Vomit the Lukewarm

2006-02-22T12:42:00.000-08:00

NEW BLOG LOCATION

Without further ado, Vomit the Lukewarm is now located at http://www.liverevolt.com/assimilatiodei . It is now named "Assimilatio Dei".

Please change your bookmarks to reflect this development. Thank you, and enjoy!

2006-02-21T17:12:00.000-08:00

Going from this to that.

Certain things can be described as going from _____ to ______. The things in the blanks are-properly speaking- contraries sharing a common genus; we could not, for example, put "green" and "two feet long" in the blanks. A little reflection reveals to us that everything we actually know- cats, season, planets, forces, energy, etc. are things that "go from______ to ______" They move positions, they increase and decrease, they go from being one kind to another, and so on.

There is one condition to "going from _____ to ____": you can't have the thing in the second blank. By definition, then the thing that goes from one thing to a to another has to lack the thing in the second blank, and inasmuch as it might have that thing, it can't go to it. In other words, one necessary condition of things that go from one thing to another is that they lack something.

Another condition of going from ____ to ____ is that the thing has to be able to get to the second thing, and it has to start from the first thing. We cannot, in real truth, be on our way to someplace that is not there.

Other condition is that the second term be the completion of this "being able to get to the second thing". This second thing is either positive of privative, but if it is privative, its isn't called a "thing" except per accidens: engine failure or a crushed house, for example, is more the absence of something than a thing. This is why when we speak about a thing going from this thing to that thing, the "that" indicates a certain fulfillment always, but a perfection when we use the word "thing" in its proper sense.

2006-02-19T16:02:00.000-08:00

for what all think to be good, that, we assert, is good- he that subverts our opinion is the belief of all mankind will hardly pursuade us to believe his own either.

Nic. Eth, 10, chap ii

Our most intimate connection to the opinion of all mankind is through the language we speak. Our words are artifacts of billions of individual lives and minds. These words, our tools of thought, are in many cases older even than history, and can be traced to a time that left us nothing but root stems like "erg" or "ad" or "gno" or "len".

2006-02-19T10:57:00.000-08:00

True things I heard in the last week, etc:

-Typical male sins are impersonal: drinking, reckless behavior, pornography, and the whole filthy heap of dehumanizing sexual sins.

Typical female sins are personal: manipulation, brutally destructive gossip, and sentimentality in the face of evil persons. Sexual sins tend to be sentimental.

-Modern political science has a curious influence from both John Calhoun and modern advertising practices. In different ways, this seems to make it a science influenced by a love of slavery.

-Christ as eucharistic is the union between the two great commandments- we cannot love God, i.e we cannot make the perfect loving communion with God, without at the same time making a communion with all who receive.

-We can't market sex except by marketing persons- which involves treating a person in exactly the same way one would treat, say, pork bellies or kleenex. The offense here not so much the lack of some distinction (it is not evil for a scale to make no distinction between a 50 pound hog and a 50 pound person) rather it is the confounding the good in itself with the good per accidens. Man is the good for which products exist, not a product that exists for man.

-The human mind, considered as a passive power, knows absolutely everything, without exception. The mind is intrinsically aware of its own absence of limitations even in the mere act of counting, but in the same way, it can relate to "perfection", "cause", "existence". This awareness of the infinity of which we are unable to know in actuality allows us in a certain sense to know what we do not know. Every number that the human mind actually knows is finite, but it does not follow that we need thing of all numbers as being finite- we can in fact know that they have no intrinsic limit. So too with perfections. Every one we know is finite and related to a subject- but we still can be aware that some perfection has no intrinsic limitation. We can even know that it is necessary. I am aware that the two cases of number and perfection are not perfectly equivalent, and I do not propose them as being so. I only mean to indicate the way in which the mind, by being aware of its passive infinity, can in a certain sense "know what it does not know", or as the mystics say "to know God as unknown".

2006-02-18T11:49:00.000-08:00

One essential beginning of metaphysics is seeing Parmenides as a problem that needs to be addressed- as opposed to ignored or dismissed.

______________________

The life of philosophy: Georgias 526d

2006-02-17T21:15:00.000-08:00

What is the thing in us that we seal with a word?

Everyone, and by this I mean everyone- from the crudest materialist to the most spiritualized Platonist, from Marxists to disciples of Berkeley- agree that knowledge involves "having something in mind". We all agree that when we know- by reason or imagination- certain things are "in" us. We are left to explain what this thing is within us, and how is it in us (there it is again, that phrase "what this thing is..." ousia).

2006-02-17T19:25:00.000-08:00

The good is communicative of itself.

St. Thomas agrees, but goes further: it is the nature of act- that is, of being- that it communicate itself as much as possible. One of the easiest thomistic axioms to misunderstand is "everything acts inasmuch as it is in act". St. Thomas wants us to take the axiom with the emphasis on the word acts: i.e he wants us to read the axiom as "everything, insofar as it is in act, is acting." see the below, but more importantly, De Potentia, Q. II, art. 1. Where he simply says outright that it is the nature of act to communicate itself, for everything acts inasmuch as it is in act.

2006-02-16T17:09:00.000-08:00

It makes perfect sense when you think about it:

SCG, I, c. 45:

Every substance exists for the sake of its operation

...so just as matter exists for the sake of form, so form, which is [being] in first act, exists for the sake of operation, which is [being] in second act. Operation is thus the end of a created thing.

ST, I q.105, a 5

Man exists for the sake of Science and moral virtue. In a virtuous man, one encounters the fullness of a man.

2006-02-16T09:56:00.000-08:00

In itself and not in itself

The Categories distinguishes all things into those that are in a subject, and those that are not in a subject. To be in a subject means to really depend upon the subject for its existence. Whatever is not in a subject is a substance (ousia, see below), either primarily (John) or secondarily (man, animal).

One of the characteristic marks of perennial philosophy is this irreducible and primary division between derived existence and existence not being derived. This allows for a certain order, or even a hierarchy among beings. Since there is no common genus between derived beings and beings not derived, but at the same time the mind is naturally carried from the idea of the one to the other, we approximate a genus by a sort of incomplete thought, like "_______ of existence" where certain terms can be placed in the blank. The relation between the various results are said to be "named analogously".

2006-02-15T10:06:00.000-08:00

Satire Draft

What if one leveled the same arguments that philosophy has to deal with against, say, Chemistry?

1.) Chemistry, during the time of Dalton and Lavossier, was free and unfettered. But in the times after that, chemistry hardened into dogmatism. Students were forced to memorize the names of the elements; they were taught outdated models of thinking about "atoms as little balls"; students had to learn the ways of balancing chemical equations by rote; anyone who doubted the canonical status of anything in the popular theory was marginalized...

2.) We really should read the writings of the 13th century chemists- there's a lot of good things that we can learn from Madrigon of Chalon, and Rodger of Oxford. Both of them showed some things about the relative densities of things, which is the grounding of modern chemistry. And besides, even if we disagree with what they are saying, we need to know how to respond to people who believe the sorts of arguments they give.

3.) Chemistry is more about the questions we ask about matter. Why should we be killing the spirit of questioning about matter?

4.) Why Should chemistry study matter? There are many other ways of understanding chemistry.

2006-02-14T15:58:00.000-08:00

Anyone can doubt or question whether he can know "the metaphysical essence of nature"

Aristotle claims only to know what some things are. So does everyone. You know what language this is.

2006-02-14T12:02:00.000-08:00

The Categories and Ousia ---Updated---

It's interesting to follow the word "ousia" though the Categories. Ousia first means "what something is", but it is also the name for the first category of things (usually called "substance").

The word first appears in the opening sentence of the book: "things are said equivocally when... the logos of ousia is different... things are univocal when the logos of ousia is the same." Here "logos" seems to be "account" and "ousia" means "what something is". Another acceptable translation of ousia here would be "essence".

In chapter five of the Categories we read that "ousia, in the truest, strictest, and primary sense of the term is what is neither said of a subject, nor in a subject." By "said of", he means "explained in reference to" and "in" means "deriving existence from". We spoke of this distinction between "of"and "in" a subject below.

The central term in ousia is "what". When we understand ousia as primarily the "what" of a thing, i.e. "what a thing is" it becomes easier to undersand what is commonly called secondary substance. Secondary substance is an absurd sounding concept in English, but if we understand it as meaning "what a thing is secondarily" then it makes more sense. If I point to John Smith, it makes sense to say he is John Smith "primarily" and man "secondarily" or even more generally, he is an animal.

If we call ousia "what" then we can also more easily see the relation that all the other categories have to it. This is how Aristotle initially accounts for the categories, although, as Neoteronous points out, there is no pronoun for "what" in the last four Categories:

How large (quantity)

what sort (quality)

to what (relation)

when (what time)

where (what place)

to lie (what position)

to have (what circumstance)

to act (what doing)

to suffer (what suffering)

2006-02-13T16:45:00.000-08:00

It's striking to notice the number of similarities there are between leveling a few insults at people and eating junk food: we do it to relieve stress, we get a small charge of good feeling, we don't cause any desirable growth, we easily get hooked on doing it, etc.

Something like this is indicated in the Psalms, where one who sins is described as having "a heart that is as fat as grease"

2006-02-13T12:31:00.000-08:00

Ammonius on the Categories

At the beginning of the Categories, Aristotle divides all uncombined words into four groups:

What is said of a subject, not in a subject (kath' and en hupokeimen__)

What is not of, but is in.

What is of, and in.

What is not of, nor in.

Examples of these, respectively

man

a particular white, or a particular piece of knowledge

white

Joe, or "this horse"

Ammonius arranges these in a square of opposition: he says that all is either substance, or accident, and either universal or particular, therefore, there is, in order:

Universal substance

particular accident

universal accident

particular substance.

2006-02-12T09:32:00.000-08:00

Having taught Latin for several years, I've heard a fair number of kids whine about how useless it is.

The fact of the matter, though, is that there is simply no comparison between the literature of the ancients and anything composed in a romance language. To complain that Latin is a dead language can only be a part of a proof of the fact that dead men are the only ones worth listening to. The sort of thing that Virgil does with words simply cannot be done in English, and the craftsmanship of what he does can no more be done by a modern writer than an ancient doctor could perform interuterine surgery or build the space shuttle. One can certainly talk about "beautiful modern poetry", but this means about the same thing as "cutting edge- 13th century chemistry".

And even if I might be willing to concede a little bit about poetry, I'd hold more firm on the status of philosophy. There is something to comparing Tennyson or Rimbaud to Cutullus, for example, but it would be utterly meaningless to try to compare, say, Wittgenstein to Plato, as though the two could be measured by a common unit.

I don't think that the ancients were sprinked with some kind of magic pixie dust that made them better poets- I don't even really want to live in the sort of world that makes for ancient poetry. A large part of the reason that the ancients produced better poets (and by extension, literature) is because they treated poets like gods. A great poet could be afforded the same respect as the writers of the Gospels are afforded today, or scientists who heal diseases and produce technology. Such renown is a powerful incentive- the sort of incentive that doesn't exist anymore for poets. Poets write now only because they like too.

2006-02-10T12:29:00.000-08:00

One Way To Understand Temporal Being

One way we can understand what it means for all material beings to be temporal beings is to see that in all material things, a sort of clock proceeds from their very nature. Even in matter which seems to be simply "sitting there" we can still know that it is decomposing at a certain rate, being affected by the things that are surrounding it at a given rate, pressing down on the world around it with a certain intensity that is understood with time units, etc. Even inorganic elements are a swarm of activity down to the last electron, an activity that is every bit as regular as a clock, as is seen in radioactive dating of things.

2006-02-09T12:29:00.000-08:00

Islam And Stereotypes

Brandon laments that some of the generalizations made about Muslims are the same generalizations made about the Jews. The similarities are striking:

...suspicion of Muslims as a whole, refusal to believe that Muslims can really participate in Western civilization, doubts about whether Muslims can be loyal Americans or Frenchmen or what-have-you, fear-mongering about how much Muslims control...

What are we to do with stereotypes?

The easiest response, and the one I was raised to have, is to see all stereotypes as wrong, simply as stereotypes. The mere act of casting a universal judgment on a group of persons was a sign of ignorance. Since no stereotype is correct, then, we are left only to distinguish the acceptable ones from the non- acceptable ones. The criterion for judgment was that a stereotype was unacceptable if it was held by the enfranchised, and if it impugned the disfranchised.

The easy response, however, rests on the judgment that all stereotypes are simply wrong. This assumption is wrong on is face, and I doubt there is anyone who would believe it if he articulated it clearly. We might still condemn stereotypes as harmful, though, and precind from considering to what extent the stereotype might have some truth to it.

Brandon, and those who commented on his post, were concerned that the stereotypes against Muslims would lead to a hostile and disproportionate harming of Muslims. But to the extent that the stereotypes about Muslims are correct, Western democracies would have to fear being harmed by Islam. I emphasize that I use the phrase "to the extent that". Stereotypes are at best partially true. A stereotype is an opinion formed for the political purpose of making correct a judgment in a majority of cases. What general rules should we have about persons who believe in Islam? Let us all admit that Brandon articulated the stereotypes that are believed against Islam. To the extent that they are correct, the West should fear; to the extent that they are false, Muslims can fear unjust reprisals. My suspicion is that either way, a civilization will fall.

2006-02-09T10:10:00.000-08:00

Light as an Equivocal Cause -UPDATED

Light, like mind, unifies contraries in its power of causality: particles and waves, color and whiteness.

Light causes all these things above, though they are exclusive of each other. People often throw up their hands and think that light, because it causes mutually exclusive propeties, must be some kind of contradiction. Empedocles thought something similar to this too (though in a different context)- he said that if smoke comes from fire, then wood must be made out of smoke. More exactly though, thinking that light must be a contradiction because it causes both a particle and a wave is like thinking that the mind is a contradiction because it causes both black paint and white paint.

This sort of overly materialistic thinking with regard to light is only cleared up when we understand the doctrine that the Medievals had about equivocal causes- an equivocal cause is an agent that contains its effects in a higher way than they are present in the effect- like mind does, or like the Medievals thought the sun did. Calculation of sums, for example, is a mechanical operation in a calculator, but it is a spiritual operation in man, i.e. the operation exists in a higher way in a man. In a similar way, night and day can never exist together, but they are known together in the mind- even necessarily so since "night" contains "day" in its definition. So too with "sight" and "blindness" or any other contraries or exclusive things.

2006-02-08T08:16:00.000-08:00

As far as modern physics is concerned, a human being (or anything with a body) simply is time, for time is what is from a clock, and a human body- with its heartbeats, developments, menstrual cycles, terms of pregnancy, rates of decomposition after death etc. is a clock just as much as a swinging pendulum. We are sometimes less ideal for measuring purposes, but we are clocks nonetheless. As far as time is concerned, we are the same sort of thing as an electrical pulse going through a quartz crystal at 32,768 waves per second (this is how the average quartz watch measures time, it counts to 32,768 and then ticks another second).

2006-02-07T08:04:00.000-08:00

Different sciences have different ways of defining what they study: some define hypothetically, others define according to the proper meaning of the word, others define things in order to make them more apt to be measured well. Each science demonstrates according to these definitions: metrical sciences demonstrate through measurements, hypothetical sciences by confirmation of hypothesis (hypotheses are essentially experimental, since by nature they are predictive- if ______, then this will happen.)

For example, physics and chemistry define "matter" as "whatever takes up space and has mass" a definition that allows for easy measurement by a meter stick and a scale. The Philosophy of nature defines matter according to what the word means: "that out of which something is made". Another science, or part of a science, might define matter according to a particular hypothesis, say that it is reducible to energy in a certain way. Each science gives us an understanding of matter, but according to a particular kind of middle term.

2006-02-05T12:37:00.000-08:00

The Signs for the Damned

In the demonic religions of the Aztecs and Maya, the gods were shown with large protruding tongues. The large tongues were signs for something- it is believed that they were symbols of a large thirst needing to be continually slaked.

In our own time, I can think of no better sign for the life of the damned than an abortion machine. It works by inducing a vacuum- a non being; it swallows and gorges itself on death; and by nature it can never be filled (the machine would not work if it were full).

When you think about it, of course modern man had to symbolize his covenant with the damned with a machine. Does anyone think we could have done it with sculpture?

2006-02-05T12:35:00.000-08:00

The first commandment acknowledges God as the one "who delivered us out of bondage".

2006-02-04T16:50:00.000-08:00

Plato, Aristotle, and St. Thomas all claim that the goal of human life is to become as like to God as possible (see Theatetus 176 b, Ethics book X) Thomas Aquinas goes further than either of these two and proves that man naturally desires the happiness divinization, and will only be happy when he is divinized.

2006-02-04T08:02:00.000-08:00

Cause and effect are simultaneous.

In the first sense of the word "cause", a thing is not a cause unless it is causing, i.e. unless it is actually exercising causation. There is no problem with saying someone or something was caused in the past, and the thing that was caused still exists, but if we pay close attention to how we use the word "cause", it is something that in its most proper sense must be simultaneous with its effect. This is shown from the first definition of a cause: "that which gives rise to an effect*". A cause, therefore, is first known by a relation, and so to lose an actual relation is to lose an actual cause.

_____________________
*This is the standard definition- I took mine from the OED and American Heritage.

2006-02-03T17:03:00.000-08:00

What causes, and what is causing

The not every cause of becoming is the same as the cause of being. The man causes the wall to become white by painting it, but the paint both causes and is causing the wall to have the color it has.

A man conceives a son, and therefore causes a man. But he does not cause his son inasmuch as he is human, for then he would have to cause himself as well.

These are all related to the principle that every thing is either from self, or from other. If not from self, then from something else. We call this something else "efficient cause". And the principle is "the principle of efficient causality".

2006-02-02T12:21:00.000-08:00

One and Many

What is found in many can be explained only by reference to some one, as St. Thomas says:

"If something is found as a common note in many, this must be because some one cause has brought it about in them; for it cannot be that the common note of itself belongs to each thing, since each thing is by its own nature distinct."

De Potentia, q.3 a.5

And perfection is found in many.

2006-02-01T12:55:00.000-08:00

Limit as Perfection and the Negation of Perfection

Whatever is limited and perfect has a double relation to its limit: in one sense, the perfection is constituted by the limit, and in fact is the same as the limit, but in another sense, the limit is the negation of perfection. The limit cuts off the thing from other perfections: because it has this one, it cannot have that one. It is this sort of limitation that made it necessary for God to create intellectual substance- for everything in the universe was limited only to its own peculiar perfection, but intellectual substance has the perfection of all being by knowledge.

2006-01-31T17:01:00.000-08:00

The perfect is known by a certain negation- it is that to which nothing can be added or taken away. In our experience, this consists in the thing being limited- that is, something lacks pefection if it goes beyond the limit, or if it falls short of it. Call this limited perfection, which in our experience is the only kind of perfection there is.

But we can also understand that perfection could occur if the the perfect being had a certain infinity, for if something is unlimited, it is also something to which nothing could be added or taken away. This is shown even in the material and imperfect infinity of mathematics: to add or subtract anything from infinity leaves one with infinity.

These are two different meanings of perfection, one limited and the other unlimited. Though we are using one word "perfection" to speak of both, the word is not a genus to which limited and unlimited are species, the way that "tree" can be said of oak and maple. Rather, from the first idea of perfection "that to which nothing can be added..." we notice another meaning of "what cannot be added to". The same word means two different things, and yet the meaning of the first leads us by the hand to the meaning of the other. Perfection means something different when said of the unlimited and the limited, and yet we still need to understand the first meaning of perfection before we can understand the second one.

2006-01-30T20:35:00.000-08:00

Remembering Mozart's Ave Verum.

Ave Verum is perfect. I mean that more as a fact than as praise.

There are certainly other ways that art could be, and therefore be perfect. But there is a limit on the height of the object that can be attained by our senses, emotions, and imagination- and if it's not Ave Verum, it's something else that Mozart wrote.

2006-01-29T15:42:00.000-08:00

All great crimes have great justifications. But yet what is justified is not a crime.

This paradox leads to one of the more silly ticks that the human mind plays upon itself: a.) something absolutely terrible happens- morally repugnant and totally evil; b.) Human beings start looking into why the terrible thing happened, and they find the argument that convinced the criminal himself to do the terrible thing; c.) they become moved, or sympathetic with the argument, and they forget how evil the action was . They end up forgetting the plain fact that the only reason they looked into this all in the first place was in order to explain the evil, not explain it away.

This argument does not apply to those who are too close to the great evil- those who loose family members, etc.

This paradox is usually caused by too much reliance on sentiment and emotion in moral questions. Only reason can strike a harmony between the competing motions of understanding and condemnation. "To understand all is to forgive all". This is true for those led by emotion - who either condemn because they refuse to acknowledge the force of the criminals justifications, or forgive them wholly only because they have explained the crime away.

2006-01-28T07:33:00.000-08:00

Error is more common among animals than truth. This is shown by our instinctive urge to make wild inductions on the basis of almost no evidence: we eat one bad burger at one restaurant once, and we assume the whole chain is dirty; we see one news report about one thing, and we immediately feel like there might be a "crisis" (the news, in fact, counts on this instinctive desire to make improbable inductions as a rule- hence the "lead story format" that is common to all media.) Give a man two examples, any two hard cases, and you can convince him that there is a crisis over anything.

It is the desire to escape this that leads man alternately to seek after a more systematic knowledge of things. Concerning contingent things to be dome, he seeks prudence, by trying to model himself after the prudent men he sees; and concerning necessary things, he seeks science by discipleship to a reliable teacher.

2006-01-27T17:18:00.000-08:00

There is a strange argument going about that one cannot be a philosopher if he has religious devotion. If this were true, we would never be able to figure out if an argument was philosophical by reading it. Give whatever argument you think is patently philosophical: all being is good, universals are found in mind as regards the-state-of-universality, etc. Are these arguments philosophical? Not if we would believe certain interpretations of the "Athens vs, Jerusalem" crowd- for some would have us believe that we have to interrogate the author as to his motivations- and then have to take him at his word over whether his argument was philosophical or not.

2006-01-27T12:07:00.000-08:00

The seed grow by itself? Yes, if we are speaking of the agent. No, if we mean it can do so without water or soil.

2006-01-26T18:46:00.000-08:00

More than once, I've realized that I've just listended to a speaker talk for an hour about how one should live, or the sort of things that one should do with their life, or about the sort of fundamental aims that a government should have, and yet they never mentioned anything about happiness.

In all moral concerns, there is absolutely no substitute for the ideas of goodness, reason, and happiness.

In concrete terms, if you try to substitute, say, "democracy" or the choice of the people for goodness, reason, and happiness, you will be left looking like an idiot when half-a million fools elect Hamas.

In even more concrete terms, I saw one of the women who won a seat in the elections. She is a nationally loved figure in Palestine because she sacrificed three of her sons in suicide missions. The people, it is said, respect most about her that she did not even cry for her sons.

Did not even Cry!? The actions of this woman are among the most disgusting and odious actions that I have ever known. Good Lord defend us! The Molechites would brag over how they didn't weep when they sacrificed their children! This is the sort of mountainous, blasphemous degradation that only Islam can muster: put it right up there with female genital mutilation and the doctrinal belief that heaven is a vast whorehouse built to service mass murderers.

2006-01-26T16:44:00.000-08:00

Sketch of A Theological Argument From the Nature of Material Beings

We call something "material" because some thing is made out of it. The material is not the same as the thing: metal is not a car, and wood is not a tree or a house.

In art, we start from certain given materials and form them according to our ideas. This idea is always essential to the art: a sign of this is that we call a painting "a De Vinci" a book "Plato" and a recording "Mozart".

In natural things, the materials are not given and are not formed according to our ideas. They are formed by some internal power. This kind of coming forth- apart from art- is what we first call "nature" or natural.

And yet the material is not the same as the natural thing. Material is distinct from the material thing, and so the natural thing stands to its matter as a whole to a part, as an end to a means.

But in natural things, this order of means to end is intrinsic, and if it is intrinsic, it cannot come to be by chance. For example, letters might fall together by chance to spell "cat", but c-a-t does not mean cat by chance. This intrinsic, meaningful order of means (the letters "a" "t" and "c") to an end (giving a word to name what Fluffy is) is not the sort of thing that chance can do.

If not by chance, then by intelligence. But it is not an intelligence like ours, which takes natural things as given, and works from them- it is an intelligence that is more intimately within the things, which does not presuppose any natural things. We oppose our art to nature because art moves extrinsically, and nature moves intrinsically. If nature is being moved by intelligence, it is being moved from within- in fact its very nature consists in being moved from within. We call it being moved even though we realize that it is not a "being moved" as we understand it, for when we move something there is some given thing with a nature that is "already there", but for the intelligence that is moving nature from within, no nature is presupposed.

But if no nature is presupposed, then the whole nature proceeds from the action of the intelligence that is within it. The nature both exists and acts though the intelligence that is giving it being and the power to act.

In sum:

Material beings come to be, and act in virtue of an intrinsic order between the material and the material thing.
No intrinsic order can be by chance.

but The order of natural things is intrinsic to them
So all material beings come to be and act by intelligence acting within them.

But the intelligence that is causing natural things cannot presuppose natural things, for then nature would be art.

So the intelligence that is moving natural things exceeds infinitely the power of any finite intelligence, that takes knowledge from nature.

2006-01-25T10:12:00.000-08:00

And it came to pass, when Ahab saw Elijah, that Ahab said unto him, [Art] thou he that troubleth Israel?
		And he answered, I have not troubled Israel; but thou, and thy father's house, in that ye have forsaken the commandments of the LORD, and thou hast followed Baalim.
		Now therefore send, [and] gather to me all Israel unto mount Carmel, and the prophets of Baal four hundred and fifty, and the prophets of the groves four hundred, which eat at Jezebel's table.
		So Ahab sent unto all the children of Israel, and gathered the prophets together unto mount Carmel.
		And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye between two opinions? if the LORD [be] God, follow him: but if Baal, [then] follow him. And the people answered him not a word.
		Then said Elijah unto the people, I, [even] I only, remain a prophet of the LORD; but Baal's prophets [are] four hundred and fifty men.

2006-01-24T12:49:00.000-08:00

Just because there is something wrong with _________, doesn't mean you get to replace it with something worse.

2006-01-23T19:39:00.000-08:00

St. Matthew

One of the poems I would have written long ago, if I had any ability to write poems, would have been about St. Matthew reflecting on his decision to write his gospel- and most especially, his recording the words of institution at the last supper: "this is my body".

Something in me says that St. Matthew was almost indifferent to writing his Gospel, in the sense that it was self- evident to him, even beyond needing to be said, that the good news of Christ would be spread regardless of whether he wrote anything down or not. Matthew did not bother to explain his Gospel, he did not intersperse the Gospel with any commentary or interpretation, because he did not see his Gospel the only way that the story would ever be told. I suspect that Matthew's main motive for writing the gospel was the desire to spend all of his time talking about Christ, and remembering how sweet it was to be in his presence.

Matthew knew that the truth about Christ would be known throughout the world forever, even if he never wrote anything down, even if Christ were abandoned by all his Apostles, even if Christ had never done a single miracle. Consider the plain fact that Christ was perfectly content to die without having committed a single word to paper, and without ever commanding, requesting, or even hinting that his disciples write a single word about his life*, or anything he had done.

___________________________

*As far as I know, Christ only commands John to write to the seven churches in Asia Minor, but he commands nothing to be said about his life, his doctrines, or even his Sacrifice on the Cross.

2006-01-23T12:16:00.000-08:00

Universal in Causando

The universal cause does not cause a universal- the cause of being does not cause "being" as opposed to causing, say, John. In the case of John, the universal cause of being is causing John, and in the case of you, the universal cause of being is causing you.

Causes of a thing need not be partial causes in the sense that each person might be a partial cause of the gumbo, by each giving an ingredient. Rather, not every cause can be viewed as the only cause of a thing. Both the parent and the universal cause of being cause John, but the universal cause causes John more intimately, for it continues to cause him for as long as he exists.

2006-01-22T12:39:00.000-08:00

Meditation on A Child.

If I consider him as made out of something, he can be given four accounts:

1.) He is himself, for what he is made out of makes him.

2.) He is his parents, for he is made out of them, and in this sense is nothing other than the subsistence of his parents in another place.

3.) He is the earth, for what he is made out of reduces to what came out of the earth (and the things of earth out of the stars)

4.) He is every human generation that came before him, for all he was made out of was derived from his parents, but his parents derived this same thing from their parents, and so on.

If I consider him as human, then he is not caused by anything mentioned above, for none of these things can be cause a human as human. Neither the child, nor his parents, not the generations that came before him are the cause of man, for they were all already human. Neither did the earth make this child apart from the co- generation of his parents. Similar considerations apply when we consider the child as existing, or having being.

And yet the child is obviously both made out of things, and human, and existing. None of these things constitute the child partially, for the same being is considered totally human, totally what he is made of, and totally existent. The causes, however, are diverse. Many different causes flow together to make a single effect. This child is being caused by more than one thing.

2006-01-21T18:36:00.000-08:00

I'm With Gerrigou- Lagrange:

Reasons for the Last Judgment

St. Thomas explains these reasons. First, dead men live in the memory of men on earth and are often judged contrary to truth. Spirits, strong and false, like Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel, are judged as if they were great philosophers...

read the whole thing here.

2006-01-20T16:53:00.000-08:00

Russell's Paradox and Definition.

During a discussion about the foundations of knowledge, a very accomplished analytical logician argued that we could never be confident that anything was self-evident. He argued that most people would confidently assert it to be evident that every particular property or thing had a corresponding class that it was in. For example, "a red car" is in the class of "red things" and "John" in the class "man". This, the logician said, had been proven false. There need not be a corresponding class for every property.

I suspect that the refutation was based on Russell's paradox: which asserts that every class is either

A.) a member of itself (the class "five or more things" has more than five things in it)

or

B.) Not a member of itself (the class "man" is not a man)

If we talk about the class of all "B's" then either it is a B or an A.

But if its an A, then it must not be a member of itself- which results in contradiction.

If it's a B, then it's an A, and the same contradiction applies.

Viola, classes like "man", "green", "computer", "redness", "wisdom", "virtue", "vice" and any others of the kind, which is more or less every meaningful class that one could study, are thus rendered impossible and contradictory.

Ugh. If we read this same argument in Plato's Euthydemus- or more to the point, in his dialogue Sophist, we would instantly understand what kind of argument it was. Nihil sub sole novum.

The absurdity is in assuming that it is meaningful to speak about a class being a member of itself at all. If "class" is taken to mean "the species or genus of the thing, or the sort of thing it is", then there simply is no such thing as our class "A" above, and Russell's whole antinomy becomes impossible. The definition of "more than five things" is not more than five things, any more than the definition of seven has seven different meanings.

I do praise Russell, however, for being infinitely more clear, readable, and convincing than any of those I have ever seen try to solve his paradox using the presuppositions or method of analytical logic.

Philebus 15 a-e.

2006-01-20T12:31:00.000-08:00

Parts and Wholes

If we consider the parts of a definition, There is one way in which both the individual and the species are in the genus. The species is divided from the genus, and is in this sense a part. Man is divided from "animal" by "rational"; and "green" from "color" by "distinctive to grass and other foliage".

If we consider the parts of a definition in another way, the genus is in the species and in the individual. "Animal" is contained in the account of man and "virtue" in temperance.

To say that John, or a man, is an animal does not simply make animal a set of which John is a material part. The relation of part an whole in natures, universals, sets, and individuals is not as simple as that of hogs in a pen, or switches flicking in a microchip.

2006-01-19T10:05:00.000-08:00

If to be in a class means to be contained in an idea the way that hogs are in a pen, or marks are upon a page, or electrical flashes are in a microchip, then the first sense of "man" does not name a class, nor of "five", nor of "two".

2006-01-18T17:05:00.000-08:00

Even after the theory of evolution was proposed, people continued to believe in the idea of spontaneous generation. That living beings might come from non-living things was a philosophical commonplace at least until Pasteur showed the origin of bacteria, etc.

No sooner do we refute the last belief that life comes from non-living matter (flies from rotting meat, lice from hair and urine, etc.) , then we walk into a controversy about whether life comes from non- living things.

2006-01-18T10:16:00.000-08:00

Notes on Chance and Divinity

If beings that come to be by chance are not caused by God, then they are not beings.

So too if beings come to be by chance, then there is no account of why a thing is a sort of thing, only why it is an individual.

Chance can make a man only as another man can make one, he cannot account for the fact that his offspring is this human as human, only for the fact that it is this human as this.

2006-01-17T17:54:00.000-08:00

wisdom : immaterial being :: smelling the turkey cook : getting to eat it.

recta sapere

(to taste right things= to be wise)

2006-01-17T12:46:00.000-08:00

The monkey and the typewriter argument "an infinite number of monkeys..." illustrates exactly the difference between the per se unity of a word being typed, and the per accidens quality of the word being "an arrangement of letters"

Chance can account for any arrangement of letters, but if a word is only an arragement of letters, there is no difference between "cat" and "hjm,ZDSV" (I just banged the keyboard). The unity of order can only proceed from intelligence. An irrational cause creates order only as a carpenter might do heart surgery, or as a musician might build.

2006-01-16T17:24:00.000-08:00

Meditations on the argument for intellectual activity after death.

1.) Given it belongs to reason that there is a personal existence of the soul after death, does it follow that there is an operation of the soul? St. Thomas argues yes, because

Nothing acts except inasmuch as it is actual,

The way which something acts follows the way it exists. Given that the soul exists apart from the body, so also it acts. After this, we are answering objections.

2.) The difficulty is that the soul's operation by nature requires phantasms, and phantasms corrupt with the body. The soul is not the act of the body, yet it requires a bodly thing that it might operate- but how is even this so? Don't we establish immortality on the basis of an operation that is seperable from sense? (see the sed contra of the article)

3.) Modern thomists have picked up on the fact that St.Thomas says that it is almost impossible to prove immortality where the ressurection is denied, but the emphasis shoul be on denied, it is possible to precind from the cinsideration of the possibility of ressurection.

4.) In what way could operation stand to existence as act to potency?

How is existence related to its operation? Not as round is to circle, at least not in us.

5.) While the state of union with the body and the state of separation are the different, they admit of a certain more and less: St. Thomas claims in a number of places that:

the more our soul is abstracted from corporeal things, the more it is capable of receiving abstract intelligible things. Hence in dreams and alienations of the bodily senses divine revelations and foresight of future events are perceived the more clearly.

ST 1 q.12 a.11

6.) IS theattempt to sever existence from operation simply wrong- headed? The very proof for immortality is taken from the fact that the soul has an operation proper to itself. Again, the sed contra.

7.) Whatever the truth of the matter is, it must be conducive to human happiness.

8.) The mind knows itself in this life through another, in the next life it does not know through another see here.

2006-01-15T21:13:00.000-08:00

Jottings on The First Principle of Relativity

-Einstein grounds his theory of relativity on a developed idea of what "simultaneous" means, which necessarily defined simultaneity in relation to an observer. In the classical system of physics, one could meaningfully speak about two events happening "at the same time", without reference to an observer, but one cannot on Einstein's account, or according to the truth of the matter.

-Consider an easier example: Are thunder and lighting simultaneous? We must in some sense truly say "no". Things are simultaneous which we see happen at the same time. The man next to a cannon holds that the smoke and the bang are simultaneous, the man he is shooting at does not. Did the flash and the banghappen at the same time? In one sense, obviously not- the one occured six seconds later, an obsever would say. He could even show you a video of the things occuring six seconds apart.

-Simultaneity has always been understood in reference to an observer, because it is time. All measurements are essentially observer- dependent.

-Einstein certainly is trying to understand nature, but in order to get a clear idea of what he is doing, we need a clearer idea of the way in which measurement reveals the nature. Galileo, for example, took an ingenious route and said measurement revealed nature because nature simply was subsistent quantity. This is ingenious, but untenable, as it involved a sort of divinization of nature (eternity, immutability, pure intelligibility) and a strange sort of divinization at that (mathematics, like logic, is essentially human- it subsists in the imagination. Angels do not need mathematics to understand quantity)

2006-01-15T20:04:00.000-08:00

Christianity, Jerusalem, and Athens.

Christianity is necessarily tied to events that happened in first century Jerusalem, and for this reason it is tied to the great accomplishments of Athens. The essentially Jewish character of christianity is taken for granted these days- and it should be- but not only is christianity essentially Jewish, it is also essentially Hellenistic. It can even be seen as hellenistic because it is first- century Jewish. Consider a few points:

- If we assume the Apostles wrote their own writings in the language they survived in, five of the original apostles spoke Greek fluently.
-"Christ" is a Greek word, as is the name for the new sect, "Christianoi"
- The whole New Testament survived as a Greek document.
- The first evangelists to spread the word out of Jerusalem are Hellenized Jews- Jews that had spoken greek for at least one generation, and who had Greek names- Stephen, for example (see Acts 6)
- The epistle is a distinctively Greek mode of discourse.
- The Old Testament references in the new testament are taken, as a rule, from the Septuagint. - The Septuagint itself contains many books that are blatantly hellenic: Wisdom, Sirach, Maccabees. Consider a phrase like we find in Wisdom that says God "made the world out of matter without form." or the mother in Maccabees who tells he son that the universe was created out of nothing.

A good deal of Apostolic Christianity is simply Greek speaking Hellenized people speaking to other Greek speakers in Greek modes of discourse, quoting from a Greek text. I is for this reasons, and others, that I say that Christianity is essentially Greek- It is no more possible to ignore its Greek than its Jewish character. A Christianity without Athens would literally be a christianity without "Christianity"- the word would be something different.

2006-01-14T13:01:00.000-08:00

Five Hundredth Post.

Writing five hundred posts is significant to me. I wanted to celebrate with new skins, but incompetence, lack of motivation, and failure to find any skins I liked killed off the idea. I was tempted to change the name of the blog too, since the title can't be anything but a cause of revulsion for those who don't know that it was taken from the last paragraph of De Koninck's "Essay on the Common Good", which at the time seemed to me one of the best articulations of what I thought about philosophy- in addition to sounding, well, cool.

The blog is a great help to me because it helps me see the content of my own thought. I can order my thoughts more clearly, and have a record of things I might otherwise forget. Some things I would rather forget, but it's helpful to have those around too, for various reasons.

I know a few folks stop by to read the blog, and I think you for doing so. For me, knowing that someone is going to read my things is a good incentive to be clear, and to write habitually. I have tried in the past to write every day in a journal, but I never had any incentive to really clean up my thoughts, or write in the journal daily. Having people I respect read my stuff solved the problem, and now I write with enough frequency to build up good writing habits.

2006-01-11T21:29:00.000-08:00

Nothing can acquire a form it already has.
Intellect can acquire the form of any body.

(intellect is given as existent- this is admitted by all as self evident)

The argument seems to have been abandoned by Thomists of late. If you replace "body" with "immaterial thing", it seems to prove that the intellect is a body.

The argument does work, when undertood properly. It's found in De Anima, III, c.5.

2006-01-11T10:44:00.000-08:00

Evolution is a rational account of where the species came from. The ancients did not seek a rational account of where the species came from, because they did not know they needed to give one. Through the middle ages, scholars were still puzzling over whether the world was eternal or not- the main debate for them was whether all species simply went back forever in time, or not. Christianity forced people to believe that the world had a finite beginning in time, but a dispute still raged over whether this could be known rationally. It is impossible, however, to give an account of the origin of the species in time until it is given rationally that species had an origin in time.

It was not until science sufficiently developed its experimental part that people could know that the universe was finite, because as St. Thomas shows, the origin of the world in time cannot be known philosophically. Darwin's answer is that species come to be from other species. What is the alternative? We can dispute the mechanism, but not the principle. Species either come to be from other species, or they come to be from nothing.

2006-01-11T09:09:00.000-08:00

Intuitions

It is common to hear people claim that knowledge is based on intuitions. If these intuitions are taken to mean an essential grasp of a thing, then I agree, but I don't see how one can get the word intuition to mean an essential grasp of a thing. The essence of a thing is revealed in words, in its name. This essence imples that certain things are per se, others per accidens, and certain things are virtually contained in the very idea of the term. To say these things of the term makes for what is called "a self evident proposition"- a primarily known truth. Intuitions seem to be wordless things, you just "get it" apart from words, apart from the act of naming. Naming, in this sense, is seen as incidental to the act of knowledge, and it is unclear how the self evident comes to be, since essence is not acknowledged as known.

I think the physicist that I imagined below in my dialogue two posts back had an "intuition" of time and distance and mass in the true sense, but I would call his grasp "a working postulate" or something of the kind.

In a word, intuitions lack a relation to the essential. It is inevitable that an intuition based science will be unable to handle accusations of being arbitrary.

2006-01-10T16:51:00.000-08:00

Architectonic syllogisms on how the mind must know the essences of things

Proof 1.)

M: What is per se is essential, as opposed to accidental.
m: We name what is per se, and we name as we know.

proof m: We do not call a man "man" because he is wearing a plaid shirt, or because he has brown hair.

the Major is simply an account of what "per se" means, the minor an account of something necessary for naming.

2.)

What is most changeless of a thing is essence, or known relative to essence.
We know what is changeless in a thing.

2006-01-10T10:06:00.000-08:00

A Discussion with an All-Physics Knowing Physicist

q.) What is power?

a.) I know that that has 15 watts of power.

q.) how do you know that?

a.) I measured the amount of work it did, and divided it by the number of seconds it took. For short, you can just remember P= w/t

q.) How much work did it do?

a.) It corresponded to the amount of energy it had.

q.) how much energy did it have?

a.) Seven Joules.

q.) What do you mean by that?

a.) I mean that I took the amount of force it had in Newtons, and multiplied it by the amount of meters it could cover, that is W= Fd

q.) what do you mean when you said you "took the force"?

a.) I mean that I measured the number of kilograms that could have been moved, multiplied it by how far the kilos moved, and divided it by the square of the time, kg x m/ sec^2.

q.) what are time, kilograms, and distance?

a.) Time is this (shows the number on a stopwatch), kilograms are ( shows a number on his scale), the meters are (shows the number of times he puts a stick on something).

q.) That's why you say things like "time is 5, Kg is 6, and M is 9.2."

a.) Huh?

q.) Well, since you explain everything in relation to time, mass and length, I just wanted to know what you thought these things were.

a.) Time is "t" and mass is "m" and length is "d". This (points to the numbers on the watch) and this (points to a numeral on a scale) and this (shows the markings on a stick).

2006-01-09T12:01:00.000-08:00

Actual responses people would have if all the stars in space spontaneously arranged themselves to spell "Repent and believe in Jesus Christ", and continued to spell the message for the entire night.

-The media would broadcast the miracle in round the clock coverage, eventually including a panel of experts that would worry about the violence that might be inflicted on Jews and Muslims.

-Muslims would explain the event as a Jewish conspiracy.

-Local governments would have no official response, for fear of violating the first amendment.

-The ACLU would file suit against one county in Georgia that put up a banner mentioning the event. The county would insist that the banner was only put up for historical reasons.

-Planned Parenthood would release a fundraising card, written in computer generated stars, saying "repent and believe in Choice"

-Traditionalist Catholics would complain that the message was not in Latin. They would explain this by pointing to the laxity that came out of Vatican II.

-Scientists would hypothesize that an event similar to this was the cause of religious belief among primitive cultures.

-Academics would write papers inspired by the event, arguing that the "conceptualization of a second order repenting cannot other 'itself' at any meta- level of analysis." The message's value for feminist theory would be hotly debated.

-People living in sin would stop fornicating for up to three days.

-The UN would insist that we should acknowledge the call of the message. In keeping with this, they would increase their shipments of condoms to Africa.

-The wise would recognize that miracles without grace are dead.

2006-01-07T19:25:00.000-08:00

Scientists have discovered the biological basis of religious belief

Scientists have discovered the biological basis of hunger.

Why haven't we debunked the myth of food yet?

2006-01-07T14:01:00.000-08:00

Paper Draft, IV

criticism appreciated- especially of writing style and clarity!!!

St. Thomas claims that the things of faith are the foundation of a science. In a word, the things of faith are scientific. The objection to this is immediately at hand: science is based on things known, but the things of faith are a not known "blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe" or "we walk by faith, and not by sight (2Cor. 5: 7.)" St. Thomas answers by distinguishing what is known from what is known to us. The articles of faith are things known to God and the blessed, proposed to us for belief. We hold by faith that faith is science. This requires that one who does not have faith will not admit that the faith is scientific, but this is hardly surprising- no science could be accepted by a man who lacks the basis for the science.

The denial of the scientific character of faith always involves identifying what is known and what is known to man. As soon as we distinguish these two, revelation becomes possible, making it possible for man to believe in something known to a higher intellect. There is nothing particularly shocking about having to believe in what is known by another- it is the usual way most of us learned the physical sciences. Any twelve year old, for example, can be told that matter is atomic and that the earth revolves around the sun, but it takes years of learning in order to understand the arguments that prove atomic theory and heliocentrism. Until the child knows the proof for himself, he is left to accept the truth of heliocentrism on the authority of his elders.

But even after one grants the scientific character of faith, there is still a question of why faith was necessary at all. Why not simply leave human reason alone?

To answer this, we must return to what we mentioned earlier about the scientific method pointing beyond itself to another science. What is the name for the science it is pointing to? The ancients called the science "philosophy", but philosophy has fallen upon hard times of late, and so I won't insist on calling the science philosophy. It is enough for now to point out that the science is naturally known. By "naturally known" I mean two things, sc. that it is known by a human mind, and that the thing known is within the natural world. But just as the scientific method points beyond itself to a philosophical knowledge that is firmly within the limits of nature, so too natural knowledge points beyond itself to a knowledge of the things beyond nature. This happens because it belongs to the essence of reason to seek the causes of things, and a cause is nothing other than what is responsible for the existence of something. But every natural thing has something upon which it depends for existence. Reason, therefore, can never find the ultimate cause of things among natural things. By nature, reason will always look beyond itself for fulfillment, and it is on this account- among other reasons- that revelation was necessary. Even if revelation were not given, man would have still by nature hoped for it.

2006-01-07T09:47:00.000-08:00

Paper draft, III

Now in a certain sense, science B, commonly called "the scientific method" does not need to be justified. As we've already said, it is not as if anyone seriously wonders if it is a good way to build up a body of knowledge. So long as one is simply using the scientific method, there is no reason to ask questions about it- it is enough that the method, like any tool, simply gets results. But scientific method can not only be used, but also examined as an object, just as we are doing now. We can ask questions about scientific method itself: What is is scope? What are it limits? Is it the only way of being objective? Can it tell us of whether there is an intelligent design to the universe? We can even arrange the answers to these questions to form a systematic, objective, and dispassionate body of knowledge- in other words we can form a science. The scientific method, therefore, whenever it is taken as an object, points beyond itself to another science.

Now there are several objections that one tends to hear to the claim that the scientific method points beyond itself to another science. Most of the objections boil down to the claim that there is no science beyond the scientific method since there is no agreement about what is. This objection packs some emotional force, but crumbles with the slightest glance of reason. Sciences aren't formed by popular agreement, and they never have been. We should already be warned of the difficulty of the science beyond the scientific method: given the difficulty and the amount of time needed to figure out things even with the scientific method, it will be no easy task to figure out the science beyond it. There is also a certain irony in the objections to the claim that the scientific method points beyond itself. Let me put it this way- no objector ever says something like "this man's hypothesis is totally wrong! I can prove it with the readings from my atom smasher!" or "A science beyond empirical science? Bosh! Just look at these test tubes, and this printout from my science-o-meter!" Just as the arguments I'm giving here are neither hypothetical nor experimental, so too, none of the objections to my point will be. As soon as anyone speaks about the nature of the scientific method itself, they instinctively reach for premises that come from a knowledge outside of the scientific method.

2006-01-06T09:20:00.000-08:00

Paper Draft, Part II

In contemporary usage, the word "science" can mean two things:

A.) A systematic, objective, dispassionate body of knowledge about a particular subject matter (lets call this "science A").

B.) An inductive, hypothetical and experimentally verified body of knowledge about a particular subject matter- usually something in the natural world (Let's call this "Science B".)

How are these two meanings related? Is every science B a science A? Is every science A a science B?

First of all, we can set aside at least one point about which there is no controversy: namely that some, if not most science B is science A. That the expermentaly verified hypothesis is an effective way of building up a body of knowledge is a settled question, and so we can set it aside. In fact, what we he call science B has been so effective in building up science, it has even led some persons to believe that it is the only way of being systematic and objective. We might get so carried away with enthusiasm for science B as to think every science A is a science B. There's nothing wrong with being enthusiastic about science, of course, but this opinion is an inadequate description of science. First of all, if every systematic, objective body of knowledge was hypothetical and experimentally verified, then arithmetic, geometry, history, logic, etc would not be systematic, objective bodies of knowledge. The main problem with saying that science A must be science B is that to say this would destroy the possibility of having scientific knowledge of science B. How could we ever show that science B is the only method of attaining systematic, objective knowledge? We would, by our own premisses, be forced to use the method of "science B", which would require assuming the truth of the thing we were trying to prove.

2006-01-05T17:50:00.000-08:00

(Paper Draft, Part I)

On The Relation of Science and Faith

(a riff on a long-term topic of Kodiak)

At the beginning of his Summa Theologicae, Thomas Aquinas asks whether Sacred Doctrine- which is based in faith- is a science, and he proves to his own satisfaction that it is. It is now, of course, a commonplace to hold that what is based in faith is not a science. The whole disagreement about the relation of faith and science takes place after both sides have agreed that faith is not scientific. Some may hold that faith and science are mutually exclusive, others might hold that they are mutually supportive, and still others hold that there is no relation between them at all, but all of these agree that the faith is not science. What then are we to do with the argument of Thomas Aquinas?

We might try to resolve the whole disagreement to a mere verbal confusion. Perhaps it is false to think that Aquinas' words "fides" and "scientia" mean more or less the same thing as our "faith" and "science". The first problem with this is that its contrary to what any lexicon would tell us: "fides" just does mean faith and "sciencia" science. Another problem with this is that some of the things Aquinas calls "scienciae" are still called a sciences today- mathematics, logic, and the mathematical study of the motion of the planets in Astronomy. The fundamental problem, however, is that even if the disagreement was merely verbal, we are still left to wonder which side has the better account of what science should mean. St. Thomas would insist that the things of faith should be called scientific right alongside of geometry, arithmetic, and hypotheses about the stars. To the contemporary mind, however, it is absurd on its face to call all these things by the same name, as though they were the same sort of enterprise. Though many might be tempted to simply dismiss Aquinas out of hand (what could those Medievals know anyway?) it's worth while to take a look at the way we use the term science, and see whether we can defend our use of the term as clearly and rigorously as he did.

2006-01-05T12:23:00.000-08:00

Scientific Methods and Matters

Every science includes a method and a subject matter. Not every subject matter is treated by the same method, nor can it be. A method is a sort of tool, and one would not expect to use the same tools to understand triangles, laws, logical matter, God, history, ancient civilizations, irrational numbers, life, death, etc. The most well known scientific method, sc. the hypothesis tested experimentally, is worthless for understanding almost all of the things mentioned above.

2006-01-04T09:09:00.000-08:00

A Comparison and Contrast of Sense Knowledge and Intellectual Knowledge.

Sense knowledge and intellectual knowledge share four properties:

a.) they are both knowledge, and so they both belong to conscious beings that have an object within consciousness.
b.) As knowledge, they rise above the power of matter considered as such, for they can contain an object in a fundamentally different way from the way a mere matter contains an object (something heard, for example, is not in consciousness the way nails are in a box.)
c.) The thing within consciousness is intentional, i.e. it is about something.
d.) The thing within consciousness can be remembered, which allows for a set of individuals to be grouped together according to some similarity. Tis happens because memory gives something the power to be reminded of something and this reminding of necessity imples similarity.

So long as we focus on consciousness, the way the object is contained, intentionality, or a set of individuals grouped together, we will be unable to distinguish the knowledge of sense from the knowledge of intellect. In these four ways, there is no essential difference between the knowledge of human beings, chimps, chickens, or any other animal with memory (and a-c are common to even animals without memory*.)

Sense knowledge and intellectual knowledge differ in that:

a.) When an object is in consciousness according to sense, it is in consciousness according to its particularity. When an object is in consciousness according to intellect, it is in consciousness in a way that is not limited to any particularity. When I am seeing the color red, I must actually see one particular red thing. When I am thinking about what red means, I need not be thing about any one particular red thing. The imagination of red is about one particular, the word red is not.
b.) Because of this, there is something in the intellect that cannot be reduced to any sense particular. But any sense particular proceeds from the activity of a particular sense organ. Therefore there is something in the intellect that cannot be reduced to the activity of any sense organ**.
c.) The intellect imposes names on things. The name of something is ordered to expressing what is essential in the thing named***. And so the intellect is ordered to understanding what is essential in things, and the seal and external embodiment of this knowledge is the name.
d.) Because the same thing can have different names for different people, the names of things are not natural (like bird calls or the warning growls of dogs), but the words are in some sense conventional. For this reason those who use words are essentially social. The knowledge embodied in words will require life in society. Sense knowledge, as knowledge, does not require this.

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*This does not explain all the likenesses between human and animal knowledge- it says nothing of emotions, habits, even a sense in which non-human animals have "voluntary action". Animals have been traditionally misunderstood by making them, alternately, both human (think PETA or Peter Singer) and Machines (Descartes, Michael Behe). Though I am convinced that both these opinions are mistakes, I take them seriously and I see them as both having some truth to them. I certainly don't intend to degrade animals by opposing sense knowledge to intellectual knowledge. An animal, or even any natural thing, is essentially superior to anything we'll ever be able to produce by art.
**This is a 2nd AEE "camestres", not the invalid 1st AEE. The A premise is commensurate)
*** We don't call a man "man" because he is, say, brown-eyed or blond, for this is accidental. We call him man in relation to something essential. This is so with all names even when what is essential is not known explicitly, and so we must substitute something for the essential. But the mere fact that we are substituting for the essential shows that the name is ordered to understanding it.

2006-01-03T16:19:00.000-08:00

A Valid And Useful Argument

If ________ were true, I would destroy the possibility of human happiness.
But all actions in human life, including the thought of _________, can only be done for the sake of happiness.

Therefore ___________ is not true.

(for an example of something that could go in the blank, read the philosophy described here)

2006-01-03T10:11:00.000-08:00

Universality and Intentionality Should Be Taken Into Account When We Consider The Primacy of Ideas.

There is nothing wrong with holding that the human intellect first knows the idea, as opposed to the exterior world. This doctrine is common to almost every philosopher who has ever lived, and I suspect that most thoughtful people have at some time considered the doctrine compelling. The difficulty is that the doctrine of the mind first knowing ideas tends to be the cause of apprehension and fear- we fear that the whole world could be a dream or some such thing.

The fear is motivated by thinking that consciousness could replace the external world. In other words, if the first world we know is the world "inside our head"- i.e. the world of consciousness, then it is possible that the world of consciousness could be taking the place of the external world, and we are none the wiser. When we actually pay attention to the nature of the world within our heads, however, it makes no more sense to think it could replace the external world than the idea of grass could replace the idea of a dog.

The world within our heads is universal and intentional. When I say the word "man" which man do I mean? When I think the word "music", which song am I thinking of? Our idea of dog- our consciousness of it, isn't the sort of thing that could replace Fido and Lassie. No one could ever confuse the idea "dog" with any particular dog in the way that, say, a mallard might confuse a decoy with a real duck, or the way we might mistake a silk rose for a living flower. Our ideas are more than pictures of things, which is manifest both from our experience of what an idea is, and from the fact that even if ideas were simply pictures, this wouldn't explain why they are known. In other words, if we think ideas are nothing more than pictures, we don't explain why they are ideas at all.

Another reason one could never simply replace Lassie with the idea "dog" is that the idea "dog" is about something, whereas Lassie isn't about something. Even if someone wanted to say "okay, the idea of 'dog' can't replace the dog in the world, but the imagination of a dog could replace the one in the world, for the imagination has a particular image". Even then, the argument wouldn't work, for the image in the imagination is still about something, and essentially so. We can't remove the idea of about-ness from ideas or imaginations any more than we could remove the idea of "side" from square. If we say "everyting is ideas and sensations" we mean "everything is about something else, but something else is meaningless" said another way "everything refers beyond itself, but it can't refer beyond itself"

2006-01-02T15:32:00.000-08:00

Sources And Contemporary Scholars

One of the statements that always comes up whenever "thomism" comes up among a group of contemporary scholars goes something like this: "I read a lot about thomism: I've read Genieges 'Spirit in Esse and thomistic Metaphysics'; Gilson's 'The Spirit of Thomism'; Deneloffmann's 'Esse and the Analogy of Being in Later Neo-Thomistic Thought...'"

Another very common thing that academic- type people say about thomism goes something like this: "How can I know which school of Thomism is 'authentic' or 'representative'? Should one read The Neo Scholastics? The Augustinian Thomists? The Whig/Transcendental/Existential/ Ontological/ Essentialist/ Analytic Thomists...?"

These opinions share the common trait that it never seems to cross the mind of the one speaking to simply read St. Thomas himself- we do, after all, still have access to the stuff he wrote. We do not, moreover, need to read him as though he were some kind of unintelligible matter which needed to be formed by the opinions of others. Shouldn't it be one of the main goals of a thomst to read the whole Summa? How about the entire Contra Gentiles? Disputed Questions? Why not just do this? If we want to solve the question of what is authentically Thomist, if we want to get what is absolutely thomistic, why not go to the one source where we're absolutely certain to get it?

2006-01-02T10:33:00.000-08:00

Composition and Negation

One of the points of agreement between Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas is that a concrete term signifies the participation in an abstract form. To call something white means "to have the form of whiteness; to call something a man means "to have the form of humanity". The same is also true vice versa: to have the form of whiteness is to be white, to have personhood is is to be a person. Now as everyone learns in Philosophy 101, there is a difference between what Plato made of this fact and what Aristotle made of it- Plato claimed that the form as form existed both within the human mind and outside of it, Aristotle claimed that the form as a form exists only within the human mind. But this profound difference of opinion shouldn't obscure the point of agreement between Plato and Aristotle about the relation between concrete and abstract terms. There are two main points of agreement:

a.) The form is that in virtue of which a thing is intelligible, and
b.) The thought of a thing is composite, for a form is viewed in relation to something, either as in it (concrete) or as separate from it (abstract)*.

When we speak of fundamental things, the intelligible form in our mind is usually a negation of something. The first definition in the first science (geometry) is "that which has no part" . The first principle absolutely for man is the principle of contradiction, which cannot be stated without speaking of "cannot" or "impossible". The first principle of the whole universe is well described as "a spirit that is infinitely perfect", but such a being is known by a string of negations: "spiritual" means "not material", "infinite" means "not finite" and "perfect" denotes "that which lacks nothing" or "that to which nothing can be added or taken away".

Negations cannot be treated indifferently. Both what is non-existent and what is spiritual can be described as "non material", but it does not follow from this that the spiritual is the same as the non-existent. It is true that to simply call something, say, "not finite" can apply to both the infinite and the non- existent, but this is not how one comes to the term "not finite" when they arrive at it rightly. We don't simply start out knowing immaterial in the same way that we know "red" or "hot". The word immaterial can never have some meaning apart from what "material" means, and nothing immaterial can be known to exist except in virtue of what we know about matter which exists. This is to say that any meaningful use of the word "immaterial" or "infinite" exists as a sort of term to an inquiry that can never separate itself from the what matter and finitude are.

Another confusion about negation is the way in which it presupposes something positive. Our knowledge of the immaterial requires a prior positive knowledge of material, but not a proper positive knowlege of the thing that is immaterial. What is immaterial is known as a term or limit, or a thing to which the material refers**.
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*again, Plato would claim it also has a subsistence apart from mind, Aris. would deny this.
** The argument goes something ike this: all matter stands in need of an exterior agent in order that it might act or be. But this exterior agent cannot be material. So something immaterial must exist, since matter does.

2006-01-01T16:51:00.000-08:00

Jottings

-Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle would both hold that the idea is the first things known, but they understand this differently from the idealists: their ideas are intentions, and they are of what Thomas called "nature absolutely considered". The idea "man", for example, is both about something- it's about man, in fact- and it applies to all men. This is an insight that's easy to miss for being obvious. The thought of a man is about a man. This is a unique trait of ideas. A fish, for example, isn't about a fish. An idea also does not need to have the sort of particularity we see in all the things around us: which fish is the word "fish" about"? If it is about any one, it could not be about another, but if it were not about any one, it couldn't be said of it. The claim of the Thomists is that a universal is about any particular, as that particular is known by a human mind. Neither angels or God require abstraction to know.

-Participation first means "to take part in". Each participant takes part because he is a part, and yet in he is also regarded as equal to the whole: each individual player can be treated as though he performed the whole act, whether the act is winning a competition or robbing a bank. When one receives more, it is either because they participated more, or because they played a greater part in causing the thing they participated in.

2005-12-24T01:10:00.000-08:00

On Our Opinion of How long Our Writing Needs To Be

I'm struck by how long some of my older posts were. "A Response to John Deck" stands out as terribly long, much more so than it needed to be... it makes sense that the man I wrote it for never responded. At the time I wrote the post, though, I think that I was of the mind that one must write long responses to important questions. While it is true that ceteris paribus one needs to write something longer for a more an important point than for a less important point, our idea of how long a piece of writing has to be is, in general, greatly exaggerated. The ancients thought that something the length of the Matthew's Gospel was long enough to explain the life of Christ. The medievals thought that an article about the length of an Op- ed could prove pretty much any one thing you wanted to know about God. With the amount of words that the average guy would dedicate to his Doctoral thesis, Plato could probably write twenty dialogues, and Aristotle, half his corpus.

2005-12-22T09:59:00.000-08:00

Aristotle and Words

Aristotle's whole philosophy is grounded on words. This should be evident from the beginnings of the first two books in Aristotle's corpus, from the fifth book of the Metaphysics, and from the frequency with which Aristotle says thing like "______ is said to be..." etc. Even before I was a disciple of Aristotle, I remember reading him and thinking "no one could ever beat this guy in an argument: he's cornered the market on words". At the time, I said this because I thought Aristotle was being tricky or underhanded. Like most readers of Aristotle, I was convinced that his whole philosophy was a bunch of "word games". The frequency with which Aristotle gets accused of simply playing tricks with words is an indication of the centrality of words in his philosophy.

We can belittle Aristotle for founding his philosophy on words only if we assert that words do not essentially reveal what things are. This opinion is now common. Much of modern logic, for example, is reared upon the idea that words are unnecessary for thought, even that they are an impediment to figuring out what is true. This opinion is in keeping with certain ideas of what it means to be "scientific", sc. that one should strive to eliminate as many words as possible, to get to the point where one is imply manipulating various symbols according to pre- set laws. We expect those who preeminently are supposed to tell us about the nature of the universe: i.e. the scientists, to do their job in silence and simply churn out equations. We also expect the science which is preeminently certain, sc. mathematics, to be about the manipulation of symbols, as opposed to the meaning of things. What the modern mind calls mathematics is really a sort of symbol manipulation that is done far better by a computer. Everyone admits that computers have a great ability to manipulate symbols, but it is just as obvious that they have no ability to explain what a word means.

But symbols, even though they are necessary tools for science, cannot take the place of words. A symbol and a word have an essential difference: a symbol stands for some thing, but a word has a meaning. The best short thomistic argument of this can be seen in this example: take a common symbol in physics "F" and a common word "dog". I can say "F = 6 Newtons", because the symbol "F" stands for any force in particular. But I can't say "Dog is fido", because the word dog doesn't stand for any dog in particular. Another sign of the difference between symbols and words is that we can't "solve for dog". Yet another sign is that we don't need to know what a symbol means to use it effectively (if 5+ x= 17.2, we don't need to know what x means to use it... i.e. is it standing for a force? a temperature? pounds of butter?) but we do need to know what "dog" means if we want to use it in speech. There is an irreducible difference between standing for something and meaning something.

Aristotle' science is essentially ordered to explaining the meanings of things. For this reason, he must ground his science on words. This was not a particularly Aristotelian notion- even those with profound disagreements with Aristotle still tried to found their thought on the meanings of words- we are simply more prone than other times to see the use of symbols as a greater sign of erudition than the use and understanding of words.

2005-12-21T14:26:00.000-08:00

Intelligent Design, Evolution, and Thomism

Both the ID'ers and the Evolutionists (and for that matter, most people simply speaking) agree on the following principle:

"what happens by chance is not caused by intelligence"

This is fine as a dialectical principle to get a discussion going, but in the sense in which the ID'ers and the evolutionists want to use it, it is false, since the whole ID/ evolution debate revolves around whether we can know God, and this principle is false when it is said in relation to the divine intelligence. As soon as this whole discussion shifts to a discussion of God, the Thomists can get involved: and the first thing we can bring up is that God is the universal cause of all participated being- regardless of whether the being came to be by chance or by design.

The principle quoted above is only true when it is restricted to what perennial philosophy calls "beings by participation". Said another way, the principle is true when if one is speaking about human or angelic intelligence, but not if he is speaking about the intelligence of God, the universal agent. The intelligence of the universal agent is the cause of existence as such, in such a way that whatever exists is caused and being caused by this agent. You can obviously disagree over whether any such intelligent universal agent exists- but if you want to do so, you need to start talking about being, essence, existence, causality, agency, being by participation... and for that matter, you have to start talking about what intelligence means.

2005-12-19T21:04:00.000-08:00

The Short form of the Argument Below.

Mozart is a better composer than Marty Haugen.

2005-12-19T11:19:00.000-08:00

On Modern Liturgical Music

Over at Plato's Stepchild, there is a dispute about Catholic liturgical music. Both sides (see here) are being silly now, which is unfortunate since the topic they are discussing is of extreme importance. Music in general is of underappreciated importance- being one of the primary influences of character. This makes the music of the liturgy significant even when considered simply as music, but even more so because the music of the liturgy cannot but be seen- especially by the young- as the music approved by God.

The dispute began with Tony asking The Stepchild to define a bad hymn. The stepchild didn't do so. Let me try: I define a bad hymn primarily as "A musical composition that is not fitting to the mass". So there's a definition. The definition can be taken in two ways:

1.) Modern liturgical music is a bad because it is the sort of music that is unfitting to the mass, or
2.) Modern liturgical music is bad, but only because of the particular songs that have been written.

For my own part, I favor position 1. Here's why:

- It has always been my experience that no one listens to modern Catholic liturgical music outside of when they have to listen to it at the mass. Mr. Haugen and Mr. Haas do not sell many CD's, and there seems to be no demand for them. I have never heard any of their songs outside of the context of the mass. If their music is intrinsically worth listening to, why is it that it sells so poorly, especially given the sort of aggressive advertising that is afforded to someone who gets heard so frequently by so many people?

- Modern liturgical music- as any liturgical music- is by nature ordered toward making God known. But modern liturgical music is intrinsically limited in it ability to make God known. Modern liturgical music does not admit of any way of expressing the majesty, transcendence or solemnity of God, because it is folk inspired, and folk- inspired music has no power to strike one with a sense of awe. People love folk music because it is folkish, which is the opposite of awe inspiring, solemn, transcendent, majestic, sublime, etc. If one tried to play a folk song when a king walked in- or some other lofty dignitary, everyone would be confused. It is unfitting, it would clang. But liturgical music must be able to invoke majesty and awe- to the extent that it cannot, it is simply unfitting.

-Modern liturgical music is unfit to be played in any context- since it is intrinsically unable to highlight any emotional state. A sign of this is that modern liturgical music is not used in any movie scene as a compliment to the action- even when the action is religious or uplifting, or expressing intimacy with God. Imagine, just as the most favorable example, a movie scene that calls for a moment in which a man experiences the revelation of the love of God- like St. Peter weeping at the feet of the Blessed Mother in The Passion, or William Wallace praying in his prison cell "Give me the strength, Lord, to die with dignity". Imagine the movie camera showing him choke on his tears. Then imagine that someone cues up the music "Here I am, Lord". CLANG. Everyone recognizes that this would, at best, destroy the whole scene. There could never be a movie made about the Passion of Christ that used modern liturgical music: so why is it that we think that it should ever be used at the mass- and for that matter, when does it ever work? Is there a single movie scene anywhere that effectively uses modern liturgical music as a compliment to anything?

-Modern liturgical music is by definition new. Inasmuch as it is new sort of music, it is unfit to invoke a sense of continuity with those who have come before us. But it is of the nature of the liturgy to invoke a sense of unity with those who came before us Therefore modern liturgical music is a bad sort of music.

2005-12-18T22:21:00.000-08:00

Scholarship about the highest things is ordered to profundity of learning- even when there is also great vastness of learning. Many great church doctors probably would not have done much better or much worse than other bright theologians on a standardized test of theological knowledge, but they could meditate for days over parts of the Creed or the Scriptures that almost everyone else passes over without notice. The same things that the saints could weep over, give their lives to thinking about, and toil to assimilate into their being are the same things as that we see as dogmatic, sterile, hackneyed, and too obvious to bother thinking about. Everyone has the same basic premisses in their head, but not all have the same disposition toward them. What the upstart tholgian finds boring or not as fulfilling is the same thing that an older theologian can find intensely interesting. It is surely possible to find new perspectives on things, new proofs for things known, new rhetorical rpresentations of things already known- but the goal is to understand the premise that we understood by rote since the beginning.

2005-12-18T21:52:00.000-08:00

A Few Jottings on the Principle of Contradiction.

-Either we explicitly take the principle of contradiction as primary, or we do not. If we don't, all roads will lead to Hegel, and then to Marx.

-All nature is nothing other than a certain potency to be moved by the divine mind- and the principle of contradiction is known by nature. So the principle of contradiction is the voice of God within us. If you want to hear the voice of God say "nothing can both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect" or- my favorite formulation- "being is, and cannot not be"

-We do not ever need to ask "is this a situation where I can apply the principle of contradiction"? This shows that the principle is absolutely transcendent. This proves that there is some sense in which we already know all things. The same is shown by the fact that we understand the word "thing" and "all" and "nothing" and "always" and "existence" and "being"...

-The principle of identity is not primary. If it were, there would have to be two principles of identity: sc. "being is being" and "non- being is non- being"- and we only know that these are really two principles if we already know the principle of contradiction.

-The confusion about the principle of identity comes from confusions in analytical logic. This logic replaces perfectly good words like "being" with symbols like "A". But the symbolization is not possible apart from some word known first- a word that speaks to being. The symbol precinds from meaning- and therefore even from the distinction between being and non- being. But our knowledge, and the world, does not precind from the distinction between being and non-being. The symbolization of the principle of contradiction, and other premises of being will always lead to perverse ideas.

2005-12-15T10:06:00.000-08:00

-Double-effect reasoning is almost always done in a way that does not take note of the common good. Even when the argument still works, it doesn't work as well. When one intends the common good, such an intention can be contrary to certain individual goods. To negate certain goods becomes possible.

2005-12-14T21:03:00.000-08:00

-If it is not evil to think anything, it is not evil to do anything.

-One sense of the word "certainty" is "firmness of conviction" where conviction means "a feeling". In this sense, we are often more certain of culturally held opinions than of anything we have have proven. Most people feel more certain about the evils of racism than about any truths they demonstrate in, say, physics.

-Opinion and knowledge are not distinguished by the thing known, but how we know it. The one who has a rational proof knows, and to fall short of this is to have, at best, belief. For this reason, most people have beliefs about scientific facts: heliocentrism, atomic theory, evolution, genetics, etc. By "most people" I include most of the scientists I have known. How many chemists, for example, could give an informed argument for why matter must be atomic?

-One of the most universally accepted attributes of God is that he has no body. How many theologians hold this as a mere opinion? How many of them could even give an informed argument for why an existing being with no body is so much as possible?

2005-12-13T17:29:00.000-08:00

If you, O Lord, were to lay our sins bare, what eye could endure it?

A large part of what makes us what we are is utterly loathsome, and known only to ourselves (if you can't remember yours right off the bat, give it some time). Between the guilt of all this, and the irrational things we do the hide guilt, and the darkness of mind that attends our loathsomeness, a large part of why a person or a society does what it does is unknown.

2005-12-12T20:36:00.000-08:00

A Whack at the Gordian Knot of Energy in Physics

(one half of a dialectical give and take- but I'd like to see how far it could be pushed)

Save me from the spiritualization of energy! Physicists seem intent on viewing it a mystical and almost divine way (divinization of natural beings is a common to the earlier stages of any mathematical physics). The puzzles about what energy is all seem unnecessary to me. Energy is a certain number of kilograms moved in a certain amount of time, times meters. It's a measurement on a scale, a stick, and a stopwatch and that's it.

2005-12-12T17:10:00.000-08:00

Hypothesis

St. Thomas claimed to learn more in prayer before a crucifix than in all his study of books.

Hypothesis:

As a scholarly type, Thomas Aquinas continually thought about what things mean. He considered the life of Christ from every angle. He carved out a thousand distinctions about him, he memorized every word the Scriptures said about him, he memorized more books about Christ than most people have read, and understood every page of them. He meditated continually on the meaning of Christ's life as he knelt before the crucifix, and grew in understanding.

And yet, one day in prayer it strikes him all the things that Christ's life means are dependent upon the fact that Christ actually lived. This perfection, which even a child can understand with great clarity, and perhaps with even greater clarity than an adult, was the perfection upon which all the others depend. Christ can not mean anything unless he existed. The essence of his life is a secondary perfection to his existence. Thomas proceeds to meditate on this existence continually, experiencing its primacy and power. Just think, all the things that he learned as a scholar were dependent on the one insight that any five year old could have- the root perfection of the faith is not anything that the Incarnation means, but the belief that it happened.

St. Thomas, through this insight, comes to an intimite understanding of esse, existence. Later he uses this insight to explain certain philosophical and theological problems. This insight comes to be seen as one of his central contibutions to philosophy.

2005-12-12T12:03:00.000-08:00

Manuducio

One of the loveliest ideas in St. Thomas articulated in his use of the word manuducio: "being led by the hand". This word conveys the central idea in discipleship. Man is for some time in life led by the hand by a master, and he is aways led in this life by the things of sensation, and by his angel, and he is led by God both in this life and the next. St. Thomas sees manuducio as esential to the intellectual life. Philosophers should see themselves more as being led than as leading.

2005-12-10T13:46:00.000-08:00

Number and the Things Beyond the Cosmos.

Scripture has many instances of numbers that express the superabundance of heavenly things: of the angels, there is "thousand thousands [of angels] ministered unto him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him (Dan. 7:10)" and "the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands (Rev. 5:11)". To express the magnitude of what is forgiven by grace, we have Christ saying: "one was brought unto him, which owed him ten thousand talents (Mt. 18:27)". The idea with these is not to indicate a specific sum, but rather to exhaust the imagination. We were meant to encounter those numbers as unimaginable sums, which leads to a sort of ecstasy of contemplation. Ten thousand times ten thousand was supposed to mean something like "beyond all number".

But ten thousand times ten thousand is not beyond all number for the modern mind. Even very young children will talk about billions and trillions- and if you give them the names for higher numbers they will speak of them too. Eighth grade science textbooks will throw around far greater numbers than billions, and one can write out numbers of unimaginable magnitude quite easily using scientific notation. No matter how absurdly large one wants a number, scientific notation makes brief work of it: the number of grams the sun weighs (2 x 10^33) the distance to the furthest known galaxy in nanometers, etc. Once one knows the method for manipulating scientific notation, he doesn't have to do much more than be able to multiply single digits, and add doubles to easily write out numbers that seem as great as can be calculated.

I like the modern mind on this account. Because there is no number that can dazzle our minds simply as number, we are more forced to come to grips with what it means to be "beyond number". This getting beyond number is, to my mind, one of the hardest things to understand about the things beyond the cosmos. When we say "there are three divine persons" and "there are three oranges on the table" the word "three" does not mean the same thing in both statements. Likewise, "ten thousand angels" and "ten thousand puppies" do not use the word "ten thousand" in the same way. Angels do not have the sort of homogeneity that number requires, the homogeneity of quantity. All the things that happen in the cosmos have a sort of homogeneity, of space or time or both, which allows us to count them.

The things of heaven do not have this homogeneity in any way, because they have a degree of uniqueness that exceeds anything in the cosmos, even man. When we are in heaven, and first see an angel- we will first think that it is God- but even after we are told that it is not God, the next time we look at an angel, the exact same thing will happen. Angels are not what we call "alike". Each individual is a completely different species. One angel need not remind us of another, the way all men are recognizable as men, for each angel is a subsistent species. God is further than even this, for he is beyond all species and genera absolutely. Any sort of universality of genus or species is utterly impossible to say of God. If there were one, it could only be "esse" or "existence"- but this is not a genus.

2005-12-09T22:08:00.000-08:00

The Cosmos as a Whole

(By cosmos, I mean the whole of material things- the solar system, the galaxies, the distant stars, etc. This order is often called "the universe". For thomists, however, "the universe" includes the angelic universe, which exist in a far greater number than the order of material things.)

The cosmos is already essentially known as temporal, corporeal, changeable and changing, arranged in a hierarchy, evolved, composed, caused and causing, existent, etc. These traits are already known, and are known as the sorts of things that one will always find in the cosmos (the material universe). It makes no difference if we look around where we are or if we travel as great a distance from here as we wish to imagine- all through the trip, and after it, and after any amount of trips of even greater length, we already know that there is time, bodily existence, change, space, cause and caused, and all the essential properties of these. So long as we speak of these things, then, we are speaking of the cosmos as a whole.

The cosmos, as a whole, is already known, and cannot not be knowable. Even if we say "everything we know about the cosmos might be wrong", we are still speaking about a possible error concerning the cosmos as a whole, which requires some grasp of the cosmos as a whole*. For this reason, whenever there is intellect and the cosmos the intellect will contain the cosmos, and if the cosmos itself contains the intellect, then the cosmos will be perfective of intellect. The intellect in the cosmos will also give a certain perfection to the cosmos, for through cosmic intellect (and cosmic/material intellect is all philosophy considers to be man) the universe becomes known to itself, acquiring a new an immaterial unity. Also, in man, matter gains an essential unity to the immaterial, for man is a rational animal- a immaterial/material being.

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*The cosmos is not simply "whatever is", a sort of null set devoid of content. This was shown in the first paragraph. There is, in fact, quite a lot of content in the word "cosmos".

2005-12-09T11:36:00.000-08:00

Participation

(some doctrine of participation in essential to the thought of Plato, Aristotle, and St. Thomas- making it as close to a philosophical slam dunk as you're going to find)

To exist by participation is to have being through the activity of another. This participated existence is analogous to the existence our ideas have in our own mind, but the analogy is not perfect. The analogy works insofar as:

-The participation proceeds from an activity of mind.

-The whole being of the participated thing is from the other- it is not the case, for example, that there is something that first exists, and then the participation is something added to it.

-The participated thing is continually getting existence from the activity of the mind. There is in fact no difference in the dependence that our ideas have on the mind when we first think of them, and after we have thought about them for awhile.

-Though the whole being is receiving existence from the mind, this still allows for an order.

-The participated thing is different from the activity of the mind.

The analogy does not work insofar as

-The things do not give perfection to the mind, as our ideas do. IF they did, then the mind from which they proceeded would in fact exist by participation- the cause of all being would be caused by all being.

-The ideas in our mind are generally not substances, but as accidents in us. But those things that exist by participation are truly substances. There is no proof necessary for this. If you ever find yourself denying that a pig, chicken or a man are substances, you've taken a wrong turn somewhere. Truths don't get much more obvious than this.

2005-12-08T12:28:00.000-08:00

Some Necessary Reading in The Relation of Catholicism and Thomism

here. In chapter #55. For another account of the same thomistic theses mentioned, see here

There is more by the author here.

2005-12-08T10:58:00.000-08:00

St. Thomas for Memorization

Now what the mind conceives may be reduced to a twofold principle; to God Himself, Who is the primal truth; and to the will of the one who understands, whereby we actually consider anything. But because truth is the light of the intellect, and God Himself is the rule of all truth; the manifestation of what is conceived by the mind, as depending on the primary truth, is both speech and enlightenment; for example, when one man says to another: "Heaven was created by God"; or, "Man is an animal." The manifestation, however, of what depends on the will of the one who understands, cannot be called an enlightenment, but is only a speech; for instance, when one says to another: "I wish to learn this; I wish to do this or that." The reason is that the created will is not a light, nor a rule of truth; but participates of light. Hence to communicate what comes from the created will is not, as such, an enlightening. For to know what you may will, or what you may understand does not belong to the perfection of my intellect; but only to know the truth in reality.

S.T. 1, Q.107, a.2

2005-12-07T16:27:00.000-08:00

Hypothesis Formed While Sitting at A Gathering of Contemporary Theologians.

One of the distinctive characteristics of the modern theologians I have had to deal with is that they hold that the Incarnation, Resurrection, etc. would have meaning for them even if they never happened. I understand the feeling here: I see great meaning in Greek myths, even though I don't believe in any of those gods; and I greatly value what the belief in Athena did for Greek architecture, sculpture, and letters, even though I don't believe she exists.

But why is it that I can see Athena as meaningful, and yet non-existent? One necessary condition for this seems to be that I'm indifferent to Athena's existence in this sense: I've never prayed to Athena, nor attended any ceremonies to her, nor have I ever tried to live as though she cared about me, nor have I humiliated myself in front of her priests in the hope of winning her favor. I've also never expressed any love to Athena, nor given my life to her. That, in a nutshell, is why I can simultaneously believe that Athena has meaning, and yet does not exist. If I loved Athena- loved her in the sense that I truly gave my life for her- I would see any attempt to sever Athena's existence from her meaning as, well, blasphemous.

On this note, it seems typical of modern theologians that they see great meaning in the significant events in the life of Christ, even though they don't believe that any of them happened. In the end, this strikes me as nothing other than a Christianity that doesn't love Christ. At the very least, I have no interest in such a Christianity.

2005-12-07T11:55:00.000-08:00

The closer we approach the particular, the less we are able to know. I could give general reasons for why men become philosophers, but I'm not sure I could ever give the exact reason why I became one, beyond the general accounts. A good amount of why I became one has no natural reason at all- it happened by chance. There is nothing in the nature of the universe that demanded that I have a Grandfather that told me to read Plato and Aristotle- nor that I have the disposition to listen to him. There's nothing that required that I find a mentor where I did, nor that I would listen to him either, as opposed to chasing after vanity. When I start adding up the number of coincidences that were required to make me a get into philosophy, I end up saying little more than "it happened that way because it did".

This is far before I try to figure out why my particular consciousness is as it is. When I die, no one will be able to figure out what purpose my death served in the universe. There is nothing to say. Chance has no natural reason, and chance is a part of everything.

2005-12-06T12:56:00.000-08:00

Scientific method is essential to understanding nature. Scientific method is not the only method essential to understanding nature.

2005-12-05T11:56:00.000-08:00

Unity and Perfectability

Perfection/act/being/goodness/unity is proportional to communicability, and communicability is proportional to perfection/act/being/goodness/unity. This is best exemplified in the Trinity, where there is a perfect preservation of the unity and the communication of the nature.

Failure to understand this premise is the root of many errors. The short list includes:

1.) Errors about the Trinity.
2.) Errors about the primacy of the common good.
3.) Impediments to the understanding of the nature and perfection of knowledge, and the hierarchy of being. The root of knowledge is the amplitude of existence, demonstrated by the degree of communicability of the nature.

2005-12-04T14:44:00.000-08:00

The Object of the Intellect.

An object is a term of an activity or operation- as the object of competition is to win, the object of going up the mountain is to get to the top, the object of collecting sticks is to build the nest, etc. "Object" in this sense means to be whatever completes or determines the action per se. The whole activity exists in relation to that term. Since the intellect has a determinate activity, it therefore exists in relation to an object, or term.

An object can be considered in two ways: in the formally, and in its amplitude. By formally we mean that thing that the power always attains per se: sight always attains color, hearing always attains sound. By the amplitude of the power, we mean the extent to which a power grasps the formal object: men can hear fewer sounds than dogs or other animals, but man can see more colors than a deer.

The object of the intellect, taken formally, is being. In every act of the intellect, the intellect attains to what is. This is seen through our naming things, for a name expresses what a thing is; and through our judging things, for a judgment expresses what is and is not; and through our reasoning about things, for all reasoning (and every act of the intellect) presupposes the principle of contradiction, which obtains being as such (everyone knows that the principle of contradiction has no limitation, that it is true of all things without qualification.)

The amplitude of the intellect, since it relates to what the intellect can attain, can be taken in two ways. If we means what is within the passive power of the intellect, then there is absolutely no limitation on what the intellect is able to attain. I stress this word absolute: the knowledge of the Trinity, spiritual substances, the angelic hierarchy, etc. are all within the natural passive power of the intellect.

But in this life, the intellect takes its knowledge from the senses, as should be clear enough from the power of drunkenness or a stroke to destroy reasoning. And so if we consider the active power of the intellect in this life, the amplitude of its object extends to understanding the being of material things* which are perceived by the senses. All the other things which the human intellect knows within its natural passive power can only be known in this life by these material things, by this very limited class of intelligible things.

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*I can't stress enough how important each word is here in the definition of man's proper object. The proper object of the intellect is the being (quiddity) of material things. There are two possible errors here. On the one hand, we can emphasize man's knowledge of being to the exclusion of any kind of essential dependence on the senses. When this happens, we end up with with some form of error which can't explain the necessity of the body for human perfection. When we do this, we end up thinking of man as an angel or a god. On the other hand, we can emphasize the dependence of our knowledge on material things in such a way as to ignore our real grasp of being as such. When we do this, we end up understanding man as a sort of beast. The deep paradox of man's most proper object the quiddity/ being of material things, proceeds from the paradox of man; for man is a rational animal, and therefore by definition an immaterial material being.

2005-12-02T17:06:00.000-08:00

A few years ago I was arguing with a guy over something. I forget what the argument was originally about, but toward the end of it I told him something like "Our power to reason is like a mother to us. In fact, reason is more of a mother than even our own mother. Our own mother caused us to come to be at one moment in the beginning of our life, and then she partially caused us to be what we are through external advice and prodding and discipline- but reason is constantly causing us to be what we are, all throughout our life, and it is causing us to be what we are intimately and internally- it is our very essence."

The guy shot back with one of the ugliest replies I have ever heard: "reason isn't my mother. Reason is just a tool."

Both of us immediately saw that there was nothing left to speak about. The disagreement was of the sort that left no possibility of further discussion. I still see my position and his as admitting of no compromise, no dialogue, and no third option- any agreement or disagreement we might seem to hold in common would be hiding an equivocation somewhere. Reason, taken as such, is either something that should be loved for its own sake, or not.

Reason is just a tool. I have not heard anyone since summarize the position so well. I have heard a hundred different guys talk about how reasoning is a computer, a symbol holder, a cellular machine, a calculating lump of meat, a mechanical linking of appearances, a sum of conscious states, etc. Whatever. I'm not interested in arguing against materialism or physicalism (doctrines which gain most of their plausibility from a failure to define matter or physical things)
I'm only interested here in pointing our that all of the above opinions of the mind agree that the mind is just a tool, but none put the opinion as clearly as saying reason is just a tool. Either this is the case, or reason deserves to be loved for its own sake.

So those are the options.

2005-12-01T11:52:00.000-08:00

Objectivity and Speculative Science

One of my favorite thought experiments is to imagine various philosophers getting hired to write definitions for Miriam-Webster. Imagine the modern philosophers of mind submitting their definition of "consciousness" or "conscious" or "person". What would an editor say to "the sum of all mental states " or "Locus of responsibility and awareness to pleasure"? What would they say to an account of necessity like "having a probability of 1"?

The dictionary is the best example of what objectivity in philosophy and the other speculative sciences should sound like. An account is objective when it gives us the object- i.e. when personal prejudices or emotions do not distort the account given of the object. No one expects to encounter any personal theory or prejudice in the dictionary- we do not even relate to the dictionary as though it were written by a person. We relate to a dictionary as though the objects themselves were speaking to us. This "letting the object speak for itself" is the goal of all speculative sciences.

2005-11-29T17:28:00.000-08:00

Scripture and Gambling

To my knowledge, there is no direct reference to the morality of gambling in scripture. Something like gambling, is alluded to: "and for his vesture they cast lots*", but never is there a clear condemnation of the act, nor even a clear instance of it.

It is difficult to isolate what one means by "the morality of gambling". It is obvious that it can be wrong per accidens- if someone were to, say, waste all their substance on it. It also seems pretty undisputed that gambling can be right under various conditions, like playing bingo to support the nuns. One can neither condemn games of chance flat out, like adultery or murder, nor reckon them as morally neutral as scratching your nose.

To my mind, gambling is dangerous for its unique ability to combine greed and sloth: "Those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. One of the most common temptations is the desire to be rich quick- i.e. the desire to get rich without work. Because this desire is so common in men, we should choose as a rule not to allow widespread gambling in a society.

But what is wrong in a society is not always wrong in an individual case. If the question is whether to allow widespread gambling in a certain society, then I would argue that it is simply wrong, always or for the most part- and that we don't need to consider any special circumstances. If the question is whether an individual act of gambling is wrong, then I think we more have to look at the circumstances.

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*Scripture often makes things of great moment turn upon lots: The land given to the twelve tribes is divided by lot; Saul determines who cursed his battle by lot (the lot falls upon his son, Jonathan); and the successor of Judas is chosen by lot. A very fascinating essay might be written about lots- my thesis would be that lot is taken as the voice of God. This is strange when you think about it- those in scripture saw the lots as testifying to God's will, whereas chance in general is taken to be a sign of the absence of God: i.e. "Life comes to be by chance, so there is no God". Even if this were so, why not see living being as "taken by lot"?

And yes, yes, I remember the difference between luck and chance...

2005-11-29T16:51:00.000-08:00

The Comic Consciousness

Hegel claims that philosophers first destroy the traditional beliefs in the gods, and that this leads to a comic consciousness, which is unable to take serious things seriously. This is not an altogether unfitting description of our own time. It may be one of the better descriptions of the spirit of our age.

2005-11-28T21:22:00.000-08:00

"Nor ought we follow those who say that a mortal should have thought concerned with mortality."

Philosophy is the understanding of immortal and eternal things. If someone can attain such knowedge, it is commanded of them- love God with your whole mind.

2005-11-27T09:19:00.000-08:00

A Personal Story About Learning the First Way

It took me ten years to get an scientific understanding* of St. Thomas' first proof for the existence of God. This isn't to say that I had no clue what was going on for ten years and then it just hit me. Over time, each of the premises revealed a little bit more of itself. I got clearer ideas of the parts of the proof: act and potency, the principle of causality, the relation of matter to agent, the distinctions in infinite regress. All the while, I was also getting clearer ideas of the responses to the objections to the proof: the problem of inertia, the problem of the possibility of many gods, the problem that it allowed for polytheism and things that no one would ever call God. I also had to learn the separate sciences that were necessary to understand the first way- the philosophy of nature, Aristotle's logical treatises, etc,

Some part of what kept me going- perhaps even the greater part- was sheer vanity: based on my past experience of myself, I probably wouldn't have kept studying the proof if everyone else was. Also, I already believed that that God exists, and I wanted to know this for myself. This doesn't make the first way some delusion or wish fulfillment- the man who discovered Troy, for example, only searched for it out of a faith in the fact that Homer must have been telling the truth. If faith in Homer can motivate a real discovery, why can't faith in God?

Even after all the work it takes to get the first way, one is only beginning theology. Notice that one hasn't even answered in the first way one lacks some very rudimentary truths about God: his incorporeality, for example (which, when you think about it, is a scandal for the mind- you mean that there can be something that exists, but has no body?) But it's also true that the first way is very fertile, and it leads to a thousand different conclusions, if one takes it seriously (so too with all the other five ways: I choose the first because it is, well, first in presentation, and because it was given by both St. Thomas, Aristotle, and Plato in The Laws.)

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*by "scientific understanding" I mean primarily that I could reduce the proof to the self-evident, but also that I could give answers to the main objections. It's important to point out that the greater part of this time was spent in learning the science as such, not in learning the proof- but nonetheless, it is true to say that it takes ten years to learn the proof. since if someone were to start from scratch, it would take him ten years to get the sort of answer he wants. If an atheist were to challenge me "prove that God exists!" I don't know how I could give him a proof as rigorous as the one he wants- it took me ten years even with faith to sustain the journey.

2005-11-26T13:27:00.000-08:00

Everything in the comsos can become something else. Said another way, there is something belonging to every being in the cosmos that is capaple of becoming something else. If we consider this thing that is able to be other inasmuch as it is able to be another, than it is clearly different from the thing. A such it is not determined to the thing, yet it is a part of it.

This lack of determination is the root of time and space, for in cosmic beings to endure means to have sucession in time, and to exist involves having a sucession of parts in space. It is also the root of death, for death can only belong to a thing which can become something else- for if it could not so change it would by definition maintain itself as what it was.