Seminar at Princeton

I don't know how many of you straussians, platonists, and neo-thomist know about this seminar at Princeton, but I imagine you might be interested. Its a summer graduate seminar in Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics in the Thomistic and Analytic Traditions. That is HOT. You Catholic U guys might know about it because Michael Gorman is going to be there. Check it out and come if you hearing about it for the first time. Also if you already knew about it, are you applying. The faculty is unbelievable: Nicholas Rescher, Mark Murphy, and the above mentioned Michael Gotman.

I think the TACers should take the seminar over. Just think if we got Zep, Wink, Neoteronous, and Bissex all to come. (Who else is studying philosophy anyway?) I hope I'll see you there.

"It glorifies Satan in some way"

In the Denver Post, which I still read online, there was a commentary piece by Ed Quillen. In it he speaks about the latest school curriculum scandal. The scandal is erupting in Bennett Colorado, a town that is small, ugly, and ... well small. What is happening? Are they trying to kick Evolution out of the curriculum ? Are teachers sneaking prayers into the classes? Not really.

A few weeks ago the elementary music teacher, Tresa Waggoner, showed portions of a video designed to introduce children to opera. The 1859 opera was "Faust" by Charles Gounod, a French composer of church music.

First, let it be said that the Bennett school district is to be commended for having an elementary music program. So many schools these days have eliminated music and art programs.

I can't even think of a practical economic rationale for such cuts, since I know many people who make their livelihoods from music and art, while I've never known even one professional football player. You'd think that if schools were preparing children for careers, they'd keep the programs that offer the most career possibilities. If the idea is to produce educated citizens, music and art are certainly important parts of our culture.

He then goes on to explain the story of Faust; which I find embarrassing. I live in a country in which no one can be expected to know the plot of Faust. After all Faust stands with Troy and Arthur as one of the defining legends of our civilization. If we can't expect people to know about Faust, what can we expect them to know?

Any way back to article, Quillen is spot on when he says,

Faustian themes illuminate modern discussions of capital punishment and stem-cell research.

This seems to be beside the point for certain concerned parents of Bennett, one of whom said, "It glorifies Satan in some way."

That's because a major character in all Faust versions is Mephistopheles, the demon who represents Satan while transacting with Faust. Mephistopheles is a complex character, who comes running for Faust's soul at his first opportunity, but also implores, "Oh, Faustus, leave these frivolous demands, Which strike a terror to my fainting soul."

This is hardly a glorification of Satan, who is, after all, a necessary character in such accounts. To put this another way, the Bible would be a very short book without Satan.

Other parents complained that their children had nightmares from the video about opera. I can still remember the childhood nightmares I had after watching "The Wizard of Oz" for the first time - some works, no matter how innocuous, can do that.

But how far are we supposed to go in the prevention of child
hood nightmares? Can we guarantee that children riding the bus to school won't pass some gruesome nightmare-generating auto accident? Or that nightmares will never be provoked by "Hansel and Gretel," "Little Red Riding Hood" or "Bird Hunting with Dick Cheney"?

The more one ponders this, the more it appears that those concerned parents ought to demand that the school present a full production of Marlowe's Faustus to the youngsters. Mephistopheles might get many of the best of Marlowe's mighty lines, but the play is a straightforward tale of a man who is damned for seeking knowledge.

And that seems to be the exact attitude of those parents - seeking knowledge is an evil which must be punished.

Oh, To be Forty Years Older

Father Neuhaus writes today,

Big Bill Jones is dead. Those of us a certain age keep an eye on the leaves hanging on our branch of the tree of life, wondering which will fall next. That’s one of the reasons I hang out with Avery Cardinal Dulles, age 87, who seems to be attached where the sap flows strong.

The Rev. William A. Jones was for more than forty years pastor of Bethany Baptist, a huge church in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, the largest black community in New York. As best I remember, we first met in 1962 in a protest against the exclusion of blacks from major construction unions in the city. We spent the night in jail, and he was excellent company. It would not be our last time to be arrested together.

Bill was a bear of a man, with a musical voice that rumbled a couple of octaves below middle C. He remained very much a man of the conventional left, viewing Rudolph Giuliani as a fascist or worse, and given to elegantly outrageous homiletical riffs on Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush as Pharaohs.

Martin King at his very best may have been the greatest master of black preaching I have ever heard. For steady greatness, nobody was more reliable than Gardner Taylor of Concord Baptist in Brooklyn. Bill Jones was in their class, as those who knew him from “Bethany Hour,” broadcast in hundreds of cities, can testify. He was big and ebullient. He didn’t have a theological bone in his body but he loved Jesus. More precisely, I think he loved the Bible stories of which Jesus was the hero.

I regret that we lost touch in recent years. There was a roughness about him. I once called him “God’s gangster,” and he wore the title with pride. But I suppose I remember him chiefly as a man greatly amused by the ways of the world, and by his place in it. William A. Jones. Requiescat in pace.

Plato and Platonists

I am posting my reply to Shulamite and Neoteronous because it is too long to put in the comment section and because my points are also important for my current thoughts about philosophy generally.
First I am not putting Plato down. To say that Wittgenstein had tools that where unavailable to Plato is an incontrovertible truth. This has no bearing on Plato's place as a "great" philosopher. Consider other academic disciplines. Gibbon is still a great historian even though his actual history has been superseded by recent scholarship: a more indepth study of sources and archeology etc.. The development in philosophy over the last 24 centuries is not superficial or formal (in the non-logical sense). Then again I never said it was getting better. After all most, if not all the great philosophers of the 20th century have looked back to earlier philosophies (by that I exclude the contenetial school not from prejudice but from lack of familiarity). The best example of this is modern epistemology; which still wrestles with Humean skepticism (I think has finally been answered by Puttnam). Because philosophy is not an exact science like physics the wisdom of the ages plays an extremely important roll for it, and that is the truth that I base my Aristotelianism on.

I think Neoteronous and me are on the same page on this point. If not please explain to me how not.

As for the Shulamite's form/matter argument that is a bigger story. I will grant him something I don't believe before I give my argument. I will grant him this,

... what is Plato's account of philosophy, of that thing which he was doing? He views it as an attempt to assimilate oneself to the life of God, to prepare oneself for death. Said another way, philosophy is a meditation on, and an assimilation of eternal things, according to that part that is eternal within us. To say that Plato means something else by philosophy is to fundamentally misunderstand what he is doing, and confuse the per se with the per accidens.

The reason I don't agree with this is that I think it gives us an impoverished sense of Plato. Plato did seek the Good in his philosophy but that is not all he sought. The Cratylus, Sophist and the other late dialogues prove that Plato was very concerned with other things as well. Indeed that is the wonderful thing that the Plato's opus shows us. He started with ethical and theological concerns and ended up in linguistic analysis (just like modern philosophy). All the same I said I would grant this point.

So suppose that Plato is primarily a philosopher of religion (in the modern sense); not overly concerned with all the things that those annoying analytics like to do (linguistics, meaning, logic). If this is true can we still compare him with Wittgenstein the supreme analytic, the philosopher who believed that philosophy was only linguistic analysis? I say yes.

Now I can see how my point in the original post was unclear. I did not mean to say that Wittgenstein will be shown better than Plato, but only that we would start to see deficiencies in Plato, lacunas in his thought, blind spots. This cannot be turned around on Wittgenstein and say that because Wittgenstein didn't do traditional metaphysics he had a blind spot. Because Wittgenstein didn't have a blind spot; he just rejected traditional metaphysics. There is a huge difference between ignorance of (Plato) and rejection of (Wittgenstein).

Now my last point. Going back to Plato the philosopher of religion and Wittgenstein the philosopher of language there is no equivocation in the 'philosopher' at this point. The Platonist can argue against Wittgensteinians and say they are wrong in ignoring the Good. The Wittgensteinian probably won't care, but that won't take away from any valid argument that the Platonist made. Likewise the Platonist better cover his arguments in modern logic lest he fall into fallacy. Because this dialogue between platonism and analytics can still exist, and indeed does (and further consider John Haldane calling himself an 'analytic-thomist) I think that the burden of proof lies with you. I see no equivocation; I see quite the opposite.

Blogger Comments

In general I don't comment about other's blogs on my blog, and I also don't usually read anything with the word 'vomit' in the title. I did run into an interesting post over at Vomit to Lukewarm though, and I thought it deserved comment. He makes a funny but good point about classical poetry,

To complain that Latin is a dead language can only be a part of a proof of the fact that dead men are the only ones worth listening to. The sort of thing that Virgil does with words simply cannot be done in English, and the craftsmanship of what he does can no more be done by a modern writer than an ancient doctor could perform interuterine surgery or build the space shuttle. One can certainly talk about "beautiful modern poetry", but this means about the same thing as "cutting edge- 13th century chemistry".

But then he goes and says something that one can only describe as BAT SHIT CRAZY.

There is something to comparing Tennyson or Rimbaud to Cutullus, for example, but it would be utterly meaningless to try to compare, say, Wittgenstein to Plato, as though the two could be measured by a common unit.

What the hell does that mean? I say let us compare Wittgenstein to Plato, and Plato is going to come out the worst for it (sorry guys but it's true). Let's see, Plato didn't have
(1) Logic
(2) the distinction between sense and reference
(3) the notion of a demonstrable argument
and a whole bunch of other shit that is slightly important if you want to find the truth about anything. I hate to tell you guys this but philosophy develops. When someone comes around and discovers something, (like Aristotle and logic, Boethius and the fourth figure, Russell and formal logic) it makes the subsequent philosophy better.

Mr. Vomit might say that that proves his point, Plato is missing so much that Wittgenstein is taking for granted that there can be no comparison. I say this is the wrong way of looking at it. We can never know what Plato's blind spots are if we don't compare him with later philosophers. To say otherwise would result in the conclusion that we cannot point out the logical fallacies in a Socratic argument.

Granville Ohio, Here I come

Are you guys as excited about going to Granville Ohio as I am? I'm not talking about for a vacation but for a conference that can only be described as sexy. The 2006 annual meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. Still not excited? Well the conference them is "Intelligence and the Philosophy of Mind". If you are still not excited yet, and you would have to be dead not to be, then check this out. The plenary speakers are,

John Haldane (University of St. Andrews)
Anthony Kenny (Oxford University)
Kurt Pritzl (The Catholic University of America)

I know, I know. I am looking for plane tickets already too. See you all there.

TAKE THAT!!! WORLD

48 hours ago I thought I was leaving St Andrews in shame and poverty. Now I am staying at St Andrews, at least until May, in extreme poverty. Oh, and I got an Internship at the Center for the Study of Religion and Politics doing research into Benedict XVI's encyclical Deus Caritas Est, and the magisterium's political philosophy.

HA!!!!!!!!!!!

Dan: 1. Reality: 30,000,000