Substance and Suppositum: Notes on Fernand Van Steenberghen

Here is another of the scholastic manuals I pulled off my shelf: Fernand van Steenberghen, Ontology (Nauwelaerts Publisher, Brussels, 1970, tr. Moonan).  A paragraph from p. 278 supports my thesis that the distinction between primary substance and suppositum is an ad hoc device invented for a theological purpose, a device for which there is no independent philosophical warrant:

4. The problem of subsistence or personality.  This problem was inserted into metaphysics for the benefit of theology, as is quite plain, in order to prepare the way for a satisfactory explanation of the theological  mystery of the incarnation, the question of knowing how and why the human nature of Jesus Christ does not constitute a human person.  But this problem is extraneous to philosophy and must remain so, for from the metaphysical point of view, there is no reason for distinguishing individual nature and individual.  It is therefore contrary to any sane method to ask in ontology on what conditions an individual nature might not be a suppositum (or person, where it is an intelligent nature that is in question.)

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Why Run?

If the sky is the daily bread of the eyes (Emerson), then hiking, running, and cycling are the daily bread of the legs and lungs. And   what better way to appreciate the sky, and the lambent light of the desert Southwest, than by running over mountain trails at sunrise?   Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie.

From the Mail Bag: Occasionalism

Todd Wright e-mails:

Great blog, thanks for writing it!

[. . .]

2.  Are you familiar with the writings of the muslim philosopher Al-Ghazali and his idea now called "Occasionalism"?  It seems to me that the person of faith must give up his/her faith in cause and effect for the supernatural to make sense, and Al-Ghazali seems to be the only person to have ever understood this.

Thanks again for your blog!  It's fantastic!

Am I familiar with occasionalism?  Indeed I am and have given it quite a bit of thought.  I advocate a contemporary version of occasionalism in "Concurrentism or Occasionalism? American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, vol. LXX, no. 3, Summer 1996, pp 339-359. This post will give the reader some idea of what occasionalism is.

Does the believer have to give up his faith in cause and effect for the supernatural to make sense?  No, at the very most he would have to abandon certain views of causation.  That there is causation in the natural world is undeniable, a 'Moorean fact,' a datum.  Anyone who denies this is a lunatic who belongs in the same 'bin' with eliminativists in the philosophy of mind.    For if one were to deny causation, then one would in effect be denying that there is any difference between causal and noncausal event sequences.  But surely there is such a difference as all will admit including al-Ghazali and Malebranche.  I flip a switch (e1) and the light goes on (e2).  At the same time the phone rings (e3).   E1-e2 is a causal event sequence. E1-e3 is not.  Philosophers are not in the business of denying such data as these.  Philosophical questions first arise when we ask what it is for one event to cause another.  That there is causation is a pre-philosophical datum.  What causes what is a question for experience and science.  What causation is is a philosophical question.

Some theories of causation are inconsistent with theism, but not all are.  For example, if it is maintained that all causation is event-causation and that there cannot be be agent-causation, then classical theism is ruled out.  And I should also point out that one can be a theist without holding an occasionalist theory of causation.  For example, once could be a concurrentist.  But this is not the place to go into these details.

 

The 26.2 Club

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

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

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

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

Substance and Suppositum: Notes on Klubertanz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Was Descartes Poisoned by a Catholic Priest?

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Platonist at Breakfast

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

"How would you like your eggs, sir?"

More Fun With Alienans Adjectives and an Application

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

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

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

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

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

For more on alienans adjectives, see Adjectives.

This Life

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