Showing posts with label Philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Philosophy. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Knowledge and Faith (McInerny #4)

*Aspects of argument*

    McInerny lays out one of Aquinas’ five proofs for the existence of God. Before this, he states that for the medievals, “logic rides piggy-back on our knowledge of the world.” Logic works in “second intentions…relations established by the mind between first intentions, which were the grasps of the way things are.” With the proper uses of logic in mind, McInerny turns to Aquinas:

*Whatever is moved is moved by another
*There cannot be an infinite series of moved movers
*Therefore there must be a first unmoved mover

    McInerny points out that Aquinas was writing for beginners, but not in philosophy. His students had read Aristotle in detail, and already knew Aristotle’s motion argument. Aquinas was writing for beginners in theology. He doesn’t want to impart entirely new information, but rather wants to compare the truths pagan philosophers have come to know, with truths that have supposedly been revealed. The reader of the Summa theologiae (Aquinas’ big work) is expected to know certain things, and have a certain background. Proofs do not take place in a vacuum—they rely on a “vast fund of knowledge” shared by the teacher and student, part and parcel of “the culture in which they and countless others stand.”
    A three-sentence proof is a “distillation” of someone saying something to someone else in a specific context. The addressee is supposed to reenact the process the teacher has gone through to come to the knowledge, via the three sentences. The actual words are supposed to be as inaudible as possible, the truth being what is loud, the aim of the proof itself. The three sentences themselves cannot prove anything “anymore than a musical score can fill the ear with sound.”
    But what about changing one’s life? Does changing one’s mind entail this? I don’t think it’s so clear cut—after all, a person’s mind is in life, and life is experienced via the mind. But all that aside, I think if something only affects you in your mind, and not in your life, it’s completely worthless, and I’m not sure such a thing exists. If you count donkeys in your head all day long because it’s fun, well, that’s a part of your life.

*Intemperate Reasoning*

    One way to tell the difference between theoretical and practical thinking is the end result of each. For theoretical thinking, it’s “the perfection of thinking as such, truth.” It’s knowing the truth of something. The end result of practical thinking is something you’ve done or made—“the perfection of some activity other than thinking itself.” McInerny’s example: you’re told that the sun is 93,000,000 miles from earth. This does not spur us into action; we don’t say, “What? That far? I’d better hurry.”
    Practical science has to be differentiated from practical thinking, and the same with theoretical. Because we can think theoretically about a practical subject. For “I would define and describe a bird house in the same way that I would a robin’s nest, as if it were simply an item in the natural world.” Knowing the making of a bird house as a series of steps is to have practical knowledge “ in a fuller sense.” Actually working at the bench is the fullest sense of practical knowledge.
    So what about the relationship between knowing and being good?

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Some Goblins Are Gay (Terry Eagleton)

   Terry Eagleton thinks the New Atheism is botched and wrong. Terry Eagleton is a literature critic and theorist who connects Catholicism and Marxism (he gave a lecture called “Marxism as a Theodicy”), and wrote books like How to Read a Poem, The Illusions of Postmodernism, and The Meaning of Life in the “Very Short Introduction” series. I hadn’t heard of him before I stumbled upon his Gifford Lecture, “The God Debate.” My response? First, the audience wasn’t really having it—they didn’t laugh at almost any of his jokes, some of which were really good—and weren’t agreeing with him, based on the question and answer session. They do have some good points which I will address later.

PS: In what he admits is an irreverent move, he lumps Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens in the name ‘Ditchkins’.

*Exceprts From Lecture*
Yeti flitting through the forest

   In order to reject religious faith, an atheist must first grasp something of what it entails, what he or she is rejecting. It’s deeply doubtful that Ditchkins has any such grasp at all and therefore logically questionable whether he can be called an atheist in the first place. More or less, every single current champion of the anti-religious case subscribes to what I’ve called the ‘Yeti’ view of faith. They imagine that the question, ‘do you believe in God?’ is rather like the question, ‘do you believe in the yeti?’ or ‘do you believe in the loch ness monster, or alien abductions?’ Belief in God, of course, has precious little to do with the proposition that there exists somewhere a supreme being. The grammar of ‘I believe in God’ is only superficially akin to the grammar of ‘I believe in big foot’ or ‘I believe at least some goblins are gay.’
   Ditchkins is just as theologically illiterate about the doctrine of creation. He seems to imagine that is has something to do with how the world got off the ground. I don’t know why he thinks that, that the Judeo-Christian doctrine of creation has something to do with how the world originated. He thinks that science can offer a vastly more plausible explanation of that than can the Book of Genesis, but the doctrine of creation is not, of course, about this at all. The New Testament, for example, has almost nothing to say about God as celestial manufacturer. Theologians are not in competition with astrophysics any more than sculptors are at war with stockbrokers. The greatest theologian who ever wrote, Thomas Aquinas, thought it was quite possible that the universe had no origin at all. Yet he believed devoutly in the doctrine of creation.
Creation concerns not, of course, the origin of the world, which is a matter for science, but the curious fact that it’s there in the first place, and its radical dependency, dependent for its very freedom and autonomy, in a striking paradox, on a god who brought it about just for the fun of it. Or, to use a more theological term, just for the hell of it. The doctrine of creation thus means that precisely there isn’t an explanation for the world, that God created it out of his own eternal gratuitous self-delight, conjuring it up simply for the hell of it, out of the unfathomable abyss of his love, and thus acting a lot more like an artist than a manufacturer. The world is the original a gratuis, a question of grace and gift, which, like God himself (this surely is the doctrine of creation), has no ground or purpose or end or raison d’ ĂȘtre, other than those it bears within itself. The cosmos is a gloriously pointless work of art, not an instrumental or utilitarian product, and the doctrine of creation is trying to get at this remarkable fact. Ditchkens, by contrast, seems to imagine that Christian faith is meant to be an explanation of the world, which is rather like supposing that Moby Dick is meant to be a report on the whaling industry. It’s doubtful, then, whether one can even award the title of atheist to such a botched understanding of what it is one is rejecting, any more than one would describe Brad Pitt as an anti-philosopher. To be an anti-philosopher, like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Adorno, Freud, Wittgenstein, or Derrida, you have to reject the orthodox philosophical project of your time for philosophically interesting reasons, a category into which Mr. Pitt fails to fall.

Saturday, December 31, 2011

Nihilism Has Become Chic (McInerny #3)

    I’d like to start with an argument regarding material predication and epistemological predication. No, not ‘prediction,’ even though predication will turn out to be a sort of predictor. Predication is well, making something a predicate, as in, the grammatical subject and predicate. The cat is fat. The cat is angry. The cat is a dragon. These are all instances (one of them is awesome) of predication, in which ‘is’ is the copula (word connecting subject to predicate).

*Kant*

    Kant states that ‘being’ is “obviously not a real predicate.” Meaning, it doesn’t actually saying anything new of anything. It’s a predicate, but only a logical one. It exists in the abstract realm (if you can get more abstract than Kant) of logic and ‘imagination’, as in, “The field is a monster, and, um, the acorn was a cat, and, uh, the flying spaghetti monster is real.” You can say anything of anything that way. Kant gives us what I consider to be a pretty cool example. So, there’s this thing (Thing Z) with a piece of reality missing. It has every feature of reality except one. This missing feature is not added by saying, “Thing Z exists”: duh. If the missing feature WERE added by saying “Thing Z exists,” it wouldn’t be Thing Z anymore, because it would have the missing piece of reality, and anything that has a different piece than the thing before it is, well, different. God cannot be snuck into existence just by thinking of the concept of God. The second thing (the God that you brought into existence) would have something different than the first thing if the second thing is to exist—it would have, namely, existence—but then the thing you were looking to bring into existence (the first thing) would not now be in existence. It is now a different thing, something maybe called “first thing plus existence,” which is NOT “first thing.” Catch Kant’s drift?
    I think Kant is saying that ‘is’ cannot both be a copula (connecting subject and predicate) and a predicate. I don’t have Critique of Pure Reason in front of me and I’m too lazy to search online. Also, if I search online, I’ll get distracted and never get back to my book reportage.
    Anyway, remember way back in the above paragraph when I stated that Kant recognizes that ‘is’ is a predicate, just not a real one? Something interesting happens if we take him up seriously on this, and see what exactly he means by something being a real predicate. (I take that back: I do NOT want to figure out what Kant exactly means by anything—poolside CPR and Critique of Pure Reason do not share initials for nothing.) What is the opposite of a logical predicate? Well, something not merely logical, something not merely imagined, so probably something real: something material.
    Kant discounts Descartes’ ontological proof, stating that trying to sneak existence into God is like trying to increase your funds by adding zeros to the end of your bank statement. Let this analogy sink in for a moment. I understand that much trust is involved, as you first have to trust that I read this analogy somewhere, and second, that this is worth your time. Worth your time. That I read this somewhere. Increase your funds. Done? We focus on the bank statement too much in the analogy, and not enough (and sometimes not at all) on the person writing in zeros—you. You are the one strapped for cash. You are the one who puts in the zeros. You are the one who is trying to figure out if God exists, formulating thoughts and statements about God.
    Anyway, now that Kant is out of the way (Kant is boring), we can talk about McInerny. It will turn out McInerny relies on the value of material predication—that there are truths to be found, and that we find them. But before he gets to this exactly, he lays the groundwork for what’s up with natural theology.

*Friends and Foes of Natural Theology*

    “The Cartesian turn,” McInerny says, “can be said to have ushered in a happy time for natural theology.” The world was proven through God, who guarantees the reliability of Descartes’ senses. Descartes knows God through reason (natural theology), the admittedly odd logic and reason of a doubting self (McInerny doesn’t say this—he never says how the Cartesian turn is, on paper, a good one for natural theology, but I’m guessing that was why). But with Descartes came “the remarkable persistence of the notion that subjectivity, that is, the knowing subject, comes thematically first.”
    McInerny argues that Descartes and his descendants have turned philosophy into something concerned not with the problem of finding truth, but with the problem of determining a match-up between our ideas/judgments, and things outside our mind. The Cartesian turn has led to putting the world into “an epistemological dock.” “The contribution our minds made to the objects of knowledge took center stage”; the fact that an object is intelligible or sensible, able to be thought or sensed accurately, “became constitutive” of it. In pre-modern discussions, the mind’s contribution was not ignored, but it didn’t “swamp the object known” (a nice phrase).
    Philosophy’s task was now to prove that philosophy itself was the problem, and examined itself that way. “We no longer seek to achieve the true and avoid the false. Forget about both of those. The only question is, does it work, is it successful.” Philosophy lost its ‘true-pointing’ function. McInerny discusses philosophers like A.J. Ayer, Wittgenstein, and even Sartre, concluding that in their philosophical ambiance, “language is no longer the sign of thought and thought is no longer the grasp of nature, of essence, of the way things are. We are thrown back on language itself…”
    The culmination of all this for natural theology? Theism can’t be said to be false because it can’t be said to be anything—you have to go through Logical Empiricism and Representationalism and all that before you can, well, speak.

*Atheism is Not the Default Position*

    It is the loss of something. “It does seem true,” McInerny states, “that people usually become atheists by losing their childhood beliefs. The original position was belief, theism, and then, as the alpha privative suggests, it was lost and that result was atheism.” Even though “it could be argued that throughout history the vast majority of philosophers have been theists or religious believers,” the default position in philosophy today is atheism, “the end to which anyone who seriously uses his mind is expected inevitably to come.”

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Christian Convictions (McInerny #2)

    Ralph McInerny is out to prove the validity of natural theology (duh). But when he says he is already a believer, doesn’t this disqualify him from natural theology (coming to know God via reason)? What does it mean to be both a philosopher who uses reason and a believer who uses faith, in the specific context of thinking about natural theology?

*Antecedent Convictions*

    As I stated, McInerny is a Catholic, and comes to the question of the existence of God with an antecedent conviction—like we all do. He states, “I take up my task in the firm pre-philosophical conviction, thanks to my Christian faith, that it can be done…everyone comes to every inquiry with antecedent convictions.” We approach every problem with a certain set of attentions—we pay attention to certain things and ignore others based on, well, something in us that has been established either genetically or environmentally. I think this has to do with Kierkegaard’s urging us to recognize our finitude, the space we are in, the space over which we have no control. I have brown hair and ADHD—I can’t control this. I grew up with a certain set of beliefs—I also can’t control this. I grew up in a moderately Catholic household, and voila, I am moderately Catholic. It is not why I am moderately Catholic, but certainly does not fail to contribute to my being so. McInerny asserts that “all philosophers have acquired a lengthy personal history before they even begin the study of philosophy”—a history comprising what he elsewhere calls ‘pre-philosophy.’ He is appealing to the complicated rather than the simple: “everyone thinks out of a very complicated personal background, one that affects what questions he entertains, the expectations he has of possible answers, and doubtless causes him to give short shrift to lines of thought which disturb those antecedents.” This may all seem like a non-issue: yes, people have personal background. So what. You’re supposed to look past them to find the truth. However, as McInerny claims, the modern turn in philosophy has led to lazy nihilism and a relativism that cuts down both atheistic thought and faithful thought by attempting, among other endeavors, to overturn antecedent convictions. Everyone has antecedent convictions, “not only believers.” In the end, “if having antecedent beliefs disqualified one from philosophy, there could be no philosophers.”
    But if everyone has antecedent convictions…uh-oh…how is philosophy not then just the “formation of reasons for what we already hold to be true”? Is this not “chaotic relativism”? (I’m actually not sure what he means by that phrase.) McInerny’s stance is that the opinions formed based on, or in, antecedent convictions, are in fact appraisable by criteria that “float free” from those various pre-philosophical opinions. He dives into this later.

*Advantage of Christian Philosophy*

    The advantage of Christian philosophy, McInerny states, and the reason the Christian philosopher is at a “tremendous advantage” in philosophizing, is that his antecedent attitude is not based on hearsay, tribal lore, or even on a respected thinker, but on the “Word of God…what God has revealed to be true and has the sanction of God himself.” And that’s it.
    I think this is a compelling view. It answers the nagging question, ‘ok, so if you go far enough back, there needs to be a first antecedent conviction, a conviction that doesn’t have, well, an antecedent—one that forms the convictions of the future. Where did this come from?” Well, this first ‘conviction’ could be thought to be the Word of God, the divine Word, and everything in that Word. This is among the reasons why I think the Book of Genesis is the most important book in the Bible.
    I also think this view is flawed. It’s a little too quick and dirty. It still rests on the authority of the recorders and reporters of God’s Word. We have no idea what God said—we just know what these writers wrote. Most of us have never even read the parts in the Bible when God reveals himself. I mean, most of us tend to ignore the Bible or not take it seriously as a great work of literature. (one of the reasons the Bible is compelling to me as literature is the claim it makes: it claims to be the Law, the Word of God, even though God didn’t write it. I would still find this claim interesting even if he supposedly did.)

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Prelude to a Book Report (McInerny #1)

 

 I couldn’t help it: I read a book that wasn’t on my reading list. I just felt like reading this one—Characters In Search of Their Author: The Gifford Lectures by Ralph McInerny. I knew of McInerny from reading and writing a paper on his translation of Aquinas’ On There Being Only One Intellect and his introduction and essays in the back of the book. He has some very interesting things to say about truth, writing in an inviting way using true-to-life metaphors. The following is not a metaphor he uses, but one of my professor’s.
   Imagine you’re playing a game with Billy: timing how long it takes to walk from one end of Ascension Hall to the other (what fun!). You’re up first. It takes you 2 min. 30 seconds. Then, Billy: it takes him 2 min. 30 seconds. You meet up outside Ascension. You realize that you have the same time as Billy. But Billy says, “That’s not true.” Billy is right: why?
   While I set it up as a kind of riddle, the above ‘story’ is a fast and dirty semi-argument against Nietzsche. Basically, the answer is this: the two times, 2 min. 30 seconds, aren’t the same, because one time is my time, another, his. This is about truth: my professor states that what he perceives as Nietzsche’s relativism and disruption of objective truth is ridiculous because at the end of the day, we have to say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ It comes down to you, the whole you, which includes your body as well as soul. There are truths to be found in the world, and you find them. Another example: a golfer. When he swings, it is not proper to say that his ulna connected to his distal radioulnar joint connected to his wrist through the radial nerve swings. We say that he swings; this golfer swings. You do truths, too.
A green volume
     Ralph McInerny thinks this kind of thing, and his Gifford lectures are a really clear and cogent, and often exciting, summing-up of his main views on philosophy and natural theology. Natural theology is the topic of all the Gifford lectures. Sir Gifford, whoever he was, wanted lecturers to discuss topics related to ‘knowledge of God.’ McInerny takes ‘natural theology’ to mean “the philosophical discipline which proves that God exists and that he has certain attributes…natural because it makes use of our natural powers unaided by any supernatural revelation”. Basically, natural theology is proving God exists with certain attributes using only your natural reason, instead of just accepting by faith that God exists because, well, He said so, and here is His revelation. McInerny points out that his understanding of natural theology is a non-idiosyncratic one. The fact that he points this out means that he is, of course, talking to philosophers, who like to parse and take apart words and phrases. They’ll catch him on his ‘I take natural theology to mean…’ and claim that his argument fails because of a misunderstanding of terms. What we can take away from this, reading his lectures 12 years later, is that he is speaking to people with reasonably cultivated educations in philosophy who like to analyze things. You need to have read some philosophy to jive with some of his terms and the way he speaks. This is why I don’t recommend this book to anyone who hasn’t been introduced to philosophy of religion and some general academic philosophy.
       McInerny is out to clear the way for natural theology to be a viable way of thinking about God and the world. This isn’t to say that he is some preacher trying to make you believe in God. He is a philosopher. But this is not to say that he isn’t a believing philosopher, a “content and grateful” Catholic. This is key. In his first lecture, he discusses antecedent convictions and argues that they are extremely useful in philosophy. In the next two, he talks about the modern turn in philosophy, the move towards nihilism and relativism in truth claims, and atheism as not being the default position in philosophy (although it is the dominant one now, he claims). McInerny’s lecture series is philosophy, not church in between two covers. But…not necessarily. How these seemingly diametrically opposed worlds intersect (pure philosophy and reason versus religious faith and coming to the question of God’s existence already knowing that he does exist) and if they should intersect at all, is the discussion McInerny is after (and he presents in an exciting way. Maybe because he talks about Kierkegaard and Nietzsche even though he’s a Thomas Aquinas scholar. Philosophy of religion, exciting? Oh my God!)

So I’m going to talk about the ten lectures in my next three blog posts. Ok?