[Serious] Book reports

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Reading (re-reading, actually) Twain's 'Following The Equator'.  While actually a travelogue, he spends roughly a third of the book discussing the religious practices of the various cultures he encounters, particularly India.

He concludes that, 'True irreverence is disrespect for another man's god.'

Boru

[GrandizerII]

Reading (re-reading, actually) Twain's 'Following The Equator'.  While actually a travelogue, he spends roughly a third of the book discussing the religious practices of the various cultures he encounters, particularly India.

He concludes that, 'True irreverence is disrespect for another man's god.'

Boru

Sounds like a book I would love to eventually read.

So, just got done reading the bit about act and potency in the first part of the second chapter of Feser's "Aquinas". Generally speaking, the way Feser explains "act" and "potency" makes sense, and examples are provided to illustrate these notions. I still wonder if Aquinas (and by proxy, Feser) hold to the view that "potentiality" is something that almost spookily "waits" for certain conditions to actualize it ... as opposed to being incidentally actualized because a set of conditions occurred that naturally leads to the actualization. When he writes of the "gooeyness potential" of a rubber ball, does he mean there is this inactive tendency that actually exists and is ready to be actualized if/when the ball is subjected to heat? Or does he simply mean that when the rubber ball is subjected to heat, it will melt and become gooey, and in this sense the "gooeyness potential" was actualized? The bit I've read so far doesn't make clear enough to me what he's really saying in regard to this question, though he does make clear that potency cannot exist on its own and without reference to the corresponding act FWIW.

A bit of an aside, I think I'm more on the side of Parmenides with regards to whether change is ultimately an illusion or not. But the reasoning made by Parmenides, as described by the author of this book, does seem to reflect the mind of an ancient thinker who had to put in great mental effort to come up with views that, in this day and age, many of us take for granted as either intuitively true or intuitively false. In other words, they had to think hard about various "simple" topics so that "we wouldn't have to". Well, we still have to think hard about philosophical topics, but we at least are able to make reference to a wide variety of past philosophical views that help to set a foundation for our modernized intuitions.

[Belacqua]

Reading (re-reading, actually) Twain's 'Following The Equator'.  While actually a travelogue, he spends roughly a third of the book discussing the religious practices of the various cultures he encounters, particularly India.

He concludes that, 'True irreverence is disrespect for another man's god.'

Boru

Sounds like a book I would love to eventually read.

I guess I don't understand why he makes showing disrespect for someone else's god a desirable thing. Irreverence is easy. 

still wonder if Aquinas (and by proxy, Feser) hold to the view that "potentiality" is something that almost spookily "waits" for certain conditions to actualize it ... as opposed to being incidentally actualized because a set of conditions occurred that naturally leads to the actualization. When he writes of the "gooeyness potential" of a rubber ball, does he mean there is this inactive tendency that actually exists and is ready to be actualized if/when the ball is subjected to heat? Or does he simply mean that when the rubber ball is subjected to heat, it will melt and become gooey, and in this sense the "gooeyness potential" was actualized? 

Maybe I missed it, but I didn't get the impression that there's anything spooky going on. Each object, due to its nature, has a set of potential things it can do or become. The rubber ball can become gooey, in the right conditions, but it can't become edible. Whether the various potentials get activated or not depends on various factors. 

Obviously quantum physics is out of my area, but some people are taking Aristotle-type potentialities seriously as a way to explain certain strange behaviors. 

https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context...-realities

This suggests that various potentialities do somehow exist concurrently before they become actualized. 

 

In other words, they had to think hard about various "simple" topics so that "we wouldn't have to".

I like that! 

It's amazing to think they could do all that. Such basic things that everybody saw -- like change and motion -- yet the desire to conceptualize and explain turned out to be fantastically difficult, and require explanations that nobody would have expected. 

And they didn't even have coffee!

[Belacqua]

And to report back about the book on Plotinus I'm reading now -- since at heart I'm much more of a Platonist than an Aristotelian.....

Plotinus has expanded on Plato's idea that the passion of Eros is the only thing that can guide us to the truth. This is fascinating to me because it goes so clearly against our modern ideas.

For us, emotion is always what clouds reason. Science is true because it removes passion.

Yet, as Blake made so clear, science is abstraction. We say it's empirical -- based in the senses -- but the truth of science once you've got to it is not sensory but abstract. To understand mass and energy, you have to understand Einstein's famous formula, which is numbers -- abstractions. I was surprised to learn, back when I was translating for brain researchers, that all the research papers about fMRI results present abstractions from the real results. The pretty pictures of activated brain regions are averages combined, after the outliers have been discarded, and it may well be that not a single individual was exactly like the "true picture" offered.

Plotinus seems to reject this kind of thing nearly as much as Blake. Our emotional and personal reaction to the world is what is real, while the quantified abstraction is a copy.

So here I made a connection I wasn't expecting: my novel-reading group is reading The Good Apprentice by Iris Murdoch. She was a Platonist, too, and much of her fiction is about irrational passions among people. She argues that, paradoxically, only those who are in love with someone can see that person clearly. This, again, is so against the grain that it seems just crazy at first. Love is blind and smoke gets in your eyes, etc. But it's precisely the irrational valuing of someone -- who to everyone else seems disposable or interchangeable -- which pushes us to see the true worth and character of the person.

Whether we want to say that the centering of passion is religion or not I guess is something people could debate. It isn't science. But it may be that religion has been the structure through which this irrational valuing has expressed itself in Europe. Blake, though affecting to despise Plato, was an early critic of the scientizing of all values, and he did it from a Christian framework.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Sounds like a book I would love to eventually read.

I guess I don't understand why he makes showing disrespect for someone else's god a desirable thing. Irreverence is easy. 

He isn't making it a desirable thing, he's pointing out that it's a hypocritical thing.  I guess it wasn't as plain as I thought it would be, so here's the context:

Twain mentions a newspaper story about a gaggle of British and American tourists holding a picnic/dance party in the Taj Mahal.  No one seems particularly shocked by this (no Westerners, that is), so Twain asks the reader to imagine that a group of Muslims were to do with same thing in a place sacred to British or Americans, such as Westminster Abbey, or a Quaker meeting house.  His point is that it is hypocritical of someone to be shocked when their religion is disrespected or their sacred places profaned while at the same time they do the same thing to others'. Twain didn't see a lot of value in religion, but he was a right bear when it came to religious freedom.

I see now that it was hard to understand without the context.  Apologies.

Boru

[Belacqua]

I guess I don't understand why he makes showing disrespect for someone else's god a desirable thing. Irreverence is easy. 

He isn't making it a desirable thing, he's pointing out that it's a hypocritical thing.  I guess it wasn't as plain as I thought it would be, so here's the context:

Twain mentions a newspaper story about a gaggle of British and American tourists holding a picnic/dance party in the Taj Mahal.  No one seems particularly shocked by this (no Westerners, that is), so Twain asks the reader to imagine that a group of Muslims were to do with same thing in a place sacred to British or Americans, such as Westminster Abbey, or a Quaker meeting house.  His point is that it is hypocritical of someone to be shocked when their religion is disrespected or their sacred places profaned while at the same time they do the same thing to others'. Twain didn't see a lot of value in religion, but he was a right bear when it came to religious freedom.

I see now that it was hard to understand without the context.  Apologies.

Boru

Thank you! I really did read that the wrong way. My suspicious mind, I guess. 

Twain was a brilliant guy and obviously ahead of his time.

[GrandizerII]

Maybe I missed it, but I didn't get the impression that there's anything spooky going on. Each object, due to its nature, has a set of potential things it can do or become. The rubber ball can become gooey, in the right conditions, but it can't become edible. Whether the various potentials get activated or not depends on various factors.

I agree, and the author doesn't clearly make any statement that comes off as spooky in this regard. I guess I'm just thinking ahead to what the author may eventually say in the later parts of the book, but honestly, so far things have generally made sense (when I don't read too much into what the author is saying). Actuality is prior to potentiality. I agree with this for sure.

Obviously quantum physics is out of my area, but some people are taking Aristotle-type potentialities seriously as a way to explain certain strange behaviors. 

https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context...-realities

This suggests that various potentialities do somehow exist concurrently before they become actualized.

Interesting interpretation, but still raises more questions for me than it answers. I mean, the interpretation involves a list of potentialities existing actually, yet only one of them is actualized? The researchers acknowledge this is really strange but that we should not dismiss it just because it is "unimaginable". Still, this doesn't sound right, and I feel there are better interpretations out there anyway (my favorite is the many-worlds interpretation).

So, anyway, just got done reading the bit on hylemorphism, for which Feser makes a good case. In the material world, you can't have matter without form and form without matter. But I think a case should be made here that materialists don't necessarily disagree with the conception of form as something that exists. A ball, to be a ball, obviously needs to be in the shape of a ball, and I doubt materialists would generally disagree with that. That said, not sure exactly what point Feser was trying to make against materialists in this section, but perhaps it'll be made more clear later in the book. The stuff about angels and other immaterial beings does make me eyeroll and, apparently, he does elaborate on this later on in the book. We'll see.

[Belacqua]

I agree, and the author doesn't clearly make any statement that comes off as spooky in this regard. I guess I'm just thinking ahead to what the author may eventually say in the later parts of the book, but honestly, so far things have generally made sense (when I don't read too much into what the author is saying). Actuality is prior to potentiality. I agree with this for sure.

I think this is the interesting thing about the book -- or someone might say the sneaky thing, if they were so inclined. It starts off very matter-of-fact and self-evident, and then builds one baby step at a time to conclusions that are wildly beyond self-evident. I guess if we're going to knock it down, we'd have to point to exactly which baby step goes wrong. As long as he stays with natural, non-revealed theology, I haven't put my finger on a misstep, but that may be my own limitation. 

So, anyway, just got done reading the bit on hylemorphism, for which Feser makes a good case. In the material world, you can't have matter without form and form without matter. But I think a case should be made here that materialists don't necessarily disagree with the conception of form as something that exists. A ball, to be a ball, obviously needs to be in the shape of a ball, and I doubt materialists would generally disagree with that. That said, not sure exactly what point Feser was trying to make against materialists in this section, but perhaps it'll be made more clear later in the book. The stuff about angels and other immaterial beings does make me eyeroll and, apparently, he does elaborate on this later on in the book. We'll see.

I've never understood why hylomorphism itself is controversial. To me it seems kind of like saying that everything has a left side and a right side, and that you can't have one without the other. Yet I've had people on this forum (or was it TTA?) flip out when I mention it.

On a recent thread about the soul I tried to explain how for Aristotelians, "soul" is just another name for a person's form. This is how lots of people have used the word. Though maybe people would like to avoid the word "soul" because of its implications, I thought it made sense. For example, it acknowledges that disembodied souls are impossible, because morphe always has hyle. And Thomas is clear that when Christians say one's morphe can be transferred at death to a different hyle, it is faith and not a proven argument. 

There are ways hylomorphism gets applied that won't satisfy us moderns. For example, Aristotle explains knowledge by saying that your mind takes in a portion of a thing's form but not its matter. (So form can exist separate from matter, but only mentally, as idea.) This makes sense to me as metaphor, and possibly more than metaphor, though I'm not sure. It kind of seems right to say that when I know of Mt. Fuji, I call to mind a portion of its form -- I remember its shape, its appearance. But of course its matter is too big to fit into my little skull. 

As for angels and that -- I don't recall that Feser ever tried to build a case for them that would satisfy people who don't already believe! I'm pretty sure that case is made by Neoplatonists like Pseudo-Dionysius who argue from a Great Chain of Being type argument -- from dead prime matter to humans there is a chain of lower-to-higher beings, and this means for them that there must also be a chain from people to God of different beings as well. With the hierarchy being one of more active mind. But that's another book.

[mordant]

So here I made a connection I wasn't expecting: my novel-reading group is reading The Good Apprentice by Iris Murdoch. She was a Platonist, too, and much of her fiction is about irrational passions among people. She argues that, paradoxically, only those who are in love with someone can see that person clearly. This, again, is so against the grain that it seems just crazy at first. Love is blind and smoke gets in your eyes, etc. But it's precisely the irrational valuing of someone -- who to everyone else seems disposable or interchangeable -- which pushes us to see the true worth and character of the person.

I don't know. It cuts both ways. One who is "in love" (in the throes of cathexis) sees an idealistic version of the love object. It is in a sense a virtue in itself to value the beloved as if they weren't in fact objectively no different than a zillion other people of similar character and ability and personality. However ... noble-feeling though it may be, eventually one must give back their projections, take the beloved off their pedestal, and allow them to breathe and be human. And then we're right back where we started.

I think Sartre had it more right with his "hell is other people". By which he meant, in large part, that you can't know yourself fully without the judgments and criticisms and demands of other people, most especially those who know you best. That is not the same as saying people or relationships are a waste of time or that they provide more pain than pleasure ... that's a very individual calculus. But I think it means that relationships cannot be all rainbows and unicorns and pleasure. It is also the pain of standing naked (metaphorically) before another, without masks, and risking finding out that not you're all virtue and nobility and just generally an overlooked diamond of a person. It's a relatively high risk actually, especially after the honeymoon period in any relationship, when you start to grate on other people's nerves.

Real and honest relationships more often than not end up with the parties thereto saying "I know you and I love you ... ANYWAY". Not because you're perfect, or more special, but exactly because you're not. It's an affirmation of the bedrock value and worthiness of a person based not on their exceptional qualities but on their humanity. It is seeing someone as they truly are -- imperfections and all -- and not discarding them in some misguided notion that there is someone out there who is more perfect or worthy of your love. You could choose to see the value in someone else ... but you've chosen to see it and commit to it in THIS particular person, despite that their table manners are lacking or that they snore or fart in their sleep or can sometimes be an inconsiderate ass. Because you know that equivalent unsavory things are true of you, too.

So count me, I guess, as one who is not an idealist. It is just too exhausting making excuses for the real features of an imperfect other person who is "supposed" to be the embodiment of all your hopes and dreams for a partner in life. It reminds me of making excuses for this supposedly deeply interventionist god I used to worship when it was self-evident that he was not intervening whatsoever. At least with a human partner, you're dealing with someone who is REAL. But for that to be completely true -- so that you're not dealing with some highly stylized fantasy overlay rather than the person themself -- you must accept not only their flesh and blood reality, but their failings and weaknesses. In my experience ... most potential partners are not up for that. And they certainly are not committed to know you and hold fast to you in that real sort of way.

[GrandizerII]

Just finished the section (in Feser's book) related to the Aristotelian notion of causality (efficient, formal, material, final) along with the author's address of the Humean thinking with regards to causality.

This section (despite the title of the book) was a bit of a tough read for me. Some of the stuff I would have loved more elaboration on, and I am left not completely understanding what he really means by such words as "end" or "goal". For me, final causality is a very iffy thing. I get that final causality does not require the agent to be conscious in order to be directed to a certain effect, but something about directedness nevertheless does appear to imply some ultimate "goalmaker". I am not sure how a heart pumping blood into the circulatory system would imply that there's an end towards which the heart does what it does, unless there is an intelligent ultimate designer of this world who allowed for the eventual formation of the heart so that it would be able to do so for the sake of keeping the human body alive and well. Under the worldview in which such a designer does not exist, and/or evolution is purely a blind process (before the emergence of human beings at least), I'm not confident in saying that the heart has evolved in order to keep the human body alive and well.

Additionally, I don't think Feser made a good case against Humean causality in this section. It may be very convenient to speak of causality (even in the Aristotelian sense) in our everyday languages and at the level of our everyday experiences, and it's fair to say that causality makes a lot of sense according to our intuitions. But we should take more care when we then try to apply our causality intuitions to the more sophisticated language(s) we use when we start to do philosophy and talk about the fundamentals of this world/reality.

Given what we know/observe about this world in terms of structure, and in light of the fact that there are things that occur in this world that are not completely predictable (even if we had access to all knowledge pertaining to this world), I'm personally inclined to generally agree with Hume here. Even at the point of a violently-thrown brick striking the glass of a window, because of the apparent randomness of the particles that constitute both the brick and the window, the window could potentially break in more than one specific way and could also potentially not break at all (unless there is something about the forces of nature that prevent this from happening). In other words, because of what we've been able to observe at the quantum level, I can't say that bricks and glass windows could ever be used as part of an analogy that adequately explains what causality is ultimately. We speak of the brick causing a break in the window glass, but really what is happening is that a bunch of particles interacted with one another in an apparently random way so that a specific state in spacetime occurs and that this specific state could instead have been a slightly different or even perhaps a radically different state in that same "spacetime zone".

This is how I see it for now at least. Anyhow, one good thing from reading this section was there was quite a bit to learn that I didn't know before ... even if I didn't end up agreeing with some of the stuff being said. Furthermore, despite my skepticism of causality, I still want to carry on assuming Aristotelian metaphysics as I continue to read through the book just to see how strong the eventually-stated arguments for God made by Aquinas/Feser hold under these assumptions.