Book abstracts

5. Montgomery, Path to Leadership (2 April 2025)

by kurto

An elongated essay on the direction of men by the UK’s World War II field marshal, culminating with forgettable sketches of political figures whom the author has come to know. The leader must be able to master events, or else his subordinates will lose confidence in his direction. He must therefore choose his purposes wisely, and delegate or dispose of all else, so that he can proceed with a clear conscience, courage, and sincerity – so that subordinates understand he is disinterested and selfless. Military men, having gained the advantage (whether in peacetime or preliminary fighting), must seize the initiative at the decisive moment. (Preparation, especially during peacetime, is vital but insufficient. The general’s art is to simplify the problem, decide the best course, and then act. He must bow to the political leader, however.

Military sketches include Genghis Khan (a surprisingly modern commander), von Moltke, and Britain’s World War I generals; Gallipoli was well designed but badly executed. Political sketches include Alfred, Cromwell, Lincoln (whose purpose was not to impose his will but to guide the people to decide for themseves), and such contemporaries as Nehru, Mao, De Gaulle, and Churchill.

Not countries without atomic bombs but lacking universal principles are second rate.

6. Clarey, Master (16 April 2025)

by kurto

A privileged, well-drawn biography of Swiss tennis great Roger Federer, highlighting the once-temperamental teenager’s transformation to a paragon of elegance as well as his rivalries with Raphael Nadal and Novak Djokovic.

Federer uniquely directed a long-lived, peripatetic career, managing business decisions (with his wife’s help) and leading the player union’s welfare and also promotional activities. He had chosen tennis over soccer for the promise of superior individual control of affair (i.e., less dependency on team and third-party management). The untimely passing of early coach Peter Carter, whom he had somewhat unsentimentally released, was a turning point.
Consistency of preparation was key to his game, and to a career largely free of major injury. Federer mastered ‘joindre l’utile a l’agreable, the conjoining of the necessary with the interesting / engaging. In his late teens, he briefly retained sed a performance psychologist prior to his breakthrough wins, which sits uneasily with his individualism.

Federer’s game is most comparable to Sampras; but the prior generation was far less likely to socialize together, and Federer enjoyed the demanding travel schedule. The arrival of Nadal, whose forte was the French clay and style more fiery and gritty, made for a rivalry that lifted both players. Djokovic, the latecomer, was more the master technician, always searching for a better approach. Federer’s claim to primes inter pares is his success at Wimbledon, the most elegant of the Grand Slam tournaments.

Federer piled up major tournament wins before the other two arrived, and can be criticized for collapsing in Slam finals. He never defeated both Nadal and Djokovic in a Grand Slam tournament.

Refreshingly free of hyperbole, Clarey’s sketch abounds with mostly unobtrusive personal interjections and includes a fair amount of tennis history. One wonders whether the introduction of the Hawkeye technology facilitated Federer’s grace?

7. Dudley, Understanding Germany Idealism (25 Mar 2021)

by kurto

German idealism, commencing with Kant’s initiative to defeat Humean skepticism and determinism and culminating in Hegel’s efforts to ground philosophy in an unassailable base, simultaneously pursued rationality and freedom in ways overlooked by European Enlightenment and English empiricism.
Hume asserted metaphysics must be grounded in scientific demonstration (i.e., fact) not Spinozan geometry (relationship). Induction is circular and so lacks rational justification; causal inference must rest on custom (past experience). Empiricism shows the individual incapable of rational self-determination and also epistemological, moral, and political autonomy – freedom.

For Kant, matters of fact can be known by reason alone. His response to Hume is tantamount to Copernicus’ astronomical revolution: instead of knowledge conforming to the world as it is (noumena), the world conforms to the structure of the mind. Metaphysics is saved by reexamining the subject’s capacity for representation and experience, provided we are agnostic about that which transcends our experience. Such agnosticism is justifiable only in respect of free will: we cannot know, which creates license to act as if we are free. Hence freedom is the keystone to pure reason. Pure concepts of understanding do not derive from impressions, but their application in experience is legitimated (the transcendental argument), leading to synthetic a priori knowledge. A central claim of critical philosophy is arguments about the soul, freedom, and God cannot yield knowledge because they transcend experience and play no role in making it possible. Further, ideas of reason (‘pure’ ideas) which derive from the mind’s operation do not lead to knowledge but transcend illusion. Because we can’t know if there is immortality, freedom, or God, Kant considers the possibility that remains defeats skepticism. Rational willing for Kant is borne of the nature of reason, it cannot be contingent. Morality depends exclusively on what we do in full knowledge and motive. Doing one’s moral duty for its own sake establishes dignity and rationality of man, and therefore establishes freedom. The use of practical reason, especially in moral resolutions, both demands and generates ‘rational faith’, belief in God and a human soul, to which theoretical reason must agnostic. To appreciate aesthetics, we must abstract from cognition and sensory satisfaction. Only through disinterested appreciation of the object and its appeal to desires can we appreciate the form of qualities for their own sake. Nature is purposive only if we regard it as intelligently designed: God has arrayed matters seen of science is such a way that they orient toward the emergence of rational creatures. Seeing the world as governed by providence bridges the gap between nature and freedom: nature’s purpose is to create conditions for humanity exercising freedom for moral ends.

Transcendentalism distinguishes between the possibility of experience and of being (subjective idealism), seeking to define conditions of the former, the conditions of synthetic a priori. Transcendental idealism presumes experience can be explained only by supposing the external world. This was disputed: Jacobi asserted Kant’s philosophy is an idealism that makes all knowledge dependent on faith in the senses and is thus dependent on finitude of humanity. Reinhold, the bridge to Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, each of whom argues over unconditional, self-determining starting points, sought to defend transcendental idealism; but concluded Kant’s foundation lacked an explanation of how cognition works (i.e., understanding the senses). He recognized Kant’s cognitive capacities – sensibility, understanding, reason – as well being modes of receiving or processing mental representations; but concludes Kant has not established a ‘science of representation’. Whereas rationalism commences from defined terms and axiomatic principles, but a lacks defensible starting point.

Fichte: the core problem is the basis of synthetic a priori, not explaining things-in-themselves, which we can’t know. Philosophy cannot take Reinhold’s representation as a foundation, but must deduce the necessity of representation from more basic self-consciousness. The former is contingent, the latter necessary. Philosophy is concerned solely with necessary operations of mind, making it a closed system, unlike all other senses: constitutive elements of consciousness are generated by the mind itself. This has the effect of rejecting transcendental deduction of categories, since the world of objects is constituted by the conditions which make experience possible. Fichte’s influence foundered on the difficulty of his argument. NB: it was Fichte, not Hegel, who invented the thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic, not Hegel.

The primary appeal of practical (political) philosophy is concern with freedom of the individual in a sociopolitical setting, as determined by individual use of reason. But Fichte substitutes Kant’s individual (uncaused cause) with a communitarian ideal: if rational agents are well-ordered among one another, then they are free. For Kant, by contrast, freedom is a metaphysical postulate which underpins moral obligations: politics serves morality, as does education and religion. For Fichte, freedom is not given but an end in itself, available only to certain communities (i.e., with certain characteristics): thus, economic resources and opportunities become involved in what we now call social justice. Fichte’s revision of the categorical imperative means there can be no truly human persons without just communities fostering the individual’s capacity for rationality. Sociopolitical relations are a prior condition to moral agency, a view embraced by Hegal and Marx.

Schelling changed his mind thrice, albeit honestly. Hegelians often him a waystation, while critics take his final rejection of metaphysics as a precursor to Kirkegaard, Marx, Heidegger, and postmodernism. He first sought epistemological grounds, then abandoned the search in favor of the ontological – from Kant to the Spinozan tradition. Kant has insisted we could not treat ideas of reason as if they can inform us of the world, asking the epistemological question ‘How is it possible to know anything to be true that is not an analytic, conceptual relation?’ Schelling replied asking an ontological question ‘How is it possible for there to be differentiated subjects and objects, without which there would be no need for a cognitive synthesis?’ Philosophy is to explain how anything emerges from an undifferentiated subject, and to reconcile this all-encompassing subject with the freedom of individual subjects, he thought, breaking with Kant and Fichte and anticipating Heidegger. That is, the objective is not understanding cognition but essence / being. Kant would have replied the ontological question is outside the scope of transcendental idealism, because it is beyond rational inquiry. In his middle period Schelling contrasted idealism which commences with the subject and ‘philosophy of nature’ which starts with objective or natural world to determine why self-conscious subjects should emerge. His paradigm of the object is math, such as the concept of triangles: science determines not merely how we think but how they must be. He tried to reconcile a philosophy of identity, but could not and so abandoned the a priori system. It was a pursuit akin to speculative physics, in which the first problem is to explain the absolute cause of motion.

More Schelling: latterly, he asserted the product (content) of true art is the absolute identity. It is the pinnacle of human activity, the unconscious element of acting and producing, generating identity via consciousness. His idea of freedom comes from Spinoza: that which is free acts according to laws of inner being, unimpeded by anything else. He tries to reconcile this freedom with the emergence of everything from the absolute being. (Whereas (to repeat) Kant’s assertion that the cognizing subject cannot conform to the object of cognition, if there is to be metaphysical knowledge, was transcendental idealism’s Copernican revolution, its point of departure. The object must be understandable by the subject.) The French Revolution theorists argued freedom is impossible if the populist must conform to ruling authorities, and so sought to establish an entirely rational polity with no such authorities.

Hegel, following Schelling, denies that Kant (and Fichte) established an identity of subject-and-object; Hegel calls true identity ‘reason’ – actuality must be rational. The Phenomenology claims rational cognition is possible only if the determinations of thinking and being can be established; this is to reject Kant’s view that philosophy is incapable of rational cognition; he joins Schelling in restoring metaphysics as queen of the discipline, rejecting Kant’s view that thinking cannot determine the truth of being. Therefore his project is ontological, an account of what it is to be.

For Hegel, ‘consciousness’ means self-understanding: knowledge requires the thinking subject to truly appreciate the realm of objectivity it confronts and distinguish itself from it. Dualism is suspended, one achieves knowing by result of the subject undermining one’s assumptions via synthesis achieving reason (‘science’). While Fichte and Schelling accepted selfhood (consciousness) as a fact, Hegel in Phenomenology describes how consciousness seems; how it can only be determined by dialectical reason.

To appreciate ancient skepticism is to suspend the Cartesian subject-object dualism. Presuppositionless knowledge (i.e., phenomenology), or presuppositionless philosophy is a systematic philosophy beginning with indeterminate being of thought and unfolding as logic, or what must be thought of being, and ontology, what must be of being. Thought can only be self-determining if it allows immanent dialectic to emerge; otherwise it is beholden to the subject. However, the natural world exists independent of thought and also thinking subjects; but Hegel is an idealist in that nature has a structure which thinking can comprehend. The rational is actual and vice versa, but all is implicit, not empirical.

There is a limit to systematic philosophy’s explanation of the natural world – we know there are contingencies, such as the form matter will take. Thus Hegel is not totalizing. The systematic philosophy provides an account of being and comprehends rational aspects of empirical phenomena but stops at contingency and chance. Hegel rejects Kant’s view that freedom transcends nature; freedom depends on thinking being the achievement of reconciliation with the natural world from which it differs. Hegel sees, as does Fichte, the moral will is self-certain and hence capable of evil by mistaken conclusion – there is no objective standard. It is not objective freedom. The will cannot reconcile with the natural world: ethics and purpose (of the subject) do not guarantee freedom. Only spirit (geist), art, religion, and philosophy can reconcile. Peoples with different understandings of freedom develop different sociopolitical arrangements and customs. Philosophy is first of equals because of spirit, the interpretation of which is philosophy’s job.

For Kant, freedom is transcending natural causes and acting purely from rationality and moral law it imposes. Since all of his conclusions depend on an account of cognition, his successors pursued refinement of criticality – unassailable foundations. Fichte pursued self-consciousness and relations to the object. Schelling replaced dualism with a single indeterminacy. Hegel thought the defeat of skepticism turned on systematic examination of necessary structure of thought, the dialectic. He was the last idealist to attempt Kant’s project based on a priori grounds. The Romantics succeeded this idealism, asserting philosophy’s limitations were fulfilled by art. Romantics deemed such rationality could justify moral and ethical commitments, prompting Hegel’s violently disagreement.

3. Anderson, Revolution (23 February 2025)

by kurto

Inspired by recovering individual liberty and market economics as well as the need for a strong military, the Reagan presidency amounted to a revolutionary restoration of American government, lifting the United States to the brink of winning the Cold War – albeit not before recovering from the Iran-contra affair.

The three fundamental issues of American politics are peace, prosperity, and individual liberty. The core of the 1980 presidential campaign, from Anderson’s vantage as policy and economics chief, were economic policy (i.e., tax), energy, and foreign policy and defense. Reagan saw a thriving economy and strong military (i.e., anti-Soviet foreign policy including the Strategic Defense Initiative) as imperatives; the latter was not a contingency but an absolute requirement. The arms race was one-sided, the US held back by elite opinion. Declining Soviet economics were accelerated by falling oil prices, China’s conversion to market economics, and American missile defense, which together forced Russia to choose between guns and butter. Whereas an improving US economic would alleviate the same dilemma.

In August 1980, economic forecasters including the Congressional Budget Office showed tax revenue for the next five years would increase faster than government expense. By 1985, there would be a $45 billion surplus; but the $55 billion deficit in 1981 was a campaign liability. Reagan’s October 1976 op-ed calling for reexamination of Harding and Kennedy supply-side tax cuts was the closest he came to claiming cuts would instantly yield more revenue. Tax cuts resulted in the wealthy carrying a large share of the burden.

In the 1960s-80s, new policy ideas came from universities, think tanks, publishing houses, and news media. Milton Friedman is the economic hero; reforming the regulatory state was a major component of economic policy. For Anderson, public service was a duty, but working at Hoover was preferable.

Cabinet councils, informal work groups for interrelated – but not government-wide – issues were highly effective. The use of advisory boards was invaluable for presenting outside views to the president. In foreign policy, advisors are more critical than in domestic affairs because matters are less subject to public knowledge and scrutiny. In Reagan’s second term, Baker, Meese, Kirkpatrick, and Deaver were out of the picture, while Bush was ineffective. Bill Casey is the villain: his sins included Iran-contra as well as dismantling PFLAB. Iran-contra reinforced that trading with terrorists is a very poor strategy: the terrorists will always return for more. Producing intelligence should always be separate from setting policy (consuming it).

Management under Reagan featured establishing strategic priorities, changing tactics as warranted, delegating aggressively, and negotiating from overstated starting points. In elaborating Reagan’s strategy of asking for 200 percent of the objective, he defends Baker’s work as chief of staff. Nixon’s mismanaging personnel selection crippled his presidency, a mistake Reagan was conscious to avoid.

23. Rodger, Safeguard of the Sea (25 Nov 2024)

by kurto

Following 1,000 years of naval development, England was the first European state to achieve the political and administrative sophistication necessary to operate an advanced navy and merchant marine. Precisely because the navy is more costly than a standing army, it required public support, not merely the backing of a consolidated, monarchical government, which explains why Spain in the 16th century, France in the 18th, and Germany and Russia in the 20th failed. Organizing evidence in the categories of policy, strategy and operations, finance, and administration and logistics, Rodger powerfully contradicts the consensus that modern states emerged to support armies; indeed, the new naval powers of England and the Netherlands retained their medieval constitutions.

Prior to circa 1000, English rulers saw the island as confronting three seas – the North, the Narrow (i.e., the English channel), and the Irish – which could not all be mastered, though the public thought they should be. Viking raids had preceded 865, but the Great Army was the first invasion for conquest rather than simple plunder. The invaders were highly mobile, the English based in London. Nonetheless, the resistance of Alfred (r. 871-99) was mainly fought on land: in this era, ships mainly moved troops. To take the helm (steerage) was to take command. Landowners generally provided the military.

The Norman revolution replaced unitary Anglo-Saxon England with an unstable feudal baronage, meaning independent military power. The ship-muster system fell into disuse, and Harold’s fleet withered, creating a vacuum in the Irish Sea filled by Dublin-based Vikings that lasted through the 12th century. Most medieval navigation was English coastal pilotage.

Henry II’s 1171 conquest of Dublin owes less to naval prowess than England’s growing economic/demographic advantage. Its overlordship could easily have been disrupted by
an Irish sea power. Over 1200-40 France drove for the sea, acquiring Normandy on the channel, Poitou on the Atlantic, and a Mediterranean presence, often at the expense of Angevin England whose remnants in Gascony were exposed. The Bordeaux wine trade (‘claret’) accelerated after the 1293 loss of Poitou, coming to serve as the foundation for England’s merchant marine and later naval strength. Viking fleets had receded during the 12th century, absorbed by Scandinavian wars, before returning in the 1180s and persisting as an Irish sea power through the 1260s. England’s defeat by Alexander III of Scotland led to the latter claiming the isles of Man and Hebrides. but the need to be active in western waters threatened Welsh independence, and following a pair of Welsh campaigns, England gained ascendancy in the west. Still, her lack of sea power was evident, and doctrine not yet advanced much past convoys, though ship designs were showing increased scale and other adaptions.

Medieval England was a reputable military power with a modest navy. Only Richard I (a Plantagenet, the Lionheart, 1189-99) and Henry V (a Lancaster, author of Agincourt, 1413-22) understood sea power. Edward I’s loss at Bannockburn in 1314 is normally seen to mark the rise of infantry and archers, but decisive failings were evident at sea. England could not provision Perth or Stirling and was so weak that its troops and shipping both required convoys. In 1340 Edward III defeated the French at Sluys in the Spanish Netherlands: nonetheless the continental balance of power was unchanged. Naval failure – the lack of good government at seas – contributed to popular discontent evident in the 1381 peasants’ revolt and the 1399 murder of Richard II.

All subjects were bound to support the king in wartime; there was no distinction between knights who provided horses and swords, and merchants who offered ships. But the latter rarely received compensation for losses or even usage. By the late 14th century voluntarist service was evidently failing: cash compensation was necessary. This opened the door for the Commons. Already in the prior century, the crown had summoned representatives of seaports, which group was quasi-Parliamentarian.
In the 15th century, single mast ships were replaced by three. Spanish and French ships began to carry larger artillery, an order of difference from heavy-grade crossbows, terrifying to sailors. The English ships of Henry V were smallish and dispersed: it was time-consuming to muster and provision. Though patrol and scouting were common and certain confined spaces could be dominated, the open seas were impossible to interdict. In the 1480s, convoys to Iceland were the first example of open-ocean navigation. ‘Safeguard’ or ‘safekeeping’ of the seas was the state’s protection of commercial interests. Weak kings were obliged to tolerate domestic piracy despite the diplomatic drawbacks. Admirals exercised not only disciplinary matters but disposition of piracy prizes (especially involving foreign claims). Cases were civil suits for damages, and because lucrative, were eventually divided from naval matters proper.

English ambitions on the continent effectively ended in October 1523 when Suffolk’s army abandoned its march on Paris: Henry VIII was the last to pursue the Hundred Years War. Henceforth her military goals would be naval. Henry is sometimes seen as architect of the modern navy, but in fact he was conventional, using ships for convoy escort, local patrols, and coastal raids. Strategy amounted to invading France (in conjunction with the Low Countries). Operations were limited to the East coast to the Firth of Forth, the Channel to Brest, and the southern Irish seas. Administration and provisioning was haphazard, and there was no agency for foreign trade.
By midcentury, Henry VIII’s new foreign policy became evident in naval matters: England was forced to follow Scotland in assuming it was a weak power whose enemies could only come by sea. Breaking with Rome had weakened England; he had to sell monastic lands to fund the navy, and also to encourage piracy. During Lady Jane Grey’s interregnum, Northumberland’s policies established the link between Protestantism, piracy, naval service, and foreign trade amid the Spanish and Portuguese monopolies, which position Elizabeth inherited. But her navy was premised on defending England by dominating the Channel and North Sea. In the 1540s, shipbuilding scaled to match the Spanish galleon, and accommodate forward firing, thereby merging seaworthiness and armament. Whereas turn-of-the-century Spanish warships were really armed merchantmen, English galleons were closer to pure men of war, lacking storage for long distance, were thus defensive. The country came late to carrying heavy guns, naval warfare, and oceanic voyaging, following in the wake of Scotland, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, Genoa, the Dutch, and France. Rodger asserts they were not laying the basis of empire or even Nelson’s navy (e.g., establishing lines of battle), for the immediate challenge was ship design and tactics to defeat peninsular galleys. Henry VIII’s reforms commenced lasting administrative and logistical structures, unique to England (save Portugal), providing an institutional memory across reigns that proved both resilient and adaptive. the most important factor in 18th-century open-water gains stem from 16th-century advances in provisioning of foodstuffs and water.

The duel with Spain commenced prior to 1588 and extended beyond. Phillip II’s inflexible orders to make no independent landing of the Armada but to first link with the Duka of Parma in Flanders for conveyance to the Downs condemned the mission to fail. Spain hadn’t shallow-draft ships to fend off Dutch raiders. Medinia Sidonia was forced to anchor at Calais for nearly a week, with the English to windward, waiting for Parma. England attacked, eventually driving Spain into the North sea and dissolution. In 1594 Spain sought to build a fort near Brest, Brittany, which would command approaches to the channel. England and France (the latter content to ally as the converted Henry IV was enthroned) attacked and defeated Spain in a battle equally important as 1588. The Spanish war produced seasoned navigators using math and charts.

By end of century, English ministers had decided the best defense was offensive operations against the Spanish coastline or shipping. Ireland had been pacified (i.e., was not a potential enemy base), Dutch strength was growing, France unified under Henry IV, and privateering established as reliable for the crown in the east Atlantic as well as the Caribbean. The latter transformed the merchant marine and its London owners into political players. Elizabeth consciously sought to employ sea power to stave off European powers, and consequently depended on a small number of merchants, shipowners, investors, and naval officers whose interests had congealed since her father’s era, and whose privateering was difficult to separate from the crown. Men of rank (aristocrats) were now seeking to men their name at seas, somewhat at the expense of ‘professionals’.

It takes much longer to build a squadron than raise an army, though shipbuilding itself is rapid as against routinizing operations and training. The dockyards are the most complex part of administration, but the real premium is on planning. (16th century armies expend to lose one-third of strength every campaign year.) From 1577 John Hawkins dominated the Navy Board, making it relatively free of corruption. (Rodger several times says historians overuse or conflate corruption with weakness of complex, premodern systems.)

From 1600 Barbary Coast (Algerian) pirates pushed into the Atlantic: with more than 100 warships, most with 25-plus guns, they stood as Europe’s largest fleet, taking more than 400 English ships over 1609-16 alone. The business amounting to capturing men for slavery, the West country and Newfoundland fisheries suffered most.

One fragility of Charles I’s reign can be found in the competing needs to deter European rivals and to protect fishermen, traders, and coastal residents: there was no agreement of the navy’s strategic purpose, yet it was very expensive, requiring public input. Thus the weighty matters of ship money. During the Civil War, the ‘new merchants’ were independent traders and privateers, not the great chartered firms like the East India Company; were Presbyterian; and were dominant in naval administration such that the army and the navy were on opposite sides. The latter lost out during the Interregnum, and country’s naval tradition looked to be faltering.
The trajectory of the British Isles to 1650 was very much shaped by sea power or lack thereof. England, via her navy, had been ascendant until 1066, then fell back as military (land) power grew in importance. The sea is a highway as much as a barrier. English governments were overthrown by naval invasion nine times to 1688, not counting unsuccessful attempts.

1. Gregg, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization (13 Jan 2025 – reread)

by kurto

A hallmark of Western civilization is reasoned inquiry in pursuit of permanent knowledge (truth), Gregg writes in the Thomist tradition. Unaided reason degenerates into mere empiricism, sidelining the benefits of Christian logos while engendering pathologies such as social engineering, scientism, nihilistic skepticism, and relativism (i.e., reason reaching non-empirical truths).

Reason is not equivalent to the scientific method, for the premises of an argument may be self-evident: deductive reason follows a logical path. Judaism had separated human reason from mythology, and St. Paul is a key source of natural law, that which all men can discern (regardless of religion); however, Christian religion is not based on Mosaic law but first-hand witness of the miraculous – the resurrection is a historical event. Christianity’s contribution to rationality originates in God’s rational nature (logos).

Epistemological arguments, including the empiricism of Locke, encourage a view of religion as superstition and further that men are entirely shapeable (tabula rasa). This gave rise tot Prometheanism, but Western institution often reflect the truths of unchanging human nature. Islamic belief that only God establishes truth is despotic: the people cannot reason but only follow interpretation.

26. Leroy, Why We Think What We Think (20 Dec 2024)

by kurto

Surveys the course of philosophy from the Pre-Socratics to the present era, contending the modern concentration on epistemology has severed reason and faith, undercutting the discipline’s value for humanity. Science confronts questions it cannot answer while automatically rejecting answers which theology might supply. The wrong turn began with William of Ockham as well as Duns Scotus, each of whom undermined Thomistic reconciliation, and accelerated with the Enlightenment. Most moderns sought to make ‘more sense than God’, and to define freedom as escaping natural limits of God and nature. The author is less concerned with science’s claims to autonomy that skepticism’s role in abandoning man to uncaring, everchanging universe. In sketching this decline, the author does not address the Straussian view that human things too must be at the center of consideration. What is the arbiter of natural law and natural rights?

The Socratic method first turned philosophy from metaphysics to ethics and epistemology. Plato’s universals are a limit on freedom: humans can’t define certain topics, so the Good measures mankind. Aristotle’s final cause (purpose) is another reminder of man’s limited freedom. Skepticism foreshadowed relativism.

Augustine asserted God does not author evil but allows it via free will. A city is a community of rational people united by agreement of interests and passions for the most important things. Boethius, the first scholastic, distinguished reason from faith. Al-Ghazali’s attack on Avicenna closed Islam to science. Aquinas held reason could be trusted but not everything could be reasoned, the converse of the position that all knowledge is suspended until proven. Distinguishing between essence and existence, as Aristotle had done (and al Farabi resurfaced) with the concepts of actuality and potentiality, leads back to the first mover: what started the chain of events is pure existence. There are three common arguments for God’s existence: cosmological (first mover), teleological (the order of the universe suggests purpose), and ontological (the conception of the highest being). Aquinas rejected the latter as relying on essence to prove existence, since once can’t start from a definition.

Ockham: acts have no intrinsic moral qualities, but are dependent on intent (voluntarism). Will takes precedence over reason. Thus an act isn’t good because one is trying to do God’s will but good because God wills it; but one can’t know God’s will, so religion becomes faith alone. This conceptualism does the work of nominalism: universals are just names, there are no shared essences. Further, knowing purpose in an Aristotelian sense is impossible. Ockham’s denials gave rise to radical empiricism, wherein all is continent, nothing necessary, and there is no explaining God but only physical processes. Ockham’s conclusions were perverse. The church could not simultaneously eradicate error while being denied the ability to define the truth. Christianity was cut off from the ability to defend faith using reason; the Protestants were comfortable with this personalized justification.

After Bacon, science was no longer to understand nature for the sake of knowledge but for control, utility, and power. Hobbesian determinism asserted every event has a cause, and all valid explanations are mechanistic, given in terms of shape, size, motion, etc., but purpose is an unacceptable explanation. Descartes (again) turned the focus of philosophy to epistemology (i.e., how can we know?). Pascal’s views also confronted faith; his ‘wager’ is an orthodox Christian view of rationalism. Hume distinguished between impressions (empirical) and ideas (mental copies of impressions, the result of evaluating sense data), and concluded that to eliminate doubt about knowledge, only impressions could be admitted, resulting in radical doubt of ideas. Further, since it was impossible to define causation, as all that is valid is sensory, so it’s best to make educated guesses in favor of custom. Smith: morality develops from human sentiments: the ultimate standard of right and wrong is the standard of the impartial spectator (not the divine will).

Rousseau’s legislator replaces the messiah, as politics is the center of humanity, and he can solve problems by creating new kinds of men. Whereas Burke thought ancient legislators commenced from human nature. Kant: humans create reality by applying mental templates to objects we encounter, but we wouldn’t know the states of our minds were we not aware of permanent substances outside the mind. The existence of the world around us proves minds are working: rationalism (a priori template of the mind) and empiricism (the template translates sense data) results in transcendental idealism. Knowing the world beyond senses is transcendence, understanding the mind’s processes is idealism. Nietzsche’s understanding that weakened belief in Christianity led to disbelief is the culmination of Ockham-cum-Luther view that God can only be known by faith. From Ockham and Duns Scotus to Descartes to Hume and Kant, the emphasis was what we couldn’t know – doubt is the basis of epistemology – for the purpose of ‘freeing’ the individual.

Unlike the moderns, but equally in pursuit of individual liberation, the postmoderns rejected both reason and science. Husserl’s phenomenology focused not on the object in itself but on its perception. Preconceptions are to be ‘bracketed’ because our thoughts are intentional. The result reopens the Cartesian mind-body problem, so Husserl solves the solipsism by empathizing with others, which reveals the shared life-world. Heidegger disagrees, focusing on existence not knowledge, ontology not epistemology. Sartre: man has no essence prior to existence: the project of a lifetime is to determine one’s own essence. Derrida, following Saussure, uses binary opposition of terms (e.g., white-black) to turn every statement into its opposite, thus creating instability, not revealing it. Almost all of the things that matter most cannot be expressed by language, contrary to the view that language subsumes power. (Popper: we can’t prove ultimate truths but can show untruths. The open society embraces criticism in the spirit of intellectual excellence, but unlimited tolerance to the intolerant extinguishes criticism.)

Karol Wojtyla (John Paul II) followed Aquinas in combining reason and the senses. ‘Action constitutes the specific moment when the person is revealed’; ‘the body, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible; the spiritual and the divine’. Alasdair McIntyre asserted a new dark age has arrived, for the moral life is already opposed by Westerners. Nietzsche’s call for ubermensch fails if Aristotle was right to emphasize ethics as natural and foundational. There are people as they are in nature, people as they could be, and the link is virtue.

25. Gottlieb, Dream of Reason (20 Dec 2024)

by kurto

An introductory study of pre-Socratic and classical philosophy which seeks to rehabilitate those schools which were shunned in the Scholastic period. Sophism is a legitimate pursuit of wisdom, but more importantly the ‘suppression’ of the Sceptics and Epicureans retarded Western science, for the Scholastics were overly concerned to accommodate Plato and Aristotle. Gottlieb’s explication is conventional: science had to jettison faith before moving ahead.

The Greeks appreciated intellectual order. For the Pythagoreans, maths was key to the order and beauty of the universe. Parmenides was the first to ask how the individual (i.e., the subject) processed mind, language, and the objective world; from him sprang the contrasting of reason and the senses; after his paradoxes, epistemology required reworking. For Parmenides there could be no discussion of what is not, which opened the way to non-mathematical disciplines using deduction as well as logic ab absurdum. (Hegel suggested Parmenides revealed the ‘transitory has no truth’, meaning anything that changes cannot be real.) Empedocles came closest to premodern physics with his dichotomy of love and strife. Like many of the best of the early Greeks, his accounts were a mix of astute observation and imaginative extrapolation, the latter drawing on metaphors and analogies not experimentation. (In a characteristic aside, Gottlieb notes Aristotle disliked Empedocles’ theory of the random, for nature was purposeful; natural selection the was consequently ‘stamped out’ until Darwin.) Democritus’ ancient atomism was the ‘crowning achievement’ in philosophy before Plato. It was, however, opposed by early Christians for explaining all in terms of mechanics, and for rejecting life after death. Along with Leucippus, Democritus evinced ‘premature modernity’ in seeing a vast, impersonal universe unconcerned with human telos. Gottlieb again: we are ‘rapidly filling in details’ of the cosmological trajectory without the first mover (Darwin having provided impetus), but the author does not address the origin of matter. Separately, Democritus asserted virtue is self-interested.

The Sophists sought to take over from poets and playwrights as educators. They were searching for truth, demanding to know reasons for moral ends, and comfortable with irresolvable complexities – making them relativists, following Protagoras. (Modern relativism derives from Kant, who thought man could know universal truths because human minds are the same in crucial respects; but if they are not then there are many truths.) ‘The victory goes to the best speaker’ is not cynical but only normative; but what of ‘making the weaker argument the stronger’?; Adamson and Leroy would not agree. Plato’s interest in separating Socratic philosophy from Sophistry was driven by class interest (i.e., Sophists sought payment) as well as self-defense in a turbulent era, Gottlieb says.
For Socrates, the most important thing is tending to the welfare of the soul, which benefits when we do right, and suffers when we do wrong. One must be wise enough to anticipate consequences and so do right; it is a craft of using all subordinate virtues (e.g., honesty, frugality, etc.). The real figure, not the Platonic edition, sought understanding of how to live virtuously, principally through courage, moderation, piety, wisdom, and justice. Where Socrates saw defining these virtues as means to the end, Plato saw the end in itself, the eternal form, and Aristotle accused Socrates of conflating theoretical and practical questions: we don’t wish to know what bravery is but to be brave, nor what justice is but to be just, the same as we wish to be healthy not to know what health is. The Platonic forms are like Parmenides’ One albeit more closely related to physical world. The forms are the north star to common sense. The tyrant’s core problem is an ill-balanced soul, unguided by reason. The happiest man (in the Republic) is reasonable, not distracted; is a master craftsman.

Aristotle’s view of technology is entirely unlike Bacon in that knowledge of nature is desirable in itself, not a means to utility. Having no means of measurement, his physics couldn’t be extended, whereas dissection advanced biology, so he tended to deal in absolutes (i.e., heavy-light) not degrees; but he was perceptive about such concepts as time, space, infinity. In effect, his conception of science assumed all the data has been gathered, so the question was how to organize findings into axioms. In actuality he knew it was not so but medieval scholars didn’t and skipped further research to concentrate on syllogisms. The first questions of ethics are ‘what is the good for man’, ‘what is the aim of humanity’. We inquire not to know what is excellence but to become good. Ethics is the prologue to politics: ethics studies the best people’s characters and actions, whereas politic studies the laws and constitutions that promote excellence.

The succeeding Hellenistic schools of thought (Epicureans, Stoics, Skeptics, Cynics) followed Socrates in seeking a practical relevance of philosophy: change your priorities, change your life. Epicureans thought the world is completely unplanned; Stoics that it is rationally organized to the last detail; Skeptics would not endorse but merely point out alternatives, asking what do the experts really know if they are always changing their views. Epicureanism is the main ancestor of utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill. Lucretius, a materialist (atomist), held random behavior is not the key to freedom of will, for there is no agency.

A long chapter covering late antiquity through the 17th century holds Scholastic thought mainly adapted the ‘big three’ to the Christian era, retarding science and thus philosophy by making these disciplines beholden to Christianity. Gottlieb’s view is entirely contrary to Rubenstein; Leroy’s is the better survey. Ockham thought essence was not the purpose of science because it’s misleading: God is not obliged to take notice. Catholic thinkers made use of Skepticism because it validated the status quo (i.e., lack of change). All the best thinkers of the 17th century struggled with the implications of the new scientific method, and here was science’s chance to break free: if matter is in flux and perceptions are subjective, once Newton’s clockmaker is discounted, how much truth is there in the empirical senses? For Gottlieb, the ancients do not supply a way to arrest the regression to nihilism.

NB: Aristotle quoted the Sophist Gorgias as saying: kill the opponent’s earnest argument with jest, and playful argument with seriousness.

24. Adamson, Classical Philosophy (7 Dec 2024)

by kurto

Explicates the continuum of pre-Socratic, Socratic and Platonic, and Aristotelian philosophy, from the first systematic inquiries into nature and man’s nature until the end of Hellenistic period, generally presenting matters on their own terms rather than in context of future history of philosophy.

Pre-Socratic: The theme of constant, dynamic opposition against underlying unity preoccupied the departure from mythology and religion. Pythagoras preceded Plato’s forms (and also Descartes’ cogito) with a dualist theory of soul and also the representational power of numbers. Parmenides debuted the precedence of reason (rationalism) over empirical evident, and the role of being (ontology) in argument and consequence. But the problem of non-being was unresolved. Democritus considered that science banished the common-sense experience of the world (whereas moderns consider science more an extension or an enhancement). Anaxagoras embodied the pre-Socratics’ system-building efforts, whereas post-Aristotelians (Skeptics, Stoics, Cynics, Epicureans) were essentially ethicists, seeking to live an untroubled life. Empedocles married religious trappings to a rational cosmology. Medicine and philosophy were closely related in the Greek world, as in the Hippocratic oath.

The Sophists, embodied by Protagoras, were not dispassionately seeking truth, contra Gottlieb, but foreshadowed relativism in their pursuit of ‘making the weaker argument the stronger’ or in ‘man is the measure of all things’. Sophism assimilates virtue to what is advantageous, pace Thrasymachus, since morality is no more than social convention. Gorgias doubted the reality of being itself, the better to operate at the level of seeming than to pursue knowledge.
Socrates invented the view of philosophy as a pursuit of how men should live, versus the pursuit of metaphysics. Epistemology and ethics, though distinctly separate in modern philosophy, cannot be so if virtue is knowledge. In Meno, the Platonic Socrates asks not for a list of virtues but what they have in common. New theories are to be subjected to the test of consistency with itself (i.e., if nothing is true, is that itself true?)

Plato, considering the soul immortal, thereby explains how it knows of immortal forms (i.e., the so-called theory of recollection). Forms are standards of judgment, guideposts in human knowledge. ‘Good’ is the super-form; thereafter come being, change, rest, sameness, difference. Being is pervaded by difference, thereby disposing of the problem of being arising from not being; for what is not is false, not nothing. To be explanatory, the cause must give rise of the outcome; the true cause should not be consistent with other effects (i.e., largeness does not produce smallness). Knowledge is always true whereas belief can be true or false, and ignorance is always false. More elaborately: imagination < belief < thought < understanding < knowledge. Dialectic is the process of hypothesizing and then discovering the principles which support the hypothesis. The dialectician divides the inquiry’s evidence along ‘natural joints’ of categorization. Language is built on a presumption of stability, of shared meaning (convention), even if usage changes just as substance changes. It is a likelihood not a permanence. Phaedo and Republic utilize unchanging forms and changing things that participate in them. Timaeus introduces the demiurge, the mover. Aristotle saw dialectic more simply as argument from agreed premises. Logic is categorical: statements relate subject to predicate, in order to proceed to the syllogism. A demonstrative syllogism shows not only that something is (or is not) the case but why. The premises of demonstrative syllogisms must identify essential features of the things in consideration. ‘Accidental’ features (a giraffe with a broken toe) are not significant, contra modern science. For Aristotle, epistemology is fairly the same as the philosophy of science (systematic exploration), save that episteme encompasses all disciplines. Also in contrast to modern empiricism (e.g., Hume): though sense experience stops the regress of endless demonstration, rational or even plausible deduction is permissible even though they may be overturned. Items in the world are primary, not derivative of forms: without beautiful things there's no such thing as beauty. Changes involves the nature or property, called form, and the underlying substance, matter. The four causes are the material (substance), the formal (definition or determination), the efficient (the dynamic) and the final (purpose). Substance has potential to actually become something else. As to ethics, one seeks not only the ideal life but the good life that earns the admiration of others. Virtue is achieved by those raised well – by habituation. The virtuous action lies between the extremes, the rational discernment or perception of right action in the circumstance; but there is the problem of ‘moral luck’, ethics as a product of happenstance, as a luxury. Only the virtuous can have friends, who share interests and right action. Sensation isn’t the same as imagination, which is closer to preliminary thinking; yet it is short of belief. Adamson’s treatment of Aristotle’s political philosophy is shallow.

18. Biggar, Colonialism (23 August 2024)

by kurto

The British empire evidenced both good and evil, defying the simplistic judgements of leftist critics. Imperialism, so far from being an ideological ‘project’, was more a race to catch up with trading and settlement. After the American Revolution, British society converted to antislavery: the Colonial Office’s intentions were Christian and humanitarian, above all dedicated to eradicating slavery and instilling such characteristic institutions as parliamentary accountability, a free press, and independent courts. Though detractors frequently compare the empire with Nazism, the ultimate proof of British aims are evident in its spending the last of its resources to oppose Germany in the world wars.

Social hierarchy is not itself immoral. Any large society will arrange a division of labor; the challenge is preventing functional hierarchy. There are countless examples of colonial administrators insisting on British rule of law applied in harmony with local customer, such Governor of Madras Thomas Muro writing in the 1820s to the East India Company directors: ‘You are not here to turn India into England or Scotland. Work through, not in spite of, native systems and native ways, with a prejudice in the favour rather than against them; and when in the fullness of time your subject can frame and maintain a worthy government for themselves, get out and take the glory of the achievement and the sense of having done your duty as the chief reward for your exertions’.

Because slavery had not existed in England for many centuries, the common law was silent. Parliament abolished slavery in British colonies in 1806, during the Napoleonic wars, subverting its economy. In 1819 the Foreign Office established an (anti) Slave Trade Department, its largest precinct during the 1820s and 30s. In contrast, Muslim slavery persisted to 1920. An estimated 17 million Africans were sold east over second millennium (?) versus 11 million across the Atlantic.
Colonial governments, especially in the dominions, unilaterally bound themselves to respecting native property law, as an extension of (western) natural law. Modern claims that treaties were made by uncomprehending natives do not falsify the intention, but do indicate partisanship. Further, the oral histories often cited as evidence are often framed, anthropology has shown, to make sense of the present rather than to demonstrate the past. Those in the 21st century who believe the West should cease ‘oppressing the global south’ largely align with 19th-century Christian missionaries, whom they pejoratively label imperialist. Whereas Nigerian national Chinua Achebe exemplifies those who recognize imperialism both harmed and helped: no culture has a right to isolation.

In Australasia and Africa, policies for detaining aboriginals were limited measures to preclude violent resistance to settlement, not ipso facto racism. Other times segregation was meant to protect natives. In North America as well, British government was borne of Christian, Enlightenment views of human equality and cultural advancement not the competition of social Darwinism. Economic exploitation is hardly unique to colonialism, see Stalinist or Maoist industrialization. Famines are not attributable to policy: they persisted in the postwar era. The novelty of welfare policies, as well as penurious colonial governmental, makes their absence an anachronism. There is no evidence of racism in India’s partition, but perhaps overcaution after failing to prevent Irish civil war. Comparisons with Nazism (but never Soviet communism) are polemical.

That India’s economic output, measured in a global framework, collapsed over the 19th century does not prove imperial exploitation, since independent China fell equally dramatically; the neo-Marxist theory of appropriating surplus does not account for the Industrial Revolution. To the contrary, free trade opened the English market to the UK’s disadvantage. In west Africa, the worst excesses of agricultural boards (commissariats) came from the hands of postcolonials exploiting dated systems. Between 1870-1945, three quarters of foreign capital invested into sub-Saharan Africa was British.

Contemporary historians fairly point to examples of racism, economic exploitation, cultural repression, and wanton violence. But these are not essential only wrongful. They overlook British suppression of slavery, efforts to moderate the impacts on traditional societies, the seeding of modern agriculture, the opportunity of free trade, and the provision of civil services and judiciary to pre-democratic societies. The dominions as well as Israel and the United States are some of the world’s most advanced countries.

Detractors cannot distinguish between just war and Fanon’s and Satre’s cathartic violence. Biggar, an ethicist rather than a historian, declares himself a Burkean conservative. Moral (Christian) understanding of human frailties should promote tolerance of past and even present shortcomings. He points out it’s banal to say Milner wanted power; of course he did, pressing the Cabinet into the second Boer for the purpose of securing English institutions including equal treatment of blacks, whereas Kruger sought legal subordination. In this and other instance, historians have got culpability wrong. Discussing the possibility of reparations, he notes what is just smaller or earlier societies may not be in larger or later countries. Compensation requires demonstration of current harm caused by past wrongs, not merely current disadvantage.