's the God/Allah reference problem again. (Which I will not get into.)

    You're conflating being wrong with differing in sense. (And you don't need Wittgenstein to state or understand that.)

    With two incommensurable concepts of X, W.'s "method" is not to try to adjudicate which concept of X is the right or the better one. Nor is it to say that both are wrong or that "both are right (or wrong) individually and relative to their contexts". It is instead to look at the uses of "X" before the split into the non-congruent X_1 and X_2 even occurs (the X_i are connected to different i-practices and have different i-criteria that fix what *counts* as, say, an explanation of X_i or the truth of X_i). With the perspicuity gained from that, the "problem" is recognized as a pseudo-problem and disappears. "Right_i", "wrong_i", "certainty_i" etc. are no longer metaphysical categories, but are nevertheless as absolute as a kick to the groin because they get their meaning from being part of certain practices, not from obeying certain language-internal rules.

    W.'s plan is not to look for "deeper truths" about X, X_i, etc. but to untie the knots in our thoughts created by misapprehensions of certain (ab)uses of language.

    (Whether philosophy should/must/can stop there and if one is epistemically and ontologically satisfied at this point is another question.)

    Gnus usually live in a (mostly unreflected) proposition-world where everything must be either true or false and empirically decidable. All knowledge is knowledge-that to them. This abstraction denies reality, where, say, I may run into a wall and get a bump on my head. Then it is true-that-P where P="I have a bump on my head". But the bump itself is neither true nor false. It simply is. This latter part is problematic for proposition-worlders since they cannot explain what makes the statement "there is a bump" true. Existence itself remains a mystery. And this is where classical theism comes knocking on the door.

    "Knock, knock." "Who is it?" "It's classical theism." "Classical theism who?" "You idiot, there can only be one necessary being."

    The ghost of Wittgenstein told you to learn philosophy or fuck off. I wonder what classical theism's message might be.

    ReplyDelete
  56. GlennJanuary 30, 2016 at 9:25 PM

    laubadetriste,

    Of course, there might some other reason why we might... but, no, we'd never set you sailing on an ice flow. Though we might fly you to Antarctica. Or put your in a plane on Antarctica.

    Just kiddin'. Natch.

    And I do know what you meant. Can't say I have never been there myself.

    ReplyDelete
  57. GlennJanuary 30, 2016 at 9:43 PM

    pck,

    My kingdom for a rational baseline. I blame Google.

    There's that.

    Then, too, there's this (from Tracy Kidder's The Soul of A New Machine):

    West said that designing a computer was a "mind game." I asked Blau whether following an instruction around through the engine in the way that we had was the sort of mind game that they played when designing Eagle. "Yet bet it is!" he said. But they played hundreds of such mind games; and figuring out how to equip Eagle merely to WSEQ was itself much more intricate than Blau could fully explain in a single setting.

    Such games of logic, especially if they are played in a hurry...can take a grip on an engineer's thoughts and hold on. After playing this way for a while, you look at a tree and, aha, it is clear that a tree is much like a computer; and a road with side streets is -- what else? -- a kind of computer program. Chuck Holland said that this unpleasant sensation, of being locked inside the machine, usually lingered three days -- on the rare occasion when he got away from the basement for that long.

    Lot's of blame to go around.

    ReplyDelete
  58. pckJanuary 31, 2016 at 5:12 AM

    Glenn:
    Then, too, there's this (from Tracy Kidder's The Soul of A New Machine):
    [...]
    "Such games of logic, especially if they are played in a hurry...can take a grip on an engineer's thoughts and hold on."

    Too true. Thanks for the reminder, that book has been on my order list for a while.

    Not coincidentally, the difference between following a rule (which takes intellect/agency) and merely acting in accord with it is among Wittgenstein's primary concerns.

    E.g. in here and here.

    ReplyDelete
  59. SantiJanuary 31, 2016 at 7:23 AM

    pck:

    Good qualification on the Linus cartoon I was thinking of. Good point.

    You also say this: "Gnus usually live in a (mostly unreflected) proposition-world where everything must be either true or false and empirically decidable. All knowledge is knowledge-that to them. This abstraction denies reality, [...] It simply is. [...] Existence itself remains a mystery. And this is where classical theism comes knocking on the door. 'Knock, knock.' 'Who is it?' 'It's classical theism.' 'Classical theism who?' 'You idiot, there can only be one necessary being.'"

    Have you seen or heard of Mary Jane Rubenstein's book, "Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe"? Coyne's not a fan of her stuff, but I am, and the book I mention is concerned with what you raise above, and on many levels.

    One of them concerns hyper-confidence. It's one thing to point to the ontological mystery as a mystery (why is there something when there might have been nothing), it's another to tame this mystery with metaphysical closure.

    In other words, it's that "You idiot" part of the comment that reminds one that classical theism carries a historical shadow, moving from mystery to metaphysical certainty (God has to exist as a matter of logic, and that God happens to possess the traits attributed to Him--always a Him--by classical monotheism, all good, all powerful, all knowing, a person lacking in nothing, etc.), to the alienation of outsiders as fools or badly motivated. Keep up! Get with the program, stay with the program, don't doubt the program.

    Aye, aye, captain.

    There are worse things to be in the world than somebody who leaves the ontological mystery in parenthesis and otherwise asks for evidence.

    ReplyDelete
  60. glennJanuary 31, 2016 at 7:24 AM

    pck,

    Not coincidentally, the difference between following a rule (which takes intellect/agency) and merely acting in accord with it is among Wittgenstein's primary concerns:

    Interesting. And a good thing to be concerned with.

    (Analogously, and in reverse order, some seem to go through life as if a thing is true by virtue of it being pleasing to their understanding, and as if a thing is good by virtue of it being enjoyable to their will; while others have the wherewithal to consider, "Yes, it pleases my understanding; but is it really true on its own beyond that?", and to consider, "Yes, it's enjoyable to my will; but is it really good on its own beyond that?")

    ReplyDelete
  61. GlennJanuary 31, 2016 at 7:34 AM

    (Oh, and Kidder's Soul of a New Machine, that had come highly recommended, and had been on my list for quite a while. I finally got around to it two or three years ago. Well worth it.)

    ReplyDelete
  62. Don JindraJanuary 31, 2016 at 9:39 AM

    Santi,

    "In other words, it's that "You idiot" part of the comment that reminds one that classical theism carries a historical shadow, moving from mystery to metaphysical certainty (God has to exist as a matter of logic, and that God happens to possess the traits attributed to Him--always a Him--by classical monotheism, all good, all powerful, all knowing, a person lacking in nothing, etc.), to the alienation of outsiders as fools or badly motivated."

    Exactly. I've said many times that classical theism plays a shell game. Bring attention to the sleight of hand -- well, don't expect a reasoned response.

    ReplyDelete
  63. AnonymousJanuary 31, 2016 at 10:02 AM

    Laubadetriste: Santi has shown a willingness to be corrected (January 26, 2016 at 6:02 AM). Both of them are clearly well-read. Plus, I dislike the thought of responding only to those predisposed to agree with me.

    But I think Santi has made it clear that he can’t or won’t be corrected. (His 6:02 response seems to be, “OK, so I was Bulviating, but everyone does it, and besides, nothing wrong with some intellectually dishonest rationalisation.”) It’s not merely that he never accepts correction about areas where he is grotesquely wrong (for example, his blatant misunderstanding of science, especially biological evolution (if evolution worked the way Santi seems to think, “Then why are there still monkeys” would be a devastating retort)) — after all, how could we expect him to trust what we slippery Scholastics say about science? But he never even allows that we might know what our own position is: no matter how many people tell him, “No, that’s not what we think”, he continues to [attempt to] criticise his imaginary version. That I have very little patience with.

    (I was going to add that Santi gives me the impression less of being well-read than of being able to stick names into Google and creatively interpret the results, but he beat me to it himself.)

    As for predispositional agreement, surely we want to qualify that: constructive disagreement can be very useful, but debating someone who misses your points and his is like trying to sharpen your blade against a rotten tree stump. The best that can be hoped for is that such a person might inadvertently suggest a productive line of thought in spite of himself; but we don’t need trolls for that. You can, and have, put Santi’s (potential) arguments better than he, so why not cut out the middle man and play devil’s advocate yourself? It would be far more productive for all of us.

    For while I seem to relish polemic rather more than many others here, I am also respectful of the totality of our experience here, and I will stop if that is in jeopardy, no questions asked.

    Well, in general I don’t care for feeding the (virtual) trolls because the discussions inevitably engender long, on-going, tedious posts, the discussion goes around and around in circles, with no good way to skip over the chaff, and they prevent good discussions from taking root. A few pithy comments here and there would be all right, but human nature being what it is, someone (or sometwo or somemore) always jump in and try to beard the cuttlefish in his own den.

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  64. laubadetristeJanuary 31, 2016 at 10:13 AM

    @Mr. Green:

    Seems fair.

    @Don Jindra: "'In other words, it's that "You idiot" part of the comment that reminds one that classical theism carries a historical shadow, moving from mystery to metaphysical certainty (God has to exist as a matter of logic, and that God happens to possess the traits attributed to Him--always a Him--by classical monotheism, all good, all powerful, all knowing, a person lacking in nothing, etc.), to the alienation of outsiders as fools or badly motivated.' / Exactly. I've said many times that classical theism plays a shell game. Bring attention to the sleight of hand -- well, don't expect a reasoned response."

    Of course, in *classical* theism, God does not "happen" to possess any traits. That seems to be a key part of the argument you and Santi miss even while paying it lip service.

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  65. scbrownlhrmJanuary 31, 2016 at 10:13 AM

    Mr. Green,

    The collective whole could ask Santi one, concise question, and, then, unanimously reply, to each reply of Santi's which goes off target, reply back to Santi something like, "You didn't address the question. Hard stop until you do."

    And just keep repeating that record, point by point..... by point...

    Of course, if even one gave in to an off topic reply by Santi the net will fail to capture accuracy from him.

    Short of such a collective effort......

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  66. scbrownlhrmJanuary 31, 2016 at 12:00 PM

    Don,

    It's true that metaphysical necessities and logic compel reason as truth-finder into the Divine. However, physics, causation, and all abstraction -- mind -- also affirm reason's conclusion that lucidity obtains there and there alone.

    The shell games, conflations, and equivocations Non-Theism is forced to dive into in order to escape logic's relentless demands for lucidity "through and through" are, while entertaining, fairly droll. Such contentment with what cannot sum to more than autohypnosis is, in itself, evidence as well.

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  67. SantiJanuary 31, 2016 at 5:28 PM

    Laubadetriste:

    You expressed reluctance to get out there at the edge of your knowledge in public, akin to what you see me doing with Wittgenstein.

    I would say: be braver than this. Life is too short to worry about what people think of you. And you don't need a crisp image of Pluto to navigate to Pluto; indeed, a crisper image is arrived at precisely in the navigation.

    Wittgenstein, for example, is a notoriously difficult philosopher, and to make any claim concerning Wittgenstein at all, especially in the context of a passionate topic (Thomistic religion vs. science), is bound to bring on a slew of resistance, and in the resistance the learning takes place--and on all sides. Somebody has to risk the tomatoes thrown from the crowd.

    So on Wittgenstein, I'm glad I didn't "shut-the-fuck-up" on the first cries to do so. I wouldn't have thought of the relation of evolution to Wittgenstein, which gave me a lot of delight; I wouldn't have gotten some interesting links cast my way, and some smart people disputing what I think I know about Wittgenstein.

    The swarm mind is intelligent, akin to that Japanese Old Pond haiku:

    The old pond.
    A frog jumps in.
    Reverberations.

    Toss the topic of Wittgenstein into the still pond, and make a big kur-plunk, getting something wrong, and out of the deep knowledge of the collective comes all sorts of interesting things. Maybe Hillary Clinton is interesting to consider here as well: "You don't know how far a frog will jump until you poke it."

    So what happens when you claim Wittgenstein for the anti-essentialist and secular side in a frog pond of Thomists? Well, you learn things.

    Brandon sends links on Wittgenstein and essentialism; a professor sasses me about imprecision and confusion, etc. None of this is bad, not for me, not for others. And I'm always amazed at the expressions of partisan insult, incuriosity, and impatience. That's fascinating to think about in terms of human nature.

    So it's okay when somebody says, "You're full of shit," especially if they give you a reason, even if you think it's a dubious one. Am I full of shit? It's always good to ask yourself that question.

    Critical thinking isn't something you just direct outward, it's also something you direct at yourself. Can you be self-critical? Can you doubt yourself?

    I'd rather be a member of the doubting community than the faith community.

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  68. scbrownlhrmJanuary 31, 2016 at 6:03 PM



    Santi,

    You're correct.

    Critical thinking on physics, causation, causal closure, and eminently deflationary truth values is important.

    It's the ultimate reality test.

    As you and other Non-Theists too often do (as in this thread), you demonstrate an incessant drive to embrace unavoidable absurdity merely to avoid being compelled by all data points into a conclusion which contradicts your own a priori.

    That amounts to a purely emotion based autohypnosis unwilling to reality test fears. Unavoidably (because physics) deflationary reason amounts to, simply, literally, Non-Reason.

    I'd rather be a member of the Reason and Faith community than the autohypnotic community of Non-Reason and Non-Faith.

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  69. SantiJanuary 31, 2016 at 6:22 PM

    Don Jindra:

    You say: "[C]lassical theism plays a shell game. Bring attention to the sleight of hand..."

    Agreed, but I have a question for you. Why do you occasionally enter threads at Feser's blog, and read Feser's blog?

    I do it for a couple of chief reasons:

    (1) I like to see what the most clever and sophisticated theist responses are to questions like gay marriage, the (non)existence of Adam and Eve, etc.
    (2) I like to talk to people who disagree with me; I find it fascinating to hear from "the other."
    (3) I like to test drive thoughts in the presence of others who won't hold back their strongest criticisms (because they don't know me or don't like me). For example, in this thread I hit on an insight on the late Wittgenstein in relation to evolutionary taxonomy, and I've gotten a lot of criticism about my thoughts on Wittgenstein, but not much on that, which I find interesting. Maybe I'm on to something?

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  70. scbrownlhrmJanuary 31, 2016 at 6:45 PM



    Santi,


    "So like the evolutionary taxonomist with species, and Freud with dreams, Wittgenstein did not think words have essential meanings in advance of contexts. The penis is not "for" anything in advance of a context of selection..."

    You *are* on to something.

    For *you*..... since that seems to be new information for you.

    Symbols and context work together within concept communique rather than standing magically separated from one another.

    Yep.

    And?

    While you got excited about your new discovery, it just wasn't noteworthy for most of us....being old news and all that.

    A lack of response could signal a yawn.

    Or, as you unabashedly imply, stunned silence by Christians overwhelmed by your brilliant "discovery".

    How can you know if you keep refusing to test your premises against reality? Against context?

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  71. BillyJanuary 31, 2016 at 8:44 PM

    Santi,

    Thought you might find this of some interest. But maybe you have already read it.

    ReplyDelete
  72. laubadetristeJanuary 31, 2016 at 9:06 PM

    Same old frog.
    Kiss from Pallas.
    That sure ain't no prince.

    ReplyDelete
  73. pckFebruary 1, 2016 at 12:07 AM

    Santi:
    It's one thing to point to the ontological mystery as a mystery (why is there something when there might have been nothing), it's another to tame this mystery with metaphysical closure.

    If the mystery of existence can be comprehended or approached at all, it will have to happen by way of logical argument. The existence of the world is not a natural fact. Natural facts obtain in the world, but one has to have a world first. The term "exists" plays different roles in the following statements:

    1) "planetary systems exist" (empirical)
    2) "prime numbers exist" (logical)
    3) "the world exists" (metaphysical)

    Concepts like "truth" and "confidence" vary accordingly between 1-3. 2) and 3) are conceptual statements which cannot be proved or disproved by experiment (i.e. by looking at the world).

    2) and 3) also escape our ordinary conception of sense: Their opposites are not imaginable. This observation about 3) provides a possible point of attack against classical theism. But it does not change the fact that any evidence brought against c.t. will have to be conceptual. Logic can never be defeated by empirical facts, because logical statements are rules of language. They show how we talk about the world, not what the world is like. Existence is not a property of nature (or any part of nature) but a precondition of it. (Careful here about confusing this use of "existence" with its cousin "existence" as in "the solar system came into existence from a rotating gas cloud". It's a standard Gnu mistake to confuse classical theism's God, who is Being, with a being.)

    In other words, it's that "You idiot" part of the comment that reminds one that classical theism carries a historical shadow, moving from mystery to metaphysical certainty (God has to exist as a matter of logic, and that God happens to possess the traits attributed to Him--always a Him--by classical monotheism, all good, all powerful, all knowing, a person lacking in nothing, etc.)

    If classical theism is correct, it does not constitute a "move" from mystery to certainty, it simply establishes certainty. "Certainty" meaning: Given that we talk how we talk, one can say that there is a necessary being, a creative force, from which all things come. (Obviously this is a compressed statement which still needs quite a bit of unpacking.) "Certainty" in this context does *not* mean: "There are confirmed facts of nature (reliable observations) from which we can infer the existence of a creative force."

    I included the "you idiot" bit merely for effect, no need to place any more significance on it than that.

    to the alienation of outsiders as fools or badly motivated. Keep up! Get with the program, stay with the program, don't doubt the program.

    This is mere rhetoric devoid of any serious content. The same accusation can be made whenever anyone argues for or against anything.

    More about "getting with the program" and confidence in the following post.

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  74. pckFebruary 1, 2016 at 12:08 AM

    (contd. from previous post)

    Can we be confident (hyper- or not) that 1+1=2? When I first learned that 1+1=2, I did so by getting and staying with the program. Arithmetic starts as a drill. Could I have at any later point discovered that the program is wrong? The answer is no. Why not? Because 1+1=2 is not a natural fact. It's not a truth about the world. When we say that 1+1=2 is true, we are stating a rule of language that only superficially looks like an empirical fact.

    I first noticed this when I was studying math and took an interest in the foundations of mathematics. I came a across a proof for 1+1=2 from the axioms of set theory, i.e. a proof at the most fundamental level of math. The proof revealed no great insight into why 1+1 equals 2 (which I had hoped it would). This was because the axioms of set theory could clearly be seen to have been designed to be capable of delivering just this result. I eventually realized that if the proof produced 1+1=n with n not equal to 2, we would reject and modify the axioms (or our methods of inference), but never our understanding of arithmetic. In short, we want to say that 1+1=2 and we construct our formalisms to reflect this desire. We "get with the program". There are good reasons for doing so, which have in equal measure to do with what human beings are like (we are able to draw distinctions and identify objects in our visual field) and what the world is like (most of the time we experience a sufficient degree of stability of our environment, which is a necessary condition for arithmetic to be useful).

    So the world makes arithmetic usful, but not (empirically) true. Mathematics is therefore not the language of nature. It's a language used by humans to talk about nature.

    What I could at best have discovered is that 1+1=2 does not have any interesting or useful applications. Regarding arithmetic, that is all I can be confident about based on my experiences. The concept of confidence cannot be intelligibly applied to the fact that 1+1=2, because it is a conceptual fact, i.e. a rule of language. Asking whether one can be confident that 1+1=2 is like asking whether one can be confident that the king in chess moves only one square at a time. One cannot be confident in something which it is impossible to have no confidence in. A man incapable of fear cannot be courageous.

    There are worse things to be in the world than somebody who leaves the ontological mystery in parenthesis and otherwise asks for evidence.

    Assuming that evidence = empirical evidence, then sure, but this is not an argument for or against classical theism. Or anything else. You're merely avoiding the question. That it is possible not to have to appeal to God when engaged in certain empirical enterprises is consistent with and even explicitly affirmed by c.t. Again, any evidence that could refute classical theism would have to be conceptual, not empirical.

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  75. pckFebruary 1, 2016 at 12:28 AM

    Santi:
    And you don't need a crisp image of Pluto to navigate to Pluto; indeed, a crisper image is arrived at precisely in the navigation.

    Unless you misidentified Pluto from the beginning and are now headed for the Andromeda galaxy, misinterpreting everything you see on the way. Which rather accurately summarizes your take on Wittgenstein.

    Toss the topic of Wittgenstein into the still pond, and make a big kur-plunk, getting something wrong, and out of the deep knowledge of the collective comes all sorts of interesting things.

    So apparently you figure yourself as some brilliant experimenter whose laboratory is the world. Way to humble brag. You're not up against a collective. You're up against the knowledge and insights individuals have gathered through years of study and dialogue. Dialogue is not debate. Gnus seek attention through debate and this is all you and Jindra have so far shown yourselves to be capable of. I have to agree with laubadetriste, frogs like that are not of royal breed. The ripples you make dissipate quickly into the background noise of the socio-political movement that is atheist fundamentalism.

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  76. scbrownlhrmFebruary 1, 2016 at 6:13 AM


    Santi,

    Billy's recent link to E. Feser's comment on Wittgenstein affirms your error in assuming any particular author must be approached by your bizarre "all or none" approach (or standard?) just because of an author's overall background (as per the January 30, 2016 at 10:53 AM comment). Knowledge does not work that way.

    ReplyDelete
  77. SantiFebruary 1, 2016 at 6:18 AM

    Billy,

    No, I hadn't seen that link to Feser talking about Wittgenstein. Thanks for that.

    ReplyDelete
  78. SantiFebruary 1, 2016 at 6:34 AM

    scbrown:

    You write: "A lack of response could signal a yawn." Yes, I agree. It's one of the things I have to consider in evaluating feedback. It's logically possible.

    ReplyDelete
  79. GottfriedFebruary 1, 2016 at 7:05 AM

    I think I may owe Santi an apology.

    I said above that he was only here to play games and that he didn't even believe many of the statements he made. I had imagined a sort of clever nihilist who was consciously attempting to overcome reason with rhetoric. I had pictured him with a hint of a smile and a Mephistophelean glint in his eye when he accused others of playing shell games and blowing smoke, etc. I simply couldn't believe that an intelligent and articulate person could make so many absurd and contradictory statements in seriousness.

    After reflecting on some of his more recent comments, I'm fairly certain I was mistaken. On some level Santi really does believe everything he says, even when he contradicts himself. He really does believe the assertions he presents as arguments should be compelling to rational people. He really does believe he is being treated rudely by theists who can't handle his trenchant questioning. The character I had in mind would have had the awareness to recognize when the rhetorical battle had been lost, and had far too much pride to continue making a fool of himself in the way Santi has. And while Santi is playing a game, certainly, I no longer think he's fully conscious of the game he's playing.

    Of course, all that means that responding to Santi is even more pointless than I had originally thought. As scbrownlhrm keeps reiterating, the Santian outlook is truly impervious to "reality-testing." The world is full of ironies.

    As such, I pledge to do my best to resist the temptation to respond to Santi ever again.

    So, Santi, I'm sorry for my unwarranted accusation of malice and insincerity. And I hope that, by the grace of God, you someday escape from the mental prison you've constructed.

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  80. DNWFebruary 1, 2016 at 7:44 AM

    "After reflecting on some of his more recent comments, I'm fairly certain I was mistaken. On some level Santi really does believe everything he says ..."

    Take a look at his blog, and you will learn all you need to know about him; and why attempting to reason with a dancing nihilist constitutes its own particular kind of category mistake.

    ReplyDelete
  81. Don JindraFebruary 1, 2016 at 9:19 AM

    Santi,

    "Why do you occasionally enter threads at Feser's blog, and read Feser's blog?"

    I've been asked this before. I'm in agreement with all your reasons but your #3 is my top reason. I've always loved ideas. Places like this are the best places to discuss them -- not because of the abundance of good ideas, but because participants have their own ideas and they don't mind letting you know. :) Conflict pushes me in directions I wouldn't have gone on my own. Even though I haven't had a religion since my 20s, I like learning about religious topics. It's kind of like going on vacation to some exotic land -- nice to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. This place has some of that feel. There's also the political angle. It's kept just under the surface (and I have to keep it that way if I want to keep my head) but it permeates this A-T ideology, imo. What American doesn't like to argue about politics, even if it's by proxy?

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  82. SantiFebruary 1, 2016 at 9:24 AM

    Gottfried:

    What a malicious thing for you to post. Wow. And the length of it. I'm used to attempts at shaming as a method of shutting me up, but you've reached a new low.

    Even if you thought that about somebody, and even if you were right, what's the point of humiliating--except for pleasure (!), and showing off your willingness to rhetorically kick others--drawing smiles and approval (you presume) from the theist in-crowd that roams these threads?

    If this raises your coinage with others here (it appear to have with DNW), talking to another human being like that, so much the worse for what goes under the name of intellectual "Christianity" in the 21st century. I'll pass.

    And in your patronizing, you've basically dehumanized me and tried to double-bind me--all under the pretense of an apology.

    I'm an honest doubter. This is how you deal with doubters? Consider the signal you send to other doubters.

    And you conclude with the most galling self-righteousness and unwarranted confidence: "I hope that, by the grace of God, you someday escape from the mental prison you've constructed."

    ReplyDelete
  83. SantiFebruary 1, 2016 at 9:43 AM

    pck:

    You say toward the conclusion of your first post just above: "Given that we talk how we talk, one can say that there is a necessary being, a creative force, from which all things come."

    Let me say, first of all, that you explained the necessary being argument flawlessly. I'm deeply, deeply moved and impressed. Bravo. It's clear as a bell. If you don't already write books on this for lay people, you should copy and paste that start into a Word document and keep going from there. I appreciate you taking the time to unpack it so clearly. It's the clearest statement of that argument I've probably encountered, and I can't see any reason to disagree with it. Well done.

    So why isn't everybody a theist (at least to this minimal extent, accepting the necessary being argument)? It would seem to be as solid an argument as someone explaining why a king, given a particular configuration of pieces, has to be in checkmate.

    I would say that it hinges on whether "necessary being" has sufficient precision to really say anything genuinely meaningful. Do you agree that's the crux of the problem? It may be that our language may not be able to take us as far as we would like to see--and only appears to do so. The necessary being, after all, is one of a kind (sui generis), and that makes for difficulties.

    So "necessary being" sounds meaningful until you ask: What would a necessary being look like apart from and prior to the existence of contingent beings? It would be a single thing, self-consistent, simple and uniform through and through, infinite in extent, not consisting of parts, and therefore indistinguishable from NOTHING (akin metaphorically to empty space, yet somehow capable of being prolific nonetheless).

    If you were in the midst of such a "being," you could not get your bearings in relation to it. What would it mean to say it existed apart from being the "medium" in which you live, move, and have your own being (to echo Paul)?

    Could such a "being" be conscious, and think in any human sense of that word, so as to be "creative" (your word)? After all, the moment it had the least focus, and thought something, "I'll make Ed Feser someday," it would no longer be one, but two (it would consist of a thought, and the observer of the thought). And it would be in time, for how can any thinking go on outside of a sequence in time?

    Are we to leave such questions in the category of mystery, or should we just go silent, noting the limits that logic and language can reach--yet still affirm the "existence" of the necessary being? Have we really said anything?

    Is God akin to the It in the sentence "It is raining?" Is this what Wittgenstein means to suggest in saying, "essence is expressed in grammar"? Are we sure we're really saying anything meaningful when we say, "It is raining," rather than just, "Raining"? Are we sure we're saying anything meaningful when we say, "The necessary being is raining contingent beings," rather than just "Raining contingent beings"?

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  84. SantiFebruary 1, 2016 at 10:36 AM

    pck:

    As a matter of logic, doesn't it seem that necessary and contingent beings are dependent on one another to exist? In other words, for God to exist, God needs contingent beings to exist, and for contingent beings to exist, God needs to exist. They're like yin-yang, and would suggest that both must be eternal or come into existence at the same moment.

    You can't have the It in "It is raining," without the raining, and it seems you can't have the necessary being without the raining of contingent beings. Not in any meaningful sense. Don't you agree? Where is the It without the rain, and where is God without the creation?

    What creates what here? How can the It and God be prior to what they are raining (creating)? They're not doing anything beyond raining (raining water and contingent beings), and they have no parts apart from the raining. Isn't the raining just the mode of It, and aren't the contingent beings just the modes of God? (Not to bring yet another difficult philosopher into the mix, but isn't that gist of Spinoza?)

    "Except ye let them go, I will plague your borders with frogs."

    So if, like the Pharaoh not letting the Israelites in Egypt go, you don't let the It and God go--if you don't give them up as the ghost birds that they are (seeming essences "expressed in grammar," but not more than that)--aren't you just exposing yourself to a plague of frogs at the borders of language? Isn't this what Wittgenstein means when he says that "Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday"--that is, when contexts shift or are dropped, yet you try to use the same word in the same sense everywhere?

    What could the It possibly mean in "It is raining" outside of the context of the raining that It supposedly does, and what could a simple being without parts (God) possibly mean outside of the context of the raining (creating) of contingent beings with parts that God supposedly does? "God is raining beings" and "It is raining frogs" seem to be performing the same place-marker trick. They seem to be saying more than they are.

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  85. SantiFebruary 1, 2016 at 10:52 AM

    Don Jindra:

    You write: "It's kind of like going on vacation to some exotic land -- nice to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there."

    I wouldn't want to live there. That's it. You hit the nail on the head. I might not visit Feser's site for months at a time (prior to this thread, I hadn't been around since about September of last year), and then when I visit, I recall why I could never live in such a pinched and conservative mental space (Gottfried's recent love letter to me constituting exhibit A).

    When I first visited Feser's site, it was out of genuine curiousity as to whether Thomism could be argued for sufficiently to make me believe in God. I've always wished God existed, but haven't really believed it since my teens (I had a time of belief).

    I knew Protestant apologetics were lame and faltered badly, but I thought Catholic apologetics might function in a more sophisticated fashion and feel more persuasive (based on reading Feser's anti-atheist book). I was right, it's far better than Protestant apologetics, but it's mystifying to me that people can get so seriously caught up in it (the anti-gay marriage ideology grounded in "natural law," the attempts to make Adam and Eve historical figures so as to save original sin, etc.).

    Thomism hangs an awful lot of weight on some very thin metaphysical branches, then lards it with a whole lot of politics, superstition, supernaturalism, and patriarchy. "Miracle, mystery, and authority."

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  86. AnonymousFebruary 1, 2016 at 11:09 AM

    @Don Jindra and @Santi,

    Has it occurred to you guys that maybe what is keeping you away from God is not something intellectual but emotional?

    As a matter of logic, doesn't it seem that necessary and contingent beings are dependent on one another to exist? In other words, for God to exist, God needs contingent beings to exist, and for contingent beings to exist, God needs to exist. They're like yin-yang, and would suggest that both must be eternal or come into existence at the same moment.

    Even I, who is just starting out on philosophy can see what is wrong with that statement.

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  87. laubadetristeFebruary 1, 2016 at 12:30 PM

    @Santi: "I'm an honest doubter. This is how you deal with doubters? Consider the signal you send to other doubters."

    You've gone from humble-bragging, which pck noted, to humble-indignation. That's how Gottfried chose to "deal with" you *after* a rainbow of other methods failed repeatedly to "deal with" you over the course of at least a year.

    If you are honest, then that would tend to establish Gottfried's point, since he apologized for having mistaken you to be dishonest.

    As for the signal sent to other doubters, I--*as a doubter*--was signaled that even after all your pissing in the communal pool, Gottfried can still apologize to you for, as he thinks, mistaking your intentions, and, moreover, still pray for you. Which does not surprise me, as other than the occasional doorknob, the regulars here who are believers have demonstrated such concern repeatedly.

    "The necessary being, after all, is one of a kind (sui generis), and that makes for difficulties. / So 'necessary being' sounds meaningful until you ask: What would a necessary being look like apart from and prior to the existence of contingent beings? It would be a single thing, self-consistent, simple and uniform through and through, infinite in extent, not consisting of parts, and therefore indistinguishable from NOTHING (akin metaphorically to empty space, yet somehow capable of being prolific nonetheless). "

    Of course, in *classical* theism, God is neither a being, nor a thing, nor an it, nor uniform (*because* simple), nor extended, nor "of a kind". Those seem to be key parts of the argument you miss even while paying them lip service.

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  88. ScottFebruary 1, 2016 at 3:19 PM

    Santi:

    "What a malicious thing for you to post."

    Gottfried hopes that the grace of God will free you from your mental prison. So do I. There's nothing malicious about that; Christians hope as much for everyone, especially those in most need of grace. More joy in heaven, and all that.

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  89. ScottFebruary 1, 2016 at 3:21 PM

    (Nor is there anything "self-righteous" about Gottfried's hope. For the record, I spent a good deal of my life as an "honest doubter" and it wouldn't surprise me if Gottfried did too. We didn't rescue ourselves.)

    ReplyDelete
  90. ScottFebruary 1, 2016 at 5:26 PM

    I should perhaps also mention, since it's been obvious that Santi has had me in mind now and again, that I'm still 100% certain there's a God. And for the record, I accepted that conclusion after Auschwitz.

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  91. SantiFebruary 1, 2016 at 8:09 PM

    Laubadetriste:

    You say: "[I]n *classical* theism, God is neither a being, nor a thing, nor an it..."

    Why is God then called a necessary being?

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  92. SantiFebruary 1, 2016 at 8:16 PM

    Well, Scott, you're very good at cognitive dissonance if you can pray after Auschwitz. And when you say "God," do you mean a personal God who hears prayers, answers them, does miracles, made the penis for vaginas only, and is all good and all powerful?

    I'm not trying to set you up for an attack or drawn out tussle, I just can't recall if you ever said whether you think God is a person.

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  93. SantiFebruary 1, 2016 at 10:12 PM

    Anonymous:

    The necessary being is posited as an a posteriori argument. It is inferred as being necessary from the fact that all other things we experience consist of parts, are contingent on prior conditions, and are subject to arising and passing away in time. To avoid the infinite regress, the necessary being is proposed.

    So I'm simply taking a cue from Nargarjuna, the Indian non-dual philosopher. Maybe "things" and "being" are like love and marriage, going "together like a horse and carriage." I'm suggesting a non-dual interpretation of this argument: maybe the high rests on the low, and vice versa.

    Put another way, maybe emptiness underlies the one, many, and zero. Maybe the Buddhists are right that nothing, not even God, can enjoy non-ecological and isolated self-sameness; that all things are, indeed, connected and, therefore, empty. No man is an island. No God is either.

    Look close enough and you come up empty of a self-same essence, even of God. You come up with something other than what appears. Things go from familiar to "other" and "strange." No flower in the flower. No God in the God. No one in the one. No zero in the zero. No many in the many. (Where are you in a zoom-in on your brain or thoughts? Who's behind your thoughts? Who's behind God's thoughts?)

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  94. scbrownlhrmFebruary 2, 2016 at 12:57 AM



    Santi,

    The Necessary Being has nothing to do with "solving the problem" of the question of an "infinite regress."

    Just FYI.

    The rest is gibberish as far as the logic of necessity.

    Just FYI.

    Have you ever tried talking about actual Christian truth claims?

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  95. scbrownlhrmFebruary 2, 2016 at 1:14 AM



    Santi,

    There you go again on Auschwitz.

    You've been asked to justify your claim that Evil, that Privation, in created beings contradicts immutable love's landscape in the Necessary Being.

    Crickets.

    To state the obvious: To favor Goodness Itself is to favor love. Hard Stop. You want God to Stop/Refuse the creative act, you want Him to Stop/Refuse love's (metaphysical) instantiation amid the (metaphysically) volitional Imago Dei, which He can as the creative act is the Free Act of God. However, you haven't shown, nor demonstrated, nor argued (coherently) to the ends of your metaphysical explanatory terminus, that He is both Good for (thusly) annihilating / refusing love's landscape and Evil for begetting love's landscape, just as you haven't shown that He is both Good for (thusly) refusing love and Evil for, again, begetting love, just as you haven't shown that He is both Good for (thusly) refusing to define (a possible world) reality by Self-Giving Love (which is Himself) and Evil for defining (possible worlds) reality by Self-Giving Love (which is Himself).

    In fact, but for the metaphysical reality of immutable love, your metaphysical complaint against evil must land atop its own annihilation.

    Have you ever talked about Christianity's actual truth claims?

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  96. scbrownlhrmFebruary 2, 2016 at 1:21 AM

    Santi,


    "If God is not a being why is God called a necessary being....?"


    Are you really getting that board? Or is it that you have nothing of any importance to do?





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  97. ScottFebruary 2, 2016 at 6:12 AM

    "I just can't recall if you ever said whether you think God is a person."

    I don't know why there would be any question about that. From the fact that I profess the Catholic faith, you can easily infer that I believe God is three Persons.

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  98. pckFebruary 2, 2016 at 8:38 AM

    Santi:
    Let me say, first of all, that you explained the necessary being argument flawlessly. [...] It's clear as a bell.

    Apparently not clear enough. I explicitly cautioned against treating God in classical theism as a being instead of Being itself. But many of your subsequent remarks commit just that error.

    [...] I can't see any reason to disagree with it. So why isn't everybody a theist (at least to this minimal extent, accepting the necessary being argument)?

    I didn't claim that classical theism is true and that everybody should accept it, I was concerned with explaining my view of what certainty amounts with respect to classical theism if it is true. What I do consider to be beyond doubt is that empirical knowledge is never going to settle or clarify the issue of existence.

    Are we to leave such questions in the category of mystery, or should we just go silent, noting the limits that logic and language can reach--yet still affirm the "existence" of the necessary being? Have we really said anything?

    Again, classical theism does not speak of the "existence of the necessary being".

    Are we sure we're really saying anything meaningful when we say, "It is raining," rather than just, "Raining"?

    "Being meaningful" is not a property of a proposition. Meaning is immanent in the use of propositions. The "it" in "it is raining" is indeed not a reference to anything and nodding your head towards a window while say "raining" or "rains" to the person who is with you in the room will do the exact same job. It's practices, not language-internal rules or references which give power to words. (Language-internal rules exist for a different purpose. They provide some of the regularities without which communication would be impossible.)

    I would say that it hinges on whether "necessary being" has sufficient precision to really say anything genuinely meaningful. [...] It may be that our language may not be able to take us as far as we would like to see--and only appears to do so.

    Of course our language runs into trouble when we try to illuminate the transcendent. That is not just unsurprising but definitely to be expected. Propositional language is not all-powerful. You're not going to say anything meaningful about God in the same sense that you say something meaningful about your neighbour, your friend, your house, your hopes and dreams, or facebook. But just as our attempts to fully capture the relationship between language and the world by saying things are doomed to fail, these attempts nevertheless show something about said relationship, as conveyed by Wittgenstein through (as opposed to in) the Tractatus -- the parts of the T. about that relationship were, as the remarks about "climbing the ladder and throwing it away" indicate, strictly speaking nonsense, but they were instructive nonsense -- nonsense that shows something. Getting a bump on the head from running into an invisible wall is indicative of a wall being there. (And to pre-empt objections which I know are coming: This analogy cannot be stretched very far because the presence of an invisible wall is subject to empirical testing, while the language-world relationship and God are not.)

    As long as you retain an obsession with trying to explain meaning by attempting to reveal what is "behind" words, you will fail. Similarly, if you keep trying to explain existence by revealing what is "behind" the world (like a puppeteer being behind the movements of a puppet), you will not make any progress. Words alone will capture neither meaning nor God. You have to live your life to experience meaning and you have to live a certain kind of life to experience God. (Which particular kind is of course a matter of contention.)

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  99. Don JindraFebruary 2, 2016 at 8:42 AM

    Anonymous,

    "Has it occurred to you guys that maybe what is keeping you away from God is not something intellectual but emotional?"

    I wonder what emotion you have in mind? It's not so typical here, but it's typical elsewhere for Christians to hit me with the "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" approach. I've been to a few revivals in my life. I've seen video of faith healers, snake handlers and the Pensacola laughing revival. Emotions are a common reason for belief in God. I lack that emotional need. My cup doesn't runneth over.

    But usually there's an insinuation with your question. Is it that God won't let me do something I really like doing? That's wrong at both ends. Historically it's obvious that God doesn't prevent believers from justifying anything. Dostoevsky got it wrong. With God, everything is permissible.

    I was a college athlete. (If curious, see this "action" photo on lower right.) I ran a lot of miles in those days, many of them with teammates who were card-carrying FCA members. There wasn't much else to do on an hour run except talk. In those days we could carry on a normal conversation while clicking off 5:30 miles. Several times I was asked why I don't drink, do drugs, or cuss. Why did I spend my free time in the library? How could I be getting married when there were so many coeds to experience? I wasn't even religious. I didn't even believe in God. So how could this be? I was supposed to be an atheistic hedonist. But my buddies saw I clearly wasn't. Years later a business associate, who was a super Christian, asked me point-blank -- Why don't you seem to have any vices? He was sure I should.

    How does one answer questions like that? It never crossed my mind that self-respect, honor, and civility should have anything to do with God. It never crossed my mind that being a good citizen, husband, father and neighbor was an imposition.

    So I suppose the short answer to your question is that emotion has nothing to do with keeping me away from God. More importantly, emotion doesn't drive me toward God. So in that respect I could say a lack of emotion helps keep me away. The only emotion I have toward the divine, or holy, is that sense of awe and gratitude for all the good stuff in the world. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It's probably the piety of Cephalus that has the greatest emotional appeal for me, and I also believe, is the sum of true religion. But Socrates promptly dismisses that.

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  100. GlennFebruary 2, 2016 at 8:50 AM

    Well, Scott, you're very good at cognitive dissonance if you can pray after Auschwitz.

    Whatever may be the dissonance you think you are detecting, it is not Scott's. It is your dissonance, which you seek to fob off as belonging to someone else.

    Viktor Frankl spent three years in Nazi concentration camps. Some of his experiences in them can be read about in his Man’s Search for Meaning, an excerpt from the latter part of which is as follow:

    - - - - -

    I should like to cite the following instance: Once, the mother of a boy who had died at the age of eleven years was admitted to my hospital department after a suicide attempt. Dr. Kurt Kocourek invited her to join a therapeutic group, and it happened that I stepped into the room where he was conduction a psychodrama. She was telling her story. At the death of her boy she was left alone with another, older son, who was crippled, suffering from the effects of infantile paralysis. The poor boy had to be move around in a wheelchair. His mother, however, rebelled against her fate. But when she tried to commit suicide together with him, it was the crippled son who prevented her from doing so; he liked living! For him, life had remained meaningful. Why was it not so for his mother? How could her life still have a meaning? And how could we help her to become aware of it?

    Improvising, I participated in the discussion, and questioned another woman in the group. I asked her how old she was and she answer, "Thirty." I replied, "No, you are not thirty but instead eighty and lying on your deathbed. And now you are looking back on your life, a life which was childless but full of financial success and social prestige." And then I invited her to imagine what she would feel in this situation. "What will you think of it? What will you say to yourself?" Let me quote what she actually said from a tape which was recorded during that session. "Oh, I married a millionaire, I had an easy life full of wealth, and I lived it up! I flirted with men; I teased them! But now I am eighty; I have no children of my own. Looking back as an old woman, I cannot see what all that was for; actually, I must say, my life was a failure!"

    (cont)

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  101. GlennFebruary 2, 2016 at 8:51 AM

    I then invited the mother of the handicapped son to imagine herself similarly looking back over her life. Let us listen to what she had to say as recorded on the tape: "I wished to have children and this wish has been granted to me; one boy died; the other, however, the crippled on, would have been sent to an institution if I had not taken over his care. Though he is crippled and helpless, he is after all my boy. And so I have made a fuller life possible for him; I have made a better human being out of my son." At this moment, there was an outburst of tears and, crying, she continued: "As for myself, I can look back peacefully on my life; for I can say my life was full of meaning, and I have tried hard to fulfill it; I have done my best -- I have done the best for my son. My life was no failure!" Viewing her life as if from her deathbed, she had suddenly been able to see a meaning to it, a meaning which even included all her sufferings. By the same token, however, it had become clear as well that a life of short duration, like that, for example, of her dead boy, could be so rich in joy and love that it could contain more meaning that a life lasting eighty years.

    After a while I proceeded to another question, this time addressing myself to the whole group. The question was whether an ape which was being used to develop poliomyelitis serum, and for this reason punctured again and again, would ever be able to grasp the meaning of its suffering. Unanimously, the group replied that of course it would not; with it limited intelligence, it could not enter the world of man, i.e., the only world in which the meaning of its suffering would be understandable. Then I pushed forward with the following question: "What about man? Are you sure that the human world is a terminal point in the evolution of the cosmos? Is it not conceivable that there is still another dimension, a world beyond man's world; a world in which the question of an ultimate meaning of human suffering would find an answer?"

    This ultimate meaning necessarily exceeds and surpasses the finite intellectual capacities of man; in logotherapy, we speak in this context of a super-meaning. What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms. Logos is deeper than logic.

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  102. GlennFebruary 2, 2016 at 9:04 AM

    (I noticed just that now that pck had written earlier: "Of course our language runs into trouble when we try to illuminate the transcendent. That is not just unsurprising but definitely to be expected.")

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  103. AnonymousFebruary 2, 2016 at 9:46 AM

    @Don Jindra,

    too emotionally invested in your own world view that no matter how many intellectual arguments are given you will not accept it since going back would be the hardest thing to do. Being emotionally invested in something is not a good or a bad thing, we all do it (unless it is used to harm or influence someone). We are rational human beings but equally important part is the emotional side and that is what makes us human. There is no insinuation of any kind or "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" approach (whatever that might be) or even an imposition of being a good person.

    It is silly (no beyond silly) to say that you can only be a good person if you believe in God and it is unfortunate that Christians you have had interactions with seem to think so. Thank you for sharing, especially that picture.

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  104. pckFebruary 2, 2016 at 10:49 AM

    Santi:
    So why isn't everybody a theist (at least to this minimal extent, accepting the necessary being argument)? It would seem to be as solid an argument as someone explaining why a king, given a particular configuration of pieces, has to be in checkmate.

    Not quite. This is a conflation of a logical rule (chess king moves like this) with a metaphysical claim (God/the world exists). See examples 2) and 3) for the different uses of "exists" in one of my posts above.

    While in mathematics and chess "existence" refers to what we allow ourselves to do within certain symbolic games of our own devising, we do something different with the term while talking about God and the existence of the world. The latter is, among other things, a display of a special type of ontological curiosity about reality/the world. Math, by contrast, formalises certain ordinary practises (counting, ordering, measuring) the ontologies of which are pretty well understood (or in many cases not even subject to much philosophical scrutiny). So while math and philosophy/theology have in common that they express their concerns using logic, metaphysical claims like "the world exists" have nevertheless a very different ontic status than "prime numbers exist".

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  105. scbrownlhrmFebruary 2, 2016 at 12:40 PM



    Immutable Love and Auschwitz:


    In David Bentley Hart’s, “The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth”, there is a much longer comment surrounding the interface of divine love and horrific evil. To offer just parts of it, in “Part Two” there is “Section 1” entitled Trinity. Its first sub-part is “Divine Apatheia”. In the printed version it’s pages 155 to 167.


    We discover that the pure dynamism that is God’s love is “…..pure positivity and pure activity, that His love is an infinite peace and so needs no violence to shape it, no death over which to triumph: if it did, it would never be ontological peace but only metaphysical armistice.” Further in and by the Trinitarian landscape we discover that not only is there no necessity of Evil but there is also no necessity of the actual history of Evil. Moving further, “….the cross of Christ does not determine the nature of divine love, but rather manifests it, because there is a more original outpouring of God that – without needing to submit itself to the order of sacrifice that builds crosses – always already surpasses every abyss of godforsakenness and pain that sin can impose between the world and God: an outpouring that is in its proper nature indefectible happiness.” Obviously in 21 pages there’s more but this is only to introduce a landscape where we find that love’s ceaseless outpouring in the triune God finds that “…….crucified love is precisely what makes the entire narrative of salvation in Christ intelligible. And second, it is an almost agonizing irony that, in our attempts to revise trinitarian doctrine in such a way as to make God comprehensible in the "light" of Auschwitz, invariably we end up describing a God who – it turns out – is actually simply the metaphysical ground of Auschwitz.” Indeed, ultimate reality void of the triune cannot sum to immutable love and the potential errors looming there on evil are many. The section closes looking at that which “……is divine beauty, that perfect joy in the other by which God is God: the Father's delectation in the beauty of his eternal Image, the Spirit as the light and joy and sweetness of that knowledge. As Augustine says of the three persons, "In that Trinity is the highest origin of all things, and the most perfect beauty, and the most blessed delight. Therefore those three are seen to be mutually determined, and are in themselves infinite, that is, infinitely determined as the living love of the divine persons – to "one another" – to which infinity no moment of the negative or of becoming or even of "triumph" can give increase. Hence God is love.”

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  106. DNWFebruary 2, 2016 at 2:42 PM



    Santi said...

    Well, Scott, you're very good at cognitive dissonance if you can pray after Auschwitz. "



    What an exorbitant thing for a self-proclaimed nominalist to say.

    But then, they say many bewilderingly inordinate things.

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  107. SantiFebruary 2, 2016 at 2:44 PM

    pck:

    When your comments first started to rise on my radar as far more interesting and challenging than the norm in these threads, I thought you were nevertheless also too narrowly focused, missing some (not all) of the big picture things. But I've come to enjoy your precision and care. You're like the grocery store manager in John Updike's "A&P": you don't miss much. So I don't have anything that I strongly disagree with you about in your last two comments above, and if I did, I'm pretty sure I'd be in the wrong, not you. But I will deign to suggest something you might--emphasis on "might"--want to think about:

    You said this in one of your earlier posts: "[E]vidence brought against c.t. [classical theism] will have to be conceptual. Logic can never be defeated by empirical facts, because logical statements are rules of language. They show how we talk about the world, not what the world is like."

    You then said this just a couple of posts up: "I didn't claim that classical theism is true and that everybody should accept it, I was concerned with explaining my view of what certainty amounts [to] with respect to classical theism if it is true. What I do consider to be beyond doubt is that empirical knowledge is never going to settle or clarify the issue of existence."

    I agree that empiricism is unlikely to ever make progress on the question, Why is there something when there might have been nothing, but might it at least "clarify" (your word) the level of confidence that one ought to reasonably express on an issue like existence? (I'm thinking of Scott's expression of 100% confidence that God exists.)

    Isn't it reasonable for evolution, history (experience), sociology, phenomenology, psychology, and "the linguistic turn" in philosophy to reduce one's expressions of metaphysical confidence (Scott's "I'm 100% certain God exists") via five avenues: (1) we're evolved animals, and therefore not perfect reasoners, especially all by our lonesome; (2) the project, spanning over 2,000 years, of reaching expert consensus in most areas of philosophy has failed miserably; (3) Nietzsche and historians of philosophy etc. have convincingly argued that our philosophical and theological language games have large subjective, contingent, creative, imaginary, and metaphorical aspects to them; (4) Wittgenstein and other linguistically oriented logicians have given us reasonable pause concerning how language gets deployed in philosophy; and (5) Freud and other psychologists have convincingly demonstrated that humans, when they reason, are subject to things like confirmation bias, fantasy driven narratives, etc.

    I realize these are not formal arguments for or against whether monotheists read existence correctly, but we're not gods outside of history. Just because we've convinced ourselves of a metaphysical argument, shouldn't part of our epistemic weighing of an issue include looking around and remembering that the easiest person to fool is yourself? Shouldn't that bring us off of 100% certainty? If you buy the necessary being argument, and you then learn that Kant, for instance, didn't buy the necessary being argument, shouldn't that throw you into at least some reasonable doubt?

    In this sense, isn't one's logic at least neutralized a bit by facts on the ground, perhaps bringing you off of belief and action into the realm of "maybe" and inaction? Didn't 17th century science, the 20th century linguistic turn, phenomenology, postmodernism, etc. all emerge out of exhaustion with the failures of traditional philosophy to make progress?

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  108. SantiFebruary 2, 2016 at 2:47 PM

    DNW:

    If somebody says that, grounded in metaphysical argument, they're 100% certain that God must be all good and all powerful, and hears one's prayers, but then learns of the Holocaust, isn't that data for wondering whether the metaphysical arguments hide a flaw? In this sense, aren't facts on the ground rightly fucking with metaphysical conclusions in ways that, while one might with to bracket them to the side, one rightly should not?

    That's what I mean by cognitive dissonance here. There's a holistic element to the expression of confidence that includes reality testing, not just metaphysics in isolation.

    Isn't this happening now in the Catholic Church with gays and women? The metaphysical arguments surrounding gays and women in Aquinas are running up against, not political correctness, but people. Real people. People who had been in the shadows, but who are now in the light. Do you just carry on with metaphysical business as usual? Supersessionism is another obvious example. How do you continue to believe in such a thing after the Holocaust?

    Nobody wants to be, I presume, the Donald Rumsfeld or Dr. Pangloss of metaphysics.

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  109. DNWFebruary 2, 2016 at 3:13 PM

    "Santi said...

    Gottfried:

    What a malicious thing for you to post. Wow. And the length of it. I'm used to attempts at shaming as a method of shutting me up, but you've reached a new low.

    Even if you thought that about somebody, and even if you were right, what's the point of humiliating--except for pleasure (!), and showing off your willingness to rhetorically kick others--drawing smiles and approval (you presume) from the theist in-crowd that roams these threads?

    If this raises your coinage with others here (it appear to have with DNW), talking to another human being like that, so much the worse for what goes under the name of intellectual "Christianity" in the 21st century. I'll pass.

    And in your patronizing, you've basically dehumanized me and tried to double-bind me--all under the pretense of an apology.

    I'm an honest doubter. This is how you deal with doubters? Consider the signal you send to other doubters.

    And you conclude with the most galling self-righteousness and unwarranted confidence: "I hope that, by the grace of God, you someday escape from the mental prison you've constructed."

    February 1, 2016 at 9:24 AM"


    Come on Santi, the poem was pretty amusing; and there's no good reason for you to grouse about it.

    Surely, Santi, someone with your announced metaphysical views and philosophical anthropology - which have been stated here, noted, and examined at length for their implicative structure repeatedly - has no real logical grounds for logging the kinds of objections you do over supposed violations of shared mores.

    Frankly, the Christians on this site are continually tripping over themselves in order to grant you practical concessions and dispensations which they ought not on strictly logical grounds - granting your own premisses - be allowing to you.

    If someone, to set a parallel example, wishes to amuse themselves by treating the Churchlands as if there is someone really there (inside); even though according to the Churchlands there really is not, well then I guess they are welcome to do so.

    But I say, unlike the Catholics here, if a man is determined to redefine himself into something other, then let him do so and just revise the list.

    Surely you can, at base, have no objection to that. And surely you cannot object to someone letting you define yourself and then just noting what you have done and the result of it all.

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  110. DNWFebruary 2, 2016 at 3:25 PM

    "Santi said...

    DNW:

    If somebody says that, grounded in metaphysical argument, they're 100% certain that God must be all good and all powerful, and hears one's prayers, but then learns of the Holocaust, isn't that data for wondering whether the metaphysical arguments hide a flaw? In this sense, aren't facts on the ground rightly fucking with metaphysical conclusions in ways that, while one might with to bracket them to the side, one rightly should not?"

    If someone grants your premisses then there is no common humanity for you to whine about anyway.

    Therefore "one's prayers" would be a meaningless phrase; as there would be no fungible "one" to indifferently refer to in a fit of frustrated pique and indignation; but only .... drum roll .... historically contingent "ones"; which might or might not match the operative template.

    If however, you grant their's, then humanity alone - in the mere taxonomic sense - does not suffice to get prayers answered.

    You know, you dig this damn hole with your own shovel; you jump in, and then have the gall to scream about the injustice of it all: when, under your own scheme of interpretation there can be no common justice in the - as you would have it - fucking first place, champ.

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  111. DNWFebruary 2, 2016 at 3:58 PM

    "Isn't this happening now in the Catholic Church with gays and women?"


    There's something really screwy going on with someone who tries to abolish categories, and then stake claims on the basis of the categories he has just abolished.

    You keep manufacturing, as others have relentlessly, needfully, and repeatedly pointed out, a world of sui generis entities which have no real membership in a natural kind, and regarding which reason may then properly abstract teleologically based normative inferences.

    Yet, yet, you still yammer on and on with this "we" shit.

    Why? What can that "move" possibly be, but the most cynically manipulative rhetorical attempt by one meaningless locus of appetite as it attempts to finagle or filch a satisfaction or concession out of another, to that latter's ultimate cost?



    " The metaphysical arguments surrounding gays and women in Aquinas are running up against, not political correctness, but people. Real people."



    There you go again with this "people" terminological crap, as if the nominalist rubric "people" denotes anything certain, objective, shared, or which implies an objective interpersonal obligation - much less even some mutual advantage.


    " People who had been in the shadows, but who are now in the light. Do you just carry on with metaphysical business as usual?"


    By acknowledging that when framed in your vision, they don't even rise to the status of broken like-kinds, but devolve into what are arguably little more than alien appetite loci; and that all your histrionic emoting does not, and cannot, change that simple, logical, irreducible, fact.

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  112. BillyFebruary 2, 2016 at 4:24 PM

    "If somebody says that, grounded in metaphysical argument, they're 100% certain that God must be all good and all powerful, and hears one's prayers, but then learns of the Holocaust, isn't that data for wondering whether the metaphysical arguments hide a flaw?"

    Not really. The existence of evil is compatible with the God of CT. It may pose an issue with ones religious beliefs though, if there are added ideas that come directly from revelation. But I believe in the God of CT, but I am not religious in the same sense that Feser. We'll see though.

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  113. laubadetristeFebruary 2, 2016 at 4:26 PM

    Santi Baton Roue.

    ReplyDelete
  114. JasonFebruary 2, 2016 at 4:34 PM

    @Santi
    If somebody says that, grounded in metaphysical argument, they're 100% certain that God must be all good and all powerful, and hears one's prayers, but then learns of the Holocaust, isn't that data for wondering whether the metaphysical arguments hide a flaw? In this sense, aren't facts on the ground rightly fucking with metaphysical conclusions in ways that, while one might with to bracket them to the side, one rightly should not?

    I think it is not hiding a flaw but you are missing something, in my humble opinion. One of the supreme ethics in life is love (hopefully you will agree to that) then in order for love to be true you need free will. Without free will, love cannot exist i.e. you cannot force someone to love you, they have to choose. According to Jesus the first / greatest commandment is to love your God with all your heart, mind and soul and to love your neighbours as yourself see here. If God does not give us free will then our love for Him will not exist.

    Free will means that people will choose to do evil like the Holocaust and that has nothing to do with God being all good and all powerful. So the facts on the ground is that evil exists and exists in people’s heart and they choose to manifest it into evil actions. The redemptive power of the cross heals the heart, quite literally targeting the “heart” of the problem.

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  115. SantiFebruary 2, 2016 at 8:32 PM

    DNW:

    Notice the double-bind you put gays, women, and religious doubters (like myself) in. If we reject your metaphysical essentialism, we have no grounds for equal rights because we're mere sui generis contingencies on the move, products of evolution, incoherently appealing to a solidarity that cannot exist, and if we accept your metaphysical essentialism, equal rights cannot be granted.

    There's got to be a better way to talk about gays and women (and atheists) than this. And fortunately, there is. You heard some of those arguments in the Supreme Court over the summer. If languages are tools for getting desirable things done, your language displays a clear problematic: it does not pass the justice and equality for gays, women, and atheists test (as you've just demonstrated in your two most recent posts).

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  116. SantiFebruary 2, 2016 at 8:59 PM

    pck:

    When it comes right down to it, I think what gets my knickers in a twist when I visit Feser's website is not the arguments for this or that Catholic doctrine, but the combative confidence with which both Feser and his thread followers put their ideas forward. Like Midas, everything that Feser touches turns, not to gold, but to supreme confidence that he's right, and everybody else has gotten it wrong. He can't even put gay marriage outside of scare quotes, as if the only way to define marriage is his way (or the highway).

    It's the insistence (sometimes just implicit, other times quite explicit) that an OPINION grounded in a series of metaphysical arguments amounts to KNOWLEDGE ("I'm 100% certain God exists", "'Gay marriage' is an oxymoron. It can't exist even in principle," etc.).

    And then enters the black-caped villain from the other side of the stage, making the opposite trip from Feser's Greek chorus: people like me, the lug-head Coyne sympathizers, are the practitioners of "scientism."

    What is scientism?

    The definition that most consistently fits what I feel is being sent my way rhetorically with the term is this: Scientism is the confusion of opinion with scientific knowledge. What I (and gnus like Coyne) can't see with sufficient acuity is that what we take to be KNOWLEDGE supported by science is mere OPINION. Our metaphysical premises have been insufficiently scrutinized.

    But notice the double-bind here. The religious philosopher says to the science-only enthusiast: "You have evidence, but you have presuppositions too, and so you can't be confident about the deliverances of science beyond a very narrow epistemic range. You've got to pull back your inferences, otherwise you're engaged in 'scientism.' I, however, get to keep my ludicrous religious presuppositions absent all evidence, which aren't really ludicrous at all once you understand the full coherence of my system. In fact, I get to be quite confident in my metaphysical arguments because I've thought them through. I've reached knowledge, not illusion or opinion. I'm 100% certain on key controversial issues (God's existence, etc.), and I'm warranted in being so because I've thought it through over many years of study. You, by contrast, can't be confident in your materialism, even though science superficially supports it--and why not? Precisely because you haven't thought through the metaphysical implications of the materialist position. Thus I have knowledge, you have mere opinion."

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  117. SantiFebruary 2, 2016 at 9:01 PM

    DNW:

    Feser's review of Coyne's book shows how topsy-turvy things get in Feserland. The scientist has evidence and minimally conservative, Occam's razor-style, metaphysical presuppositions, but he can't trust them, or can only trust them just so far, while the metaphysician has no falsifiable evidence whatsoever to support his claims, and quite an elaborate system of interlocking presuppositions, but he gets to trust them with the confidence that Feser displays (which is a lot). What warrants this reality flip? Because, the metaphysician earnestly assures us, he has thought them through flawlessly and meticulously, akin to the theologian who has spent years parsing chapter and verse in the Bible. He knows God exists, and what God wants.

    But this confidence game is the very behavior that bred religious (intellectual and literal) combat through history, culminating in Europe in the Thirty Years War, and thoughtful people started saying at that point, "Can we get our claims to knowledge on firmer ground, and be less cocksure with one another? And if not, can we at least figure out how such metaphysical certainty functions pragmatically, and to what end?"

    The whole history of Western epistemic practice from the 17th century forward--science, Nietzsche, phenomenalism, historicism, logical positivism, the linguistic turn in philosophy, poststructuralism, Freud, Zizek, Derrida, the intellectual turn toward Buddhism, Coyne's "scientism," etc.--all seem to have one thing in common: there's got to be a better song to sing than metaphysical essentialism accompanied by dogmatic confidence.

    Every sensitive contemporary person runs away, by one route or another, from the dogmatist who is under the spell of a language game--except other dogmatists also under the same spell. They circle wagons together.

    But the rest of us are trying to find our way out of Wittgenstein's fly bottle, which is to say, to a more democratic, tolerant, tolerable, open, imaginative, diverse, and sane world. Wittgenstein needn't have been closeted because he was gay ("of what we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence..."). We're trying to work with flux, uncertainty, and democratic diversity, not arrest it. (A conservative like yourself, of course, is often proud to characterize himself as standing athwart history and saying, "Stop!")

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  118. SantiFebruary 2, 2016 at 9:06 PM

    Billy and Jason:

    What level of epistemic certainty would you attach to your belief in God? Are you 100% certain God existed, or is your confidence somewhat less than that? Can you articulate what role (if any) faith--believing things beyond the warrant of evidence, or absent evidence--plays in your God belief?

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  119. GlennFebruary 3, 2016 at 4:19 AM

    1. You Can't Make This Stuff Up

    1990: The commissioner of baseball, Fay Vincent, wants to suspend the owner of the New York Yankees, George Steinbrenner, for a period of two years, and put him on probation for a period of three years. Unhappy with the prospect of being suspended for two years, and on probation for three years, Steinbrenner asks for an alternative. Vincent complies with Steinbrenner's request for an alternative, and the former offers the latter the alternative of being banned for life. Steinbrenner opts to be banned for life.

    It remains unclear at this late date whether Steinbrenner had been in possession of his faculties, or was possessed by something else.

    (See Faced With Suspension, Steinbrenner Sought an Alternative.)

    2. History Repeats Itself (Sort Of)

    2016: Gottfried asserts that Santi resides in a mental prison of his own making. Santi, unhappy with the assertion, makes it known that he feels the assertion is malicious and -- get this -- dehumanizing. In an apparent attempt to reinforce his long standing reputation which, it shall be recalled, had been succinctly summarized by Gottfried's spot-on assertion, Santi later refers to himself as a fly trapped in a bottle from which he continues to, pardon the pun, fruitlessly seek escape.

    It remains unclear at this time, and perhaps will continue to do so for the next eon or two, whether Santi is in possession of his faculties, or is possessed by something else.

    3. Something else not yet known...

    ...is whether the champion of democractic diversity of opinion shall lodge yet another and possibly more vociferous complaint.

    ReplyDelete
  120. SantiFebruary 3, 2016 at 6:31 AM

    pck:

    I notice a similarity concerning Isaiah Berlin's critique of largely incompatible social and legal goals (freedom vs. equality, etc.), and thus of the tragic nature of existence (one cannot hold in a single vision a perfect community where both human freedom and equality are present to their maximal degree at the same time) as akin to the atheist critique of theism: theists try to pack numerous maximal traits (the all good, the all powerful, the all loving, etc.) into their single vision: God.

    In the real world, it seems that God, akin to utopia, cannot carry all the aspirations and traits we attach to him (her).

    Some people (theists and utopians) may try to reconcile the wished for traits, arguing for how it's logically possible for them to work and exist together, maintaining that the vision is coherent and really can match reality, while others (atheists and pragmatists) have simply abandoned the project as unworkable.

    In the theist-atheist debate, isn't this what's going on around, say, the Holocaust (how God can be all good and powerful and yet allow the Holocaust to occur, etc.)?

    And isn't this what's going on around arguments concerning, say, God's ability to think? ("How could God ever think a thought?" "Oh, well, God doesn't think, he's Thought Itself." "Where does God exist as Thought Itself?" "Outside of time." "Isn't this a category mistake? Hasn't language gone on a holiday here, applying the word 'thought,' something that goes on in time, to Being Itself, which exists outside of time?" "Oh, well, it's just analogous," etc.)

    And isn't this what's going on around arguments concerning, say, God's ability to hear everybody's prayers at the same time? ("God isn't hearing, but Hearing Itself, outside of time. He's not like Santa, doing a bunch of things in time at once..." "But what does that mean, to hear without ears, and everything at once, and to be Hearing Itself?" "Well, these are just analogies for God's ultimate mystery," etc.)

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  121. JasonFebruary 3, 2016 at 6:34 AM

    @Santi
    faith--believing things beyond the warrant of evidence, or absent evidence

    Before I answer any of your questions can you explain why you equate faith to "believing things beyond the warrant of evidence, or absent evidence"? (seems like we have come full circle)

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  122. SantiFebruary 3, 2016 at 6:56 AM

    Glenn:

    The dehumanizing is in the exclusion, treating healthy humanity, to which Gottfried presumes himself to belong, as not subject to the incoherences, limits of vision, confirmation biases, blind spots, and mental prisons of lesser humans. The sick are outside of the blessed community, and are really sick, degenerate in mind, objectively disordered--and not just being rebellious.

    Please recall the Nazi preoccupation with degenerate art in this context, with the exclusion of people as other, and contrast this with Paul who, in a moment of inclusive humility, said, "For now we see through a glass darkly,..."

    That's the bottle we're all in.

    There's a big difference between triumphalist, post-resurrection confidence Christianity and the sort of Christianity that stays up on the cross with Jesus in doubts.

    So the idea that we're not equally just vulnerable people, religious and secular, talking in the same sublunary environment--beneath the moon; in the fog of existence; not seeing from the vantage of the heavens and the gods, but from the vantage of evolved beings on a small planet--"My God, why have you forsaken us?"--opens the door for unwarranted confidence, patronizing, shaming of others, humiliation, and dehumanization--which are all present in Gottfried's missive.

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  123. SantiFebruary 3, 2016 at 7:02 AM

    Jason:

    That would be, again, the critique of Doubting Thomas, right? Aren't you supposed to be blessed if you believe in spite of having full access to the evidence--if you trust the community's leadership testimony alone?

    I'm not saying no evidence or argument supports one's beliefs, but what do you take to be the difference between faith and reason? Are they basically indistinguishable? If you have faith, you can move mountains, right? What could that mean, but pressing forward against all odds--doing something unreasonable? Didn't Tertullian infamously say, "It is absurd, therefore I believe"?

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  124. DNWFebruary 3, 2016 at 7:17 AM

    " If we reject your metaphysical essentialism, we have no grounds for equal rights because we're mere sui generis contingencies on the move, products of evolution, incoherently appealing to a solidarity that cannot exist, and if we accept your metaphysical essentialism, equal rights cannot be granted.There's got to be a better way to talk about gays and women (and atheists) than this. And fortunately, there is."


    Only if you think that lapsing into intellectual and logical incoherence for no demonstrably sound reason at all, is better. But you never did say you needed "reasons" did you.

    Your problem, to put it in its most sweeping and colloquial form, is that your logic of classes is not distributive, and cannot be on your own assumptions.

    As you jabber on - purportedly about justice - it turns out that you are not at all talking about indifferently distributed political and associative benefits, costs, and liabilities, though you deploy language which has historically been used to that effect.

    So the problem you try to sweep under the rug with claims of a universal benefit delivering justice, in the case (your case) where there is no real universal class referent, is to explain just what the real advantage and benefit is to those doing the tolerating, or protecting, or producing.

    Don't be surprised at the predicament you find yourself in. It is one that every collectivist or communitarian leaning would-be philosopher who rejects teleology, has found himself with. Marx simply shrugged; and recognizing that "justice" and "equality" and especially "return of value" were nothing more to his cause than rallying slogans, admitted that his real motto was "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". Which of course leaves little questions such as to what a "need" is (under his interpretation it constantly evolves under social pressures)and who assesses needs, and who and how one determines just how much effort he who has the ability must spend in fulfilling the wants of he who has the needs.

    The solution to that problem on the part of of men like Rawls and the Parecon boys has been to deny that you are even morally entitled to the benefits of your own talents; since they are under their scheme, "undeserved".

    This is the position of the modern social justice crowd and the Democrat party at present; with a little "utilitarian" clap-trap thrown in for ornamentation.

    They, like you, argue out of both sides of their mouths: there is no general good, and therefore no general justice, just competing and even antithetical "goods" jostling in the same political space which are adjusted through "democratic" means. But, you know, that is a good itself somehow. The result being that those who are denominated victims, somehow deserve better; and those who are life competent and self-sufficient, deserve ever less. This, because in giving up what they give up, they end up enabling those who inevitably stake even more - ultimately unjustifiable and endless - claims against them. And so it goes, in the world of that particular locus of appetite, that styles itself a modern liberal.

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  125. DNWFebruary 3, 2016 at 7:23 AM

    " Blogger Santi said...

    DNW:

    Notice the double-bind you put gays ..."

    Notice that that is not actually a double bind. A double bind is not a simple dilemma or unappealing choice between options. Please refer to your old college psych text books for the real definition. Wiki looks to be trustworthy on this if you no longer have them.

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  126. ScottFebruary 3, 2016 at 7:25 AM

    DNW, you beat me to it.

    ReplyDelete
  127. DNWFebruary 3, 2016 at 7:41 AM

    " ... the metaphysician has no falsifiable evidence whatsoever to support his claims, and quite an elaborate system of interlocking presuppositions, but he gets to trust them with the confidence ... the metaphysician earnestly assures us, he has thought them through flawlessly and meticulously ...

    But this confidence game is the very behavior that bred religious (intellectual and literal) combat through history, culminating in Europe in the Thirty Years War, and thoughtful people started saying at that point, "Can we get our claims to knowledge on firmer ground, and be less cocksure with one another? And if not, can we at least figure out how such metaphysical certainty functions pragmatically, and to what end?"


    Why do you pretend to be an historian when you are not? You realize don't you, that you are talking utter nonsense?


    By the way I got a good laugh out of this part "Can we get our claims to knowledge on firmer ground, and be less cocksure with one another?"

    It's always amusing when an obvious collectivist of some stripe - ultimately a totalitarian when it comes to practice - starts yammering on about how enlightenment driven epistemic humility leads to fewer social claims and burdens; especially we are to imagine, in the form of government backed interpersonal demands for sociopolitical affirmation and support.

    It must be circulating as a kind of talking points memo, in your crowd.

    Or possibly it represents a psychological quirk: The bigger the talk about epistemic restraint, the more unrestrained the program of social management.

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  128. DNWFebruary 3, 2016 at 7:54 AM

    Scott said...

    DNW, you beat me to it.

    February 3, 2016 at 7:25 AM"

    You would think that, if the guy is not just some kind of open loop program that spews what it spews without any capacity for handling feedback, it would have dawned on him by now that half the people commenting here are grad students, or guys with multiple majors or the formal equivalent in areas such as philosophy, economics, psychology and history. [not to mention the mathematicians]

    In fact almost everyone who has ever commented here has a deeper and more detailed knowledge of the historical literature than does Santi.

    So why does he keep thinking he can get away with these poses ... as if he is a middle school teacher lording it over clueless 13 year olds.

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  129. scbrownlhrmFebruary 3, 2016 at 8:52 AM




    Santi,

    Doubting Thomas:

    Do you think it's God in the trauma bays bringing people back to life after a few hours of no-flow (spare me, temp)?

    Do you?

    But the resurrection is.. is what?

    It's not everything given the nature of Mind and Body.

    After 3 days 2K years ago?

    Today's knowledge grants Atheists foisting: An Alien from Planet X could have done it...

    I raised the issue of the syntax of "X brought Y back to life" early in this thread with you. The definition of Death is contingent upon the Mind/Minds around the Body and upon Knowledge. It's *not* defined by the body proper. The ONLY reason to deny the resurrection is an a priori of the sorts of Persons/Minds actually which exist (historicity too). Science affirms syntax(X brought Y back to life) in the ever morphing "definition" of "death".

    The NT authors got that right and, now, science is catching up.

    Your reply early in this thread -- you know -- when you asked about Thomas and Resurrections....??

    Crickets.

    So what is BETTER than THAT?

    Christ knew He would not physically be here but that something more reliable will be what we are "reduced" (wink wink) to relying on.

    Eye, Appearance, & Bling-Bling Power Plays, are, being Material-Based, modes of sight which leave the door open for: "An Alien from Planet X did that Medical Miracle. Big deal. No-God."

    However, Christ claims the Immaterial trumps "that”.

    Therefore:

    Christ tells us that the Immaterial is BETTER than Him doing the Medical Miracle Bling-Bling Power Play b/c the eye is open to the Big Con and one day soon men will “push” death a bit further out. Christianity's truth predicates affirm Death as contingent on the ability of the Minds around the Body.

    Bring someone back to life after a few hours. Atheist response: Science. And he is right -- because the syntax of the form "X brought Y back to life" is that which Scripture and the NT authors got right. As in: Given the nature of reality, and mind, and body, and what death is, said syntax is scientifically justified. Seconds morphs to minutes morphs to hours morphs to days morphs to.....

    So then, the Immaterial -- More Blessed are you if.... As in:

    NON-Deflationary Reason, Logic, Intelligibility, that which no contingent being from Planet X can do/grant/arrange --- the Universals, the Immutable and Irreducible bedrock of Man's Sanity which cannot be less than the Immutable Mind of the Divine.

    Blessed are those who rely on that which cannot be The Big Con. Santi thinks Christ is saying, “Blessed are those who do with LESS” but that’s impossible UNLESS Faith = Anti-Reason. Santi's been challenged on deflationary truth values before. Silence.

    Christ says the **SAME** thing TWO different ways: [1] It is BETTER that I (the material based) GO AWAY so that the Holy Spirit (the Immaterial Based) can lead you into ALL TRUTH (Material Based will fail us), then He repeats it: [2] Blessed are those who do not see (eyeballs, material based, X brought Y back to life), and yet (the Immaterial emerges) believe - pause - Believe = Faith = Evidence based. WHAT evidence? That which no Material Based X will ever be able to assure: absolute & immutable guarantees against The Big Con. Such is the Divine Mind and no less. Holy Spirit is not ONLY the revelatory but ALSO the *guarantee* of intelligibility in all directions (reason, logic, irreducible mind).

    Nothing material can guarantee *THAT*. Dear Child you are more blessed if you move within THAT and those who trust THAT more than the Material Based (the fallible) will be higher…better……”

    Such transcends not only Law (the Ministry of Death), not only Medical Miracles, but also all uneasiness for while we are never in the fullness of knowledge, we know that in HIM the Immutable both lives and awaits our now fragmented sightlines.

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  130. pckFebruary 3, 2016 at 8:53 AM

    Santi (February 2, 2016 at 2:44 PM):
    In this sense, isn't one's logic at least neutralized a bit by facts on the ground, perhaps bringing you off of belief and action into the realm of "maybe" and inaction?

    Your points (1)-(5) are all valid concerns (and Thomists will also acknowledge them) but what they "neutralize" or potentially call into question is not logic itself, but the premises (propositions, hypotheses, etc.) used in reasoning. They potentially challenge the "A" in "A => B", not the "=>". Logic is part of the scaffolding of reason. If you drop logic you saw off the branch you're sitting on and drop reason with it. You furthermore cannot doubt the very thing which makes doubt possible in the first place. The category of doubt/certainty does not apply to logic. Logical truths cannot be opinions and they cannot be empirically tested, since all empirical testing *presupposes* a logical framework which establishes what *counts* as a successful or unsuccessful test. Such a framework must be in place before empirical investigation can begin, or else you have not even fixed what the goal of your research is/can be.

    If you have decided that the king in chess moves one square at a time, it makes no sense to begin to "doubt" that rule. You can change it, but you cannot doubt it. What you can doubt is whether the rule has been correctly applied in a specific case (e.g. a move by your opponent). But we hit bedrock almost immediately. If I, in hyper-skeptical fashion, doubt that I (and everybody else) saw him move correctly (when I and everyone else thought he did), I'm immediately in a bind from which there is no recovery. It's like asking "what if every mathematician who ever lived got the proof about 1+1=2 wrong and the real result is actually 3?" Even in this extreme case, what you are doubting is the capacity of mathematicians, not the rules of set theory or the Peano axioms, or whatever system you are using. You cannot doubt the rules themselves because there is nothing there to doubt.

    All reasoning in chess will have to accept the rule about the king. If we began to "doubt" it, we would no longer be reasoning about chess but about another game. We could of course do that. But if we change the rules of logic, we are not doubting logic, we are changing our form of understanding. This would be very difficult too, as logic is part of the unquestioned and unexamined intellectual background we acquire as we grow up and which provides us with the means to make judgements (against this background) in the first place. Changes in norms of representation mean changes in our form of life, not doubt about the validity of our previous norms. It's like deciding to wear contact lenses with a green tint from now on and (re-)describing the changed colour spectrum one subsequently experiences. It's different from the one previously experienced, but not "closer to the truth".

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  131. pckFebruary 3, 2016 at 8:54 AM

    Santi (February 2, 2016 at 8:59 PM):

    As for your opinion/knowledge/scientism dilemma, most of it goes away as soon as you understand

    a) the difference between conceptual and empirical knowledge/facts

    and

    b) that conceptual and empirical knowledge/facts are not at war with each other but complementary

    Logic without facts is a vacuous game of symbols, and facts without a conceptual framework have little or no meaning. (It is only by such a framework that we can *relate* facts to one another.) Science and philosophy need each other and their relationship is unavoidably symbiotic. We cannot expect to derive one from the other or one to eventually render the other superfluous. Thomists and other reasonable religious people have no trouble acknowledging that. You will not find Ed Feser or other members of this blog's A-T crowd ranting against science or denouncing its value.

    So you don't have to worry that all those treasured scientific results will be written off as mere opinion by Thomists. While all empirical knowledge is in some sense preliminary and potentially subject to change, that does not downgrade it to "mere opinion". (Catholics in particular value science. Much of modern Western rationality has its origins in mediaeval Christian thought. The first Big Bang theory was devised by a Catholic priest from Belgium. The Vatican officially acknowledges the BBT as the most likely origin of the universe. And so on. If you want to rant against Catholics you have to pick a different terrain than science. These are just a bunch of facts. I'm not a Catholic and I'm not trying to sell you Catholicism.)

    Empiricists and the adherents of scientism like to call philosophy "mere opinion" because it is unlike science ("no progess", "no consensus", etc.). First of all this is debatable, since there are at least partial instances of consensus and progress in philosophy, but of course not of the same kind as in science. Second, it is not always the job of philosophy to produce consensus or final answers. At least part of its job is to ask the same questions again and again under changing circumstances. The philosophy of X changes as X changes and/or X's practitioners change. Science's goal is concept formation. Philosophy's goal is concept elucidation. Elucidation can take many forms and must change along with its targets. For example, no one would expect moral philosophy to remain the same under radically different cultural circumstances.

    The religious philosopher says to the science-only enthusiast: "You have evidence, but you have presuppositions too, and so you can't be confident about the deliverances of science beyond a very narrow epistemic range. You've got to pull back your inferences, otherwise you're engaged in 'scientism.

    This does not capture scientism accurately. One combats scientism not by shouting down all knowledge that is not 100% empirically secure. That would indeed be counterproductive and ridiculous. Putting a toe in the water must always be allowed. Scientism is the belief that all knowledge must be come by exclusively through empirical means. It is the rejection of the importance of conceptual knowledge (often the rejection is not conscious but simply born of ignorance). The inferences that must be withdrawn are inferences which transgress the boundaries of science and thus the boundaries of sense. (For example when neuroscientists claim to have made discoveries about the nature of human thought through brain imaging.) Scientistic thinkers will of course claim that science has no boundaries. Which is naive and quite simply factually false (see a) and b) and my previous post about needing to have a logical framework in place before experimenting can even begin). Finally, note that a rejection of scientism does not require one to be religious or to have specific beliefs (or any at all) regarding the supernatural.

    ReplyDelete
  132. scbrownlhrmFebruary 3, 2016 at 8:57 AM



    Santi,

    Do you trust your mind?

    Why is the Holy Spirit better than Bling Bling Power Plays and Medical Miracles?

    Why is the Immaterial/Immutable better than the Material/Contingent?

    Think, Santi, think.......

    Christ shows us the way to the BETTER, the HIGHER.

    I am more blessed than you because I do not put my faith in frail, mutable, and contingent things. Like Bling Bling and Medical Miracles. They help. But they are fallible. They are ONLY pointers. Pointers **point** to something **else**.

    Got Final Intelligibility?

    You don't, Santi.

    ReplyDelete
  133. scbrownlhrmFebruary 3, 2016 at 9:01 AM



    Santi,

    Clarification:

    The last comment (February 3, 2016 at 8:57 AM) was in reference to my comment to you at February 3, 2016 at 8:52 AM.

    ReplyDelete
  134. laubadetristeFebruary 3, 2016 at 9:03 AM

    @scbrownlhrm: "Santi, /Doubting Thomas..."

    Calling Santi Doubting Thomas is a bit much, don't you think? I mean, Doubting Thomas actually examined the evidence given to him.

    ReplyDelete
  135. DNWFebruary 3, 2016 at 9:06 AM

    "Santi said...

    Glenn:

    The dehumanizing is in the exclusion ..."

    This is probably critical to the "logic" of Santiism, and if constructed as a categorical proposition - the converse and the obverse examined - be subjected to useful analysis.

    Since he is not a particularly coherent or systematic reasoner, this drawing out of immediate inferences in alternate phrasings would help to clarify the implicit Santian anthropological construct.

    What Santi consistently tacitly assumes - astonishingly in light of his own constellation of nominalist predicate assumptions regarding "the good" - is that self-sacrificial "democratic" tolerance, or better enabling, is somehow an objective, and even Mirabile dictu! categorically distributive good. As if then, in ostensibly presenting a modest "democratic" [note the bracketing quotes] workaround (it's really a program) he has stumbled upon what is in fact an indubitable good: i.e., self-abnegating, if not destructive, enabling and underwriting "solidarity" and risk assumption.

    The notion apparently, is that doing what is bad for you is good for you; if, others neither you nor congenial are thereby enabled to thrive or at least experience greater feelings of esteem and belonging and assurance off of your unconditional solidarity.

    Not only will you not exclude them from your father's table for throwing garbage on your plate, you will pay for the privilege of applauding them as they do it.

    Because ...

    Well, therein lies the mystery, doesn't it.

    ReplyDelete
  136. DNWFebruary 3, 2016 at 9:14 AM

    laubadetriste said...

    @scbrownlhrm: "Santi, /Doubting Thomas..."

    Calling Santi Doubting Thomas is a bit much, don't you think? I mean, Doubting Thomas actually examined the evidence given to him.

    February 3, 2016 at 9:03 AM"



    Poor Santi. He has some rather emotional people desperately trying to convert him, and others content to let him go his way straight to hell.

    No wonder he is confused.



    ReplyDelete
  137. scbrownlhrmFebruary 3, 2016 at 9:28 AM



    Doubting Thomas / Not a Title for Santi:


    Actually, the "Doubting Thomas" was *NOT* a title for Santi but rather it was used because he and Jason had finally come full circle on that topic which arose very early in the thread (Doubting Thomas) and so I was addressing what Christ meant when He said MORE blessed are those who do NOT see......

    (As per the February 3, 2016 at 8:57 AM comment and the February 3, 2016 at 8:52 AM comment)

    Santi's definitions and exegeses (and metaphysics) are all off.....so I was merely trying to reorient his definitions to the real world.

    So he could reality-test them.

    ReplyDelete
  138. pckFebruary 3, 2016 at 9:29 AM

    Santi:
    theists try to pack numerous maximal traits (the all good, the all powerful, the all loving, etc.) into their single vision: God
    In the real world, it seems that God, akin to utopia, cannot carry all the aspirations and traits we attach to him (her).
    [...]
    And isn't this what's going on around arguments concerning, say, God's ability to hear everybody's prayers at the same time? ("God isn't hearing, but Hearing Itself, outside of time. He's not like Santa, doing a bunch of things in time at once..." "But what does that mean, to hear without ears, and everything at once, and to be Hearing Itself?" "Well, these are just analogies for God's ultimate mystery," etc.)

    Well, nobody said it was going to be easy. You might want to read something like David Bently Hart's "The Experience of God", "The Doors of the Sea" or Ed Feser's "Aquinas" (perhaps someone more qualified than I am can make further suggestions). I have only been reading up on religion and Christianity in particular for 2 years, I'm nowhere near where my own standards require me to be for an informed answer given in my own words.

    In the theist-atheist debate, isn't this what's going on around, say, the Holocaust (how God can be all good and powerful and yet allow the Holocaust to occur, etc.)?

    Sure, it's called the problem of evil and it's obviously a bit of a poser which requires an unpacking of the relevant terms "all-powerful", "all-good", etc. Clearly, a naive interpretation immediately runs into logical problems. But it's not like there isn't a long tradition of scholastic thought just waiting for you to sink your teeth into. I can tell you can hardly wait to educate yourself.

    We don't need to invoke the H-word to discuss this, I should think. It's a bit off-putting for me since I'm German [1]. Not that I take offense at the topic, but as you can imagine I have discussed this a million times already in pretty much every context imaginable. It gets a bit tiresome after 2 or 3 decades. In particular because there are no interesting moral lessons to be taken from the 3rd Reich. Anyone who needed WWII to happen to understand that it's wrong to kill millions of innocent people had obviously not been quite right in the head (and perhaps other places) all along.

    [1] All the cliches are true. I read Wittgenstein in the original and I eat my cornflakes without milk. No sense of humour either.

    ReplyDelete
  139. scbrownlhrmFebruary 3, 2016 at 9:38 AM



    All:

    My apologies to all if the "Doubting Thomas" items came across as a plea for conversion.

    Given Santi's apparent unwillingness to demand logical lucidity, to reality-test his premises and definitions, to reject deflationary truth values, and to hold fast to the means and ends of immutable love amidst good and evil, I'd make no such plea in no such format.

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  140. GlennFebruary 3, 2016 at 9:41 AM

    With one entity having received a tongue lashing for saying of Santi that he was a person trapped in a mental prison, you'd think that another entity would be lambasted for saying of Santi that he was a bug trapped in a bottle. But, no, and perhaps true to form, Santi, while displeased, is not displeased with himself either for being a bug in a bottle or for having publicly said of himself that he is a bug in a bottle -- he is only displeased that there are entities which persist in thinking themselves to be humans with natures.

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  141. scbrownlhrmFebruary 3, 2016 at 9:49 AM



    Santi,

    On Auschwitz, and all metrics thereof, it is going to be immutable love -- or else nothing. Vacuity or else love. And if it is vacuity, if it is nothing, then all your metrics -- all your words -- in it, on it, and around it do not exist. Literally. In short: If anything -- then immutable love -- God.

    As per the comment from February 2, 2016 at 12:40 PM, reposted here with a typo corrected:

    In David Bentley Hart’s, “The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth", there is a much longer comment surrounding the interface of divine love and horrific evil. To offer just parts of it, in “Part Two” there is “Section 1” entitled Trinity. Its first sub-part is “Divine Apatheia”. In the printed version it’s pages 155 to 167.

    We discover that the pure dynamism that is God’s love is “…..pure positivity and pure activity, that His love is an infinite peace and so needs no violence to shape it, no death over which to triumph: if it did, it would never be ontological peace but only metaphysical armistice.” Further in and by the Trinitarian landscape we discover that not only is there no necessity of Evil but there is also no necessity of the actual history of Evil. Moving further, “….the cross of Christ does not determine the nature of divine love, but rather manifests it, because there is a more original outpouring of God that – without needing to submit itself to the order of sacrifice that builds crosses – always already surpasses every abyss of godforsakenness and pain that sin can impose between the world and God: an outpouring that is in its proper nature indefectible happiness.” Obviously in 12 pages there’s more but this is only to introduce a landscape where we find that love’s ceaseless outpouring in the triune God finds that “…….crucified love is precisely what makes the entire narrative of salvation in Christ intelligible. And second, it is an almost agonizing irony that, in our attempts to revise trinitarian doctrine in such a way as to make God comprehensible in the "light" of Auschwitz, invariably we end up describing a God who – it turns out – is actually simply the metaphysical ground of Auschwitz.” Indeed, ultimate reality void of the triune cannot sum to immutable love and the potential errors looming there on evil are many. The section closes looking at that which “……is divine beauty, that perfect joy in the other by which God is God: the Father's delectation in the beauty of his eternal Image, the Spirit as the light and joy and sweetness of that knowledge. As Augustine says of the three persons, "In that Trinity is the highest origin of all things, and the most perfect beauty, and the most blessed delight. Therefore those three are seen to be mutually determined, and are in themselves infinite, that is, infinitely determined as the living love of the divine persons – to "one another" – to which infinity no moment of the negative or of becoming or even of "triumph" can give increase. Hence God is love.”

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  142. SantiFebruary 3, 2016 at 10:06 AM

    DNW:

    Isn't the problem of justification always going to be a shell game? You can always find where I'm dropping a premise, taking something for granted without arguing for it, and I can always locate the same sorts of moves in your arguments.

    We can all be accused of question begging at some point along the way in our arguments, otherwise we'd be doing mathematics or science, and we'd arrive at lots and lot of areas of full consensus, and make progress.

    But when talking about metaphysics, religion, and irreligion, one person's confident claim to knowledge or common sense is heard by another person as mere opinion. It seems to come down to: where does your community agree that justification can stop? That seems to be the question, not whether one is a bad or good reasoner, or whether one is badly motivated.

    Thoreau, in Walden, spoke of wanting to dig down to existence's bedrock, with "rocks in place," but maybe this is the myth of depth. Maybe, given our existential situation, we cannot reach bedrock or see as far as we would like to see. Maybe our existential fate is that we have to sail in fog, not in the certainty of one who can see to the horizon on a cloudless day.

    In the fog of our circumstances, what can we have together? Empathy. We're all on the same mortal boat in a fog, cast far out to sea in space and time.

    We can have solidarity and empathy with beings in the same existential situation. We can all understand that evolution makes each of us different; that we are sui generis variants in the dice game of evolution--and yet we can feel empathy and solidarity in our collective flungness. Nothing compels such solidarity, but it's not incoherent, and nothing prevents it. It's a choice. "We" is a choice. As Sartre used to say, "Existence before essence." And Hume, anticipating Sartre, said no "is" need dictate our "oughts." Our choice in situation remains active in this very moment. We can choose one another.

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  143. scbrownlhrmFebruary 3, 2016 at 10:18 AM



    Santi,

    Yes, your gaze towards love's three explanatory termini in the elemental and ceaseless reciprocity amid Self/Other constituting unicity's Singular Us is testifying of that which you cannot claim given your means -- and yet claim given the means of others. Those three explanatory termini within the immutable love of the Necessary Being saturate all your own intonations and thereby your own truth predicates deliver to the world a sonnet which declares the God you claim you cannot see.

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  144. SantiFebruary 3, 2016 at 10:26 AM

    Glenn,

    What is "human nature," but to be a variant, and therefore sui generis, primate diced into the evolutionary game with the superpower of overriding the previous moment given by nature?

    You can see a river--the given--and divert it.

    Isn't human nature the power of choice? That moment of existence and choice before acquiescence to essence and what came before? We have clever, imaginative brains for mapping possibilities and choosing among the range of logically possible alternatives in situation.

    Other animals are governed by instinct, our evolutionary strategy is not to be. The clever brain can look down and override the "given" use of the penis or clitoris (for instance). Nothing in human nature requires submission to the given of form and prior successful use. Evolution wouldn't even work if that was the standard. Nothing would ever change. Form follows variant and creative behavior. Ask any artist. Which is what we are--artists. That's our nature. We are the "imaginative animal." That's evolution's gamble on us. Or we can play it conservative and submit to what has gone before. (That too is an evolutionary strategy we can choose.)

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  145. laubadetristeFebruary 3, 2016 at 10:32 AM

    @scbrownlhrm: "Actually, the 'Doubting Thomas' was *NOT* a title for Santi..."

    Ah. I get it. My mistake.

    "My apologies to all if the 'Doubting Thomas' items came across as a plea for conversion."

    I at least do not object in the slightest. In fact, I thought you were being generous, and rather wish you *would* convert the man. Might knock some sense into 'im. We would still have disagreements, but perhaps the rest of us wouldn't be nailing jelly to a wall.

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  146. scbrownlhrnFebruary 3, 2016 at 10:33 AM



    Santi,

    If you think you can divert said river of said photons inside said skulls -- you're merely projecting The Big Con which evolution has played on you (us).

    Else -- God.

    See... that's that failure to reality-test your premises against physics shining through again.

    Physics *outside* our skulls does not magically undergo a "rule change" when transitioning into neurons.

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  147. BillyFebruary 3, 2016 at 10:34 AM

    @Santi,

    "What level of epistemic certainty would you attach to your belief in God? Are you 100% certain God existed, or is your confidence somewhat less than that? Can you articulate what role (if any) faith--believing things beyond the warrant of evidence, or absent evidence--plays in your God belief?"

    Read The Will to Believe by William James for my take on faith. It is not very long. Basically I am certain enough that it motivates my actions. I try my best not to lie because I believe that ultimately it is the wrong thing to do.

    How much certainty are you that the Holocaust is really that bad of an event?

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  148. scbrownlhrmFebruary 3, 2016 at 10:35 AM



    "...nailing jelly to a wall...."


    Yeah. The nihilistic dance of equivocation.... until....absurdity...

    ReplyDelete
  149. BillyFebruary 3, 2016 at 10:37 AM

    Correction: "How certain are you..."

    ReplyDelete
  150. laubadetristeFebruary 3, 2016 at 10:42 AM

    @Billy: "How certaint are you that the Holocaust is really that bad of an event?"

    Yeah, ok, let's stop that there. What pck ↑said.

    ReplyDelete
  151. ScottFebruary 3, 2016 at 10:45 AM

    Lauberdetriste:

    "I at least do not object in the slightest. In fact, I thought you were being generous, and rather wish you *would* convert the man."

    In that spirit I happily renew my malicious agreement with Gottfried's malicious hope. Santi's con- (or re-)version would certainly be no more miraculous, and no less an occasion for joy, than those of some of the rest of us have been. And if it knocked a little sense into him, that would be nice too.

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  152. DNWFebruary 3, 2016 at 10:59 AM

    Santi, are you a carrion eater?


    Don't have time here to lay out the case in detail, but suppose the following hypothetical instance just as a starting point.

    A "man" says he likes to eat half rotted animal carcasses. He certainly demonstrates a compulsion to do so. In fact there are a number like him expressing similar preferences. A rough count shows that one in a thousand or two have similar impulses to one degree or another

    Now it is true, that not only does he suffer the same risk an ordinary glutton might suffer, but he regularly manifests other symptoms of debilitating gastric illnesses (if we are allowed to believe that there is a non-homeostatic state called "illness") brought on by only moderate or infrequent indulgence in expressing his inner - whatever.

    So, what obligation has one, and on what basis to, the intractable carrion eater?

    To affirm his impulse? To socially validate it? To allow him to eat at your table? To spend money on his medical treatment rather than on your kid's shoes?


    A second case, well known to police. Mr. X likes to frequent public parks and enjoys sexually gratifying himself before generally revolted witnesses. Mr. X argues that he was born that way, that what he does is more or less medically harmless, that it was reportedly indulged in by an ancient Greek philosopher, that the parks are for the use of all, and that it is mere prudery and outmoded religious convictions which combine to deny him and those like him the means whereby he may obtain genuine emotional and physical satisfaction. And further, that excluding him from the society of others, including children, while he engages in these behaviors, or even ridiculing them, is denying his "humanity" and frustrating his essential inner call.

    Your obligation to affiliate and validate him in this is:

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  153. pckFebruary 3, 2016 at 11:09 AM

    Santi:
    What is "human nature," but to be a variant, and therefore sui generis, primate diced into the evolutionary game with the superpower of overriding the previous moment given by nature?

    I'm pretty sure this is what Adorno said when they spotted him in the x-rated section of the Frankfurt School's video rental.

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  154. BillyFebruary 3, 2016 at 11:13 AM

    'Yeah, ok, let's stop that there. What pck ↑said.

    I think you guys are getting a bit ahead of Santi here. No one is really asking him why he thinks CT and Evil are incompatible, which makes it pointless trying to explain the CT position. He is understanding CT in reference to his own position at the moment, which just prompts further questions related to misunderstanding. I think its probably better to get him to unpack his own position.

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  155. laubadetristeFebruary 3, 2016 at 11:17 AM

    @Scott: "In that spirit I happily renew my malicious agreement with Gottfried's malicious hope. Santi's con- (or re-)version would certainly be no more miraculous, and no less an occasion for joy, than those of some of the rest of us have been. And if it knocked a little sense into him, that would be nice too."

    And amen to the joy part. May he be surprised by it. Until then, I hope it is not too unchristian of me to wish that his life be as pleasant as he is. :)

    @Billy: "I think you guys are getting a bit ahead of Santi here. No one is really asking him why he thinks CT and Evil are incompatible, which makes it pointless trying to explain the CT position. He is understanding CT in reference to his own position at the moment, which just prompts further questions related to misunderstanding. I think its probably better to get him to unpack his own position."

    You may be right. However, please use another example. Maybe the Turkish newspaper bits in *Brothers K*. Or the infamous fawn-in-a-forest-fire.

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  156. laubadetristeFebruary 3, 2016 at 11:22 AM

    ...or the tsunami...

    (And keep in mind that this is coming from the guy, me, who actually quoted Sebald up-post, and the guy, pck, who is actually German. Godwin's Law has so many corollaries...)

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  157. JasonFebruary 3, 2016 at 11:51 AM

    @Santi
    That would be, again, the critique of Doubting Thomas, right? Aren't you supposed to be blessed if you believe in spite of having full access to the evidence--if you trust the community's leadership testimony alone?

    Again people have gone through the doubting Thomas issue (see previous comments), but to reiterate, no where does it say not to believe without evidence or to only trust community leadership alone.

    If you have faith, you can move mountains, right? What could that mean, but pressing forward against all odds--doing something unreasonable?

    It means using faith to move obstacles in your life but that is by no means doing something unreasonable, on the other hand it tell you that your faith carries you through life’s problems / obstacles.

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  158. GlennFebruary 3, 2016 at 1:21 PM

    What is "human nature," but to be a variant, and therefore sui generis, primate diced into the evolutionary game with the superpower of overriding the previous moment given by nature?

    Uh-huh.

    If, however, that be granted arguendo, then it follows that you must be pleased, quite pleased indeed, that, in light of your 'definition' of "human nature", I consider it right and proper, as well as natural and good, not just to be unlike you, and not just to be noticeably unlike you, but to be so unlike you that there is little danger of someone else mistakenly thinking of you one the one hand and myself on the other hand as being, so to speak, two peas in a single pod.

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  159. scbrownlhrmFebruary 3, 2016 at 1:25 PM



    Santi,

    Moving mountains:


    On the doubt of Thomas, first, the last two comments on that topic I made to you a few hours ago, and, second, on mountains, you are again lost in the material based. Remember that it is Christ speaking, the pathology is the fragmentation of the Imago Dei, which is love, and the fight, the mountains, are, again, Immaterial just as in the "better/higher" trusting in, faith in, that which is sure, solid, immutable (rather then in Medical Miracles and Bling like Thomas.... Thomas who is on the way to being tricked at some point somewhere if his eyes, if appearances, "buys" a Big Con). Physicality and Bling are fine, even good, but they are pointers to something else.

    Mountain :

    Pastor Martin Luther King Jr. trusted in the hard evidence of the Image of God and did -- not the unreasonable -- but merely the impossible.

    There's a big difference.

    The impossible just is the reasonable should the impossible be the instantiation of the Imago Dei in and by many and various vectors.

    Faith. Reason.

    Reason. Faith.

    And the immutable love of the Necessary Being.

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  160. JasonFebruary 3, 2016 at 1:37 PM

    @scbrownlhrm

    Awesome!!! :) especially "The impossible just is the reasonable should the impossible be the instantiation of the Imago Dei"

    ReplyDelete
  161. scbrownlhrmFebruary 3, 2016 at 1:45 PM



    :-)

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  162. DNWFebruary 3, 2016 at 2:10 PM

    " Blogger Santi said...

    DNW:

    Isn't the problem of justification always going to be a shell game? You can always find where I'm dropping a premise, taking something for granted without arguing for it ..."

    I'm not accusing you of "dropping a premise" or taking something for granted without arguing for it. I am accusing you of something worse: deliberate intellectual fraud.

    I am accusing you of persistently deploying universal terms which have been rendered entirely problematical on your own account, as if they still meant what they once did in a moral universe populated by natural kinds and furnished with teleologically derived normative standards.

    It's just all too effen precious.

    Now, I understand, Santi, as the relative newcomers here might not always, that the nihilist dance routine, and the refrain that it is better to huckster the crowd than to pester about the ultimate, is in fact your operating premise. But, and it's a big ugly butt as they say, if you took your own claim of epistemic humility seriously, you would keep this truth about your method at the forefront, and refuse to engage in pseudo-arguments which are in principle incapable of any kind of resolution because of the built-in problems of equivocation; problems of which you are perfectly aware, and have in fact placed there.

    Thus, when you launch off on these rhetorical diversions, one can only conclude that these speech acts of yours are base and cynical attempts to simply exhaust those who don't quite get the meta-narrative which lies behind and informs and shapes your surface efforts.

    What you need to do, in order to be "truly authentic", is to admit to yourself and to everyone else, why that kind of consistent honesty is so dangerous to those taking your stance; and why, unless relentlessly pressed, you seek to avoid it.

    You know Santi, and in adverting to the paragraph two above, there is in fact, something profoundly "metaphysical" in that diversionary, dissembling tactic. Something, as you have I believe yourself admitted as anti-logocentric. Something which at the deepest and most profound level takes deceit, and manipulation, to be at the very heart of a "life strategy"

    It almost reminds me of ... well ... the paradigm or myth escapes me at the moment. But I am sure it will come to me eventually ...

    Till then.

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  163. BrandonFebruary 3, 2016 at 2:32 PM

    You see, Glenn, the problem was that you were assuming metaphysical essences, so that when Santi referred to himself as a fly in a bottle, you assumed he meant (as most people would) that he was in need of release from something that could be called a mental prison. In reality, what Santi was doing was self-identifying, and since human nature is just choice, Santi is really a fly in a bottle. Once you remove all the blinders of essentialism and see that if Santi chooses to be a fly, he's a fly, then the logical inconsistency ceases to exist.

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  164. GottfriedFebruary 3, 2016 at 3:11 PM


    I think I'm going to walk back a bit from part of my last post (which I had thought was one of my nicer posts directed at Santi, but which was, alas, apparently beyond the pale): my pledge seems, in retrospect, a bit dramatic. My hopes of getting through to Santi have gone from very low to practically nonexistent, but if he's going to continue inflicting his presence on us it only seems fair that we get to have a bit of fun with him.

    I should probably also clarify, as I know some of my comments could be misleading, that I'm not a Christian in any official sense. I'm a longtime agnostic and sometime atheist who has only fairly recently returned to belief in God (Scott guessed correctly!). And I can state in total honesty that it was mostly pride, hormones, and ignorance that led me to abandon Christianity in my early teens; it is reason and inquiry (as much as my feeble powers will allow), along with some nontrivial encounters with suffering and evil, that have brought me back to the threshold of faith. I'm no Pangloss.

    I'll let Wittgenstein finish for me:

    "I seem to be surrounded now by Roman Catholic converts! I don't know whether they pray for me. I hope they do." (Recollections p. 148)

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  165. ScottFebruary 3, 2016 at 3:17 PM

    "…then the logical inconsistency ceases to exist."

    And then it will finally be time to stop marginalizing and dehumanizing gays, women, and people who think they're flies.

    Words are fluid, not fixed. Language evolves. And when the meaning of a word changes, so does the thing it used to refer to, probably!

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  166. ScottFebruary 3, 2016 at 3:20 PM

    Gottfried:

    "And I can state in total honesty that it was mostly pride, hormones, and ignorance that led me to abandon Christianity in my early teens; it is reason and inquiry (as much as my feeble powers will allow), along with some nontrivial encounters with suffering and evil, that have brought me back to the threshold of faith."

    Thy tale thus far is much like unto mine own.

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  167. laubadetristeFebruary 3, 2016 at 3:44 PM

    Since someone will forever be surprising
    A hunger in himself to be more serious,
    And gravitating with it to this ground,
    Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
    If only that so many dead lie round.

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  168. GlennFebruary 3, 2016 at 8:05 PM

    Brandon,

    You see, Glenn, the problem was that you were assuming metaphysical essences, so that when Santi referred to himself as a fly in a bottle, you assumed he meant (as most people would) that he was in need of release from something that could be called a mental prison.

    In reality, what Santi was doing was self-identifying, and since human nature is just choice, Santi is really a fly in a bottle. Once you remove all the blinders of essentialism and see that if Santi chooses to be a fly, he's a fly, then the logical inconsistency ceases to exist.

    Ah. I confess that the first part is true, and concede the essential point of the second part. (Oh darn, there I go again.)

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  169. Jeremy TaylorFebruary 4, 2016 at 2:41 AM

    I think there really needs to be some kind of special rules for Santi's posts. His main problem is he can't put forward a straight forward point without obscuring it in waffle. Maybe there should be a 200 word limit on his posts to encourage him to argue more succinctly.

    Of course, when he does make a genuine point, he often seems to forget just what that point was in his next post. I don't know how that could be fixed.

    I have grave doubts whether Santi is an honest doubter. Wouldn't an honest doubter try to stay on topic, cut the waffle, and try to argue properly?

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  170. AnonymousFebruary 4, 2016 at 5:09 AM

    Glenn: I consider it right and proper, [...] to be so unlike you that there is little danger of someone else mistakenly thinking of you one the one hand and myself on the other hand as being, so to speak, two peas in a single pod.

    No chance of that. Perhaps one pea and one pod-person…. (There's a hit sitcom in there somewhere… an extraterrestrial comes to earth and tries to learn to act like a human, but always manages to get it backwards. Catch-phrase: <blam!> "Take that!")
    There certainly is an unearthly level of self-confusion in Santi's posts. He denies human nature, yet other people are dehumanising him. Someone expresses hope for him; he sees malice. He expects, implores, berates others for daring to be certain — if only we could consider that Thomism might possibly be wrong! Yet he could never consider that Thomism might necessarily be right. Providing arguments for how evil fits into the world is cognitive dissonance; but making up bits of psychology or history or philosophy constitutes proof. Lots of people disagree with all of us about lots of things, but only Santi is "used to" being shamed, yet never picks up on the common factor. Is it possible to shame someone who has no shame… even when he should? "I thank thee, non-existent Lord, that I am ever so epistemically humble! ...not like that low-down logic-grubbing Thomist over there!"
    Hey, maybe the trick to reading Santi's posts is to play a laugh-track in the background. (A commercial break every seven minutes to go to the bathroom would really help too.)



    Laube: Santi Baton Roue

    Touché.

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  171. AnonymousFebruary 4, 2016 at 5:14 AM

    Santi: You can't have the It in "It is raining," without the raining

    Uh, well, I'm no professor of English, but I'm pretty sure that's: "It isn't raining."

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  172. AnonymousFebruary 4, 2016 at 5:21 AM

    PCK: If you drop logic you saw off the branch you're sitting on and drop reason with it.

    I hate to break it to you, but Santi ain't sitting on that branch. In fact, if you cut it off, sharpened it into a pointy stake and stabbed him through the heart with it, it's the branch that would turn to dust.

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  173. DNWFebruary 4, 2016 at 9:35 AM

    If you can't talk sense with someone, you might be able to talk some sense about them. My aim is not to drag out discussion, but to amplify a point I made earlier.

    For example Santi is on record as saying, "exclusion is dehumanizing". If we take that seriously and literally, rather than as a mere synonym for "you are hurting my feelings" what will this tell us? Say, if we do the logic, and then add a little Euro-style critical thinking re grounds and conditions.

    Consideration of the following quotes might do as well.

    - ... what can we have together? Empathy. We're all on the same mortal boat in a fog, cast far out to sea in space and time.We can have solidarity and empathy with beings in the same existential situation.

    The same existential situation? Not convincingly demonstrated. In what way, is the positive "existential situation" of stipulatively Sui Generis entities "the same"? Mortality functions as a kind of logical "spandrel" here, to steal a term so beloved of A-T critics.

    - We can all understand that evolution makes each of us different; that we are sui generis variants in the dice game of evolution--and yet we can feel empathy and solidarity in our collective flungness.

    Among considerations which arise almost simultaneously, is the realization that there are no good grounds for adverting to "flungness" or "foundness" as conditioning: as the quality of this condition is not equivalent among the "sui generis" set of subjects. And, in order for your flungness to do the psychological work you hope it will do, one must be in a state of disappointed disenchantment ... not mere disenchantment; wherein the impact of this "flungness" is so severely vitiated by a presumptively non-theistic eternal universe in which the concept of "nothing" has no role, that it becomes useless as even a rhetorical lever.

    - Nothing compels such solidarity, but it's not incoherent, and nothing prevents it.

    Well you seem to think it is compelling, if not compelled. Yet, people, even "flung people", if we can still use the term "people" as if it has a univocal or even coherent sense, make decisions on the basis of perceived interests and returns on investments or life expenditures. But, with "sui generis" entities there is no reason to assume that they have any conditioning interests in common.

    It's a choice. "We" is a choice. As Sartre used to say

    And Sartre is probably a good example of someone who it is rational to exclude. Certainly Sartre himself was not shy about excluding others from his circle or life project.

    We can choose one another.

    Aside from the justification of which "one [or] another" we choose to affiliate with invest in and why - since to joyfully choose some is not to glumly accept thralldom to all - there's that problematic presumptive positive class term rearing it's disruptive head through the tissue of any coherent nominalism again.

    The term "spandrel" has been seen in these comments from time to time.

    Imagine a class composed of the attributes of a spandlrel, and we have a class wherein the membership is analogous to the membership of Santi's "each other".

    There is not really anything positive inside there at all.

    (Just occurred to me that the doctrine of evolution is structured somewhat like that as well; which is probably why much to the annoyance of Mayr, some have referred to the "process" as a tautology. A subconscious recognition of this may have contributed to the New Atheists bright idea of using this term in their polemics)

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  174. DNWFebruary 4, 2016 at 12:12 PM

    By the way, and for what it is worth; I don't wish to leave the impression that I imagine there is some functional equivalence between the concept of a tautology and a spandrel. I was - probably obviously - implying the prosaic image of a cluster of tautological statements giving an appearance of a meaningful structure or system when stacked and leaned up against each other at various angles ... the resultant spaces providing the necessary illusion for pattern projecting subjects to go on to ... etc ... etc ...

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  175. SantiFebruary 6, 2016 at 7:00 AM

    DNW:

    I don't have a problem with your libertarianism. I'm not a libertarian myself, but your vegan example is a good one. I still think empathy could come in, and shared purposes, absent God. Camus thought this as well. Thus the meat eater might be helped with medical bills because he's also a taxpayer who helps pay for the maintenance of streets that lead to, say, a business that I like to frequent. If taxation is equitable, it can bond people to a common purpose, and at least some shared social lifting.

    Trade functions the same way. Why trade with those people from other religions and cultures? Mutual interest, keeping life more peaceful and distrustful, etc. You don't need God for the logic of empathy, equitable taxation, and trade to work.

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  176. SantiFebruary 6, 2016 at 7:23 AM

    Glenn:

    You write: "I consider it right and proper, as well as natural and good, not just to be unlike you, and not just to be noticeably unlike you, but to be so unlike you that there is little danger of someone else mistakenly thinking of you one the one hand and myself on the other hand as being, so to speak, two peas in a single pod."

    Well, of course, that's an evolutionary strategy, and you see organism make such moves all the time--and it often works in the environment that they happen to swim in. Along a continuum, you can have shark strategies on one end (swim alone, eat alone, drastically limit affiliation), and on the other, bonobo strategies (group sex, lesbian behavior, hippie communal gentleness, males and females close to the same size, etc.).

    You can thus have a very narrow threshold of affiliation and empathy (your religion, family, nation is best, piss on the rest, etc.), and you're not "wrong," certainly not on evolutionary terms, if that were your position in relation to secular people like me.

    But I personally see the two of us, you and I, as two peas in a pod. We are both interested in religion, speak English, like intellectual stuff, etc.--but you emphasize form and essence, and I emphasize change and variation. These really make up the non-dual--the larger reality--whereof we cannot wholly speak, and so we end up putting forward a partial description of reality, and take sides, then argue in the context of our own contingency and variation, salivating to even the different emphases we place on the sentences that we write.

    It's akin to aspect seeing: you're seeing the vase, I'm seeing the faces. You're seeing the butter-side up, and I'm seeing the butter-side down (to use the famous Dr. Seuss analogy in his Butter Battle Book).

    There are many, many context in which I would be on your side, your ally, in disputes. I assume, were a Hitler to arise in American politics, CNN cameras would find both of us on the same street, resisting him.

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  177. SantiFebruary 6, 2016 at 7:41 AM

    DNW:

    You write: "[I]f you took your own claim of epistemic humility seriously, you would keep this truth about your method at the forefront, and refuse to engage in pseudo-arguments which are in principle incapable of any kind of resolution because of the built-in problems of equivocation; problems of which you are perfectly aware, and have in fact placed there."

    What you're suggesting, DNW, is that, if the problems inherent in communication identified by Wittgenstein, Derrida, Nietzsche, etc. ("truth is a mobile army of metaphors," etc.) are confronted, I should simply fall into silence (like Aquinas did, I would add, at the end of his life).

    This feels too all-or-nothing to me. I don't think you've got to have a perfectly laid out, God-based, metaphysics to ever really speak again--nor do you have to pretend that Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, etc. never happened in intellectual history--to speak. You just have to treat your speech with greater irony, knowing what it might be accomplishing, and what not, and how it's more akin to play, and not to be spell-cast by it, or imagine that only one language should be--or ever can be--overlaid on the whole of reality.

    You can't, in my view, unspill the milk here. Once you see the arguments of historicism and linguistics surrounding the spell-casting nature of language and metaphysics, it's hard to go back and say, "God is still not a ghost bird. I'll keep talking about God as if nothing's has happened since the early nineteenth century surrounding our understanding of the cosmos and language."

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  178. SantiFebruary 6, 2016 at 8:03 AM

    Mr. Green:

    You write: "He denies human nature, yet other people are dehumanising him."

    No, I don't deny that each human being has a nature, and it may be very similar to the people around her at the movie theater in many respects, but not all. For example, some people are temperamentally set to risk taking, others to caution. That's part of their contingent natures, which they locate when they INTROSPECT.

    What I deny is that you can use a generalization about human nature to proscribe what, say, an individual movie-goer's sexual orientation or sexual proclivities OUGHT to be. Because we are variant organisms, with variant natures, some of us will be more along the spectrum of homosexual behaviors as opposed to heterosexual behaviors. If you want to know who somebody is, just ask them. They know. You don't. That's not a denial of human nature, that's combining human nature with what we know about evolution (that it introduces variation in every roll of the genetic dice).

    What Thomists do is overgeneralize about human nature ("women are x, not y; you're feeling and doing y, which is against your fundamental nature...."). I argue that evolution, acting as it does on variation at the level of the individual, renders proscription silly in human nature terms.

    You might be able to talk statistically, generally, and loosely about human nature--"To shop is human nature," "Everybody loves a grand opening of a new store because it's human nature to hunt and gather," etc.--BUT to then translate this down to an individual--"You ought to like shopping more, it's part of human nature"--is where Thomistic-styles of proscription run up against the way we know evolution works (through individual variation).

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  179. scbrownlhrmFebruary 6, 2016 at 10:23 AM



    Santi,

    This fact:

    [1] Symbols and context work together within concept communique rather than standing magically separated from one another.

    And this fact:

    [2] There is not even *one* word which cannot change meaning within the morphing contours of [1].

    Have no connection, at all, to this:

    [3] The supposed reality of deflationary (metaphysical) truth values.

    Metaphysical necessities -- the reach thereof -- are simply untouched by [1] and [2].

    You continue in your nihilism where [3] is concerned and seem to think [1] and [2] somehow (inexplicably) buttress that "connection".

    That you're mistaken is bad enough. But that you merely presuppose said connection and try to build on top of it, rather than justifying the premise that said connection exists, is just the sloppy result of indolence.

    Then, your dance of equivocation two-steps as you try to equate reason's demand for "logical lucidity" to "demanding that we say nothing in an all or none system".

    Dance, Santi, dance.....

    ReplyDelete
  180. scbrownlhrmFebruary 6, 2016 at 10:28 AM


    Santi,

    You're prescribing behavior.

    Dance, Santi, dance.....

    ReplyDelete
  181. GlennFebruary 6, 2016 at 11:41 AM

    But I personally see the two of us, you and I, as two peas in a pod. We are both interested in religion, speak English, like intellectual stuff, etc.--but you emphasize form and essence, and I emphasize change and variation.

    There is no change unless it is change from something, and there is no variation unless is it a variation of something. You deny the 'something', so undermine your claim re 'change and variation'. IOW, and as has happened before, in going on about change and variation while denying forn and essence, you shoot yourself in the foot. I don't know if you also say, "There! Take that!" But I can well imagine you saying, "Ah, that feels good!"

    I assume, were a Hitler to arise in American politics, CNN cameras would find both of us on the same street, resisting him.

    As has been noted before, there is a huge gulf between us. In this case, since you're on one coast, and I'm on the other, it is the expanse of the continental U.S. which separates us. In order that those CNN cameras might find us both on the same street, then, you'll have to pay the price (of transportation) to get to where I am. For some odd, unfathomable reason, I don't see you doing that.

    ReplyDelete
  182. ScottFebruary 6, 2016 at 12:16 PM

    Ho-hum, it's a lazy Saturday afternoon so I may as well while away the time by shooting fish in a barrel. Selecting a paragraph more or less at random:

    "What I deny is that you can use a generalization about human nature to proscribe what, say, an individual movie-goer's sexual orientation or sexual proclivities OUGHT to be."

    As writing teachers should probably know, the word we want here is "prescribe," not "proscribe." We don't "proscribe" what things "OUGHT to be."

    "Because we are variant organisms, with variant natures, some of us will be more along the spectrum of homosexual behaviors as opposed to heterosexual behaviors."

    Possibly true, but stunningly irrelevant. Some of us are "more along the spectrum of autism," too. So what? Does that make autism less of a disorder?

    "If you want to know who somebody is, just ask them. They know. You don't."

    This statement is not only false but dangerously so. ("You really need to cut back seriously on your drinking, Bob." "But, doctor, I self-identify as an alcoholic! It's who I am!" "Oh. Well, okay then. You're the one in a position to know.") And it's especially incongruous coming from someone who claims to be concerned about confirmation bias.

    "That's not a denial of human nature…"

    Of course it is. I mean, not to put too fine a point on it and you should pardon the expression, but bloody duhh.

    "…that's combining human nature with what we know about evolution (that it introduces variation in every roll of the genetic dice)."

    Evolution doesn't "introduce variation"; it presumes it. In fact, left (so to speak) to its own devices, evolution via natural selection reduces variation, which is why it requires a source of new variation that isn't strictly part of the evolutionary process itself.

    ReplyDelete
  183. ScottFebruary 6, 2016 at 1:35 PM

    (I should perhaps also add that there's nothing about "human nature" that precludes "variation" in the first place: human nature "combin[ed] with" variation equals human nature.)

    ReplyDelete
  184. AnonymousFebruary 7, 2016 at 7:21 AM

    Santi: That's not a denial of human nature, that's combining human nature with what we know about evolution

    Again: you say it's not denying human nature, then in the same sentence you go on to deny it. (Even glossing over that "what you know about evolution" is nothing, because your writings make it clear that you don't understand science in general, let alone evolutionary biology in particular.) You can't prove someone wrong by making up new definitions for the words he's using.

    "To shop is human nature,"

    I genuinely cannot tell whether you're trying to be funny or whether that's another case in point.


    Look, here's an honest question for you — simple and straightforward, and calling for a simple, straightforward answer. No bluffing, no word-soup. Given that the folks here hold the positions they do simply because they find the reasons for them compelling (you may not like them or understand them, but rest assured that we did not arrive at these positions by flipping coins; we really do have reasons), do you think that anyone is going to change his mind just because you wish he would? Do you seriously think that someone with good reasons for his views will suddenly start doubting them just because you don't like them, or you think "doubt" is really groovy? What other than coherent counter-argumentation do you think would convince him?

    ReplyDelete
  185. ScottFebruary 7, 2016 at 3:30 PM

    (New profile picture. Testing.)

    ReplyDelete
  186. TaylorFebruary 8, 2016 at 1:39 PM

    I enjoy following these discussions, though rarely speak up.

    What I do find interesting is the variability of 'humanity' that those like Santi like to point out, and that they see as fundamentally different from Thomists and many religious folk, primarily because it eschews an essence to humanity (there isn't a normal human, but humans are varied entities).

    There seems to be a desire to accept and affirm all life as it occurs in it's various iterations. And, yet, so often those like Santi seem to deny the humanity of a non-fully formed human. Which is so odd, to me, because otherwise these people see themselves as taking the high-road when it comes to affirming 'life'.

    What I find further interesting, is that despite this progressivism, I sense a changing in the discourse, especially among some 'continental philosophers', which some of like Santi (who pay attention to literary analysis and probably have some background in reading 'postmodern' and 'continental' philosophy) seem to be well-versed in.

    I wonder which way the winds will blow. And, I wonder if affirming all life, truly, will become more fashionable for guys like Santi, who seem rather inconsistent in their affirming the magic of the vaginal barrier to transform lumps of goo to distinct, living entities.

    (And, we haven't even broached the subject of the fetishization of choice, which I would think someone with continental sensibilities would note as being marred by the spirit of capitalism [not using this phrase in the Weberian sense, btw])

    ReplyDelete
  187. DNWFebruary 8, 2016 at 3:09 PM

    Blogger Santi said...

    DNW:

    You write: "[I]f you took your own claim of epistemic humility seriously, you would keep this truth about your method at the forefront, and refuse to engage in pseudo-arguments which are in principle incapable of any kind of resolution because of the built-in problems of equivocation; problems of which you are perfectly aware, and have in fact placed there."

    What you're suggesting, DNW, is that, if the problems inherent in communication identified by Wittgenstein, Derrida, Nietzsche, etc. ("truth is a mobile army of metaphors," etc.) are confronted, I should simply fall into silence (like Aquinas did, I would add, at the end of his life).

    This feels too all-or-nothing to me ..."



    You will be glad to know that you need not feel that way, since that is not what I was suggesting.

    I was stating outright that given your epistemological bracketing of and placing aside systems of truth in favor of a kind of "pragmatism", and given your adoption of a Rotarian program of arguing rhetorically, rather than logically and categorically, you should try admitting this upfront, rather than having it squeezed out of you.

    It would be an interesting experiment to observe what would happen if you were to say to someone: "Now, what I am saying is not to be taken as universally true, or even true in your case, but I wish you to accede to my request because it makes me feel better and serves my interests even if it does not, yours."

    It would be akin to the Churchlands whom I mentioned earlier, admitting upfront that they had no minds but that they nonetheless - wished insofar as there was a they, that could "wish" - had registered an impulse which caused them to try and modify your brain state and thus affect your behavior. Not that there was as they would be the first to stipulate, that there was any real "purpose" to it.

    I am challenging you to give up using traditional moral language in a deceptive and purely rhetorical manner and to adopt a more transparent and less time-wasting mode of interfacing: or, to at least always admit upfront that what you are doing is wheedling, rather than arguing in any traditional sense. I'm challenging you to drop the camouflage as a matter of principle, and not wait for it to be forcibly stripped from you.

    I'm challenging you to admit that your "arguments" are not arguments in any reals sense but attempts to produce emotional effects in others, and thereby modify their behaviors in a way which you find reinforcing.

    How far do you think you might be able to get in this project in that open manner and without the camouflaging rags of a habit you have long thrown off?

    And if you cannot get by in that manner, what does it say regarding your essential life project, and the role of deception in it?

    You mention the post-moderns. Perhaps you would like to share some of the broader implications of an explicitly anti-logocentric anthropology?

    ReplyDelete
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