BBC's Vatican: less than Global Minds

The BBC's Duncan Kennedy had this report as journalism from Rome under the rubric Europe News:

"If the Big Bang was the start of everything, what came before it?"
That is one of the questions being posed by a new website being set up by the Vatican and Italy's scientific community. After centuries of mistrust between religion and science, the intention is to give the public a greater understanding of both sides. The website, which will be available in Italian and English, has information on everything from astronomy to theology, from space missions to philosophy and art. ...

It was my good fortune to hear his drivel about philosophical questions and cosmology.  Kennedy is unaware that there is a field of philosophy of physics and philosophy of science and philosophy of religion.  But, ah, yes, the web site is for the "public", which Kennedy also serves.

Only he serves cold porridge.

Kennedy appears ignorant that in my own lifetime Hoyle and Gamow's beginning of astro-biology was such an offence to the harmless Lutherans of Sweden that a Nobel was out of the question.  And nothing as changed for atheists in Catholic countries.

Suppose Kennedy had asked what parallel existed between String Theory and the doctrine of the Trinity or between dark matter and the Physical Ascension of Mary?  We have a clear idea of what might cause String Theory to topple - but will the Vatican revisit the triumph of the mystery of the Triune-God over the heresies of the "philosophical" early Christians?  We know what may alter the calculation of the amount of dark matter surrounding the Milky Way, but did the feces and urine of Mary also physically ascend to heaven?  The parasites in her intestines?  The dogma of Pope Pius in 1960 came at a time when even the relation between nuclear membrane and cellular membrane in the somatic cell was not yet well understood.  But what could cause that pious dogma to be revised?  Is there an equivalent discussion to that in 1960 of the endoplasmic reticulum?  How does bad theology cease to be dogma in the one true Church?

What counts as "philosophical" for the paid BBC reporter is what counts as "sophomoric" elsewhere.

Kennedy's priest mentions Einstein, but not Weyl.  Hermann Weyl had philosophic concerns that did not lead him to the Christian soul or the Christian God of his native northern Germany.  What could have brought Weyl, Gamow or Hoyle home to the One True Church?  Not that BBC broadcast or this BBC web posting.

Science does not have all the answers - but it can defend a few assertions, such as the importance of condoms.  Social and medical science can make a strong case against the celibacy of priests.  Ethics can make a strong case for female priests.

The core issue for me is whether a non-reductionist, non-materialist atheist such as myself could ever by evidence and argument alone convince a believer in the soul that evolved embodied mind is a biological-social-linguistic fact and that individual minds end with their respective biological lives.  End of story.  A Weyl, perhaps.  A Pope Pius, no.  And among the philosophers courting the Vatican: Charles Taylor, no; Alasdair MacIntyre, well, time is running out there.

Note:  The Vatican has been active in observational astronomy for many years - which is why facts are important (but only if your theory is not a dogma.)  In mathematical physics, Georges Lemaître was both a priest and the author of the Big Bang.  But he was also an artillery officer in WWI - something which Bertrand Russell was not.  I take more issue with the use of heavy field artillery as morally unjustifiable in any infantry conflict between France and Germany ( as much so as aerial bombardment, machine guns and poison gas  ) than with his being ordained as a priest and continuing in that confession.  Note that after that war, conscientious objectors in pious Canada lost their right to vote - they might as easily have lost the right to study at universities.  With argument, vote was restored, mustard gas banned.  But the dogma of the Trinity stands untouched in Italy (see the fate of Bernard Bolzano, centuries after Bruno.) COBE may have backed  Georges Lemaître over Fred Hoyle, but the facts and theory did nothing to legitimate the views of either - not the Jesuits' God and not Hoyle's "a bit of God ... operating in all of us".

The attacks on the Enlightment and "modernity": notes

I have posted a page over at modernity.aule-browser.com as part of an exploration of the requirements and desiderata for a useful research browser for the humanities. The APSA paper is available as a PDF.

The paper is made available at allacademic.com but was not the paper which first caught my attention: that paper was A Critique of Modernity: On Positivism, and Phenomenology and, like the paper posted, was presented at a recent Political Science convention in the USA. [I have since located that paper in PDF and posted a text version for analysis.

When I was staying in Marburg some years ago, I was struck by the pro-Palestinian sentiments of students studying in a German univeristy town where Heidegger had made his academic reputation and where there was as yet no sign for the many tourists of where one of the great synagogues of Europe had stood.  I was from leftist universities myself (U. Regina and L'UQAM) but at least at the former there was no shortage of left-wing New Yorkers who were at least raised as ethnic Jews and often presented themselves as such.  Montreal was a more complex case, with some French-speaking Moroccan Jews attending all the universities  but with deeply engrained anti-Semitism in the guise of "anti-English" and "anti-Westmount" or "anti-West Island" - all of which signified areas notably Jewish - as compared to Ukrainian Rosemount or Italian St. Léonard.  Montrealers are not at ease with their anit-semitic past and present or their language mania (banning the use of the French word "hangar" for exterior coal sheds which were a feature of Montreal's miles of old cold-water flats, the French word "stopper" from "Stop" signs, etc, etc.)  Montreal is also notable as the home of one of the most virulent attacks on the scientific worldview of the western world, that being the political philosophy and cultural history of Charles Taylor at McGill University.

There are other hotbeds of leftist rhetoric in smaller Canadian universities or some campuses of urban universities or province-wide universities and some small colleges - rather like Macalister College here in Minneapolis-St. Paul or the home campus of "philosopher" Angela Davis in California.  The usual rhetoric stems from sources such as Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Habermas and to a lesser extent, Gadamer and Derrida.  Simple irrationalism is always a ready import from Paris and invited speakers make for a real challenge to the comprehension of any English-speaking audience as I can attest when hearing some of the "Greats" of Paris at U de Mtl during my first year "in French" while already conversant with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, Habermas, Dilthey, Heideger and Taylor in English.

Taylor is a special case: I now see that his attack on "modernity" must be clearly distinguised from MacIntyre's defense of the Thomistic tradition.

First MacIntyre.  A.M. would have his reader believe that an entire tradition fell into neglect.  It remains for an historian to refute this: it was not in neglect among Jesuits teaching high school in Regina or Catholic philosphers teaching at the religious colleges affiliated with our two Saskatchewan universities.  There is no basis for the claim with regard to the school in Quebec City where the political luminaries of late 20th Century all studied or at Laval University.

Taylor's lines of argument comes out of a different background than those of MacIntyre and I am sure Taylor would not want this hermeneutical asoect to be over-looked. [...]

Many of us look at behaviorism and operationalism in social science and now think that the answer was to wait for the wave to pass: no head-long attack would be effective.  But this may not be the case in political commentary, where insight can pass for research.  This appears to be the case with the lasting adoration of Adorno if addresses to Political Science conferences as preserved at allacademic.com are any indication.

In the past, unpublished papers tended to vanish at retirement of the author (not the case with at least one of Taylor's own "grey" articles).  While conference papers are sometimes said to be "peer-reviewed" what is more often meant if "accepted for reading by a peer" or "reader invited by a peer".  Nothing else, presumably, could explain the papers which I am now reading.

In the on Rappa paper, the most distressly line might be

because it is the very nature of capitalism to deny the fullness of any aesthetic
that cannot be exploited to the Jewish for its pie-making possibilities.

but there is no way of knowing if he read that line to the audience at that conference.

Charles Taylor on Science and Psychology: notes

In the "Human Agency and Language" collection of Charles Taylor's essays there is another inadequate index.  But there is one thing that is immediately noticeable: a few entries for Frege, many for Heidegger, for Wittgenstein - but not a single reference to Brentano, Husserl or Twardowski.

Kazimierz Twardowski, seven years younger than Edmund Husserl, also died in 1938. 

What is most striking - more so than the lack of any entries for Putnam or Searle - is the lack of any entry for Adolph Reinach.

During his years at McGill, Taylor was to be found in the department housing political science.  During my years attending lectures in both  that and the philosophy department, there was no shortage of hours spent on Frege, Cantor, Gödel - but not on the Munich School of phenomenology or the Göttingen school of phenomenology.  With Taylor, it all starts at Freiburg with Heidegger replacing Husserl in '28 and then the trusted Gadamer (reputed to be the true philosphical confidante of the master in his exclusive visits to the thinker's hillside cabin.)

There has been some effort to provide a corrective in the works of Claire Ortiz Hill  and in 1995 in  "The Cambridge Companion to Husserl".  Most recently, Alasdair MacIntyre, in 2006 in his short book on Edith Stein's years in academic philosophy has provided both an introduction  to Husserl and to Reinach.  MacIntyre also laments that Heidegger never troubled himself to learn Polish (remarkable given what Arendt was expecting from Heidegger on Logik.)  One can only imagine Heidegger raked over the coals in Polish by a living poet, Czesław Miłosz.

Also missing: Anton Marty and Stanisław Leśniewski (notable as a corrective to the influence of John Duns Scotus on Heidegger.)

What is important though is try to assess to what extent Husserl also turned against science.  Dorian Cairns makes a report of one clue that Husserl's attacks on physicalist and naturalist positions had evolved to a delight in anticipating failures in natural science.

At the time of Heidegger's absurd pronouncements on science, the NASA Gravity Probe B project was underway.  While plagued by unanticipated problems in sources of error, and perhaps damned by the anti-science philosophers as a mere "technical" achievement, it ranks with the most important experiments since Galileo's inclined planes.

At Heidegger's hut the concessions to technology are the hand water pump, the ax, skiis, door hinges, boots and even forks on the table.  There is no astrolabe, no sundial and not even a pre-telescope concession to astronomy.  Husserl, on the other hand, had begun in astronomy - and by the time he was being driven out of teaching in Freiburg, the centuries old Vatican astronomical observatory was moving to its new home at Castel Gandolfo.  It have have been there during summer meeting at the papal residence that Taylor first met Miłosz .

Whether Husserl eventually turned against natural science in bitterness or old age - or not at all - may be contested.  What is more evident is that Taylor has been more clearly in the anti-science camp with his large "wisdom" tomes on the self and the scular age.  This was not so obvious in his earlier essays and in his 1964 book on psychology, The Explanation of Behaviour, nor in his 1971 essay in Social Research.  Taylor's earlier work is on the inabilities of certain theoretical commitments to deliver adequate explanations and true understanding due to the naive views of the nature of knowledge and science in the training of psychologists and social scientists: they failed to understand that the objects of study were agents with a mental life and the actions of those agents given their values.  This could be corrected - and one such corrective can be found in a recent work by Colin McGinn, Mindsight.

But Taylor, in my view, stands closer to the Sartre of "the psychology of the imagination".  Sartre was never trained in phenomenology, instead he found what he was looking for in Heidegger (Raymond Aron referred Sartre to phenomenology - Merleauu-Ponty, on the other hand, would advice the Viet Kong philosopher  ___ to go to Leuven even during the war.)  Sartre's rhetorical ploy was that conceptual analysis would have to suffice because his readers were not familiar with phenomenology.  Taylor, on the other hand, entered the scene at a time when ...  de Beauvoir ntoed that Sartre seemed happiest writing what he did not yet understand - often clear in his obscure condescension to his "French" reader denied access to the Husserl archive - when it is clear that Sartre in "néantisation" was providing not phenomenology verifiable by another, but "a way of talking" about the visual field in perception, for example, which is not distrubed by whether it is adequate - it is enough that it "fits".  But phenomenology is not mere description of human experience in novel forms or cleverness about "néant" and hypostatization.  The latter is a serious problem facing certain views of intentionality in their account of mental life, mental contents and common referents which are not physical individuals validated as existing in space and time (for recent non-phenomemologist philosophers on intentionality see Roderick Chisholm "Perceiving: A Philosphical Study" and John Searle, Intentionality - An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, and for an interesting parallel to MacIntyre, Peter Geach and Eliz. Anscombe; s/a Anscombe's Intention  paper of 1957)

Taylor's targets have too often been the easy targets: his reader could easily draw the conclusion that there was no stronger challenge (behaviorism was dominant in academic life and in practice - but not successful in the one and with very limited success in the other - and today finds more success in practice as a nuddled language-cognition variant of behaviorism.)

Both Taylor and MacIntyre embrace a kind of limited relativism - a view that a philosphical standpoint always involves presuppositions and arises within a tradition, whether that tradition is recognized, avowed or affirmed.  Comparing Taylor to Putnam or Searle is comparing him to philosophers who see nothing to fear in science and trends attributed by historians to "the enlightenment" and the "secular".  Comparing Taylor to MacIntyre in his "Whose Justice? Which Rationality? " - say in MacIntyre's treatment of Hume and Thomas Reid, there is the feeling of a philospher at work and not a lecturer (for that we have his realted Gifford Lectures.)

When Hegel was working on his logic, he was teaching the equivalent of high school students.  When Taylor was working on his philosphy of social science, he was very active in Canadian politics.  It is possible that Taylor sacrficed scholarship for his political commitments: it cannot be expected that many of his students would know that Heidegger/Gadamer/Habermas are only one train out of Freiburg -and that the train departed first from Göttingen where it had come up from Munich - or that Roman Ingarden had departed in quite another direction, as had Koyré.  MacIntyre, if he chooses, could provide that corrective in a book on realism and nominalism in the past century.

note: Thomas S. Kuhn nennt Koyrés Schriften als bedeutsam bei der Entstehung seines Hauptwerkes Die Struktur wissenschaftlicher Revolutionen.

A persisting curiosity: the absence of Murdoch in Taylor.

Academic lives to compare when Americans mock the British sense of "fair-play": Iris Murdoch at Oxford, Edith Stein at Göttingen (and Philippa Foot & Anscombe some 30+ years later; women and the "chairs" of Collège de France)

Note: John Haldane places Germain Grisez in this group along with John Finnis and Henry Veatch
Compare: three writers on Simone Weil: Iris Murdoch, Czesław Miłosz, Charles Taylor.

My assessment of the influence of Taylor: comparable to that of Northrop Frye on Margaret Atwood's "Surfacing".  My correctives to that: Martha Ostenso's "Wild Geese", my great-grandmother's stories of life along the North Saskatchewan River in the 1880's, my cousin in the 1980's urging native women out on the wind-swept tundra to use the porta-potty and her collecting stones to hold down the tent; Samuel Hearne making tea; my cousin's body being prepared by her brother for an arctic burial; that Glen Gould thought The Great North was somewhere just outside Fort William and Port Arthur; my great-great uncle returnign via Hudson's Bay.  Correctives to Taylor: taking seriously Oliver Sachs on the man who lost colour vision as might have Merleau-Ponty; abandoning the notion that what we need is another, older, tradition in order to escape scientism, physicalism, mechanism or naive materialism in a philosophical appreciation and assessment of current discoveries, achievements, theories and trends biology, neurology and linguistics.  Ditto for assessing, constraining and advocating for technologies in relation to societies, economies and environments.
The less than subtle, incessant and continual pleading for theism in recent western philosophy: only satire may do, as without their appeal to "tradition" they cannot choose between Jeshua, Mahomet or Bahá'u'lláh.
Corrective to Heidegger on science: Hermann Weyl

term: subjectity as used in relation to Heidegger's Hegel by Robert Sinnerbrink.

Jerome Kagan on Mind and Charles Taylor on Science

At the taz.de archive I find this question to Taylor:

Wer definiert denn, was Muslimen heilig ist? Müssen wir da immer auf die konservativsten Stimmen hören?

Google translates that question as:

Who defines what is sacred to Muslims? Do we have to always listen to the most conservative voices?

Taylor's answer:

Was wir brauchen, ist eine größere Sensibilität. Multikulturalismus setzt gegenseitiges Lernen voraus und ein gewisses Gespür dafür, wie weit man gehen kann. Man muss natürlich immer ein bisschen zu weit gehen, um die Grenzen zu testen.

Google translates this as:

What we need is a greater sensitivity. Multiculturalism implies mutual learning and a certain sense of how far one can go. We need to go, of course, always a bit too far to test the limits.

Of course I have taken his answer out of the context - extracted it from their dialog.


I want to return to this topic in terms of the philosopher as theist and three topics in western theology: papal infallibility, immaculate conception and the physical ascension - the first notably  contested by a philosopher.


Of greater interest to me personally is the chapter in Jerome Kagan's book, "An Argument For Mind" entitled "Celebrating Mind".  Kagan's chapter is terribly flawed by his high esteem for certain dated views in the philosophy of physics - but they are not flaws which I find off-putting.  I would not hesitate to recommend reading that chapter of his book.


Compare the closing chapter, "Conclusion", of Taylor's massive set of lecture notes: Hegel.

"This [modern, western] civilization is in a sense the heir of the Enlightenment" (my insertion)

That this secular world is just such is presented in his other two great compendia of lecture notes: that on the self and that on the "secular age".


Most retired philosophers, even if they reach emeritus, must fend for themselves in retirement: but not those few whose views strike a chord with certain well-endowed foundations.  Taylor is one such lucky fellow.


On that same page 539 we read:

"The objectification extends beyond external nature to englobe human life and society and the result is a certain vision of man, an associationist psychology, utilitarian ethics, atomistic politics of social engineering, and, ultimately a mechanistic science of man."

Hogwash.  Twaddle.  Sophomoric babble.


When as a young student of philosophy and psychology - having just studied Taylor's attack on behaviourism in his "The Explanation of Behavior" - I was suggested [ by Glenn Argan] his article attacking behavioirism in political science of three years earlier in the journal Social Research,  I was very taken.  Here was a Canadian philosopher embracing the "Geisteswissenchaften", "les sciences humaines".


In the intervening years a great deal changed.  In the case of non-linear dynamics, the simple notions of 18th Century mechanists are gone.  No view of neural activity can ignore the phenomena of wave's cresting or piles of sand collapsing.


Specifically with behaviorism, the answer has been patience: at least a generation of students, become professors, had to retire, their mentors die, before the trend had run its course.


This is not the case with theology.  If Lutherans join with Episcopalians and the latter join with Anglicans in a return to the one, true Catholic Church, the three key recent doctrinal revisions which philosophers should question are doctrines unlikely to change.


I can see no such quandary in the sciences.  Were a philosopher to return to a science rather than a religion in his or her retirement, they would not find any such dilemmas facing them: there is not question of having to embrace a faith which has voluntarily and against protest adopted indefensible doctrines.


Social relations.  Kagan has a long-standing involvement here as does Taylor.  I have now spent more time in the Twin Cities of Minnesota than the decade that I spent reading philosophy  and psychology in the libraries of Montreal. My impressions follow.


The Twin Cities (hereafter, MSP) of Minneapolis (MPLS) and St Paul (SP) are notable for their friendly nature as big American cites.  Each has one or two "dangerous" neighborhoods but neither approach the wide-spread social problems and crime of Memphis, Cleveland or numerous other cities lying between the longitudes of Boston and Denver.


I have a few theses.  SP is a Catholic town with an Irish heritage.  It is a noticeable friendly place, but somehow rather conservative.  MPLS and its western suburbs in a Lutheran agglomeration and rather "liberal".  Both areas were ethnically German before being their respective Irish and Scandinavian centers.  Why the liberal ethos which characterizes both?  "Progressive" social programs which are rare elsewhere in America are common-place in MSP.  "Progressive" federal political figures have emerged from Minnesota, yet the current governor is Republican and the previous was a populist fool.  Why these many contradications?


What is most notable for someone moving from Montreal to MPLS would be the social distance in public transport and in elevators.  Unlike Montreal, a crowded MPLS office elevator - one which people in a hurry will not enter - looks very roomy and empty.  In SP this is somewhat less evident.  In MPLS, people are very friendly in a startlingly superficial way: they will talk with you but you need not expect an invitation to their homes.  In MPLS, most ethnic Scandinavians live only mile from where their grandparents lived;  home is for old friends and church members.  Very notable is that you will not get to know the parents of your children's best friends except in a very superficial manner.  This contrasts sharply with both Boston and Montreal.


My first thesis is that the two cities work in a strange tandem: SP would be a very conservative town were it not for its neighboring town (SP has a history of laxity where organized crime was concerned - very different from the same laxity in Boston and in Montreal.)  MPLS would be a very conservative urban area were it not for its Irish Catholic neighbour.  Either in isolation would be quite different: neither would have the "liberal" social programs which are so surprising even for a resident from socialist, populist Saskatchewan.


Demographics indicate a worrisome trend: the children of Democratic voters in affluent suburban MPLS are trending towards conservative Republicanism.  There are signs of growing religious fundamentalism foreign to both the Evangelical Lutherans and the Irish Catholics.


Understanding the leaders of movements for change and the social organizations which tolerated change -adapted to demands, suggestions and petitions for change - would require multi-disciplinary science and history.  It would not just be a question of behavior, either "social behavior" or "political behavior".


MPLS saw decades go by before the rejuvenation of the area which fell victim to rioting on the occasion of the assassination of MLK Jr.  MPLS is the city which had the Jews gold course in its Golden Valley suburb.  SP sits in a county which has managed to preserve some natural space; MPLS has a western suburb, Plymouth, exercising domain over hilly woodlands with an eye to a mall and business tax base.  Social challenges abound.


MSP does not fit some simple cliché of the midwest Bible-belt.  Perhaps had the twin cities arisen a few more miles apart there would be little to distinguish them from other parochial, narrow-minded midwest towns.


But the result of the interaction of these two urban areas could not be predicted, but neither does understanding and appreciating MSP require or even suggest the derogation of science.


Who should we hope studies these phenomena, a student of Chicago CT or a student of Harvard JK.  I know my preference, although one is philosophically more sophisticated than the other.