Month: April 2024

Reading Now: Karl Barth, Henri Bouillard, Erich Przywara

'Now' above refers to March 2003. Tempus fugit! This unfinished post has been languishing in storage and now wants to see the light of day. Fiat lux!

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I'm on a bit of theological jag at present. The updating of my SEP divine simplicity entry has occasioned my review of recent literature on modal collapse arguments against DDS, some of it by theologians. See the final section for the modal collapse arguments.

Henri Bouillard's The Knowledge of God (Herder and Herder, 1968) introduced me to Karl Barth.  Bouillard is a philosopher, Barth a theologian.  Both are in quest of the Absolute but in different ways. But completeness demands a tripartite distinction between philosopher, theologian, and mystic.

Thomas Aquinas, the Great Synthesizer, is all three at different times and in different texts. The natural theology of the praeambula fidei is philosophy, not theology strictly speaking. To argue from the mundus sensibilis to an extra-mundane causa prima is to do natural theology, which is a branch of philosophy.  No use is made by the philosopher qua philosopher of divine revelation. There is no appeal to the supernatural. Recourse is only to (discursive/dianoetic) reason and the deliverances of the senses.  Properly theological topics, on the other hand, among them  Trinity and Incarnation, are knowable only via revelation, which presupposes faith. They are not knowable by philosophical methods. Whether cognitio fidei (knowledge by faith) should be called knowledge is an important but vexing question, especially for those of us who toil in the shadow of the great Descartes. I have something to say about it here in connection with Edith Stein and her first and second 'masters,' the neo-Cartesian Edmund Husserl and Thomas Aquinas, respectively.

A third source of insight into the Absolute is via mysticism which promises direct access to God as opposed to access via discursive operations from the side of the finite subject and/or access via divine communication from God to man via Scripture. As I understand Barth so far in my study of him, he denies that God reveals himself in the created world or via the teaching authority of any church, let alone the church of Rome. On his account we know God only from God. Revelation is confined to Scripture and to God Incarnate, Jesus Christ. So there is no access to God via natural theology nor through direct mystical insight. 

Erich Przywara (1889-1972) somewhere in his stupendous Analogia  Entis (orig. publ. in German in 1962, English tr. by Betz and Hart, Eerdmans 2014) adds a fourth category, that of the theological philosopher. But I have forgotten what exactly he means by 'theological philosopher.'

He who quests for the Absolute may therefore wear one or more of four hats: philosopher, theologian (narrow or proper sense), mystic, or theological philosopher. Might there be other 'hats'? That of the moral reformer? That of the the beauty-seeker?

Lee’s Lunar Lunacy

Another example of a dumb-as-dirt Dem.

No Sheila dear, the Moon is not a planet, but a natural satellite of the Earth, the only one in fact. Its singularity is why, in correct orthography, we write 'the Moon' and not 'the moon.'  Jupiter has a number of moons, whereas the Earth has exactly one. Our moon is therefore properly referred to as 'the Moon.' And as you may have just now noticed, our home planet is properly referred to as 'the Earth,' not 'the earth.'  And our sun, which the distinguished Congresswoman informs us is "a mighty powerful heat," is properly referred to as 'the Sun.' So-called 'journalists' take note. 

Contrary to what Sheila thinks, the Moon is not made up mostly of gases. Nor is it a "complete-rounded circle" only when it is full.  Does she perhaps think that the phases of the Moon are changes intrinsic to the Moon as opposed to changes in the way it appears to us? Does she think that the Moon is a two-dimensional object? Her talk of a circle suggests as much. May I suggest 'sphere' or even better 'spheroid'? Does she perhaps also think that the Moon is the source of its light? Is she aware that moonlight is reflected sunlight?

Please realize that when you vote for Democrats you are voting for people who, as a group, are not only morally inferior to Republicans, but also intellectually inferior as well. I am speaking of the contemporary Democrat party. 

Story here.

Finally, what was the name of that black male pol who, if memory serves,  opined that islands float and can sink?

Political Perceptions

Only a leftard could come up with this  knee-slappingly risible explanation why 'No Labels' didn't stick:

The other problem with the No Labels operation is that there already is a moderate, bipartisanship-minded political faction in the United States. It is called the Democratic Party. For better or for worse, that party continues to be the home of nearly all of the remaining “institutionalists” in U.S. politics, and party leadership has repeatedly, over the past decade, passed up opportunities to engage in retaliatory procedural maneuvering in response to GOP constitutional hardball, preferring instead to stand up for a long-vanished consensus politics that has virtually no support on the other side of the aisle.

President Joe Biden not only leads that institutionalist party, but he is also its most vocal and successful backer of bipartisanship as a governing and political philosophy.

Herbert Aptheker

To understand the Left and its depredations, you must study communism. Herbert Aptheker was a major player in the CPUSA. Our friend Tony Flood, once a card-carrying member of the CPUSA, and an assistant to Aptheker, points us to a Wikipedia piece on the man which will provide some background to Aptheker and his work. 

Tony would have us note that he, or rather his name, leads off the Further References:

Sabotage Anyone?

Should a state university add "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" to its curriculum?

This is an undoubtedly interesting time to be alive. How could anyone be bored?

Should I rename my Academia category, Academentia?

Demented POTUS, demented polity. Madness spreads and the fish stinks from the head.

Update (3:39 pm): More academentia at UCLA medical school. Unbelievable, but you'd better believe it.

Heliophysics and Common Ground

The solar eclipse brought us all together for one day. Well, we do share common ground when, like Thales, our heads are craned upwards in wonder. That common ground is the home planet, spaceship Earth, upon which we stand, bitterly disagree, and slaughter one another when not distracted by an unusual celestial phenomenon.  Clearly, common ground of the terrestrial sort is not enough: we also need ideological common ground to make the world less of an abattoir.

This is something the open-borders types don't want to understand. One of their fundamental errors is to imagine that all-inclusive diversity is compatible with social harmony.   

It is not that diversity is not a value; it plainly is.  Many types of diversity are good. One thinks of culinary diversity, musical diversity, artistic diversity generally. Biodiversity is good, and so is a diversity of opinions, especially insofar as such diversity makes possible a robustly competitive marketplace of ideas wherein the best rise to the top. A diversity of testable hypotheses is conducive to scientific progress. And so on.

Biden Chases ‘Death to America’ Vote

David Harsanyi:

Biden, it should be noted, is a vacuous political zombie who has never met a position he hasn’t dropped for a vote. Today, he is surrounded by Obama-era advisers and Hamas sympathizers . . . who have long wanted the U.S. to be aligned with mullahs of Iran, as a counterbalance to colonialist Western capitalists of Israel. And now that Democrats like Chuck Schumer have sold out the Jews to the vultures for a few votes in Dearborn, nothing holds back progressive Democrats from normalizing the antisemitism that already infects the hard left.  

That's the truth. Just so you know who you are supporting if you support Biden. You may not like Trump, but if it comes down to Trump versus Biden, you must support the former out of self-interest if for no other reason.

‘Progressive’ and ‘Conservative’

In their contemporary usages these terms are mainly misnomers.

If progress is change for the good, there is little progressive about contemporary 'progressives.' They are more accurately referred to as regressives. Or do you think that allowing biological males to compete in women's sporting events is a change for the good? It is obviously not, for reasons you will be able to discern without my help.  That is just one example among many.

As for so-called 'conservatives,' what do they ever succeed in conserving? These 'conservatives' are good at conserving only one thing: their own perquisites, privileges, pelf, and position. The things they are supposed to conserve they allow to be destroyed, among them,  the rule of law, our rights and liberties as enumerated in the Constitution, our national heritage as embodied in monuments and statues to great men, the very distinctions, principles, and values that underpin our republican form of government.  They will soon be gone forever,  and the Left will have won, if we the people don't push back pronto. 

But it may be too late for effective resistance, sunk as we Americans are in the warm bath of our own decadence.  We shall see.

Meanwhile, don't get too excited about all this. This world's a vanishing quantity and we with it.  The wise live for something that transcends it, but without dogmatism and doctrinal narrowness.

Richard Dawkins on Christianity and Islam

Here (HT: Catacomb Joe):

Famed atheist and self-styled intellectual Richard Dawkins shared in a recent interview that he was “horrified” to find that Oxford Street in London had lit up its public signs and displays to celebrate the Muslim fasting period called Ramadan, just days before Easter Sunday. “I have to choose my words carefully: If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I’d choose Christianity every single time,” Dawkins declared, expressing concern over the thousands of Muslim mosques being constructed across the U.K. He added, “It seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion, in a way that I think Islam is not.”

I hope to say more about this later. Now I have to prepare for a meeting with Brian the Calvinist.  First lunch and casual conversation about the events of the day and the latest outrages of the depredatory Left, then intense philosophical conversation about Jesus and the Powers, a stimulating albeit flawed book, and finally  two or so hours of battling over the 64 squares. 

That's the kind of socializing I like. Otherwise, solitude rules. 

‘Insurrection’ as ‘Fedsurrection’ and the ‘Vibe Shift’

The Jan 6 narrative crumbles as Roger Kimball reports in his Navigating the Vibe Shift of a Cultural Reckoning.

But the 'vibe shift' in the direction of optimism faces stiff resistance. And so our man ends on a less-than-optimistic note:

I, too, discern cracks in the Narrative. I seem to see the Overton Window being forced open here and there.  But I also sense an aroma of panic among the dispensers and enforcers of the Narrative. You can feel it in the arrogant incredulousness of Nicolle Wallace attempting to digest the novel idea that maybe, just possibly, her snotty but ill-informed idea of what happened on January 6, 2021, is completely wrong.

You also see it in the minatory actions of the Deep State and its increasingly blatant resort to intimidation and coercion.  We might ask former Trump adviser Peter Navarro about that, but he is now moldering in jail, yet another political prisoner of the regime.  His tort? Ignoring a Congressional subpoena—the same thing that Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric “wingman” Holder did, but of course he belongs to a protected class, so nothing was done to him.

My point is this: as evidence of a “vibe shift” grows more numerous and more substantive, so too will the vibe-stiffening reaction among the guardians of the status quo.

The melancholy datum to bear in mind is that those guardians control virtually all of the levers of power in our society, beginning with the regime’s police power and wending its way down to the soft but ingratiating power of the media, the ditto-head cultural establishment, and practically the entire educational apparat.

What this means is that for any serious “vibe shift” to happen, something like cultural warfare, if not the other kind, is going to have to unfold.  I do not expect the coming months to be tranquil or pleasant. I do think they will tell us whether we get to resuscitate our constitutional republic or whether we will continue the long and rebarbative slide into woke socialist conformity.

Theme music: Good Vibrations