Category: Uncategorized

Belief

Al-Farabi’s 10th century reading of Aristotle — which set many patterns for later Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin developments — was generally historically salutary, but among other things reflected a definite “theoreticist” bias, strongly privileging episteme (“deductive science”, or knowledge in a strong sense) over dialectic and practical judgment. It was not until Kant that this bias began to be counterbalanced again. Even Hegel still understated the role of dialectic and practical judgment in Aristotle. (See also Aristotelian Demonstration; The Epistemic Modesty of Plato and Aristotle.)

It is in this context of dialectic and practical judgment that I want to think about belief. I have a bit of a double meaning in mind, recalling both discussions among analytic philosophers and questions about faith and reason.

To the analytic philosophers, I want to recommend a pragmatically flavored emphasis on sound belief as a result of dialectic and practical judgment, to replace many uses of “true belief” that is supposed to simply correspond to a state of affairs. (See also “Said Of”; Brandom on Truth; Commitment.)

In the context of faith and reason, I want to respectfully recommend that faith should be decoupled from a list of things one is supposed to assert or “believe”. I have always believed that the highest concept of faith is instead a pure affective attitude and way of being and doing that resembles hope and charity and an anticipation of grace. (See also Theology.)

Errors of the Philosophers

As the works of Aristotle and other authors translated from the Arabic became unbanned and began to be understood, this caused considerable tension in the previously insular Latin West. Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and others worked to reconcile the two intersecting traditions. Secular masters of arts who were not theologians often concentrated mainly on reading the new texts as they stood — a tradition that continued through the Renaissance. The bishop of Paris issued lists of condemned propositions in 1270 and 1277 (see Wikipedia and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Scholars generally agree that there was no coherent group or single individual targeted by the whole of the longer 1277 one, which also contained a few propositions endorsed by the not-yet-canonized Aquinas.

In the 20th century, Pierre Duhem influentially claimed that the 1277 condemnation had a large positive effect on nascent medieval natural science, by freeing it from the alleged dogmatism of Aristotle, but with more research, scholarly consensus has backed sharply away from this (although I think there is still some distance to go). This is a good example of the lingering effects of anti-Aristotelian prejudice. Contrary to the stereotype, medieval Aristotelians often cheerfully adopted new ideas when they seemed to have merit, and Italian Aristotelianism in particular was especially friendly to such developments.

A little treatise attributed to Giles of Rome (excerpt relating to Aristotle here) on “the errors of the philosophers” appeared around 1270. In other writings, Giles was by no means hostile to all philosophy, but here he focused on matters of theological concern at the time, with a bit more motivation and analysis than the actual condemnations. “Philosophers” refers with some specificity to the canon of falsafa translated from the Arabic.

As Giles analyzed it, the main issue underlying concerns about Aristotle himself lay in the principle that later scholastics referred to as “nothing comes from nothing”, and that Leibniz later endorsed as the principle of sufficient reason. Leibniz and others found this constructive-flavored notion implicit in Aristotelian and neoplatonic thought to be compatible with theological concerns. More generally, many theologians have found ways to read the broad spirit of Greek rationalism and naturalism as not inherently opposed to their concerns. Greek rationalism and naturalism, unlike many of their modern variants, were not reductive in nature. The thought of Aristotle in particular provides sophisticated resources for integrating concepts of immanent purpose in a rational account of the world that makes no special pleadings.

The notion of creation from nothing is itself a theological interpretation not literally present in Genesis, but creation in time is literally present, and many theologians have been reluctant to give it a figurative interpretation, even though broad principles of interpretation as far back as Augustine allow for figurative interpretation when there are issues with a literal reading. Aquinas, for one, took a diplomatic middle position that reason cannot decide between possibilities of eternal creation or creation in time, so he adopted a forgiving attitude toward Aristotle on the related question of the eternity of the world. I believe Aristotle and the neoplatonists on the other hand clearly thought reason did rule out a creation in time, and that this did not in any way destroy higher spiritual values. Personally, I want to say that they were right on this, so I respectfully disagree with the diplomatic Thomistic position, while considering it historically progressive in its context. (See also Fortunes of Aristotle; God and the Soul; Strong Omnipotence; Occasionalism; Pseudo-Dionysius on the Soul.)

Occasionalism

The conservative Sunni Islamic theologian and Sufi al-Ghazali (1058 – 1111 CE) wrote a famous denunciation of philosophers in Islam, called The Incoherence of the Philosophers. (In Latin, “incoherence” was rendered as “destruction”.) This was a classic statement of the occasionalist doctrine that everything that happens is directly caused by the will of God, and all other explanations are illusory. This is a kind of consequence of strong theological voluntarism. Spurred by the voluntarism of Descartes, many 17th century Cartesians later adopted occasionalist views. Related voluntarist views were earlier strongly voiced by Philo of Alexandria, and later in the Latin West by Franciscan theologians such as Duns Scotus and William of Occam.

The great Aristotelian commentator Ibn Rushd or Averroes responded to Ghazali on behalf of the philosophers, in a work entitled Incoherence of the Incoherence. An Islamic jurist as well as a philosopher, he argued in another work never translated to Latin that the Koran effectively tells those who are capable of rational understanding to study philosophy. In his response to Ghazali, Averroes pointed out that Ghazali’s argument made inferences from the empirical to the divine. Ghazali had said that everything that happens is deliberated and knowingly chosen by God. This actually Aristotelian terminology of deliberation and choice applies to empirical agents, insofar as they want and lack something. Averroes responded that God lacks nothing, and therefore does not choose or deliberate like a human would.

This small piece of a much larger argument is illustrative of a typical contrast. Broadly Aristotelian and neoplatonic views both emphasized the eternity of the divine as part of its perfection. They also took “secondary” causes very seriously, because they took something like Hegelian mediation seriously. Conversely, if God were directly responsible (causally or morally) for everything that happens, this would abolish all causal or moral responsibility of all other beings, and indeed all distinction whatsoever. (See also Strong Omnipotence.)

Strong Omnipotence

The Greek-speaking Jewish theologian Philo of Alexandria (1st century BCE to 1st CE) was perhaps the original antiphilosopher. That is to say, he used some philosophical ideas with learning and sophistication, but was unequivocally hostile to the autonomy of reason, which was something of a commonplace among the Greek philosophers.

For Philo, any equivalent of ethical virtue seems to come exclusively from faith in the revelation of the Greek Old Testament, taken as the literal word of God. To me, this sounds like an unfortunate precursor to today’s fundamentalisms, which ignore all sounder theology, and preclude the very possibility of genuine ethics. Where there is no allowance for virtue independent of one-sided authority, it may become all too permissible to hate whomever is called an unbeliever or heretic. Many other theologians have been far less one-sided, allowing for at least a relative autonomy of reason, and a possibility of genuine virtue independent of sheer obedience to presumed dictates of revelation. With them, a moral philosopher can find common ground.

Philo may have originated the suggestion that Platonic ideas exist in the mind of an omnipotent God. An emphatic supernaturalist, he defended creation from nothing, grounded in an ultra-strong version of divine omnipotence. On this view, God has absolute liberty, and thus can do absolutely any absolutely arbitrary thing at any time, as with the later Islamic occasionalists. Philo explicitly contrasted this view with those of all the Greek philosophers and those influenced by them, who at the very least would expect God to act in ways that are genuinely reasonable and good, and thus put reason and goodness before any will. Unlike the God of Aquinas, for instance, the God of Philo is even supposed to be able to do logically impossible things if he so wills. This is extreme theological voluntarism.

Philonic strong omnipotence is precisely the kind of thing Leibniz later said would make of God an arbitrary tyrant, with disastrous ethical and social consequences. Notions of divine will tacitly assumed to be known with certainty by human authority, and not subject to any inquiry go against the whole better tradition of faith seeking understanding, and make it all too easy to mask hate in the name of supposed holiness.

In all three of the major monotheistic traditions, this dangerous kind of voluntarism has been applied by some to God. Some have gone on to attribute similar supernatural free will to humans as well, on the ground that they are made in the image of a God that has that kind of completely unconstrained freedom. This is using bad theology to justify bad anthropology. As anthropology, it is what Hegel called the illusion of Mastery. Some bad philosophers have simply postulated a similar completely unconstrained “negative” freedom or “freedom of indifference” for humans, without even a pretended explanation of how this could be. (See also Freedom and Free Will.)

My main source for statements about Philo here is the actually sympathetic essay by Harry Austryn Wolfson, in his book Religious Philosophy: A Group of Essays (1961). I always thought of Wolfson as a Spinoza scholar, but Wikipedia says he is actually best known for another, larger work on Philo. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a nice summary of current Philo scholarship. (See also Fragility of the Good; Theology.)

Fortunes of Aristotle

The history of the reception of Aristotle is actually quite fascinating. Aristotle, the greatest of the Greek philosophers, lived from 384 – 322 BCE. While very famous and influential during his own lifetime, his work went into eclipse for a while, shortly after his death. According to Strabo (1st century CE), Aristotle collected the world’s first library of handwritten manuscripts, which eventually became the starter for the famous library of Alexandria in Egypt. In between, the library and Aristotle’s own original manuscripts were privately held by the family of Theophrastus, moved to what is now Turkey, and allowed to deteriorate. Theophrastus, Aristotle’s best known direct student, was mainly interested in his own research in natural science, and is known as the father of botany.

Meanwhile, for several centuries, philosophy came to be dominated by Stoicism, founded by Zeno of Citium (334 – 262 BCE) and codified by Chryssippus (279 – 206 BCE). Stoicism, with its unique combination of rough-and-ready materialism with ascetic spiritual teaching, achieved great popularity, and was the first broadly “philosophical” teaching to significantly influence society at large. Compared to Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics promoted a much simplified notion of philosophy, and turned it into a complete system of truths claimed as certain. Still, they were quite sophisticated, and developed many original ideas.

Aristotle’s surviving manuscripts were later edited by several hands, including Andronicus of Rhodes (1st century BCE), a Greek who taught in Rome. With the edition of Andronicus, the works of Aristotle began to be circulated in many copies.

The oldest surviving commentaries on Aristotle are those of Aspasius (2nd century CE). The greatest Aristotelian commentator of the ancient world, Alexander of Aphrodisias, flourished in the late 2nd to early 3rd centuries CE. Recent scholarship has shown that the works of Plotinus (3rd century CE), the founder of the so-called neoplatonic school, contain abundant traces of implicit dialogue with Aristotle and Alexander, even though Plotinus identified mainly as a Platonist. Although Plotinus significantly influenced Augustine, the Athenian branch of the later neoplatonic school became a center of non-Christian spirituality and culture in the later Roman empire, and for this reason was forcibly closed in 529. The Alexandrian branch under Ammonius (5th/6th centuries) escaped a similar fate, apparently in part by shifting teaching away from the now-suspect Plato to the apparently less controversial Aristotle. The largest bulk of surviving Greek commentaries on Aristotle come from the Alexandrian neoplatonic school, and reflect neoplatonizing tendencies.

Philosophy in the period of the initial rise of Islam is not well documented, but apparently the main centers of learning moved further east from Alexandria, and extended along the Silk Route. Most Greek works were translated to Arabic from intermediate versions in Syriac. By the time of the first self-described philosopher to write in Arabic, al-Kindi (9th century), Aristotle had become unequivocally recognized as the greatest of the ancient philosophers. By the 10th century, there was an amazing flourishing of interest in Arabic translations of ancient learning among a relatively broad layer of literate skilled artisans in the middle east, as well as important sponsorship from the caliphs. While retaining some neoplatonic perspectives, the great al-Farabi (roughly 870 – 950) made strides toward recovering a more historical reading of Aristotle (but see caveat in Belief). By painstaking textual study of multiple Arabic translations, the greatest of all commentators on Aristotle in Arabic, the Andalusian Ibn Rushd or Averrroes (1126 – 1198 ), or “the” Commentator as he was known to the Latins, in a truly amazing intellectual achievement went much further in this progressive recovery of Aristotle’s meaning.

There is, then, an intriguing progressive historical sequence in the larger societal uptake of philosophical ideas, which runs from Stoicism to neoplatonism to renewed Aristotelianism.

In the Latin West, only Aristotle’s Categories and On Interpretation were known in the early middle ages. As more of Aristotle’s works began to be available in Latin, Peter Abelard (1079 – 1142) initiated the development that later came to be known as scholasticism. Abelard emphasized the importance of reason in theology and ethics, and in a monument of intellectual honesty compiled many conflicting opinions of authorities on various questions in Sic et Non (“Yes and No”), with discussions on ambiguities and interpretation. Translation of the commentaries of Averroes to Latin in the 13th century then sparked a gigantic development with many famous names, including Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas.

In the 12th and early 13th centuries, Christians attempting to engage in theological debate with Moslems and Jews found themselves at an embarrassing disadvantage, because educated Moslems and Jews by this time often had a great deal of Aristotelian learning, and the Christians did not. During part of the 13th century, teaching of most of the newly translated works of Aristotle was still banned in Europe. But late in the century, the Church took bold and controversial steps to actively sponsor Aristotelian learning, and began to found universities all over Europe for its promotion. In spite of the fact that Averroes was considered to have a few positions that were strongly censured by theologians, the Church nonetheless sponsored the teaching of Aristotle — most often through the commentaries of Averroes — as the foundation of all higher education. During the 14th century controversy over nominalism, for instance, the prestigious University of Paris reaffirmed that Aristotle should be taught with the interpretations of the Commentator. (See also Errors of the Philosophers.)

Aristotelian teaching in Europe grew even stronger across the Renaissance. More commentaries on Aristotle are said to have been written in the 16th century than in all previous history combined, and this continued into the early 17th century. Common stereotypes about sterile and nonsensical scholasticism are extremely prejudiced, and mostly based on sheer ignorance. Especially in Italy, there came to be a very strong tradition of independent secular Aristotelianism. Across Europe, theologians too became tremendously sophisticated in their arguments, as a result of their mandatory preliminary seven years reading Aristotle.

With the rise of early modernity in the 17th century, huge additional discontinuities followed from the transition to modern languages and printed books. Aristotle came to be generally treated with ignorant hostility by people identifying with a modern point of view. Leibniz was an exception, but only with Hegel did the trend begin to reverse again. There has been a great deal of excellent scholarship on Aristotle since the late 19th century.

Defeasible

“Defeasible” (i.e., defeatable) is a legal term metaphorically used by Brandom for anything provisionally affirmed or accepted. The great majority of things we affirm or accept fall into this category.

Brandom applies a legal model of due process to ethical negotiation. We start with presumptions of innocence and good faith. This means that until a cause for reasonable doubt is shown, we act on the assumption that people have good reasons for what they say and for what they want; but anything can be challenged. (See also Things Said; Dialogue; Assumptions; Reasons; Desire, Coherence; Commitment; Mutual Recognition; Scorekeeping.)

In general, I strongly believe that ethics should drive law and not the other way around, but I would argue that the broad notion of due process actually is a good example of ethics driving law, as it should.

Desire, Coherence

We experience all sorts of passing and possibly conflicting impulses or wishes upon which we don’t necessarily act, and to which we never commit ourselves. It would not be appropriate to call these things that we “really” want.

Really wanting something implies what Aristotle would call a choice. This does involve a kind of ethical commitment. As Aristotle and Brandom might jointly remind us, to choose something is also inherently to choose whatever the realization of that thing requires; to choose what follows from the realization of that thing; and not to choose anything else that is incompatible with any of these. That is why Aristotle associates choice with deliberation. Just as emotion and reason interpenetrate in feeling, really wanting something implicitly has a rational and normative component as well as a desiring component.

Of course the possibility remains open that in particular cases, we may be unclear on what we want. In this case, we are back in the territory of wish and impulse. There is still some responsibility even here, but it is shared with others, and generally also matter for forgiveness. But as talking animals, if we explicitly say to someone that we want something, we are in the realm of choice and commitment, and we are responsible to be able to explain ourselves. Our participation in the universal community of ethical reason lifts organic desire into a defeasible rational desire. (See also Unity of Apperception; Dialogue; Scorekeeping.)

Objectivity of Objects

Things like objectivity (see also Ethics; Reason; Semantics; Historiography; Philosophy of Math etc.) and subjectivity are potent, ultra-high-level abstractions that remain highly ambiguous until meanings are made more explicit in particular contexts of application. Objectivity and subjectivity are constituted through very involved processes, and their real meaning is about the detailed working out of particular cases.

Objects generically are abstract referential placeholders at which we can figuratively “point”. What is really of interest with objects, though, is not this susceptibility to being pointed at, but their implicit content, which can be elicited in particular cases by developing the context in which the pointing occurs (see Substance; Material Inference). The implicit content of objects is made progressively more objective through such development.

Such a development of the objectivity of objects eventually entails not only a movement toward unity of apperception, but (since objectivity with regard to content concerns shareable content), engagement with a larger, ongoing movement of mutual recognition among talking animals across history. (See also Truth, Beauty.)

Monism, Pluralism, Dualism?

I’d like to return to the question of keeping space open for the harmonious coexistence of a kind of monism, a kind of pluralism, and a kind of dualism at different levels of interpretation in the development pursued here.

At the level of the whole field of potential attributions of agency and responsibility, I’d like to foster the normative monism or monism of expression that I have attributed to Brandom. This seems to have the resources to translate any given empirical, factual content into the expressive terms of a transcendental normative evaluation. Here, everything that is expressible in any way whatsoever becomes expressible in ethical terms. The meaning of the monism in question has to do mainly with a kind of completeness of coverage in overcoming the subject-object dichotomy, not a lack of differentiation. Also, the complete field will include many overlapping attributions, so we should not expect it to have a univocal interpretation. So, in these ways, this monism is not incompatible with a pluralism after all.

At the level of detailed actual processes of evaluation of what is right and true, “monism” — or, more properly, unity of apperception — is only a guiding end that must be applied to a constantly moving target, so a unity that is momentarily achieved may partially unravel again. (See Error.) Also, there may be more than one sound interpretation of the “same” content under evaluation, and multiple explanations may yield complementary insight. The aimed-at “monism” here has to do mainly with a kind of coherence subject to all these caveats, so it is even more pluralistic.

At the level of an adequate account of the many aspects of subjectivity and experience, I want to be careful to preserve a broadly Kantian distinction between empirical and transcendental elements, while modeling their relation on the broadly Aristotelian relation of “first nature” to second nature. In Kant’s own presentation, the empirical/transcendental distinction has a dualistic appearance, but the first-nature/second-nature distinction I want to map it to involves a kind of emergence of second nature from first nature, rather than a dualism.

Previously, I resorted to programming language metaphors of compilation and “lifting” — and a distinction between operational and expressive equivalence — to help describe the relations between first and second nature in a way that would resolve the tension between my monistic claim and the distinction I want to maintain. (See Bookkeeping; Layers.) I’m still pondering the implications of such a metaphorical application of concepts from a formal domain to things that are after all not formal. While I still find that interesting, I think the above sketch might be sufficient to assuage concerns of overall consistency without it.