Politics is important...

...Aristotle defined humans as essentially political because we live in groups and, in order to live in groups, we have to treat political issues as essential..

... but totalitarian politics - politics that pushes out everything not political - is dehumanizing.

//Like so many other areas of study, a consensus has been reached in English and Comparative Literature that the aims of one’s research should be about more than a body of knowledge or a disciplinary canon. Critique, as it is understood, is ultimately a criticism of the society (not the author) that produced a given text; all literary criticism reduces to social criticism. The contemporary literature professor need not even be an expert on any particular author or literary figure, but can be expected to be a master at applying a particular interpretive lens such as Queer Theory or Critical Race Theory.

The reality that the humanities and social sciences seem to be increasingly attracting one particular kind of person with one, very distinct, understanding of the world can be seen in other disciplines as well. Entire fields and subfields such as Diplomatic History and Military History are on the precipice of extinction, as more and more current and aspiring historians ignore or abandon these fields for the sexier (and more explicitly ideological) fields in Cultural and Social History.

What has happened in Literature and History departments as well as in other disciplines draws attention to something rarely considered in discussions concerning intellectual diversity in higher education. Conservatives will point to statistics such as the imbalance in the ratio between registered Democrats and Republicans as evidence of a political imbalance. Students it is argued are only getting one side of the story. While this sentiment is certainly understandable, it ignores an element of the current phenomena that might be even more deleterious to student learning and thus all the more intractable. The problem isn’t simply one of political imbalance, an absence of parity between Left and Right voices, but the extent to which humanities departments have become politicized.

The possibility that one might read a manuscript or approach a cultural or philosophical question from a perspective that isn’t explicitly political is now often dismissed as either naive or not worthwhile. In this way, the humanities have constructed a sort of ideological prison house for themselves. One of the most compelling features of humanistic study is the inexhaustibility of interpretations—the capacity to engage a text, a cultural practice, or an age-old philosophical question and derive new meanings and new possibilities from it. As the humanities have become subsumed into a larger political project, the possible interpretations that one may entertain have become narrowed to explicitly politicized readings.//

Aristotle Knew

Friendship and Hook-up Culture.

As Aristotle knew, our characters are formed by what we repeatedly do. We cannot just flip a switch when the time is right and care about other people. If we spend the first half of our lives looking out for ourselves and our careers while treating other people like disposable objects that exist to serve our needs, that will influence our characters. Later, if we decide to get married and have children, our spouse, children and co-workers, who interact on a daily basis with a selfish person, will suffer.

There is nothing wrong with women and men striving for fulfilling careers. There is something wrong with an objectivist narrative, which says that the only things worth doing are self-serving. In this narrative all of life becomes a means. Nothing is a good in itself. Everything becomes instrumentalized (sex, kids, job, spouse, house, income). We spend our lives accruing honors trying to prove that we have value, when what truly makes us happy is to contribute to our communities in a meaningful way, to love and be loved.

In a detached environment, the message from the church sounds impossibly strange, and yet it is one worth remembering: It is not unambitious to want to have a good marriage or close friendships or to get along with one’s family or know one’s neighbors. It is, in fact, extremely ambitious. People do not accidentally have harmonious relationships, any more than they accidentally become secretary of state. They put in the hours, and their practices become their habits and their habits become their virtues and their virtues become their lives.

There are many ways to live a happy and fulfilled life: single, married, with children, without them. Goodness is diverse. But we are made for love and friendship. As Cicero wrote, “Friendship improves happiness and abates misery,” not by scoring us the corner office, “but by doubling our joys and dividing our grief.”//

If you don't have Aristotle...

...you will follow any idiot who comes along.

Teleology -  don't leave home without it.

Terrence Deacon’s Incomplete Nature, might have been titled Aristotle’s Revenge.
While the book’s subtitle is ‘How Mind Emerged From Matter’, it’s a far more ambitious–and complicated–attempt to show how goal-directed processes, including the origin of life and mind, can arise from purely physical processes.

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Deacon is a Professor of biological anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at University of California, Berkeley, and the author of a previous book, The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and the Brain. [Technically, his new book was released late last year, but as it's got a © 2012, I'm selecting it as my pick for this year's most notable.]

 

In Incomplete Nature, Deacon begins by exposing the inadequacy of reductionistic explanations of consciousness and purpose as mere by-products of an impersonal natural order.

He is equally unsatisfied with dualism and the argument that mind and purpose can only be explained by an appeal to the transcendent.

No. For Deacon, the answer has to lie in a closer look at self-organizing processes and how the origins of life and consciousness are rooted in the constraints that bind and shape these processes as they build from the simplest self-assembly of molecules up to the emergence of the first life forms.

At 602 pages, index, notes and all, the book is a long commitment for any reader. And some reviewers (fellow academics) have been harsh. Deacon coins a number of new terms to lay out his arguments, each with its own chapter–homeodynamics, morphodynamics, teleodynamics–and while the glossary is certainly helpful, it’s not always easy to visualize what each term represents without constant, concrete examples.
Still, Evan Thomspon, a professor of philosophy who has written his own contribution to the field, Mind in Life, sums up the book’s virtues in his review for Nature.

Deacon takes his guiding idea from one of my favourite chapters of a classic Chinese philosophical text from the fourth century B.C., the Tao Te Ching: “Pots are fashioned from clay/But it’s the hollow that makes a pot work.” Similarly, Deacon sees the ‘constitutive absence’ as functional, a defining property of life and mind. Living things are dynamically organized around ends, such as finding nourishment; and minds are dynamically organized around meanings, such as anticipated future events. And like the hollowed interior of the pot, these ends and meanings are both functional and absent, in the sense that they affect a system’s behaviour, yet are not material parts of it.

Deacon is arguing that scientists can accept head on, the notion that conscious thought is not material, and yet in principle can be explained in natural terms by a sort of architecture of constraints.

Constraints, as Deacon wrote last year in an overview for New Scientist, involve:

… the degrees of freedom not realised in a dynamical process. To illustrate, consider how a quickly flowing stream forms stable eddies as it curls around a boulder, or how a snow crystal spontaneously grows its precise, hexagonally symmetric, yet idiosyncratic branches.

In both cases, he said, “the resulting order is a consequence of possibilities that become increasingly improbable by the compounding of constraints, due to continual perturbation.”

“Thus, as the branches of a snow crystal grow, they progressively restrict where new growth can take place. Constraints reflect what is not there,” he said, “and the more constrained something is, the more symmetric and regular it is.”

Admittedly, it’s a long way from the constraints in snow crystals … to the constraints surrounding the conscious existence of you and me. And some of Deacon’s colleagues are skeptical about his program.

But what I liked about the book is it’s author’s insistence that teleology, in one way or another, has a place in the natural sciences. I think modern day Aristotelians would approve.

So I asked Deacon, how he would distinguish the ‘contraints’-based approach to, say, a neo-Aristotelian who came up to him and said, ‘Hey, this is what we’ve been arguing all along…’ (i.e., about the explanatory power of concepts like potentiality and actuality in living systems)?

“He’d be right,” he told me in an email, “though without the science to back it up. But my work only parallels the Aristolelean approach.”

“Thus, where Aristotle tries to save a bit of Platonism, I reject it – replaced with the concept of constraint and a negative conception of form and organization – and to the extent that my theory is based on thermodynamics, deriving order and telos secondarily, I am ultimately grounded on very different metaphysical assumptions.”

Top-down causality is not the answer. But the bottom-up isn’t blind, either.

Deacon discusses the book in some detail in this presentation followed by Q&A.

Aristotle Call Your Office.

Science suggests that mental imagery gives language meaning.

Scientists climb to top of mountain, only to...

...discover Aristotle beat them there by 2,500 years.

A recent Time article on recent development in cognitive psychology:

Study co-author Ralph Adolphs, a professor of psychology at Caltech, explains the distinction by way of a grocery shopping example: “Your valuation network is always providing you with information about what’s rewarding around you — the things you want to buy — but also lots of distracting things like junk food and other items popping into your vision off the shelves.”

Cognitive control is what keeps this network in check. “To be able to get to the checkout counter with what you planned, you need to maintain a goal in mind, such as perhaps only buying the salad you needed for dinner,” says Adolphs. “That’s your cognitive control network maintaining an overall goal despite lots of distractions.”

Understanding how the brain parcels out specific decision-making tasks can offer insight into conditions in which such networks go awry, such as in the case of psychiatric disorders. Depressed people, for example, clearly have difficulty with value-based decision making: because nothing feels good or seems appealing, all options appear equally bleak and making choices becomes impossible. Hoarding disorder, in contrast, may involve overvaluation of certain possessions and impairment of the cognitive control needed to shift one’s attention away from them. That explains why hoarding becomes more important than other life goals like maintaining relationships.

So, basically, our decision are based on "reason" and "will." Reason proposes options to our will and our will decides based on its apprehension of the goodness of the choice. If the will doesn't apprehend goodness, it can't decide. If reason doesn't "tee up" the options, the will has nothing to decide upon.

Pure Aristotle.

Incidentally, that last part on "hoarding" sounds "spot on" from my observations. Aristotle and St. Thomas would say that the problem involves an inordinate or disordered desire for a particular good.

Good Question.

What if our ability to have a free society is dependent on our ability to restrain ourselves from exercising our freedom through reasona and prudence?

Designs on the Truth points out:

A frequent mantra from talk-show callers, this statement is often followed by “And that’s why I can’t vote for Santorum” or “That’s why I support Ron Paul.”

The proclamation is usually delivered in a measured tone, calculated to convey how very reasonable and rational the speaker is:

“Yes, as an independent thinker I’ve carefully considered past and present socio-economic trends and sagely concluded that conservatism is definitely called for in fiscal matters, but when it comes to morals well, that’s personal, whatever works for you.”

The glaring problem with this theory is that, all historical evidence to the contrary, it assumes a dualistic view of human nature. It says we’re able to behave one way in this area of our lives and the opposite way in this area. That we can be totally unfettered socially, yet totally disciplined in economic matters.

But if we’re generally freewheeling when it comes to our personal lifestyle choices, how do we magically develop restraint or responsibility in fiscal matters?

We don’t. As our friends across the pond are slowly, and painfully, realizing

A nice summary of the "Four Causes."

At Brutally Honest:

Imagine four sheets of paper. One has been folded into an airplane. One has been shaped into an origami frog. One has been crumpled into a ball, a paper wad. And one sheet is left alone.


All four objects are made of the same stuff but they are different things. Philosophers call that stuff the Material Cause. The last sheet represents that cause; the stuff of each object. It is important how the sheets were made, by whom and why. But for now consider just sheets of paper taking different forms.

Their form makes the objects different. Philosophers call that the Formal Cause. The paper wad represents that cause; a different form than the sheet. I read recently that crumpled paper has deep mystery to science. It cannot be accurately modeled! But for now, it is enough to see that a paper wad is different from a sheet. It has a different form.

An origami frog might be folded by an eight year old, but I couldn't do it. Philosophers call the eight year old the Efficient Cause. Almost anyone can make a paper wad. But it takes skill to make a frog. If you'd never seen a real frog, you might have trouble distinguishing the frog from the wad. But for now, it is important to note that an Efficient Cause must be up to the task. I couldn't do it. I am not an efficient cause of origami though you might be.

The paper airplane was made to fly. Philosophers call that purpose, the Final Cause. If the paper plane doesn't fly or doesn't fly well, we say it isn't well made because it doesn't fulfill its purpose.

My friend says that the universe is merely "atoms and void". We agree on this material cause. We agree on the formal causes, the different forms atoms can take. But I continue to be amazed that anyone, especially Randy, can think that natural laws are an efficient cause for those forms of matter that are alive. Nothing in nature, not even natural selection, has demonstrated the creativity necessary for a DNA molecule, let alone a human brain. Nature by itself is simply not up to the task. Believing life happened naturally seems to take an enormous leap of faith.

But the most troubling aspect of my friend's atheism is the loss of purpose. For Randy, there is no final cause for the universe, no purpose to life except what he gives it. When he is gone, so is the purpose.

Darwin and Aristotle.

Michael Flynn on Darwinism:

Mendel chose pea plants partly because they i) had easily identifiable features, ii) could self-fertilize, and iii) were easy to protect from cross-fertilization. But before he could even start, he needed true-breeding plants; that is, plants that when self-crossed would always produce the same phenotype. This took two years of preliminary work. Mendel then spent years making thousands of crosses, discovering that


traits were inherited whole and

traits that seemed to disappear in one generation could reappear in another generation

He described these observations in a set of mathematical relationships (laws) regarding the inheritance of dominant and recessive traits. (These were similar to Darwin's mathematical laws of natural selection setting out the relationship between fitness and reproductive success... Oh, wait. Never mind.)

People sometimes wonder where Mendel found the time to do all this, considering his monastic responsiblities. I have even seen it alleged that the abbot shut him down, a nice example of "model-based history"*. But the answer is easy. His research was one of his monastic responsibilities. The monastery had been conducting hybridization research even before Mendel arrived. The Augustinians freed up his time for the research, allocated large plots of land for his research, and built a greenhouse where he could establish a control group for his studies. The Order did not sorta kinda "give Mendel a research grant" to pursue his personal hobby as some historically ill-informed have grudgingly allowed: The research was part and parcel of the Order's program. Mendel himself had trained as a physicist, not a biologist, so this would not likely have been his own personal choice. Mendel was simply doing the scientific research that his Order asked him to do.**

Mendel's results were published in the Proceedings of the Natural History Society of Brünn in 1866. No-one noticed. Over the next 35 years, his work was cited... three times! Oh well. In the early 1900s, Mendel's work was rediscovered by Correns, deVries, and others, and developed into an entirely new discipline within biology -- genetics.

*model-based history. This is where one starts with an idee fixe and deduces "what must have happened" in the light of that prior assumption. This dispenses with the laborious requirement for actual empirical evidence.

** Oddly, Mendel's work and the support from his Order are seldom mentioned during debates about church-science relationships. See first note (*).

And:

The term "evolution" is the opposite of "involution." It means "an opening of what was rolled up" and was used by the Romans to describe reading a scroll. By the 1660s, it was used in English to mean what we call "morphogenesis." In 1762, it was used by Bonnet for the homunculus theory of embryological development. It was greatly popularized in the philosophy of Herbert Spencer. It was also used (in France) to mean social progress culminating in that pinnacle of evolution: the French intellectual. Most of all, it was used always with a teleological spin.


These were the meanings current when Darwin did his thing. Darwin, who knew that the English country squire was the pinnacle of evolution, rejected the term "evolution" both because of its association with the French Terror (according to Michael Ruse) and its inherent teleology (according to Etienne Gilson). He did not use it until the sixth (and final) edition of the Origin, much preferring either "natural selection" or [his favorite] "descent with modification."

The public mind, however, prefers short terms to longer phrases, and quickly conflated Darwin's natural selection with Spencer's evolution, to the great distress of both men. Spencer objected that his principle was much broader than a mere scientific law, and published a widely-translated pamphlet making his (ultimately vain) case for priority. Darwin, who seldom bothered responding to any disagreement (and seems to have regarded Spencer in person unfavorably) detested philosophy on principle and resisted using the term "evolution" until he finally threw in the towel in the sixth edition of Origin.

And:

Basically, we have seen several major threads coming together: Mendel's genetics, Darwin's natural selection, Kimura's neo-Lamarckian neutral selection. In an article that I have long lost, these factors were summarized as follows:


The genetic factor: the tendency to variation resulting from constant small random mutations in the genetic code; i. e., a variety of differing individuals within a species capable of transmitting their differences

The epigenetic factor: the tendency of interbreeding population to reproduce itself in a stable manner and increase in numbers; i. e., the maintenance of type

The selective factor: natural selection by the environment which eliminates those variants which are less effective in reproducing their kind; i. e., the agent determining in which direction species-change will take place

The exploitative factor: the flexibility of living things by which they are able to occupy new niches in the changing environment; i. e., a feed-back mechanism which guides the selective process toward a new type which can exploit new environmental possibilities

Which the Aristotelians among you may recognize as

Material cause

Formal cause

Efficient cause

Final cause

Surprise! That old Stagerite sure does get around. But then, as Aristotle told Empedocles, you have to look at things from all four points of view to get a complete sense of what is happening.

Another scientific study proves that water is wet. First it was atheists tend toward autism and now...

...people who tend to be utilitarian in solving moral dilemmas tend toward anti-social personalities.

These results (which recently appeared in the journal Cognition) raise questions for psychological theories of moral judgment that equate utilitarian responses with optimal morality, and treat non-utilitarian responses as moral "mistakes". The issue, for these theories, is that these results would lead to the counterintuitive conclusion that those who are "optimal" moral decision makers (i.e., who are likely to favor utilitarian solutions) are also those who possess a set of traits that many would consider prototypically immoral (e.g., the emotional callousness and manipulative nature of psychopathy and Machiavellianism).

Jeepers, who would have thought that people who decide the answer to moral questions based on a cold-hearted analysis of the best outcome could possibly be cold-hearted people who analyze everything in terms of outcomes?

Score another one for Aristotle and his idea that actions shape habits and habits shape personality and personality shapes destiny.

Amazon Book Review - Etienne Gilson,  "From Aristotle to Darwin & Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species and Evolution."

Go here and give me a "helpful" vote.

"Not for everyone, but useful for those with a deep interest in the project of  science," September 25, 2011


By Peter S. Bradley "Peter Sean Bradley"

Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)

This review is from: From Aristotle to Darwin & Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species and Evolution (Paperback)

This book is a lot like physical exercise; difficult, occasionally enjoyable, often a slog, but worthwhile after the fact.

Gilson's book is not facially anti-Darwinian. Gilson's real concern is in defending the idea of final cause or teleology in biology from those who would say that such an idea has been disproven by science. Final cause, or teleology, is the idea that things are directed towards some end, either by something external to themselves or by their own internal existence. Gilson's argument is that Darwinism either doesn't disprove teleology because Darwin's method of science isn't interested in science or that Darwinism actually incorporates teleology by its incorporation of the idea of "evolution" itself.

Gilson is primarily writing as a historian of science and philosopher. Consequently, is method of analysis is historical. He reviews the history of ideas, rather than criticizing evolution or Darwin on a scientific basis. On the whole, Gilson appears to be quite sympathetic to Darwin as a person and a scientist.

Gilson's first chapter is on the "Aristotelian prologue." Gilson examines Aristotle's idea of final cause, and how Aristotle responded to those who would deny final cause. Gilson points out that Aristotle's interest in biology led him to conclude that there was clear and convincing evidence of final cause in the biological world. This evidence grew out of Aristotle's observations that natural things developed regularly and orderly in the direction of an end, e.g., calves grew up to be cows and seed grew up to be plants. Moreover, things in nature develop to a "limit." Calves grow up to be cows, and then develop no more, which implies a limit or an end toward their development. Aristotle's observations - based as they were on truth - carried the day, and from Aristotle onward, any person who sought to examine nature was compelled to include in their description some idea of final cause.

Gilson's next chapter is on the "Mechanist Objection." In a nutshell, that objection, formulated by Rene Descarte and Francis Bacon, was that science ought to be useful, and that final cause was not useful. Gilson observes that the Aristotelian approach found its end in the "contemplation" of nature, and that "contemplation" was tied up with appreciating "final cause." Gilson notes that for scientists, the appreciation for the truth of a theory is often related to an appreciation of the beauty of a theory, which is itself tied up in the wonder of "final cause." However, a scientific approach that incorporates final cause may find that science is being "retarded" in its ability to produce practical results as scientists become "critics" of nature, rather than "mechanics."

So, for Bacon and Descarte, "final cause" had to go, not because it was wrong, but because it was either not useful, or it was retarding scientists from focusing on the useful.

After clearing the ground, Gilson then addresses the history of the idea of evolution. Gilson's argument here seems to be that neither "fixism" - the idea that species were fixed from the beginning - and "transformism" - the idea that species change over time - is conceptually opposed to the idea of final cause. In fact, it seems that Darwin was not opposed to the idea of final cause, but on one occasion accepted the congratulations of a friend that he had restored final cause to science.

The truth appears to be that Darwin simply wasn't concerned with final cause. Being nurtured in an understanding of science that had developed after Bacon, final cause simply wasn't a thing that Darwin was concerned about.

Darwin's big target was the idea of "special creation." Gilson argues that when Darwin felt that his observations disproved special creation, it meant that the Bible could not be trusted by itself as an accurate description of truth. From that point on, it seems, Darwin made common cause with those "partisans" who opposed "special creation," whether or not they accepted Darwin's notion of natural selection, or its chief competitor, Lamarckianism.

One of the partisans who came into Darwin's camp, even though Darwin did not like him personally, was Herbert Spencer. It was Spencer who popularized the notion of "evolution," not Darwin. According to Gilson, in his first editions of the Origin of the Species, Darwin did not use evolution, rather he spoke of "transformation." It was Spencer who spoke of "evolution," but in Spencer's usage evolution had a clear teleology in that their was an internal dynamic by which things progressed from the simple to the complex. Eventually, Darwin began to speak of his theory as "evolution," but by doing so he incorporated, sotto voce, Spencer's teleology.

Gilson discusses other contributors to Darwinism. His take-down of Parson Thomas Malthus is a must-read example of ironically damning someone with faint praise.

So, Darwinism, or "evolution", did not eliminate the notion of final cause, and how could it if final cause is true? Rather, Darwinism is either irrelevant to the notion of final cause, or it incorporates that notion without explicitly acknowledging that it does.

Gilson ends his book by explaining why we ought to continue to think that final cause is necessary for our understanding of truth. That reason primarily is that we see it all around us, even if we don't have a mechanistic explanation for it. Gilson notes, for example, that one of the things that we see in evolutionary development is a progress toward individuation: slime mold is less individual than plants which are less individual than bees which are less individual than cows which are less individual than lions which are less individual than human beings, who have a mind and self-awareness. Is this observation wrong? No. Can it be explained mechanistically? No. Does this teleology, showing a development toward limits, exist? Yes.

Is this science? Probaby not, but it seems to be "common sense" as that term was classically understood as meaning a first order inference from undisputed facts and ideas. To paraphrase a source quoted by Gilson, scientists need to be careful in ruling out "common sense" because where the results of a scientific inquiry conflict too strongly with common sense, it may not be common sense that it wrong.

Gilson concludes by pointing out that final cause may not be scientifically useful, but it is a necessary concept for understanding reality, and it is attested to by numerous real world examples. Its truth may not be scientifically verifiable, but many things we take for granted are not scientifically verifiable. The meaning of ideas, for example, is not scientifically verifiable. We hear words, but the meanings behind the sounds and symbols that are words cannot be measured. Meanings are sense independent, and, in fact, immaterial. Does that mean that meanings don't exist?

Likewise, science relies a variety of theoretical principles to reach its conclusions, including Occam's razor, the principle of least action, etc. Why are those things any more true and real than final cause? Gilson concludes with the following:

"Compared to generalizations such as the principle of least action, economy of thought, and other similar ones, the notion of natural teleology cuts a modest figure. It can be reproached for being anthropomorphic, but in a science which is the work of man, what is not? Furthermore, the important thing is to know whether or not it expresses a fact given in nature for if we object to final causality as an explanation, it remains as a fact to be explained."

Gilson's book is difficult, but I think that on reflection - and reflection is required to put together Gilson's arguments - it pays dividends.

Choices create habits; habits create character; character creates destiny.

Father Barron against the modern Gnostics - what we do with our bodies shapes our spirit.

It is just so obvious when it's put that way.

From reading Aquinas' commentaries on de Anima and the Nichomachean Ethics, I knew that the intellect is prior to the will in that the intellect "tees up" the options for the will to choose, but it takes Thomistic Sci-Fi author Mike Flynn to summarize the idea in this understandable way:

On the free will front, I explained the Aristotelian position: the will is an appetite for the products of the intellect, and the intellect is therefore prior to the will.

"For the products of the intellect."  Good stuff.  The intellect "gets busy" and outlines the pros and cons of a decision, but the will has to choose by an act of "appetite" what will be done.

Flynn continues:

I gave the parallel with the perceptions of the senses and the emotions (or sensitive appetites). The will is necessarily free because the intellect does not know perfectly. I asked how many wanted world peace. Most raised their hands, causing some worry regarding the others. But when questioned, most admitted they did not know what world peace would look like or how it would be achieved. Since you cannot desire what you do not know, the will is free to choose various means to the end. That's all free will means, after all. It doesn't mean muscular motions, or random choices, or unpredictable choices. For more detail see a previous essay.