Timothy Patitsas: Beauty, Complexity and Ethics

The Theoretical Impulse in Plato and Aristotle

The Treasonous Clerk: “See, I Am Doing Something New”: John Paul II’s Summons to Secular Being, by James Matthew Wilson

The pope’s summons proves extremely daunting: he wants a philosophy attentive to metaphysics in order to reground modern theology in a concern with reality—with objective and absolute truth. But, in 1998, he finds no one (or few) in contemporary philosophy turned toward the questions of being. Who any longer treats philosophy as founded in its sapiential dimension—that is, in its drive to explore the foundational human questions all persons need answered if they are to live fully (§81)? And who endeavors to arrive at philosophy’s “genuinely metaphysical range” (§83), its concern with being, with what is real? And so Fides et Ratio makes an intervention in philosophy in hopes of building up a population of philosophers who might, someday and in turn, help to rebuild modern theology as a discipline attentive to the foundations of reality rather than merely the phenomena of history or experience. Beyond analytic and Continental philosophy, we need, as it were, a renewal of “plain old-fashioned philosophy.”
Emblem of the Papacy

Thus, the provisional nature of this encyclical. It makes insightful arguments about the history of religions and intellectual inquiry in general; it recovers a reading or narrative of history often dismissed as the alibi of an anti-modern Church; but in doing so it primarily makes the case for others to begin a new work: the rediscovery of human life as an intellectual and spiritual pilgrimage whose terrain is always what is real (being) and whose horizons are the specific historical revelation of God’s Word and the “infinite mystery” of God Himself (§14). We are asked to rediscover that the reason of “separate philosophy” leads finally to despair of reason. If, on the contrary, we recognize that reason is preceded by faith (as we experience, for instance, in the already present desire to know the truth about ourselves) and that reason is completed by faith (reason opens onto truths that, finally, surpass it and that it can see in only fragmented fashion) (§13)—we discover something grand. Reason participates in the human being’s circular journey from the gift of being and the gift of revelation toward a theological understanding of those gifts. It is man’s natural means of searching for a truth that ultimately transcends human life and reason alike and brings all searching to an end (§73).

Fr. Benedict Ashley has written that Thomism has neglected the historical dimension of being, but it is not clear to me how this can be the case if philosophy is to attain to the Aristotelian ideal of episteme and sophia. The contingent may be helpful in helping us understand natures and causes, but there cannot be a science of the contingent as such. While Pope John Paul II is correct that we are in need of metaphysics, Fr. Ashley rightly reminds those who desire to know that we must first have an adequate physics.

Philosophy is not intellectual history

Even if some departments seem to have reduced the philosophical enterprise to it, usually to avoid inter-departmental debate and to adopt a liberal/PC/or relativist attitude towards what thinkers actually hold. As I have written before, inquiring into reality is not the same as doing intellectual history, even if intellectual history may be a useful way to gather the opinions of others. But in the end, one must still evalute those opinions and judge them by what one knows of reality.

Also, what philosophers sometimes forget is that arguments about the origins of ideas need to be framed (and evaluated) not as philosophical arguments but as historical arguments. I was thinking about this yesterday as I was reading through Kirkpatrick Sale's The Human Scale--he does not put forth any genealogy, but I could see some enthusistic undergraduate or even graduate student jump in and say, "The desire to dominate nature has its origins in Descartes" or Francis Bacon. But is it not part of the fallen human condition to assume a wrongful dominion over creation, making it serve man's disordered appetites and without any regard for the consequences or the future? It is one thing to say that the writings of Descartes or Bacon reflects this disordered desire; it's another to say that they are the intellectual progenitors of this desire, which could be named some appropriate '-ism'.

Too often philosophers try to establish their intellectual credibility by looking for the origin of ideas and locating it in some supposed focal figure in the past. While the texts may show that the author did indeed share such ideas, this is not conclusive in itself--what must be done is to show that the ideas were desseminated through him, and had an impact on society at large. This is rarely done, and usually cannot be done.

On the other hand, perhaps some notiosn of rights can be traced back in history to certain people, but the introductory texts that I have read so far have not persuaded me of this--precisely because they have not discussed the educational system of the time--what books were being read and studied in universities and law schools, and what was being cited in other texts, and so on.

At this point in time I think that ius as a subjective active right can be found not inly during the medieval period, but before, in Roman law. But this does not mean all medievals or all Romans held to a conception of right as a manifestation of dominion or property. For the medievals at least it seems clear that there were several theories of subjective active rights, not just one.

It is better to look at the purpose that subjective active rights served within law, and to draw up an undnerstanding of rights based on that, rather than creating an a priori theory about what rights are (within ethics or politics), and then reading this into legal texts.

General Semantics

*started on May 9*

Pete Takeshi mentioned he had been doing some reading on General Semantics and the writings of Hayakawa. I don't know anything about it; I did take a look at the wikipedia article, and I wonder if the founders of General Semantics really have a grasp of Aristotle, and aren't setting up strawmen arguments. I wish I could get my hands on this paper. Still, the school doesn't look like it's of much importance, and I don't think it has many followers in academic philosophy. At least I haven't come across any followers when browsing through department pages and the like.

Is it really anti-essentialist? And while I might agree with its goal of enabling 'clear thinking,' does it supply us with a good account of the difference between sensation and knowing, and how we use names? Aristotelians acknowledge that our use of a name does not mean that we automatically or necessarily have an adequate definition of the thing being named, and that all sorts of other things can be associated with the thing named, though their relationship to it may be contingent or necessary in different respects. Is General Semantics just trying to reinvent Aristotelian logic?

wiki

Alfred Korzybski - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
S. I. Hayakawa - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
General Semantics
General Semantics -- Korzybski
general semantics
Institute of General Semantics
Institute of General Semantics
The New York Society for General Semantics
Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems ... - Google Books Result
DFW Center for General Semantics: Korzybski and Hayakawa
Bibliography of General Semantics Papers by Ralph Kenyon
General Semantics

Amazon.com: Language in Thought and Action: Fifth Edition: S. I. ...
SOME NOTES ON "Language in Thought and Action" by S I Hayakawa

Sylvia Berryman

Sylvia Berryman :: UBC Department of Philosophy

Cambridge, HPS Seminar Abstracts:

15 May

Sylvia Berryman (University of British Columbia) The 'mechanical hypothesis' in Ancient Greek natural philosophy

I argue that the impact of the mechanics of the Hellenistic period on ancient natural philosophy has been underappreciated, and that the reasons for its rejection by the philosophical schools of late antiquity need to be re-examined. Traces of a 'mechanical hypothesis' can be found in late antiquity; attention to this helps us understand the role of the discipline of mechanics in the history of natural philosophy. The reason for the Neoplatonist rejection of the generality of mechanical theory stem from some unsolved problems and counter evidence, rather than a blanket rejection of mechanics as mere art, as marvellous, or as working 'against nature'.

Sylvia Berryman - The Structured Self in Hellenistic and Roman ...
O'Keefe's comments on Sylvia Berryman, "Ancient Automata and ...
Metaphysics, Soul, and Ethics in Ancient Thought: Themes from the ... - Google Books Result
Phronesis Vol. 48, No. 4 August 2003
Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy: Volume XXIII: Winter 2002 - Google Books Result
Vision Of Humanity Democritus by Sylvia Berryman

Henry of Ghent website

at UNC Ashville

Summary of the 2007 Whitehead lectures

lectures given by Professor Sarah Broadie, summaries by Professor Michael Pakaluk

Nature and Divinity in Plato's Timaeus: Precis
Nature and Divinity in Aristotle's Cosmology: A Precis

Plato's Protagoras

available here or here
From the translation by Benjamin Jowett

In Virtue, Order, Mind: Marie I. George, Plato's Protagoras: On choosing a teacher