James Chastek talks about Game theory and alpha males, but fails -- more research would be warranted.

Like when dealing with other schools (like the Franciscan school), Catholic intellectuals should do the appropriate research when trying to understand what other people are saying. I hope this is true if the Alt Right undergoes greater scrutiny by American Roman Catholics. I am fairly certain that most will mischaracterize the Alt Right in their initial attempt.

A Little Too Accepting of the Assumptions of Modern Physics?

A critique of Aristotle’s physics in Aristotle’s terms

Are we really justified in eliminating the distinction between agent and patient (and teleology)?

Sexual "Orientation" and Friendship

James Chastek replies to Michael Hannon regarding marital friendship.

How Useful for Natural Theology?

James Chastek: From feminine to divine perfections

While Aquinas does make the claim that the mother's love for her child is one ideal, is it disputed which sex has the better capacity for love that is tempered by justice? Some perfections pertain to the intellect and the will, some pertain to the operation of the intellect and the will in so far as the soul is the form of the body and thus we have to consider the influence of the emotions. It is not so controversial among Catholics to claim that there are sex differences. But to claim that such differences ground a hierarchy within the family and society at large?

Updating Theology and Philosophy

James Chastek: Marketing philosophy

Related:
Pertinacious Papist: "Modernism is exhausted ..."

James Chastek: Beginner-level notes on double effect

A quick response:

And so we distinguish things that knowingly belong to an act from those that define it. Since acts are defined by their goals or the things we intended, it makes sense to distinguish what is knowingly done from what is intentionally done.

What defines the act as opposed to what knowingly belongs to it - this is important consideration. But it is also important to note that two acts may be similar in their physical description (~the matter of the moral act), and yet what is being aimed at by the agent is different. (~the form of the moral act). The object of the moral act would include both the form and the matter, and not one to the exclusion of the other.

Notice these things, in a concrete case, are notionally distinct as opposed to being really distinct. A man might do surgery on the battlefield while thinking to himself “Gosh, I just love that sound they make when they scream and beg me to stop”. If this is so, he is not just a surgeon but a sadist too.

I don't agree that they are notionally distinct rather than really distinct - the intention of an act is really different from the object of the act. The intention of the will is the end to which the act is ordered.

A thing can be done knowingly without being done intentionally (at least in the sense of “intentional” set out here), and this is opens the possibility of what became the doctrine of double effect.

What opens the possibility of the doctrine of double effect is the distinction between the 'form' and 'matter' of the moral act (and foreseeen consequences and willed consequences and the like).  Does Brock offer the best treatment of these points? I'll have to review my notes.).

James Chastek: The Trinity understood through typical male-female corruptions

Masculinity corrupts the self by seeking to subordinate everything to itself: the male self is the one that seeks to be utterly set apart with all beneath him, gazing upward in admiration. There is, however, a contrary corruption of the self that is more typical of the feminine: namely to so identify with the expectations and beliefs of the group that any personal desire is altogether lost. One of the dark sides of the feminine traits we praise is that, when pushed to an extreme, they all lead to a dissolution of the self through an identity with others. Empathy with others carries to the extent of loss of the self; tenderness of affection leads to an ontological softness that blurs any distinction between self and other.

This might be true of some married women of the previous generation, their total "giving" to their children; but I have not seen any examples of this not accompanied by a neglect of the marriage and their husbands. Such seeming "self-giving" can actually be a form of disordered self-love.

Even the herd thinking that exemplifies contemporary feminism is tied to modern narcissism, etc.

There are distinct forms of male and female pride; male pride is discussed here, but female pride, which is a more characteristic vice of women, is not.

James Chastek on Nominalism

Two posts today: first and second parts.

James Chastek, Rights and Justice

St. Thomas makes rights the object of justice, and they are recognizable as rights in our own sense (e.g. they are divided into natural and legal rights, and slaves as slaves do not have any). One important difference is that, by locating them in the context of justice, rights are properly had by others. It is certainly true that I have rights, but when I say this I am considering them so far as they can make someone else just. To consider rights as my own leaves them recognizable as rights, but it prescinds from the context that could make me a good, virtuous, happy person.

1. Ius (pl. iura) is the object of justice that is true; to translate it as right is potentially misleading since what is meant as ius by St. Thomas is not the same as what we mean by right in the sense of a moral faculty or freedom to do a certain action. It is proper to the Bill of Rights to list these moral faculties in order to safeguard them from being infringed by the Federal Government. The Bill of Rights sets to make explicit the limits to the authority of the Federal Government. [subjective active rights]

2. The other subjective "right," a title or claim to something, may be bound up with St. Thomas's notion of ius. Ius, as explained by St. Thomas, is proper to ethics is moral theology - determining what is owed to another, what must be done/rendered to another (an action, first of all) by a moral agent. Determining what is owed to me is proper to a judge or someone else mediating a dispute, though it is not without the flip side - if I have a legitimate claim to something, then it must be given to me. [subjective passive rights]

James Chastek, The order among analogues and An order among analogues, II

James Chatek, A thomistic response to William Lane Craig’s denial of divine atemporality

James Chastek, Integral truth

Mr. Chastek compares theological truth with food and relates both to multiple ends. G-L is making a point though about the epistemology of those supporting the development of a new, up-to-date theology. If theology is not true, then how can it benefit or aid modern man and his vexations? Do we know God via things? Or do we know God through our ideas?

We could also ask the question of whether theology is more speculative or practical in nature.

James Chastek, Lecture on Thomism and Molinism

James Chatsek, The analogous names of God developed by philosophies of dialogue

James Chastek, Aristotle’s theohedonics (pt. 1)

Waiting for the next part.

James Chastek, Two answers to “why do we form political associations?”

Plato says that the city arises from an individual’s inability to meet his own physical needs; Aristotle says that it arises because men are political by nature. At first glace, it seems like Aristotle’s account is facile, or even that it is no explanation at all: “men are naturally political because they are political by nature! What an insight!” But Aristotle’s explanation is the better one. In effect, he is insisting that political life is irreducible. It is not the result of a more fundamental drive or desire – political life itself is the fundamental desire, and it would remain so even if it was not as good at meeting physical needs. This is why his Politics doesn’t begin by considering the individual (and his needs) as the principle of a society, but takes communal life as irreducible.

How many modern political theories start with the good of the individual and the myth that society originates in the need of individuals to cooperate for survival?

But if political life is a basic and irreducible need, then just regimes must at least strive to make the regime a place in which the citizens can be truly politically active. Again, where political order reduces to physical need, the Leviathan-state is possible and perhaps even desirable; but where an individual’s political life is an irreducible reality, the Leviathan-state is in flagrant contradiction with the first principle of politics, since no one can lead a political life in the Leviathan state. The Leviathan might meet all the individual’s physical needs, but it does not allow his political actions to make anything beyond a negligible difference.

Political friendship, by the nature of friendship, is ordered to some measure of equality? (Or that constitution known as republic/polity?)

James Chastek, Re-evaluation of First Matter

James Chastek, Right and violence

He quotes the CE (the new one?): "Every perfect right, i.e. every right involving in others an obligation in justice a deference thereto, to be efficacious, and consequently a real and not an illusory power, carries with it at the last appeal the subsidiary right of coercion. A perfect right, then, implies the right of physical force…"

James Chastek, The Kettlewell Principle and Deductions from nature being caused by hae hou heneka

A conversation on Ted: Will we ever truly be able to model nature?

James Chastek's appraisal of Aristotle's natural science: Note on Aristotle’s Physics

How can metaphysics then be a science rather than tentative opinion?

But in turning to the Physics in search of such truths, all one finds is a series of conclusions that are either false or of no value, and by “of no value” I mean the term as Aristotle himself used it: “definitions which do not enable us to discover the derived properties, or which fail to facilitate even a conjecture about them, must obviously be… futile (De anima, I:1)” If the value of definitions is from the power they give us to derive new properties and facilitate conjecture, then we must admit the truth of any number of things that nullify the supposed truth of common experience. For example, it is more valuable to identify rest and motion (as happens in inertia) or magnitude and time (as happens in Relativity). Again, we should affirm that things with no parts can move (Like electrons. The premise is not inconsequential – it grounds Aristotle’s proof for the existence of God) and we should deny that anything in motion needs a subject of notion (a light wave is not some thing waving – like aether) and that, as a consequence to this, magnitude is not the foundation of physical things, that is, a sort of substrate that supports all activity.

I wouldn't be so quick to jettison Aristotelian physics in favor of the reasonings of contemporary physicists, but it deserves a longer and better defense than I can give at the moment.