tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post7722157598536823694..comments2024-03-28T03:20:15.940-07:00Comments on Edward Feser: Putnam and analytical Thomism, Part IIEdward Feserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13643921537838616224noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-56478511531372034732020-01-18T15:12:13.613-08:002020-01-18T15:12:13.613-08:00This comment has been removed by the author.Joshua McGillivrayhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01915709602991970213noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-52103600033124557922020-01-04T02:33:20.062-08:002020-01-04T02:33:20.062-08:00You are aware, unlike some modern Thomists, the re...You are aware, unlike some modern Thomists, the real St. Thomas thought (and this is about epistemology) that when you believe, you need to believe not just what God wanted you to know as guidelines for your salvation, but also (insofar as you read the Bible) how the doctrine was revealed to us (secondary object of faith : no obligation for laymen to be aware of it, but obligation to believe it if aware).<br /><br />This ties in with me searching for a post with not already too many comments on which I can post a link to my essay on epistemology of Genesis 3:<br /><br /><a href="https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2020/01/how-do-we-know-events-of-genesis-3.html" rel="nofollow"><i>Creation vs. Evolution : How do We Know the Events of Genesis 3?</i><br />https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2020/01/how-do-we-know-events-of-genesis-3.html</a>Hans Georg Lundahlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01055583255516264955noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-15287892939418409162016-07-30T07:51:06.557-07:002016-07-30T07:51:06.557-07:00"But somebody had better be able and willing ..."But somebody had better be able and willing to do it. Metaphysics must always be a part of religion even if it is not the whole of it."<br /><br />I am late to this thread, but I certainly agree with this point. I think "heart" people miss that a passion for encountering the divine must involve the head must as the heart. <br /><br />"Absorb my mind" - this is from a prayer of St. Francis (not one he wrote, but prayed, I believe.) <br /><br />I was a physics major in college and a computer programmer after that - an environment filled with big egos (physics is the superior science, don't you know?) and so immersed in materialism that no other light was allowed in. It's been years since I read any philosophy (busy raising 6 children) but I did read quite a bit before I converted because I needed to know that it was rational to believe that God exists. I am now just relearning much of what I have forgotten - and all the new arguments in the nearly 30 years since that time. <br /><br />While I don't believe that God can ever be "proved" to exist because of our human limitations, I do think our desire to unite with God means pursuing him intellectually as well as in every other way available to us.<br /><br />So, thanks for taking it up. <br /><br />"I believe that You, O Jesus, are in the most holy Sacrament. I love<br /> You and desire You. Come into my heart. I embrace You. Oh, never leave me. <br /> May the burning and most sweet power of Your love, O Lord Jesus Christ, I<br /> beseech You, absorb my mind that I may die through love of Your love, Who were <br /> graciously pleased to die through love of my love." (St. Francis) Elizabeth Gormleyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14233587289334878913noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-12576417399509049692016-06-01T06:10:24.973-07:002016-06-01T06:10:24.973-07:00 Michael Benoit I do hop Ed has seen your comment!... Michael Benoit I do hop Ed has seen your comment!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-15126237857135170302016-05-26T12:01:49.064-07:002016-05-26T12:01:49.064-07:00When you are talking about men and women, it is im...When you are talking about men and women, it is important to keep your eye steadily on final cause, the cause of causes. Men are oriented towards reproducing through an act that is relatively brief and takes place outside their bodies. They do not have an intimate bodily relationship with their children. Therefore any relationship with their children tends to be mediated by things like law and covenant. Women are oriented towards reproducing through an sexual act that takes place inside their bodies and which results in an immediate, direct and ongoing body to body relationship with their children that involves feeding the child directly from their own body. This continues after birth with nursing. This is the essential difference between men and women.<br /><br />This is true even if there is a breakdown or failure to develop in a person's reproductive organs. We can tell what a womb or penis is for, even if it doesn't work or doesn't work anymore. We can also tell what having an X or Y chromosome (in a particular spot) is for too. That is oriented towards developing either a woman or man.<br /><br />Intersex people are also not . They aren't some magical third kind of being with wholly other kinds of body parts, but rather they combine recognizably male and female body parts in one person. It is a matter of some controversy whether these persons are really, in fact, either male or female. But even if they really are some combination of male and female, their bodies are not some wholly other thing nor are they on some supposed continuum.<br /><br />Statistical differences in personality and behaviour (or even in physical characteristics) flow from this essential difference, but are not identical with it. Many women have some stereotypically masculine interests and personality traits, and vice versa, and there is nothing necessarily wrong with that. There are many suites of traits that can get the job of being a man or woman done, so to speak. Though, of course, there can be suites of traits that can be a hindrance to fulfilling your purpose as a man or woman too, and ought to be corrected. Traditional societies will often tend to steer people towards a suite of traits that works for being a man or woman in their particular circumstances.<br /><br />Anyway, a bit of a sketch. There is a blogger called Alastair Roberts who writes a lot on these issues. Well worth seeking out.Thursdayhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13002311410445623799noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-29329267945877364392016-05-26T08:58:21.951-07:002016-05-26T08:58:21.951-07:00I realize that this is off-topic, but perhaps it w...I realize that this is off-topic, but perhaps it would be timely for Dr. Feser to make a post on the metaphysics of gender, by which I mean: an A-T explication of what makes a man a man, and a woman a woman, as well as a rebuttal to the claim that someone having a male body and a "female brain" makes them, in fact a female. <br /><br />In short, I think it would be fruitful to see an A-T handling of the whole transgender question. George Burkehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07140560695237124620noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-76587255587839058212016-05-24T12:46:38.066-07:002016-05-24T12:46:38.066-07:00This discussion reminds me a lot of By Knowledge a...This discussion reminds me a lot of <i>By Knowledge and by Love: Charity and Knowledge in the Moral Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas</i> by Michael S. Sherwin. He has a great discussion of the interplay of the will and the intellect / love and knowledge. I wish I had more time to absorb it. But the way one resolves this question has a massive impact on one's theology and philosophy. <br /><br />Cheers,<br />DanielDanielhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17479435356630882897noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-52463426011741938222016-05-24T11:50:36.605-07:002016-05-24T11:50:36.605-07:00The Thomistic understanding of analogical language...The Thomistic understanding of analogical language is both more complex and more subtle than many commentators on it realize. Witness the variety of interpretations of it in the lterature; from Cajetan through James Anderson's Bond of Being, to George Klubertanz's St. Thomas on Analogy and Ralph McInerny's Aquinas and Analogy. Professor has provided a reasonably good summary of the majority view on what Thomas meant. <br /><br />Always interesting to read about folks who are genuinely trying to enter into dialogue with Aristotelian/Thomisic philosophy.Moonfallhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12512038282639072566noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-92039769468320215302016-05-24T09:02:10.400-07:002016-05-24T09:02:10.400-07:00Awesome. Thanks so much for these posts. I learn s...Awesome. Thanks so much for these posts. I learn so much from them and I tell my wife about them all the time. I am also starting to introduce my 4 year old daughter (don't worry i am not over whelming her) to some of the metaphysical concepts involved in classical theism. My wife think's she'll grow up to think daddy's funny but i think it'll make her a smarter person a more rational thinker and hopefully a better and life long Christian. <br /><br />You da man.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-71610620872771724352016-05-23T15:13:20.311-07:002016-05-23T15:13:20.311-07:00I think Putnam needed to draw on the concept of co...I think Putnam needed to draw on the concept of connaturality to clarify his position. Broadly understood, connaturality is the idea that a seeker of knowledge has to be in tune with the source of knowledge in order to receive it. No philosophical argument, no personal testimony, and no presentation of the evidence for the resurrection would have convinced Saul of Tarsus that he was wrong about Christianity. What was necessary was a life changing experience, One's own experience trumps everything else. Putnam was vague but correct in his remarks on experience. It is not a question of heart knowledge being more important than head knowledge. All our knowledge gets filtered through one's lived experience. Lamonthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17534269474358121464noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-87833473555687967872016-05-23T10:10:10.610-07:002016-05-23T10:10:10.610-07:00To His Fesership,
By the way,I wonder how much lo...<br /><br />To His Fesership,<br /><br />By the way,I wonder how much longer Putnam's blog will be up and whether it needs to be archived before it disappears as a suspended account.<br /><br />I would guess that there is someone who will keep it up for some time?<br /><br />It has a good deal more technical (leaning) argument on it, than I would have suspected and appears at first glance to be a valuable, and free, resourceDNWnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-56752901885700379592016-05-23T09:07:58.962-07:002016-05-23T09:07:58.962-07:00"What sorts of experience Putnam has in mind ...<i>"What sorts of experience Putnam has in mind is not entirely clear -- perhaps it is ethical experience or aesthetic experience, or perhaps he sees religious experience as something sui generis. The fact that he uses the specific term “religious” to pick out what he wants to distinguish from philosophy and metaphysics, and the influence that Wittgenstein’s writings on religion have had on him (as is evident from some of Putnam’s other work), incline me to think that he probably regards religious experience as sui generis. In any event, variations on this “more heart than head” theme are a staple of modern theology, from Pascal to Schleiermacher to Maurice Blondel to David Bentley Hart."</i><br /><br />That is what usually comes most readily to mind, given the faith vs reason dichotomy we are all familiar with.<br /><br />Add to that formula of the will or right to believe, seen of course as a kind of inalienable human right to delusional self-consolation as a coping method, and you have pretty much the standard framework. And I think, it is a framework more or less tacitly endorsed by many Christians with fideist leanings.<br /><br />Nonetheless, it might be that Putnam has something in mind of a more phenomenological and less emotion driven content: i.e., of a confrontation with being, in the sense of being led by some event to advert to the startling fact that "we are", as Gilson would put it.<br /><br />Putnam might have in mind an experiential event which could be described as similar to the events - life crises or not - which cause that surprising adverting to, the mental apprehension of, or the appreciation that, "being is": a sudden, often startling, apprehension or appreciation which is described by so many phenomenological philosophers.<br /><br />Maybe Putnam meant that. Or, maybe not.DNWnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-33701050061340308692016-05-23T05:08:20.204-07:002016-05-23T05:08:20.204-07:00"I would say that I cannot explain how [theol..."I would say that I cannot explain how [theological language] works except in religious terms, by showing how the use of those terms figures in my religious life, showing how projecting those terms from my non-religious to my religious life is an essential part of that life. And neither can I explain what I mean by ‘God’, except by showing how my use of the term figures in my religious life -- and that is not something I can do at just any time or to any person. Of course, this disbars me from claiming that I can “prove” that God exists to an atheist. But I have already indicated that that is not a claim that I think a religious person should make. (p. 498)<br /><br />Rather, says Putnam:<br /><br />I am inclined to say… that while the potentiality for religious language, the possibility of making it one’s own, is a basic human potentiality, the exercise of that potentiality is not a real possibility for every human being at every time… I myself believe that it requires something experiential and not merely intellectual to awaken that possibility in a human being… But what if the belief in God were simply a belief in the strength of a certain philosophical argument?... On the supposition that that is all that was going on, I would say that this was not belief in God at all, but a metaphysical illusion. (p. 492)"<br /><br />This seems like the typical American pragmatism and corresponding distrust of the universality of reason. What are we to make of philosophical statements like Moses', "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD", and St. Paul's, "For in him we live, and move, and are"? Are these statements not philosophical in that they appeal to men's reason, to their understanding? Even if they are speaking ultimately on their prophetic or apostolic authority and not on the authority of reason, yet they still appeal to the understanding. According to American pragmatism, Moses shouldn't have said that God is One, he should have embodied God's "oneness" in his own "living", and that would have demonstrated that God was One better than any appeal to the mind; St. Paul shouldn't have said that we exist in God, he should have just lived a godly life and let that speak for itself. It's this typical Anglo pig-headedness which sneers at "abstraction" and will hear only about what is "practical". There's also a kind of sentimentalism implied in it too: my religion shouldn't be reduced to cold philosophical abstractions, because they don' capture the wonderful experiences I have in my religion. Well, just because one uses philosophical abstraction to support one's religious beliefs, does not mean that one reduces the whole of one's religion to such abstractions; there's a difference between being a natural theologian like Aristotle, and a practicing Catholic like St. Thomas, yet St. Thomas didn't have problems in borrowing from Aristotle.<br /><br />===<br /><br />Analogical language in describing God is interesting. I don't like negative theology which states that God can only be distinguished by what he isn't, because I think it's more true to say that God is a divine fullness than a divine emptiness or void, which is where negative theology seems naturally to lead.<br /><br />For example, "God is life". Though God does not live in the same way that animals live. What is life? I would say that life is the quality of self-motion. A living substance is one that moves itself internally, is the efficient cause of its own motions. This does not apply univocally to God, because God does not move. But he is in a sense self-moving, and is the supreme self-mover above all living creatures, in that he is perfectly his own cause.Jackhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13858873453982708283noreply@blogger.com