Monday, February 06, 2006
Notes for 2/07/06
Chapter 4 Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy (Fifth through Fifteenth Centuries).
We will spend three classroom sessions discussing the subject matter of this chapter, a time period of ten centuries. Today we cover Augustine, the Encyclopediasts and John Scotus Eriugena (to p. 117).
Augustine lived during the 4th and 5th centuries (354-430). His best known works are his Confessions (397-8) and The City of God (413-26), both written in Latin. It has been said that he was a great sinner who became a great saint. The first part of his confessions (books 1-9, of 13 books) enumerate his sins; that is one sense of the word "confession," the only one used today in modern parlance. The second part is "a confession of faith," i.e. a declaration of faith. It takes the form of a commentary on the Book of Genesis, with many quotes from and allusions to the Psalms and also various books of the New Testament. He takes Moses to be the divinely inspired author of the Book of Genesis, though modern critical scholarship seems to question this. His commentary on Genesis is intertwined with praise of God and philosophical questions such as the nature of time.
He was a Manichean from age 18 till his conversion to Christianity (the religion of his mother Monica) in 386 (ages 34). Manicheanism, the struggle between equally matched powers of good and evil. ("The Devil made me do it" theory of evil.) Dissatisfied with this, Augustine adopts from Neoplatonism he got the idea that evil does not exist, but is simply the absence of good. After his conversion to Christianity, Augustine sees self-love as the source of evil, and insufficent love of God. If Manicheanism underplayed man's free will, The Pelagian heresy overemphasized the role of free will (as opposed to God's grace) in man's salvation. These are all theological matters, but nonetheless philosophical as well. The problem of squaring God's knowledge of the future with man's free will. If God knows the future, man's freedom is illusory. But if man is not free, it is unjust to hold him responsible for his actions, and God is immoral to punish man for his evil acts. (Similarly, if a man commits horrendous acts "because" of the abuse he or she underwent as a child, is that person "responsible"?) Either God is omniscient or immoral, he is benevolent but ignorant. Augustine's two arguments to get out of the dilemma. (1) God is outside of time, thus knowing all things past, present and future (from our point of view) in an eternal present. (This is interesting, but I must admit I don't see how it solves the dilemma. Whether God knows the future as if it were present or not does not solve the question of predetermination, or as theology puts it, "predestination." His second argument is more pertinent. It is an argument known as compatibility. Freedom and necessity are somehow compatible, as, for example, in Stoicism, in which I contrive to want what is, in such a way that what I want to do and what I can do are made to coincide. Augustine also points out that foreknowledge does not determine what will take place, "any more than my own acts are caused by my knowledge of what I'm going to do" (Palmer, 108). This seems to me quite unclear. Does "knowledge of what I am going to do" mean my intention? If so, it does seem to determine, or at least co-determine, what I will do. Distinguish these concepts: fate (or destiny), predestination, necessity, predetermination, predictibility. What is the difference between fate and the modern notion of a causally-determined universe? What is the difference between freedom and randomness?
The Encyclopediasts (not to be confused with the 18th-century French "Encyclopédistes," such as Diderot and Voltaire, who contributed to the making of the first modern encyclopedias).
Boethius in Italy, Isadore in Spain, and the venerable Bede in England (480-735), men of classical learning in the so-called Dark Ages.
John Scotus Eriugena (ca 810-77). How to understand the totality of reality ("Nature"). First distinction: things that are/things that are not. Deprivations or lacks, but also super-being, i.e. God. The via affirmativa vs. the via negativa. (Correction on bottom of page 112, under via negativa, change We deny the affirmation to We deny the affirmation that God is wise. Discuss John Scotus's categories on p. 113. Note God is in categories 1 and 4.
Saint Anselm (1033-1109).
His ontological argument. It is an a priori argument, i.e. based on logic, not on empirical observation. Work through his argument, as well as Gaunilon's objections. It is said that Immanuel Kant put the argument to rest in the 18th century by showing that it contains a "grammatical" flaw. What does this mean? That a distinction must be made between the use of to be as an existential statement (that something actually exists) and of to be as a copulative verb, merely associating subject and predicate, or a noun and a quality. One could state this differently by saying that existence is not a predicate, not a quality. Note also the unexamined presupposition that it is better to be than not to be. Is "existence" appropriate to God? Consider Jean-Luc Marion's work, God without Being (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995 reprint): Jean-Luc Marion advances a controversial argument for a God free of all categories of Being. ("Taking a characteristically postmodern stance, Marion challenges a fundamental premise of both metaphysics and neo-Thomist theology: that God, before all else, must be. Rather, he locates a "God without Being" in the realm of agape, of Christian charity or love.") Marion found this concept of a God without (or beyond) Being in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.
We will spend three classroom sessions discussing the subject matter of this chapter, a time period of ten centuries. Today we cover Augustine, the Encyclopediasts and John Scotus Eriugena (to p. 117).
Augustine lived during the 4th and 5th centuries (354-430). His best known works are his Confessions (397-8) and The City of God (413-26), both written in Latin. It has been said that he was a great sinner who became a great saint. The first part of his confessions (books 1-9, of 13 books) enumerate his sins; that is one sense of the word "confession," the only one used today in modern parlance. The second part is "a confession of faith," i.e. a declaration of faith. It takes the form of a commentary on the Book of Genesis, with many quotes from and allusions to the Psalms and also various books of the New Testament. He takes Moses to be the divinely inspired author of the Book of Genesis, though modern critical scholarship seems to question this. His commentary on Genesis is intertwined with praise of God and philosophical questions such as the nature of time.
He was a Manichean from age 18 till his conversion to Christianity (the religion of his mother Monica) in 386 (ages 34). Manicheanism, the struggle between equally matched powers of good and evil. ("The Devil made me do it" theory of evil.) Dissatisfied with this, Augustine adopts from Neoplatonism he got the idea that evil does not exist, but is simply the absence of good. After his conversion to Christianity, Augustine sees self-love as the source of evil, and insufficent love of God. If Manicheanism underplayed man's free will, The Pelagian heresy overemphasized the role of free will (as opposed to God's grace) in man's salvation. These are all theological matters, but nonetheless philosophical as well. The problem of squaring God's knowledge of the future with man's free will. If God knows the future, man's freedom is illusory. But if man is not free, it is unjust to hold him responsible for his actions, and God is immoral to punish man for his evil acts. (Similarly, if a man commits horrendous acts "because" of the abuse he or she underwent as a child, is that person "responsible"?) Either God is omniscient or immoral, he is benevolent but ignorant. Augustine's two arguments to get out of the dilemma. (1) God is outside of time, thus knowing all things past, present and future (from our point of view) in an eternal present. (This is interesting, but I must admit I don't see how it solves the dilemma. Whether God knows the future as if it were present or not does not solve the question of predetermination, or as theology puts it, "predestination." His second argument is more pertinent. It is an argument known as compatibility. Freedom and necessity are somehow compatible, as, for example, in Stoicism, in which I contrive to want what is, in such a way that what I want to do and what I can do are made to coincide. Augustine also points out that foreknowledge does not determine what will take place, "any more than my own acts are caused by my knowledge of what I'm going to do" (Palmer, 108). This seems to me quite unclear. Does "knowledge of what I am going to do" mean my intention? If so, it does seem to determine, or at least co-determine, what I will do. Distinguish these concepts: fate (or destiny), predestination, necessity, predetermination, predictibility. What is the difference between fate and the modern notion of a causally-determined universe? What is the difference between freedom and randomness?
The Encyclopediasts (not to be confused with the 18th-century French "Encyclopédistes," such as Diderot and Voltaire, who contributed to the making of the first modern encyclopedias).
Boethius in Italy, Isadore in Spain, and the venerable Bede in England (480-735), men of classical learning in the so-called Dark Ages.
John Scotus Eriugena (ca 810-77). How to understand the totality of reality ("Nature"). First distinction: things that are/things that are not. Deprivations or lacks, but also super-being, i.e. God. The via affirmativa vs. the via negativa. (Correction on bottom of page 112, under via negativa, change We deny the affirmation to We deny the affirmation that God is wise. Discuss John Scotus's categories on p. 113. Note God is in categories 1 and 4.
Saint Anselm (1033-1109).
His ontological argument. It is an a priori argument, i.e. based on logic, not on empirical observation. Work through his argument, as well as Gaunilon's objections. It is said that Immanuel Kant put the argument to rest in the 18th century by showing that it contains a "grammatical" flaw. What does this mean? That a distinction must be made between the use of to be as an existential statement (that something actually exists) and of to be as a copulative verb, merely associating subject and predicate, or a noun and a quality. One could state this differently by saying that existence is not a predicate, not a quality. Note also the unexamined presupposition that it is better to be than not to be. Is "existence" appropriate to God? Consider Jean-Luc Marion's work, God without Being (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995 reprint): Jean-Luc Marion advances a controversial argument for a God free of all categories of Being. ("Taking a characteristically postmodern stance, Marion challenges a fundamental premise of both metaphysics and neo-Thomist theology: that God, before all else, must be. Rather, he locates a "God without Being" in the realm of agape, of Christian charity or love.") Marion found this concept of a God without (or beyond) Being in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.
# posted by Michael @ 7:50 AM 
