Classical Theism, Philosophy, and Religion Forum » Roman Catholicism and Transubstantiation

John West · 7/21/2015 10:38 pm

Scott wrote:
John West wrote:
There is one resemblance nominalist whose taken seriously, but he has to bring in Lewis's extreme modal realism to make his theory work.
Rodriguez-Pereyra?

Yeah. In one of his last books (A Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysic), Armstrong writes that Rodriguez-Pereyra made him take back several of his comments in his earlier works.

Jason Grey · 7/23/2015 8:24 pm

Jason Grey wrote:
I'm on my way offline, but the short answer to your second question is that I don't think it does. I deny the first conditional of the dilemma for the reasons I stated. This should also, I hope, go some way to showing why I reject the notion that God's omnipotence does in fact lead to radical skepticism. The purpose of my dilemma was to show that if God is deceitful (ie. such that He just banged around transubstantiating everything), then we don't need anything nearly as spectacular as transubstantiation for the kind of skepticism Mark mentioned in the line I later quoted.

It would be interesting to discuss the points you list (I consider at least a few untroubling; ie. at least one is I think, at bottom, tied up with a Humean analysis of the laws of nature I reject) in a separate thread. Didn't Daniel ask questions about some epistemological claims you made anyway?

I was not meaning to say that I endorsed every one of those points. Only that each provides a strong prima facie reason for thinking that absolute Cartesian certainty is impossible in empirical matters. I think, in fact, this Cartesian shift from truth to certainty is one of the great things that has gone wrong with modern thought.

I think the demand for Cartesian certainty in all cases, that is, to make this kind of certainty a necessary condition of knowledge ends up rendering almost all knowledge impossible, and therefore entails skepticism.

It does seem to be true that if God just "banged around transubstantiating everything" (nice turn of phrase), then that would present a serious skeptical problem. I think the way to answer it is to argue for an intellectualist conception of God rather than a voluntarist one (an inscrutably "banging around" God). I think Muslims have this problem, and that it did and does significantly hinder philosophy and science in the greater Islamic world. I think Christianity contracted this voluntarist conception in the late middle ages. Duns Scotus .. maybe, but certainly by Ockham, and it has been an utter disaster.

If I had to pick a single word to sum up what is mistaken about modernism, that word would be "autonomy." The late medieaval theologians described an inscrutable God of terrible power and unknowable will, a kind of divine monster that is frankly terrifying. I think this both set the stage for people wanted to get away from this monstrous God, and for a transfer of this radically voluntarist understanding from God to man, thus ushering in the era of the subordination of the intellect to the will. Descartes devotes one of his 6 Meditations to establishing that the will is that in us that is most Godlike -- the father of modern philosophy, the father of "Rationalism" clearly states that reason is inferior to will. Philosophically, it is only a few steps to Hume's skepticism and Nietzsche's exaltation of art (making, creating) over truth.

I didn't see anything by Daniel, but I'll check.

_Jason

John West · 7/23/2015 9:27 pm

Hi Jason,

Concerning intellectualism and voluntarism, I agree. The only thing more terrifying than Ockham's God is Ockham's whole metaphysic—an unknowable world held together by a psychopath.

Jason Grey · 7/24/2015 12:06 am

John West wrote:
Hi Jason,

Concerning intellectualism and voluntarism, I agree. The only thing more terrifying than Ockham's God is Ockham's whole metaphysic—an unknowable world held together by a psychopath.

Have you read Michael Gillespe's book Nihilism Before Nietzsche? He makes an pretty good case, as I recall, that the Enlightenment was a kind of massive project of human self-defense against this kind of absolutely terrifying monster God. I don't think the Christian world had ever been TERRIFIED of God before, not like that. He doesn't go back further than the Enlightenment, although he already indicated he thought the trouble started with Ockham and nominalism, who had, after all, created the monster God that Descartes and others felt they had to erect the basiton of Reason against.

Reason opposed to God! That is literally, to my mind, insane, the very thought that reason could be opposed to God or God to reason. So how did this happen?

Jason Grey · 7/24/2015 12:23 am

DanielCC wrote:
Jason Grey wrote:
I am definitely not anti-philosophical. But like many here I suspect, I think that human reason (like all that is best in us) aims upwards to God, who can of course meet us more than halfway, through revelation and grace.
Never said you were Jason. My post was more of a whimsical aside on the relationship between mystical experience and philosophical proofs.

Jason Grey wrote:
Why would it surprise us in the least that a God whom we believe is Himself both the eternal Logos and Truth itself would guide a trust-seeking philosopher to an argument? Haven't almost all the great Christian philosophers and thinkers prayed for assistance, support, and guidance in their thinking? I'm not sure one can even distinguish praying and philosophizing in, say, The Confessions. God may even have a sense of humor about this: Anselm famously prayed a very long time for THE argument to answer the atheist -- and he got the Ontological Argument. Question: is that in any way related to God's answers, much more directly, to questions by Moses and Job?
Well in as much as certain persons may receive divine inspiration in the course of their philosophising certainly. That doesn't actually effect the final product i.e. the propositions they set down though. Likewise with Augustine we can certainly attempt to provide a phenomenological elucidation of religious experience (much of The Confessions is a indeed drawn out prayer but at the same time it’s a phenomenological reflection on the nature of time, memory and the act of praying itself).

Jason Grey wrote:
As Pascal said, "There is nothing more reasonable than reason's recognition that there are things above reason." The solution is not to take a leap of faith over reason -- Nietzsche, with no knowledge of Kierkegaard, wrote of the "weariness that wants to reach the ulimate in one leap, in one fatal leap." Pascal saw that the rationalism of Descartes was a severe truncation of reason -- although he didn't escape this himself.
I'm not sure what you mean by Rationalism here. If you mean the Cartesian way of doubt then I agree but so would most philosophers who aren't hard-line Foundationalists (also the subjecting the laws of logic to doubt being incoherent but of course that’s widely accepted too). Though he wasn't a complete fideist I'm suspicious of Pascal – that style of rhetoric turns the intellectual soul from being the mirror of God to being a broken nothing indeed of help from something fundamentally beyond and incomprehensible to its own order. The theophantic nature of reality vanishes and some incoherent phantasm called the ‘natural world’ appears against God.

Jason Grey wrote:
If I had to formulate one of the main problems that classical theists face today, it is that "reason" has been co-opted into rationalism (calculative rationality, ratio in the narrow sense, not logos is the wide sense), and is being laid claim to by the secularists in the form of scientism. And scientism, or any ungrounded rationalism is, paradoxically, PROFOUNDLY IRRATIONAL, even absurdist, and ends up becoming an exercise more in power than in truth -- it "enframes" the world, as Heidegger would put, allow only certain things past its filter to count as "evidence" or "truth."
Here, you've touched on precisely what concerns me with the above: scientism or Logical Positivism are not paradoxically irrational they're just irrational full-stop, the result of intellectual and social fads – one needs no mystical experience to establish this: even Bertram Russell spent decades trying to point it out. Sometimes I think modern philosophers would benefit from a good dose of Cartesian-Phenomenological history-culture bracketing to cut through some of these prejudices.

I agree that there is a possible over emphasis on dialectical reasoning as opposed to given experience of the Divine – Hegel would be a prime example of this – but I think that’s relatively uncommon these days.

Jason Grey wrote:
Would many or most of you agree that clasical theism sees faith and reason as related in a complimentary (if not spousal) manner, whereas the situation we find today is an almost complete opposition or divorce ASSERTED to exist between them? That we are trying to sail between the Charybdis of fideism and the Sylla of scientism?
I would agree that they ought to exist in such a complementary manner. With doctrines such as Transubstantiation or the Trinity the Christian philosopher can show that they are not contradictory even if their existence cannot be deduced from reasoned premises.

Hello Daniel,

John asked if I hadn't talked about episemology with you, and I think he meant this exchange. The reason I didn't respond, which is not really a good reason now that I think it through, is that you don't say anything I disagree with, as far as I can tell. I want to say things like, "Yes, exactly. The Confessions is both a prayer and a brilliant philosophical reflection on all those things."

Some days I feel sorry for Aristotle for having written the Physics 750 years before Augustine, because he is the only great writer on time who doesn't quote Augustine's opening observation about time:

"What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know. But if someone asks me, I do not know, and cannot answer the questioner."

I think this principle is general and applies not only to time, but to nearly all the archai (first things/principles) that philosophy deals with.

Question: How would you relate philosophy and phenomenology?

Last edited by Jason Grey (7/24/2015 12:30 am)

John West · 7/24/2015 12:28 am

Jason Grey wrote:
Reason opposed to God! That is literally, to my mind, insane, the very thought that reason could be opposed to God or God to reason. So how did this happen?

I haven't read Gillespe but, I think, one necessary condition for this view was the elimination of final causes. Given final causes, God is the natural ends of reason.

By the way, I just checked. The question of which I was thinking is here. Sorry about that.

Last edited by John West (7/24/2015 12:33 am)

Jason Grey · 7/24/2015 12:38 am

John West wrote:
Jason Grey wrote:
Reason opposed to God! That is literally, to my mind, insane, the very thought that reason could be opposed to God or God to reason. So how did this happen?
I haven't read Gillespe but, I think, one necessary condition for this view was the elimination of final causes. Given final causes, God is the natural ends of reason.

I absolutely agree. There is a whole web of things here, including the expulsion of final and formal causes, nominalism, voluntarism ... it is like a witch's brew of bad philosophy.

If there are no ends in reality, no telē, the very idea of the good itself stops making sense. It MUST become "subjective." The only way to explain the good if there are no ends in reality is by material causes or efficient causes. The will, or subjectivity generally looks a lot more promising to explain goodness than anything material.

If you make man the master of all creation and also assure him he can't really know any natures, such as his own, and that he has no real end, what else is there but will and haphazard desire?

I don't even think it is coherent to have confidence in reason itself if it were not the case that reason is teleologically ordered towards truth.

Last edited by Jason Grey (7/24/2015 12:40 am)

DanielCC · 7/24/2015 5:10 am

Jason Grey wrote:
Hello Daniel,

John asked if I hadn't talked about episemology with you, and I think he meant this exchange. The reason I didn't respond, which is not really a good reason now that I think it through, is that you don't say anything I disagree with, as far as I can tell. I want to say things like, "Yes, exactly. The Confessions is both a prayer and a brilliant philosophical reflection on all those things."

Some days I feel sorry for Aristotle for having written the Physics 750 years before Augustine, because he is the only great writer on time who doesn't quote Augustine's opening observation about time:

"What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know. But if someone asks me, I do not know, and cannot answer the questioner."

I think this principle is general and applies not only to time, but to nearly all the archai (first things/principles) that philosophy deals with.

Question: How would you relate philosophy and phenomenology?

Hello Jason,

No problem at all. I was actually talking about on your Introduction thread where I asked how one can defend a philosophy which grants a primacy of intuition without appearing question-begging to the naturalist

About phenomenology, I view it, or at least the phenomenology developed by Husserl and his followers in their Munich days, as a highly purified form of 'empiricism', that is a focus on given experience without all the grotesque baggage of British Empiricism i.e. the image theory of thought, Nominalism, Representationalism. It also breaks down the in my opinion wrong-headed and simplistic dichotomy between 'experience', taken to mean sense experience in crude fashion, and reason - to paraphrase from memory to carry through the Pythagorean Theorem step by step, to bring it to fulfilment, is an experience of truth. Ironically I think the Empiricism of Aristotle and thus Thomas (Scotus does better here) had too much in common with Locke and co, for instance in their emphasis on an alleged strict 'phantasm'-concept relation - Scholastic epistemology would be greatly enriched from a dialogue with The Logical Investigations and Ideas II, something I hope to undertake one day.

Generally I think the phenomenological analysis of Giveness, eidetic analysis, intentional analysis et cetera is a good propaedeutic and clarifactory procedure to approaching philosophical problems. To the horror of those who whinge about 'armchair philosophy' in understanding how we understand the world we often come to understand more of the world in the process (case in point: it’s likely that our experience of colours furnishes us with a ready example of Metaphysical/Broadly Logical Necessity, something that Russell and Wittgenstein grudgingly began to recognise).

Last edited by DanielCC (7/24/2015 5:11 am)

Jason Grey · 7/24/2015 9:16 pm

DanielCC wrote:

Generally I think the phenomenological analysis of Giveness, eidetic analysis, intentional analysis et cetera is a good propaedeutic and clarifactory procedure to approaching philosophical problems. To the horror of those who whinge about 'armchair philosophy' in understanding how we understand the world we often come to understand more of the world in the process (case in point: it’s likely that our experience of colours furnishes us with a ready example of Metaphysical/Broadly Logical Necessity, something that Russell and Wittgenstein grudgingly began to recognise).

Robert Sokolowski used to define philosophy as the art of making distinctions, which seems like a reasonably good definition to me. I'm entirely happy to call myself a phenomenologist in the same way that Heidegger is perfectly happy to call Plato and Aristotle phenomenologists.

Philosophy seems to me to stand or fall with the thought that being and thinking are mutally open to one another. The given is being's directedness towards being understood; intentionality is thinking's directedness towards understanding.

And as it happens, Being does not give itself as a Parmenidean block, but as beings, and for every being there is its act of existenece, its that-it-is, and its essence, its eidos or what-it-is.

In 101, I tell my students that philosophy involves both seeing and saying, by which I mean noēsis and logos as dialegesthai or dianoiein, discursive reasoning.

It seems clear that the denial of essences or natures can be done by denying them outright, or by denying that we have a power of knowing them. So to deny eidē is also to deny noēsis. This is what modern philosophy has done. Denying noēsis while retaining logos leads to skepticism first, and then to sophistry.

To deny essences is to say that there is nothing that things really are. To deny noēsis is to say that we cannot know what things really are. We can still give discursive definitions, but without a superdiscursive noetic ground, we have no way to decide among competing definitions -- other than of course which definintion prevails in the event, and so power (hence, sophistry).

Plato and Aristotle are clear about this, that we know the first things, the archai, noetically. Discursive reasoning cannot go backwards forever.

My question is, what are the best ways to get someone to SEE that they need to SEE certain things? That some things are so fundamental they cannot be proven discursively, but that this does not make them irrational? How do you talk to someone who expresed doubt about the law of noncontradiction or his own existence? Can you?

Caveat: when I use the word logos, I mean discursive reason, the specific difference of man, not Christ the eternal Logos.

Last edited by Jason Grey (7/24/2015 9:23 pm)

DanielCC · 7/25/2015 6:07 am

Some general comments: I know Jason is stating a general position rather than giving dialectical responses specifically to me so I’m giving general sorts of comments in response. Sorry to him and everyone else for the piece-meal nature of these posts – not in an environment conducive to tranquillity and reflection atm!

Jason Grey wrote:
Philosophy seems to me to stand or fall with the thought that being and thinking are mutally open to one another. The given is being's directedness towards being understood; intentionality is thinking's directedness towards understanding.

I agree but don’t think the alternative is even coherent. If we could not think about reality we could not even think about our own thoughts in order to make that statement – even if our mind was the only concrete thing we could know about it would still remain part of reality.

Jason Grey wrote:
To deny essences is to say that there is nothing that things really are. To deny noēsis is to say that we cannot know what things really are. We can still give discursive definitions, but without a superdiscursive noetic ground, we have no way to decide among competing definitions -- other than of course which definintion prevails in the event, and so power (hence, sophistry).

To be fair some modern philosophers at least in the Analytical school have woken up to this. It’s not yet general admittance of eidos but the recognition of De re truths about properties like the colour example earlier is a significant step on the road to reality (I say not yet an admittance since Nominalists would like to paraphrase talk of universals to talk of other things e.g. sets of tropes, sets of objects across all possible worlds – naturally I think they’re wrong here but the admission that reality has a necessary structure is a step in the right direction).

Jason Grey wrote:
Plato and Aristotle are clear about this, that we know the first things, the archai, noetically. Discursive reasoning cannot go backwards forever.

I agree but we should be careful here to distinguish between the ancient (bad) argument that our inability to give discursive proofs for everything leads to scepticism and modern debates on the virtues of Coherantism as opposed to Foundationalism. The above pushes us in the direction of Foundationalism, with which I would side, but if Coherantism can work then it can support metaphysical arguments just as well as Foundationalism.

Jason Grey wrote:
My question is, what are the best ways to get someone to SEE that they need to SEE certain things? That some things are so fundamental they cannot be proven discursively, but that this does not make them irrational? How do you talk to someone who expresed doubt about the law of noncontradiction or his own existence? Can you?

(I’m reminded of an anecdote about Coplestone. The Jesuit, when asked to prove the existence of God by someone with then popular ‘Plain Language’ tendencies, replied that he had merely to point to one contingent being.)

Ironically if they refuse to see it’s tantamount to a denial of all empiricism and the possibility of any knowledge coming from without (and ultimately within as was said earlier).

A lot of logical not to mention metaphysical principles are axiomic though in that one need give no positive proof for them only point out that their denial leads to contradiction and incoherency. The sceptic can still press on from here but if they do they tacitly admit that they’re no longer engaging in rational thought i.e. that they are sceptical of the very idea of rational thought in which case their scepticism is a mere brute feeling or act of will, a ‘mystical’ scepticism.

Last edited by DanielCC (7/25/2015 10:36 am)