Month: February 2010

The 26.2 Club

26.2 I affixed my 26.2 decal to the rear window of my Jeep Liberty this morning.  I've earned and have the right to advertise my entry into an elite club.  Sunday's Lost Dutchman was my second attempt but my first success.  The first attempt was Boston 1979.  My training had been overzealous and my knees were giving me serious trouble; fearing permanent injury I dropped out at the top of Heartbreak Hill, 21.3 miles into it, with Boston a mere five miles downhill.  (It was my first road race, I confess to running as a tag-along or a 'bandit' in today's parlance, I was young, I didn't know any better. Mea maxima culpa.)

How elite a club?  Joe Henderson, who has been marathoning and writing about it since the late '60s, says it well:

If you really want to know where you stand, don't count how many runners finish ahead of you.  Instead, turn around and look behind you.  Look especially at the people you can't see: those who trained for a marathon and didn't reach the starting line . . . who race but not at this distance . . . who run but never race . . . who used to run but don't any more . . . who never ran and never will.  [. . .]  Being a marathoner make you one in a thousand Americans.  Pat yourself on the back for doing something that 99.9 per cent of your countrymen or women couldn't or wouldn't do.

Don't call yourself slow, because you are not. You are fast enough to beat everyone who isn't in the race.  (Marathon Training, 2nd ed. 2004, p. 10)

Substance and Suppositum: Notes on Klubertanz

This recent excursion into the philosophy of The School is proving to be quite fascinating, and I thank Dr. Novak et al. for their stimulation.  I should say that I have read thousands upon thousands of pages of scholastic material, from Aquinas to Zubiri,  from Maritain to Marechal, over the past 40 years, so it is not as if I am a complete stranger to it; I do confess, however, to finding some of it mumbo-jumbo and lacking in the sort of analytic rigor that we broadly analytic types prize. To get a better handle on the notion of suppositum ('supposit' in English), this morning I pulled down from the shelf a number of scholastic manuals.

Let us first  turn to George P. Klubertanz, S. J., Introduction to the Philosophy of Being, 2nd ed. (Meredith Publ., 1963).  Back in the day, when Catholic colleges were Catholic as opposed to catholic, this textbook was inflicted upon many a bored undergraduate in required courses. In those days, philosophy was taught systematically; this was before and during Vatican II, before and while  the rot set in (if rot it was) and before chaos descended, the kind of chaos that issued in the Vagina Monologues being presented at the University of Notre Dame.  (To cop a riff from Dennis Prager, there is no coward like an academic coward, and the abdication of authority on the part of university officials from the 60s on is something to marvel at.)

But I digress.  According to Klubertanz, "The first substance is the singular substance which exists.  When we want to designate the being precisely as an existing, substantial, complete individual, we call it a 'supposit.'" (251)  He goes on to say that a supposit is a "complete individual" and therefore not something common to many in the manner of a secondary substance.  Nor is a supposit an integral part, or an essential part, of a substance.  Klubertanz gives the example of the body of a living thing as an example of an essential part of it — presumably because a living thing cannot exist without a body — and the example of a hand as an example of an "integral part."  Klubertanz gives no rigorous definition of the latter phrase, but I surmise that an integral part is a part that is not essential to the whole of which it is a part.  Thus a primary substance such as a particular man can exist without a hand.

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Professor Anderson and the Hyper-Inscrutability of the Trinitarian Doctrine (Peter Lupu)

(This gem is pulled up from the vasty deeps of the ComBox to where it may shine in a more fitting setting.  Minor editing, bolding, and comments in blue by BV.)

1). Let us say that a *real* contradiction is a sentence which comes out false according to every possible model (M): i.e., M = language-plus-domain-plus-interpretation, where an ‘interpretation’ is a complete and systematic assignment of extensions to the non-logical terms of the language (L). We assume that L is a well developed natural language such as English and we have a sufficiently rich domain that includes whatever entities are required to implement an interpretation that will suffice for theological purposes.

1.1) Note: We are assuming throughout classical logic in two sense: (a) the logical constants are interpreted classically; (b) there are no *real* true contradictions.

1.2) Sentence S is a *real* contradiction just in case there is no *normal model* M in which it comes out true. A normal model in this context is one which features an interpretation that assigns extensions to the non-logical terms in the usual way prior to resolving any potential ambiguities. On a realist conception of truth, S [if contradictory] has no truth-maker (T-maker) in any normal model or possible world.

2) Let us now define at least one sense of an *apparent contradiction* in model theoretic terms. Let S be a sentence expressible in L and suppose S comes out false in every normal model M. S appears to be a contradiction. Is it really a contradiction? Prof. Anderson maintains that there are sentences which are contradictory in every normal model, but are non-contradictory in some other models of L. How can that be? [Shouldn't Peter have 'false' for contradictory and 'true' for non-contradictory in the preceding sentence?  After all, in (1) we are told in effect that contradictoriness is falsehood in every model, which implies that noncontradictoriness is truth in some model.  'Contradictory in every model' is a pleonastic expression.]

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Was Descartes Poisoned by a Catholic Priest?

Descartes-rene As we have been learning, the conceivability of such theological doctrines as Trinity, Incarnation, and Transubstantiation depends on one's background ontology.  Erlangen University's Theodor Ebert, according to this Guardian account, argues that the father of modern philosophy was poisoned with an arsenic-laced communion wafer by a Catholic priest because his metaphysical position is inconsistent with the Transubstantiation doctrine.

This raises an interesting question:  Isn't a Catholic priest's commission of murder by desecration of the host far worse than a philosopher's holding of heretical views? 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Running on St. Valentine’s Day

My training over and my carbo-loading done, I am now in the psych-up phase for tomorrow's Lost Dutchman marathon.  Will I be able to go the distance?  At the outset, I'll Take It Easy but then Take It to the Limit.  I will have no trouble with the first 20 miles, but the last 10 K I will be Running on Empty.  Question is whether I will be Willin' to keep on movin'?

And while we're on the running them, let's not forget Del Shannon's Runaway, Roy Orbison's Running Scared, and Dion DiMucci's Runaround Sue.  And then there's that Crystals number the refrain of which sounds like 'They do run, run.'

And tomorrow  being St Valentine's Day, three for my wife.  An old Sam Cooke number, a lovely Shirelles tune, and my favorite from the Seekers.

A Platonist at Breakfast

I head out early one morning with wifey in tow. I’m going to take her to a really fancy joint this time, the 5 and Diner, a greasy spoon just dripping with 1950s Americana. We belly up to the counter –where I can keep an eye on the waitresses — and order the $2. 98 special: two eggs any style, hashbrowns, toast and coffee. Meanwhile I punch the buttons of Floyd Cramer’s "Last Date" on the personal jukebox in front of me after feeding it with a quarter from wifey’s purse.

"How would you like your eggs, sir?"

More Fun With Alienans Adjectives and an Application

My bathroom sinks are made of faux marble, which is to say that they are not made of marble: false marble is not marble.  So faux and 'false' function here as alienans adjectives. Similar cases: false gold, falsies, false friend.  But 'false' in 'false teeth' is not an alienans adjective: false teeth are teeth just as an artificial hand is a hand.  Artificial leather, however, is not leather.

What about 'epistemic' in 'epistemic possibility'?  I'd say it is alienans.  I ask the secretary whether Professor Windbag is in his office.  She says, "It's possible."  Unbeknownst to both of us, however, old Windbag was cremated the night before.  So one cannot validly infer 'It is possible that p'  from 'It is epistemically possible that p.'

I saw a liberal on John Stossel's show the other night.  She said more than once that obesity is contagious.  When called on the absurdity of her assertion, she retreated to the claim that it is socially contagious.  Socially contagious?  I pronounce my 'bullshit' upon that: 'socially' here functions as an alienans adjective.  What is socially contagious is not contagious strictly speaking.

Liberals want to make of obesity a public health problem.  We ought not let them get away with it.  I have explained before why it is not a public health problem, and I'm not in the mood to repeat myself.  I'll just remind you that if we let the proponents of socialized medicine get their way, our liberty is near an end.  Once the government controls every aspect of health care, they will be in a position to dictate your behavior in almost every particular: what you must eat, what you must not eat, whether and how much you should exercise, whether you will be allowed to engage in such risky activities as riding motorcycles and so on.  And if high risk activities are allowed, then you can expect special taxes and restrictions galore.

So when I go on about language, it is not all just pedantry and scholarly nicety.  Attention to language is a prerequisite for critical thinking.  There is no semantic vehicle that some leftist will not try to hijack and pilot to a Left Coast destination; so sharpen your wits and be on guard.

For more on alienans adjectives, see Adjectives.

This Life

Too dream-like to be real, this life is too real to be a dream.  We cannot literally be "such stuff as dreams are made on" (The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1), but the spiritually percipient will catch the Bard's drift.  "Our little life  rounded with a sleep" is not a candidate for plenary Reality.

More Christology: Freddoso on Supposita

To better understand the doctrine of supposita and the role it plays in the doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation, we turn to Alfred J. Freddoso, Human Nature, Potency and the Incarnation (bolding added):

According to the Christian faith, as defined in this instance by the great Christological Councils and mirrored in centuries of liturgical practice and theological reflection, Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man. More precisely, he is a single divine person, the eternal Word, in whom are united, whole and unmixed, a divine nature and a human nature–so that he is, to quote Chalcedon, "one with the Father in his divinity and one with us in his humanity."

In expounding this doctrine medieval theologians fashioned the technical metaphysical notion of a suppositum (or hypostasis), i.e. an independently existing ultimate subject of characteristics.4 The philosophically astute will detect at once that, so understood, the concept of a suppositum is remarkably akin to that of an Aristotelian primary substance or individual(ized) nature. Indeed, had it not been for the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, medieval Christian thinkers would never have been led to assert that suppositum and substance (or: individual nature) are distinct concepts. To speak now only of the Incarnation, Christ's individual human nature, i.e. the individual composed of a body and an intellective soul and united to the Son of God, is a paradigmatic Aristotelian [primary] substance . . . .Yet, because of its metaphysical union with and dependence upon the eternal Word, this nature is not the ultimate metaphysical subject of Christ's characteristics–not even of his "purely human" characteristics. So in this one instance, known to us only by divine revelation, we have a substance which is not a suppositum, a substance which is metaphysically "sustained" by something distinct from it. To complete the picture, a person is just a suppositum with an intellectual nature, i.e. a suppositum essentially endowed with intellect and free will.

In technical medieval terminology, then, Jesus Christ is a divine suppositum or person, the Son of God, who has freely "assumed" and now "sustains" an individual human nature. What's more, this human nature is united to the divine person "hypostatically," i.e. in such a way that properties had immediately by the human nature have the Son of God as their ultimate metaphysical subject–in a manner analogous to that in which many properties had immediately by a proper part of a whole have the whole itself as their ultimate metaphysical subject.

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