The Human Question

Okay, these are just philosophical doodlings that I hope will still make sense when I look at them again tomorrow. It occurred to me that what Aristotle calls techne and Aquinas calls ars might be called engineering in English.  That is, the systematic knowledge of how to make something.  More than a trademan's skill.  The creative ability of an architect, engineer, cure-finder-in-medicine, a chef who invents a new recipe... stuff like that. In any case, it pertains to such "engineers" to look at items in nature as instruments in new sense of the term "instrument."  They look at such an item as capable of serving diverse human purposes.  Perhaps such a way of seeing nature is part of a process that leads to the inquiry into things having purposes of their own apart from instrumentality to human goals.  But that is another theme for another day.  For now I want to explore the relation between this instrumentality and math. It seems to me that math...

This post is still being edited... it's pretty unclear as written... hopefully editing will clarify This has to do with the problems with a utilitarian understanding of motivation when it is used in evolutionary psychology.  Utilitarians look at human actions have genuine desirability solely in terms of the expected consequences. No inherently desirable actions. But they grant that repeated action can cause one fuse (or better, confuse) the desirability of the action with that of the outcome. Hence the admiration we have for virtues such as courage. Replace "repeated action" with "repeated generations" and you have at least one explanation of the origin of virtue quoted with approval by Darwin in the Descent of Man. And you are not far from today's evolutionary psychology. The problem is, why would any animal act courageously to protect kin in the first place? The initial answer, it seems to me must be that we should be asking a related quest...

Aquinas authored (or perhaps customized) five arguments for the existence of God called, not-so-creatively, the "five ways."  The third way argues that the existence of contingent beings (i.e., beings that can go out of existence) requires a necessary being.  And not just any necessary being; rather, one that does not derive its necessity from any other. This argument has been criticized for committing the fallacy of composition when its initial argument claims that because each component in the universe can go out of existence therefore the universe as a whole could go entirely out of existence. Apart from noting the fallacy of composition (which I think may not be an insurmountable problem)  have the following problem.  Aquinas begins the argument by proposing that since everything material CAN corrupt, therefore it must at some time do so (i.e., go out of existence), but he clearly believes that some material things are incorruptible: the spheres that guide th...

That is the Latin expression used by Aquinas in his first way of proving the existence of God.  It means all that is moved is moved by another.  All it means is that things that are moved are not moved by themselves but are instead moved by another.  It does NOT mean that all things that are in motion are moved by another.  The latter claim actually contradicts what Aristotle and Aquinas thought about natural motion (up/down for light/heavy things).  That is, heavy/light substances naturally move down/up in virtue of their form.  No need to posit an efficient (moving) cause.  Not unlike what we would say now about gravity, the four forces (or is it five this week?).  [digression: the real point of Aristotle in saying {in Greek, not Latin, of course} omne quod movetur... is to contradict Plato's notion of a self-moved mover: no such thing possible for Aristotle] All that stuff people say about the need for a medium is inapplicable to natural mo...

Natural scientists aspire to be able to explain nature in quantitative terms : that is, terms of its common sensible characteristics as well as the force, and other quantifiable characteristics needed to explain changes in common sensible characteristics. out the recognition of the qualitative features of experience. Thomas Nagel recognized this problem in his article "What's it like to be a Bat?" That article points out that scientific knowledge of how a bat perceives can never convey the experience that a bat has from a bat's point of view. These perceptual notes are called qualia what it's like for a to perceive, so that if we never perceive things the way a bat does, we wouldn't know how to point out that part of nature that indicates that, when you've then you will leave out the recognition of the qualitative features of nature or experience, including the proper-sensibles. But that is not to say that these qualia are immaterial. Rather, it ma...