Last week I quoted Plotinus about how the soul may use the body as an instrument without thereby sharing the experiences of the body. In the comments beneath that post, one will see Henry's observation that, if "soul" here means "mind," the observation is unremarkable. If soul means something else, it is nonsensical. Allow me to expand. Plotinus is using "soul" here to mean "active intellect," and he is expounding on a distinction between the active and the passive intellect. Centuries before him, Aristotle had written in De Anima , that "knowledge in activity is identical with the subject; but knowledge in potentiality pre-exists in the individual...." That is one of the more mysterious of his observations! And no, more context would not resolve the mystery but would deepen it. Here is the context if you want it. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Vital_Principle/Book_3/Chapter_5 The "knowledge in potentiality" ...
Posts
Just a brief book note. Those of us who are but dabblers in medieval social philosophy know of "just war" theory as a body of thought that stresses proportionality and discrimination in the pursuit of war, and has something to do with the "principle of double effect." It is one thing for a nation to go to war for bad (illegitimate) reasons. It is another for a nation to go to reason for legitimate reasons, which one branch of just war theory elucidates. But, separately, there is the question of how war is conducted, and the body of theory dating to Aquinas discusses the just conduct thereof as an issue distinct from its legitimacy. James Dubik "reconsidered" this body of thought, not to reject it but to develop its intuitions further, in a 2016 volume. Here is a review: Just War Reconsidered: Strategy, Ethics, and Theory (usnwc.edu)
Let us continue the thoughts we expounded yesterday. For the "Latin" thinkers most inspired by Averroes had another trick up their sleeves, by way of remaining orthodox Roman Catholics while expounding on the unity of the intellect. They didn't have to go with doubling truth. They could also double up what is meant by "intellect." For it isn't the intellect that needs to be saved in order not to be damned, according to that orthodoxy. It is the soul. And the intellectuals intent upon introducing Averroes' ideas north of the Mediterranean distinguished between the active or agent intellect on the one hand and the individual or passive intellect to be another. Aristotle speaks tersely of a passive intellect that "is what it is by becoming all things." He appears to mean that one aspect of the intellect becomes a balloon when it looks upon a balloon, becomes the 'popping' sound when it hears that. etc. In my life, I have "become...
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews has a review up of a new book on Averroes' thought, especially on the critical question of the unity of the intellect. The book is by Stephen R. Ogden, of Notre Dame' s philosophy faculty. The review is the work of Kendall A. Fisher, of Gonzaga University. Averroes on Intellect: From Aristotelian Origins to Aquinas’ Critique | Reviews | Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews | University of Notre Dame (nd.edu) Averroes is the philosopher known in the Arab speaking world as Ibn Rushd. One of the propositions for which he is well known among scholars in the history of philosophy is, as I mentioned above, that of the unity of the intellect. This is the proposition (which Averroes attributed to Aristotle) that all human beings share a single eternal intellect. Further, this single intellect is separate from our material selves. It is an exegetically tricky question whether Averroes was right to read Aristotle that way. But it hardly m...
So ... stop me if you've heard this one. Thomas Aquinas walked into a bar and ordered a lot of mead. The bartender said, "You really plan to drink all that? You have problems?" Because in jokes bartenders are always eager to hear your problems. Aquinas said: "Yes, I just lost my manuscript. An important one, too. I called it the SUMMA THEOLOGICA. It was going to be the definitive explanation of Catholic philosophy, incorporating Aristotle's best insights into the body of our faith. It was brilliant. I must have been inspired by God to write it." Bartender says, "And now it's gone?" Aquinas, "Yes, and I can't help but wonder what message God is trying to send me. Why would he inspire me to write a great work like this and then let me lose it???" Bartender, "Maybe he was just trying to say, 'You win Summa, you lose Summa.' P.S. Next week I'll get back to the issue of cause and effect.
I'll just give the joke as I remember of it and will skip explanation of how it came up. St Thomas Aquinas walked into a bar and ordered a lot of mead. The bartender said, "You really plan to drink all that? You have problems?" Because in jokes bartenders are always eager to hear your problems. Aquinas said: "Yes, I just lost my manuscript. An important one, too. I called it the SUMMA THEOLOGICA. It was going to be the definitive explanation of Catholic philosophy, incorporating Aristotle's insights into the body of faith. It was brilliant. I was inspired by God to write it." Bartender says, "And now it's gone?" Aquinas, "Yes, and I can't help but wonder what message God is trying to send me. Why would he inspire me to write a great work like this and then let me lose it???" Bartender, "Maybe he was just trying to say, 'You win Summa, you lose Summa.'"
Here is an explanation, from Thomas Aquinas, of why patriotism is a virtue: "A man becomes a debtor to others in divers ways in accord with the divers types of their excellence and the diverse benefits that he receives from them. In both these regards, God occupies the highest place ... in second place, the principles of our being and governance are our parents and our country, by whom and in which we are born and governed. And so, after God, a man is especially indebted to his parents and to his country. Hence, just as religion involves venerating God, so at the second level piety involves venerating one's parents and country. Now, the veneration of ... one's country includes the veneration of one's fellow citizens and of all the friends of one's country." You're taking 'divers' leaps here, Tom, even if we grant you certain premises.... BTW, is "divers" just an alternate spelling of "diverse"? I've generally read ...
In a famous passage, G.K. Chesterton described the philosophy of medieval Catholicism as the common sense of the human race, the philosophy to which we all tend when we aren't poisoned by ... any of the alternatives. "Since the modern world began in the sixteenth century, nobody's system of philosophy has really corresponded to everybody's sense of reality: to what, if left to themselves, common men would call common sense. Each started with a paradox; a peculiar point of view demanding the sacrifice of what they would call a sane point of view. That is the one thing common to Hobbes and Hegel, to Kant and Bergson, to Berkeley and William James. A man had to believe something that no normal man would believe, if it were suddenly propounded to his simplicity: as that law is above right, or right is outside reason, or things are only as we think them, or everything is relative to a reality that is not there. The modern philosopher claims, like a sort of confidence ma...
I'll here continue yesterday's discussion on William James' skepticism about the argument from design, which was in turn continuing a discussion from the week before. In my recent exchange in the comments section of this blog with Henry, I observed that there has been an alliance, in the development of the philosophy of religion, between fideists and unbelievers. A fideist by standard definition is one who embraces a religious creed and who sees that embrace (Faith) as valuable in itself, and again who sees it as "in some sense independent of, if not outright adversarial toward, reason." James's essay on the "will to believe" is a rather moderate expression of fideism. He is certainly not advocating an adversarial relationship with reason, but he does argue that there are matters reason doesn't decide, and that in these matters an intellectualized expression of human will -- Faith -- may and in fact must step in. It is good that Faith ...