Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, 865 pp. NYRB review here. 'KL' abbreviates Konzentrationslager.
Like a Moth to the Flame
Jean van Heijenoort was drawn to Anne-Marie Zamora like a moth to the flame. He firmly believed she wanted to kill him and yet he travelled thousands of miles to Mexico City to visit her where kill him she did by pumping three rounds from her Colt .38 Special into his head while he slept. She then turned the gun on herself. There is no little irony in the fact that van Heijenoort met his end in the same city as Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky. For van Heijenoort was Trotsky's secretary, body guard, and translator from 1932 to 1939.
The former 'Comrade Van' was a super-sharp logician but a romantic fool nonetheless. He is known mainly for his contribution to the history of mathematical logic. He edited From Frege to Godel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879-1931 (Harvard University Press 1967) and translated some of the papers. The source book is a work of meticulous scholarship that has earned almost universally high praise from experts in the field.
One lesson is the folly of seeking happiness in another human being. The happiness we seek, whether we know it or not, no man or woman can provide. And then there is the mystery of self-destruction. Here is a brilliant, productive, and well-respected man. He knows that 'the flame' will destroy him, but he enters it anyway. And if you believe that this material life is the only life you will ever have, why throw it away for an unstable, pistol-packing female?
One might conclude to the uselessness of logic for life. If the heart has its reasons (Pascal) they apparently are not subject to the discipline of mathematical logic. All that logic and you still behave irrationally about the most important matters of self-interest? So what good is it? Apparently, van Heijenoort never learned to control his sexual and emotional nature. Does it make sense to be ever so scrupulous about what you allow yourself to believe, but not about what you allow yourself to love?
SOURCES (The following are extremely enjoyable books. I've read both twice.)
Anita Burdman Feferman, Politics, Logic, and Love: The Life of Jean van Heijenoort, Boston: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 1993.
Jean van Hejenoort, With Trotsky in Exile: From Prinkipo to Coyoacan, Harvard UP, 1978.
Related: Trotsky's Faith
The Last Words of Leon Trotsky
Trotsky, Frida Kahlo, with van Heijenoort standing behind Frida.
Vallicella on Orilia on Bradley’s Regress
The other day I was pleased to receive an e-mail message from Francesco Orilia whom I hadn't heard from in several years. He inquired about some correspondence we engaged in back in the spring of 2004. I thought it had evaporated into the aether, but the Wayback Machine came to the rescue. I reproduce it below, warts and all. But first a demonstration of how Italians speak with their hands. This is from our meeting at a conference on Bradley's Regress in Geneva, Switzerland in December of 2008.
More proof:
Also relevant to the topic below are two entries from November 2008, Francesco Orilia on Facts and Bradley's Regress Part I, and Francesco Orilia on Facts and Bradley's Regress Part II. Professore Orilia enters the ComBox of the second post to respond.
Continue reading “Vallicella on Orilia on Bradley’s Regress”
Decision and Conclusion
How much of decision is included in every conclusion? Did you conclude that there is no God or decide that there is no God? Some of both? Which then is the major player here, reason or will?
An Old Man’s Lament
"My old friends are dead," he said, "and my new ones will never be old."
Are You a Natural Writer? Take the Gide Test
Here is an interesting passage from André Gide's last work, written shortly before his death in 1951, So Be It or The Chips Are Down, tr. Justin O'Brien, Alfred Knopf, 1959, pp. 145-146, bolding added, italics in original. Brief commentary follows.
It is certain that the man who wonders as he takes up his pen: what service can be performed by what I am about to write? is not a born writer, and would do better to give up producing at once. Verse or prose, one's work is born of a sort of imperative one cannot elude. It results (I am now speaking only of the authentic writer) from an artesian gushing-forth, almost unintentional, on which reason, critical spirit, and art operate only as regulators. But once the page is written, he may wonder: what's the use? . . . And when I turn to myself, I think that what above all urged me to write is an urgent need of understanding. This is the need that now prompts the ratiocinations with which I am filling this notebook and makes me banish all bombast from them. I hope the young man who may read me will feel on an equal footing with me. I don't bring any doctrine; I resist giving advice; and in a discussion I beat a hasty retreat. But I know that today many seek their way gropingly and don't know in whom to trust. To them I say: believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it; doubt everything, but don't doubt of yourself. There is more light in Christ's words than in any other human word. This is not enough, it seems, to be a Christian: in addition, one must believe. Well, I do not believe. Having said this, I am your brother.
1. Writers are born, not made. For the born writer, doubts about the value of writing are insufficient to impede the process of putting words on paper. Something similar goes for the born philosopher. Doubts about philosophy are just more grist for the philosophical mill and have no tendency to impede the thinker's inquiry. No real philosopher is put off by doubts and objections of the sort cataloged and refuted in Philosophy Under Attack. You are either driven by a need to understand the world or you are not. If you are driven by that need you will gravitate toward philosophy whether or not you call it 'philosophy.'
2. The writer writes to satisfy a pressing need, the need to understand himself and the world. Driven by that need, he scribbles away, well or poorly, with or without a readership, under gusts of inspiration or in the horse-latitudes of the spirit, and whether it fills or depletes his belly.
3. The truth-seekers are to be trusted, the truth-finders doubted. Makes a good aphorism!
4. Unlike Bertrand Russell and others, Gide discerned truth in Christ's words, but was unable to believe. This shows that the discerning of truth is insufficient for belief. So much the worse for doxastic involuntarism. Belief requires something more, an act of will. There is something voluntary about belief. In many cases, not all, we decide what to believe and what to disbelieve. Josef Pieper who, in his Belief and Faith, p. 26, refers to the last of the Gide lines just quoted, remarks, "A free assent of will must be performed. Belief rests upon volition." (p. 27) See here for more on doxastic voluntarism.
5. Memo to BV: Get hold of the André Gide-Paul Claudel correspondence and explore why Claudel but not Gide embraced the Church of Rome.
A Prediction of Mine Come True
A June 1st entry, 'Structural Racism' and Conservative Cluelessness ended with a prediction:
. . . I predict things are going to get hot in the coming years. The summer of 2015 should prove to be positively 'toasty' in major urban centers as the destructive ideas of the Left lead to ever more violence.
But liberal fools such as the aptronymically appellated Charles Blow will be safe in their upper-class enclaves.
It seems I was right about the summer of 2015. Here is just one item from a pile of of evidence: L. A. Sees Deadliest August in Eight Years.
On May 30th, my prediction assumed this form:
The 'Ferguson' Effect
A Turkish proverb has it that "the fish stinks from the head." And indeed it does. From Obama on down, the vilification of law enforcement has lead to a nation-wide spike in violent crime. But while liberals caused the Ferguson effect, they won't suffer from it. Urban blacks will. Having seen how Officer Darren Wilson's career was destroyed, cops can be expected to hang back and avoid pro-active interventions. I predict a long, hot, violent summer. On the upside, Dunkin' Donuts will do better business and more cats will be rescued from trees.
Some of us are old enough to remember the Watts riots from the summer of 1965 in Los Angeles, 50 years ago. At the time a joke made the rounds. "How much power would it take to destroy Los Angeles?"
Five or six Watts.
The Big Unplug Starts Today
Starting now, I will unplug from this hyperkinetic modern world for a period of days or weeks. How long remains to be seen. I will devote myself to such spiritual exercises as prayer, meditation, spiritual reading, hard-core philosophy and theology pursued for truth as opposed to professional gain, and the exploration of nature.
I will avoid unnecessary conversations and their near occasion, socializing, newspapers, telephony, radio, television, blogging, facebooking, tweeting, and all non-essential Internet-related activities. In a word: all of the ephemera that most people take to be the ne plus ultra of reality and importance. (As for Twitter, I am and hope to remain a virgin: I have never had truck with this weapon of mass distraction.)
Why? Some reasons in Mass Media and Spiritual Deterioration.
But I am no benighted neo-Luddite. The air conditioning will stay on in my abode in the shadows of the Superstitions.
I ask my valued correspondents to refrain from sending me any links to events of the day or commentary thereon. I am going on a 'news fast' which is even more salutary for the soul than a food fast is for the body.
From time to time we should devote time to be still and listen beyond the human horizon. Modern man, crazed little hustler and self-absorbed chatterbox that he is, needs to enter his depths and listen.
"Be still, and know that I am God." (Psalm 46:10)
A Battle of Titans: Plato Versus Aristotle
It is sometimes said that there are only two kinds of philosophers, Platonists and Aristotelians. What follows is a quotation from Heinrich Heine which expresses one version of this useful simplification. Carl Gustav Jung places it at the very beginning of his Psychological Types (Princeton UP, 1971, p. 2.)
Plato and Aristotle! These are not merely two systems: they are also types of two distinct human natures, which from time immemorial, under every sort of disguise, stand more or less inimically opposed. The whole medieval period in particular was riven by this conflict, which persists down to the present day, and which forms the most essential content of the history of the Christian Church. Although under other names, it is always of Plato and Aristotle that we speak. Visionary, mystical, Platonic natures disclose Christian ideas and their corresponding symbols from the fathomless depths of their souls. Practical, orderly, Aristotelian natures build out of these ideas and symbols a fixed system, a dogma and a cult. Finally, the Church eventually embraces both natures—one of them entrenched in the clergy, and the other in monasticism; but both keeping up a constant feud. ~ H. Heine, Deutschland
Plato, on the left carrying The Timaeus, points upwards while Aristotle, on the right carrying his Ethics, points either forward (thereby valorizing the 'horizontal' dimension of time and change as against Plato's 'vertical' gesture) or downwards (emphasizing the foundational status of sense particulars and sense knowledge.) At least five contrasts are suggested: vita contemplativa versus vita activa, mundus intelligibilis versus mundus sensibilis, transcendence versus immanence, eternity versus time, mystical unity versus rational-cum-empirical plurality.
Heine is right about the battle within Christianity between the Platonic and Aristotelian tendencies. Trinity, Incarnation, Transubstantiation, Divine Simplicity — these are at bottom mystical notions impervious to penetration by the discursive intellect as we have been lately observing. Nevertheless,"Practical, orderly, Aristotelian natures build out of these ideas and symbols a fixed system, a dogma and a cult." But the dogmatic constructions, no matter how clever and detailed, never succeed in rendering intelligible the transintelligible, mystical contents.
Death Penalty, Abortion, and Certainty
Some opponents of the death penalty oppose it on the ground that one can never be certain whether the accused is guilty as charged. Some of these people are pro-choice. To them I say: Are you certain that the killing of the unborn is morally permissible? How can you be sure? How can you be sure that the right to life kicks in only at birth and not one minute before? What makes you think that a mere 'change of address,' a mere spatial translation from womb to crib, confers normative personhood and with it the right to life? Or is it being one minute older that confers normative personhood? What is the difference that makes a moral difference — thereby justifying a difference in treatment — between unborn human individuals and infant human individuals?
Suppose you accept the general moral prohibition against homicide. And suppose that you grant that there are legitimate exceptions to the general prohibition including one or more of the following: self-defense, just war, suicide, capital punishment. Are you certain that abortion is a legitimate exception? And if you allow abortion as a legitimate exception, why not also capital punishment?
After all, most of those found guilty of capital crimes actually are guilty and deserving of execution; but none of the unborn are guilty of anything.
My point,then, is that if you demand certainty of guilt before you will allow capital punishment, then you should demand certainty of the moral permissibility of abortion before you allow it. I should add that in many capital cases there is objective certainty of guilt (the miscreant confesses, the evidence is overwhelming, etc.); but no one can legitimately claim to be objectively certain that abortion is morally permissible.
The Potentiality Argument Against Abortion and Feinberg’s Logical Point About Potentiality
I claim that the standard objections to the Potentiality Argument (PA) are very weak and can be answered. This is especially so with respect to Joel Feinberg's "logical point about potentiality," which alone I will discuss in this post. This often-made objection is extremely weak and should persuade no rational person. But first a guideline for the discussion.
The issue is solely whether Feinberg's objection is probative, that and nothing else. Thus one may not introduce any consideration or demand extraneous to this one issue. One may not demand of me a proof of the Potentiality Principle (PP), to be set forth in a moment. I have an argument for PP, but that is not the issue currently under discussion. Again the issue is solely whether Feinberg's "logical point about potentiality" refutes the PA. Progress is out of the question unless we 'focus like a laser' on the precise issue under consideration.
Of course, the removal of all extant objections to an argument does not amount to a positive demonstration of the argument's soundness. But at the risk of being tedious, the issue before us is solely whether Feinberg's objection is a good one.
The PA in a simplified form can be set forth as follows, where the major premise is the PP:
1. All potential persons have a right to life.
2. The fetus is a potential person.
—–
3. The fetus has a right to life.
What Feinberg calls the "logical point about potentiality" and finds unanswerable is "the charge that merely potential possession of any set of qualifications for a moral status does not logically ensure actual possession of that status." (Matters of Life and Death, ed. Regan, p. 193) Feinberg provides an example he borrows from Stanley Benn: A potential president of the United States is not on that account Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces.
It seems to me that Feinberg's objection, far from being unanswerable, is easily answered. Let me begin by conceding something that is perfectly self-evident, namely, that inferences of the following form are invalid:
4. X is a potential possessor of qualifications for a certain moral or legal status S
ergo
5. X is an actual possessor of qualifications for status S.
This is a glaring non sequitur as all must admit. If x potentially possesses some qualifications, then x does not actually possess them. So of course one cannot infer actual possession from potential possession. A five-year-old's potential possession of the qualifications for voting does not entail his actually having the right to vote.
But what does this painfully obvious point have to do with PP? It has nothing to do with it. For what the proponent of PP is saying is that potential personhood is an actual qualification for the right to life. He is not saying that the fetus' potential possession of the qualifications for being a rights-possessor makes it an actual rights-possessor. He is saying that the actual possession of potential personhood makes the fetus a rights-possessor. The right to life, in other words, is grounded in the very potentiality to become a person.
What Feinberg and Co. do is commit a blatant ignoratio elenchi against the proponents of PA. They take the proponent of the PA to be endorsing an invalid inference, the (4)-(5) inference, when he is doing nothing of the kind. They fail to appreciate that the potentialist's claim is that potential personhood is an actual (and sufficient) qualification for the right to life.
Of course, one can ask why potential personhood should be such a qualification, but that is a further question, one logically separate from the question of the soundness of Feinberg's objection.
I have just decisively refuted Feinberg's "logical point about potentiality" objection. What defenders of it must do now, without changing the subject or introducing any extraneous consideration, is to tell me whether they accept my refutation of Feinberg. If they do not, then there is no point in discussing this topic further with them. If they do, then we can proceed to examine other objections to PA, and the positive considerations in favor of PA.
The Catch-22 of ‘Disparate Impact’
If I were an envious man, I would envy Malcolm Pollack this post.
Changing the Engine Air Filter on a 2013 Jeep Wrangler
The owner's manual calls for a changeout every 30,000 miles or 3 years, whichever comes first. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. These off-road vehicles suck in a lot of dust off-road and plenty of dust on-road too in a dusty state like Arizona. And since air filters are cheap, and the installation easy, I thought I'd go ahead, invest a few dollars and minutes and change mine even though I am only about half-way to the 30,000 mile mark.
The STP filter cost me $13.89 plus tax at Auto Zone.
Well, the installation used to be easy on Jeeps: unsnap four clips with your fingers, lift up the plastic air box hood, remove old filter, insert new, reconnect clips. No tools needed.
So I unsnapped the four clips, but the hood wouldn't come off. So I got a flashlight and looked for a fifth clip. Didn't find one. Now I am sweating like a pig and cursing the recalcitrance of matter. Why is this simple job proving to be difficult?
To the Internet! One video was useless, and so was the Jeep Forum, but then I found this video in which the secret is revealed.
On This Date 31 Years Ago and 50 Years Ago: Jim Fixx and Bob Dylan
It was 31 years ago today, during a training run. Running pioneer James F. Fixx, author of the wildly successful The Complete Book of Running, keeled over dead of cardiac arrest. He died with his 'boots' on, and not from running but from a bad heart. It's a good bet that his running added years to his life in addition to adding life to his years. I've just pulled my hardbound copy of The Complete Book of Running from the shelf. It's a first edition, 1977, in good condition with dust jacket. I read it when it first came out. Do I hear $1000? Just kidding, it's not for sale. This book and the books of that other pioneer, George Sheehan, certainly made a difference in my life.
The atavism and simplicity and cleansing quality of a good hard run are particularly beneficial for Luftmenschen. Paradoxically, the animality of it releases lofty thoughts.
See here for a comparison of Fixx and Sartre. And here for something on George Sheehan. Now for some 'running' tunes.
Spencer Davis Group, Keep on Running
Jackson Browne, Running on Empty
Eagles, The Long Run
Beatles, Run for Your Life
Del Shannon, Runaway. Charles Weedon Westover was born 30 December 1934 and is best known for his 1961 #1 hit, "Runaway." Suffering from depression, Shannon committed suicide on February 8, 1990, with a .22-caliber rifle at his home in Santa Clarita, California. Following his death, the Traveling Wilburys honored him by recording a version of "Runaway".
Bob Dylan, If Dogs Run Free
Chuck Berry, Run Rudolph Run
Johnny Preston, Running Bear
Dion DiMucci, Runaround Sue
Roy Orbison, Running Scared
Crystals, They Do Run Run
Bob Dylan
Today, 20 July, is not only the 31th anniversary of Jim Fixx's death, but also the 50th anniversary of the release of Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone. Wikipedia:
The song had a huge impact on Bruce Springsteen, who was 15 years old when he first heard it. Springsteen described the moment during his speech inducting Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 and also assessed the long-term significance of "Like a Rolling Stone":
The first time I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind … The way that Elvis freed your body, Dylan freed your mind, and showed us that because the music was physical did not mean it was anti-intellect. He had the vision and talent to make a pop song so that it contained the whole world. He invented a new way a pop singer could sound, broke through the limitations of what a recording could achieve, and he changed the face of rock'n'roll for ever and ever "[66][67]
Dylan's contemporaries in 1965 were both startled and challenged by the single. Paul McCartney remembered going around to John Lennon's house in Weybridge to hear the song. According to McCartney, "It seemed to go on and on forever. It was just beautiful … He showed all of us that it was possible to go a little further."[68] Frank Zappa had a more extreme reaction: "When I heard 'Like a Rolling Stone', I wanted to quit the music business, because I felt: 'If this wins and it does what it's supposed to do, I don't need to do anything else …' But it didn't do anything. It sold but nobody responded to it in the way that they should have."[68] Nearly forty years later, in 2003, Elvis Costello commented on the innovative quality of the single. "What a shocking thing to live in a world where there was Manfred Mann and the Supremes and Engelbert Humperdinck and here comes 'Like a Rolling Stone'".[69]
Your humble correspondent was lying in the sand at Huntington Beach, California, when the song came on the radio. It was like nothing else on the radio in those days of the Beatles and the Beach Boys. It 'blew my mind.' What is THAT? And WHO is that? I had been very vaguely aware of some B. Dylan as the writer of PPM's Don't Think Twice. I pronounced the name like 'Dial in.' That memorable summer of '65 I became a Dylan fanatic, researching him at the library and buying all his records. The fanaticism faded with the '60s. But while no longer a fanatic, I remain a fan, 50 years later.
Potentiality and the Substance View of Persons
I suspect that Vlastimil V's (neo-scholastic) understanding of potentiality is similar to the one provided by Matthew Lu in Potentiality Rightly Understood:
The substance view of persons holds that every human being either has the potential to manifest any and all properties essential to personhood or does actually manifest them. For the adherent of the substance view of persons, "potential" does not essentially refer to some possible future state of affairs. Rather, in this conception of what I will call developmental potential, to say that an organism has the potential to manifest some property means that that property belongs essentially to the kind of thing that it is (i.e., is among the essential properties it has by nature). Whether or not a specific individual actualizes the potentialities of its nature is contingent; but those potentialities necessarily belong to its nature in virtue of its membership in a specific natural kind.
I don't understand this. Let the property be rationality. Let organism o belong to the natural kind human being. We assume that man is by nature a rational animal. A human fetus is of course a human being. Suppose the fetus is anencephalic. It too is a human being — it is not lupine or bovine or a member of any other animal species. But it is a defective human being, one whose defect is so serious that it, that very individual, will never manifest rationality. So how can every human being have "the potential to manifest any and all properties essential to personhood"? That is my question. Now consider the following answers/views.
A1: The anencephalic human fetus does not have the potentiality to manifest rationality. This is because it lacks "the largest part of the brain consisting mainly of the cerebral hemispheres, including the neocortex, which is responsible for cognition." (Wikipedia)
A2: The anencephalic human fetus does have the potentiality to manifest rationality because it is a member of a species or natural kind the normal (non-defective) members of which do have the potentiality in question.
A3: The anencephalic human fetus does have the potentiality to manifest rationality because the natural kind itself has the potentiality to manifest rationality.
I think (A2) is the most charitable reading of the above quoted paragraph considered in the context of Lu's entire paper. Accordingly, a particular anencephalic fetus has the potentiality to manifest rationality because other genetically human members of the same species do have the potentiality in question. This makes no sense to me. But perhaps I am being obtuse, in which case a charitable soul may wish to help me understand. To be perfectly honest, I really would like it to be the case that EVERY "human being either has the potential to manifest any and all properties essential to personhood or does actually manifest them." I would like that to be the case because then I would not have to supplement my Potentiality Argument against abortion with other principles as I have done in other entries.
What's my problem? Let's start with an analogy. It is narrowly logically possible and broadly logically possible that I run a four-minute mile. It is also nomologically possible that I run a four-minute mile. For all the latter means is that the laws of nature pertaining to human anatomy and physiology do not rule out a human being's running a four-minute mile. Since they do not rule out a human being's running that fast, they don't rule out my running that fast.
But note that the laws of human physiology abstract entirely from the particularities and peculiarities of me qua individual animal. They abstract from my particular O2 uptake, the ratio of 'fast twitch' to 'slow twitch' muscle fibers in my legs, and so on. And to be totally clear: it is the concrete flesh-and-blood individual that runs, 'Boston Billy' Rodgers, for example, that very guy, not his form, not his matter, not his nature, not any accident or property or universal or subjective concept or objective concept that pertains to him.
Now consider the question: do I, BV, have the potential to run a four-minute mile? No. Why not? Because of a number of deficiencies, insufficiencies, limitations and whatnot pertaining to the particular critter that I am. The fact that other runners have the potential in question is totally irrelevant. What do their individual potentialities have to do with me? The question, again, is whether I, BV, have/has the potentiality in question. It is also totally irrelevant that the laws of human physiology do not rule out my running a four-minute mile. Again, this is because said laws abstract from the particularities and peculiarities of the concrete individual. Surely it would be a very serious blunder to suppose that the nomological possibility of my running a four-minute mile entails the potentiality of my doing any such thing. That would be a two-fold blunder: (i) potentiality is not possibility, and (ii) potentiality is always the potentiality of some concrete individual or other.
Similarly, the anencephalic individual does not have the potentiality to manifest rationality. The fact that normal human fetuses do have this potentiality is totally irrelevant. What do their individual potentialities have to do with the potentialities or lacks thereof of the anencephalic individual? It is also totally irrelevant that man is by nature a rational animal, that the capacity to reason is 'inscribed' (as a Continental philosopher might say) in his very essence. For the question is precisely whether or not this very anencephalic individual has the potentiality to manifest rationality. My answer, as you may have surmised, is No.
I think I can diagnose the neo-Scholastic error, if error it is. (I hope it is not an error, for then the Potentiality Argument is strengthened and simplified.) Take a look at (A3):
A3. The anencephalic human fetus does have the potentiality to manifest rationality because the natural kind itself has the potentiality to manifest rationality.
This, I submit, is a complete non-starter. Whatever a natural kind is, it itself does not have the potential to be rational. It can no more be rational than humanity in general can run. (I once entered a 10 K event called 'The Human Race.' I did not compete against humanity in general, but against certain particular human critters.)
So it can't be the universal nature humanity that has the potential to be rational. What about the individual or individualized nature, the human nature of Socrates, of Plato, et al.? Could a particular individualized nature be that which has the potential to manifest rationality? No again. For it is but an ontological constituent of a concrete man such as Socrates. It is baby Socrates that has the potential to manifest rationality and excel in dialetic, not one of his ontological constituents. Socrates is more than his individual human nature; there is also the dude's matter (materia signata) to take into consideration. Our man is a hylomorphic compound, and it is this compound in which the potentiality to display rationality is grounded.
My diagnosis of neo-Scholastic error, then, is that neo-Scholastics, being Aristotelians, tend to conflate a primary substance such as Socrates with his individual(ized) nature. Since human nature in general includes the potential to be rational, it is natural to think that every individual(ized) human nature, whether normal or defective, has the potential to be rational. But surely it is not the individual(ized) human nature that has the potential to be rational, but the ontological whole of which the individual(ized) human nature is a proper part. In the case of the anencephalic fetus, this ontological whole includes defective matter that cannot support the development of rationality. Only if one confuses the individual(ized) human nature of the anencephalic individual with the concrete anencephalic individual could one suppose that it too has the potential to manifest rationality.
The fact that Lu's paragraph above is ambiguous as between (A2) and (A3) further supports my contention that there is a confusion here.
My view, then, is (A1). Abortion is a grave moral evil. The Potentiality Argument, however, does not suffice as an argument against every instance of it. This is not to say that the aborting of the anencephalic is morally acceptable. It rather suggests that the PA requires some form of supplementation.