- rondokeele
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Re: Q&A with Rondo Keele
AKG wrote:
Again thanks for your response Professor Keele:
With all due respect, I have to disagree with you regards to this as I think there are ways to ground morality in God without resorting to Divine Command Theory as I admit that I am not convinced by the response you have given as:
I'm not really sure that resolves the problem as much as simply appeals to the irrational. It's basically saying "oh yeah, well what if God was so super super super suuuuuper incomprehensibly amazing that you're compelled to submit to His arbitrary commands through sheer terror, confusion, and awe?"
I have found that some people have no taste for this solution. It sounds as though it's not to your liking... I do think that God is super incomprehensibly amazing. But I think it's important to see that, in fact we are not compelled to submit. That's the really hard edge of the matter. Human beings can resist and resist.
Again, I can attach no sense to the phrase "God's arbitrary commands". No divine command is arbitrary. God's actions and decisions are perfect and purposeful and beyond my comprehension. Hence I cannot see where I have appealed to the irrational. Again, submitting in awe I get, but not in terror or confusion. And if you ask me "Can God do whatever he wants?" My answer will be "Of course." I cannot imagine God as cruel or whimsical; I know he is not because he tells me how he is in Qur'an and I believe him. He tells me my good deeds will never be lost; whoever does an atom's weight of good will have it weighed in the scales and whoever does an atom's weight of evil will have it weighed. So I know he will be just in this sense, although nothing whatsoever in the world could possibly hold him to account for this or for anything else at all. It's not that I think "with God in charge, I cannot lose on judgment day;" I most certainly can lose. But I believe that if I go to hell I deserve it. God will not get this wrong. My anxiety about hell isn't aimed at God, it's aimed at me. I ask that God forgive me and you, and that he give me and you goodness and ease in this world and the next. Amen.
Professor as with regards to your interpretation of the Surah I would recommend checking out the comments on this article(not the article itself), along with other points on the website in general which focus on reason and Islam rather than arbitrary wills:
Also with regards to the issue of Divine Command theory do you know how Avicenna, Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, and Averroes dealt with this issue as I know Avicenna/Averroes stood by intellectualism rather than voluntarism but I have trouble finding readings which elaborate on their works.
Good question. I think that the voluntarism\intellectualism distinction, clearly applicable and salient in the history of Christianity, is perhaps less applicable or even a bit misleading in the history of Islam. The divide over the nature of God between medieval Thomists and Franciscans is important, but not so very wide; the somewhat similar divide between Ibn Sina and al-Ghazali, say, over the universe as created versus necessarily emanated -- this is a much wider gulf indeed. You could try looking into some basic readings about this, say Leaman's A Brief Introduction to Islamic Philosophy. One thing to keep in mind is that the status of Islam as a divine command religion is much more widespread and secure than it is in Christianity; Islam has a well worked-out legal theory and a clear-cut revelation which make that possible. However human intellect is used to play around in metaphysics, its use in deriving the moral law is not in establishing first principles, but in clarifying and applying revealed commands, and infering law the best we can based on reports of prophetic conduct. There are no foundational arguments in fiqh about the source of the moral law, nor even in the main what texts are relevant to work from. I find Islam completely rational this way, very straightforward. But I find it (rightly) uncompromising about the question of what is the ultimate source of right and wrong. Just like Ockham.
Thanks and peace.
Wa alaikum assalaam.
Last edited by rondokeele (1/16/2017 5:59 pm)
- iwpoe
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Re: Q&A with Rondo Keele
وَإِذْ قَالَ رَبُّكَ لِلْمَلَائِكَةِ إِنِّي جَاعِلٌ فِي الْأَرْضِ خَلِيفَةً ۖ قَالُوا أَتَجْعَلُ فِيهَا مَن يُفْسِدُ فِيهَا وَيَسْفِكُ الدِّمَاءَ وَنَحْنُ نُسَبِّحُ بِحَمْدِكَ وَنُقَدِّسُ لَكَ ۖ
قَالَ إِنِّي أَعْلَمُ مَا لَا تَعْلَمُونَ
For full reference (as I think almost none of us can read Arabic):
Al-Baqarah (The Cow) 2:30:
Transliterated:
Wa-ith qala rabbuka lilmala-ikatiinnee jaAAilun fee al-ardi khaleefatan qalooatajAAalu feeha man yufsidu feeha wayasfiku addimaawanahnu nusabbihu bihamdika wanuqaddisu lakaqala innee aAAlamu ma la taAAlamoon
English:
And [mention, O Muhammad], when your Lord said to the angels, "Indeed, I will make upon the earth a successive authority (a khalif)." They said, "Will You place upon it one who causes corruption therein and sheds blood, while we declare Your praise and sanctify You?" Allah said, "Indeed, I know that which you do not know."
Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
My Books
It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
- 884heid
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Re: Q&A with Rondo Keele
Hello Professor Keele, it's an absolute honor to have you here. I am a big fan of your work. I've read that you identify yourself as a Sunni Muslim and that is surprising to me since most of the medieval specializing philosophers that I've heard of are mostly Catholic, especially since you specialise in Chatton and Ockham, and I don't mean that in a negative manner of course.
If this isn't too personal, I would like to ask how did you come to accept the faith of Islam? Was it a philosophical epiphany or perhaps a religious experience? You've mentioned that you specialise in medieval philosophy and you don't limit yourself to Ockham and Chatton which makes me certain that you are familar with a myriad of theologians such as Aquinas and Maimonides as well with their theological arguments and predisposition towards Catholicism and Judaism. This perhaps makes the question of Islam being your religion such a fascinating topic to me. Please feel free not to answer this in case I am intruding too much.
And thank you so much John for this Q and A, I failed to engage with Professor Keele in reddit a few years back. I was already able to learn more about Chatton thanks to the few questions and answers that have been posted here.
- Camoden
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Re: Q&A with Rondo Keele
Hi Professor Keele, thanks for participating in this great Q&A. I have a question concerning the philosophy of beauty. Are scholastics, Muslims, or classical theists in general committed to have an objective analysis of beauty?
Also, do Ockham and Chatton explore this question in any length, in a substantive sense?
Thanks in advance, and I appreciate your presence here.
God bless you,
Cameron
Last edited by Camoden (1/17/2017 1:28 pm)
- rondokeele
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Re: Q&A with Rondo Keele
Hello iwpoe,
(I don't know if it is correct etiquette to address people with screen names; if it's not I apologize.)
You as three very good questions. I'll try to take them in turns. It might need more than one post.
Professor, I appreciate you for your time and detailed contribution and attention to our forum.
1. I understand that this is a very historically complicated question, but since you are a competent historian as well as a philosopher, I wanted to know:
What do you think of the position of somebody like Lloyd Gerson that Platonism and Aristotlianism are not as strictly distinct a set of positions as is sometimes pretended?
2. On what points of philosophical importance are Chatton and Ockham in major substantive agreement?
3. You've charecterised a key point of disagreement between Ockham and Chatton as one over indirect realism in the fictum theory. Many of us here have in one form or the other discussed the problems of indirect realism in early modern thought. Would it be in any respect accurate to think that the fictum theory "had legs" despite Ockham's ultimate rejection or does the indirect realism of modernity have some other traceable source in medieval thinking?
So, regarding the first question...
1. I understand that this is a very historically complicated question, but since you are a competent historian as well as a philosopher, I wanted to know:
What do you think of the position of somebody like Lloyd Gerson that Platonism and Aristotlianism are not as strictly distinct a set of positions as is sometimes pretended?
I’ll tell you a story about one of my favorite teachers in college, Tom Reed. One of the best, most patient, powerful analytic minds I have ever met. When asked about his methods in philosophy he used to reply: “I read the first sentence of the book or article, and then each one thereafter in turn. After each sentence I ask myself: why is this false?”
I think this captures something both funny and true about the so-called analytic tradition in philosophy, about that Anglo-American style, which is that it tends, like my old teacher, to reduce things to a series of truth claims which are then ‘tested’, by thought experiment or counterargument or what have you, until their breaking point is found.
There’s something decidedly Cartesian about all this.
This style has definite drawbacks, some very serious. But one advantage it has in that it forces the reasoner to organize and systematize for critique the views under study. And this leads to the tendency you mention, the construction of a “distinct a set of positions” which are then attributed to the thinker and criticized; “Why is this false?” If the thinker being reconstructed is influential, we make an ‘-ism’ out of his name, call it a school, and claim that the -ism is constituted by the aforementioned reconstruction of the characteristic set of positions. So Platonism = {form is a cause; form is the cause; form is real, realer than the things it’s a form of; form is separate;…} and Aristotelianism = {form is a cause; form is a cause; a form is not realer than the things it’s a form of; a form is not separate, in fact it is inseperable;…}, and so on. Then we can even have Early Aristotelianism = {…; a form is less real than the things it’s a form of; …} and Late Aristotelianism = {…; a form is as real as the things it’s a form of; …} and so on. There is a utility in all this. But it is a reconstruction, to be sure, and as such is inorganic and often ahistorical. Analytic philosophers are often abysmal historians.
Moreover, the whole approach (should we call it the ‘alethic approach’? as if only truth values matter?) has a definite shortcoming, which lies in the practical dimension, and there are three sides to it. (1) The alethic approach leaves unaddressed the most important questions you can ask about a thinker: “What animated his labors? Why do all this?” If you don’t know what their intellectual anxieties are, you have no idea what they are talking about. If you don’t know who they themselves read and were responding to, you have no idea what they are talking about. There is a practical dimension, often called ‘context’, which goes missing, and is even necessary to get the alethic approach right in the first place. (2) Moreover, even more devastating, the alethic approach makes it impossible for us to enter sympathetically into what animates these labors, the motives and anxieties, etc., and so prevents us from thinking with Plato and Aristotle, for example, instead of just thinking about them, or worse, about their –isms. Plato wanted to know how we can think the many nevertheless as one; and this is in fact a really deep and quite mysterious thing. Most of the Greeks avoid thinking about nothing, and so are haunted by the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’, unable to ‘solve’ the problem of essential versus accidental change, the problem of absolute generation. We need to be able to see, even feel, why they did this, what were the costs and opportunities for talking like this.
I once heard Nicholas White, the great Plato scholar, describe himself at an informal academic gathering this way (everyone was supposed to make an introduction and to say what his or her ‘interests’ were): “Hi, I’m Nick White, and I’m interested in everything Plato was interested in.” Perfect answer. And at some point we want to know if Plato was right about things, sure, but first we have to think with Plato for a while.
(3) The final practical dimension of philosophy that is lost to exclusive reliance on alethic style is that, sometimes Plato writes something but is not making a claim at all. Rather, he’s trying to do something to your soul, to produce an effect: for example, to get your mind to rise. I mean this quite literally; Plato is abstracting and talking about higher objects and making arguments so that your soul will elevate its gaze in order to regard them, with the result that your soul is now angled upward instead of downward. This is not dissimilar from a coach who gives a runner or a jumper a performance target they cannot now hit and have never hit before, so that the trainee will stretch and reach and try, and eventually do better, eventually rise. (Incidentally, this is why Plato sometimes relates and constructs myths in his philosophical writing, stories he doesn’t necessarily believe in detail. Because hearing them can nevertheless elevate you. This is also why he wrote literature, why he wrote beautifully.) If you only ever think about Plato’s views (or worse, about Platonism) instead of also thinking with him, being interested in all the things that interested him, then you will never be susceptible to the elevating effects of his talk.
Similar things could be said of Aristotle, although perhaps to a lesser degree. Maybe there really is more a thing called ‘Aristotelianism’. My teacher Paul Spade used to say (perhaps he was quoting someone else): Plato cared about what is important, never mind whether or not it is true; Aristotle cared about what is true, never mind whether or not it is important.
- rondokeele
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Re: Q&A with Rondo Keele
Hello Professor Keele, it's an absolute honor to have you here. I am a big fan of your work. I've read that you identify yourself as a Sunni Muslim and that is surprising to me since most of the medieval specializing philosophers that I've heard of are mostly Catholic, especially since you specialise in Chatton and Ockham, and I don't mean that in a negative manner of course.
If this isn't too personal, I would like to ask how did you come to accept the faith of Islam? Was it a philosophical epiphany or perhaps a religious experience? You've mentioned that you specialise in medieval philosophy and you don't limit yourself to Ockham and Chatton which makes me certain that you are familar with a myriad of theologians such as Aquinas and Maimonides as well with their theological arguments and predisposition towards Catholicism and Judaism. This perhaps makes the question of Islam being your religion such a fascinating topic to me. Please feel free not to answer this in case I am intruding too much.
And thank you so much John for this Q and A, I failed to engage with Professor Keele in reddit a few years back. I was already able to learn more about Chatton thanks to the few questions and answers that have been posted here.
Hi, 884heid. Thank you for your kind words; your questions are neither intrusive nor bothersome.
In order to survive in the academy one has to publish quite a bit, and to do that one needs to be somewhat expert in something. So I have a narrow research focus, and I enjoy going deeply into scholastic philosophy, even to the level of detail. But by temperament I’m a generalist, and I teach in a liberal-arts honors college, so I get to think about lots of different things and how they connect with each other, which is nice. For example, I teach a course in mediaeval philosophy, where we do two problems: future contingents and divine foreknowledge, and the problem of the eternity of the world. For the first problem we do some background to get ready, then read Augustine and Ockham; for the second we do some background, then read al-Ghazali. I frame the whole thing by having us read Maimonides for both problems, and to give students the spirit and flavor of later mediaeval philosophy generally. I like Maimonides very much. So I do enjoy the broad perspective this affords.
How I came to contain such an odd assemblage of interests is a fairly simple story. I was born and raised in Utah, with an extended family who were either Catholic or Mormon or not religious. My own family were not particularly religious, my Catholic family lived far away, and while the Mormons have excellent values, their theology is not tempting. I was a smart kid, so I grew up arrogantly resentful, and basically agnostic. But always I was interested in religion. In college I became attracted to philosophy, adding that major to my initial major, which was archaeology. I enjoyed the clarity of thought and expression in philosophy, the depth of its problems, and especially their difficulty, since it is fun to think very hard about things. While an undergraduate training in the analytic tradition, I became aware of mediaeval philosophy from a visiting Dutch student, and was quite shocked to learn that it was very difficult and deep. I assumed, based on nothing but ignorance, that it would not be rigorous. This opened me up to the possibility of looking into it. I finished my BA and BS and did an MA on the epistemology of religious experience, working on Alston and Plantinga, mostly from a hostile perspective, but still engaging the issues.
I went on to a Ph.D. and just happened to meet Professor Paul Spade, the eminent mediaevalist, and liked his teaching very much. I took class after class with him, and after studying Ockham decided to make this my specialty. I still was not a believer but I had much less hostility to religion and began to be disillusioned with those who did. While there I took a course in Sufism, that is, Islamic mysticism, my first serious exposure to Islam. I remember liking Islam theologically, and thinking if I ever were religious I would be a Muslim, but I never imagined that actually happening. I enjoyed the intellectual problems of Christian philosophical theology, but the doctrines of the incarnation and trinity never appealed to me at all. I did a dissertation with Spade on Ockham and Chatton, and, rather than taking the customary visiting positions on my way to a tenure track job, I took a tenure track job in Cairo, Egypt, at the American University in Cairo.
Living in a place suffused with Islam changed me. It is very difficult to describe the effect, and it was very subtle. No one tried to convert me, although they were happy to talk about Islam. However, seeing a cab driver pray in public on a patch of grass because he could not reach the mosque in time, seeing the people endure crushing poverty with good humor, seeing the unbelievable generosity, the charity of Ramadan, the haunting sound of the call to prayer, all these things, a thousand small experiences, brought subtle, slow changes to my heart, gently weakening my arrogance.
I returned to take a position in the States, but soon after a series of personal disasters (a very sick child and a divorce) broke the last of my resistance, and after a doubt-destroying religious experience I began to believe. When you believe in God it becomes necessary to worship him, just as when a baby is born it becomes necessary for it to breath. How though to worship God? Either by Christianity, Judaism, or Islam; no other options. I wanted the religion of Abraham, universal monotheism. Christianity is a universal religion, no doubt, but not monotheism; Judaism is monotheism, but not universal. This leaves only Islam, and it took very little time after approaching the Qur’an with an open heart to realize this book is not the work of a man. I said the shahada just in time for Ramadan, and began to learn to pray.
Hence, through this rather odd path I became, in my forties, a Muslim who has a research specialty in Christian philosophical theology.
Last edited by rondokeele (1/19/2017 9:31 am)
- Jason
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Thank you Professor Keele for taking the time out to come chat with us. Firstly, my question is related to your comment about the 'alethic approach' and that if we just rely on it then we lose context, lose the sympathy for that particular person and the author's perspective (if you allow me to paraphrase). I do not deny that losing the context is a good idea in any sense but with all due respect I disagree with the your second point. If we include sympathy for a person in “accessing” what they are saying then that actually does not make it objective but starts to bring a certain bias to the readers point of view. Wouldn’t that hinder you in your assessment of what they are saying? Is'nt that the advantage of this approach? Please do correct me if I am wrong here.
Secondly, thank you for sharing your conversion story. I would however like you to qualify why you think that Christianity is not monotheism?
Last edited by Jason (1/19/2017 12:29 pm)
- rondokeele
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Hi, Jason. Thank you for your questions. Let me approach them in reverse order.
Secondly, thank you for sharing your conversion story. I would however like you to qualify why you think that Christianity is not monotheism?
I don't have in mind anything polemical or controversial with this, but only just the bare claim that Christianity differs from Judaism and Islam on the question of God's unity and uniqueness. So, for example, whatever you would say in explaining to a curious martian about how Christianity differs theologically from its two cousins; that is all I have in mind here.
Thank you Professor Keele for taking the time out to come chat with us. Firstly, my question is related to your comment about the 'alethic approach' and that if we just rely on it then we lose context, lose the sympathy for that particular person and the author's perspective (if you allow me to paraphrase). I do not deny that losing the context is a good idea in any sense but with all due respect I disagree with the your second point. If we include sympathy for a person in “accessing” what they are saying then that actually does not make it objective but starts to bring a certain bias to the readers point of view. Wouldn’t that hinder you in your assessment of what they are saying? Is'nt that the advantage of this approach? Please do correct me if I am wrong here.
Let's think what a worrying bias might be like in this regard. Here are some possibilities:
(1) It might be that, awash in sympathy for the motives, constraints, and opportunities under which Ockham, say, was working, I forget to ask: is he right about X or Y? That is, I would aim to describe and understand like an insider, but not to critique at all.
I don't know if this fault should be called 'bias', exactly, but it is a fault, and it's not ultimately respectful to the thinker being studied or the readers and students looking at our work, because Ockham, for example, certainly believed in truth, and my readers deserve to know, not only what he said, but also whether, as far as I can tell, he was correct about it. I think as teachers and writers and forum participants we owe it to our companions to do this, if we feel able to do so.
(2) It might be that, by becoming involved sympathetically in a thinker's point of view, instead of confining myself to bare claims, I introduce to much of my antecedent perspective, and project, so to speak, that very perspective onto my subject, instead of finding it there. So 'Ockham' ends up saying what Keele believes instead. This fault deserves the name 'bias', I think.
If you have in mind something other than (1) and/or (2), I'm not sure what it is, but if you are thinking of (1) and (2) then my answer is, yeah, it's a worry alright. And it's hard to strike the balance. Because of my nature and my training I don't really have a problem with (1) very much, but I really have to watch out for problem (2) in my work, really have to guard against it.
I rely very, very heavily on motivation in understanding positions the history of ideas; it is possible that this is simply how my mind works, so that I am unable to do better or to do otherwise. But because I publish in peer-reviewed journals I get plenty of criticism if I overstep, so this alleviates my worries about my own bias to some degree. At this stage of my career the corrections I have received from colleagues over years has tempered me a bit, so that now I am less intuitive, more cautious; or perhaps I am slower to publish my intuitions. At any rate, if I understand your question, yes, you've identified a serious worry. But investigating context in the way I describe is essential, I think. It also humanizes these thinkers, making them more relatable, hence more accessible, to ordinary people. That's what I tried to do with Ockham Explained, and what I try to do as a teacher.
- rondokeele
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Re: Q&A with Rondo Keele
Hi Professor Keele, thanks for participating in this great Q&A. I have a question concerning the philosophy of beauty. Are scholastics, Muslims, or classical theists in general committed to have an objective analysis of beauty?
Also, do Ockham and Chatton explore this question in any length, in a substantive sense?
Thanks in advance, and I appreciate your presence here.
God bless you,
Cameron
And you.
What a great question. Here's a disappointing answer: darned if I know. I'd love to find out, though. I guess I've maybe read a little bit of al-Ghazali on this, but other than that I've never spent time following this topic systematically in the thought of Scholastics, or in Muslim thinkers more generally.
- Jason
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Hi, Jason. Thank you for your questions. Let me approach them in reverse order
Secondly, thank you for sharing your conversion story. I would however like you to qualify why you think that Christianity is not monotheism?
I don't have in mind anything polemical or controversial with this, but only just the bare claim that Christianity differs from Judaism and Islam on the question of God's unity and uniqueness. So, for example, whatever you would say in explaining to a curious martian about how Christianity differs theologically from its two cousins; that is all I have in mind here.
I really did not think it was polemical at all Professor but I would like to say that Judaism and Islam differ from Christianity not on the question of God’s unity and uniqueness (contrary to popular belief on what the Trinity is) but on the simple fact of the cross of Jesus Christ. Christians believe, as I am sure you will know, that the cross of Jesus Christ is the only place in history where God’s Perfect Justice, Perfect Wrath, Perfect Holiness and Perfect Love all converged together. Belief in the redemptive power of God through Jesus Christ rather than ANYTHING we can do to earn it is where Christianity differs theologically.
Thank you Professor Keele for taking the time out to come chat with us. Firstly, my question is related to your comment about the 'alethic approach' and that if we just rely on it then we lose context, lose the sympathy for that particular person and the author's perspective (if you allow me to paraphrase). I do not deny that losing the context is a good idea in any sense but with all due respect I disagree with the your second point. If we include sympathy for a person in “accessing” what they are saying then that actually does not make it objective but starts to bring a certain bias to the readers point of view. Wouldn’t that hinder you in your assessment of what they are saying? Is'nt that the advantage of this approach? Please do correct me if I am wrong here.
Let's think what a worrying bias might be like in this regard. Here are some possibilities
1) It might be that, awash in sympathy for the motives, constraints, and opportunities under which Ockham, say, was working, I forget to ask: is he right about X or Y? That is, I would aim to describe and understand like an insider, but not to critique at all.
I don't know if this fault should be called 'bias', exactly, but it is a fault, and it's not ultimately respectful to the thinker being studied or the readers and students looking at our work, because Ockham, for example, certainly believed in truth, and my readers deserve to know, not only what he said, but also whether, as far as I can tell, he was correct about it. I think as teachers and writers and forum participants we owe it to our companions to do this, if we feel able to do so.
(2) It might be that, by becoming involved sympathetically in a thinker's point of view, instead of confining myself to bare claims, I introduce to much of my antecedent perspective, and project, so to speak, that very perspective onto my subject, instead of finding it there. So 'Ockham' ends up saying what Keele believes instead. This fault deserves the name 'bias', I think.
If you have in mind something other than (1) and/or (2), I'm not sure what it is, but if you are thinking of (1) and (2) then my answer is, yeah, it's a worry alright. And it's hard to strike the balance. Because of my nature and my training I don't really have a problem with (1) very much, but I really have to watch out for problem (2) in my work, really have to guard against it.
I rely very, very heavily on motivation in understanding positions the history of ideas; it is possible that this is simply how my mind works, so that I am unable to do better or to do otherwise. But because I publish in peer-reviewed journals I get plenty of criticism if I overstep, so this alleviates my worries about my own bias to some degree. At this stage of my career the corrections I have received from colleagues over years has tempered me a bit, so that now I am less intuitive, more cautious; or perhaps I am slower to publish my intuitions. At any rate, if I understand your question, yes, you've identified a serious worry. But investigating context in the way I describe is essential, I think. It also humanizes these thinkers, making them more relatable, hence more accessible, to ordinary people. That's what I tried to do with Ockham Explained, and what I try to do as a teacher.
Yes Professor I was thinking most specifically about (1) and (2), but also a third point like, what if the author is entirely mistaken about a particular point and if we do not say "is he right about X or Y?" and instead faithfully describe it like an "insider" wouldn’t that ultimately be wrong in itself? (I am not saying this about Ockham at all but in a more general sense) We owe it to ourselves and even future generations to make that fact known.