Geach on worshipping the right God

In his essay “On Worshipping the Right God” (available in his collection God and the Soul), Catholic philosopher Peter Geach argues that:

[W]e dare not be complacent about confused and erroneous thinking about God, in ourselves or in others.  If anybody’s thoughts about God are sufficiently confused and erroneous, then he will fail to be thinking about the true and living God at all; and just because God alone can draw the line, none of us is in a position to say that a given error is not serious enough to be harmful. (p. 112)

How harmful?  Well, if a worshipper is not even thinking about the true God, then he is not really worshipping the true God, but something else.  That’s pretty serious.  (I would add to Geach’s concern the consideration that atheistic objections to erroneous conceptions of God can lead people falsely to conclude that the notion of God as such is suspect.  That’s pretty serious too.)

Body movin’, mind thinkin’

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

We recall that John B. Watson did not claim that quite all thought was incipient speech; it was all incipient twitching of muscles, and mostly of speech muscles.

W. V. Quine, “Mind and Verbal Dispositions”

We're getting down computer action
Do the robotic satisfaction

Beastie Boys, “Body Movin’”

To perceive a human being behaving in certain characteristic ways just is to perceive him as thinking.  There are two ways to read such a claim: Quine’s and Watson’s reductionist way, and Wittgenstein’s anti-reductionist way.  The Beastie Boys, of course, were putting forward a computational-functionalist variation on Quinean behaviorism.  (OK, not really.  Just pretend.  It’s a better quote than any I could have gleaned from a functionalist philosopher.)

Around the web

Metaphysician E. J. Lowe discusses ontology, physics, Locke, Aristotle, logic, laws of nature, potency and act, dualism, science fiction, and other matters in an interview at 3:AM Magazine. 

Over at The Montreal Review, Alex Sztuden responds to Leiter and Weisberg’s review of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos.

Frank Beckwith replies to David Bentley Hart on natural law in The Catholic Thing.

EvolutionBlog needs better Nagel critics

EvolutionBlog’s Jason Rosenhouse tells us in a recent post that he hasn’t read philosopher Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos.  And it seems obvious enough from his remarks that he also hasn’t read the commentary of any of the professional philosophers and theologians who have written about Nagel sympathetically -- such as my own series of posts on Nagel and his critics, or Bill Vallicella’s, or Alvin Plantinga’s review of Nagel, or Alva Noë’s, or John Haldane’s, or William Carroll’s, or J. P. Moreland’s.  What he has read is a critical review of Nagel’s book written by a non-philosopher, and a couple of sympathetic journalistic pieces about Nagel and some of his defenders.  And on that basis he concludes that “Nagel needs better defenders.”

New ACPQ article

My article “Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought” appears in the latest issue of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly.  Here is the abstract:

James Ross developed a simple and powerful argument for the immateriality of the intellect, an argument rooted in the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition while drawing on ideas from analytic philosophers Saul Kripke, W. V. Quine, and Nelson Goodman.  This paper provides a detailed exposition and defense of the argument, filling out aspects that Ross left sketchy.  In particular, it elucidates the argument’s relationship to its Aristotelian-Scholastic and analytic antecedents, and to Kripke’s work especially; and it responds to objections or potential objections to be found in the work of contemporary writers like Peter Dillard, Robert Pasnau, Brian Leftow, and Paul Churchland.

Cardinal virtues and counterfeit virtues

The cardinal virtues are wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice.  They are so called because they are traditionally regarded as the “hinge” (cardo) on which the rest of morality turns.  We find them discussed in Plato’s Republic and given a more given systematic exposition in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae.  

For Plato, these virtues are related to the three main parts of the soul and the corresponding three main classes in his ideal city.  Wisdom is the characteristic virtue of the highest part of the soul -- the rational part -- and of the highest class within the city, the ruling philosopher-kings.  Courage is the characteristic virtue of the middle, spirited part of the soul, and of the soldiers who constitute the second main class in the city.  Moderation is the characteristic attribute of the lowest, desiring part of the soul and of the lowest, productive class of the city.  Justice in turn is the proper ordering of the three parts of the soul and the city, each doing its part.

The Incompetent Hack

You might recognize the name of atheist blogger Chris Hallquist, who styles himself “The Uncredible Hallq,” from an earlier post.  I there characterized him as “unliterate” on the grounds that while he is capable of reading, he does not bother to do so.  (Hallquist had egregiously misrepresented something I had written in an earlier post, and made some silly and false remarks about what was and was not covered in my book Aquinas while admitting that he hadn’t read more than 15 pages of it.)  But it seems that was not quite right.  It may be that, like Otto in the movie A Fish Called Wanda (to borrow an example I used in The Last Superstition), Hallquist does read; he just doesn’t understand.

Nagel and his critics, Part II

Whereas my First Things review of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos accentuated the positive, the first post in this series put forward some criticisms of the book.  Let’s turn now to the objections against Nagel raised by Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg in their review in The Nation.  

First some stage setting is in order.  As I indicated in the previous post, Mind and Cosmos is mostly devoted to the positive task of spelling out what a non-materialist version of naturalism might look like.  The negative task of criticizing materialist forms of naturalism is carried out in only a relatively brief and sketchy way, and here Nagel is essentially relying on arguments he and others have developed at greater length elsewhere.  Especially relevant for present purposes is a line of argument Nagel put forward in what is perhaps his most famous piece of writing -- his widely reprinted 1974 article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” -- and developed further in later works like The View From Nowhere.

Who wants to be an atheist?

Suppose something like Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? hypothesis turned out to be true, and the God of the Bible was really an extraterrestrial who had impressed the Israelites with some high tech.  Would you conclude: “A ha!  Those atheists sure have egg on their faces now!  Turns out the Bible was right!  Well, basically right, anyway.  True, God’s nature isn’t exactly what we thought it was, but He does exist after all!”  Presumably not, no more than if the God of Exodus turned out to be Moses with an amplifier and some red fizzies he’d dumped into the Nile.  The correct conclusion to draw in either case would not be “God exists, but He wasn’t what He seemed” but rather “God does not exist, He only seemed to.”

Or suppose something like Frank Tipler’s Omega Point theory turned out to be correct and the universe is destined to evolve into a vastly powerful supercomputer (to which Tipler ascribes a kind of divinity).  If you had been inclined toward atheism, do you think you would now conclude: “Wow, turns out God does exist, or at least will exist someday!”  Or rather only: “Wow, so this really weird gigantic supercomputer will exist someday!  Cool.  But what does that have to do with God?”

Was Aquinas a dualist?

At the start of chapter 4 of Aquinas (the chapter on “Psychology”), I wrote:

As I have emphasized throughout this book, understanding Aquinas requires “thinking outside the box” of the basic metaphysical assumptions (concerning cause, effect, substance, essence, etc.) that contemporary philosophers tend to take for granted.  This is nowhere more true than where Aquinas’s philosophy of mind is concerned.  Indeed, to speak of Aquinas’s “philosophy of mind” is already misleading.  For Aquinas does not approach the issues dealt with in this modern philosophical sub-discipline in terms of their relevance to solving the so-called “mind-body problem.”  No such problem existed in Aquinas’s day, and for him the important distinction was in any case not between mind and body, but rather between soul and body.  Even that is potentially misleading, however, for Aquinas does not mean by “soul” what contemporary philosophers tend to mean by it, i.e. an immaterial substance of the sort affirmed by Descartes.  Furthermore, while contemporary philosophers of mind tend to obsess over the questions of whether and how science can explain consciousness and the “qualia” that define it, Aquinas instead takes what is now called “intentionality” to be the distinctive feature of the mind, and the one that it is in principle impossible to explain in materialistic terms.  At the same time, he does not think of intentionality in quite the way contemporary philosophers do.  Moreover, while he is not a materialist, he is not a Cartesian dualist either, his view being in some respects a middle position between these options.  But neither is this middle position the standard one discussed by contemporary philosophers under the label “property dualism.”  And so forth.

The divine intellect

A reader asks:

[I] was curious, given your work in philosophy of mind, what you would say is the most plausible notion we have of God's mental content… [T]he popular theories (functionalism, phenomenology, holism, etc) all seem to violate the doctrine of divine simplicity… I have a hard time conceiving of any conception of minds on which the mind is not, in some sense of the word, modular, or complex.  Minds have got to have thoughts at the very least on the most basic, primitivist conceptions, and that seems to require that minds have parts.

Brain hacking and mind reading

Over the last week or so several news stories have appeared (e.g. here and here) suggesting that it is technologically possible to “hack” the brain and extract from it PIN numbers, credit card data, and the like.  This naturally raises the question whether such a possibility vindicates materialism.  The short answer is that it does not.  I’ve commented on claims of this sort before (here and here) but it is worth revisiting the issue in light of what I’ve said in recent posts about how the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) philosopher understands the relationship between thought and brain activity.

Think, McFly, think!

As Aristotelians and Thomists use the term, intellect is that faculty by which we grasp abstract concepts (like the concepts man and mortal), put them together into judgments (like the judgment that all men are mortal), and reason logically from one judgment to another (as when we reason from all men are mortal and Socrates is a man to the conclusion that Socrates is mortal).  It is to be distinguished from imagination, the faculty by which we form mental images (such as a visual mental image of what your mother looks like, an auditory mental image of what your favorite song sounds like, a gustatory mental image of what pizza tastes like, and so forth); and from sensation, the faculty by which we perceive the goings on in the external material world and the internal world of the body (such as a visual experience of the computer in front of you, the auditory experience of the cars passing by on the street outside your window, the awareness you have of the position of your legs, etc.).

Sentient plants?

Economist Gene Callahan (a friend of this blog) calls my attention to this article, which claims that plants are capable of “sensory” responses to their environments, and even that they “talk and listen to one another.”  Gene concludes that “contrary to Aristotle, plants are active and communicate to each other, with sounds among other methods” so that “neo-Aristotelians ought to drop the idea that plants lack sensations.”  And while Gene allows that “this certainly does not invalidate all of Aristotle's metaphysics,” it does in his view show that Aristotelians should be wary of once again “ma[king] the mistake of tying Aristotelian metaphysics to Aristotelian natural science.”

But (no disrespect to Gene intended) as usual with these breathless journalistic “Science has shown that…!” stories, the actual facts are far less exciting than the sensationalistic packaging would suggest.

Philosophy of nature and philosophy of [fill in the blank]

A reader of my recent post on the philosophy of nature asks some excellent questions:

I wonder, where does the philosophy of physics and in general the philosophy of science fall in between the scheme of metaphysics and philosophy of nature?...

Also, where does the discussion on the topic of the laws of nature belong?  Is that also philosophy of nature? 

Let’s start with the question of how the philosophy of science is related to the philosophy of nature.  Recall from my recent post that as the middle ground field of the philosophy of nature gradually disappeared off the radar screen of modern philosophy, the disciplines on either side of it -- on the one hand, metaphysics and on the other, empirical science (in the modern rather than Aristotelian sense of “science”) -- came to seem the only possible avenues of investigation of reality.  Recall also that the methodology of metaphysics came to seem a matter of “conceptual analysis,” while any study with empirical content came to be identified as part of natural science.  The very notion that there could be a middle ground field of study with empirical foundations but arriving at necessary truths, thus transcending the contingent world described by physics, chemistry, etc. and pointing the way to metaphysics -- as Aristotelian philosophy of nature claims to do -- was largely forgotten.

Natural theology, natural science, and the philosophy of nature

Physicist Robert Oerter has added some further installments to his series of posts on my book The Last Superstition, including a reply to some of my criticisms of his criticisms of the book.  I will respond to his latest remarks in a forthcoming post, but before doing so it seemed to me that it would be useful to make some general remarks about certain misunderstandings that have not only cropped up in my exchange with Oerter and in the combox discussions it has generated, but which frequently arise in disputes about natural theology (and, for that matter, in disputes about natural law ethics and about the immateriality and immortality of the soul).  In particular, they tend to arise in disputes about what we might call classical natural theology -- natural theology grounded in philosophical premises deriving from the Aristotelian, Neo-Platonic, and/or Scholastic traditions.

Reading Rosenberg, Part X

And now we reach, at long last, the end of our detailed critical look at Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality.  In this final post I want to examine what Rosenberg has to say about a set of philosophical arguments he regards as “among the last serious challenges to scientism” (p. 228).  The arguments in question all entail that the realm of conscious experience -- what common sense says we know only “from inside” (p. 238), from a point of view “somewhere behind the eyes” (p. 222) -- cannot be accounted for in terms of neuroscience or physical science more generally.  In his treatment of these arguments, we get Rosenberg simultaneously at his best and at his worst.

What is a soul?

To be more precise, what is a human soul?  Or to be even more precise, what is a human being?  For that is really the key question; and I sometimes think that the biggest obstacle to understanding what the soul is is the word “soul.”  People too readily read into it various erroneous notions (erroneous from an Aristotelian-Thomistic point of view, anyway) -- ghosts, ectoplasm, or Cartesian immaterial substances.  Even the Aristotelian characterization of the soul as the form of the living body can too easily mislead.  When those unfamiliar with Aristotelian metaphysics hear “form,” they are probably tempted to think in terms of shape or a configuration of parts, which is totally wrong.  Or perhaps they think of it in Platonic terms, as an abstract universal that the individual human being participates in -- also totally wrong.  Or they suspect that since it is the form of the living body it cannot coherently be said to subsist apart from that body -- totally wrong again.   So let us, for the moment, put out of our minds all of these ideas and start instead with the question I raised above.  What is a human being?

Scruton on “neuroenvy”

We’ve had several occasions (e.g. here, here, and here) to examine the fallacies committed by those who suppose that contemporary neuroscience has radically altered our understanding of human nature, and even undermined our commonsense conception of ourselves as conscious, rational, freely choosing agents.  In a recent Spectator essay, Roger Scruton comments on the fad for neuroscientific pseudo-explanations within the humanities, labeling it “neuroenvy.”

How to animate a corpse

One of the downsides of being a philosopher is that it makes it harder to suspend disbelief when watching horror flicks.  Plot holes become more glaring and speculations seem wilder when one’s business is looking for fallacies.  On the other hand, there is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it; hence there’s no one better placed to find a way to make even the most preposterous yarn seem at least remotely plausible.  A case in point, submitted for your approval: My take on a segment from Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, adapted from H. P. Lovecraft’s short story “Cool Air.”  (You can find it on Hulu and YouTube.)  Watching it for the first time recently, I was annoyed by what at first seemed to me an obviously nonsensical twist ending.  On further reflection, there is a way to make sense of it, if one makes the appropriate metaphysical assumptions.