The Human Question

The first evidence that the human psyche in some way transcends the limitations of matter is not the epistemological claim that we know necessary and universal truths but the fact that we desire to do so.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-I_9e5qxnc It is discussed here: http://thomism.wordpress.com/2013/05/20/note-on-the-clayton-dennett-debate/

To "see" freedom, one must regard actions as speech-like, for speech occurs in the context of a shared pursuit of a common good, which is--ultimately--goodness itself. Question: are these speech-like acts more like a declarative or more like an imperative (sentence)?

Isn't the claim that we can't make a claim regarding the totality of beings itself a claim that claims to be true in all times and places?

What if each "verse" in the multiverse is (improbably but actually) ordained towards life?

If we recognize that our knowledge of causality is anthropocentric (i.e., that our own agency is our paradigm of causality) without supposing that this realization in any way entails a Kantian withdrawal from the noumenon, then "naturalism" will no longer look anti-supernatural.  For we will see that nature par excellence is a human interacting with his or her environment because he or she seeks goodness itself. The hand that shapes and directs the world is directed by eyes that look beyond it.

Edward Feser quotes this book in his own on Aquinas.

Through ritual we share in the gestures before of Reality made by those who have gone before us.

The meaning of words is always to be found in what we understand them to mean rather than in what this or that person understands at this moment.

We are only able to come up with something new (i.e., become creative) because we are not trying just to fix this or that problem, but because we are trying to figure out how everything fits together.  Wonder concerning the world is the root of creativity.

G. E. Moore asked us to do a thought experiment in order to determine whether things have an absolute value apart from their being perceived.  We are asked to imagine that we are a god who can choose between creating two worlds, one in which beauty can be found even though no perceivers inhabit it (e.g., a world with the Grand Canyon or its like), and another in which beauty is entirely lacking (e.g., New Jersey).  GEM believes a reasonable being would prefer to create the beautiful world --even though no one will ever perceive it, and he takes this as evidence that some things have value even apart from our valuing them. (This based on Professor Grimm's lecture #13 from A Question of Value) But isn't the point of this thought experiment rather the fact that we value the very existence of some things apart from our perceiving them?  Maybe I'm not really disagreeing with Moore here.  But his thought experiment seems to point to a contemplative dimension in human nature, an

The temporal is, ideally, the sacrament of the eternal.

In lecture 10 of Professor Grim's Question of Value, the speaker mentions that children in Trobrian society are raised by the mother and the mother's brother.  Apart from conceiving, the mother's lover does not father the child at all. He also mentions that Trobriands do not believe that men who have intercourse with mothers-to-be do not contribute anything positive to the child's life.  They merely open the womb so that a spirit-ancestor of the mother can enter and inhabit it. Given this belief about conception, the Trobriand way of raising children makes sense.  For the child brother has more in common the child's origin than the lover.

It seems that retributivism focues on the past and rehabilitation/preventionism focuses on the future.  But what about the present?  Could Feinberg's expressive theory of punishment be seen as present focused?

What if the same anti-metaphysical bias that moves a positivist to insist that God-talk is gibberish also leads to a purely instrumentalist epistemology of science?

Why not suppose that -- prior to the revaluation described in Nietzsche's boo -- the NOBLES (i.e, the powerful) revalued the morals of the priestly class?  After all, it's the powerful who do that sort of thing nowadays...

http://www.strangenotions.com

I need to review the lectures on "The Spiritual Brain" that talk about the suspension of the parietal lobe. In that lecture, Professor Andrew Newburg talks about a loss of self combines with a religious experience. Perhaps the so-called "self" that is lost is the spatially localized self, but the self that remains is one with only an indeterminate (but not utterly abstracted) sense of how one interacts with one's local environment. Perhaps the religious awareness had by those in this suspended state is an aspect of our our moment to moment experience, but one that gets drowned out, as it were, by the noise of our bodily interactions. If the latter is at least partially plausible, then I would refer all of this to a thought experiment offered by Fr. Luigi Giussani in the The Religious Sense where he asks us to reflect what an infant's awareness of the world is like.

Is there something teleological about the half-life of an isotope?

I will use the term "preternaturalism" to designate a willingness to posit causes that are less than divine but which stand above and beyond those observable ones we see operating within the laws of nature. A naturalist might oppose theistic arguments from miracles or design by arguing for the possibility of preternatural causes.  Such an argument, however, would bring us back to Zeus and Hera, tree nymphs and  the like: a supernatural explanation would, by contrast, be more conducive toward a scientific approach to nature (i.e., positing only laws that are falsifiable when doing science).

I've covered this theme before... while searching for a way to apply the notion of primitive impetus/energy to that of the first mover.  This time, however, I am attempting to use it to demonstrate the existence of soul (form that animates living matter). Mechanism as we initially encounter it is always found in something that serves as a machine/device FOR someone.    It is a device that always makes use of energy that it itself does not produce.   Fuel; charge; H2O (for a waterwheel); it has its own ready-made impetus; aiming for something on its own.   Humans at most trigger the energy release.   There is no such thing as a purely mechanistic system.   The question is, however, whether a human being is the kind of whole that can have its own proper impetus…. Or whether only very, very little things (gravitons?) can be said to have such properties.

I need to point out how intellection is impossible without experientia... the latter possibly being particularly relatable to the neocortex, the former going beyond and perhaps using latter as in some way containing and referring to what is beyond itself...indefinitely.

I can argue that objects of math are objective in a way that seems to guide and be inclined toward by the material world.  It seems, furthermore, that there are similar ideal objects of practical reasoning (beauty, truth, justice).  But if the relation between the mathematical and practical within us is such that the former is like a aperture and the latter is like light, it would seem that the objects of practical reasoning are just as real as are those of mathematical reasoning.  That is, the highest being is... Provident and infinitely perfect.

In my book, I might point out that, while I reject dualism, it makes more sense than materialism.  Then I can point out who holism/hylomorphism balances objections and advantages of both extremes. Later comment: I just read Feser's book on analytical philosophy: he makes the same point. 

The only place to begin to teach this distinction is with a reflection on agency.  There you find identity through time par excellence.  To start with playdough and talk about how it can take on shapes is to make oneself vulnerable to objections of a Heraclitean nature.  Not so with agency.

Somewhere Hume says it is conceivable that at least one thing can come into being without  a cause, and he illustrates this claim, I believe, with the example of a rabbit that at one moment is not imagined to be somewhere (i.e., at whatever location one is imagining) and at the next moment is in full view.  Hume thinks this illustrates the possible event of a thing coming to be without a cause.  But it seems to me that it might equally be an example of creatio ex nihilo .

Thanks, Tim, for this link: http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/05/08/on-templeton/ The author doesn't really give an argument for his position in this post: he just underscores how strongly motivated he is to refuse money from the Templeton foundation. I'll post this link for now and later (after having submitted grades) find out what makes him tick. ***Later on*** Here is his statement of why religion and science are incompatible: http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2009/06/23/science-and-religion-are-not-compatible/

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/jimmy-akin/did-animals-die-before-the-fall/ Akin below: Aquinas.... writes: In the opinion of some, those animals which now are fierce and kill others, would, in that state, have been tame, not only in regard to man, but also in regard to other animals. But this is quite unreasonable. For the nature of animals was not changed by man's sin, as if those whose nature now it is to devour the flesh of others, would then have lived on herbs, as the lion and falcon. Nor does Bede's gloss on Genesis 1:30, say that trees and herbs were given as food to all animals and birds, but to some. Thus there would have been a natural antipathy between some animals  [ Summa Theologiae I:96:1 ad 2 ].  Aquinas thus holds that it was not  all  death that entered the world through man's sin, but human  death.

An interesting article on intelligence and naturalism: http://stacytrasancos.com/the-self-defeating-argument-about-intelligence/