The Human Question

The reductionist naturally regards the concept of agency as a pre-scientific misunderstanding.  That is because a materialist of this stripe believes that human activities such as wishing, thinking, and moving are nothing but processes going on in the brain. These processes are in principle identifiable through scientific observation: that is, a scientist can correlate different aspects of experience (perception, emotion, thought, etc.) reported by a subject with different processes occurring in different parts of that subject's brain.  But the unified way in which those features occur in the subject is not to be found through any such observation.  For example, at this moment I am sitting, typing on a keyboard, sub-vocalizing what I am writing, focusing on my computer screen while being peripherally aware of the rest of my office, and starting to feel hungry.  Each of these aspects of my experience may be correlated with different physical processes going on in different parts of

Much of daily life consists of our responses to problems and opportunities.  Practical reasoning is the name for the mental processes that guide these responses.  It can be divided into four stages: first comes our recognition of some opportunity or problem, followed by our deliberation about how to respond to it; followed in turn by the adoption of one of those courses of action; followed by our ascertaining the success or failure of our course of action.   If we reflect upon this process, we may recognize that we have kept the very same goal in mind throughout our deliberations, or we may recognize that the goal itself has changed.  In either case, we are aware of not only the goal, but also of our having pursued one or many goals at many different times.  This characterization of ourselves as desiring, anticipating, planning, acting, and reflecting can be summarized in the word "agency."  Looking at ourselves as agents is not to characterize ourselves as inner, mental or s

Materialism can be defined as the conviction that all beings that exist are made of matter, or at least that human nature is so constituted that the individual ceases to exist with the death of the body.  These positions are not the target of this chapter.  Rather, a somewhat extreme version called reductive materialism is all that I mean to address here.  The alternative that I will propose--we'll call it holism--will serve as a common sense position that we can use to evaluate reductive and other positions. Reductive materialism claims that a human individual (and other animals) is nothing more than a collection of chemicals and that human action is nothing more than the complex chemical and mechanical interactions of those parts.  The whole that we call a human being is quite literally the sum of all of its parts. This position is frequently called mechanistic because a machine really is the collection of its own parts.  If we see it as a whole, that is only because we impos

Toward the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, some authors began talking about a conflict between science and religion.  Science, they proposed, offers explanations that can be proven true through measurement and observation--or at least can be proven false.  Religion, on the other hand, offers no method for testing the truth or falsity of its claims, but instead begins and ends with wishful thinking, as in the wish to live forever, to be loved unconditionally, or the wish to return to infantile bliss.  If these critics do not associate religion with childish wishful thinking, then they associate it with fear.  That is, the fear of a judge from whom you cannot escape and a punishment that never ceases.  Religion is anchored in these irrational hopes and fears, say these critics, while science is anchored in  tests through which we I am sure that there are some religious people whose lives and words might make these criticisms seem particularly apt.  But I also see

Perhaps "meaning" (as the term is used by Paul VI in Humane vitae) is purpose viewed ad intra.  And "purpose" (as applied to human action) is meaning viewed ad extra.

In Cosmos , Thomas Nagel relates how Sharon Street argues for the incompatibility of Darwinism with moral realism.  Street argues from there that we must reject moral realism because Darwinism is true.  Nagel accepts Street's argument about incompatibility, but he instead rejects Darwinism because moral realism is true. By Darwinism he means not only the claims that random variation and natural selection occurred, but the additional claim that these suffice to explain how the present-day life forms -- especially the human -- originated from more basic ones.  Because they see these two principles as sufficing, Darwinians see their account as dispensing with any need for teleology.  In fact, this rejection of teleology extends beyond evolution to the very origin of life.  Darwinism, as understood by the likes of Sharon Street and many others, operates in an atelic universe.  Nagel grants  that random variation and natural selection occurred and that the earliest life forms arose

If we look at emergence as leading toward the grasping of ideal objects, then it surely is teleological.

Could it be that successive mutations work together like compound interest? It seems plausible that they do so at the level of the population of a species, but perhaps something akin to that is sometimes true with individual mutations, inasmuch as the result of two mutations is greater than the sum of the results of each of the mutations, considered apart from the other.

When someone says that natural selection can account for our ability to know truth, what does he or she mean by "truth"? Probably the correspondence between a concrete judgment and the something is.  But other sorts of truth possess properties that are far more difficult to account for via natural selection (if they can at all).  For example, there is notion that a particular claim (e.g., that my cat is sitting on my hat) is capable of being recognized as true by other rational beings at remote times and places, inasmuch as those rational beings have an adequate grasp of reality.  Even more interesting, is the example of a proposition that I recognize as true not only for me, but for any rational being capable of grasping the terms' meanings.  Why would natural selection EVER suffice to animals to thematize the properties of the second and third kinds of truth? 

Wouldn't he say something is true to the degree that it is or acts the way in which he expected it to be?  In other words, truth as fulfillment.

First: that the classical understanding of genes is more problematic than I previously knew.  The same gene, may, on different occasions, because of other factors, be the source of coding for different proteins (this is called "alternative splicing").  Different gene combinations may be read the same way in the sense that they may be used to code for the same protein.  RNA does other things than just translate DNA into proteins.  And then there are other factors than genes that influence inheritance. And finally, some proteins may be modified after translation. The author of the related section in Companion to Philosophy of Biology says that the discovery of these complicating factors (covered in proteomics rather than genomics) has somewhat problematized the notion of the gene as the unit of inheritance.  For there is not always a one-to-one relationship between genotype and phenotype.  To the degree that these non-DNA factors figure in the formation of phenotypes, that fo

Inherent in teleological claims is the notion that the entity purportedly acting for an end is striving to achieve ONE primary goal.  But the tendency or list of tendencies of an element, such as tin, to interact with one item in one way and with another item in another, does not seem to amount to a goal.  But if all of those reactions naturally tended toward the same more remote goal, then perhaps teleology could be ascribed.  How about life as the purpose of all non-living processes--considered as a whole?

If the divine is becoming more perfect,  then is it seeking and finding that greater perfection in another?  Or through itself?  If through another, is the other more perfect?  If through itself, then how can it give itself what it does not have?

Lying in the background of our specific moral judgments is the conviction that it's better for the world to be than not to be.  Without such a conviction, it's impossible even to aspire to objective moral knowledge.  Any convictions that one who doubts or denies that background conviction must be regarded as subjective, tentative.  Nor could anyone know that the same underlying conviction (regarding the goodness of the world) merely on the basis of the experience of particular individuals.  For knowledge of the whole gathered from knowledge of the parts would at most be another fallible projection, extrapolation. Or an incoherent statement. Nor does it seem that that one could know the same underlying conviction on the basis natural selection.  For knowledge of such a whole goes well beyond what is needed for survival and procreation.  Then again, one can argue that this conviction is a kind of projection that follows a pattern of projections that are adaptive.  The totaliz

Isn't it the case that we understand what number is in virtue of our considering the set of numbers as infinite? Isn't there something parallel to that going on when we try to get at the essential definitions of the things in our world?   And isn't something analogous going on when we try to get at fundamental moral truths, or when we try to consider the nature of truth itself: aren't we considering the sent of rational beings a kind of potentially infinite set of rational beings for which this (i.e., this truth or truth itself) is the case? If so, then human inquiry is characterized by an orientation toward infinitude through which the being of beings becomes disclosed.

We could divide divine freedom into two types: 1. ad intra, which is whatever sort of freedom could rightly be attributed to God -- not in virtue of creating -- (but) in virtue simply of being; 2. ad extra, which is whatever sort of freedom that can rightly be attributed to God's creative action.  Also interesting to consider would be the way in which 2 is derived from 1. Human creativity (in making things and maybe words and more) might be considered analogous to 2.  What could be similarly compared to 1?