Aquinas on Intellect’s Independence of Matter: Summa Contra Gentiles, II, 49, 8

In an earlier post on hylomorphic dualism, I said that

Aquinas cannot do justice to his own insight into the independence of the intellect from matter from within the hylomorphic scheme of ontological analysis he inherits from Aristotle. His metaphysica generalis is at war with his special-metaphysical insight into the independence of intellect from matter.

To help nail down half of this assertion, the half that credits the Common Doctor with insight, let's look at one of the arguments Aquinas gives for the intellect's independence of matter, the one at Summa Contra Gentiles, Book II, Chapter 49, Paragraph 8:

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Paul Churchland on Eliminative Materialism

The most obvious objection to eliminative materialism (EM) is that it denies obvious data, the very data without which there would be no philosophy of mind in the first place. Introspection directly reveals the existence of pains, beliefs, desires, anxieties, pleasures, and the like. Suppose I have a headache. The pain, qua felt, cannot be doubted or denied. Its esse is its percipi. To identify the pain with a brain state makes a modicum of sense; but it makes no sense at all to deny the existence of the very datum that got us discussing this topic in the first place. But Paul M. Churchland (Matter and Consciousness, rev. ed. MIT Press, 1988, pp. 47-48) has a response to this sort of objection:

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Seneca on Drinking

In this festive season it is perhaps appropriate that we should relax a little the bonds that tether us to the straight and narrow.  A fitting apologia for a bit of indulgence and even overindulgence  is found in Seneca, On Tranquility of Mind, XVII, 8-9, tr. Basore:

At times we ought to reach even the point of intoxication, not drowning ourselves in drink, yet succumbing to it; for it washes away troubles, and stirs the mind from its very depths and heals its sorrow just as it does certain ills of the body; and the inventor of wine is not called the Releaser [Liber, Bacchus] on account of the license it gives to the tongue, but because it frees the mind from bondage to cares and emancipates it and gives it new life and makes it bolder in all that it attempts. But, as in freedom, so in wine there is a wholesome moderation.

Sed ut libertatis ita vini salubris moderatio est.

. . .

Yet we ought not to do this often, for fear that the mind may contract an evil habit; nevertheless there are times when it must be drawn into rejoicing and freedom, and gloomy sobriety must be banished for a while.

The Manhattan Shot

Time was when I imbibed two ounces of alcohol per day. But abstemiousness has set in, and now I save the sauce for special occasions. But a favorite delivery form remains what I call the Manhattan shot.

Slam a respectably sized shot glass onto the counter. Fill it two thirds to three quarters with your bourbon of choice. Top it off with sweet vermouth, and finish it with two or three drops of Angosturo(anguish) bitters. Now, without engaging in any such tomfoolery as mixing, knock it back in one fluid gesture. Straight: no chaser, no cherry.

Repeat as necessary.

Eliminative Materialism Defined

A reader inquired about eliminative materialism. In this post I will explain what eliminative materialism is. In later posts, I will indicate why I consider it to be not only false, but irremediably incoherent.

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Envy, Jealousy, Schadenfreude

The older I get, the more two things impress me. One is the suggestibility of human beings, their tendency to imbibe and repeat ideas and attitudes from their social environment with nary an attempt at critical examination. The other is the major role envy plays in human affairs. Suggestibility is best left for another occasion as part of an analysis of political correctness.

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Schadenfreude with a Twist

To feel envy is to feel diminished by another's success or well-being. Schadenfreude is in a certain sense the opposite: it is to take pleasure or satisfaction in another's misfortune. An interesting case of Schadenfreude is pleasure in having incited envy in another.

Envy is a vice of propinquity. Envy erupts only among people who compare themselves with one another, and for comparison there must be propinquity or social proximity whether it be that of friends, relatives, neighbors, co-workers. Suppose A and B work in the same office, and A gets a promotion. That is a situation in which envy may arise. Suppose it does: B comes to feel diminished by A's success. Even though the change in B is 'merely Cambridge,' as the philosophers say, merely relational, and thus no real change at all, the real change occurring in A, B nonetheless and quite perversely feels bad that A has done well even though B's feeling bad does nothing to improve his lot, and indeed harms him by befouling his mind and predisposing him to acts worse than envy.

Spinoza on Commiseratio. Pity as a Wastebasket Emotion

To commiserate, to feel compassion, to pity — these come to the same. Might compassion  be a mistake? Suppose an evil befalls you. If I am in a position to help, then perhaps I ought to. But it is unnecessary that I 'feel your pain' to use a Clintonian expression. Indeed, my allowing myself to be affected might interfere with my rendering of aid. And even if it doesn't, the affect of pity is bad in itself. Why should I feel bad that you feel bad? Of course, I should not feel good that you feel bad; that would be the diabolical emotion of Schadenfreude.  The point is that I should not feel bad that you feel bad.  For it is better if only one of us suffer. Better that I should remain unaffected and unperturbed. That way, at least one of us displays ataraxia.

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Morality Private and Public: On Not Confusing Them

Socrates and Jesus are undoubtedly two of the greatest teachers of humanity. Socrates famously maintained that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it, and Jesus, according to MT 5:39, enjoins us to "Resist not the evildoer" and "Turn the other cheek." No one with any spiritual sensitivity can fail to be deeply impressed by these sayings. It is equally clear that no one with common sense can suppose that they can be applied in the public sphere.

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How Ordinary Language Philosophy Rests on Logical Positivism

A while back I came across Ernest Gellner's Words and Things (unrevised ed., 1963). It is jam-packed with insights. Here is an example:

Linguistic Philosophy [O. L. philosophy] absolutely requires and presupposes [Logical] Positivism, for without it as a tacit premiss, there is nothing to exclude any metaphysical interpretation of the usages that are to be found, and allegedly "taken as they are," in the world. (p. 86)

Exactly right. For if the anti-metaphysics of logical positivism is not presupposed, how can the O.L. philosopher rule out as meaningless metaphysical ways of talking? People talk in all sorts of ways, not all of them mundane. People talk metaphysics for example. I do it all the time, and it certainly seems to me and some of my interlocutors that I am talking sense. For example, I say things like, 'Existence is a necessary condition of property-possession: nothing has properties unless it exists' and there are people who understand me.

On the Misuse of Religious Language

A massage parlor is given the name Nirvana, the implication being that after a well-executed massage one will be in the eponymous state. This betrays a misunderstanding of Nirvana, no doubt, but that is not the main thing, which is the perverse tendency to attach a religious or spiritual significance to a merely sensuous state of relaxation.

Why can’t the hedonist just enjoy his sensory states without glorifying them? Equivalently, why can’t he admit that there is something beyond him without attempting to drag it down to his level? But no! He wants to have it both ways: he wants both sensuous indulgence and spirituality. He wants sensuality to be a spiritual experience and spirituality to be as easy of access as sensuous enjoyment.

What’s in a Name?

Mike Gilleland's erudite disquisition on crappy names (craptronyms?) put me in mind of a chess opponent I once faced in a Las Vegas tournament. The fellow, a German, rejoiced under the name of David Assman. It would really have been a hoot had the tournament's venue been Fucking, Austria, near Salzburg. (If a major tournament can be held at Lone Pine, little more than a wide spot on old U.S. 395, why not there?) Yes, muchachos, there really is such a place. The name is pronounced 'fooking.' Although I lived as a young man in Salzburg for six months, I never got to Fucking.

More Zinsser on Writing

William Zinsser, On Writing Well, 5th ed., Chapter 13:

1. "Use active verbs unless there is no comfortable way to get around a passive verb." A good rule of thumb.

2. "Passive-voice writers," Zinsser tells us, "prefer long words of Latin origin to short Anglo-Saxon words — which compounds their trouble and makes their sentences still more glutinous." (111) Here again we see that Zinsser has a hard time following his own advice. 'Glutinous' is from the Latin, glutinosus, and means having the quality of glue. Why didn't Zinsser just write 'gummy'?

My point is not that he should have written 'gummy,' but that he ought to reexamine his animus against words of Latin origin, an animus he shares with Orwell.  Brevity and Anglo-Saxonism are values, but there are competing values.

3. "Most adverbs are unnecessary." Yes. "Most adjectives are also unnecessary." Ditto. I would have preferred the quantifier, 'many,' but let's not quibble.

4. "Prune out the small words that qualify how you feel and how you think and what you saw: 'a bit,' 'a little,' 'sort of,' 'kind of,' 'rather,' 'quite,' 'very,' 'too,' 'pretty much,' 'in a sense,' and dozens more." (114) And while we are at it, prune 'out' from the sentence just quoted.

5. ". . . let's retire the pompous 'arguably.' Unarguably we don't need it." (114)

Here I must register my disapprobation. One man's pomposity is another's urbanity. I use 'arguably' to mean it is arguable that or it can be plausibly argued that. Employing this phrase, I signal my awareness that the issue in question is difficult and that intelligent people may well disagree. I indicate that I am a civilized fellow and not a rude dogmatist. Example: 'David Lewis' On the Plurality of Worlds is arguably the best work of analytic metaphysics to appear in English in the 1980s.' 'Arguably' softens an assertion in need of softening: there are no established criteria of good, better, best in philosophy. There is no call for dogmatism. But if I were engaged in polemic with a leftie, and needed to appear firm before an audience, then more bluntness and less urbanity would be in order.

The same goes for 'register my disapprobation.' I could have written, ' Here I must disagree.' If I were an engineer writing a technical report, I would cut to the chase and elide the ornate. But I'm not. Why should I not make use of my vocabulary? Should dancers execute only the simplest steps? Ought all buildings be Bauhaus?

"Style," said Schopenhauer, "is the physiognomy of the mind." I would add that we don't all have the minds of simpletons.

Zinsser on Writing

I found William Zinsser, On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction, 5th ed., in a discard bin  a while back for a quarter. A nice find and a good read. His politics are leftish, are they not? But I won't hold that against him. From what I have read, his advice is good. Like Orwell before him, he urges a style spare and stripped-down: "the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components." (p.7) But, like Orwell, he has trouble taking his own advice:

Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that's already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what — these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence.(p.7)

Suppose we rewrite the sentence in accordance with Zinsser's advice:

Every useless word, every word that could be shortened, every adverb whose meaning is already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what — these are the adulterants that weaken a sentence.

Without changing the thought at all, I took a sentence of 54 words and rewrote it in 39 words, saving 15 words. "Thousand and one" is useless filler and false precision, and "weaken the strength of" is pleonasm.

But the deeper issue is whether a lean style is always best. Why should every long word be traded in for a short one? It is a bit like demanding that one always dress in a purely functional way, stripping from one's apparel all ornamentation. That would get rid of all ties, especially those most precious of ties, the bow tie. Think of all the 'fashion accessories' the ladies would have to renounce.

I'm a sartorial functionalist myself, and wouldn't be caught dead in a bow tie or in suspenders. Formal attire for me is anything in excess of my 'loincloth.' But in my writing I compensate: I allow myself a modicum of elegance, a bit of leisurely strut and glide. I thumb my nose at editors and schoolmarms who think all prose must fit the same crabbed mold. I won't apologize for 'modicum' or 'sartorial' or for an allusion to Sartor Resartus; if the reader doesn't get it, that is his problem. Are we writing only for the culturally retarded?

And is it always wrong to use an adverb whose meaning is already in the verb? Mocking Al Franken, I may describe him as a 'lying liar' thus rubbing his nose in his own idiotic redundancy.

These quibbles notwithstanding, Zinsser's book promises both pleasure and instruction.

On Light

Today I preach on a text from Joseph Joubert:

Light. It is a fire that does not burn. (Notebooks, 21)

Just as the eyes are the most spiritual of the bodily organs, light is the most spiritual of physical phenomena. And there is no light like the lambent light of the desert. The low humidity, the sparseness of vegetation that even in its arboreal forms hugs the ground, the long, long vistas that draw the eye out to shimmering buttes and mesas — all of these contribute to the illusion that the light is alive. This light does not consume, like fire, but allows things to appear. It licks, like flames, but does not incinerate. ('Lambent' from Latin lambere, to lick.)