The Soul

 

                                                     

                

 

THE SOUL

 

          The distinction between actuality and potentiality, the principle that effects are contained in their causes either “formally” or “eminently,” and that final causality pervades the natural order, in fact have the most dramatic consequences for the debate between religion and atheism.

          We want now to examine how some of these principles were applied by Aquinas and the Scholastic tradition in general to a defense of the immortality of the soul and the natural law conception of morality.

 

The Soul

For Aristotle a soul is just the form or essence of a living thing. One should not think of some ghostly object of the sort that floats away from a body after death. The soul is just a kind of form.

The soul of a plant is what Aristotelians call a “nutritive soul”; and that is just a form or essence that gives a thing that has it the powers of taking in nutrients, growing, and reproducing itself.

 

The soul of a non-human animal is called a “sensory soul” and it is just a form or essence that gives  a thing that has it both the powers of a nutritive soul, and also an animal’s distinctive powers of being able to sense the world around it and to move itself.

When we come to human beings we have what is called a “rational soul” which includes both the powers of the nutritive and sensory souls and also the distinctively human powers of intellect and will. So there is a natural hierarchical relationship between the souls.

 

A thing having certain form goes hand in hand with its having a certain final cause or natural end. A human being has all the ends of the sensory and nutritive soul, but on top of them he has the ends or final causes entailed by being rational and having free will. Rationality has its natural end or final cause in the attainment of truth. Free will has as its natural end or final cause the choice of those actions that best accord with the truth about the human nature being’s own nature or essence.

Morality, according to Aristotle and Aquinas, is the habitual choice of actions that further the hierarchically ordered natural ends entailed by human nature. We have seen that the deepest truth about the world is that it is caused and sustained by God. The highest fulfillment then of the power of the intellect then is to know God. The highest fulfillment of free choice is to live in a way that facilitates the knowing of God.

 

The power of the intellect cannot possibly require a material or bodily organ for its operation. Central to the intellect’s operation is its grasp of forms, essences, or universals, and other abstractions like propositions. The immaterial nature of these things entails that the intellect which grasps them must itself be immaterial as well. How so?

We apprehend the ‘universals’. The form of “dogness” that exists in our minds when we think about dogs is the same form that exists in actual dogs. This is grasping what they are. What they are is determined by their essence or form. If the intellect is a material thing—some part of the brain, then for the form to exist in the intellect is for the form to exist in a certain material thing; for example, for the form of “dogness” to exist in a certain parcel of matter is just for that parcel of matter to be a dog. In that case, if your intellect was just the same thing as some part of your brain, it follows that that part of your brain would become a dog whenever you thought about dogs. “But that’s absurd!” Assuming that the intellect is material leads to such absurdity; hence the intellect is not material.

The thought we are having must be as determinate as triangularity itself, otherwise it just wouldn’t be a thought about triangularity per se, but only a thought about some approximation of triangularity. Material triangularity is only ever an approximation. It follows that the thought about triangularity is not material. Suppose a thought about triangularity consist of some physical representation in the brain somewhere (in the form of a neuronal firing pattern or some such thing). Like any other physical representation of a triangle, this one too would be just one particular material thing among others, not universal at all. Again the idea that thought is a purely a material operation of the brain makes no sense.

Aquinas’s claim isn’t a “soul of the gaps” analogue to “God of the gaps” arguments. He is not speculating that there might be some ghostly objet floating around in there. He is saying that given the facts about universals, and our thoughts about them, it is conceptually impossible (not merely improbable) for the intellect to be material. One thing neuroscience won’t “discover” is that thought is a material operation of the brain, any more than it will “discover” that 2+2=5.

The soul of a man is not a complete substance; only the soul and body (i.e. the form and matter) together constitute a thing or substance, that is, a man. It is the man himself who thinks, just as it is the man himself and not the soul who grows taller, digests his food, and walks around. For this reason human thoughts correlate with certain brain events even if it is not identical to any of them. The operation of the intellect and will constitute the formal-cum-final cause of the action, of which the firing of the neurons, flexing of the muscles, are the material cause.

The intellect itself operates without bodily organ, it does depend indirectly on the senses for the raw material from which it abstracts universals or essences (triangularity from particular triangles). The soul as it does in thought can function apart from the matter it informs, then it can also exist apart from the matter it informs, as a kind of incomplete substance. Potentiality can never exist without actuality; but actuality can and does exist without potentiality, namely in God who is pure actuality.

Similarly matter can never exist without form; but form can exist without matter, and does in this case, at least after death, when the matter of the body is not longer inform by the soul, its form.  The soul as it does, partially operating and thus existing as it does apart from the body even when informing it, does not thereby die. For a thing to perish is just for it to lose its form. But the soul doesn’t lose its form, because it is a form.

 

GOD

    

 

GOD'S EXISTENCE

Here is the conception of classical philosophical theology: of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and other such thinkers.

God is not an object or substance alongside other objects or substances in the world; rather, He is pure being or existence itself, utterly distinct from the world of time, space, and things, underlying and maintaining them in being at every moment, and apart from whose ongoing conserving action they would be instantly annihilated. The world is not an independent object in the sense of something that might carry on if God were to “go away”; it is more like the music produced by a musician, which exists only when he plays and vanishes the moment he stops. None of the concepts we apply to things in the world, including to ourselves, apply to God in anything but an analogous sense. Hence, for example, we may say that God is “personal” insofar as He is not less than a person, the way an animal is less than a person. But God is not literally “a person” in the sense of being one individual thing among others who reasons, chooses, has moral obligations, etc. such concepts make no sense when literally applied to God.

Aquinas’s famous doctrine of analogy, on which the language we use to refer to God is not used in the same or “univocal” sense in which it is applied to things in this world (as might describe a fire engine and Stop sign as being “red” in exactly the same sense), but neither is it used in a completely different or “equivocal” sense (the way that a tree has “bark” and a dog has a “bark” in entirely different senses,). Rather, it is used in an analogical sense, as when you say hat you “see” the tree in front of you and also that  you can “see” that the Pythagorean theorem must be true. Obviously you don’t see the truth of the theorem in exactly the same sense in which you see a tree, but there is an analogy between vision and intellectual insight that makes the use of the term appropriate in both cases. Similarly, God is not personal, or good, or powerful, or intelligent in the same sense in which a human being is, but He can nevertheless  correctly be described in these terms if they are understood analogously.

We can know which terms apply by examining the arguments for God’s existence and their implications.

Intro to Metaphysics Part V

  

 

 

Nature of Metaphysical  Arguments.

Now Aquinas’s arguments, like Plato’s and Aristotle’s, are metaphysical in character, not scientific; that does not mean that they are not rational arguments. They are different in the following respects.

They are like geometrical arguments in being all-or-nothing but unlike geometrical arguments they start with empirical premises rather than pure abstractions.

Scientific arguments start from empirical premises and draw merely probabilistic conclusions.

Mathematical arguments start from purely conceptual premises and draw necessary conclusions.

Metaphysical arguments combine elements of both these other forms of reasoning: they take obvious, though empirical, starting points, and try to show that from these starting points, together with certain conceptual premises, certain metaphysical conclusions follow necessarily. Using empirical starting points that cannot seriously be doubted. Ex.: More than one object is red.

Plato and Aristotle argued that given the nature of things as we observe them, there must necessarily be forms or universals that are neither purely mental nor reducible to matter.

As with geometrical arguments, metaphysical reasoning is not infallible.

Ex.: Parmenides would claim to doubt that change ever occurs. This sort of doubt derives from a competing metaphysical theory, rather than from scientific discovery.

The New Atheists’ criticism do not see the difference between a scientific hypothesis and a metaphysical demonstration; they thereby rule out metaphysical arguments, (scientism or positivism).

They have to defend their position not just assert it. The moment thy attempt to defend it, they will have effectively refuted it, for scientism or positivism is itself a metaphysical position that could only be justified using metaphysical arguments.

Assumptions scientific investigation takes for granted:

_There is a physical world existing independently from our minds.

_This world has objective patterns and regularities.

_Our senses are at least partially reliable sources of information about this world.

_There are objective laws of logic and mathematics that apply to this world.

_Our cognitive powers (concept formation, reasoning)  afford us a grasp of these laws.

_The language we use can adequately express truths about these laws and about the external world; and so on and on.

Science, since its very method presupposes these assumptions, could not possibly defend them without arguing in a circle.

Their defense is a task for metaphysics, and for philosophy more generally; scientism is shown thereby to be incoherent.

The New Atheists (Dawkins in particular) try to frame the debate about the existence of God and the nature of the human mind as if they hinged on evolution. This is an attempt to very bad metaphysics indeed.

Aquinas does not argue that “everything has a cause”, nor does he argue that the universe had a beginning and that God was the cause of that beginning.

His aim is to show that given that there are in fact some causes of various sorts, the nature of cause and effect entails that God is necessary as an uncaused cause of the universe even if the universe had no beginning.

 

Intelligent Design of Sleep

Eric Hedin on the Intelligent Design of Sleep

Eric Hedin on the Intelligent Design of Sleep | ID the Future

 

Eric Hedin

 We’re asleep an average of about 26 years of our life! Most people have a sense that sleep is important, but many of us aren’t sure exactly why. Why is sleep so crucial to survival? And how did the processes of sleep emerge in living things? Could a gradual Darwinian process be responsible, or are the systems involved another instance of intelligent design? On this episode, host Andrew McDiarmid begins a conversation with Dr. Eric Hedin about the origin and intelligent design of sleep.

In Part 1, Dr. Hedin suggests that the evolutionary mindset operates as a major obstacle to the scientific understanding of sleep. From an evolutionary point of view, sleep is risky for the fitness of organisms. “Survival of the unconscious…the most unconscious person wins…that just doesn’t seem to fit at all with an evolutionary survival of the fittest paradigm,” says Hedin. In his review of the science literature on sleep, Hedin found that even Darwinist researchers admit that there has to be a really good reason for sleep for it to have been selected through an evolutionary process.

Dr. Hedin also unpacks what’s going on when we sleep. Though it’s simple to fall asleep and wake up, there’s a complicated set of processes involved that exhibit complex engineering design patterns and irreducible complexity, both key hallmarks of intelligently designed systems.

This is Part 1 of a two-part interview. Look for Part 2 next!

Dig Deeper

Read the articles by Dr. Hedin that inspired this interview:

Sleep: Designed For Our Good

https://evolutionnews.org/2023/12/sleep-designed-for-our-good/

Sleeping and Waking: A Designer’s Gift

https://evolutionnews.org/2023/12/sleeping-and-waking-a-designers-gift/

Eric Hedin

FELLOW, CENTER FOR SCIENCE AND CULTURE

Eric Hedin earned his doctorate in physics from the University of Washington and conducted post-doctoral research at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden in experimental plasma physics. He has taught physics and astronomy at Taylor University and Ball State University (BSU) in Indiana, and at Biola University in Southern California. He served as professor of physics at Biola University in California, and chaired the department of chemistry, physics, and engineering at Biola from 2019-2021. Since the fall of 2021, Dr. Hedin has taught physics part-time with Indiana Wesleyan University and speaks regularly at universities around the country with God’s Not Dead Events, led by Dr. Rice Broocks. Dr. Hedin is also an emeritus professor of physics and astronomy at Ball State University in Indiana.

Intro to Metaphysics Part IV

 

    

Part 4

The Four Causes:

These might be the most important of all the philosophical concepts we’ve looked at so far.

Material cause > the underlying stuff a thing is made of.

Formal cause  > which is the form, structure, or the pattern that the form exhibits.

As you can see, the material and formal causes of a thing are just its matter and form, considered as components of a complete explanation of it.

Efficient cause > which is what brings a thing into being, or more generally and technically, which actualizes a potentiality in a thing.

Final cause  > which is the end, goal, or purpose of a thing.

The four causes are completely general, applying throughout the natural world and not only to human artifacts.

Ex.:

A heart’s material cause> muscle tissue of a certain sort.

       “        formal cause > muscle tissue organized into atria, ventricles and the like.

       “        efficient cause> biological processes that determined that certain embryonic cells would form into a heart rather than, say, a kidney or brain.

“      final cause > it serves the function of pumping blood.

Remember that Aristotle’s entire metaphysical scheme is “moderate realism”.

A thing’s formal cause is, at the deepest level, its substantial form or essence; its material cause entails that it has certain potentialities and lacks others; its formal cause, being its substantial form or essence, is shared by other things and known by the intellect via abstraction from experience; and so forth. To be sure, these various philosophical subtleties are built on common sense and do not contradict it, but they do go considerably beyond it.

Just as material and formal causation are deeply intertwined on Aristotle’s account, so too are efficient causes and final causes. You simply cannot properly understand the one apart from the other; indeed, there cannot be efficient causes without final ones.

Modern thinkers deny that there really are any final causes at all, appearances notwithstanding. This has led them into all sorts of paradoxes and incoherencies.

Modern tendency is to treat cause and effect as essentially a relation between temporally ordered events; the first event causes the second one. Maybe “cause and effect” is just a matter of there being regular or “lawlike” correlations between events, and science must rest content with discovering these correlations.

The way of posing the “problem” of cause and effect just described owes much to the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), a big hero to “New Atheists” and secularists in general.

Supposed you asked somebody what caused the broken window. He probably say, “The brick did”—the brick, not “the event of the brick’s being thrown”. In other words, for common sense it is ultimately things that are causes, not events. Aristotle would agree. He would also say that the immediate efficient cause of an effect, and the one most directly responsible for it, is simultaneous with the effect, not temporally prior to it.

It may be noticed that Aristotle’s account seems to entail a series of simultaneous causes and effects, and might also wonder where such a series terminates and how it can be explained.

Also relevant is a further Aristotelian principle concerning efficient causation, namely that whatever is in the effect must in some sense be contained in the cause as well.

Cause cannot give to its effect what it does not have to give.

The effect might be contained in the cause in various ways.

The cause of a fire might itself be on fire, as when a torch is used to start a brushfire, or it may instead have the power to produce fire, as a cigarette lighter has even when it is not being used.

The traditional way of making this distinction is to say that a cause has the feature that it generates in the effect “formally” in the first sort of case and “eminently” in the second sort of case.

If a cause didn’t contain all the features of its effect either formally or eminently, there would be no way to account for how the effect came about in just the way it did.

Again a cause cannot give to its effect what it does not have.

There will be more to say about the dramatic implications of Aristotle’s conception of efficient causes later.

Aristotle regards final causation—goal-directedness, purposiveness, something’s pointing toward an end beyond itself—as extending well beyond the realm of human artifacts, indeed as pervading the natural world.

Aristotle takes final causation or goal-directedness to exist throughout inorganic nature as well. The moon is “directed toward” movement around the earth, as a kind of ‘goal.” Fire is directed toward the production of heat, specifically, rather than cold.

He is not making the claim that the moon is consciously trying to go around the sun. or that fire wants to produce heat.

His whole point, in fact, is that there is a kind of goal-directness that exists even apart from conscious thought processes and intentions.

For Aristotle, our conscious thought processes are really but a special case of the more general natural phenomenon of goal-directedness or final causality, which exists in the natural world in a way that is mostly totally divorced from any conscious mind or intelligence. The functions of various bodily organs (hearts, kidneys, livers, etc.) are the most obvious examples—the organs have these functions, and performs them, even though they are totally unconscious—but less complex forms of final causality are to be found throughout the inorganic realm.

Aquinas refers to the final cause as “the cause of causes,” and for good reason.

The material cause o a thing underlies its potential for change; but potentialities, as we’ve seen, are always potentialities for, or directed toward, some actuality. Hence final causality underlies all potentiality and thus all materiality. The final cause of a thing is also the central aspect of its formal cause; indeed, it determines its formal cause. For it is only because a thing has a certain end of final cause that it has the form it has—hence hearts have ventricles, atria, and the like precisely because they have the function of pumping blood. 

Also, again, efficient causality cannot be made sense of apart from final causality.

Indeed, nothing makes sense—not the world as a whole, not morality or human action in general, not the thoughts you’re thinking or the words you’re using, not anything at all—without final causes. They are certainly utterly central to, and ineliminable from, our conception of ourselves as rational and freely choosing agents, whose thoughts and actions are always directed toward an end beyond themselves.

Yet modern philosophers, scientists, and intellectuals in general claim not to believe in final causality. I say “claim” because, like all normal human beings, they actually appeal to final causes all the time in their everyday personal lives, and even to a great extent in their professional lives.

Aristotle’s account of the metaphysical structure of reality, far from being empty verbiage or of mere academic interest, has dramatic implications for religion, morality, and science that will repay the effort we have put into understanding it.

     

HOW REASONABLE IS SCIENTIFIC REASON?

 

 

The following is part of an interview from cbc radio. The interviewee is Sajay Samuel .

Isn’t scientific knowledge true since it manifestly works? Samuel begins his answer by drawing a distinction he finds in the work of historian of science Peter Dear.

Samuel Sajay: Peter Dear notes that, when we today speak about science, we speak about science in two ways. We refer to bodies of knowledge that tell us something about the world as it is. We also speak about science as an instrument with which to change the world, to improve the world—the vaccine, the bomb, the car.

It has both this instrumental face, to use his language, and a natural, philosophical face—natural philosophy being the study of the way the world works and the way the world is. When you ask, why is science true? Why is a certain theory true?, the tendency is to say, because it works, because the plane flies, because the vaccine prevents disease, because the atom bomb explodes—those stand as proofs of the truth claims of science. If science were false, if the truth claims made by science were false, this vaccine wouldn’t work. If you ask, why does this vaccine work; it’s because the science is true. There’s circularity in this jusࢢficaࢢon; it’s true because it works, and it works because it’s true. Peter Dear calls it an ideology, and he calls it that in part, I think, because it can be falsified. Take the case of radio waves, which is one of his two examples. The predicࢢon of radio waves in 1880, I think it was, by Hertz, based upon a scienࢢfic theory propounded by Maxwell regarding the ether. The atmosphere is composed of ether through which radio waves propagate. Well the radio waves, which is one of his two examples. Well the radio waves were real—the prediction was sound; it worked—but the theory was not: it was utterly false. The other example he gives is of navigators, who, even today, use the old geocentric astronomy rather than the heliocentric astronomy. Again, you can have a perfectly false theory regarding what the world is, and it’s useful. You can get things done. This unquestioned justification—why is something true? Because it works. Why does it work? Because it’s true— can be easily falsified. And yet is held. We don’t tend to question the connection between knowing something and constructivism, knowledge through construction can be understood to be the signature of modernity.

What concerns Samuel is that science, historically speaking, doesn’t just supplement common sense; it displaces it. Scientific knowing becomes the epitome of reason and the paradigm of all proper knowledge. The term “common sense” continues to denote sound judgment, but it also begins to evoke a certain ignorance of how things really are. Typical, in this respect, is Albert Einstein’s often cited remark that “common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudice laid down by the mind in childhood.”

Samuel wants to contest science’s monopoly of reason. He would like to restore the dignity of common sense and restrict the application of science. Two distinctions are crucial to his case: mathematical knowledge must be distinguished from judgment, and experiment must be distinguished from experience.

Benedict XVI on Faith and Reason

 Ratzinger was concerned with the faith-reason relation.

In (Intro to Christianity p.26) he wrote: “Ever since the Prologue to the Gospel of John, the concept of logos has been at the very center of Christian faith . . . The God who is logos guarantees the intelligibility of the world, the intelligibility of our existence, the aptitude of reason to know God and the reasonableness of God, even though his understanding infinitely surpasses ours and to us may so often appear to be darkness. 

“The world comes from reason, and this reason is a Person, is Love.” Ibid.

In ITC Ratzinger is dealing with a text governed by the word credo and can hardly avoid giving some account of the act of faith.

He begins with the assertion that for human living, openness to a reality that exceeds the visible and tangible is an existential prerequisite, even an imperative. p.52

Until the early modern period, rational thought assisted, rather than inhibited, the act of faith in the invisible.

For ancient and medieval ontology, being is true—intelligible, meaningful—because it is creatively thought by God, who is absolute spirit. So long as this presupposition is in place, we can describe human thinking as the “rethinking of being” or the “rethinking of the thought that is being itself.” Man can rethink the logos, the meaning of being, because his own logos, his reason, is logos of the one logos, thought of the original thought, of the creative spirit that permeates and governs his being. Ibid p.59

This (healthful)assumption was abandoned, highly influentially, by the eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico.

According to Vico, understanding is or should be of the humanly initiated.

Not verum quia ens,”true because being,” but verum quia factum, “true because made”. 

Eventually it produces the technological rationality which Ratzinger takes to be normative today. The true is now the feasible.

Here we have a further definition of truth, verum quia faciendum: something is “true because it can be done.” 

In the context of the ancient thinking and of the Bible, a stand was taken trustfully on the ground of the word of God. op.cit.p69

That word is meant to clear a path to the total of reality.

Such a total meaning cannot be made, it can only be received. 

This enables Benedict to make a link with the New Testament concept of faith. 

Christian faith is a faith that comes “from hearing”. Romans 10:17

To put it in another way, such a faith is the reception of something that I have not thought out, so that in the last analysis thinking in the context of faith is always a thinking over of something previously heard and received.op.cit.p.91

The affirmation of “credo in” ends not with a ground but with a person: the incarnate Word, in whose life “the meaning of the world is present before us”.

So that beside the language of logos is the language of love.

“Meaning knows me and loves me.” Ibid p.80

The self-communicative fullness of being(a philosophical description) is identical with the self-donation of the God of love. Absolute being, unsurpassable love.

Theology must continue to draw from the treasury of knowledge that it did not invent itself, that always surpasses it and that, never being totally exhaustible through reflection, and precisely because of this launches thinking.

Philosophy must truly remain an undertaking of reason in its proper freedom and proper responsibility; it must recognize its limits, and precisely in this way also its grandeur and vastness.

Intro to Metaphysics Part 3

 

                                      

                            

                                Plato and his student Aristotle.

                                                   

                                           Part 3

                                 Actuality and Potentiality

(I think that I may have forgotten to mention that I have been and will continue to rely heavily on the American philosopher Edward C. Feser.)

For Aristotle as for Plato, universals or forms are real, and they are not reducible to anything either material or mental. Still, he thinks it is an error to regard them as objects existing in a “third realm” of their own. Rather, considered as they are in themselves they exist only “in” the things they are the forms of; and considered as abstractions from these things, they exist only in the intellect. Furthermore even the intellect rely on the senses in coming to know them.

A. Actuality and potentiality

Contra Parmenides who said that change is impossible because something can’t come from nothing, but that nothing was the only thing that something new could come from, since the only thing there is other than what already exists (i.e. being) is non-being or nothing.

Aristotle’s reply is that while it is true that something can’t come from nothing, it is false to suppose that nothing or non-being is the only possible candidate for a source of change.

Take a blue rubber ball for instance.

It can be solid, round, blue, and bouncy. (Different aspects of its being)

There are ways it is not: square and red, for example; it is not a dog or other things.

But the ball is potentially is: red (if you paint it), soft and gooey (if you melt it), a miniature globe (if you draw little continents on it), and so forth.

So being and non-being aren’t the only relevant factors here; there are also a thing’s various potentialities.

On Conscience

(Notes taken while reading ON CONSCIENCE by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. Ignatius

 Conscience, the highest norm that man is to follow even in opposition to authority. If this were the case, it would mean that there is no truth, at least not in moral and religious matters.

One must follow a certain conscience or at least not act against it.

Some would argue that we should be grateful to God that He allows so many unbelievers in good conscience. For if their eyes were opened and they became believers, they would not be capable, in this world of ours, of bearing the burden of faith with all its moral obligations. But as it is, since they can go another way in good conscience, they can still reach salvation.

According to this view, faith would not make salvation easier but harder. Being happy would mean not being burdened with having to believe or having to submit to the moral yoke of the faith of the Catholic Church. The erroneous conscience, which makes life easier and marks a more human course, would then be the real grace, the normal way to salvation. Untruth, keeping truth at bay, would be better for man than truth.  

If this were the state of affairs, how could faith give rise to joy? Who would have the courage to pass faith on others? Would it not be better to spare them the truth or even keep them from it?

Is conscience subjectivity’s protective shell, into which man can escape and hide from reality?

Conscience is a window through which one can see outward to that common truth that finds and sustains all, and so makes possible through the common recognition of truth the community of wants and responsibilities.

Conscience is man’s openness to the ground of his being, the power of perception for what is highest and most essential.

The liberal idea of conscience dispenses with truth. It becomes the justification of our subjectivity, which would not like to have itself called into question. Similarly, it becomes the justification for social conformity. As mediating value between the different subjectivities, social conformity is intended to make living together possible. The obligation to seek the truth terminates as do any doubts about the general inclination of society and what it has become accustomed to. Being convinced  of oneself, as well as conforming to others, is sufficient. Man is reduced to his superficial conviction, and the less depth he has, the better for him.

The Nazi SS would be justified and we should seek them in heaven, since they carried out all their atrocities with fanatic conviction and complete certainty of conscience. Since they followed their (albeit mistaken) consciences, one would have to recognize their conduct as moral and as a result, should not doubt their eternal salvation.

That is the  justifying power of the subjective conscience. Firm, subjective conviction and the lack of doubts and scruples that follow from it do not justify man.

To identify my conscience with the “I,” with its subjective certainty about itself and its moral behavior would make my conscience a mere reflection of the social surroundings and the opinions in circulation. On the other hand, this consciousness might also derive from a lack of self-criticism, a deficiency in listening to the depths of one’s own soul.

The identification of conscience with superficial consciousness, the reduction of man to his subjectivity, does not liberate but enslaves.

Whoever equates conscience with superficial conviction identifies conscience with a pseudo-rational certainty, a certainty that in fact has been woven from self-righteousness, conformity, and lethargy. 

Intro to Metaphysics Part 2

 

Aristotle Metaphysics

Part 2

Realism

 

          You might think that Plato has gone off the rail a bit; Aristotle certainly thought so.

Although something like Plato’s theory is very hard to avoid.

 Universals

          Over and above this or that particular triangle, we have the universal “triangularity”; over and above this or that particular human being, we have the universal “humanness”; over and above this or that particular red thing, we have the universal “redness”; in general, each particular thing seems to instantiate or exemplify various universal features. The particular things are unique and non-repeatable, but the features they exemplify (e.g. “humanness”) are repeatable and common to many things, hence “universal’.

 Numbers and other mathematical entities.

          Numbers are not physical objects: the numeral “2” isn’t the number 2 any more than the name “George” is the same thing as the man George.

 Numbers are not purely mental: we discover them rather than invent them. They are in someway “out there” waiting for us to find them and thus cannot depend for their truth on our thinking about them.

They are necessary truths rather than contingent ones.

To know that 2+2=4 is to know a necessary truth, one that could not have been otherwise. It would remain true even if the entire universe collapsed in on itself.

 Propositions.

          Statements about the world, whether true or false, which are distinct from the sentences that express them. “John is a bachelor” and “John is an unmarried man” are different sentences, but they express the same proposition. When Socrates and Ben Gallant think that snow is white, they are thinking exactly the same thing, despite the fact that one of them expresses this thought in Greek in the Athens of the 5^th century B.C., and the other in English in 21^st century Canada.

Being different from any sentence, or indeed from any other sequence of physical sounds or shapes we might use to express them, propositions are in some sense distinct from the material world. But since a proposition is either true or false whether or not we happen to be entertaining it—again, 2+2=4 would be still be true even if we forgot this tomorrow, 2+2=5 would be false even if we all came to believe it, and snow was white long before anyone first saw it—it seems to follow that propositions are also independent of any mind.

 

          The  view that universals, numbers, and/or propositions exist objectively, apart from the human mind and distinct from any material or physical features of the world, is called realism.

It can seem at first glance to be very dry, esoteric, and irrelevant to practical life. But nothing could be further from the truth, as we shall see.

 

Intro to Metaphysics Part 1

  The study of reality and existence is metaphysics, named from a set of books written by Aristotle asking what is being, what are first causes, and what is change. It studies what we are and what our purpose is, seeking knowledge about everything from the nature of the entire universe to that of he human mind.

Starting with Plato I think will make it much easier to understand the theories of his student Aristotle, later on.

Plato wanted to understand the relationship between the material and immaterial realms, the one and the many, change and permanence and the proper role of both senses and the intellect in coming to know them. He sought to demonstrate that objective knowledge about all these things, and not mere opinion, was possible. This is enshrine in his famous theory of Forms.

(For a fine introduction to Plato’s thought in general and his Theory of Forms in particular, see David Melling, Understanding Plato (Oxford University Press, 1987)

 

What is a “Form”?

Consider several triangles; on paper, on chalkboard, on sand, on the pc screen, small, large, red, black.

The essence or nature of a triangle is a closed plane figure with three straight sides.

The features of a triangle has nothing to do with ‘triangularity” as such.

Every particular physical or material triangle—the sort of triangle we know through the senses, and indeed the only sort we can know through the senses—is always going to have features that are simply not part of the essence of nature of triangularity per se, and is always going to lack features that are part of the essence or nature of triangularity.

Plato would say that when we grasp the nature of being a triangle, what we grasp is not something material or physical, and not something we grasp or could grasp through the senses.

Material triangles come and go but triangularity stays the same.

The essential features of triangles would remain true even if every particular material triangle were erased tomorrow.

What we know when we know the essence of triangularity is something universal rather than particular, something immaterial rather than material, an something we know through the intellect rather than senses.

 

What we know is an objective fact that we have discovered, not invented. It is not up to us to decide what the feature of a triangle should be. If the Canadian parliament should declare that  triangles should sometimes regarded has having four sides, it would cast doubt on the sanity of the parliamentarians. The Pythagorean theorems were true long before we discovered them and will remain true long after we’re all dead.

 

          Now if the essence of triangularity is something neither material nor mental—that is to say, something that exists neither in the material world nor merely in the human mind—then it has a unique kind of existence all its own, that of an abstract object existing in what Platonists sometimes call a “third realm.” And what is true, of the essences of triangles is no less, true in Plato’s view, of the essences of pretty much everything; of squares, circles, and other geometrical figures, but also (and more interestingly) of human beings, tables and chairs, dogs, cats, justice, beauty, goodness, and so on and on.

          When we grasp the essence of any of these things, we grasp something that is universal, immaterial, extra-mental, and known via the intellect rather than senses, and is thus a denizen of this “third realm”. What we grasp, in short, is a Form.

          The Forms not being material cannot exist in a spatial location. Plato’s whole point is that the Theory of Forms, if correct, proves that there is more to reality than the world of time and space. As Plato sees it our senses are not the only sources of knowledge of reality; for the highest level of reality is knowable only through the intellect.

In general, the world of material things is merely a faint copy of re realm of the Forms. Particular things an events are what they are only by “participating in,” or “instantiating” the Forms.

Fido is a dog because it participates in the Form of dog.

Paying your phone bill is a just action because it participates in the Form of Justice.

These individual exemplars are all imperfect in various ways.

The Forms are perfect, being the archetypes or standards by reference to which we judge something to be a dog or just action, etc.

Individual things come and go; the Forms, being outside of time and space, are eternal and unchanging.

The Forms are more real that the material things that exemplify them.

A shadow or reflection won’t exist at all unless a physical object casts it, while the object will exist whether or not its shadow or image does. By the same token, the physical objects themselves exist only insofar as they participates in the Forms, while the Forms would exist whether or not the particular physical instantiations did.

 

My view on politics

 I do not like “one person one vote” which seems to be the sacrosanct democratic principle.

Why? Because this way of choosing a leader will always result to the least common denominator or representative. Someone put it very nicely:  What is more important in any voting system - the means or the end? If the process leads to sub-optimal outcomes, should we still fight tooth and nail to preserve this process?

The only time we ask for everybody’s opinion an insist on it, is when we choose our leaders. Now leaving aside the gerrymandering and the many other possible political manoeuvring trying to beat the one person one vote system, why would we ask everybody, even those who have no idea what the idea of leadership is all about, to chose our leaders? In any other circumstances when a choice has to be made, be it building something, buying something, etc., we consult experts in the matter before we make a decision. So why pretend that everyone is an expert when it comes to leadership? 

My problem however is that there does not seem to be any reasonable alternative.

The only positive I can see with the system we have is that, hopefully, having more than one political party seeking election, they can keep each other in check when one is in the power seat. A very important factor indeed is the reporters, always questioning and investigating, keeping a close look at the politicians’ moves.

You might have guessed by now that my allegiance is to conservative principles. If one googles ‘conservatism’ one is bombarded by many, many descriptions of many kinds of conservatism. My description is short and to the point, I think. A conservative will if necessary, trim, make sure a tree is well fed and continues to provide for new circumstances. A liberal will uproot the tree and plant another one, for the same purpose.

I never judge the parties by their political names. Before I vote, I closely look at their leader, at his character, at his decisions records. Their platform has to be seriously consider. Because so many people will choose a candidate for so many idiosyncratic reasons, I always feel that my efforts are wasted.

Now on a more personal level. I had at least a dozen books on political matters, books I did my best to learn from for many years. Then one day, I gave them all away and promised myself not to discuss politics anymore. The reason was that I became too emotional, too argumentative, when it came to political matters. It was perhaps due to my lack of knowledge in the matter which made me see everything in black and white instead of shades of grey; I really don’t know.

Interest In Sciences

 

    I have always been interested in the advance of science, an interest I still very much have today. I always found the basics physics fascinating and still do. I try to keep in touch with the latest development in the natural sciences, especially Theoretical Physics and the latest advances in Photonics and Electronics.

Here are a few examples at random; there are so many to chose from.

The coming of quantum computers is pretty exciting.

What about the ability of measuring how long it takes an electron to revolve around its nucleus? Pretty amazing, I would say.

If you are fascinated by space and time as I am, here is a fascinating example on that subject..

One of the main problems in science today is uniting General Relativity and quantum mechanics. There are different approaches to solve the problem.

One is called Superstring Theory which leads to M Theory.

Another one is called Quantum Loop.

A third one is called twistor theory.

Again another is Quantum Group Theory.

The one that I find really interesting is the Non-commutative geometry which is rich in many conceptual possibilities. One such possibility is the idea that the fundamental level of physical reality can be non-local. On that  level there can be no time and no space in their usual sense. How cool is that? (contact me if you are curious about the details).

This is not the place to get over-excited about this subject, something I obviously could do.

     I also developed a great interest in the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mathematics (what is the nature of), the whole question of religion in relation to natural sciences. I keep deepening my knowledge of theology and apologetics. I have no hesitation to mention that the author I admire the most in theology is the holy and genius man called Cardinal Ratzinger who became Pope Benedict XVI, 1927-2022

I have 62 books written by him and a few about him on my shelves.

 

Objective Truth

 If there is no objective truth then whatever a person says is true. This leads to contradictions.

When there is a contradiction, one statement must be false and the other must be true.

John, for instance, is either at home or he is not. If someone says John is at home and another person says John is not home, only one of these statements can be true. Similarly, it is either right or wrong to date your professor who is already married.

Protagoras, a Greek philosopher of the 4th century BC, maintained "man is the measure of all things." Protagoras is saying each individual determines what is true, and nobody else. If I am the "measure", then I determine what is true; I determine what is right and wrong.

In many ways this is the Age of Protagoras. In today's moral climate individuals decide for themselves what is true, and then they decide what the right thing to do is. Our laws function in this manner, and now our schools more and more.

An objective truth or good does not appear to exist any longer; it's only what is "true for me," and what is "right for me.

Objective truth serves to establish norms of moral behaviour whereby a person can say what is right and wrong.

Man is not the measure of all things. Objective truth is the measure.

Objective truth refers to information or statements that correspond to reality independent of individual perspectives, emotions, or biases. It remains constant regardless of who observes or interprets it. The concept finds its roots in logic and empirical evidence, emphasizing the necessity of verifiable and repeatable facts. 

In philosophy, the idea of truth as objective is straightforward: some things will always be true and other will always be false, irrespective of our beliefs or opinions. Our personal convictions have no bearing on the facts of the world around us. That which is true remains true, even if we stop believing it or cease to exist altogether.

Most people, in their daily lives, implicitly act as though they believe in objective truth. We assume that our clothes will still be in the closet in the morning, even though we stopped thinking about them during the night. We expect our keys to be where we left them, even if we don’t actively believe this at the moment. These assumptions are rooted in the idea that things happen independently of our beliefs.

Scientific research also operates under the assumption of objective, independent truths. Scientists make predictions based on theories and then test those predictions. If the tests succeed or fail, it doesn’t matter how many researchers believe in the outcome—the results stand on their own. This process relies on the existence of objective truths that remain unaffected by our subjective beliefs.

While there are logical and pragmatic reasons for assuming that truth is objective, some skeptics challenge this position. Nevertheless, our daily functioning depends on the idea that certain things are objectively true, regardless of our individual perspectives.  So, whether we’re discussing the height of Mount Everest or the length of a banana, objective truth remains a fundamental concept in our understanding of reality.

Common Sense Principles Of Discussion

 

         Effective and civil discussion is absolutely essential in reestablishing science on its firm foundation. Since discussion has

in recent times become less and less clearly centered on its purpose — which is to get to the truth — we find we have

developed bad habits of discussion. Indeed it often happens that, despite our good intentions, discussions degenerate

into incivility. It is our hope that the following thoughts will help restore the right emphasis and civility in conversation.

l) The aim of discussion is to arrive at a precise statement of a problem and a true answer. It is profitable if progress in achieving this goal is made even if there is not ultimate success.

2) The first step in critical thinking must be to state a problem clearly in the form A is B, or at least that A is not B.

Many disagreements arise from not being clear about what problem is to be solved.

3) lf you are speaking to someone who has more education and knowledge in the field under discussion, give deference

to him. This means that conversation will not equally split with each person speaking 50 % of the time. Clearly, the

one who has more knowledge will necessarily have to spend more time relating it.

a)

The receiver of knowledge should not resent the giver merely because the giver gives more, i.e. speaks more. Indeed,

like the receiver of a wonderful material gift, the spiritual gift of knowledge should be received with sincere appreciation. Few who receive a gift of gold will respond with accusations of unfairness about the inequity involved of them not being able to respond in kind. Rather, most will receive it with great thanks and enthusiasm as lottery winners do. Since the spiritual gift of knowledge is literally infinitely more valuable, the gratitude of the receiver of knowledge

should be immense.

b) One essential way of showing gratitude to the giver, which is also an exercise of justice, is to remember his gift and acknowledge him to others. Remembering is key in the process of finding and verifying trustworthy sources, for one needs to remember who has given what to be able to note whose information is reliable.

The giver should always act and respond charitably to the receiver, never using his knowledge as a club to assert superiority. Instead, the giver should remember that his own knowledge is ultimately itself a gift. Even first hand knowledge is not our own, for it ultimately comes from the external world, which in turn is from God.

c)

Both sides should be grateful for the opportunity for discussion, because, if nothing else, it is an opportunity to be present to your fellowman, through the exercise of the highest human power: the intellect. After all, you are conversing with a being made in the very image of God and in that very conversing you are manifesting and seeing manifested that image, which is man’s intellectual power. Beyond this, the receiver should be thankful for the new understanding he receives and the giver for the new perspective opened up to his own mind by carefully answering the points made

by the receiver. For each party, it is the opportunity to serve his fellowman.

Letter To A Physicist

 

This letter was an answer to a physicist who asserted that science has priority, not philosophy.

        There is ’science’ then there is the ’scientific method’; you do not seem to acknowledge their differences. Knowledge, prediction (even if mathematical) is science as much as philosophy is science. The philosophical a priori that one need to do ’science=knowledge’ can make all the difference in how I view the usefulness or nature of the ’scientific method’, a method based on logic, therefore philosophy.

For example, if I assume philosophically (you might say scientifically, having your experimental goal in mind) that ’all there is’ is, or can be, mathematically accessible or understandable. That assumption is a philosophical one, not a scientific one.

The Scientific Method measures and counts, If I assume that all I care and worry about can be measured and counted so far so good. We are all witnesses to how far that Scientific Method has taken us.

I do not for an instant doubt or question the utility, the grandeur of the Scientific Method. Far from me the thought. But in the realm of Knowledge (Science if you will) it is only part of the story.

In the realm of Knowledge science is limited

BRAIN DEATH

 This an introduction to an article from the National Library of Medicine.

The article can be found here: Brain death and true patient care - PMC (nih.gov)

Summary: Though legally accepted and widely practiced, the “brain death” standard for the determination of death has remained a controversial issue, especially in view of the occurrence of “chronic brain death” survivors. This paper critically re-evaluates the clinical test-criteria for “brain death,” taking into account what is known about the neuro-critical care of severe brain injury. The medical evidence, together with the understanding of the moral role of the physician toward the patient present before him or her, indicate that an alternative approach should be offered to the deeply comatose patient.

Importance of Philosophical History.

 

The following from a Gilson Reader illustrates quite well I think the point I was trying to make to my brother which is: “ a philosophy or philosopher can only be understood in the context of the history of philosophy.”

 By  turning the concrete into a mosaic of clear ideas, the mathematical method of Descartes raised difficulties whose solution was sought throughout the whole of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; in the nineteenth century it led in the end to despair—despair of philosophy itself.

How can the domain of pure thought ever be in touch with the domain of pure extension when the property of substances is to be mutually exclusive? This is what Descartes does not tell us. He allows us a thought (not a soul), and extension (not a body): he is unable to account for the union of soul and body.

 

. . . The occasionalism of Malebranche, the pre-established harmony of Leibniz, the parallelism of Spinoza are so many metaphysical “epicycles to solve an ill-stated problem by rescuing, with the aid of complementary devices, the very principle which make the problem insoluble.

 

Again:

What is the most striking difference between the Greek notion of the deity and the notion of God common to practically all the seventeenth-century philosophers? The best answer we can imagine is that, apart from Anaximander, who in a rather cryptic statement said that “the first principle of all things is infinite,” no known Greek philosopher ever posited an infinite being as the cause of all that which is, whereas Descartes, Leibniz, Malebranche, and practically all the other metaphysicians of the seventeenth century conceived of God as the primary cause of all that which is, and they did so on the strength of he principle hat, if there is a God, He must needs be an infinite being. The remark applies even to the only one among these philosophers who was not a Christian, namely Spinoza. God, Spinoza says, ”is a being absolutely indefinite, that is a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence.” What can be the cause for this radical change in perspective? The only answer we can imagine is that this cause is to be found in the theological speculation which starting from the biblical notion of a

Creator of all beings, led the men of the middle ages to conceive infinity as a positive conception of being.

 

Again:

. . . Even Spinoza cannot be fully accounted for without taking into account the speculation of the middle ages. To overlook what happened to philosophy in the thirteenth century is to deprive the history of Wetsern thought of its continuity and, by the same token, its intelligibility.

BELIEF

        Starting from a quite general analysis of the basic attitude of "belief", we have arrive directly at the Christian mode of belief.

 For to believe as a Christian means in fact entrusting oneself to the meaning that upholds me and the world; taking it as the firm ground on which I can stand fearlessly. Using rather more traditional language, we could say that to believe as a Christian means understanding our existence as a response to the word, the logos, that upholds and maintains all things.

 It means affirming that the meaning we do not make but can only receive is already granted to us, so that we have only to take it and entrust ourselves to it.

Correspondingly, Christian belief is the option for the view that the receiving precedes the making--though this does not mean that making is reduced in value or proclaimed to be superfluous. It is only because we have received that we can also "make". And further: Christian belief--as we have already said--means opting for the view that what cannot be seen in more real than what can be seen. It is an avowal of the primacy of the invisible as the truly real, which upholds us and hence enables us to face the visible with calm composure --knowing that we are responsible before the invisible as the true ground of all things. 

To that extent it is undeniable that Christian belief is a double affront to the attitude that the present world situation seems to force us to adopt. In the shape of positivism and phenomenalism it invites us to confine ourselves to the "visible", the "apparent", in the widest sense of the terms; to extend the basic methodology to which natural science is indebted for its successes to the totality of our relationship with reality. 

Again, in the shape of techne it calls upon us to rely on the "makable" and to expect to find in this the ground that upholds us. The primacy of the invisible over the visible and that of receiving over making run directly counter to this basic situation. No doubt that is why it is so difficult for us today to make the leap of entrusting ourselves to what cannot be seen. 

Yet the freedom of making, like that of enlisting the visible in our service by means of methodical investigation, is in the last analysis only made possible by the provisional character that Christian belief assigns to both and by the superiority it has thus revealed.

UGLINESS

     To be in error is by definition to be out of touch with reality as it is. Error is therefore at least misleading, even when it is presented unwittingly and in good faith, and because it is out of touch and often with an element of beguilement, there is in it an element of the ugly. 

        New ageism serves as an example of what we mean. By mingling Oriental texts with a sprinkling of scientific terms and bits of literature and religion that may appear to the unwary to bestow an aura of respectability, contemporary gurus make assertions that are actually nothing more than airy, vague sentiments with no foundations in the actual world: "Field of infinite possibilities . . . the unbounded, ever-loving universe  . . . [we are]all sisters of a mysterious order . . . space and unified field . . . our age of awareness . . . conscious energy field". These romanticized but vacuous feelings may mislead millions into thinking their problems are being solved in some mysteriously ultimate manner. New ageism is pseudosophistication devoid of evidence and serious thought, quite the opposite of the beautiful.

Proposing what may tickle some ears, new ageism makes few or no moral demands, for one need not worry about responsibility to God, about a need to say no. Hence, there is no fear of responsibility and punishment for the choices one makes. A recent critic observed that "the spiritual peace and enlightenment offered by pop gurus doesn't require a lifetime of discipline.  It requires only that  you suspend judgment, attend their lectures and workshops and buy their books or tapes."