The Text

The Background

Hobbes’ 1651 Leviathan (revised Latin edition, 1668):
THE INTRODUCTION
 
Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governes the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal. For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the begining whereof is in some principall part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that Rationall and most excellent worke of Nature, Man. For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which, the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; The Magistrates, and other Officers of Judicature and Execution, artificiall Joynts; […]

Analysis

Are We Spiritual Machines?

William A. Dembski

Copyright (c) 1999 First Things 96 (October 1999): 25-31.

For two hundred years materialist philosophers have argued that man is some sort of machine. The claim began with French materialists of the Enlightenment such as Pierre Cabanis, Julien La Mettrie, and Baron d’Holbach (La Mettrie even wrote a book titled Man the Machine). Likewise contemporary materialists like Marvin Minsky, Daniel Dennett, and Patricia Churchland claim that the motions and modifications of matter are sufficient to account for all human experiences, even our interior and cognitive ones. Whereas the Enlightenment philosophes might have thought of humans in terms of gear mechanisms and fluid flows, contemporary materialists think of humans in terms of neurological systems and computational devices. The idiom has been updated, but the underlying impulse to reduce mind to matter remains unchanged.

Materialism remains unsatisfying, however; it seems inadequate to explain our deeper selves.
[...]

Not so for the tender–minded materialists of our age. Though firmly committed to materialism, they are just as firmly committed to not missing out on the benefits ascribed to religious experience. They believe spiritual materialism is now possible, from which it follows that we are spiritual machines. The juxtaposition of spirit and mechanism, which previously would have been regarded as an oxymoron, is now said to constitute a profound insight.

Consider Ray Kurzweil’s recent The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (Viking, 1999). Kurzweil is a leader in artificial intelligence, specifically in the field of voice–recognition software. Ten years ago he published the more modestly titled The Age of Intelligent Machines, where he gave the standard strong artificial intelligence position about machine and human intelligence being functionally equivalent. In The Age of Spiritual Machines, however, Kurzweil’s aim is no longer to show that machines are merely capable of human capacities. Rather, his aim is to show that machines are capable of vastly outstripping human capacities and will do so within the next thirty years.

According to The Age of Spiritual Machines, machine intelligence is the next great step in the evolution of intelligence. That man is the most intelligent being at the moment is simply an accident of natural history.
[...] 

[H]umans are not spiritual machines. Even so, it is interesting to ask what it would mean for a machine to be spiritual. My immediate aim, therefore, is not to refute the claim that humans are spiritual machines, but to show that any spirituality of machines could only be an impoverished spirituality. It’s rather like talking about "free prisoners." Whatever else freedom might mean here, it doesn’t mean freedom to leave the prison.

By a machine we normally mean an integrated system of parts that function together to accomplish some purpose. To avoid the troubled waters of teleology, let us bracket the question of purpose. In that case we can define a machine as any integrated system of parts whose motions and modifications entirely characterize the system. Implicit in this definition is that all the parts are physical. Consequently a machine is fully determined by the constitution, dynamics, and interrelationships of its physical parts.

This definition is very general. It incorporates artifacts as well as organisms. Because the nineteenth–century Romanticism that separates organisms from machines is still with us, many people shy away from calling organisms machines. But organisms are as much integrated systems of physical parts as are artifacts. Perhaps "integrated physical systems" would be more precise, but "machines" emphasizes the strict absence of extra–material factors from such systems, and it is that absence which is the point of controversy.

Because machines are integrated systems of parts, they are subject to what I call the replacement principle. This means that physically indistinguishable parts of a machine can be exchanged without altering the machine. At the subatomic level, particles in the same quantum state can be exchanged without altering the subatomic system. At the biochemical level, polynucleotides with the same length and sequence specificity can be exchanged without altering the biochemical system. At the organismal level, identical organs can be exchanged without altering the biological system. At the level of human contrivances, identical components can be exchanged without altering the contrivance.

The replacement principle is relevant here because it implies that machines have no substantive history. As Hilaire Belloc put it, "To comprehend the history of a thing is to unlock the mysteries of its present, and more, to disclose the profundities of its future." But a machine, properly speaking, has no history. What happened to it yesterday is irrelevant; it could easily have been different without altering the machine. If something is a machine, then according to the replacement principle it and a replica of it are identical. Forgeries of the present become masterpieces of the past if the forgeries are good enough. This may not be a problem for art dealers, but it does become a problem when the machines in question are ourselves.

For a machine, all that it is is what it is at this moment. We typically think of our pasts as either remembered or forgotten, and if forgotten then having the possibility of recovery. But machines do not, properly speaking, remember or forget; they only access or fail to access items in storage. What’s more, if they fail to access an item, it’s either because the retrieval mechanism failed or because the item was erased. Consequently, items that represent past occurrences but were later erased are, as far as the machine is concerned, just as though they never happened. Mutatis mutandis, items that represent counterfactual occurrences (i.e., things that never happened) but which are accessible can be, as far as the machine is concerned, just as though they did happen.

The causal history leading up to a machine is strictly an accidental feature of it.
Consequently, any dispositions we ascribe to a machine (e.g., goodness, morality, virtue, and, yes, even spirituality) properly pertain only to its current state and possible future ones, but not to its past. 

Because the formal symbol manipulations by themselves don't have any intentionality; they are quite meaningless; they aren't even symbol manipulations, since the symbols don't symbolize anything. In the linguistic jargon, they have only a syntax but no semantics. Such intentionality as computers appear to have is solely in the minds of those who program them and those who use them, those who send in the input and those who interpret the output.

The aim of the Chinese room example was to try to show this by showing that as soon as we put something into the system that really does have intentionality (a man), and we program him with the formal program, you can see that the formal program carries no additional intentionality. It adds nothing, for example, to a man's ability to understand Chinese.
[…]

Precisely that feature of AI that seemed so appealing -- the distinction between the program and the realization -- proves fatal to the claim that simulation could be duplication. The distinction between the program and its realization in the hardware seems to be parallel to the distinction between the level of mental operations and the level of brain operations. And if we could describe the level of mental operations as a formal program, then it seems we could describe what was essential about the mind without doing either introspective psychology or neurophysiology of the brain. But the equation, "mind is to brain as program is to hardware" breaks down at several points among them the following three:

First, the distinction between program and realization has the consequence that the same program could have all sorts of crazy realizations that had no form of intentionality. Weizenbaum (1976, Ch. 2), for example, shows   in detail how to construct a computer using a roll of toilet paper and a pile of small stones. Similarly, the Chinese story understanding program can be programmed into a sequence of water pipes, a set of wind machines, or a monolingual English speaker, none of which thereby acquires an understanding of Chinese. Stones, toilet paper, wind, and water pipes are the wrong kind of stuff to have intentionality in the first place -- only something that has the same causal powers as brains can have intentionality -- and though the English speaker has the right kind of stuff for intentionality you can easily see that he doesn't get any extra intentionality by memorizing the program, since memorizing it won't teach him Chinese.

Second, the program is purely formal, but the intentional states are not in that way formal. They are defined in terms of their content, not their form. The belief that it is raining, for example, is not defined as a certain formal shape, but as a certain mental content with conditions of satisfaction, a direction of fit (see Searle 1979), and the like. Indeed the belief as such hasn't even got a formal shape in this syntactic sense, since one and the same belief can be given an indefinite number of different syntactic expressions in different linguistic systems.

Third, as I mentioned before, mental states and events are literally a product of the operation of the brain, but the program is not in that way a product of the computer.

The synonymy of the "conscious" and the "mental" is at the heart of the CRA (even if Searle is not yet fully conscious of it -- and even if he obscured it by persistently using the weasel-word "intentional" in its place!): Normally, if someone claims that an entity -- any entity -- is in a mental state (has a mind), there is no way I can confirm or disconfirm it. This is the "other minds" problem.
​
-- at http://cogprints.org/1622/

Intentionality

Intentionality is by definition that feature of certain mental states by which they are directed at or about objects and states of affairs in the world. Thus, beliefs, desires, and intentions are intentional states; undirected forms of anxiety and depression are not.

Intentionality: That a feeling, emotion, or mood is about something; its objectivity. A mood such as Angst is about the world as a whole, the undefined world in which an individual is situated. This situatedness is immediate and is not reducible either to cognition or to volition. The “location” of intentionality is best understood as a spatio-temporal field of consciousness and intersubjective experience. -- Gregory P. Schulz, Wednesday’s Child: From Heidegger to Affective Neuroscience, a Field Theory of Angst, available at www.wipfandstock.com/wednesday-s-child.html or http://www.amazon.com/Wednesdays-Child-Heidegger-Affective-Neuroscience/dp/1608996840/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1460922493&sr=8-1&keywords=gregory+schulz%2C+wednesdays+child

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (/ˈvɪtɡənˌstaɪn/; German: [ˈvɪtgənˌʃtaɪn]; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. From 1929 to 1947, Wittgenstein taught at the University of Cambridge. During his lifetime he published just one slim book, the 75-page Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), one article, one book review and a children's dictionary. His voluminous manuscripts were edited and published posthumously. Philosophical Investigations appeared as a book in 1953, and has since come to be recognised as one of the most important works of philosophy in the twentieth century. His teacher Bertrand Russell described Wittgenstein as "the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived; passionate, profound, intense, and dominating."
​
[You may be interested in the particular quotes from Wittgenstein in the Faith section of this Wikipedia article.]
-- accessed March 2016 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein

(a) We are concerned with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, so please be sure to read this compact masterpiece (described as “a philosophical poem” in Wittgenstein’s published obituary) for yourself. Paperback copies are widely available, many with side-by-side pages of Wittgenstein’s German text and pages of English translation.
There is a readable English translation with an editorial introduction available as a PDF download at www.gutenberg.org/files/5740/5740-pdf.pdf
A good side-by-side German-English version is available as a PDF download at www.people.umass.edu/phil335-klement-2/tlp/tlp-ebook.pdf
I’ve included my own annotated version of the first and last sentences or propositions of Tractatus along with the fuller context of Proposition 6 for you on pages 5-10 below. Please give at least these portions of Tractatus a reading and then a careful re-reading!
 
(b)  Wittgenstein is sometimes (but not often enough, in my view!) studied and discussed as a heavyweight opponent of scientism, the theoretical and practical supposition that only knowledge gained by the scientific method counts as genuine knowledge. As I present Wittgenstein’s text in class, scientism as promulgated by the Logical Positivists (aka the Vienna Circle) particularly irked him for philosophical reasons. These philosophical reasons for not agreeing that only scientifically-held knowledge counts for us are elucidated in the Tractatus, for example in its first proposition and in its last proposition.
 
(c)  Here then is Wittgenstein’s Rule for When to Speak and When to Remain Silent. We could think of this as “Wittgenstein’s When to Shut-Up Principle”, if we were not sophisticated, philosophy-minded folks:
1. The world is everything that is the case. (Die Welt is alles, was der Fall ist, German.)
 [***]
7.  Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. (Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muss man schweigen, German.)

My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one. (Wittgenstein, Letter to Ludwig Ficker of circa September­ October 1919)

But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him”— these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God (1 Corinthians 2:9-10).

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(a) First, let’s think about Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), the human being …

Walter Kaufmann, who almost singlehandedly introduced Nietzsche and his philosophy to the English-speaking world in the 20th Century, cites Stefan Zweig on Nietzsche’s circumstances and his chronic health problems in The Portable Nietzsche:

"Carefully the myopic man sits down to a table; carefully, the man with the sensitive stomach considers every item on the menu … for every mistake in his diet upsets his sensitive digestion and every transgression in his nourishment wreaks havoc with his quivering nerves for days … nothing that stimulates, refreshes, or rests him: only the short meager meal and a little urbane, unprofound conversation in a soft voice with an occasional neighbor (as a man speaks who for years has been unused to talking and is afraid of being asked too much). […]

[And back up in his tiny unheated apartment] a heavy and graceless trunk, his only possession, with the two shirts and the other worn suit. Otherwise, only books and manuscripts, and on a tray innumerable bottles and jars and potions: against the migraines, against the stomach cramps, against spasmodic vomiting, against the slothful intestines, and above all the dreadful sedatives against his insomnia, chloral hydrate and Veronal. … his fingers freezing, his double glasses pressed close to the paper, his hurried hand writes for hours – words the dim eyes can hardly decipher. For hours he sits like this until his eyes burn."

In this same volume Kaufmann observes in connection with 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' (a writing saturated with biblical allusions that seems to me to be a sustained and blasphemous invitation or dare for God to intervene) that “what Nietzsche needed most was [an editor with] a blue pencil”. I teach my undergraduates that what Nietzsche needed most was a devoted friend, a faithful, articulate Lutheran friend who would stick with him over the long and provide a long-term profound conversation about God in Christ and life in the life He gives us to the full. This, I tell my students, is why they must read Nietzsche: to be prepared and to be on the lookout for 21st-century Nietzsche’s who need their friendship. And, I also explain that they need to read Nietzsche during their university days to begin building an immunity toward his philosophy.

(b) Second, let’s think about Friedrich Nietzsche, the author …
​
For a rather brief intro to his view of philosophy, see the video at
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Friedrich+Nietzsche+Ubermensch&&view=detail&mid=93855D73D4DF9FD1B1D993855D73D4DF9FD1B1D9&FORM=VRDGAR

If you’re amenable to reading one complete writing of Nietzsche, I recommend spending some time perusing Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. BTW, odd things happen when you google this title, so it’s worth mentioning that the original German title is Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. As Kaufmann explains, Wissenschaft is not what we think of as the natural sciences, but is a way of referring to a disciplined study. The colorful word fröhliche sets the tone for the mode Nietzsche is working in, so to speak. It’s not exactly philosophy as done in the university classroom. As Kaufmann says,

"Thus the title of the book has polemical overtones; it is meant to be anti-German, anti-professorial, anti-academic and goes well with the idea of “the good European” that is encountered in these pages. It is also meant to suggest “light feet,” “dancing,” “laughter” – and ridicule of “the spirit of gravity.”

(It is, then, a bit fröhlicheit to have a university professor by the name of “Schulz” and sometimes known for his gravitas to be providing you this introduction to section 125 of Nietzsche’s book, nicht war?!)

The Gay Science is written as a series of poems and aphorisms. Nietzsche scholars will usually point out that this playful format hides a coherent system underneath it all. I am not so sure that there is a coherent argument here. It’s philosophical pyrotechnics, so you ought to watch out that you don’t get scorched. At any rate, I am now going to take the Master Metaphor of The Madman (Book 3, Section 125 of The Gay Science) as a stand-alone piece for our consideration in keeping with Nietzsche’s aphoristic style.

So, please read Nietzsche’s The Madman in its entirety once or twice. I’ve attached my annotated version of the metaphor below. The Cambridge edition of the complete book is available as a downloadable PDF at www.holybooks.com/.../The-Gay-Science-by-Friedrich-Nietzsche.pdf. Kaufmann’s translation with commentary is what I use. Used copies of that old standby are readily available in hard copy.

For a single volume introduction to Nietzsche and his work, see Walter Kaufman’s The Portable Nietzsche.

(c) Third, let’s think about Friedrich Nietzsche, the patron saint of postmodernism as we experience it …

Dramatic 21st-century videos on Nietzsche: https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=God+Is+Dead+Friedrich+Nietzsche&&view=detail&mid=7C3D44613F6E1248F3C97C3D44613F6E1248F3C9&FORM=VRDGAR
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=God+Is+Dead+Friedrich+Nietzsche&&view=detail&mid=212F35AF932AB4103F7C212F35AF932AB4103F7C&rvsmid=7C3D44613F6E1248F3C97C3D44613F6E1248F3C9&FORM=VDQVAP&fsscr=0

Let me offer this excursus regarding Western culture – the culture for which Nietzsche says that God is dead – from my own philosophical critique of Jacque Derrida’s “deconstruction” of marriage. 

1. Here is Derrida’s recommendation for a secularized kind of marriage:

2. Here is my definition of Western culture, the culture which Derrida takes as being dead to God

3. Derrida was committed to postmodernism. His “patron saint” was Nietzsche. You’ll notice that he provides a demonstrably poor, anemic and pitiful notion of marriage as a replacement for what Bonhoeffer identified as “the divine mandate of marriage”. In other words, Derrida dismisses the traditional concept of marriage for no reason other than its biblical origin and offers in return … nothing but his own dogmatic and adolescent replacement. 

Towards the Übermensch (“the Overman, the Super-man, the Transhuman”)
 
     "I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? […] What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment...
     Behold, I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! […]
     Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth...
     What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour when your happiness, too, arouses your disgust, and even your reason and your virtue.
     The hour when you say, 'What matters my happiness? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment. But my happiness ought to justify existence itself.'
     The hour when you say, 'What matters my reason? Does it crave knowledge as the lion his food? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.'
     The hour when you say, 'What matters my virtue? As yet it has not made me rage. How weary I am of my good and my evil! All that is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.'  [***]
     'Formerly, all the world was mad,' say the most refined, and they blink ...
     One has one's little pleasure for the day and one's little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health.
     'We have invented happiness,' say the last men, and they blink.”
 
-- Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Walter Kaufmann, translator

Download the conversation here:

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Kant’s Ultimate Principle for Relationships
(a) Think of Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) as the poster Professor of the Enlightenment.
 
To hear from Kant in his own words what the Enlightenment Project is please see his 1784 essay What is Enlightenment (at least the first two paragraphs) at www.allmendeberlin.de/What-is-Enlightenment.pdf
 
I recommend considering that this Enlightenment Project amounts to “Let’s assume that the God of the Bible does not exist and see how politics, ethics and life are better without Him”.
 
This, then, is what Kant is endeavoring to do with his moral philosophy:
 
“Sapere aude! ‘Have courage to use your own reason!’- that is the motto of enlightenment.”
-Or, in other words- Act veluti si Deus daretur. “Act as if God is not a given” – that is the Enlightenment Project.
 
(b) How does Kant work this out? He introduces the categorical imperative.
 
To read Kant’s thinking on this way of construing ethics (a branch of philosophy seeking to answer the  question, “How then ought we to live together as human beings?”) see his 1785 book Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals.
 
The complete Groundwork is available in its entirety with footnotes and critical essays at http://www.inp.uw.edu.pl/mdsie/Political_Thought/Kant%20-%20groundwork%20for%20the%20metaphysics%20of%20morals%20with%20essays.pdf
 
I’ve included the central sections from the Groundwork (around section 420) regarding the three forms of the categorical imperative for you below, with my highlighting.
 
BTW, for the very hearty philosophical appetite, there is a nice and blessedly brief introduction to Kant’s moral or ethical reasoning within the context of his wider philosophical development at http://www.iep.utm.edu/kantmeta/. Section (8) treats his ethics.
 
(c) Above you will find my PHIL 101 handout with my paraphrases of the categorical imperative.
(d)  About the voice behind the categorical imperative …
 
Q.  As you read the groundwork or my paraphrases, do you hear a familiar voice behind the categorical imperative?
A1. It may sound like your mother’s voice, but oddly reversed: “If you are getting set to jump off the bridge, do you want everyone else to jump off too?”
A2. It may sound like Jesus’ voice in His Sermon on the Mount: “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 7:12).
 
(e)  In university ethics courses, we normally refer to Kant’s moral philosophy as deontology or a duty-driven ethic.
 
However, this Enlightenment deontology is derived from a biblical, 3rd petition understanding of ethics. Call it biblical deontology (see Ecclesiastes, esp 12:11-14)
 
11 The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings; they are given by one Shepherd. 12 My son, beware of anything beyond these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh. 13 The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. 14 For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.
 
About Deontology or a “Duty-driven” Ethos
 
“[Taking to heart Genesis 22 and Abraham’s test.] A Temptation; but what does that mean? That which ordinarily tempts a human, to be sure, is whatever would keep him from doing his duty, but here the temptation is the ethical itself, which would keep him from doing God’s will. But Here the necessity of a new category for understanding Abraham becomes apparent.
-- Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
 
Such a Christian ethics, although it is reasonable, is not a gnostic undertaking; on the contrary, it is an anxious, existential resurrecting to a new life kata Christon, in Christ Himself. Think of Bonhoeffer’s Christ-ethic.
 
Doing God’s Will versus Ethical Self-Knowledge
 
“The knowledge of good and evil seems to be the aim of all ethical reflection. The first task of Christian ethics is to invalidate this knowledge” (21).
 
1. All knowledge now is based upon self-knowledge (29).
1.1 The experience of shame indicates an original loss (24-27).
1.2 Our original comprehension of God and other human beings has become empty.
1.3 Our original union has been displaced by disunion: disunion from God, from human beings, from
self (see the datum of conscience).
1.4 “Know yourself” (gnothi seauton, Greek) is unachievable.
 
2. Freedom in Christ, not knowledge, is the center of Christian ethics (30ff).
2.1 We cannot know or approach God except through the Word (nisi per Verbum).
2.2 Jesus’ freedom is the freedom of the absolute simplicity of His action. There is never a plurality of possibilities, conflicts or alternatives; there is only doing the will of His Father.
 
3. Doing God’s will, not merely contemplating the good, is the summum bonum of Christian ethics.
3.1 Genuine knowledge depends on God’s revelation in the Person of Christ (37).
3.2 The knowledge of the Pharisees was barren, disruptive, negating.
3.3 The knowledge of Jesus and His disciples is fruitful, redemptive, active.
 
4. Paradoxically, then, if we gain merely an epistemology from Christ – if hearing the Word does
not make us doers – knowing becomes a forgetting (48).
4.1 Hearing and doing are interdependent.
4.2 “To know” in the biblical languages means “to love;” we love because He first loved us (1 John
4:19).
4.3 Loving God is simply the other aspect of being loved by God.
 
-- adapted from Bonhoeffer’s Ethics (Part One, I)

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Berkeley’s Table
a) Read Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge. There is an enjoyable version of Berkeley at http://sqapo.com/berkeley.htm. Let’s agree not to tell anyone that we are using Glyn Hughes’ Squashed Philosophers or Berkeley’s Principles squashed down to 35 minutes of reading!
 
A full edition of Principles is downloadable at www.maths.tcd.ie/~dwilkins/Berkeley/HumanKnowledge/1734/HumKno.pdf.
 
There is a nice, free self-quiz at http://global.oup.com/us/companion.websites/9780195342604/student/chapt3/quiz/berkeley/.
 
b) George Berkeley (1685 – 1753) is the only major philosopher in the modern period for whom the God of the Bible is taken seriously as a lynchpin in his philosophy. A key Bible passage for Berkeley is Acts 17:28. Be sure to reread Acts 17:16-34 and then to invest at least a few minutes looking up verse 28 in a study Bible or in your favorite Greek NT commentary.
 
c) Berkeley is taking on the empiricist philosopher John Locke (1632–1704). To get a quick understanding of empiricism, please see especially Part 2. Regarding John Locke at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SPE), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/.
 
I’ve attached my own annotated version of part of the SPE article on Berkeley’s philosophy below.
 
d) Berkeley challenges Locke’s materialistic empiricism (that extramental entities automatically deliver their ideas into our minds via our senses). In answer to the problems that Locke’s materialism poses, Berkeley differentiates between inanimate entities and mindful beings. The essence of inanimate beings, Berkeley argues, is to be perceived (esse est percipi), whereas the essence of mindful beings is to perceive (esse est percipere). Epistemologically speaking, then, it makes no sense to talk about epistemology or knowledge without a mindful being, a perceiving being such as a human being – or at least the God of the Bible – doing the perceiving and knowing. No knower, no epistemology. So, something much more robust that a materialist empiricism is called for – something such as God Himself, “in whom we live and move and have our being”!
 
BTW, Metaphysics = Ontology + Epistemology

e) Berkeley’s challenge to Locke’s materialism has been put into poetry:
 
Berkeley Limericks by Ronald Knox:
 
There was a young man who said, "God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad."
 
God's Reply:
Dear Sir, Your astonishment's odd:
I am always about in the quad
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be,
Since observed by
Yours faithfully, God.

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Descartes’ Evil Demon
a) Read Rene Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy with particular attention to Meditation 1 and Meditation 3. Then reread these two Meditations!
 
The Classical Library posting at http://www.classicallibrary.org/descartes/meditations/  is somewhat searchable. There is a basic outline of Descartes’ arguments at http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/medol.htm, but D. Weiss’s annotated version at http://www.faculty.ycp.edu/~dweiss/phl321_epistemology/descartes  gets five stars for its annotations and thought-provoking questions embedded in Descartes’ text.
 
(The Descartes’ Introduction, Meditation 1 and Meditation 3 from the Weiss version is posted above for your reference.)

b) We’re moving now into the modern period of Western Thought (1600 – the present), a period characterized by the messy divorce of faith by reason. Think of Descartes (1596 – 1650) as the keynote speaker of modernity. Descartes ushers in a sea change for Western thought. It’s the tectonic shift from looking to God for salvation to looking to science for salvation.

So, we will begin our understanding of what’s going on in modernity with a consideration of Descartes’ scientistic philosophy and move from there into his treatment of God as a philosophical idea.

c) As a warm-up to a fundamental, Cartesian problem and for a glimpse at the consequences of this sea change in modernity, please view the first 25-30 minutes of the Princeton lecture, Toward a More Perfect Human by Leon Kass at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N_BOyGFekA


This will introduce you to Kass’s critique of scientism or the modern penchant for replacing Christ crucified with salvation-by-science. It’s a longer introduction to Descartes than you may expect – it’s a bioethics lecture, in fact – but do stick with it. There’s a method to my madness; I’m setting the stage for the madness of Descartes’ method for doing philosophy!


d) After the video lecture read Kass’s diagnosis of the root of scientism in Descartes’ way of doing philosophy at http://log24.com/log07/saved/071024-KassApp.html  I’ve included this below for you, with my highlighting added.

e) Now we are in a position to see what an innovator Descartes is in his philosophy – an innovator of the sort that C.S. Lewis refers to in The Abolition of Man.
It’s the Cartesian Two-Step:
1. First, reduce philosophy, the befriending of wisdom, to a scientific project that methodologically reduces our human quest for understanding creation to a sort of science for manipulation of nature.
2. Second, treat God as a mental idea.




My analysis
Descartes’ treatment of God as a mental idea is innovative, but unwarranted. Prior to Descartes and modernity ideas were not assumed to originate within one’s mind, but were, already and always, in the public domain. Recall Plato’s Cave, where the Idea of The Good is “beyond being” or Aristotle’s intellectual confidence that ideas and the truth of reality were located in language or logos. Think of how language has us – how language shapes our neuro-architecture, rather than the other way around.


It is a newfangled idea (!) that God (or God as an Evil Demon!) could be approached as a mental idea in the first place. Note the scientism and the mathematical manhandling of creation and the human creature involved in this methodological innovation. See Leon Kass on Descartes’ Innovative method below.


Consider the methodological diminution of Descartes’ Methodism, so to speak.


Observe how it reroutes the philosophical inquiry away from the theology of the cross and toward science for salvation. (For the Lutheran theologia crucis as an epistemological recognition regarding God, see Article 4 of the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, an article on Justification: “But God cannot be treated with, God cannot be apprehended nisi per Verbum, except through the Word.”)


Observe further how Descartes’ Methodism reduces our working understanding of the human being as the sort of living creature that is characterized by logos.


Consider the Cartesian hangover in relation to our understanding and practice of the Gospel ministry, given that the office of the ministry is not assessable scientifically. See my LOGIA article, On the Terminating of the Church’s Professors (Vol 19, No 4, Reformation 2010).

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Aquinas’ Phoenix

1. Read Thomas Aquinas’ little book On Being and Essence (De Ente Et Essentia in Latin). Aquinas’ text is a must-read! An online reproducible and contemporary translation by Robert Miller is at http://www.theologywebsite.com/etext/aquinas/beingandessence.shtml. A more scholarly and footnoted translation online is the Fordham version at http://www.faculty.fordham.edu/klima/Blackwell-proofs/MP_C30.pdf

The Miller translation is found above for your reference, excerpted and with my own annotations and charts.
 
b) Let’s begin with the normative use of the term substance in the 4th-century AD Nicene Creed:

There is a careful, detailed understanding of substance in traditional Western philosophy – a careful, detailed approach begun by Aristotle (384–322 BC) before Nicea and adapted by Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) the later Mediaeval period centuries after Nicea. The detailed philosophical work on substance is reflected in the so-called Tree of Porphyry, but painstakingly explained by Aquinas in his tutorial On Being and Essence.

1. For starters, there is a brief but helpful introductory PowerPoint on Aquinas’ little book that’s viewable at www.ivc.edu/faculty/SFelder/Documents/Aquinas Being and Essence.ppt. You’ll find an exhaustive (and potentially exhausting!) analysis of Thomistic (or official Roman Catholic teaching) on Aquinas’ Being and Essence online at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05543b.htm.

Diagram [of “essence ß à existence”] by Karl Jaspers
 

1. There are two key concepts to keep in heart and mind here, namely essence and existence. Aquinas’ analog for the concept of essence is something that everybody knows: What a phoenix is, even though there’s no such thing as a phoenix. Think of the Harry Potter story:
   

Q. How do we (professor, student, movie viewer or author) know that a phoenix is a phoenix?
A. Via its essence.
 
Only one phoenix exists at a time. When the bird felt its death was near, every 500 to 1,461 years, it would build a nest of aromatic wood and set it on fire. The bird then was consumed by the flames. Then the phoenix would reappear sometime after its total disintegration.
 
e) Second key concept: Existence. Aquinas’ analog for the concept of existence is the human (type of) being.
 
Q. What’s the difference between the phoenix and the human being?
A. The human being (known as such essentially) also exists (it has being) – a decisive additional feature.
 
f) Crucial questions:
Q1. How do we “get” the essential concept of phoenix?
Q2. How is it that essences “stay put” so as to count as knowledge (see my dialogs Three Socratic Vignettes on Knowledge).
 
g) For the hearty appetite – and for perhaps a more pastorally usable consideration of substance and the question regarding the main lesson we learn from thinking and speaking about being or substance or essence, see Martin Heidegger’s What is Metaphysics? at http://www.wagner.wpengine.netdnacdn.com/psychology/files/2013/01/Heidegger.
There is a one-page summation of Heidegger’s rather different approach to the traditional Western philosophical understanding of essence at  http://philosophypages.com/hy/7b.htm.

Gustav Klimt, Pear Tree, 1903

Read Augustine’s Story of the Pears. Augustine’s text is a must-read! An online Loeb edition of Confessions, Book 2 with Augustine’s Latin on the left page and a formally equivalent English translation on the right begins at https://archive.org/stream/staugustinesconf01augu#page/64/mode/2up.  The translation I recommend is Maria Boulding’s, a volume in The 21st-Century Augustine series.
 
I’ve attached an older, public domain translation for your reference, with highlighted sections that will help to keep the Story of the Pears (green highlighting) in focus and in context (yellow).
 
Whether in English or with a look at the Latin for those so inclined, read it twice, please.
 

1. For a brief but fruitful (!) introduction to Augustine and this Master Metaphor read Leo Ferrari’s The Pear Theft in Augustine’s Confessions at http://www.brepolsonline.net/doi/abs/10.1484/J.REA.5.104193.

You may also enjoy the brief slideshow by Phineas Upham at http://www.slideshare.net/Sonya_B/saint-augustines-pear-theft-by-phineas-upham-12623017.
 

1. There are two key concepts to keep in heart and mind here, namely Augustine’s understanding of rightly ordered loves or ordo amoris and his understanding of freewill. For a pastoral consideration of Brian Hedge’s article Saint Augustine on Rightly Ordered Love at http://www.brianghedges.com/2013/09/saint-augustine-on-rightly-ordered-love.html.  

 

1. Second key concept: Augustine’s understanding of will or freewill sounds odd to our modern ears. This is because we have learned, either in school or by reading ethics books written since the 18th Century, a new-fangled notion of freewill as taught by intellectual trend-setters of the European Enlightenment such as Immanuel Kant (a major modern German philosopher who died in 1804).
2. In connection with Augustine, may I recommend the work of Phillip Cary? For an accessible way to consider Augustine’s conceptions of love and will as they are exhibited in Dante’s Divine Comedy, see Cary’s article The Weight of Love: Augustinian Metaphors of Movement in Dante's Souls  at https://www.academia.edu/761674/The_Weight_of_Love_Augustinian_Metaphors_of_Movement_in_Dantes_Souls. There are some fruitful illustrations for sermons and Bible classes here!

On the vital matter of philosophy of language and biblical hermeneutics for us 21st-century pastors and professors (and thoughtful students everywhere) Cary’s Augustine trilogy, particularly his thesis concerning the heterodoxy of what he has identified as – the dominant view of language in our day and particularly the language of Scripture – a common approach to the biblical text that he calls “expressionist semiotics” (a view held by Augustine, Cary argues at length) versus the orthodox view of the biblical text as “external effective means of grace” (the view held by Aquinas and Luther).

None of us Lutherans who write or teach biblical hermeneutics or philosophy of language can afford not to read and digest Cary’s Outward Signs: The Powerlessness of External Things in Augustine’s Thought. In regard to Augustine Cary is a Christian physician, so to speak, who diagnoses and then provides effective treatment for what I call “the Platonic Virus” that so often infects our thinking and pastoral care.

​1. Aristotle’s Cross Examination of Nature
a) Read Aristotle’s Physics, Section 3 on causes. Aristotle’s text is a must-read! Read it twice, please. The Loeb edition has facing pages of Greek and English. Online you will find an English text with Greek options at http://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-greece/aristotle/physics.asp 

b) A diagram for the so-called Four Causes can be seen at the beginning of this post.

c) Now, Aristotle’s term, the Greek term translated “cause” is misleading to us in modernity. For an example of the wild concepts, illustrations and odd un-Aristotelian notions that stem from this misunderstanding, have a look at the Wikipedia article on the four causes (but not until we’ve looked at Aristotle’s Greek first! (Curmudgeonly philosophy professor’s observation: Fruitful and evocative Greek terms inevitably get reductive-ized when rendered in Latin, horribile di!)

d) Aristotle’s term is in fact aitia, which I render as “cross examination”. Here is support for my rendering from Liddell and Scott.

αἴτιος αἰτέω 
I.to blame, blameworthy, culpable, Il., etc.: comp., αἰτιώτερος more culpable, Thuc.; Sup., τοὺς αἰτιωτάτους the most guilty, Hdt.; τινος for a thing, id=Hdt.
2.as Subst., αἴτιος, ὁ, the accused, culprit, Lat. reus, Aesch., etc.; οἱ αἴτιοι τοῦ πατρός they who have sinned against my father, id=Aesch.:—c. gen. rei, οἱ αἴτ. τοῦ φόνου those guilty of murder, id=Aesch.
II.being the cause, responsible for, c. gen. rei, Hdt., etc.; c. inf., Soph.: Sup., αἰτιώτατος ναυμαχῆσαι mainly instrumental in causing the seafight, Thuc.
2.αἴτιον, τό, a cause, Plat., etc.
Liddell and Scott. An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1889. 
accessed Jan 2015 at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0058%3Aentry%3Dai%29%2Ftios

Taking aitia as a cross-examining we see that Aristotle is in effect insisting on a more complete account of things than we usually settle for.

Why makes this thing the type of thing it is? (Aristotle’s Cross-Examination)
 
Q1. Out of what has this type of thing come?

Via Latin the answer obtained by identifying: The Material Cause:

The material cause points to "that from which, as a constituent, an object comes into being." (For instance, the bronze of a statue.)

Q2. What type of thing is it?
    
Via Latin the answer obtained by identifying: The Formal Cause:

The formal cause embodies the essential nature (all essential attributes) and represents the model or archetype of the outcome; conceptually it is expressed in the definition (logos). (It is the idea of the statue as present in artist's head.)

Q3. By means of what is it the type of thing it is?
    
Via Latin the answer obtained by identifying: The Efficient Cause:

The efficient cause is "the source of the change or rest"; it is the moving cause: "what makes of what is made and what changes of what is changed" (the sculptor who makes the statue).

Q4. For the sake of what is it the type of thing what it is?

Via Latin the answer obtained by identifying: The Final Cause:

The final cause states "that for the sake of which" a thing is the type of thing it is, or why a thing is done, or, in other words, it explicates something's end in terms of its species or class or type of thing that it is (the final shape or the effect on the audience which admires the statue).

Note: Although Aristotle himself holds all these four causes responsible for any real change and movement (aitia in Greek are those things that are "guilty" or responsible for something), they are rather demarcation points of change as revealed in our language […] In difference to the modern concept of causation, which always implies a sequence of two events, Aristotle envisions causation as a single event of double actualization … [that we can think of us a continuation of a thing according to its kind although he uses a scheme of recognizing a things potential to be what that kind of thing is, based on that kind of thing’s complete story, so to speak. GPS]

Heavily adapted from http://www.willamette.edu/~sbasu/poli212/AristotleonCause.htm 

e) By the way, Aristotle’s term for final cause or the cross-examination question, “What is the thing for?” is telos. While Kittel says that the New testament usage of telos has nothing in common with Greek philosophy (see the Kittel quote below) – and although I often try to re-think this when teaching Aristotle and especially when preaching John 19:30 – I think that those of us who are called to preach the Word may do a better job of preaching that pluperfect word from our suffering Savior, “It is finished!” with Aristotle as a footnote to the word telos.

τέλος. 
There are in the NT no statements about the telos of men which stand in formal analogy to Greek sayings (→ 50, 3 ff.). The NT puts the matter differently and sayings which are teleological in content do not set man in the centre, → II, 428, 12 ff.: II, 327, 16 ff.
[…] 
Fn: R. 6:21 f. can hardly have been understood thus by the author (→ 55, 5 ff.) or the readers or hearers, esp. as the sayings are always negative apart from R. 6:22, and could only be taken as definitions of telos in an ironically paradoxical sense.
Kittel, G., Bromiley, G. W., & Friedrich, G. (Eds.). (1964–). Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (electronic ed., Vol. 8, p. 54). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

f) For a more detailed consideration of the traditional four-question examination of things – four dimensions of the thing’s story, if you will – please consider S. Marc Cohen’s class outline The Four Causes at http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/4causes.htm 

g) Compare and contrast what the apostle Paul says of Jesus in regard to the entire cosmos or universe (“all things visible and invisible) in Colossians 1:15-2:3. Does it sound like the apostle is both thinking in an Aristotelian manner about causes or aitiai while at the same  time demonstrating a philosophy kata Christon or based on Christ Himself (see Col 2:2:8-15)? 

h) A crucial area for our understanding of Aristotle’s four causes or aitiai is in regard to his definition of the human being (that is, our kind of being) in his Politics, Book 1 as zoon logon echon. Aristotle’s four-question thinking about what kind of thing a particular member a species follows from this Four Causes cross-examination. This is foundational for natural law theory in ethics and is something that Martin Luther takes for granted (and then surpasses) with his theological understanding of the human being’s formal and final causes in his 1536 Disputation Concerning Man. These theses may be found here.

Gregory P. Schulz, all intellectual rights reserved, January 2016

1. 13. For philosophy does not know the efficient cause for certain, nor likewise the final cause,
2. 14. Because it posits no other final cause than the peace of this life, and does not know that the efficient cause is God the creator.
3. 15. Indeed, concerning the formal cause, which they call soul, there is not and never will be agreement among the philosophers.
4. 16. For so far as Aristotle defines it as first driving force of the body, which has the power to live, he too wished to deceive readers and hearers.

1. Read Plato’s Cave from Book 7 of his famous Republic. It will work to google “Plato’s Cave in Republic text”. I recommend either Thomas Sheehan’s translation or Robin Waterfield’s. Plato’s text is a must-read! Read it twice, please.

 

1. Consider how Plato has pre-explained what he is up to with The Cave in his earlier parables of The Sun and the Line by mapping the following diagram of those two parables onto the narrative of The Cave. Notice that there are four types of progressively better types of thinking (according to Plato) by which we can think of progressively more enduring objects until we reach The Good by thinking more and more abstractly.

1. Email a like-minded friend this hand-out and then talk or text to figure out how Plato’s Cave could be “re-baptized” to suit a biblical worldview. Hint: The Good is an idea that Plato says is “beyond being” and therefore is an eternal verity, a never-changing ultimate standard for us.

 

1. Have a look at my chapel sermon where I recommend a major re-working of Plato’s Cave in light of Christ as God Himself incarnate. The sermon is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzEkydimmDU

 

1. For further thought read and think through Plato’s Doctrine of Truth by the 20th-century philosopher Martin Heidegger at http://religiousstudies.stanford.edu/WWW/Sheehan/heideggertranslationonline.html(As a bonus, this includes the Greek text of Plato’s Cave.)

 

1. Compare and contrast what Jesus says of Himself in John 14:6 and the way He teaches us to know Him (as in Psalm 22, for a major example) with Heidegger’s use of The Cave.

accessed January 2016 at bing.com/images