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.

New Scholastic Meets Analytic Philosophy

Lindenthal-Institut in cooperation with the publisher Ontos Verlag announces an international colloquium on the theme “New Scholastic Meets Analytic Philosophy,” to be held in Cologne, Germany on December 7 - 8, 2013.  The invited speakers are E. J. Lowe, Uwe Meixner, David S. Oderberg, Edmund Runggaldier, Erwin Tegtmeier, and Edward Feser.  Details can be found here.

Justice or revenge?

I have, in various places (e.g. here, here, here, here, here, and here), defended capital punishment on grounds of retributive justice.  And I’ve noted (following the late Ralph McInerny) that what many people who object to capital punishment really seem to find off-putting is the idea of punishment itself (capital or otherwise), smacking as it does of retribution.  A reader asks what the difference is between retributive justice and revenge.  It seems, he says, that there is no difference.  But if there isn’t, then it is understandable why many people object to capital punishment, and even to punishment itself.

I think the reader is correct to suggest that the perception of a link between retributive justice and revenge is the source of much opposition to capital punishment, and of suspicion of the notion of punishment itself.  The thinking seems to go something like this:

1. Revenge is bad.

2. But retribution is a kind of revenge.

3. So retribution is bad.

4. But punishment involves retribution.

5. So punishment is bad.

The trouble with this argument, some defenders of punishment might think, is with premise (2).  But while I would certainly want to qualify premise (2), the main problem in my view is actually with premise (1).  “Revenge” (and related terms like “vengeance” and “vindictiveness”) have come to have almost entirely negative connotations.  But that is an artifact of modern sensibilities, and does not reflect traditional Christian morality.  For there is a sense in which revenge is not bad, at least not intrinsically.  Indeed, there is a sense in traditional Christian morality in which revenge is a virtue.  What is bad are certain things that are often, but only contingently, associated with revenge.  Hence those who reject punishment on the grounds just summarized are not wrong to see a link between retribution and revenge.  Rather, they are wrong to assume that revenge is inherently bad.

Let me explain.  Or rather, let me allow Thomas Aquinas to explain:

The divine intellect

A reader asks:

[I] was curious, given your work in philosophy of mind, what you would say is the most plausible notion we have of God's mental content… [T]he popular theories (functionalism, phenomenology, holism, etc) all seem to violate the doctrine of divine simplicity… I have a hard time conceiving of any conception of minds on which the mind is not, in some sense of the word, modular, or complex.  Minds have got to have thoughts at the very least on the most basic, primitivist conceptions, and that seems to require that minds have parts.