Being out of his line of sight,
The peacock's pluming and preening's
Invisible in the best of light.
Month: April 2016
On the Status of Thomistic Common Natures
Aquinas says that any given nature can be considered in three ways: in respect of the esse it has in concrete singulars; in respect of the esse it has in minds; absolutely, in the abstract, without reference to either material singulars or minds, and thus without reference to either mode of esse. The two modes are esse naturale (esse reale) and esse intentionale. We can speak of these in English as real existence (being) and intentional existence (being). Real existence is existence 'outside' the (finite) mind. Intentional existence is existence 'in' or 'before' the mind. The mentioned words are obviously not to be taken spatially. Esse is the Latin infinitive, to be. Every human mind is a finite mind, but don't assume the converse.
According to Schopenhauer, the medievals employed but three examples: Socrates, Plato, and an ass. Who am I to deviate from a tradition at once so hoary and noble? So take Socrates. Socrates is human. The nature humanity exists really in him, and in Plato, but not in the ass. The same nature exists intentionally in a mind that thinks about or knows Socrates. For Aquinas, there are no epistemic deputies standing between mind and thing: thought reaches right up to and grasps the thing itself. There is an isomorphism between knowing mind and thing known. The ground of this isomorphism is the natura absoluta, the nature considered absolutely. Call it the common nature (CN). It is so-called because it is common to both the knower and the known, informing both, albeit in different ways. It is also common to all the singulars of the same nature and all the thoughts directed to the same sort of thing. So caninity is common to all doggy thoughts, to all dogs, besides linking the doggy thoughts to the dogs.
Pause to appreciate how attractive this conception is. It secures the intrinsic intelligibility of the world while avoiding the 'gap problem' that bedevils post-Cartesian thought.
I need to know more, however, about the exact ontological status of the common nature (CN) which is, as it were, amphibious as between knowing mind and thing known.
With the help of Anthony Kenny, I realized that there are four possible views, not three as I stated in earlier forays:
A. The CN really exists as a separate, self-subsistent item.
B. The CN exists only intentionally in the mind of one who abstracts it from concrete extramental singulars and mental acts. (Note: a mental act is a concrete singular because in time, though not in space.)
C. The CN has Meinongian Aussersein status: it has no mode of being whatsoever, and yet is is something, not nothing. It actually has properties, it does not merely possibly have them, but is property-incomplete (and therefore in violation of the Law of Excluded Middle) in that it is neither one nor many, neither universal nor particular, neither intentionally existent nor really existent.
D. The CN exists intentionally in the mind of God, the creator.
(A) is a nonstarter and is rejected by both me and Lukas Novak. (B) appears to be Novak's view. (C) is the interpretation I was tentatively suggesting in earlier entries.. My thesis was that the CN must have Aussersein status, but then it inherits — to put it anachronistically — all the problems of Meinongianism. The doctor angelicus ends up in the jungle with a Meinongian monkey on his back.
Let me now try to explain why I reject (B), Novak's view, and incline toward (C), given that (A) cannot possibly be what Aquinas had in mind.
Consider a time t before there were any human animals and any finite minds, and ask yourself: did the nature humanity exist at t? The answer has to be in the negative if there are only two modes of existence, real existence in concrete extramental singulars and intentional existence in finite (creaturely) minds. For at t there were no humans and no finite minds. But surely it is true at t that man is rational, that humanity includes rationality. This implies that humanity at t cannot be just nothing at all. For if it were nothing at all at t, then 'Man is rational'' at t would lack a truth-maker. Furthermore, we surely don't want to say that 'Man is rational' first becomes true when the first human being exists. In some sense, the common nature must be prior to its existential realization in concrete singulars and in minds. The common nature cannot depend on these modes of realization. Kenny quotes Aquinas (Aquinas on Being, Oxford 2002, p. 73):
Socrates is rational, because man is rational, and not vice versa; so that even if Socrates and Plato did not exist, rationality would still be a characteristic of human nature.
Socrates est rationalis, quia homo est rationalis, et non e converso; unde dato quod Socrates et Plato non essent, adhuc humanae naturae rationalitas competeret. (Quodl. VIII, I, c, 108-110)
Aquinas' point could be put like this. (i) At times and in possible worlds in which humans do not exist, it is nevertheless the case that rationality is included in humanity, and (ii) the metaphysical ground of humans' being rational is the circumstance that rationality is included in humanity, and not vice versa.
Now this obviously implies that the common nature humanity has some sort of status independent of real and intentional existence. So we either go the Meinongian route or we say that comon natures exist in the mind of God. Kenny:
Aquinas' solution is to invoke the divine mind. There are really four, not three ways of considering natures: first, as they are in the mind of the creator; second, as they are in the abstract; third, as they are in individuals; and finally, as they are in the human mind. (p. 74)
This may seem to solve the problem I raised. Common natures are not nothing because they are divine accusatives. And they are not nothing in virtue of being ausserseiend. This solution avoids the three options of Platonism, subjectivism (according to which CNs exist only as products of abstraction), and Meinongianism.
The problem with the solution is that it smacks of deus ex machina: God is brought in to solve the problem similarly as Descartes had recourse to the divine veracity to solve the problem of the external world. Solutions to the problems of universals, predication, and intentionality ought to be possible without bringing God into the picture.
I think about deus ex machina objections in philosophy in Deus ex Machina: Leibniz Contra Malebranche.
But if we don't bring God into the picture then we may face a trilemma: either Platonism, or subjectivism, or Meinongianism.
What Song Did the Sirens Sing and in What Key?
Ulysses had himself bound to the mast and the ears of his sailors plugged with wax lest the ravishing strains of the sea nymphs' song reach their ears and cause them to cast themselves into the sea and into their doom. But what song did the Sirens sing, and in what key? And what about the nymphs themselves? Were their tresses of golden hue? And how long were they? Were the nymphs equipped with special nautical brassieres to protect their tender nipples from rude contact with jelly fish and such?
One cannot sing a song without singing some definite song in some definite key commencing at some definite time and ending at some definite later time.
But you understand the story of Ulysses and the Sirens and you are now thinking about the song they sang. And you are thinking about the nymphs and their ravishing endowments. But what sorts of objects are these? Incomplete objects. Are there then in reality incomplete objects?
Direct and Indirect Reference: Questions and Puzzles
London Ed asks:
Exactly what does ‘refer’ mean? And when we talk about ‘direct reference’ and ‘indirect reference’, are we really talking about exactly the same relation, or only the same in name?
The second question got me thinking.
The paradigms of direct reference are the indexicals and the demonstratives. The English letter 'I' is not the English word 'I,' and the word 'I' — the first-person singular pronoun — has non-indexical uses. But let's consider a standard indexical use of this pronoun. Tom says to Tina, "I'm hungry." Tom refers to himself directly using 'I.' That means: Tom refers to himself, but not via a description that he uniquely satisfies. The reference is not routed through a reference-mediating sense. If you think it is so routed, tell me what the reference-mediating sense of your indexical uses of the first person singular pronoun is. I wish you the best of luck.
As I understand it, to say of a singular term that it is directly referential is not to say that it lacks sense, but that it lacks a reference-determining sense. If a term has a reference-determining sense, then the reference of that term is 'routed though' or 'focused by' the sense: the term picks out whatever satisfies the sense, if anything satisfies it. The indexical 'now' does have a sense in that whatever it picks out must be a time, indeed, a time that is present. But this very general sense does not make a use of 'now' refer to the precise time to which it refers. So 'now' is directly referential despite its having a sense.
Consider the demonstrative 'this.' Pointing to a poker, I say 'This is hot.' You agree and say 'This is hot!' We point to the same thing and we say the same thing. The same thing we say is the proposition. The proposition is true. Neither the poker nor its degree of heat are true. The reference of 'this' is direct. It seems to follow that the poker itself is a constituent of the proposition that is before both of our minds and that we agree is true. The poker itself is a constituent of the proposition, not an abstract and immaterial surrogate or representative of the material poker. But then propositions are Russellian as opposed to Fregean. The poker itself, not an abstract surrogate such as a Fregean sense, is a constituent of the proposition.
How can this be? I grasp (understand) the proposition. So I grasp its constituents. (Assumption: I cannot understand a proposition unless I understand its logical parts. Compositionality of meaning.) One of the constituents is the poker itself. But how is it possible for my poor little finite mind to grasp the hot poker in all its infinitely-propertied reality? How can I get that massive chunk of external reality with all its properties before my puny little intellectus ectypus? Here is an aporetic triad for your delectation:
The proposition is in or before my mind.
The hot poker is a constituent of the proposition.
The hot poker is not in or before my mind.
How will you solve this bad boy? The first limb is well-nigh datanic. Since I understand the proposition expressed by 'This is hot' asserted while pointing to a hot poker, the proposition is before my mind. So we must either deny the second or the third limb.
My tendency is to deny the second limb and affirm that all propositions are Fregean. If all propositions are Fregean, then no proposition has as a constituent an infinitely-propertied material object such as a red-hot poker.
But if I say this, then it seems that I cannot say that the reference of 'this' is direct. But if not direct, then mediated by sense. What then is the sense of 'this'? What is the meaning of 'this'?
Or we could say the following: there is direct reference all right, but not to an infinitely-propertied chunk of physical reality, but to an incomplete object, something like what Hector-Neri Castaneda calls an "ontological guise." It is a Meinongian sort of item and involves us in the difficulties of Meinongianism.
London Ed will not like this answer one bit.
To say that a singular term t indirectly refers to object o is to say two things. (i) It is to say that there is a description D(t) that gives the sense of t, a description which is such that anything that satisfies it uniquely satisfies it. (ii) And it is to say that o uniquely satisfies D(t).
Note that for the indirect reference relation to hold there needn't be any real-world connection such as a causal connection between one's use of t and o. It is just a matter of whether or not o uniquely satisfies the description encapsulated by t. Satisfaction is a 'logical' relation. It is like the 'falling-under' relation. Ed falls under the concept Londoner. The relation of falling-under is not 'real': it is not causal or spatial or temporal or a physical part-whole relation. It is a 'logical' relation.
Indirect reference is just unique satisfaction by an item of a description encapsulated in a term. If 'Socrates' refers indirectly, then it refers to whatever satisfies some such definite description as 'the teacher of Plato.' (Or perhaps a Searlean disjunction of definite descriptions.) Direct reference, on the other hand, has nothing to do with satisfaction of a description.
So I think London Ed is on to something. When we talk about ‘direct reference’ and ‘indirect reference’, we are not talking about exactly the same relation. The two phrases have only a word in common, 'reference.' If all reference is indirect, then direct reference is not reference. And if all reference is direct, then indirect reference is not reference. There are not two kinds of reference. Only the word is in common.
The reason, again, is that indirect reference is just unique satisfaction of a description whereas direct reference has nothing to do with satisfaction of a description. This is even more obvious if the direct reference theorist brings causation into the picture.
Tyrant at Home, Pussy Abroad
Roger Kimball, Why I Support Ted Cruz:
One of the curiosities of the reign of Barack Obama is that while he has vastly increased the power of the state domestically, when it comes to the world outside, to national security, he has gravely weakened the United States, both physically, in terms of its military strength, and psychologically, in terms of that diffuse but indisputably potent resource, prestige. ISIS rages, Russia buzzes our warships and reconnaissance planes, China militarizes the South China Sea. We do . . . nothing.
Haiku
The perfect little white cloud
Dissolves before my gaze.
The sky remains.
Unsuccessful in Love
The Collected Poems and Epigrams of J. V. Cunningham, Chicago, The Swallow Press, 1971.
Epigram 57
Here lies my wife. Eternal peace
Be to us both with her decease.Epigram 59
I married in my youth a wife.
She was my own, my very first.
She gave the best years of her life.
I hope nobody gets the worst.
J. V. Cunningham is the model for John Williams' 1965 novel Stoner. An underappreciated and unfortunately titled masterpiece, it is about one William Stoner, an obscure professor of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia. At its publication in '65 it pretty much fell still-born from the press, but the years have been kind to it and it is now valued as the great novel that it is. Unfortunately, Williams, who died in 1994, did not live to see its success.
In Five Books of Professors, the late D. G. Myers describes it like this:
(4.) John Williams, Stoner (1965). Based on the life of J. V. Cunningham and especially his disastrous marriage to Barbara Gibbs. Easily the best novel ever written about the determined renunciations and quiet joys of the scholarly life. Stoner suffers reversal after reversal—a bad marriage, persecution at the hands of his department chair, the forced breakup of a brief and fulfilling love affair with a younger scholar—but he endures because of two things: his love for his daughter, who wants nothing more than to spend time with her father while he writes his scholarship, and his work on the English Renaissance. His end is tragic, but Stoner does not experience it that way. A genuinely unforgettable reading experience.
"Genuinely unforgettable" sounds like hype, but this is one novel I, for one, will not forget. For more by Myers on Stoner, see here.
My copy of the novel sports a blurb by Myers: "It will remind you of why you started reading novels: to get inside the mystery of other people's lives." Yes.
Companion post: A is A: Monism Refuted
Related articles
Is Age Only a Number?
Some say age is only a number. Not quite. It is a number that measures something. You may as well say that temperature is only a number; you are only as hot as you feel.
Face reality, but don't exaggerate how bad things are.
False Modesty
False modesty sometimes assumes the form of an avowal that one's modesty is not false.
Man the Unjust
Limited as we are, we limit others to less than they are.
Any Advice re: Firefox Browser Crashes?
Mainly I blog, but today I bleg.
I prefer the Firefox browser to Google Chrome, but the former crashes on a regular basis, like every other day. Yes, I have done the obvious things like make sure I am running the latest version. I take it that others have this crash problem. Any suggestions?
Christopher Hitchens, Religion, and Cognitive Dissonance
Hitchens says somewhere that he didn't suffer from cognitive dissonance of the sort that arises when a deeply internalized religious upbringing collides with the contrary values of the world, since he never took religion or theism seriously in the first place. But then I say religion was never a Jamesian live option for him. But if not a live existential option, one that engages the whole man and not just his intellect, then not an option explored with the openness and sympathy and humility requisite for understanding.
So why should we take seriously what Hitchens says about religion? He hasn't sympathetically entered into the subject. He hasn't fulfilled the prerequisites for understanding. One such prerequisite is openness to the pain of cognitive dissonance as suffered when the doctrines, precepts and practices of a religion taken seriously come into conflict with a world that mocks them when not ignoring them. But in Hitchens by his own account there was not even the possibility of cognitive dissonance.
Consider two working class individuals. The first is a sensitive poet with real poetic ability. His family, however, considers poetry effete and epicene and nothing that a real man could or should take seriously. The second is a lout with no appreciation of poetry whatsoever. The first suffers cognitive dissonance as his ideal world of poetic imagination collides with the grubby work-a-day-world of his unlettered parents and relatives. The second fellow obviously suffers from no comparable cognitive dissonance: he never took poetry seriously in the first place.
The second fellow, however, is full of himself and his opinions and does not hesitate to hold forth in the manner of the bar room bullshitter on any and all topics, including poetry. Should we credit his opinions about poetry? Of course not: he has never engaged with it by practice or careful reading or the consultation of works of literary criticism. He knows not whereof he speaks. His nescience reflects his lack of the poetic 'organ.'
Similarly, a fellow like Hitchens, as clever as he is, lacks the religious 'organ.' So religion is closed off from him and what he says about it , though interesting, need not be taken all that seriously, or is to be taken seriously only in a negative way in the manner of the pathologist in his study of pathogens.
Companion post: David Lewis on Religion
J. P. Moreland on Constituent Ontology: Is Exemplification a Spatial Container Relation?
J. P. Moreland defines an "impure realist" as one who denies the Axiom of Localization (Universals, McGill-Queen's UP, 2001, p. 18):
No entity whatsoever can exist at different spatial locations at once or at interrupted time intervals.
An example of an impure realist is D. M. Armstrong. An example of a pure realist is R. Grossmann. Moreland writes,
Impure realists like D. M. Armstrong deny the axiom of localization. For them, properties are spatially contained inside the things that have them. Redness is at the very place Socrates is and redness is also at the very place Plato is. Thus, redness violates the axiom of localization. Impure realists are naturalists at heart. Why? Because they accept the fact that properties are universals; that is, as entities that can be exemplified by more than one thing at once. But they do not want to deny naturalism and believe in abstract entities that are outside space and time altogether. Thus, impure realists hold that all entities are, indeed, inside space and time. But they embrace two different kinds of spatial entities: concrete particulars (Socrates) that are in only one place at a time, and universals (properties like redness) that are at different spatial locations at the very same time. For the impure realist, the exemplification relation is a spatial container relation. Socrates exemplifies redness in that redness is spatially contained inside of or at the same place as Socrates. (18-19)
The above doesn't sound right to me either in itself or as an interpretation of Armstrong.
Is Exemplification a Container Relation?
Take a nice simple 'Iowa' example. There are two round, red spots on a piece of white paper. It is a datum, a Moorean fact, that both are of the same shape and both are of the same color. Moving from data to theory: what is the ontological ground of the sameness of shape and the sameness of color? The impure realist responds with alacrity: the spots are of the same color because one and the same universal redness and one and the same universal roundness are present in both spots. The qualitative sameness of the two spots is grounded in sameness of universals. What is the ontological ground of the numerical difference of the two spots? The bare or thin particular in each. Their numerical difference grounds the numerical difference of the two spots. The bare/thin particular does a second job: it is that which instantiates the universals 'in' each spot. For not only do we need an account of numerical difference, we also need an account of why the two spots are particulars and not (conjunctive) universals.
The upshot for both Bergmann and Armstrong is that each spot is a fact or state of affairs. How so? Let 'A' designate one spot and 'B' the other. Each spot is a thick particular, a particular together with all its monadic properties. Let 'a' and 'b' designate the thin particulars in each. A thin particular is a particular taken in abstraction from its monadic properties. Let 'F-ness' designate the conjunctive universal the conjuncts of which are roundness and redness. Then A = a-instantiating F-ness, and B = b-instantiating-F-ness. A and B are concrete facts or states of affairs. A is a's being F and B is b's being F.
From what has been said so far it should be clear that instantiation/exemplification cannot be a spatial container relation. Even if F-ness is spatially inside of the thick particulars A and B, that relation is different from the relation that connects the thin particular a to the universal F-ness and the thin particular b to the universal F-ness. The point is that instantiation cannot be any sort of container, constituency, or part-whole relation on a scheme like Armstrong's or Bergmann's in which ordinary concrete particulars are assayed as states of affairs or facts. A's being red is not A's having the universal redness as a part, spatial or not. A's being red is a's instantiating the universal redness. Instantiation, it should be clear, is not a part-whole relation. If a instantiates F-ness, then neither is a a part of F-ness nor is F-ness a part of a.
Contra Moreland, we may safely say that for Armstrong, and for any scheme like his, exemplification/instantiation is not a container relation, and therefore not a spatial container relation.
Could an Ontological Part be a Spatial Part?
Moreland makes two claims in the quoted passage. One is that exemplification is a spatial container relation. The other is that there are two different kinds of spatial entities. The claims seem logically independent. Suppose you agree with me that exemplification cannot be any sort of container relation. It seems consistent with this to maintain that universals are spatial parts of ordinary concrete particulars. But this notion is difficult to swallow as well.
A constituent ontologist like Bergmann, Armstrong, or the author of A Paradigm Theory of Existence maintains that ordinary concrete particulars have ontological parts structured ontologically. Thus thin particulars and constituent universals are among the ontological parts of ordinary particulars when the latter are assayed as states of affairs or facts. The question is: could these ontological parts be spatial parts?
Consider a thin or bare particular. Is it a spatial part of a round red spot? By my lights, this makes no sense. There is no conceivable process of physical decomposition that could lay bare (please forgive the wholly intended pun) the bare particular at the metaphysical core of a red spot or a ball bearing. Suppose one arrived at genuine physical atoms, literally indivisible bits of matter, in the physical decomposition of a ball bearing. Could one of these atoms be the bare or thin particular of the ball bearing? Of course not. For any such atom you pick will have intrinsic properties. And so any atom you pick will be a thick particular. As such, it will have at its metaphysical core a thin particular which — it should now be obvious — cannot be a bit of matter. Bare particulars, if there are any, lie too deep, metaphysically speaking, to be bits of matter.
Obviously, then, bare particulars cannot be material parts of ordinary particulars. Hence they cannot be spatial parts of ordinary particulars.
What about universals? Could my two red spots — same shade of red, of course — each have as a spatial part numerically one and the same universal, a universal 'repeated' in each spot, the universal redness? If so, then the same goes for the geometrical property, roundness: it is too is a universal spatially present in both spots. But then it follows that the two universals spatially coincide: they occupy the same space in each spot. So not only can universals be in different places at the same time; two or more of them can be in the same place at the same time.
If nothing else, this conception puts considerable stress on our notion of a spatial part. One can physically separate the spatial parts of a thing. A spherical object can be literally cut into two hemispheres. But if a ball is red all over and sticky all over, the redness and the stickiness cannot be physically separated. If physical separability in principle is a criterion of spatial parthood, then universals cannot be spatial parts of spatial concrete particulars.
Any thoughts?
Three Views
Van Inwagen: The only parts of material particulars are ordinary spatial parts. The only structure of a material particular is spatial or mereological structure. The notion of an ontological part that is not a spatial part in the ordinary mereological sense is unintelligible. And the same goes for ontological structure. See here.
Armstrong as Misread by Moreland: There are ontological parts in addition to ordinary spatial parts and they too are spatial.
Vallicella (2002): There are ontological parts but they are not spatial.
Are Any Christians in the Middle East Safe?
Yes, the ones in Israel.
…………………………..
UPDATE 4/15: J. S. writes:
I happen to live in Beirut and feel safe enough in the Christian area, which is the eastern quarter of the city along with big chunks of Mt. Lebanon and the coastal area as far north asTripoli, which is a Sunni hotbed.
I've asked a lot of Lebanese Christians if they feel safe. They worry more about Sunnis than Shia, and they are especially worried about the de facto resettlement here of a million Syrian refugees, who are mostly Sunnis. There's no love lost between the Christians and Hizbollah, which is Shia, but there is an unspoken toleration of it as long as Hizbollah helps keep Lebanon a ISIS-free zone. The security at Beirut airport, for example, is almost certainly penetrated by Hizbullah partisans. Most Lebanese see that as a line of defense against ISIS bomb-smugglers.
Safety is a relative concept. I wish my reader the best. Twenty years ago I spent a year in Turkey in Ankara, the capital. We travelled all over. I wouldn't risk living in Turkey nowadays or travelling all over. I would only feel safe now with a quick in and out to Antalya or Bodrum or one of the other seaside resort towns.
The magnificent Graeco-Roman, Christian, and other antiquities in Turkey! I am glad I got to see them at Hierapolis, Ephesus, Cappadocia, and so many places. It is sickening to think of them being destroyed by jihadi savages. Remember what they did to the Buddhist statuary? Recently. the destruction in Palmyra. Have the archeologists spoken out?
The Religion of Archeological Preservation
If Islam is the religion of peace, then it is also the religion of archeological preservation. Modus tollens or modus ponens?