Dashed Off XXVII

 Greed sabotages markets.

Reading books is already a prosocial activity, and already involves empathy.

Bethsaida was renamed Julias by Philip the Tetrarch sometime before AD 34, but the Gospels consistently use 'Bethsaida'.

Jn 21:19 treats Peter's death as still in the future.

The world we find around us is a world within which one can sometimes play. Things have a sort of affordance for human playfulness.

"If everything really depended on everything else, in the organism as well as in nature, there would be no laws and no science." Maurice Merleau-Ponty
"...to learn never consists in being made capable of repeating the same gesture, but of providing an adapted response to teh situation by different means. Nor is the response acquired with regard to an individual situation. It is rather a question of a new aptitude for resolving a series of problems of the same form."
"In an organism, experience is not the recording and fixation of certain actually accomplished movements: it builds up aptitudes, that is, the general power of responding to situations of a certain type by means of varied reactions which have nothing in common but the meaning."
"The physical experiment is never the revelation of an isolated causal series: one verifies that the observed effect indeed obeys the presumed law by taking into account a series of conditions, such as temperature, atmospheric pressure, altitude, in brief, that is, a certain number of laws which are independent of those which constitute the proper object of the experiment."
"What is demanded by the actual content of science is certainly not the idea of a universe in which everythign would literally depend on everything else and in which no cleavage would be possible, but no more so is the idea of a *nature* in which processes would be knowable in isolation and which would produce them from its resources; what is demanded is neither fusion nor juxtaposition, rather it is structure."
"The relation of structure and law in science is a relation of reciprocal inclusion."
"Since the body itself is not grasped as a material and inert mass or as an external instrument but as the living envelope of our actions, the principle of these actions has no need of being a quasi-physical force. Our intentions find their natural clothing or their embodiment in movements and are expressed in them as the thing is expressed in its perspectival aspects."

consciousness as milieu selection

Memory guarantees that what we experience can be seen in more contexts, and through more layers of meaning, than could be done at the time of the experience. Through memory we experience our experiences through other experiences.

Finding the best way to say somethin is often the beginning of real succession and progress in inquiry.

Love makes truths meaningful.

Every perfect duty grounds supporting imperfect duties.

The realm of art is broader and richer than the narrow minds of critics.

"The Son was born of the Father, and the Holy Spirit proceeds principally from the Father, and since the Father gives without any interval of time, He proceeds from both in common." Augustine (De Trin 15.26)

energy as the measure of the scope for change

monads as useful fictions (like treating body as entirely at center of mass)
-- monadology as metaphysical modeling

In rehearsing for a play we are not rehearsing to copy the rehearsal but to cultivate the aptitude for the actual play.

The husk is not a mere optional extra for the life of the kernel.

Free acts are in light of the universal as such.

the perceived as an availability for conception, judgment, and reasoning

The problem with Newcomb's Paradox is that rationality and correctness of decision are not measured in dollars.

Almost everybody pays people to do things that they could themselves do for free.

Kant is right that a church would have to be one, pure, free, and immutable, but he is wrong about what these exclude, and he fails to recognize that each of these must have an actual form suitable for human beings, which will not be optional for human beings.

being relative to esse: essence
being relative to operation: nature
being relative to definition: quiddity
being relative to what is affirmed of it: res

We usually do not need arguments to believe things.

The tendency of the modern world is to create systems that depend on morals that the systems can't sustain and sometimes even subvert.

sensation as more primitive than memory, memory as more primitive than imagination

Some contingent truths must be contingent truths about necessary things.

Never try to be more clever than the truth.

Bayesian epistemologies treat belief purely as a 'software' process and thus do not do justice to what Pascal calls 'the machine'.

The poet captures the scent of a region of the intelligible realm.

In a relationship one sometimes must be there just for the being there.

book-relationships of pleasure, of use, and of virtue

extrapolative object --> family of extrapolative objects --> fictional object

Story-reference does not reduce to statement-reference.
-- one sign of this is that stories can include statements inconsistent with each other, simply speaking, but organized in such a way as to be consistent (misattributions, unreliable claims, etc.) -- the organization is essential. The referent, of course, may still be the same, precisely because of the organization.

Lejeune on le pacte autobiographique (i.e., autobiography depends on an implicit agreement between author and reader that narrator is author)

The application of law requires metalaw.

The claim that there are only two truth values only works in a specific context.

All naturalisms are based on universalizing an analogy or family of analogies.

Reading is a partial socialization.

We assess whether a story is fictional or nonfictional with respect to other stories.

In Cartesianism, the brain seem to function as a diagram of associative habit. (Hume seems to recognize something like this.)

All technical language has to be approached through nontechnical language.

the understanding that touches, the understanding that comprehends, the understanding that dwells

primary and secondary deontic structure for stage props
primary: role on stage
secondary: rules maintaining the stage prop for its role on stage (e.g., "'Don't touch/move props unless authorized")

Every fiction involves nonfictional elements (e.g., necessities).

Great writing must be earned.

Man receives from others the power to make something of himself.

Everything that can be said, can be said unclearly.

There is much to be learned from things that are almost, but only almost, nonsense.

 the careful description of obscure and confused ideas

'real' as a designation of importance or significance

In personal relationsihps, truth is not so much proven as cultivated and allowed to emerge.

We learn a lot by saying things unclearly. Sometimes, although not always, it is the thing we most need to learn.

When we say that something is true, we generally are saying that it is true of something.

People appealing to empathy in ethical argumetns are generally appealing to their own moral authority, as they conceive it to be.

An important thing to grasp in doing 'public philosophy' is that many people will approach philosophical arguments as negotiations, because that is how they approach arguments generally.

satispassion in death of the baptized (in baptism, in penance, in unction, in death proper)

Reading allows one to be alone socially without necessarily requiring that it be parasocial.

People don't generally aim for the most pleasant life, but for the life worth living.

The living body is a language game.

the totality of eventful things

The intellect is the person as capable of understanding, the will is the person as capable of intending. The intellect is the intellectual person, the will the volitional person.

What LLMs show is that any sufficiently large collection of signs of a general kind will have object-tendencies when interrelated; signs, in sufficient quantity, in definite relations, exhibit dispositions allowing for methods of extrapolation to work.

Passions shift the meanings of other passions with which they are associated.

An ethics adequate to human life will give to human life plot, characterization, and theme, and allow it to be adorned by eloquence and art.

Whether or not any consequence is good or bad depends on overall context.

It is a rare kind of exchange for which we can keep track of quantity, quality, and price throughout.

substantive goods of good quality in good quantity and distributed well

The same things may satisfy and not satisfy in different respects; what satisfies now may not later, and more, the satisfaction itself may become something with which are dissatisfied. Satisfaction is like a negotiation with life, one that is always shifting and here the optimal deal is never stable enough to be guaranteed or even always discovered.

free will as a postulate of play

The past as we know it is a realm of witness.

Thought interacts with thought until there is system.--But it seems not to create system of itself; system requires synthesizing insight.

face-off, team-up, pell-mell

Some problems keep having to be solved because their solutions are not easily externalized in a consistent way, so that they never reach 'answer in the back of the book' status, but have to be relearned by every generation.

dropping a stone into the probabilistic poole

The two kinds of innovation are teleology and chance.

Chance is a byproduct of final causality.

Pastiche fantasy works by stereotypes and allusions.

Causal intervention presupposes non-interventional causation.

Compassion requires a toughness that must be deliberately cultivated.

Most discussion of identity and inclusivity seem to be attempts to will social connections and communities into existence.

Goodness is something we first find in life itself.

Competence always posits an objective standard.

Only humility can unite the vastness and the meticulousness, the sublimity and the subtlety, of intellectual thought & life.

The humble man is always close to the true metaphysics.

The humble man has an intellectual courage that endures all things in the realm of thought.

Comedy requires that there be recognizable incongruities and therefore recognizable comparabilities, and that these be such as to be shareable.

To laugh at yourself is a path of self-knowledge.

the historian of philosophy as custos hortulorum

To read Wittgenstein well, one must read what he says as a condensation of a lot of conversation and soliloquy.

"Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real." Iris Murdoch

My Heart Leaps Up

My Heart Leaps Up
by William Wordsworth 

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

Music on My Mind

 

Powerwolf, "Joan of Arc". It drives me a bit crazy that the video keeps spelling 'pyre' as 'pire', although apparently this is a common variant spelling in some dialects.

Sumerian Bar Joke

 Anyone who has been online a lot knows of the Sumerian bar joke, because it's gone viral in memes more than once. Found in a collection of Sumerian proverbs and aphorism, it is proverb 5.77:

A dog entered a tavern and said: "I can't see a thing. I'll open this one!"

Because of the structure it is often called the 'first bar joke'. There are many speculations about what this might mean. A very popular one is that the dog's eyes are closed. Another is that there is a series of sexual innuendoes. The word for 'tavern' is sometimes associated with prostitution (not necessarily a brothel, but someplace you might find prostitutes), for instance.

But I wonder. While it likely has a humorous edge (many of the Sumerian proverbs we have seem to), and could have sexual innuendo (a number of them do), most of the aphorisms in the collections have a typical didactic point you would expect proverbs from a proverb collection to have. So we would expect this one to capture a lesson of some sort, as well.

It's natural when reading the proverb to take it to give a sequence -- the dog enters the tavern and then says something. But it may make more sense to see the dog's comment as explaining its entry into the tavern. There is another, recurring proverb we find in the collections (3.26, 19.c2, 24.9):

When the sun is setting outside so that you cannot even recognise the hand in front of you, go indoors!

The humorous point is perhaps then that the dog (often a symbol in the aphorisms for a self-indulgent person) picks the tavern as the 'indoors' when going inside for the night. There are two possibilities:

The dog is foolish. Doing something apparently common-sensical (it's too dark to see, so it goes inside), the dog has no sense and therefore opens the seediest possible door in order to get inside.

The dog is disingenuous. The dog is doing something apparently reasonable, but it has rigged it up so that it will be outside a tavern when it's time to do it. He's covering, by an excuse, the fact that he is actually just indulging himself. In this sense the idea might be that a vicious person uses advice as an excuse to indulge his vices. Alternatively, the dog might just be nosy. There is another Sumerian proverb in the collections (2.109),

A sniffing dog entering all houses,

which seems to convey the idea of a nosy person. Thus the dog is trying to pretend it's just being reasonable in indulging its nosiness.

In any case, it's anyone's guess. In interpreting such things, we're a bit like Athanasius Kircher trying to decipher hieroglyphics.

Fire Serpent and Water Mountain II

 Previous

Chapter Two: The Terror of the Gods Returns to The City of the Gods 

 The rest of the summer after the visit of the gods settled into ordinary routines as the borrowed servants were sent back with generous compensations and the Hall of the Fire Serpent became quiet and empty again. Every so often, Ioan, the young forester's boy, would drop by for a game of hide and seek, or Tera would spend some time talking with Lyko, the somewhat older boy who drove the supply wagon up to the Hall each week, or she would let herself be fussed over by Deyavara, the old charwoman who came up with Lyko each week to look after various housekeeping matters, as she had done for all of Tera's life at the Hall.

 Uncle Llew spent much of his time in his workshop, as he often did during summer, although they still met at meals. Sometimes too he would be away for a day, looking after business in the realm of Mizur. Tera herself, when neither Lyko nor Ioan nor Deyavara were around, buried herself in her studies; she had nightmares of reaching The City of the Gods and being shown up as an ignoramus. Flowers and fires were the current subject of study; she enjoyed both subjects more than she had enjoyed most, but she was often frustrated at herself, not feeling that she had any good grasp on either. 

"You should relax," said Uncle Llew. "Shifting fire requires a precision that can only be gained by trying and re-trying, and living things are among the most difficult things to shift, since they keep trying to reassert their preferences." 

"Even flowers?" asked Tera skeptically. 

"Especially flowers," said Uncle Llew dismissively. "Extremely stupid organisms, not at all cooperative." It was the right thing to say; his dry contempt for the cooperativeness of flowers made her laugh, and eased her worries for a while. But she felt at other times as if she must be unusually stupid, despite his firm assurances that most of the gods were much more stupid than she was. Uncle Llew was as dismissive of the rest of the gods as he was of flowers, and she did not quite trust his judgment, or prejudgment, about them.

At dinner the night before they planned to leave for their trip to The City of the Gods, Uncle Llew looked thoughtful and grave for the entire meal. The meal was especially delicious, even for Llew's cooking, so she let him be, certain that he would tell her eventually what was on his mind.

Sure enough, after the meal, he leaned back and said,  "This will be the last time for a while that we can really speak alone. The clan is making sure the house is ready, but what that means is that every servant will be a spy in someone else's employ, and most of the building will probably be filled with artificial eyes and ears." 

"Are they really that nosy?" asked Tera. 

"You have no idea," said Llew. "I am understating it. The City runs on gossip and the family politics of the Davnan run on information. And I am a particularly interesting target for curiosity. For the most part, we will simply have to assume that every conversation is overheard. Given Oracle, we cannot even trust the chariot once we are on our way. So anything we need to discuss privately needs to be discussed now." 

 He fell silent and said nothing else, until Tera asked, "I am assuming there is something that does need to be discussed privately?" 

"Yes," said Uncle Llew, sighing. "I am sorry. It is a difficult topic for me. I have not talked about it with anyone for nearly a thousand years, and the last time, your mother and I had a very serious argument about it. But the story will likely color how others react to us, so you need to know it. 

"I suppose the point at which to begin was that there was a longstanding feud between our family and one of the Wenovar families; it was a minor feud, mostly bickering. But then came Mael Four-Dury, who became the Wenovar representative on the Crew, which oversees The City of the Gods, and, as the Wenovar in those days held the captaincy, he became Captain. He was a charming, persuasive man who carried people before him; he was also ruthless and cruel, and he escalated the feud until your mother and I came home one day and found our parents poisoned. 

"Poisoning a Davnan is not an easy task; if we can survive it, we will, so it needs considerable care and forethought. It cannot be done accidentally, and it was obvious to us who had done it. But the gods are cowards," Llew said with some bitterness, "and what they most want is not to be bothered. So they attempted to look the other way and pretend that it was merely some natural tragedy. 

"Your mother and I were not quiet about it, so Mael tried to kill us, as well. That was his fatal mistake. The whole thing broke out into a brutal war. Mael had managed the matter quite well; many people did not believe at first, and he was a persuasive and manipulative man. The Embiadwe clan stood with us, but only because we were clan; the other four clans were against us. They no doubt thought that the Embiadwe would surrender in short order. 

"What actually happened was that we had many more resources than they knew, and our clan brought the other four to their knees. I killed Mael and his accomplices myself." 

He was quiet for some minutes, then said, "We would have won, but at the last moment a number of the other Embiadwe families struck a deal with the other clans: hostilities would cease, the Embiadwe rather than the Wenovar would receive the captaincy, and in exchange your mother and I would be exiled for a hundred years. Your mother and I could not agree on what we should do in response, so we left and never returned." He sighed again. "In any case, Davnan memories are long, and there is bad blood between me and almost every family in The City, with nearly a thousand years of non-reconciliation. But now we are going to see if some reconciliation is still possible, for your sake. You should not have to deal with all the consequences of decisions made by your mother and I. I have something I want to give to you." 

He held out a pendant on a chain and she took it; the pendant was a pair of wings, connected by a gem, under which in very fine engraving was the symbol for Metal Sun, her mother's emblem-name. "Your mother wore it when she was a little girl, and then engraved it later, when she was Enrolled. I found it not long ago; I am not even sure why I have it, but it is fortuitous. It is a cleverly made little thing; if you are wearing it, it will prevent some -- not all, but some -- forms of eavesdropping, and there is little lever here around the gemstone -- " -- he took it from her and showed her, a little bit of metal that curved around the side, and then gave it back -- "and if you pull the lever down while wearing it, it will alert me that you are in trouble. I hope you never have to use it, but we can never tell." She put it around her neck.

"All of this is to say, of course," said Llew, "that things will be awkward, and caution is always in order, as long as we are in The City of the Gods."

"I will be careful," said Tera. But later she wondered if she were at all prepared.

The next morning, very early, they flew off. Tera had not flown since the day she had left Davir. She did not remember much of the experience at the time, so it was almost as if it were completely knew when the chariot rose and she looked out the hatch window as first the land, then the clouds, swiftly fell below her. It was exhilarating, it was beautiful, and it somehow made her less nervous for the future.

They were in the air for several hours, so she and Uncle Llew mostly discussed various minor things associated with her studies. As the descent approached, Uncle Llew became busy with something about the chariot controls, and Tera went back to looking at the clouds beneath them. Eventually Llew said, "We are above The City and are approaching First Landing; you should see it in a moment when we get below the cloud cover." 

What does one imagine when one hears the name, "The City of the Gods"? Tera had always imagined great spires, gleaming in the sun, adorning a vast city of alabaster and gold, busy and full of traffic, with flying chariots everywhere. The City of the Gods was nothing like this. There were no spires. There was no alabaster and gold, nor any traffic of chariots. In fact, as far as Tera could see once they dropped below the clouds, there was not even any city in The City of the Gods. All she saw were mountains. To be sure, they were extraordinary mountains, beautifully rugged and forested and (in a few cases in the distance) snow-capped. Seeing them from the air was breathtaking. But there was no city. She looked and looked as Llew wove through the mountains, but it could all have been pristine wilderness for all that she could see. 

"First Landing is directly up ahead," Llew said. It took a moment but gradually she could make out a number of buildings in the valley ahead. They were not great spire-buildings, although a few were perhaps two or three stories tall. They were not densely clustered, being mostly scattered here and there in pell-mell fashion among what she could now begin to see were orchards and gardens and perhaps small farms. The closest to anything like a city was the small cluster of about a dozen buildings that they were approaching. 

"Tiny Hamlet of the Gods," said Tera aloud. "Not much of a city, is it?"

Uncle Llew laughed. "The Davnan come here to get away from what you have in mind. But you are also not thinking on a sufficiently bombastic scale. First Landing is not The City; First Landing, which is this whole valley, is one of the plazas of The City. The City covers this whole spur of the Great Mountains, running from south of First Landing to a bit beyond North Landing, forty miles to the north. Outside of First Landing, North Landing, and Great Lake Harbor, everything is divided into family estates, which of course are not piled on top of each other."

He pointed ahead. "We have to land in the Clearing; chariots are not allowed in The City, except for flying in and out." 

They touched down, opened the hatch of the chariot, and stepped out. The air was a bit cooler than it had been in Mizur, but it was fresh and clear. As Uncle Llew removed their luggage from the chariot and closed and locked it, she looked around at the beauty of the mountains rising around the valley.

"Hallo!" someone shouted. He turned out to be a man, brown-haired and with skin that was a golden tan like Uncle Llew's, perhaps a shade darker. Uncle Llew's face on seeing him set into an expressionless mask. 

"Llew!" said the man, as he came closer. 

"Amaethon," said Llew in a tone of voice that would have frozen a lake. They clasped hands briefly and kissed each other perfunctorily on both cheeks. Llew stepped back and said, "Tera, this is Amaethon Five-Dury, the Captain of The City of the Gods; Amaethon, this is my niece, Tera Three-Tery." 

She courtseyed in goddess-princess fashion, which Amaethon seemed to find charming. He clasped her hands briefly the way he had clasped Llew's, and kissed her quickly on both cheeks. "Welcome! It is good to have a new clanswoman!" 

He turned back to Llew. "There is a carriage coming to pick up your bags, but in the meantime, the Embiadwe are running the Tavern this half-month, so come and have a pint so we can get reacquainted."

"That would be delightful," said Llew, the chill in his voice again taking on a sarcastic edge that made clear to everyone that he would not find it delightful at all. But they all went to the Tavern, which was a building just north of the Clearing.

The Tavern was full of gods, more than Tera had known in her entire life, and the blizzard of ever-shifting possibilities that came from all of them being together took her breath away. None of them even glanced their way, beyond venturing an occasional greeting for Amaethon, but she felt that when they entered, the entire disposition of the room had changed. Nobody was looking at them, but everybody was paying attention to them. 

As for Uncle Llew, being in the presence of so many gods seemed to change him physically. All of the gods seemed preternaturally real, but Llew in their presence became almost overwhelming. The rapid shifting of possibilities that she always sensed around him accelerated to the point of being almost dizzying, so that the gods, so well rounded compared to the occasional Vilim servants who flitted around the room, nonetheless seemed flat next to him.  

The three made their way to an empty table in the back and Amaethon ordered small beer from a Vilim barmaid. Then he turned to Llew. "It is good to have you back in The City of the Gods. You have been away far too long." 

Llew's demeanor, already cold, became icier still. "I did not leave willingly, if you recall. We were banished." 

"You were asked to leave for only a hundred years," said Amaethon, "until things could settle down. Here it is, almost a millenium later, and you only now return. You should not have denied the clan your gifts." 

Llew's face grew darker. "What obligations do I have to people who betrayed me and my sister?" This was icily angry in tone, but it was clear that, even so, he was restraining himself.  

Amaethon's mouth set in a firm line, and it seemed to Tera like all of the tables around them tensed. "We only sought peace in a feud that was quickly growing worse. And even if it were not so, your obligations to your clan are still your obligations." 

"No law binds the gods," said Uncle Llew mockingly. "Is this not the saying? There is no obligation. To support one's clan is a courtesy, in exchange for benefits received from the clan." 

"You are as haughty and obstinate now as you ever were. Your clan supported both you and your sister," said Amaethon. 

"Yes," said Llew, "until you betrayed us. You deserve no trust, and the loyalty you will have will be commensurate with the good you do us." 

Amaethon clearly bit back something he was tempted to say. Then, after looking off into the corner of the room a moment, he said, "Very well, then. Have it your way. But you are also here. And your clan is still your clan, however the past may tangle that up. We are still here for you." He looked deliberately at Tera and then significantly at Llew. "Both of you." 

The small beers came at this point. Tera sipped hers, and immediately recognized it as Vilim-made. It was not awful, but it was flat, slightly metallic, in the way Vilim-made food often was. Every god in the Tavern could have made better drink than this. Why make the Vilim do it?

"In any case," Llew was saying, "I am here not for anything to do with myself, but for my niece, so that she might know something of her clan and The City before she is Enrolled." 

Amaethon visibly relaxed. "We are glad of it." He smiled at Tera. "You are from a family of extraordinary ability. The daughter of the Metal Sun! I have no doubt that you will be one of the gems of the Embiadwe." 

"I doubt that I am so extraordinary," said Tera, "but I am excited to be here." 

 They all finished their small beers in silence punctuated only by the most inoffensively bland comments. Then Amaethon said, "The Platform at Brickanbreck has been prepared, if you wish to use the public Platform here." 

"No," said Llew, "I think we will take a wagon up; this is Tera's first time here, and a wagon will let her see more of The City." 

"Of course," said Amaethon, "I also considered that possibility, so there is one ready for you." He smiled ingratiatingly at Llew, but any charm the smile might have been throwing at him bounced off Llew's impervious armor. 

Llew thanked Amaethon, not quite as coldly as his manner up to that point had been, and Llew and Tera  left the Tavern. Outside, they did indeed find the wagon waiting. Uncle Llew immediately set about examining it closely. 

"That was uncomfortable," said Tera to Llew. Llew, engrossed in his examination of the wagon, did not look up as he replied, "Oh, Amaethon is harmless, if irritating; he is not intelligent enough to be a threat." He suddenly stopped, and a smile of almost mischievous delight broke over his face. He put his finger to his lips then pointed at a portion of a beam on the under side of the wagon. 

Tera did not immediately see what Uncle Llew meant, but then she caught it. It was a wooden pin or dowel set into the wood. It was in many ways entirely ordinary. It looked like a wooden pin. It was genuinely of wood. It was helping to hold a board in place. But the possibilities associated with it were subtly off. Because it was actually functioning as a pin should, the possibilities associated with that action were more obvious and immediate; but there were possibilities available to the pin that would not have been, should not have been, available to a mere wooden pin. They were the possibilities of something with a memory, something that could record what was said around it; the pin was in fact an artificial ear, set there as a spy. She would have missed it entirely if Uncle Llew had not pointed it out, but now that she saw it, it was obvious. 

 "Yes," said Uncle Llew gleefully, and very loudly and deliberately. "I've always said that Amaethon is a talentless hack who has spent his entire life failing upward. One might as well feel threatened by a monkey." He climbed into one of the seats of the wagon, and tapped the seat next to him. "Let's be off. Whatever may be said of The City, it is a beautiful place, and I want you to see it while the light is still good."

to be continued

The Logic of Practice

 On an Aristotelian account of practical reasoning, practical reasoning necessarily has an analogy to theoretical or speculative reasoning; the difference between theoretical reason and practical reason is only one of mode. Thus one represents practical reason syllogically.

MAJOR PREMISE: Everyone in these conditions should take a walk.

MINOR PREMISE: I am in these conditions.

CONCLUSION: <the action of taking a walk>

Aristotle always presents the major of a practical syllogism as having a kind of relative necessity (what must be done, what should be done, what is needed); this is analogous to the major in a theoretical syllogism having a greater universality than the minor. He is also very clear that it concerns a good or end, and that it does even if it is not immediately obvious that it does. Thus we should see the major as identifying a requirement for some good or end in view, where the actual good may be explicit or just implied.

The minor, then, concerns my relevance to the requirement, including my ability to fulfil it. Thus it generally concerns the achievability of the end presented in the major, or, in other words, the possible means to reach it. (Although you can have a minor concerned with the means being lacking in some way.) This results in one of the ways in which the practical syllogism definitely differs from the theoretical syllogism; since the major does not have to apply to me in only one way, the minor does not necessarily exclude the opposing minor; the minor is put forward not because it is true but it is positing something so that something else will be made true. We have power over what we can do, so the minor premise in the practical syllogism is often not the only one we could use. Therefore, while the theoretical syllogism is a syllogism whose purpose requires it to be truth-preserving, the practical syllogism is a syllogism whose purpose is concerned with truth-enacting.

A second difference between the practical syllogism and the theoretical syllogism is that the conclusion of the practical syllogism is actually doing the deed. There is a school of thought that holds that this was a mistake -- that there is reason why we should treat the conclusion of the practical syllogism as distinct from the action itself, and therefore that there should be a distinct 'practical step' between the two. This is, I think, a mistake -- it's analogous, in fact, to the mistake in holding that there needs to be a 'step' of representative ideas between what we see and the world, in which we perceive representative ideas rather than things represented. It also over-assimilates the practical syllogism to the theoretical syllogism, by treating it as nothing but a theoretical syllogism about practice. Instead, the practical syllogism is itself practical, and the conclusion is not something known but something done. Thus the last judgment in practical reasoning is that which is expressed in the action itself. Actions, after all, cannot be wholly separate from the acts of the practical intellect, which they would be if they were separated from its conclusions. When, given an end, we act at once, this is the practical syllogism equivalent of the enthymeme.

We deliberate by means of the practical syllogism, and deliberation often goes wrong, Aristotle says, from faulty middle terms in the practical syllogism; but deliberation is not itself the practical syllogism. Rather, deliberation is related to the practical syllogism something as dialectical reasoning is to the theoretical syllogism; the practical syllogism is something we construct in deliberation, by deliberation. To be rational, of course, it requires a standard. Theoretical or speculative syllogisms, which are constructed in inquiry in order to know the truth of something, are measured by soundness -- truth in a structure appropriate to it. Practical syllogisms also have to have such a standard, but being constructed in deliberation in order to do something, the measure would have to be something like prudentness, i.e., a structure of means appropriate to an end for action.

Sliding Down

 A few years ago, I said, commenting on my observation of changes in responses by Ethics students to various cases:

I have a sort of standing nightmare that I will have to spend the last decades of my life arguing that, as a matter of fact, it is indeed morally wrong to murder babies.

In this context, it has been interesting to see the furor over the Lindsay Clancy case. The issue is not so much the case itself -- as Clancy has confessed to killing her three children, the issue is not whether she did it, but whether she meets the technical requirements for being incompetent to discern the right and wrong of what she did due to psychosis from postpartum depression, and that is just a matter of jury decision on evidence. The problem with these kinds of cases is never the case itself but with other people using it as a totemic emblem. Many of her supporters have been what can only be called unhinged in their comments; Anne Hendershott at "The Catholic World Report" mostly captures my views on that.

Clancy's jury was hung, requiring the judge to declare a mistrial, so I'm sure we'll be dealing with more of this for some time yet. The repeated public valorization of killers is a sign of something very wrong with people.