Richard Swinburne, Revelation, Oxford, 1992, pp. 102-103:
. . . there has been a strain in Protestantism, with its immense reverence for Scripture, to write of Holy Scripture itself as the original [propositional] revelation; what was given by God was the Bible. But that surely fits very badly with other things that those same Protestants wish to say: for example that there were Christians in the first four centuries AD. For the books of the New Testament were not written down until from twenty to seventy years after Christ taught on Earth, and were only put together and recognized as a New Testament in final form in the fourth century AD. If the books themselves were the revelation, how could there be Chrsitians when there were no books? [Footnote 6 not reproduced: it quotes Iraneus and Papias as quoted by Eusebius.] Holy Scripture must be regarded by Protestants as it is by Catholics, as no more than a true record of a revelation which existed before it.
It was a hot and humid September day, twenty years ago. I was sitting in a restaurant in Wuhan, China. There had been a power outage, so the air conditioning was off. The lady next to me was perspiring profusely. I somewhat crudely drew attention to the fact probably using some such expression as 'sweating bullets.'
The lady gave me an arch look and said, "Horses sweat, men perspire, women glow."
During a delightful rural ramble outside Prague, I mentioned to Daniel Novotný that Arthur Schopenhauer had a high opinion of Francisco Suárez (1548-1617). Daniel said he had heard as much but wondered where Schopenhauer had indicated his high regard for the scholastic philosopher. Here are some passages, though I have the sense that I am overlooking a more striking quotation than any of the ones I have just now managed to locate.
1. There is a place in the early On the Four-Fold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason where Schopenhauer is speaking of the four causes mentioned by Aristotle at Analyt. Post., II, 11. Schopenhauer describes the Metaphysical Disputations of Suárez as diesem wahren Kompendio der Scholastik, "this true compendium of scholasticism." (Ueber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde, Zweites Kapitel, sec. 6, Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg, p. 15.)
If the index to Schopenhauer's magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation (two vols., tr. Payne, Dover) is to be trusted, there are exactly six references to Suárez all of them in the first volume.
2."It was known even to the scholastics [note 24: Suarez, Disputationes metaphysicae, disp. III, sect. 3, tit. 3.] that, because the syllogism requires two premisses, no science can start from a single main principle that cannot be deduced further; on the contrary, it must have several, at least two, of these." (p. 63)
3. "Consequently, time and space are the principium individuationis, the subject of so many subtleties and disputes among the scholastics which are found collected in Suárez (Disp. 5, sect. 3)." (p. 113)
4. "That which for man is his unfathomable character, presupposed in every explanation of his actions from motives, is for every inorganic body precisely its essential quality, its manner of acting, whose manifestations are brought about by impressions from outside, while it itself, on the other hand, is determined by nothing outside it, and is thus inexplicable. Its particular manifestations, by which alone it becomes visible, are subject to the principle of sufficient reason; it itself is groundless. In essence this was correctly understood by the scholastics, who described it as forma substantialis. (Cf. Suárez, Disputationes Metaphysicae, disp. XV, sect. 1.) (p. 124)
5. P. 152, fn. 21: "The scholastics therefore said quite rightly: Causa finalis movet non secundum suum esse reale, sed secundum esse cognitum. See Suárez, Disp. Metaph., disp. XXIII, sect. 7 et 8. ('The final cause operates not according to its real being, but only according to its being as that is known.' [Tr.]"
6. The following excerpt is from "Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy," an appendix to the first volume of WWR, pp. 422-423, emphasis added):
We may regard as the third point the complete overthrow of the Scholastic philosophy, a name by which I wish here to denote generally the whole period beginning with Augustine, the Church Father, and ending just before Kant. For the chief characteristic of Scholasticism is, indeed, that which is very correctly stated by Tennemann, the guardianship of the prevailing national religion over philosophy, which had really nothing left for it to do but to prove and embellish the cardinal dogmas prescribed [pg 013] to it by religion. The Schoolmen proper, down to Suárez, confess this openly; the succeeding philosophers do it more unconsciously, or at least unavowedly. It is held that Scholastic philosophy only extends to about a hundred years before Descartes, and that then with him there begins an entirely new epoch of free investigation independent of all positive theological doctrine. Such investigation, however, is in fact not to be attributed to Descartes and his successors, but only an appearance of it, and in any case an effort after it. Descartes was a man of supreme ability, and if we take account of the age he lived in, he accomplished a great deal. But if we set aside this consideration and measure him with reference to the freeing of thought from all fetters and the commencement of a new period of untrammelled original investigation with which he is credited, we are obliged to find that with his scepticism still lacking in true earnestness, and thus abating and passing away so quickly and so completely, he has the appearance of wishing to discard all at once all the fetters of the early implanted opinions belonging to his age and nation; but does so only apparently and for a moment, in order to assume them again and hold them all the more firmly; and it is just the same with all his successors down to Kant.
7. "The word 'Idea,' first introduced by Plato, has retained ever since, through twenty-two centuries, the meaning in which he used it; for not only all the philosophers of antiquity, but also all of the scholastics, and even the Church Fathers, and the theologians of the Middle Ages, used it only with that Platonic meaning, in the sense of the Latin word exemplar, as Suárez expressly mentions in his twenty-fifth Disputation, Sect. 1." (p. 488)
I had the pleasure of meeting Trent Dougherty at the Prague conference on Analytic Theology. He informed me that he is an executive editor of a new on-line publication, The Journal of Analytic Theology.
The Journal of Analytic Theology is an open access, international journal that twice anually publishes articles, book reviews, and book symposia that explore theological and meta-theological topics in a manner that prizes terminological clarity and argumentative rigor. This includes historical studies that seek to elucidate conceptual challenges or explore strategies for addressing them.
Trent also had a limerick for me that I don't think he'll mind if I share:
I follow this really cool blog, And I just met the author in Prague. They call him a "Maverick," and act quite barbaric: He leaves them indeed quite agog.
A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to "debate" on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.
Certainly, not everything is up for grabs, i.e., not everything is a topic of reasonable debate. But it is equally certain that some things are up for grabs, and also certain that what is up for grabs and what is not is up for grabs. (Think about it.)
So while I applaud the closing of the Popular Science combox as the closing of a repository for what in the main is the drivel of cyberpunks and know-nothings, I must express skepticism at the incipient dogmatism and incipient scientism that lurks beneath both the author's words and those of the author of the NYT piece to which he links.
To mention just one item, talk of "scientific certainty" with respect to climate change, its origins, and its effects is certainly unscientific. Natural science is not in the business of generating certainty on any topic, let alone something as difficult to study as climate change.
No gain accrues by replacing religious and political dogmatism with scientistic dogmatism.
To say it again: doubt is the engine of inquiry. Inside of science and out.
Unfortunately, too much of present day 'science' is ideologically-infected. Global warming alarmism is yet another ersatz religion for liberals. See here. Of course, I also condemn those conservatives and libertarians whose knee-jerk rejection of global warming is premised on hostility to any empirical finding that might lead to policies that limit the freedom of the market.
Dale hoists a bottle of Pilsner Urquell. To his right, Daniel von Wachter, Daniel Novotny, Alexander Pruss, Michael Gorman, Piotr Dvorak. In the background, left to right, Jan Liska-Dalecki, Lukas Novak, and Trent Dougherty.
Right click to enlarge.
Lukas, Jan, and Vera.
Trent Dougherty with his arm around Vlastimil Vohanka.
One of the participants, fearful of objections, showed up in full armor.
Marvellous Czech cuisine and beer as our reward for exploring a medieval fastness and traipsing some 10-15 km through the woods on muddy trails. What looks like bread is Knedlik, a close relative of what the Germans call Knoedel. That amazing sauce with a dollop of sour cream and cranberry and lemon accents won't soon be forgotten, nor will the ebullient Czech waitress whose jokes inspired a large tip of Czech koruna and U. S. dollars.
For me, travel is disruptive
and desolating. A little desolation, however, is good for the soul, whose
tendency is to sink into complacency. Daheim, empfindet man nicht so sehr die
Unheimlichkeit des Seins. Travel knocks me out of my natural orbit, out of the familiar with its gauzy filters, into the strangeness of things. Even an
overnighter can have this effect. And then time is wasted getting back on track.
I am not cut out to be a vagabond. I Kant hack it. I do it more from duty than
from inclination. But I'm less homebound than the Sage of Koenigsberg.
More on travel in the Travel category in which you will find Emersonian and Pascalian reasons against it.
Source. Excellent advice, except for the last item. But the advice is incomplete. For a rather more complete analysis, see Some Principles of a Financial Conservative wherein I proffer advice that is rock-solid, absolutely free, and that also has the interesting property that few will follow it due to the social and moral decline of the nation.
The article from which I borrowed the above graphic sports this delightfully amphibolous construction: "It's really hard to be poor . . . ."
Reading those words, I thought to myself, yes, of course, you really have to work at being poor in this, the greatest and most prosperous nation ever to exist, a country that needs walls to keep people out unlike the commie states that need walls to keep people in. Anyone can avoid poverty if they practice he practices the old virtues and works hard. But then I realized that that cannot be the meaning intended in a sentence to be found in the left-leaning Washington ComPost.
Herewith, a partial catalog of some habits that I at least find annoying.
1. Calling an opposing view with an impressive pedigree a 'mistake' as if the opposing view can be simply dismissed as resting on some elementary blunder. Here is an example by a distinguished contemporary:
. . . it is possible to distinguish between the being and the nature of a thing — any thing; anything — and that the thick conception of being is founded on the mistake of transferring what belongs properly to the nature of a chair — or of a human being or of a universal or of God — to the being of the chair. To endorse the thick conception of being is, in fact, to make . . . the very mistake of which Kant accused Descartes: the mistake of treating being as a ‘real predicate.’ (Peter van Inwagen, Ontology, Identity, and Modality, Cambridge 2001, pp. 3-4, emphasis added.)
What van Inwagen is saying here is that the conception of being represented by such luminaries as Thomas Aquinas and all the lesser lights of the Thomist tradition is a mistake because it rests on a mistake. Now it would indeed be a mistake to "transfer what properly belongs to the nature of" an F to the being of the F-item. But that is not what the thick conception does. So if anyone is making a mistake here, it is van Inwagen.
That the thick conception of being does not rest on anything that could be called a mistake is argued by me in "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis," in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, Routledge, 2014, pp. 45-75.
2. Attempting to refute by fallacy-mongering. This is a perennial favorite of cyberpunks. Having swotted up a list of informal fallacies, they are eager to find 'fallacies' in their opponents' reasoning. Cyberpunks are beneath refutation, so I'll cite as example A. C. Grayling's ham-handed attempt to pin the fallacy of petitio principii on Plantinga. See Sensus Divinitatis: Nagel Defends Plantinga Against Grayling.
3. Dismissing seriously posed questions as 'rhetorical.' Example. Thomists take a hylomorphic approach to the mind. Roughly, they maintain that anima forma corporis: the soul is the form of the body. I am not my soul, as on Platonism: I am a composite of soul and body, substantial form and proximate matter. But they also believe that the soul can exist in a disembodied state post mortem. There is a tension here inasmuch as form and matter are incomplete items, 'principles' uncovered in the analysis of complete items, primary substances. But if souls, as forms, are incomplete items, how can they exist when apart from matter?
Now consider that question. Is it rhetorical? No. It is a genuine question and a reasonable one which may or may not have a good Thomist answer. To dismiss such a sincerely intended and reasonably motivated question as rhetorical is not a legitimate philosophical move. It is a way of disrespecting one's interlocutor by dismissing his concerns.
4. Using 'surely' as a device of bluster. Little is sure in philosophy, hence uses of 'surely' border on bluster. "Don't call me 'Shirley'" is a way of combatting this bad habit, one to which I have been known to succumb. I may have picked up the habit from Plantinga's writing.
"Surely, there is a property expressed by the predicate 'is Socrates,' the property, identity-with-Socrates." (This is not a quotation from Plantinga.) Shirley? Where's Shirley?
Just as one ought to avoid the cheap dismissals illustrated in #s 1-3, one ought to avoid the cheap avowal illustrated in #4.
5. Advertising one's political correctness. I am reading an article on some arcane topic such as counterfactual conditionals, when I encounter a ungrammatical use of 'they' to avoid the supposedly radioactive 'he.' I groan: not another PC-whipped leftist! I am distracted from the content of the article by the political correctness of the author. As I have said more than once, PC comes from the CP, and what commies, and leftists generally, attempt to do is to inject politics into every aspect of life. It is in keeping with their totalitarian agenda.
If you complain that I am injecting politics into this post, I will say that I am merely combatting and undoing the mischief of leftists. It is analogous to nonviolent people using violence to defend themselves and their way of life against the violent. We conservatives who want the political kept in its place and who are temperamentally disinclined to be political activists must be become somewhat politically active to undo the the damage caused by leftist totalitarians. By the way, there is nothing sexist about standard English; the view that it is is itself a leftist doctrine that one is free to reject.
6. Responding by repeating. If I raise a question as to the intelligibility of, say, the Chalcedonian definition, then it is no decent response merely to repeat the definition. Otherwise I become annoyed. And we don't want that.
7. Excessive use of 'of course.' I am guilty of this. It is like 'surely': more often than not a device of bluster in philosophy.
8. Feigning incomprehension. Saying, 'I don't know what you are talking about,' when you have a tolerably clear idea of what I am talking about. This may be the same as Petering Out.
What is offensive here is the dismissal of an idea or an entire philosophy because it is not totally clear, when it ought to be one purpose of philosophical dialog to clarify what is not totally clear. You say you have no idea what Emmanuel Levinas is driving at in Totality and Infinity? Then I say you must be one stupid fellow or uneducated or both. Same with Heidegger and Hegel, et al. You say you don't know what Hegel is talking about what he says, at the beginning of his Science of Logic, that Being passes over into Nothing? No idea at all? Then you are dumb or inattentive or lazy or a philistine or something else it would not be good to be.
Don't feign incomprehension. If you find what I maintain unclear, explain why you think it unclear, and then ask for clarification. In that way, we may make a bit of progress.
9. Taking the names of great philosophers in vain. If you are historically ignorant, don't attach the names of great philosophers to your pet theses. Don't use 'Leibniz's Law' for something that cannot be found in Leibniz. See 'Leibniz's Law': A Useless Expression. Don't call 'Aristotelian' the view that there are immanent universals. If you have never read Brentano or Meinong, why are you dropping their names in your labels for theses that are not theirs?
10. Confusing philosophy with the history of philosophy. Kant says it best in the second paragraph of the Introduction to his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (LLA ed. p. 3):
There are scholarly men, to whom the history of philosophy (both ancient and modern) is philosophy itself; for these the present Prolegomena are not written. They must wait till those who endeavor to draw from the fountain of reason itself have completed their work; it will then be the historian's turn to inform the world of what has been done. Unfortunately, nothing can be said, which in their opinion has not been said before, and truly the same prophecy applies to all future time; for since the human reason has for many centuries speculated upon innumerable objects in various ways, it is hardly to be expected that we should not be able to discover analogies for every new idea among the old sayings of past ages.
11. Criticizing a philosopher for thinking for himself and not discussing one's favorite historical figure.
It must have been in the early '80s. A paper of mine on haecceities had been accepted for reading at a regular colloquium session of the A. P. A., Eastern Division. The paper focused on Alvin Plantinga's theory of haecceity properties. Although I had a good job, I was looking for something better and I had also secured an interview with Penn State at that same APA convention. The late Joseph J. Kockelmans was one of the members of the Penn State philosophy department who interviewed me. When he heard that the paper I was to read dealt with haecceities, he asked whether I would be discussing Duns Scotus. I of course explained that there would be no time for that since I had twenty minutes and my paper dealt with ideas of Plantinga. Kockelman's question displayed the typical bias of the Historical/Continental type of scholar. Such a person cannot understand how one might directly engage a contemporary question without dragging in the opinions of long dead thinkers. They cannot understand how one could think for oneself, or how philosophy could be anything other than its history or the genuflecting before texts or the worshipping at the shrine of Heidegger, say.
And then there was a colleague I once had. He was a Leibniz man. Interested as I am in metaphysics, I once brought up the Identity of Indiscernibles with him. I asked him whether he accepted it. His reply was of the form: in one place Leibniz says this, and in another place he says that, and according to commentator X . . . " But what do YOU think of the principle, Dan?" Well, in the Discourse onMetaphysics Leibniz takes the view that . . . . And so it went. He was a scholar of philosophy, but no philosopher.
Examples are easily multiplied.
12. Compiling lists such as this one. This doesn't annoy me, but it might annoy you.
The Russian boys were lined up for beer; perhaps one of them couldn't wait his 'transcendental' turn and the other, forsaking duty for inclination, shot him categorically albeit phenomenally. Or maybe the shooter was attempting to demonstrate that the transcendentally ideal can also be empirically real. Or perhaps the shooter was a Randian hothead and the man shot was a Kantian.
This is what comes of ignoring 'motorist' Rodney King's rhetorical question, 'Kant we all just get along?'
For Ayn Rand and her followers, Kant is the devil incarnate. I don't dispute that Rand made some good points, but her tabloid outbursts anent the Sage of Koenigsberg aren't worth the hot air that powered them. Despite her frequent invocations of reason, her work would be a worthy target of a Critique of Poor Reason.
A minor quibble. Your recent post ("Forever Reading . . .") is in error, I'm afraid. After noticing the mistake on more than one occasion throughout several years following your wonderful blog, surely the time has come that I assist a fellow stickler. Schopenahuer did not author the line, "For ever reading, never to be read;" he merely quoted Alexander Pope, who once said,
I only know the verse myself from reading R.J. Hollingdale's translation of the Great Pessimist's essays and aphorisms, so I can see how one might attribute it thus. But alas, I know how much you honor precision, so I'm compelled to help where I can. That's it — the first error I've been able to catch since 2005 or so. Excellent work, I'd say.
Ad majorem Dei gloriam!
Mr. Fitzgerald turns out to be correct. In "On Thinking for Oneself," an essay I had read circa 1980, Schopenhauer does indeed quote Alexander Pope, though only the words "For ever reading, never to be read." And the reference he gives is a little different: Dunciad iii, 194.
I in turn have a quibble with Mr. Fitzgerald's "minor quibble." A quibble is minor by definition, so 'minor quibble' is a pleonasm. Pleonasm, however, is but a peccadillo.
I have been following your blog for years, and continue to enjoy it immensely. [I've also had the opportunity to read several of your printed works in the field, which I found to be excellent – your article on states of affairs was particularly outstanding.]
I've nothing in particular to offer, other than two anecdotes that I think you'll find amusing:
(1) I met a bona fide, genuine Marxist-Trotskyist the other day. Not much more than a boy, alas, though he had drunk the Kool-Aid in toto, e.g., dialectical materialism, Trotsky a genius, all information is propaganda, etc., etc. I engaged him for some time just for shits and giggles, until the point at which he tried to (seriously) compare slavery to the position of "the woman" within the domestic family. His view, of course, was ridiculous, backed by the flimsiest of slogans. When it became apparent that he was making little sense, he backed off by saying something to the following effect: "Well, clearly two WHITE MEN need not even be discussing this issue…" Whereupon, I was pleased to recall the Maverick Philosopher, and replied (to a slackened jaw, no less): "My friend, arguments do not have testicles."
Beautiful. (On a similar note, I took your advice a few months back and read TROTSKY: DOWNFALL OF A REVOLUTIONARY by B. Patenaude – one helluva' read.)
(2) Not so long ago, I turned a very close friend of mine – one who shares my philosophical, political and religious predilections and who teaches in the Philosophy Dept. at a private school – onto your blog. He and I occasionally swap emails concerning the content, but the following comment from him (made in relation to, I believe, the Trayvon Martin debacle) I simply had to share with you:
"If it were possible to baptize the Maverick Philosopher as my uncle, I would pay to do so."
