The Human Question

Galileo had thought experiments whose conclusion was that -- absent force -- a thing will move in a straight line without ever stopping. Might it not be better to plug in the consideration of gravity to thought experiments about momentum.  And in such a case, wouldn't be end up thing of movement as naturally moving in an ellipsis?  I throw something in the air and it returns in an apparently parabolic path.  Well, maybe it's really a really small part of an ellipsis.  And that ellipsis is cut short by the fact that the projectile hit the earth.  But if the projectile had been flying in the same direction with respect to the center of the earth while the earth itself was thousands of times denser, then the earth's surface would be so much closer to the earth's center that the projectile would not end up hitting the earth at all.  Rather, it would fly in an ellipsis, like other satellites.   One might object that we are better off abstracting from...

We can abstract from teleology in our description of movement by plotting x and y coordinates where y is displacement and x is time.  But if time itself is the measure of motion, then the very way in which we plot movement in a sense presupposes it at a more basic level.  And it presupposes a human who measures.  So if our ability to propose a plausible mechanistic view of human action requires our imagining that human activity, being only a more complicated version of the sort of activity found in non-living things, can be graphed on Cartesian charts, ... if all that is presumed, then this mechanistic proposal likewise presupposes that which it would eliminate.  It uses a feature of humans that cannot be reduced to the mechanistic without acknowledging that it is doing so, precisely at the time that it claims to be reducing the human to the mechanical. Note also that Cartesian-coordinate description of the human act of counting movement is impossible.  For th...

Aristotle points out in Book I, chapter 1 that a plurality of natures is a necessary condition for substantial change to be able to occur.  Why, because new substances/natures come into existence when things of different kinds are combined: "... when things are combined htere is coming to be, and when they are dissolved there is perishing." (314b8) It's obvious that this would (rightfully) seem to be the case at Aristotle's time, for organisms are always made of non-uniform parts.  But we could say the same today on the basis of what we know about atoms, they differ in kind because they consist of different combinations of parts.

Always try to explain as much as you can my means of the discipline in which you are engaged, while being open to the possibility that there are some things that can be explained only by another discipline than your own.

James McWilliams is trying hard--too hard-- to convince the reader that Aquinas believed in momentum/inertia before Galileo ever came up with it. I ain't takin' his word for it, but I will look up the passages that he cites. They include the Commentary on the Physics VIII, lec. 22, where St. Thomas says that "the last quantity of energy is in the stone itself and is spent on the resistance of the object struck.  Here we have our whole doctrine of inertia." Huh? He also points out (on p. 13) that Aristotle was aware that more effort is needed to get an immobile thing moving than to keep an already-moving thing at the same velocity.  "In fact, that this phenomena was discussed  appears from the Mechanica  (intended to complete the Physics ), where we read: 'why is it that a body which is already in motion is easier to move than one which is at rest?'" (see ch. 32 858a3). Fr. McWilliams also accuses Galileo of misrepresenting Aristotle's s...

De Generationibus Book I, chapter 9 makes an interesting claim (if read it correctly and remember correctly what I read).  It argues against the pro-Socratics on the basis that they could not explain efficient causality, i.e., the action/passion relation, precisely because they don't make the distinction between act/potency.

Today I'm skimming Physics and Philosophy , by James A. McWilliams, S. J.  (1945).  It seems that Aquinas mentions in lecture 28 of his commentary on Book VIII of the Physics  that the outermost or near-outermost sphere rotated every 36,000 years.  McWilliams indirectly quotes St. Thomas as saying that the "very celestial pole itself, centered near the North Star, describes an [page3/page4] orbit every '36,000 years.' Although the present calculation is nearer to 26,000, it is enlightening to learn that St. Thomas was aware of the phenomenon."  Aquinas's own commentary makes it clear that this sphere is supposed to be the one with the stars embedded on it.  Okay.  But why does the author say on page 5 that the actual time of rotation 25,800 years?

http://www.quodlibet.net/articles/kelly-lonergan.shtml

Just as the notion of a limitless number line might be entailed in our concept of counting finite numbers, so too when we begin to think of higher/lower modes or rationality, we are treating rationality itself like the number line.

If endless duration is meaningful, then our concept of duration has no inherent limit.

If we are deceived about the nature of human agency, then the basic notions of causality that animate physics are myths or illusions, for human agency is the prime instance of causality: all else is understood analogically.

I am saving this link to read later: looks interesting! http://bigquestionsonline.com/content/does-quantum-physics-make-it-easier-believe-god

sin: misdirecting our longing for the infinite

Forget material substrata for a moment.  Instead think of matter as a lowest level of form (ala Polanyi).  Doesn't that make the contingency of material things all the more obvious... and hence pave the way for  a version of the third way that would work? Weird question: what if one's starting point were the existence of a multiplicity of angelic forms?  Would the very fact that these immaterial forms are different underscore the fact that each one of them is Contingent?  From which would follow yet another workable version of the third way. Perhaps.

To Peter Atkins and others who call the positing of eternal life, with its promise of eternal bliss, mere wish fulfillment: Is positing science as a discipline that attains the truth mere wish fulfillment?  What would it take to know the truth more and more adequately—how long would it take?  If we were able to achieve this goal more and more adequately, would the truth continue to satisfy us?  Eternally?  

In an earlier post I talk about how "Atkins denies that the universe has a meaning or purpose, and then displays at every point in the discussion, a craving for unbounded knowledge of what is. That atheist is so  purpose driven ." More on the same theme.  It seems to me that Atkins' objection to cosmic purpose is based on the fact that there is no measurable "purpose-fact" out there in the world.  Granted.  But he's looking in the wrong place.  Instead of looking for purpose in galaxies and black holes, look at    human beings  (and possibly by other rational beings)  engaged in distinctively human activities.   That is because of the way that purpose relates us to each other and to the universe.  Place a bunch of humans in the same place and you get -- not a sum of individual purposes -- but a community with one purpose: to discover what others would also recognize as true... something naturally achieved together with them. W...

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/05/23/physics-and-the-immortality-of-the-soul/ thanks, Tim, for the heads up!

Fuzzy/raw idea about a response to those who find an adaptive basis for distinctively human modes of cognition: what is the adaptive basis for non-Euclidean geometry?  Evolution does not allow for us to be over-engineered, but we are overengineered in the sense that a thousand years ago, we were genotypically ready to do forms of math invented only in the last two centuries and to listen to/compose symphonies.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8510711/Belief-in-God-is-part-of-human-nature-Oxford-study.html

...the need for beauty. In fact,  The Greatest Show could be seen as a persuasive argument that evolution is beautiful.  And he offers such an argument perhaps because he recognizes the divide between beauty and truth that besets a positivistic culture. One might object that if evolution is beautiful, then how are we to understand all of the ugliness that so often attends life?  Here Dawkin's answer would seem to be like that of Augustine: the beauty of the whole is not undone by the ugliness of some of the parts, for they  lead, ultimately into something beautiful (the latter point made rather well by Michael Dowd in his sometimes touchy-feelie Thank God for Evolution ). In such as case, however, what becomes of all of some of Christopher Hitchens'  complaints about the ugliness of nature (thinking here of his allusion to the horror of human existence prior to modern medicine)?  If Dawkins/Augustine are right, then even these horrors are more adeq...