Classics and the Western Canon discussion

Here is a great, understandable companion to Aquinas for anyone interested: Holy Teaching: Introducing the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas

Ashley wrote: "Here is a great, understandable companion to Aquinas for anyone interested: Holy Teaching: Introducing the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas"

A friend wrote that Aquinas answers questions in the ST that most people would not think of asking, which makes me hesitant to read it . :)

Interesting discussion skirting the issues of the meanings of "in reality." Having just finished my first listening pass through dear Mr. James, I am looking forward to the discussions, but, frankly, am daunted.

Kenneth wrote: " I have just begun studying Aristotle... would he deny substance apart from matter in every case? In the case of God, would he not say that there could be substance apart from matter?"

As far as I can tell, Aristotle doesn't believe in God, let alone the Christian God. The closest he comes to is the notion of the Unmoved Mover, which he finds necessary to account for the motion of the heavenly sphere and everything else in it.

Lily wrote: "Interesting discussion skirting the issues of the meanings of "in reality." ..."

This discussion actually reminded me of what you wrote about "essence" in another thread some years ago, Lily. The flavor industry uses the term for artificial production of natural flavors, e.g., essence of lemon.

It tastes like lemon, but it is not lemon. :)

Nemo wrote: "Lily wrote: "Interesting discussion skirting the issues of the meanings of "in reality." ..."

This discussion actually reminded me of what you wrote about "essence" in another thread some years ag..."

lol Now my words come back to haunt me!

(I just googled "Is William James Varieties of Religious Experience still worth reading?" I haven't read the results I got yet, but the answer from the listings appears to be yes!)

Kenneth wrote: "Very true about the idea of substance and accidents coming from Aristotle. I have just begun studying Aristotle... would he deny substance apart from matter in every case? In the case of God, would he not say that there could be substance apart from matter?."

Aristotle says that the Greek word ousia is said in more than one way, but more often than not it is better translated "essence" than "substance." The Greek word has a verbal quality (it is a participle meaning be-ing) that is almost the opposite of what "substance" implies. It's what makes a thing what it is despite the accidentals. This is difficult to envision, but the gist of it is much closer to "essence" or "nature" than "substance." Ousia is not material itself, but it inheres in matter. In any case, God (or the prime mover for Aristotle) is pure actuality, and matter is potential in nature, so it is not possible for God to be material.

After we finish the Critique of Pure Reason we can move on to Aristotle's Metaphysics. I can't wait!

Nemo wrote: "Ashley wrote: "Here is a great, understandable companion to Aquinas for anyone interested: Holy Teaching: Introducing the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas"

A friend wrote that Aquinas answers questions in the ST that most people would not think of asking, which makes me hesitant to read it . :)..."

Ever since I read that Aquinas's last words before he went silent toward the end of his life were “I can write no more. All that I have written seems like straw,” I haven't felt it necessary to read him.

The context of that quote is interesting. Aquinas said that after having a mystical experience. I've seen people use that as an argument against rational/philosophical discourse on religion.

As the saying goes, an ounce of gold is worth more than a ton of straw. But for those of us who have no experience of gold, straw is better than nothing. :)

Here is a question that is not quite so philosophical, but you were talking about pounds and ounces so this question came to mind, I used it quite often for a trivia question when I was a substitute teacher:
Which is heavier, a pound of feathers or a pound of lead?

Could be a twist to that query. Could not one interpret that not as "pound" being a unit of weight but as a unit of currency? However, I don't know how many feathers or how much lead could be purchased for a pound.

Nemo wrote: "A friend wrote that Aquinas answers questions in the ST that most people would not think of asking, which makes me hesitant to read it . :)"

It's actually a quite interesting book in small doses. To see this basically scientific and logical mind engaged in defending and explaining one of the least logical and scientific endeavors of human thought is fascinating.

Thomas wrote: "After we finish the Critique of Pure Reason we can move on to Aristotle's Metaphysics. I can't wait! "

You're going to be looking at some heavy duty moderating!!!

Dianne wrote: "Can anyone recommend some good background material before we get started?"

If you keep in mind that pragmatism is basically "truth is what works," you don't really need to do much background reading. The real originator of pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce, believed the core idea of pragmatism is that philosophy should more closely resemble the scientific method. To Peirce, if your rational theory matches your experiment, then you've just discovered something of value. If people around you come to the same conclusion, then you've started to narrow in on fact. Unlike other schools of philosophy, you don't get to truth until you've been acting for a long, long time. This is what separates pragmatism from other philosophies: it doesn't penalize being wrong as long as you're working toward truth.

To this core idea, William James added some spiritualism, where he thought that belief in religion is valuable if the individual gets some benefit from it. This created a pretty substantial rift with other pragmatists: a number of the other members of the Metaphysical Club (a social group that some early pragmatists belonged to) believed that you can't separate pragmatism from the social aspect. James' critics argued a) multiple perspectives on the same question result in a more fleshed out view, and b) you can't defend the value of something just because an individual gets value from it.

That's not to say that James' opponents were anti-religion... they just felt that religion existed outside of the philosophy. Peirce, for instance, believed that God was the author of 'chance' in the universe. The early humanists and epicureans believed in what was called "the swerve," the random nature of atoms that make it so hard to make effective predictions. Scientific theories when William James and the pragmatists were around made a substantial argument toward determinism (the idea that the future is already determined). That random swerve of atoms created an argument that the universe isn't in control and opened an argument for free will. The more religious James didn't need a scientific excuse for free will though: James believed that the first exercise in free will is to believe in free will.

...and this is the core of pragmatism: truth is so often malleable and uncontrollable. We know that there's no set of central, unchanging truths; life would be too easy if there were. But this shouldn't keep us from manipulating reality in an attempt to narrow in on what works.

Thank you for the explanation, Mike.

Mike wrote: "...pragmatism is basically "truth is what works," ..."

"The end may justify the means, as long as there is something that justifies the end".

Rosemarie wrote: "Which is heavier, a pound of feathers or a pound of lead? "

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E43-C...

Nemo wrote: "Rosemarie wrote: "Which is heavier, a pound of feathers or a pound of lead? "

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E43-C..."

Wonderful catch, Nemo! Am curious as to what brought you to this video.

The question, "Does vacuum exist?"

Nemo wrote: "The question, "Does vacuum exist?""

Does "close enough" count?

Or are you asking something else?

Nemo wrote: "Rosemarie wrote: "Which is heavier, a pound of feathers or a pound of lead? "

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E43-C..."

That was so cool. I have always been fascinated by physics, mostly because I don't understand it that well.

Lily wrote: "Nemo wrote: "The question, "Does vacuum exist?""

Does "close enough" count?

Or are you asking something else?"

Believe it or not, whether void exists is a much-debated subject among philosophers, and also whether "matter" exists. I was reading George Berkeley who argues that matter does not exist. All these tie in to the question "what is real?"

Patrice wrote: "A unicorn skeleton has been discovered recently. . . .Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

1. The unicorn skeleton you are referring to is more like a bison combined with a rhinoceros and is a rather dissimilar picture than the popular conceptions of medieval fantasy.

2. "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is thrown out much too often as an absolute fallacy and it is not. In fact, we use absence of evidence to draw reasonable conclusions all the time. A throat culture that turns up negative for strep bacteria means the patient is not suffering from strep throat. The innocence project has released wrongly convicted people based on an absence of DNA evidence that would necessarily be present if they were involved in the crime. Paternity tests that can be up to 99.999% accurate indicate both who is and who could not be the father.

It really comes down to the circumstances, probability, and how well it aligns with the uniformity of nature. Visual verifying that there are no unicorns in the room is much easier than visually verifying there are no invisible teapots in orbit around the earth.

This leaves us with the question, is there anything that can be imagined that does not actually exist? If so, what is it and how do you know?

Finally this from Richard Feynman:

Some years ago I had a conversation with a layman about flying saucers — because I am scientific I know all about flying saucers! I said “I don’t think there are flying saucers”. So my antagonist said, “Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that it’s impossible?” “No”, I said, “I can’t prove it’s impossible. It’s just very unlikely”. At that he said, “You are very unscientific. If you can’t prove it impossible then how can you say that it’s unlikely?” But that is the way that is scientific. It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible. To define what I mean, I might have said to him, "Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence." It is just more likely. That is all.

from https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard...

To my mind, a test for strep that comes up negative is in fact evidence. It's not absolutely conclusive evidence, since the test (I presume) has a non-zero false negative rate, but I bet it's very persuasive.

Absence of evidence is evidence of absence only when you have strong a priori reason to believe that presence would produce evidence, if you follow me.

Disclosure: I teach this stuff for a living.

Nemo wrote: "Believe it or not, whether void exists is a much-debated subject among..."

I thought that might be where you were going with your comment. And I can't really add intelligence to your observation.

My response of "close enough" was really in terms of the demonstration of the feathers and the bowling ball accelerating at the same rate in the video when a vacuum was at least approached, even if it might not qualify as a "void."

If I understand modern physics correctly, what we call "matter" is really quantum fields, which have a finite value everywhere and never quite go to zero.

Y'all... you have no idea how much I enjoy this discussion and the back-and-forth :)

Coming back to James... I read up a bit on pragmatism and it seems to me that it is very much influenced by nominalism and the denial of universal truths.

Patrice wrote: "Just wondering if a noumenon is the same as platos forms? They sound the same and wasn't Kant a Platonist? "

Interesting question. Here's my take on it, if I remember Kant correctly.

Kant and Plato agree about the distinction between the phenomenal world of appearances and the noumenal world of ideas, but they disagree on how we understand them. Plato says that the phenomenal world "participates" in the forms, but is never a completely true representation of the "really real". He concludes that the phenomenal world is only appearance, a mere shadow of the ideal world. The world of ideas is what is really real, and we can know it by a process of dialectic and/or recollection.

Kant says almost the opposite: the phenomenal world is what we can truly understand with the intellectual apparatus that we were born with. Noumenal things, "things in themselves," the really real things, are ultimately unknowable. So it's hard to call Kant a Platonist in that he didn't believe that the "forms" were accessible in the way that Plato did.

Kerstin wrote: "Coming back to James... I read up a bit on pragmatism and it seems to me that it is very much influenced by nominalism and the denial of universal truths. "

If by "universal truths" we mean principles that are true to everyone everywhere, without exception, it would be foolish to deny such things; if we mean abstract concepts that are not comprehensible or applicable to people, then there are good reasons to deny them. I've heard of at least one real life story where "universal truth" doesn't "work" (see "When Science is Not Good Enough")

Thomas wrote: "Patrice wrote: "Just wondering if a noumenon is the same as platos forms? They sound the same and wasn't Kant a Platonist? "

Interesting question. Here's my take on it, if I remember Kant correctl..."

I agree with what Thomas wrote here.

To put it in another way, Kant is a Platonist soul in the body of a materialist.

David wrote: "Patrice wrote: "A unicorn skeleton has been discovered recently. . .."

David @86 and Mike @77, thanks for your sensible posts.

Nemo wrote: "Kerstin wrote: "Coming back to James... I read up a bit on pragmatism and it seems to me that it is very much influenced by nominalism and the denial of universal truths. "

If by "universal truths..."

The link doesn't work...

Nemo wrote: "I just fixed the link above, but here it is again: "When science is not good enough""

Re the article: Yes!

Nemo wrote: "I just fixed the link above, but here it is again: "When science is not good enough""

Wow, there is a lot going on in this piece. In light of any suffering, it seems we most often get stuck with partial answers which can't fully satisfy.

David wrote: "The unicorn skeleton you are referring to is more like a bison combined with a rhinoceros and is a rather dissimilar picture than the popular conceptions of medieval fantasy..."

True, but given that there were no written records from the time it existed and that is is known entirely from oral transmission, and given that the one-horned animal that had a generally cow/horse/bison shape had long since ceased to exist in reality but remained real in oral tradition, it's hardly surprising that it gradually morphed over thousands of years into something closer to an animal that later people were actually familiar with, or that over time, having ceased to exist, it developed magical powers. All makes perfect sense to me.

Different perspectives. For me the possibility that marmots have something to do with Herodotus' ants is interesting. But not as much as the question why he gave them credit in the first place.

What is the nature of the divide between fantasy and reality, when did we first perceive the difference? Was/is our imagination something like an exercise field for our consciousness - a precondition for becoming/being human? Can we conceive of literature and religion as locations on a gliding scale between them?

Wendel wrote: "What is the nature of the divide between fantasy and reality, "

I was taught from a very young age that reality is what exists independently of human perception and knowledge, and we gain knowledge of reality if and only if our ideas correspond to it. Fantasy would be images and ideas that have no correspondence in reality, and exists only in the mind of an individual -- unless he communicates his fantasy, others have no way of knowing it.

when did we first perceive the difference?

It happens to us individually when we meet other minds and realize that their idea of reality is different from ours.

John Dalton, a British scientist, was colourblind, but he didn't know it until someone disagreed with him on the color of some household item. That was how colorblindness was discovered.

I only started to examine my idea of the world when I talked to people whose worldview differ from mine, and began to realize that maybe I was fact-blind.

Patrice wrote: "I've read that Camelot and King Arthur never existed but I've also read that he was real,"

By happenstance I've been listening to the Teaching Company course The Story of Medieval England, and she goes in some detail into the Arthur legends and the historical basis for them. It's not clear whether he did exist, and certainly he wasn't the Arthur of legend, but there was a very successful war leader (not king) who won 12 major battles against the Danish and other invaders after the Romans left (he was a Briton, not a Roman) and seems to have halted the advance of the invaders for about 50 years, and a writer many years later referred to a great Arthur who may have been this war chief but if not was still apparently pretty special -- a 7th C Welsh war poem lavishly praises a warrior, but then says "but he was no Arthur."

So there is some evidence of a great past leader who may or may not have been named Arthur around whom the legends apparently developed over the centuries.

Nemo wrote: "I was taught from a very young age that reality is what exists independently of human perception and knowledge, and we gain knowledge of reality if and only if our ideas correspond to it. ."

Ah, but we only know that something exists if we perceive it in some way and have knowledge of it in some way, so there can be nothing we can know about that is not a product of our perception and knowledge.

Kenneth wrote: "Ah, but Aquinas would disagree with you and say that the Catholic faith is the MOST logical... because it is literally based on the Logos, the principle that forms the whole universe, "through whom all things were made." And in any sense that it is not rational or logical for the human mind, He would say it is because it is supralogical. ."

He would indeed say something much like that.

Everyman wrote: "Nemo wrote: "I was taught from a very young age that reality is what exists independently of human perception and knowledge, ..."

there can be nothing we can know about that is not a product of our perception and knowledge.

I agree, though that's different from saying, because we ourselves don't perceive and know something, that something doesn't exist.

Ironically, it was my materialist philosophy teacher who first introduced to my mind the possibility of the existence of God.

Nemo wrote: "I agree, though that's different from saying, because we ourselves don't perceive and know something, that something doesn't exist.."

Oh, absolutely. I'm sure there are many things in the universe that we don't perceive or know anything about, but they still exist. In fact there are probably many things in the deep ocean for which that is also true.

For concepts it's a bit harder, but if there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe I think it's pretty certain that they would grok concepts we that are totally alien to us and our thinking.

Patrice wrote: "I've read that Camelot and King Arthur never existed but I've also read that he was real..."

I couldn't resist :)

Peasant Woman: Well, how'd you become king, then?

King Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king.

Dennis the Peasant: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

Kenneth wrote: "Janice(JG) wrote: "Ever since I read that Aquinas's last words before he went silent toward the end of his life were “I can write no more. All that I have written seems like straw,” I haven't felt ..."

On a less mystical level, Aquinas had written something like 3500 pages of the Summa Theologiae in a relatively short period of time, during which he also had teaching and administrative duties, and at the same time he had to defend his work from critics within the Church. In the end, the Summa was left incomplete because the subject itself is inexhaustible, but the author was not. His final words seem to me a mark of his humility rather than a belittling of his intellectual achievement.

Everyman wrote: "Oh, absolutely. I'm sure there are many things in the universe that we don't perceive or know anything about, but they still exist. In fact there are probably many things in the deep ocean for which that is also true. ..."

And also, all about us! Sometimes less for lack of knowledge than for refusal of perception? And oft the reverse -- seeming perception, but lack of knowledge....

Patrice wrote: "Lol! Great!
Where is this from? Monty Python?"

Yep. :)

A little elaboration of my post @102.

My working definition of religion being that of a (collective) fantasy that is somehow felt to be real, I see in your comments two different attitudes towards the nature of this reality. Some perceive it as continuum of our empirical environment (the orthodox or 'real' reality), while others allow room for something altogether different from what we know (a spiritual or 'higher' reality).

We may think of these attitudes not as opposites, but as positions on a continuum extending to forms of spirituality beyond religion. They may also relate to different appreciations of rationality within religion: an orthodoxy trying to rival science versus a more spiritual approach content with its emotional basis. Again we might think of a gliding scale, from scholastic orthodoxy extending to idealist philosophy and types of secular religion, like marxism.

This leads me to the following progression: secular religion - idealism - scholasticism - pietism - secular spirituality - some art? - Brian? I’m not sure yet where to place James on this scale. In his essay (The Will to Believe) he states that while there is no evidence to support religious convictions, they may still be considered true (expressing reality) when they are functional. Or: the proof of the pudding is in the eating (James’s pudding apparently being quite different from the one served to Lucretius).

I was also thinking of the role of religion in human development, but that is territory well covered by cognitive and evolutionary psychology (many titles on this reading list).

It's not clear to me what the index on your gliding scale is, but on a quick glance, James seems to fall into "secular spirituality" category, the same goes for Lucretius.

I'm also not sure about the "continuum of our empirical environment". The empirical environment of the ancients may very well differ from ours, just as your personal empirical environment may differ from mine (hence my colorblind analogy). It is quite possible that gold-digging ants really existed in the distant past but became extinct. For this reason, I would not offhandedly dismiss Herodotus' account of them as mere fantasy, because it doesn't contradict any scientific or logical principles that I know of.

Nemo wrote: "It's not clear to me what the index on your gliding scale is ..."

Not clear to me either :-). Just playing with some supposed contradictions.

James is not secular, so I would move him one step to the left. Lucretius may be positioned with Marx - because of his dogmatism, based on (at the time) shaky premisses.

I don't recall whether Lucretius espoused some version of social evolution, but his belief in personal freedom, albeit based on shaky premises, sets him apart from Marx.