St. Jerome on the fall of Rome

From Letter 127:

Rome had been besieged and its citizens had been forced to buy their lives with gold.  Then thus despoiled they had been besieged again so as to lose not their substance only but their lives.  My voice sticks in my throat; and, as I dictate, sobs choke my utterance.  The City which had taken the whole world was itself taken; nay more famine was beforehand with the sword and but few citizens were left to be made captives.  In their frenzy the starving people had recourse to hideous food; and tore each other limb from limb that they might have flesh to eat.  Even the mother did not spare the babe at her breast.  In the night was Moab taken, in the night did her wall fall down. (Isaiah 15:1)  “O God, the heathen have come into your inheritance; your holy temple have they defiled; they have made Jerusalem an orchard. The dead bodies of your servants have they given to be meat unto the fowls of the heaven, the flesh of your saints unto the beasts of the earth.  Their blood have they shed like water round about Jerusalem; and there was none to bury them”

With readers at the ACPA in L.A.

On Friday I attended the first day of the American Catholic Philosophical Association meeting here in Los Angeles, and had the pleasure of meeting longtime readers Eric Mendoza, Alfredo Watkins, and Alex Yousif.  That’s me with Eric, Alfredo, and Alex, respectively, in the first two photos.  (By the way, you can find Eric’s blog here and Alfredo’s here.  Go check ‘em out.)  

So, small world.  How small?  I’d find out that evening when a few of us professors went to the Chart House in Marina del Rey for dinner.

Jazz-funk phenomenologist

Steely Dan freaks will have taken note of Donald Fagen’s new solo album Sunken Condos, and if they’re like me they’ll also have been wearing it out in the two weeks plus since it was released.  This fellow can’t make a bad album.

Steely Dan songs are often character sketches, often of sketchy characters -- the jewel thief of “Green Earrings,” the drug dealer of “Glamour Profession,” the pervert of “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies,” the loser of “What A Shame About Me,” and so forth -- and several of the tunes on the new Fagen album are in this mold.  And as with many Dan songs, some of these sketches are also drawn from a first-person point of view, the music and lyrics together conveying “what it is like” to be the character in question -- a kind of jazz-funk phenomenology.

Hey kids! Free casuistry!

Some time back I posted a set of links to some older works in Scholastic philosophy and theology available online via Archive.org.  Fans of Scholastic moral theology will be interested to know that five volumes of The Casuist: A Collection of Cases in Moral and Pastoral Theology, a very useful series published about a century ago, are also available online.  Here are the links: Volume 1; Volume 2; Volume 3; Volume 4; Volume 5.

Also available at the same site is Fr. Thomas Slater's similar work Questions of Moral Theology.

Nagel and his critics, Part II

Whereas my First Things review of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos accentuated the positive, the first post in this series put forward some criticisms of the book.  Let’s turn now to the objections against Nagel raised by Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg in their review in The Nation.  

First some stage setting is in order.  As I indicated in the previous post, Mind and Cosmos is mostly devoted to the positive task of spelling out what a non-materialist version of naturalism might look like.  The negative task of criticizing materialist forms of naturalism is carried out in only a relatively brief and sketchy way, and here Nagel is essentially relying on arguments he and others have developed at greater length elsewhere.  Especially relevant for present purposes is a line of argument Nagel put forward in what is perhaps his most famous piece of writing -- his widely reprinted 1974 article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” -- and developed further in later works like The View From Nowhere.

The Charles De Koninck Project

Philosopher Charles De Koninck (1906 - 1965) was one of the leading figures in the Laval or River Forest tradition within 20^th century Thomism.  (Need a scorecard to keep track of the different strands of Thomism?  Go here and here.)  De Koninck was the author of several important works on the relationship between the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition and modern science, as well as important works in political philosophy, Catholic theology, and other topics.  The late Ralph McInerny edited a series of De Koninck’s collected works titled The Writings of Charles De Koninck, of which only Volume 1 and Volume 2 appeared before McInerny’s death.  Now The Charles De Koninck Project has been inaugurated with the aim of making all of De Koninck’s works available online.  Take a look at the website and while you’re there consider donating to this worthy enterprise.

Nagel and his critics, Part I

Thomas Nagel’s new book Mind and Cosmos, which I reviewed favorably for First Things, has gotten some less favorable responses as well.  (See Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg’s review in The Nation, Elliott Sober’s piece in Boston Review, and a blog post by Alva Noë.)  The criticism is unsurprising given the unconventional position staked out in the book, but the critics have tried to answer Nagel’s arguments and their remarks are themselves worthy of a response.  

I’ll examine these criticisms in some further posts in this series, but in this first installment I want briefly to state some criticisms of my own.  For while I think Mind and Cosmos is certainly philosophically important and interesting, it has some shortcomings, even if they are perhaps relatively minor given the book’s limited aims.

TLS auf Deutsch

I am pleased to announce that Editiones scholasticae has released a German translation of The Last Superstition, under the title Der letzte Aberglaube: Eine philosophische Kritik des Neuen Atheismus.  Interested readers can order from the publisher’s website, or from Amazon’s German or UK sites.

Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos

Over at the online edition of First Things, you’ll find my review of Thomas Nagel’s important new book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.  (Since there’s more to say about the book than I had space for in the review, I may revisit it in a future post.)

Is [the] God [of classical theism] dead?

Is God dead?  I’m not asking a Nietzschean question about the fortunes of the idea of God in modern Western culture.  I’m asking whether the God of classical theism ought to be regarded as something literally non-living, even if He exists, given that He is characterized as pure actuality, subsistent being itself, immutable, absolutely simple or non-composite, etc.  In the combox of a recent post, the notion was mooted that descriptions of this sort make of God something “static” and therefore “dead.”  And of course, that the God of classical theism seems to some to be lifeless, impersonal, and abstract is a common motivation for theistic personalism or neo-theism.  As one reader put it, God so conceived appears (to him, anyway) to be something like “an infinite data storage device” or “a giant USB stick.”

Such criticisms are not lacking in imagination.  And that is the problem.  As I emphasized in an another recent post, if we are to understand the key notions of classical philosophy and theology, we need to stop trying literally to picture them.  We need to use, not our imaginations, but our intellects.

Separated at birth?

Existentialist (and Danish philosopher) Søren Kierkegaard and rhythmatist (and Police drummer) Stewart Copeland.  Looks like they even have the same haberdasher.  Not much of a philosophical connection, perhaps, except that “Don’t Box Me In” seems as good an existentialist anthem as any.  On the other hand, an analytic philosophy bias may lurk behind that study in the philosophy of language, “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da.”  (What did you think it was about, Dadaism?)

Whose nature? Which law?

You’ve got your natural law.  You’ve got your natural rights.  You’ve got the state of nature.  Then there’s naturalism.  And laws of nature.  And the supernatural.  There’s St. Paul’s natural man and the Scholastics’ natura pura.  There’s nature and nature’s God.  There’s natural science, natural history, natural selection, natural theology, natural philosophy, and the philosophy of nature.  There’s the Baconian scientist putting nature on the rack, and Galileo telling us that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.  And let’s not forget the literal books, like Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and Edward O. Wilson’s On Human Nature.  There’s Emerson’s essay “Nature.”  For fans of underground comics, there’s Mr. Natural; for fans of obscure superheroes too preposterous ever to get their own billion-dollar-grossing film adaptations, there’s Nature Boy.  There’s Oliver Stone’s movie Natural Born Killers and Robert Redford in The Natural.   There’s Ringo Starr singing “Act Naturally,”  Aretha Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” the Steely Dan album Two Against Nature, and that stupid Gilbert O’Sullivan tune.  

There are natural disasters, natural resources, natural gas, and dying of natural causes.  There’s natural beauty, but also freaks of nature.  There’s going back to nature and getting a natural high.  There are Mother Nature, nature hikes, all natural foods, natural family planning and natural childbirth.  There’s the natural order, and second nature.  There are natural numbers.  There are all the examples I didn’t think of.  There are blog posts that are starting to sound like George Carlin routines.

Who wants to be an atheist?

Suppose something like Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? hypothesis turned out to be true, and the God of the Bible was really an extraterrestrial who had impressed the Israelites with some high tech.  Would you conclude: “A ha!  Those atheists sure have egg on their faces now!  Turns out the Bible was right!  Well, basically right, anyway.  True, God’s nature isn’t exactly what we thought it was, but He does exist after all!”  Presumably not, no more than if the God of Exodus turned out to be Moses with an amplifier and some red fizzies he’d dumped into the Nile.  The correct conclusion to draw in either case would not be “God exists, but He wasn’t what He seemed” but rather “God does not exist, He only seemed to.”

Or suppose something like Frank Tipler’s Omega Point theory turned out to be correct and the universe is destined to evolve into a vastly powerful supercomputer (to which Tipler ascribes a kind of divinity).  If you had been inclined toward atheism, do you think you would now conclude: “Wow, turns out God does exist, or at least will exist someday!”  Or rather only: “Wow, so this really weird gigantic supercomputer will exist someday!  Cool.  But what does that have to do with God?”

The Avengers and classical theism

Watched The Avengers again on Blu-ray the other night.  In a movie full of good lines, a few stand out for (of all things) their theological significance.  Take the exchange between Black Widow and Captain America after the Norse god Thor forcibly removes his brother Loki from S.H.I.E.L.D.’s custody, Iron Man gives chase, and Captain America prepares to follow:

Black Widow: I’d sit this one out, Cap.  

Captain America: I don’t see how I can.

Black Widow: These guys come from legend, they’re basically gods.

Captain America: There’s only one God, ma’am.  And I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.

Was Aquinas a dualist?

At the start of chapter 4 of Aquinas (the chapter on “Psychology”), I wrote:

As I have emphasized throughout this book, understanding Aquinas requires “thinking outside the box” of the basic metaphysical assumptions (concerning cause, effect, substance, essence, etc.) that contemporary philosophers tend to take for granted.  This is nowhere more true than where Aquinas’s philosophy of mind is concerned.  Indeed, to speak of Aquinas’s “philosophy of mind” is already misleading.  For Aquinas does not approach the issues dealt with in this modern philosophical sub-discipline in terms of their relevance to solving the so-called “mind-body problem.”  No such problem existed in Aquinas’s day, and for him the important distinction was in any case not between mind and body, but rather between soul and body.  Even that is potentially misleading, however, for Aquinas does not mean by “soul” what contemporary philosophers tend to mean by it, i.e. an immaterial substance of the sort affirmed by Descartes.  Furthermore, while contemporary philosophers of mind tend to obsess over the questions of whether and how science can explain consciousness and the “qualia” that define it, Aquinas instead takes what is now called “intentionality” to be the distinctive feature of the mind, and the one that it is in principle impossible to explain in materialistic terms.  At the same time, he does not think of intentionality in quite the way contemporary philosophers do.  Moreover, while he is not a materialist, he is not a Cartesian dualist either, his view being in some respects a middle position between these options.  But neither is this middle position the standard one discussed by contemporary philosophers under the label “property dualism.”  And so forth.