Edward Feser's Blog, page 67

Wrath and its daughters

We’ve examined lust and its daughters.  Turning to another of the seven deadly sins, let’s consider wrath.  Like lust, wrath is the distortion of a passion that is in itself good.  Like lust, it can become deeply habituated, and even a source of a kind of perverse pleasure in the one who indulges it.  (Hence the neologism “rageaholic.”)  And like lust, it can as a consequence severely impair reason.  Aquinas treats the subject in Summa Theologiae II-II.158 and Question XII of On Evil .  (Relevant material can also be found in the treatment of the passion of anger in Summa Theologiae I-II.46-48.)Now, anger per se is not bad; on the contrary, it is natural to us, and good.  It serves the function of moving us to correct injustices, broadly construed.  We are angry with murderers, thieves, and other criminals because we know they have inflicted undeserved harm on others.  Anger moves us to redress this disordered state of affairs by stopping evildoers from committing further crimes, taking from them their ill-gotten gains, inflicting punitive harms that cancel out the psychological and material benefits they have already acquired from their evildoing, and so forth. 

We are also angry at actions that are less grave than such crimes are but that are still in a general sense unjust.  For example, someone cuts you off on the freeway or insults you, and you are naturally angry because the person unjustly endangered you or characterized you in a pejorative way that in your judgment you do not merit.  Your child refuses to eat his vegetables or do his homework, and you are naturally angry because he is not doing what is good for him and not submitting to your legitimate authority over him.  The anger in these cases, no less than in the case of anger at criminal offenses, is directed at injustice in the broad sense of a disorder in things, of things not being the way they ought to be.  Anger is nature’s way of prodding you to do something to set things right.
As Aquinas says in On Evil, quoting St. John Chrysostom, “if there be no anger, teaching is bootless, the judicial process undermined, and crimes unchecked.”  Accordingly, Aquinas concludes, “some anger is good and necessary” (p. 373, Regan translation).  The absence of anger in cases where it is called for is, for that reason, a moral defect, and a habit or tendency to respond to injustices with insufficient anger is a vice.  As Aquinas writes in the Summa:
Anger… [is] a simple movement of the will, whereby one inflicts punishment, not through passion, but in virtue of a judgment of the reason: and thus without doubt lack of anger is a sin…
Hence the movement of anger in the sensitive appetite cannot be lacking altogether, unless the movement of the will be altogether lacking or weak. Consequently lack of the passion of anger is also a vice, even as the lack of movement in the will directed to punishment by the judgment of reason…
The lack of anger is a sign that the judgment of reason is lacking.
End quote.  The sin Aquinas speaks of is manifest today in those who are excessively lenient toward criminals, those who are suspicious of the very idea of punishment, those whose knee-jerk response to even the most horrific crimes is always to talk only of forgiveness and mercy whether or not the evildoer is repentant, and so forth.  Such a reflexive attitude is not the Christian attitude but rather a crude caricature of the Christian attitude.    
What Christianity condemns, and what Aquinas condemns, is not anger per se but rather the opposite vice of excesswhere anger is concerned.  Anger becomes disordered and sinful when the passion is so strong that it overwhelms reason, when the punishment the angry person seeks to inflict on the evildoer is out of proportion to the offense, when the person at whom one is angry is in fact innocent of injustice, when the angry person acts out of hatred rather than justice, and so forth.  And habituation to disordered anger is a vice. 
If deficiency in anger is common today, excess is of course no less common.  Bizarrely, the defect and the excess sometimes exist in one and the same person.  Consider that curious character familiar from modern political life, the militant pacifist.  For even the worst murderers and dictators, he has nothing but compassion.  Their sins, he assures us, are regrettable but understandable – a result of bad upbringing or weakness of will, an overreaction to social injustice or American imperialism, or what have you.  In sharp contrast, for defenders of capital punishment or just war, the militant pacifist has nothing but venom.  He attributes to them only the basest motives – bloodthirstiness, hatred, political calculation, war profiteering, and so forth. 
It never occurs to him how deeply irrational and incoherent is this combination of attitudes.  For example, if the militant pacifist is going to try his best to show mercy to and understand the motives of murderers and the like, how much more should he show mercy and understanding to defenders of capital punishment?  (“They mean well, they’re just misguided!”)  Or if he is peremptorily going to condemn the latter as hateful and bloodthirsty, how much more peremptorily should he condemn those who kill innocent people? 
(My favorite example of this sort of incoherence is the sentiment sometimes expressed by critics of the doctrine of hell to the effect that the only people who deserve to go to hell are people who think some people deserve to go to hell.  Since critics who say that are thereby acknowledging that they themselves think some people deserve hell – namely those who think some people deserve it – these critics are implicitly including themselvesamong those worthy of hell!)
Illumination is provided by Aquinas’s account of the daughtersof the vice of wrath – the further disorders of the soul which follow upon disordered anger – of which there are six.  The first two have to do with disorders of thought, the next three with disorders of speech, and the last with disorders of action.  (See Summa Theologiae II-II.158.7 and On Evil XII.5.)
The first daughter is what Aquinas calls “indignation,” which (as Aquinas says in the Summa) is directed at “the person with whom a man is angry, and whom he deems unworthy” (emphasis added).  In On Evil, Aquinas adds that “angry persons contemplating the harm inflicted on them magnify the injustice in their minds” (p. 387).  The idea here seems to be that a person habituated to wrath tends to turn over and over in his mind the notions of how depraved are the people against whom he is angry and how graveare their imagined injustices.  He creates fantasy enemies who are more evil in their character and their actions than any real world opponents are, and directs his rage at the latter while mistaking them for the former.
The second daughter is what Aquinas refers to in the Summaas “swelling of the mind,” and in On Evilhe says that this is manifest in angry persons who “mull over different ways and means whereby they can avenge themselves.”  Whereas indignation focuses on the imagined depravity of the objects of one’s anger, swelling of the mind focuses on the harms that might be inflicted on these supposed evildoers. 
The third daughter of wrath is referred to by Aquinas in the Summa as “’clamor,’ which denotes disorderly and confused speech.”  Think of the person who is so filled with rage that he cannot get a coherent thought or line of argument out, but simply rants uncontrollably.
The fourth daughter of wrath is “contumely” or harsh and insulting language.  Think of the person so consumed by anger that he characterizes his enemies in unjust and uncharitable ways.  Contumely is essentially the verbal expression of what Aquinas calls the wrathful person’s “indignation” and “swelling of mind.”  (Note that, just as anger is not per se bad, neither is harsh or insulting speech per se bad.  Christ famously characterized the Pharisees as “a brood of vipers” and “whited sepulchers.”  What is bad is harsh or insulting language that is unmerited and/or flows from excessive passion rather than reason.)
The fifth daughter of wrath is blasphemy.  Like contumely, it involves a kind of injurious speech, but in this case directed toward God rather than other human beings.  (Needless to say, this daughter will follow from disordered anger only if God is the object of the anger.)
The sixth daughter of wrath is “quarreling.”  The wrathful person, naturally, is prone to give expression to his disorders of thought not only in his speech, but also by picking fights with various enemies or imagined enemies. 
Now, as with lust, wrath and its daughters are associated with pleasure, and as with lust, this pleasure has a tendency to “lock” or “glue” the person exhibiting the vice onto his disordered behavior.  This is harder to see in the case of wrath than in the case of lust, because anger is directed toward the rectification of perceived injustice, and the perception of injustice is unpleasant.  However, the hope of rectifying injustice is pleasant.  As Aquinas writes, “anger is always accompanied by hope, wherefore it causes pleasure” and “the movement of anger has a… tendency… to vengeance… which it desires and hopes for as being a good, wherefore it takes pleasure in it.”  What Aquinas calls “indignation,” “swelling of the mind,” contumely and the like can therefore be pleasant, and thus addictive to the one exhibiting them, deeply habituating his tendency toward disordered anger.
Taking account of the daughters of wrath, it is easy to see why the sort of person I have called the “militant pacifist” exhibits such non-pacific behavior.  Anger, if one is not careful, can become disordered whatever its object.  This is as true of people whose anger is directed toward capital punishment, war, or the like as it is of people angry over any other perceived injustice.  With the “militant pacifist,” though, we get the paradoxical result that someone angry over what he regards as disordered anger in others comes himself to exhibit disordered anger precisely toward those others.  He might become so obsessed with his cause that he falls into “indignation” in Aquinas’s sense, constructing in his mind a phantom enemy that is far more sinister than the real world people who disagree with him.  He is led thereby into “clamor” and “contumely,” hurling insults and ranting and raving rather than soberly addressing the arguments of his opponents.  And so forth.
Indeed, the “militant pacifist” may, ironically, be moreprone to fall victim to the daughters of wrath than other people are.  The reason is this.  Anger, again, is in itself good and natural to us.  It is nature’s way of getting us to redress injustice by punishing evildoers.  Now, some injustices are so extremely grave that nothing less than death would be a proportionate punishment.  And some evildoers are so dangerous that nothing less than war can effectively counter them.  Unsurprisingly, then, large numbers of people continue to support capital punishment and to believe that war is sometimes necessary to deal with evil regimes.  Even in countries that have long ago abolished capital punishment, opinion polls sometimes show that a majority still support it, despite decades of propaganda directed against it.
In light of these facts, opponents of capital punishment, war, and the like are bound to be tempted to conclude that enormous numbers of their fellow citizens are simply depraved.  (It does not occur to them that what is in fact going on is that widespread continued support for the death penalty and for just war reflects a residual grasp of the demands of the natural law.)  Frustrated by the persistence and popularity of attitudes they regard as immoral, those of what I am calling a “militant pacifist” mindset are bound to become even angrierat these perceived injustices – with a spiral into wrath and its daughters being the sequel.
Moreover, precisely because the militant pacifist’s position is always bound to be a minority view (contrary as it is to human nature), it is tempting for the militant pacifist to think of himself as possessing greater virtue than most people.  In particular, he is bound to think of himself as more merciful, more compassionate, more understanding than the great unwashed.  Such self-righteousness can be intoxicating, and contribute to the sense of being “superior” that Aquinas, in On Evil, says is part of the psychology of “indignation” (p. 387).
Finally, precisely because he is so militantly opposed to the purported disordered anger of others, the militant pacifist is deluded into thinking that he, of all people, cannot be subject to that particular vice.  He is utterly blind to the mercilessness and hatred he directs toward those whom he regards as merciless and hateful.

Davies on evil suffered

In The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil , Brian Davies draws a distinction between “evil suffered” and “evil done.”  Evil suffered is badness that happens to or afflicts someone or something.  Evil done is badness that is actively brought about or inflicted by some moral agent.  A reader asks me:
Do you agree with Davies in saying that God does not directly bring about what he calls “evil suffered”?  I want to agree, but yet I don’t know how to reconcile Davies’ position (and what seems to be Aquinas’ position) with God apparently directly willing the end of Ananias and Sapphira’s life in Acts 5, which obviously is an evil suffered.  It doesn’t seem there is causality per accidens like Davies describes God’s causal activity when it comes to evil suffered (e.g., good of one thing curtailing the good of another).Before I answer the question, let me do some stage-setting by summarizing the views of Davies alluded to here.  (See especially pp. 176-83 of Davies’ book for his own exposition.)  Davies makes two relevant points about evil suffered.  First, it is a privation rather than a positive reality.  Second, it is not willed by God as an end in itself, but only as a concomitant of some good. 

By way of illustration of these ideas, let’s suppose that in the course of giving a philosophy lecture, I begin to draw a circle on the marker board but do not complete it, so that the resulting figure looks like a C.  The circle is a bad or defective circle, and insofar as I am the cause of it, what I have caused is therefore something that exhibits badness or defect.  But strictly speaking, the badness does not amount to some positive feature I have put into the circle.  Rather, it amounts to the absence of some feature that I could have put into it and that a complete circle would have had.  The badness is a privation rather than a positive reality. 
Strictly speaking, then, I have not caused any badness to exist.  Rather, what I have done is simply refrained from causing all of the goodness that I could have caused to exist.  The circle is good as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go all the way. 
So, in that sense I have only caused what is good.  But wouldn’t it have been better still to cause the rest of the circle to exist?  All things being equal, it would have been, but suppose that the reason I refrained from completing it is that I judged that doing so was necessary in order to explain to my audience the notion of a privation.  Then there would be an overall good situation – the generation of philosophical understanding in my audience – that was brought about in part precisely by my refraining from putting into the circle all the goodness that could have been in it.  The defective circle, though bad, was an essential part of some larger good.  And that is why I willed to refrain from completing it, rather than willing the defect in the circle for its own sake.
Now, for Davies, the instances of evil suffered that we find in the natural order of things are analogous to that.  When a lamb is eaten by a lion, the damage to the lamb amounts to a set of privations – for example, the absence of a limb, flesh, or skin that is torn away.  Though bad considered in itself, the damage also plays a necessary part of a larger good, namely the flourishing of the lion.  Lions of their nature can’t be the kinds of things they are without hunting prey like lambs, so that having the good of there being lions presupposes the bad of lambs being killed.  In causing a world in which lambs are eaten by lions, then, God does not cause evil as such.  Rather, he causes a world in which certain goods (namely the good of lambs having all their limbs, flesh, etc. unmolested) are absent, and these privations are not willed by him for their own sake, but rather as a concomitant of the good of there being lions in existence.
So that’s the background to the reader’s question.  And the question, again, is how the deaths of Ananias and Sapphira fit into this account of the nature of evil suffered.  Recall that Davies’ main points about evil suffered are, first, that it is a privation rather than a positive reality, and second, that it is not willed by God as an end in itself, but only as a concomitant of some good.  These deaths would, as the reader says, be instances of evil suffered.  So do they fit Davies’ account?
It’s not hard to see how they fit the privation part of the account.  Presumably the deaths of Ananias and Sapphira were simply a matter of the absence of continued divine concurrence with the operation of their vital processes.  After all, nothing can operate for an instant unless God imparts causal power to it; hence to cause the death of a person, God need do no more than cease causing the person to live.  The badness in this case (the deaths) amounts, as in the other cases, to the absence of a good (continued life). 
Apparently the reader’s main concern is with how the scenario fits in with Davies’ second point, to the effect that an evil suffered is not willed by God as an end in itself.  For didn’t God in this case will death precisely as an end in itself?  After all, there does not seem to be in the case of Ananias and Sapphira (as there is in the case of the lion and the lamb) some other natural substance that flourished, and thus attained its own good, by way of causing their deaths.
I would answer, however, that there was a larger good for the sake of which God willed this particular case of evil suffered.  Ananias and Sapphira were, after all, being punished by God for a grave sin.  And punishment, as I argued in a post from not too long ago, is a good thing.  It is the correction of a disorder, a restoration of the natural connection between evildoing on the one hand and the suffering of a harm on the other.  God willed the evil suffered by Ananias and Sapphira as part of this larger good of securing retributive justice, as well, perhaps, as part of the realization of one of the secondary ends of punishment (deterrence). 
To be sure, the case is unlike the lion and lamb example insofar as it does not involve a substance flourishing or realizing its good by way of the bad suffered by some other thing.  All the same, punishment is a good which of its nature necessarily involves the suffering of an evil as a concomitant – namely the harm inflicted on the evildoer, which remains a harm even though it is deserved.  So, the case does fit Davies’ overall account of evil suffered. 
(For more on the nature of punishment, see By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment .  For more on the nature of divine action and the problem of evil, see the forthcoming Five Proofs of the Existence of God .)

Caught in the web

The Dictionary of Christianity and Science has just been published by Zondervan.  I contributed an essay to the volume.
Philosopher and AI critic Hubert Dreyfus has died.  John Schwenkler on Dreyfus at First Things.
A new article from David Oderberg: “Co-operation in the Age of Hobby Lobby: When Sincerity is Not Enough,” in the current issue of Expositions .  (Follow the link and click on the PDF.)
Philosopher Daniel Bonevac on being a conservative in academia, at Times Higher Education.At Aeon, Adam Frank argues that materialism cannot explain consciousness. 

At Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, a review of Fran O’Rourke’s book Aristotelian Interpretations .
Philosopher Anthony McCarthy on Peter Singer and sexual consent, at Public Discourse.
The Albertus Magnus Center for Scholastic Studies announces its Summer Program for 2017.
Business Insider reveals the fantastic story behind the Marvel movie no one was ever supposed to see. 
Roger Scruton on existentialism, at the Claremont Review of Books.  Scruton profiled at The New Criterion. 
At The Catholic Thing, Prof. Eduardo Echeverria on Pope Benedict’s and Pope Francis’s contrasting views on Gospel and Law.  At First Things, historian Bronwen Catherine McShea on Pope Francis as historian.
Politico on how Pat Buchanan paved the way for Donald Trump.
Reason on Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and the situation in Venezuela. 
The New Yorker profiles Daniel Dennett.
National Review on Bill Nye the Left-Wing Hack Guy.  Even the New Republic thinks he’s become an embarrassment.
At First Things, Stephen Barr reviews Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky’s new book on language and evolution.
The Chronicle of Higher Education on the Claremont conservatives and Trump.
Peter Adamson on medieval Jewish, Christian, and Islamic philosophy, at Aeon.
Also at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, a review of Nancy Cartwright and Keith Ward’s new anthology Rethinking Order after the Laws of Nature .
Jerry Coyne advises his fellow left-wingers to stop demonizing Trump supporters.  Noam Chomsky mocks Democrats for their obsession with Russia.  Andrew Sullivan wonders why Democrats feel sorry for Hillary Clinton.
Aeon on the 25th anniversary of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man.
Marvel Comics finds that political correctness isn’t selling.  The Federalist comments.  Marvel has had to fire an artist for inserting hidden Islamist messages into an X-Men comic book.
At the Times Literary Supplement, Steven Nadler asks: Exactly when did modern philosophy get started?
Reason and tolerance = shouting mindless slogans!  Quillette on the tyranny of flash mobs.  At City Journal, Heather Mac Donald on her ordeal at Claremont McKenna.  Slate on the creepy so-called “March for Science.”  Some left-wingers defend Ann Coulter’s right to speak.
Vintage Geek on common misconceptions about pulp-era science fiction.

Five Proofs preview

By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed will be out from Ignatius Press next month.  Later in the year, and also from Ignatius, comes my book Five Proofs of the Existence of God.  Having told you, dear reader, a bit about the former, let me say something about the latter.It is not a book about Aquinas’s Five Ways.  I have already treated that topic at some length in my book Aquinas and in several of the essays collected in Neo-Scholastic Essays .  Rather, it is a book about what I personally take to be the five most compelling arguments for God’s existence.  Naturally, there is some overlap with the Five Ways, but the book largely stakes out new ground. 

The arguments in question are what I call the Aristotelian proof, the Neo-Platonic proof, the Augustinian proof, the Thomistic proof, and the Rationalist proof.  As those labels indicate, each of the arguments has a long history in the tradition.  They can be found in some form or other in thinkers like Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, and Leibniz.  However, the specific formulations are my own.  I am not presenting the arguments exactly as any of these thinkers presented them, and I am not doing exegesis of any of their works.
That is deliberate.  In Aquinas and in The Last Superstition , I treat the question of God’s existence by way of expounding and defending Aquinas’s own arguments.  That was appropriate given the specific aims of those books, but it has a downside.  As readers of those books know, properly to understand Aquinas’s Five Ways, you first have to understand all the background philosophical theses he presupposes in the arguments but actually develops and defends elsewhere.  For example, you need to understand his account of what change is, of how efficient causation works and the different kinds of causal series that there are, of the structure of a material substance, and so on.  You also need to disentangle these background philosophical theses from the dated and mistaken scientific claims Aquinas sometimes used to illustrate them, but which are not in fact essential to them.  That is why, in both books, the reader has to work through seventy pages or so of fairly abstract general metaphysics before getting to the specific topic of what Aquinas had to say about God’s existence.
In the years since writing Aquinas, I became convinced that there was a need for a book that approaches things differently.  In particular, there was a need for a book that just gets straight to the main thrust of each of the best arguments for God’s existence, introducing the relevant background metaphysical notions along the way rather than in a separate prolegomenon, and without getting bogged down in exegetical questions or being limited to discussing what some particular writer of the past had to say.  That’s what Five Proofs does.  I defend an Aristotelian proof, but not Aristotle’sown formulation exactly; a Neo-Platonicproof, but without doing any exegesis of Plotinus’s Enneads; and so on.
The Aristotelian proof, as you might expect, is an argument from the distinction between actuality and potentiality to the existence of a purely actual actualizer of the existence of things.  The Neo-Platonic proof is an argument from the existence of things that are composite to a first cause that is absolutely simple or non-composite.  The Augustinian proof is an argument from realism about universals, propositions, possible worlds, and purported abstract objects in general to the existence of an infinite divine intellect in which these entities must reside. The Thomistic proof is an argument from the existence of things whose essence is distinct from their existence to a first cause which is subsistent existence itself.  The Rationalist proof is an argument to the existence of an absolutely necessary being from the principle of sufficient reason, where the latter is interpreted in Scholastic rather than Leibnizian terms.  Each of these arguments is developed and defended at much greater length than I have treated any of them elsewhere.
Each of the first five chapters of the book is devoted to one of these arguments, and the structure of each of these chapters is as follows.  First, I argue in a discursive or informal way for the existence of something fitting a certain key description – being a purely actual actualizer, or an absolutely simple or non-composite cause, or what have you.  Second, I argue in a discursive or informal way that anything fitting this key description must also possess the key divine attributes – unity, immutability, immateriality, omnipotence, omniscience, and so forth.  Third, I then recapitulate the argumentation of the first two sections in a more formal way, showing how the reasoning can be set out carefully in a long step-by-step demonstration that lays bare its basic logical structure.  Fourth, I address all the main objections that have been or might be raised against the argument.  Again, I follow this procedure for each of the arguments in these first five chapters.
In the sixth chapter of the book, which is quite long – almost a short book by itself – I treat in much more detail all of the key divine attributes, as well as God’s relationship to the world.  In particular, I argue at length for God’s unity, simplicity, immutability, immateriality, incorporeality, eternity, necessity, omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, will, love, and incomprehensibility.  I also defend the doctrines of divine conservation and concurrence.  These issues will all have been dealt with to some extent in the earlier chapters, but the sixth chapter is intended to probe them at greater depth, to address all the main objections, and so on.
The seventh and final chapter of the book is an “omnibus” treatment of all the main objections to arguments for God’s existence of the sort defended in the book.  Once again, these matters will have been dealt with to some extent in the earlier chapters, but the aim of the seventh chapter is to probe them at much greater depth, and also to deal with objections that aren’t treated in the earlier chapters.
The book is, then, a general work of natural theology, as concerned with the divine nature as it is with God’s existence.  Naturally, it is written from the point of view of a Thomist, but it also interacts critically and in some detail with the literature in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion, both theist and atheist.  Essentially it does for natural theology what my book Scholastic Metaphysics did for that subject.
More information to come…

Empirical science and the transcendentals

As James Ladyman notes in Understanding Philosophy of Science, “many scientists intuitively regard simple and unifying theories as, all other things being equal, more likely to be true than messy and complex ones” (p. 83).  In the minds of some prominent scientists, this simplicity criterion is tied to aesthetic value.  Einstein is often quoted as saying that “the only physical theories that we are willing to accept are the beautiful ones.”  Paul Dirac went so far as to opine that “it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment.”But this attitude is often treated as problematic by other scientists and philosophers, and not without reason.  In Hume, Kant, and other modern philosophers, aesthetic judgments are typically treated as subjective, reflecting merely our reactions toobjective reality rather than anything in objective reality itself.  Science, by contrast, is regarded as the objective intellectual enterprise par excellence.  So how could aesthetic value legitimately guide theory choice in science?

Even simplicity stripped of its aesthetic dimension remains problematic.  Ladyman brings it up in the context of discussing methodological principles in science that appear to be unfalsifiable (contra Popper’s famous criterion of what demarcates science from non-science).  Paul Feyerabend argues that the scientific obsession with unifying phenomena by bringing them under simple general laws often involves an oversimplification that papers over the “abundance” and diversity that actually exists in nature. 
There is some truth in these criticisms (and, in my view, in Feyerabend’s in particular).  Still, there is also something plausible in the scientist’s concern for simplicity and beauty, which is why scientists persist in valuing these criteria despite the fact that they are indeed problematic, or at least are problematic giventhe philosophical assumptions to which scientists tend either explicitly or implicitly to be committed. 
But the problem, I would say, is precisely with those background philosophical assumptions – namely, modern post-Cartesian, post-Humean assumptions – rather than with the criteria of simplicity and beauty themselves.  For these criteria are not only not problematic, but on the contrary are quite natural, given a more traditional metaphysics – in particular, given the Scholastic doctrine of the transcendentals, which has its roots in Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy.
A “transcendental” property, in the sense in question here, is one that all being or reality as such possesses simply by virtue of being, and which can accordingly be predicated of everything.  The standard list includes (in addition to being itself), oneness (or unity), goodness, and truth.  Some writers regard beauty as an additional transcendental, though others take it to be just a special case of goodness.  Either way, it is among the properties we can predicate of all being.
The transcendentals are “convertible” in the sense that they are really all the same thing looked at from different points of view.  For example, truth is being considered as an object of the intellect, and goodness is being considered as an object of the will.  Because they are convertible, wherever we can apply one transcendental, we can apply the others.  Hence if we can say of a thing that it has being, then we can also say of it that it is good, that it is one, that it is true, and that it has beauty. 
To take a simple example, consider a cat.  To be a cat at all is to be a good cat in the sense of a good specimen of “catness”; and to be deficient as a specimen is, by the same token, to have less being.  For instance, if a cat is missing a leg, it lacks some of the being or reality that is constitutive of “catness,” and is for that reason less good a specimen of “catness” than a cat with all four legs would be.  And a byproduct of that imperfection is an absence of some of the beautythat would be present in a more perfect specimen.  To be a cat is also to exhibit oneness or unity insofar as in a fully functioning cat, all its parts operate together for the sake of the whole.  When this is not the case – when there is some dysfunction that prevents the parts from so operating – the cat is once again lackingsome of the being or reality that is constitutive of “catness,” and it is also once again lacking some of the goodness and beauty it would otherwise have.  To be a cat is also to be a true cat in the sense of being something conforming to the concept that an intellect would form of what it is to be a cat.  In these ways the being of a cat is convertible with its unity, goodness, beauty, and truth. 
Needless to say, fully to spell out the doctrine of the transcendentals, and to justify the more general Scholastic metaphysical background assumptions needed in order to make it intelligible, would take more than a brief blog post.  I give an exposition and defense of the doctrine in Aquinas (see especially pp. 31-36) and in my essay “Being, the Good, and the Guise of the Good,” reprinted in Neo-Scholastic Essays .
The point for present purposes is just this.  Given the transcendentals, it is not surprising that considerations of simplicity and beauty would be thought appropriate criteria for choosing between theories about objective reality.  Note first that the transcendentals being and truth are relatively unproblematic even given standard modern metaphysical assumptions.  (Though I wouldn’t say that they are unproblematic full stop.  See the remarks about truth below.)  No one thinks it contrary to the objectivity of science when scientists say that the entities their theories postulate have being or reality, or that the theories themselves are true.  (To be sure, instrumentalists deny that the entities referred to by scientific theories really exist and that the theories are strictly true.  But instrumentalists don’t accuse scientific realists of a failure of objectivity, but merely of being mistaken.) 
Now, given the convertibility of the transcendentals, wherever there is being or truth, there is also going to be oneness or unity and (either because it is a transcendental in its own right or because it follows from goodness) beauty.  Hence the absence of unity and beauty is bound to be an indicator of some absence of being and truth.
Consider also that “simplicity” of the kind taken to be a criterion of theory choice is closely related to the transcendental oneness or unity.  Ultimate explanation in science is thought to involve taking all the diverse and complex natural phenomena and higher-level laws that there are down to one set of fundamental laws rather than to several, and to laws that can be stated relatively crisply and elegantly rather than in a convoluted way.  This bears a family resemblance to the Scholastic notion that there is a hierarchy of kinds of thing ordered according to their degrees of simplicity and unity.  On this view, aggregates have a lower degree of unity or oneness than substances do, material substances have a lower degree of unity than incorporeal substances (i.e. angels) do, and incorporeal substances have a lower degree of unity than God, who is absolutely simple or non-composite.  And this hierarchy of degrees of unity is also a hierarchy of degrees of being and of goodness (and thus of beauty).
Aquinas’s Fourth Way essentially makes of this notion of a hierarchy of things possessing the transcendental attributes an argument for the existence of God.  The basic idea is that degrees of being, goodness, oneness, etc. point to the existence of something that is the most real, unified, good, etc. thing possible – where the most real thing, the most unified thing, etc. must be the same one thing looked at from different points of view, given the convertibility of the transcendentals.  (See Aquinas for a detailed exposition of the argument.) 
Modern scientists don’t reason exactly this way, of course, but they aren’t as far from the spirit of the argument as they might seem at first glance.  For they do tend to think that the more ultimate or fundamental some set of laws is, the more simple and beautiful they will be.  There is even a sense in which they take the fundamental laws to be more realthan anything else.  For one thing, they take these fundamental laws to be in some sense the source of the reality of all other things.  For another, they constantly feel a pressure in the direction of a reductionismwhich treats the fundamental laws and the entities they govern (fundamental particles, say) as the most real entities.  To be sure, they often resist this pressure – by no means are all scientists ontological reductionists – but the point is that the fundamental laws and entities tend to be treated as the only unproblematically real things, whereas everything else has to either reduced to, or explained as emerging out of, these fundamental laws and entities.  What is fundamental is in that sense taken to have the highest degree of being as well as the highest degree of simplicity and beauty. 
That is not far from the thrust of Fourth Way-style reasoning.  One difference, of course, is that modern scientists don’t take the reasoning to what Aquinas would regard as its logical conclusion, viz. that the ultimateexplanatory principle would have to be something entirely beyond the corporeal world altogether (not to mention something that would have to have the divine attributes).  A second difference is that modern scientists are not really systematic about all this.  They retain their attachment to criteria like simplicity and beauty in a merely intuitive way, without bothering clearly to explain what their rational basis is.  (These two differences are connected.  For to work out rationally and systematically what in modern science are left as mere intuitions would lead precisely to a return to something like the doctrine of the transcendentals – and to its theological implications as the sequel.)
As indicated above, even the transcendental truthis, on closer inspection, problematic when detached from the older metaphysics.  Michael Polanyi points out in his book Personal Knowledge that simplicity as a criterion of theory choice essentially functions as a proxy for rationality.  That is to say, scientists are drawn to theories that make the world intelligible.  But a thing’s rationality and intelligibility have to do with its relation to the mind, and modern scientists tend to be committed to the idea that an “objective” account of the world must subtract from it any reference to the mind.  Hence scientists operate with what amount in Polanyi’s view to “a set of euphemisms” (p. 16).  He writes:
The term ‘simplicity’ functions then merely as a disguise for another meaning than its own.  It is used for smuggling an essential quality into our appreciation of a scientific theory, which a mistaken conception of objectivity forbids us openly to acknowledge.
What has just been said of ‘simplicity’ applies equally to ‘symmetry’ and ‘economy’… They must stand for those peculiar intellectual harmonies which reveal, more profoundly and permanently than any sense-experience, the presence of objective truth.
I shall call this practice a pseudo-substitution.  It is used to play down man’s real and indispensable intellectual powers for the sake of maintaining an ‘objectivist’ framework which in fact cannot account for them.   (pp. 16-17)
Though he doesn’t put it this way, what Polanyi is pointing out here is that modern scientists are implicitly committed to the reality of truth as truth is understood within the doctrine of the transcendentals – that is to say, to truth conceived of as being or reality in its relation to an intellect.  The reason they prefer terms like “simplicity” and “economy” is that they tend also to be committed to the assumption that intellect is a highly derivative phenomenon – a mere byproduct of evolutionary history that appears very late in the game as it were – and thus ought not to enter into our characterization of reality at the most fundamental level.  And the trouble is that when this reference to the intellect is deleted, it is no longer clear why simplicity and the like ought to be criteria of theory choice.
Keats was right to say that “beauty is truth, truth beauty,” but wrong to follow up this claim with the further assertion that “that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”  For we do need to know something else – namely the traditional, Scholastic metaphysics that makes the first claim intelligible.

The problem of Hume’s problem of induction

In the context of discussion of Hume’s famous “problem of induction,” induction is typically characterized as reasoning from what we have observed to what we have not observed.  For example, we reason inductively in this sense when we infer from the fact that bread has nourished us in the past that it will also nourish us in the future.  (There are, of course, other ways to characterize induction, but we can ignore them for the purposes of this post.)Hume asks how we can be rationally justified in reasoning this way, and his answer is that we cannot be.  For there are, he says, only two sorts of purported justifications that could be given, and neither of them works.  The first would justify induction in terms of what Hume calls the “relations of ideas.”  The proposition that all bachelors are unmarried is a stock example of something true by virtue of the relations of ideas.  It is a necessary truth insofar as the idea of being a bachelor logically entails the idea of being unmarried.  Justifying induction in these terms would involve showing, for example, that there is a similar logical relationship, and thus a necessary connection, between the idea of bread and the idea of being nourishing to us.

But there is, Hume argues, no such connection.  For it is at least conceivable that bread could fail to nourish us, in a way it is not conceivable that a bachelor could be married.  In general, it is conceivable with respect to any cause that its usual effect might fail to follow upon it.  Hence we cannot reason on the basis of the relations of ideas to the conclusion that causes that we have not observed will operate like those we have observed.
The other way induction might purportedly be justified would be in terms of “matters of fact.”  The proposition that many bachelors go to singles bars is true, not because the idea of being a bachelor logically entails the idea of going to a singles bar, but rather because it simply happens to be a contingent empirical fact that many bachelors do this.  To justify induction in terms of “matters of fact” would involve arguing that as a matter of contingent empirical fact, induction has been a reliable way of reasoning, so that we have grounds to trust it in the future.
But the trouble with this attempt to justify induction is that it is circular.  To infer from the fact that many observed bachelors have gone to singles bars the conclusion that many unobserved bachelors will do so too presupposes the reliability of induction.  To infer from the fact that induction has been reliable in observed cases the conclusion that it will be reliable in future cases also presupposes the reliability of induction – where its reliability is, in this case, exactly what such an argument is supposed to be showing.
In summary, Hume’s argument against the possibility of justifying induction goes as follows:
1. Induction could be rationally justified only in terms of either the relations of ideas or matters of fact.
2. But it cannot be justified in terms of the relations of ideas, since for any cause and any effect it is conceivable that the one could in the future exist without the other.
3. And it cannot be justified in terms of matters of fact, since such a purported justification would presuppose the reliability of induction and thus beg the question.
4. So induction cannot be rationally justified.
As David Stove once said of Plato’s Theory of Forms, the sequel to Hume’s argument has been centuries of rapturous applause among philosophers.  Stove didn’t mean it as a compliment; he was mocking something he took to be overrated.  The mockery is in my view not justified in Plato’s case, but it would have been justified had the barb been directed instead at Hume’s overrated argument.  For what we have here is one of many instances of Hume’s application of general philosophical presuppositions which we know to be highly problematic at best and demonstrably false at worst. 
First, the initial premise of Hume’s argument is an application of Hume’s Fork, the principle that all knowable propositions concern either relations of ideas or matters of fact.  But Hume’s Fork – which is itself neither true by virtue of the relations of its constituent ideas, nor true by virtue of empirically ascertainable facts – is notoriously self-refuting.  It is as metaphysical a principle as any Hume was trying to undermine with it, and its very promulgation presupposes that there is a third epistemic point of view additional to the two Hume was willing to recognize.  In that case, though, Hume’s celebrated “problem of induction” cannot even get out of the starting gate.  Its entire force depends on a dichotomy that is demonstrably false. 
Nor can the Humean plausibly salvage the argument by softening Hume’s Fork so as to avoid the self-refutation problem.  For the softening can take one of three forms.  The Humean could liberalize the principle by admitting that there is after all a third category in addition to “relations of ideas” and “matters of fact”; or he could maintain this dichotomy while liberalizing the notion of “relations of ideas” in such a way that Hume’s Fork itself will come out true by virtue of the relations of ideas; or he could maintain the dichotomy while liberalizing the notion of “matters of fact” in such a way that Hume’s Fork will come out true by virtue of matters of fact.
Whether and how any of these strategies could be developed in a plausible way is another question.  But the point for present purposes is that, however that might go, if he is going to salvage Hume’s problem of induction, the Humean will have to soften Hume’s Fork in such a way that it will vindicate Hume’ Fork itself without also vindicating induction at the same time.  In particular, the Humean will have to acknowledge a third category of knowable propositions in addition to relations of ideas and matters of fact while at the same time showing that induction isn’t justifiable in terms of this third category.  Or he will have to liberalize the notion of “relations of ideas” while at the same time showing that induction isn’t justifiable in terms of this new, liberalized notion.  Or he will have to liberalize the notion of matters of fact while at the same time showing that induction isn’t justifiable in terms of thatnew, liberalized notion.
Good luck with all that.  Until one of these strategies is actually developed, we don’t really have a Humean “problem of induction.” 
That’s just one problem.  Another is that Hume’s second premise depends on the principle that conceivability is a guide to real possibility.  Now, contemporary philosophers never tire of pointing out how problematic this principle is when Cartesians deploy it in arguments for their brand of dualism.  The Cartesian says that we can clearly conceive, without contradiction, of minds existing in the absence of bodies, and concludes from this that it is therefore possible in principle for minds to exist apart from bodies.  But how, the critic responds, can we rule out the possibility that this seems conceivable only because of a deficiency in our grasp of the mind?  Someone with only a vague understanding of what a Euclidean triangle is might think it possible for such a triangle to have angles that add up to something other than 180 degrees.  When he acquires a better grasp he will realize that this is not in fact possible.  Perhaps, the critic suggests, a more penetrating grasp of the nature of the mind would reveal that it cannot really exist apart from matter.
But the same sort of objection can be raised against Hume (and, in my view, with greater justice).  Perhaps if we had a complete grasp of the nature of bread and the nature of the human body, we would see that it is not in fact possible for bread to fail to be nourishing to us.  If so, then we would be justified in judging that bread will nourish us in the future just as it has in the past.
Now, the reason Hume is so confident that this is not the case is because of what commentators call his copy principle, viz. the thesis that an idea is just a faint copy of an impression.  I have an impressionof red when I am looking at a certain apple.  When the apple is not present I can call to mind what that color looked like, and this mental image is (Hume claims) my idea of red.  More complex ideas are made up of combinations of simpler ones of this sort.  My idea of bread, for example, is just a combination of the idea of a certain color, the idea of a certain shape, the idea of a certain texture, and so forth.  Thus understood, it seems plausible to say that there is nothing in my idea of bread that entails that it will be nourishing in all cases.
But this account of our ideas is ludicrous.  It reflects the imagist thesis that a concept is essentially a kind of mental image, and imagism is demonstrably false.  We have a great many concepts that are clearly not identifiable with mental images.  For example, the concept of triangularity is not identifiable with any mental image.  Any triangle you can imagine will always be of a certain specific color – black, red, green, or whatever – whereas the concept triangularityapplies to all triangles whatever their color.  Any triangle you can imagine will be a right triangle, or an equilateral triangle, or in some other way have features that don’t apply to all triangles, whereas the concept triangularity does apply to all triangles.  And so forth.  This is just the beginning of the problems with imagism.  (Here’s a fun exercise:  Try to identify the mental image that the concept mental imagemight be identified with.) 
Then there is the assumption that all necessity is logicalnecessity, viz. the sort of necessity exhibited by the relations between concepts.  Aristotelians and other non-Humean philosophers would deny this.  They hold that there is a deeper, metaphysical kind of necessity that exists in things themselves and not merely in our concepts of things.  Logical necessity, on this view, is an echo of this deeper sort of necessity.  And the echo might not ring out very strongly in a mind that has too superficial an acquaintance with all the relevant facts.  Hence, suppose that, given the nature of bread and given the nature of a healthy human body, it cannot possibly be the case that bread will fail to nourish such a body.  It may still turn out that a given person might conceive of a scenario wherein bread fails to be nourishing, not because such a failure is really possible, but rather merely because that person’s intellect has not attained a sufficiently penetrating grasp of the natures of bread and of the body.
For the non-Humean, then, it is simply not the case that all propositions are either necessary but mere conceptual truths (“relations of ideas”), or empirical but merely contingent truths (“matters of fact”).  There are also truths which are empirical but nevertheless necessary.  That bread will nourish the body could be a necessary truth even if we can know that it is true (if it is in fact true) only by empirical investigation of the natures of bread and of the body.
Naturally, the Humean will disagree with all of this, but the point is that, unless he offers an independent argument against these alternative ways of understanding the nature of concepts, necessary truth, etc., he will not have given us any non-question-begging reason to believe that there is a “problem of induction.”
The real problem, then, is not the problem of justifying induction.  The real problem is justifying the claim that there is a “problem of induction” that remains once we have put aside the false or otherwise problematic philosophical assumptions that Hume himself deployed when arguing that induction cannot be justified.

Goldman on Dreher’s The Benedict Option

People have been asking me to comment on David Goldman’s review of Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option .  The reason is that among Goldman’s criticisms of Dreher (some of which I agree with) are a set of objections to metaphysical realism, which has its roots in Plato and Aristotle, was central to the thought of medieval philosophers like Aquinas, and was abandoned by nominalists like Ockham – an abandonment which prepared the ground for some of the aspects of modernity Dreher rightly deplores.  (I’ve discussed the nature and consequences of this philosophical shift myself in several places, such as The Last Superstition .)Goldman’s opening shots are directed against the realist claim that things have mind-independent essences or natures.  Goldman writes:

[This] “essence”… is bound up with the idea that collections of things, or universals, have a metaphysical existence independent of the individual members of the collection.  That is what William of Occam denied.  Neither Plato’s theory of Forms nor Aristotle’s theory of Universals ever quite worked… At the age of 18 months my older daughter used the term “Wah-Wah” to refer to any four-legged animal, before she could differentiate between dogs and cats.  Did she fail to grasp the essence of dogs and cats, or merely accept an arbitrary name for the two beasts?  Metaphysical realism says the former, Nominalism the latter.
End quote.  I’m not sure why Goldman thinks this example proves anything.  One problem is that his argument presupposes a false dichotomy.  True, his daughter did not know the essence of either a dog or a cat.  But it doesn’t follow that all she grasped was some label she had arbitrary slapped onto these animals.  Four-leggedness is a universal, and it is what Scholastics would call a “proper accident” of dogs and cats (and other animals too), which flows or follows from their essence.  While her intellect had not penetrated to the essence of these animals, it did abstract out from them a feature which really is characteristic of mature and healthy specimens, even if it is a relatively superficial feature. 
Another problem with Goldman’s objection here is that it seems to presuppose that realists think that the essences of things are fairly easy to determine from cursory inspection.  That is the reverse of the truth.  For Plato, inquiry into the essence of a thing begins with consideration and philosophical criticism of various proposed definitions – Socratic dialectic, which, let it be noted, is not employed by most 18-month-olds.  And the point is to get us ultimately beyondobservable features (like four-leggedness) to an essence which only the intellect, and not the senses, can grasp.
For the Aristotelian realist, meanwhile, we first have to sift out the proper accidents of a thing from its mere contingent accidents.  That requires observation of a wide variety of specimens of a kind, and the noting of which features naturally tend to vary between specimens, which vary only in immature or damaged instances (such as the occasional three-legged dog), and so forth.  Then we can inquire into the essence as that which underlies and grounds (but is not to be identified with) the proper accidents.  As the technical jargon indicates, while the layman certainly might have a rough idea of the essence (or at least of the proper accidents) of everyday things, a rigorous account of essences is for the Aristotelian not possible without careful philosophical and scientific investigation.
It may be that Goldman is taking it for granted that the caricatures of Aristotelian-Scholastic thought one finds in early modern thinkers like Bacon, Descartes, Locke, et al., and which have been repeated ever since in countless histories and pop philosophy books, are more or less accurate portrayals.  Here’s my tip for those commenting on medieval and early modern intellectual history: Never do that.  (Contemporary historians of medieval and early modern philosophy – including, let it be noted, secular historians with no theological ax to grind – have mostly moved beyond these caricatures.  Unfortunately, their work has had little effect on non-experts.) 
Goldman develops his objection further, as follows:
The same problems that Plato and Aristotle encountered persist through the 20th century in the form of paradoxes in set theory.  Do infinite sets have an independent metaphysical existence or are they simply arbitrary constructs by the mathematicians?  That is related to the famous problem of the Continuum Hypothesis, which Kurt Gödel and Paul Cohen showed to be independent of any known system of mathematical logic.  Georg Cantor, who discovered transfinite numbers and demonstrated that there are different densities of infinity, hoped to prove that the rational numbers and the real numbers constituted the first two such densities, and that no other kind of infinity could be identified in between them.  Gödel’s answer appears to be that there are an infinite number of infinities, but we do not know in what order to put them, a conclusion that pleases neither Realists nor Nominalists, and has not created a consensus among mathematicians, let alone philosophers.
End quote.  Needless to say, multiple complex issues are raised in this passage, but for present purposes it will suffice to make two points.  First, Goldman once again presupposes a false dichotomy.  We are not limited to regarding sets as either “hav[ing] an independent metaphysical existence” or as “simply arbitrary constructs.”  The first option commits us to something like Plato’s “third realm” of abstract objects, and the second to the idea that mathematics is essentially a free play of signs.  The Aristotelian, of course, rejects both positions.  As with universals and mathematical objects in general, the Aristotelian view is that the abstractions of set theory do not exist as Platonic objects, but are nevertheless by no means the free creations of the mind.  Rather, the intellect abstracts them from real, mind-independent features of concrete particulars. 
(While Aristotelian realism has always been on the menu of options where the problem of universals is concerned, it has, unfortunately, been neglected in modern philosophy of mathematics.  Fortunately, James Franklin’s recent book An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics has begun to remedy that.)
Second, set theory and mathematical logic are, of course, exact sciences and paradigms of objective knowledge.  Their results are ironclad; you are not going to change them by tinkering with the symbols we use to express them.  That is, of course, a well-known problem with interpreting them nominalistically, and it is a problem that cannot be conjured away merely by citing difficulties with the Platonist alternative.  And if both nominalism and Platonism are judged problematic, that is itself an argument for the conclusion that there must be a third alternative – an alternative which is, of course, precisely what the Aristotelian claims to possess.
Goldman has other arrows in his quiver.  He says:
It wasn’t William of Occam who overthrew the medieval order, though, but Leibniz and Newton, who demonstrated – against Aristotle – that there are indeed objects in our mind that are not in our senses that nonetheless are provably real: for example, the arbitrarily small (“infinitesimal”) increments of movement of cannonball in flight that the Calculus can sum up into a positive number…
Here too, however, Goldman seems to misunderstand the Aristotelian position.  To be sure, Aristotelians do indeed hold that all knowledge is grounded in sense experience.  But they also hold that the intellect is capable of abstracting out from what is observed patterns that could not themselves be observed.  For example, the senses reveal particular triangles and trees to us, and the intellect abstracts out the universals triangularity and tree-ness.  These universals could not themselves be observed.  You can observe this or that particular triangle, but you cannot observe triangularity in the abstract; you can observe this or that particular tree, but you cannot observe tree-ness in the abstract; and so forth.  This is why, for the Aristotelian, to have a concept of a thing is not the same as being able to imagineit.  You cannot literally imagine triangularity in the abstract, because anything you can imagine is going to be merely some particular triangle or other – a black right triangle, say – rather than what is common to all triangles.  Still, it is only by working over the raw material provided by the senses that the intellect can proceed to abstract out these patterns.  In the absence of this raw material, the intellect would be inert.
Now, early modern rationalists and empiricists did not like this particular combination of views, and each responded by preserving one half of the Aristotelian position and chucking out the other half.  Rationalists agreed with the Aristotelian that concepts cannot be identified with mental images and went beyond anything we could observe.  But the rationalists judged that, if that is the case, then (contra Aristotle) concepts cannot really be derived even indirectly from sensory experience.  Hence their adoption of the doctrine of innate ideas.  Modern empiricists, meanwhile, agreed with the Aristotelians that sensory experience must be the foundation of all our concepts.  But they judged that, if that is the case, then (contra Aristotle) the intellect cannot really arrive at concepts that go beyond anything we could experience.  Hence they tended to identify concepts with mental images and to conflate the faculties of intellect and imagination.  (This is the source of all the metaphysical mischief we find in Berkeley and Hume.  Correct this one simple error and their entire systems collapse.  But I digress.)
Goldman’s problem is that he is essentially attributing to the Aristotelian the account of concept formation that we find at least implicit in Locke and explicit in Berkeley and Hume.  For only given that modern empiricist position can the sorts of examples Goldman cites seem problematic.  Goldman might yet reject the Aristotelian position for other reasons, but it is no objection at all to point out that we have concepts of things we cannot directly experience.  For that is just what the Aristotelian himself has always affirmed.
(For readers interested in the dispute between realism and nominalism and related issues, I might note that my forthcoming book Five Proofs of the Existence of God deals with these matters in considerable detail, in a long chapter devoted to the Augustinian argument from eternal truths.)
Goldman has one last objection against metaphysical realism.  It is this:
Unlike Rod Dreher, I don’t see the Middle Ages as a model to return to.  The mathematicians and physicists overthrew Scholasticism, and the philosophers came trundling along afterward to sweep up the pieces.  Thanks to them we live in a world where no-one need starve, where mothers need not bury half their infant children, and where I can tap the entire store of human knowledge from the device on which I am now writing.  The theology that attended the scientific revolution assigned extraordinary freedom and responsibility to individuals...
Once again, though, Goldman presents us with a false alternative.  He seems to think that to embrace the metaphysical realism of Aquinas and Co. requires rejecting the scientific and political benefits of modern society.  But that simply isn’t the case. 
It is true that the “mathematization” of nature facilitated the predictive and technological successes of modern science, with all the good that has come from them.  But this is in no way incompatible with the central claims of metaphysical realism.  It merely reflects a difference in emphasis.  The ancients and medievals were more interested in the why of things than in the how.  They wanted to know our first cause and last end, and thus tended to focus on issues like the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.  The specific mechanisms by which the material world operates were, for them, of merely secondary interest.  The moderns, by contrast, turned their attention precisely to those mechanisms, and in general made of intellectual life a more practical and this-worldly enterprise than it had been for the ancients and medievals.  It is hardly surprising that, having turned their attentions to the precise workings of this world, they found out more about them than their predecessors had.
Similarly, emphasizing as they did the social nature of man and the eternal destiny of the individual soul, the ancients and medievals were less concerned than the moderns are with improving political arrangements in a way that would encourage individual initiative and liberty.      
Naturally, one could criticize the ancients and medievals for being insufficiently attentive to improving life in the here and now.  But by the same token, one could also criticize the moderns for having swung the pendulum too far in the opposite direction.  A conservative like Goldman would surely agree that the aspects of modernity he rightly celebrates have their downside too.  Respect for science too often degenerates into scientism; respect for individual initiative and liberty too often degenerates into contempt for traditional institutions and the demands of social order.
Be all that as it may, the fact that modernity has brought us certain benefits simply does not by itself show that it was in everyway an improvement over what came before, or that the ancients and medievals have nothing to teach us, or that there isn’t a baby out there who got thrown out with the bathwater and needs to be retrieved. 

David Braine (1940 – 2017)

Philosopher David Braine has died.  A very moving obituary by Alan Fimister has appeared at the Catholic Herald.  Braine was a longtime contributor to the analytical Thomist movement, and the author of many important articles and books.  The latter include The Reality of Time and the Existence of God (reviewed by W. Norris Clarke here), The Human Person: Animal and Spirit , and Language and Human Understanding (discussed by Peter Leithart hereand reviewed by Nathaniel Goldberg here).
Wikipedia has a useful listof Braine’s published articles.  Braine’s reflections on Pope John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio can be found here.  University of Aberdeen web page here.  R.I.P.

Inaugural open thread

Threadjacking is, of course, a sin, a mortal sin, a nigh unforgivable sin.  And yet, dear reader, perhaps I have enabled it by neglecting to provide a venue in which all the various topics which come up at this here blog may be discussed even when they are not the subject matter of the post du jour.  So, by way of experimentation, this will be the first of perhaps a series of occasional open threads.  Wanna talk about predestination?  Prestidigitation?  Pre-prandial potables?  Abelard and Heloise, Lee and Kirby, Fagen and Becker?  Practical reason?  Impractical Jokers?  Have at it.  Mi casa es su casa.
However, since mi casa is also mi casa, please use your common sense.  No flame wars.  Keep it classy.  Given the nature of this blog, discussions with at least some vague connection to matters philosophical or theological is preferred, even if not absolutely essential.  Naturally, I reserve the right to intervene violently to break up brawls and otherwise restore order.Embedded commenting is enabled in order to facilitate this experiment.  Let’s see how it works out…

Shea apologizes

In some recent posts, I have been objectingto some things Mark Shea has been saying when commenting on the forthcoming book on capital punishment I co-authored with Joe Bessette.  In an email and in a post at his own blog, Shea has now graciously apologized.  I am happy to accept his apology.
Shea has also posted the apology at his Facebook page.