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By: ayjay

Three Temptations, and Three Triumphs | Philip Jenkins:

Psalm 91 was very famous and well-used, and quoting verse 12 naturally sent you into verse 13. But at this point, the Devil stops. In a sense, he has already said far too much, because any reader of the Psalm knew what came next, and what horribly bad news that was for Satan and his cause. Of course he stops there, because this next verse proclaims the fall of evil forces (like himself), and moreover it contained what were at the time read as evocative messianic references to trampling and serpents.

Naturally, thought some commentators, the Devil would not want to undermine his argument by citing such an embarrassing line. Origen noted this failure to follow through. Incidentally, he also thought that Satan had committed an “exegetical blunder” in suggesting that the Son of God would actually need the help of angels to accomplish anything.

So where did verse 13 go? Why did Jesus not hit Satan back with it? It makes the whole story annoyingly incomplete, and even mysteriously so. In fact, however, if we read Luke’s gospel as a whole, that very v. 13 shortly reappears, centrally and memorably, as Jesus openly proclaimed his messianic mission. Jesus caps Satan’s quotation.

When we read the story of the temptations and the wilderness, we normally read an ending at Luke 4.13: “And when the Devil had ended all the temptation, he departed from him for a season.” But that is not the end of the story. Satan and Jesus would meet again, and sooner in the story than we might expect.

The Great Endarkenment, Part I

By: Eric Schliesser

Perhaps eventually an overall Big Picture will emerge—and perhaps not: Hegel thought that the Owl of Minerva would take wing only at dusk (i.e., that we will only achieve understanding in retrospect, after it’s all over), but maybe the Owl’s wings have been broken by hyperspecialization, and it will never take to the air at all. What we can reasonably anticipate in the short term is a patchwork of inference management techniques, along with intellectual devices constructed to support them. One final observation: in the Introduction, I gave a number of reasons for thinking that our response to the Great Endarkenment is something that we can start working on now, but that it would be a mistake at this point to try to produce a magic bullet meant to fix its problems. That turns out to be correct for yet a further reason. Because the approach has to be bottom-up and piecemeal, at present we have to suffice with characterizing the problem and with taking first steps; we couldn’t possibly be in a position to know what the right answers are.
Thus far our institutional manifesto. Analytic philosophy has bequeathed to us a set of highly refined skills. The analytic tradition is visibly at the end of its run. But those skills can now be redirected and put in the service of a new philosophical agenda. In order for this to take place, we will have to reshape our philosophical pedagogy—and, very importantly, the institutions that currently have such a distorting effect on the work of the philosophers who live inside them. However, as many observers have noticed, academia is on the verge of a period of great institutional fluidity, and flux of this kind is an opportunity to introduce new procedures and incentives. We had better take full advantage of it.--Elijah Millgram (2015) The Great Endarkenment: Philosophy for an Age of Hyperspecialization, p. 281

There is a kind of relentless contrarian that is very smart, has voracious reading habits, is funny, and ends up in race science and eugenics. You are familiar with the type. Luckily, analytic philosophy also generates different contrarians about its own methods and projects that try to develop more promising (new) paths than these. Contemporary classics in this latter genre are Michael Della Rocca's (2020) The Parmenidean Ascent, Nathan Ballantyne's (2019) Knowing Our Limits, and Elijah Millgram's (2015) The Great Endarkenment all published with Oxford. In the service of a new or start (sometimes presented as a recovery of older wisdom), each engages with analytic philosophy's self-conception(s), its predominate methods (Della Rocca goes after reflective equilibrium, Millgram after semantic analysis, Ballantyne after the supplements the method of counter example), and the garden paths and epicycles we've been following. Feel free to add your own suggestions to this genre.

Millgram and Ballantyne both treat the cognitive division of labor as a challenge to how analytic philosophy is done with Ballantyne opting for extension from what we have and Millgram opting for (partially) starting anew (about which more below). I don't think I have noticed any mutual citations.  Ballantyne, Millgram, and Della Rocca really end up in distinct even opposing places. So, this genre will not be a school.

Millgram's book, which is the one that prompted this post, also belongs to the small category of works that one might call 'Darwinian Aristotelianism,' that is, a form of scientific naturalism that takes teleological causes of a sort rather seriously within a broadly Darwinian approach. Other books in this genre are Dennett's From Bacteria to Bach and Back (which analyzes it in terms of reasons without a reasoner), and David Haig's From Darwin to Derrida (which relies heavily on the type/token distinction in order to treat historical types as final causes). The latter written by an evolutionary theorist.* There is almost no mutual citation in these works (in fact, Millgram himself is rather fond of self-citation despite reading widely). C. Thi Nguyen's (2020) Games: Agency as Art may also be thought to fit this genre, but Millgram is part of his scaffolding, and Nguyen screens off his arguments from philosophical anthropology and so leave it aside here.

I had glanced at Millgram's book when I wrote my piece on synthetic philosophy, but after realizing that his approach to the advanced cognitive division of labor was orthogonal to my own set it aside then.++ But after noticing intriguing citations to it in works by C. Thi Nguyen and Neil Levy, I decided to read it anyway. The Great Endarkenment is a maddening book because the first few chapters and the afterward are highly programmatic and accessible, while the bulk of the essays involve ambitious, revisionary papers in meta-ethics, metaphysics, and (fundementally) moral psychology (or practical agency if that is a term).  The book also has rather deep discussions of David Lewis, Mill, and Bernard Williams. The parts fit together, but only if you look at them in a certain way, and only if you paid attention in all the graduate seminars you attended.

Millgram's main claim in philosophical anthropology is that rather than being a rational animal, mankind is a serial hyperspecializing animal or at least in principle capable of hyperspecializing serially (switching among different specialized niches it partially constructs itself). The very advanced cognitive division of labor we find ourselves in is, thus, not intrinsically at odds with our nature but actually an expression of it (even if Millgram can allow that it is an effect of economic or technological developments, etc.). If you are in a rush you can skip the next two asides (well at least the first).

As an aside, first, lurking in Millgram's program there is, thus, a fundamental critique of the Evolutionary Psychology program that takes our nature as adapted to and relatively fixed by niches back in the distant ancestral past. I don't mean to suggest Evolutionary Psychology is incompatible with Millgram's project, but it's fundamental style of argument in its more prominent popularizations is. 

Second, and this aside is rather important to my own projects, Millgram's philosophical anthropology is part of the account  of human nature that liberals have been searching for. And, in fact, as the quoted passages reveal, Millgram's sensibility is liberal in more ways, including his cautious preference for "bottom-up and piecemeal" efforts to tackle the challenge of the Great Endarkenment.+

Be that as it may, the cognitive division of labor and hyperspecialization is also a source of trouble. Specialists in different fields are increasingly unable to understand and thus evaluate the quality of each other's work including within disciplines. As Millgram notes this problem has become endemic within the institution most qualified to do so -- the university -- and as hyper-specialized technologies and expertise spread through the economy and society. This is also why society's certified generalists -- journalists, civil servants, and legal professionals -- so often look completely out of their depth when they have to tackle your expertise under time pressure.** It's his diagnosis of this state of affairs that has attracted, I think, most scholarly notice (but that may be a selection effect on my part by my engagement with Levy's Bad Beliefs and Nguyen's Games). Crucially, hyperspecialiation also involves the development of languages and epistemic practices that are often mutually unintelligible and perhaps even metaphysically incompatible seeming. 

As an aside that is really an important extension of Millgram's argument: because the book was written just before the great breakthroughs in machine learning were becoming known and felt, the most obvious version of the challenge (even danger) he is pointing to is not really discussed in the book: increasingly we lack access to the inner workings of the machines we rely on (at least in real time), and so there is a non-trivial sense in which if he is right the challenge posed by Great Endarkenment is accelerating. (See here for an framework developed with Federica Russo and Jean Wagemans to analyze and handle that problem.) 

That is, if Millgram is right MacAskill and his friends who worry about the dangers of AGI taking things over for rule and perhaps our destruction by the machine(s) have it backwards. The odds are more likely that our society will implode and disperse -- like the tower of Babel that frames Millgram's analysis -- by itself. And that if it survives mutual coordination by AGIs will be just as hampered by the Great Endarkenment, perhaps even more so due to their path dependencies, as ours is.

I wanted to explore the significance of this to professional philosophy (and also hint more at the riches of the book), but the post is long enough and I could stop here. So, I will return to that in the future. Let me close with an observation. As Millgram notes, in the sciences mutual unintelligibility is common. And the way it is often handled is really two-fold: first, as Peter Galison has argued, and Millgram notes, the disciplines develop local pidgins in what Galison calls their 'trading zones.' This births the possibility of mutually partially overlapping areas of expertise in (as Michael Polanyi noted) the republic of science. Millgram is alert to this for he treats a lot of the areas that have been subject of recent efforts at semantic analysis by philosophers (knowledge, counterfactuals, normativity) as (to simplify) really tracking and trailing the alethic certification of past pidgins. Part of Millgram's own project is to diagnose the function of such certification, but also help design new cognitive machinery to facilitate mutual intelligibility. That's exciting! This I hope to explore in the future. 

Second, as I have emphasized in my work on synthetic philosophy, there are reasonably general theories and topic neutralish (mathematical and experimental) techniques that transcend disciplines (Bayesianism, game theory, darwinism, actor-network, etc.). On the latter (the techniques) these often necessetate local pidgins or, when possible, textbook treatments. On the former, while these general theories are always applied differently locally, they are also conduits for mutual intelligibility. (Millgram ignores this in part.) As Millgram notes, philosophers can make themselves useful here by getting MAs in other disciplines and so facilitate mutual communication as they already do. That is to say, and this is a criticism, while there is a simultaneous advancement in the cognitive division of labor that deepens mutual barriers to intelligibility, some of this advance generates possibilities of arbitrage (I owe the insight to Liam Kofi Bright) that also accrue to specialists that help transcend local mutual intelligibility.** So, what he takes to be a call to arms is already under way. So, let's grant we're on a precipice, but the path out is already marked. 

 

 

 

 

*Because of this Millgram is able to use the insights of the tradition of neo-thomism within analytic philosophy to his own ends without seeming to be an Anscombe groupie or hinting darkly that we must return to the path of philosophical righteousness.

+This liberal resonance is not wholly accidental; there are informed references to and discussions of Hayek.

** Spare a thought for  humble bloggers, by the way.

++UPDATE: As Justin Weinberg reminded me, Millgram  did a series of five guest posts at DailyNous on themes from his book (here are the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth entries.) I surely read these, and encourage you to read them if you want the pidgin version of his book.

Zera Yacob and Intellectual traditions; a note on the origins of Africana Philosophy

By: Eric Schliesser
What should we make of this similarity? Note that it would be anachronistic to describe Zera Yacob’s argument as “Lockean,” for the Second Treatise of Government was published over two decades after Zera Yacob wrote his Hatäta. This points us toward the limits on the usefulness of viewing Zera Yacob and Locke as sharing an early modern world. Consider Richard Tuck’s Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (1979), which explores categories of Roman law, locates the birth of natural rights discourse in the late medieval period, and examines figures like Hugo Grotius, John Selden, and Thomas Hobbes before giving Locke attention in the final chapter. Scholarship like this places Locke in a certain lineage of thought, which shaped him just as much as the political context of his times. Zera Yacob does not stand in that lineage. Indeed, when comparing Zera Yacob to Descartes and Locke, we should remember that Locke read and was influenced by Descartes, learning from his approach to philosophy even while rejecting central views of his. There is a sense in which Locke and Descartes share a modernity that Zera Yacob does not, a point that need not lead us to deny that Zera Yacob is a modern philosopher but rather to say that he inhabits a different modernity. (p. 130)
[W]hile Zera Yacob can be seen as similar to Descartes but must be recognized as outside the lineage leading to and branching out from him, Amo, like Locke, did philosophy in the wake of Descartes and critically responded to his work. (p. 132)
 
What I think this means is that, for Cugoano, as for Zera Yacob, the idea of natural rights is not really embedded within a modern European intellectual tradition. Certain formulations of it may be paradigmatically European, but it is ultimately a concept that transcends cultural boundaries, which also means that one can come up with paradigmatically Fanti formulations of it. Cugoano thus does not fit neatly into the framework of modern Africana philosophy as a form of modern European philosophy into which Amo and Haynes fit. But, of course, neither is he disconnected from the European tradition in the way Zera Yacob is. Cugoano, I believe, represents modern Africana philosophy as a convergence of African and European intellectual trajectories, a hybrid case of radicalizing European thought from within, as with Haynes, while also modernizing African thought through comparing indigenous and foreign viewpoints and using reason to decide what makes the most sense, like Zera Yacob.
The quoted passages are all from Chike Jeffers' (2017) "Rights, Race, and the Beginnings of Modern Africana Philosophy." The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Race. This is a text that I assign as required background reading to the session that roughly goes from Las Casas to Cugoano and discusses slavery, mercantile political economy, and rights in my lecture course on the History of Political Theory. This is a required course with enrollments between 500 and 600 students. Jeffers' paper is short and hits the sweet spot because it offers helpful historical context, makes important distinctions, and it explains the ongoing significance of the material discussed. It's also astonishingly brief, and clear. I warmly recommend it. 
 
But as I was preparing my quiz about the text, and so re-reading it, I became uneasy in reflecting on the passages quoted above. To be sure, the underlying idea of what Africana philosophy should be going forward (articulated in final paragraph, but also made available throughout the chapter) strikes me as rather attractive and is not something I am going to challenge here. In fact, in some ways I am going to reinforce Jeffers' main point because I want to suggest that Zera Yacob is much more connected to what Jeffers calls 'the European tradition,' although what I prefer to call the (partially overlapping) 'Abrahamic-Platonic traditions' that also shaped non-trivially Descartes and Locke. What do I have in mind?
 
First, Yacob (1599 – 1692) is, in part, polemicizing against the Jesuits and, now I quote Jeffers, "as “Franğ,” a Ge’ez word that literally means “foreigner.” But note that he uses that word in a way that is interchangeable with “Catholic.”" (p. 131) And, in fact, if you read Zera Yacob’s Hatäta "or “inquiry,” commonly called his Treatise" (p. 128) it's very clear that Yacob was rather acquainted with their teachings (which he largely rejects).+ Now, Descartes was taught by Jesuits at La Flèche. (Descartes was there between 1607-1614.) So, there is a non-trivial sense in which they were exposed to largely the same views. (The Jesuits standardized their curriculum.) Obviously, I am not claiming that they had the same teachers (although Jesuits did move around so it's not wholly impossible they encountered the same people--how cool would that be?), but I would be amazed if the Iberian Jesuits who are his targets did not bring with them ideas shaped by, say, Francisco Suárez's metaphysics and moral/political theory, including his theory of rights. (Suárez was an intellectual celebrity of the age.) Suárez is rather important to Descartes and, as I have noted (here), Suárez also shaped the social contract tradition (including Hobbes and perhaps -- I will not make the case today -- Locke).
 
Second, Yacob is quite clearly evoking Augustine's Confessions at various points. This is not just in virtue of the auto-biographical style, but also in particular details of the narrative (not the least the early sinful behavior and the attraction to various alternative intellectual traditions). One important commonality is the significance of David's Psalms to both. I don't think either can do without an explicit or implicit allusion to Psalms on a single page! (I suspect one can write a PhD about this.) I return to this below. Either way, Descartes' debts to Augustine, and Augustine's Confessions has itself generated a huge scholarly enterprise. In saying this, I don't mean to suggest there are no differences between Descartes or Yacob, but just to point to the fact that they share in an overlapping tradition even if they may be mediated by different sources and contexts. (I don't mean to suggest that Descartes himself was especially shaped by Psalms--I leave that aside, although intrigued to reflect on it.)
 
Third, a good chunk of (what we might call) the philosophy in the Hatäta draws on the Book of Wisdom (which Yacob, as is common, attributes to Salomon). I don't want to make this claim more precise here. But while Yacob is plenty critical of the particularity and some of the laws of Judaism, the Hebraic sources in his text are abundant. This he does share with Hobbes and Locke. I don't mean to suggest that the sources are exclusively Jewish; I would love to know, for example, if Al-Ghazali's Deliverance of Error (with with the Hatäta and the Meditations share non-trivial commonalities) was circulating among the Muslim scholars he encountered and debated. 
 
But it's only if one denies that the Book of Wisdom (which itself is shaped by Hellenistic philosophy) is philosophy or insists that the Hebrew Bible is non-philosophy (as some who are in the grip of  the opposition between Jerusalem and Athens might claim) that this is not part of the overlapping tradition(s). (I have argued against this claim in many digressions, but start here.) In addition, it's quite clear that Yacob identifies with David's enforced exile from court, and perhaps (I put this more tentatively) even the Israelites in the dessert. 
 
So, while it is undoubtedly true that Yacob and Descartes and/or Locke did not share the exact same modernity, I also suspect that in some non-trivial respects they did. It is striking that both politically and religiously the question of religious pluralism and the role of using state authority to impose a single religion dominate France and Ethiopia (and England) in their life-times, including rather dramatic reversals of fortune. I am not especially fond of 'modernity' because it is often inscribed in complex conceptual hierarchies (involving 'feudalism,' civilization vs barbarism, etc.), but it can be useful to point to the symmetry of conditions that these thinkers faced.
 
Does anything hinge on this? Well, I am certainly not the first to note debts of Africana philosophy to Hebraic and Abrahamic sources more broadly. But when in 2019 Peter Adamson (who has collaborated with Jeffers) writes, in the context of Zera Yacob that the "Ethiopian philosophical tradition simultaneously belongs to at least two larger stories: that of philosophy within various Christian traditions of the East, and that of African philosophy," that is factually true, but it effaces the Hebraic contribution to at least the former (and, perhaps the latter--in so far as Hebraic philosophy itself was developed, in part, under African skies). A similar claim can be made "about ancient Egyptian philosophy" (which Adamson goes on to mention) in so far as Philo is a rather signicant presence in it. 

I don't think this is merely a matter of geographic score-keeping. It has important contemporary political salience when 'philosophy' plays a role in identity formation and articulation (as it seems to do within Africana philosophy--that is not a criticism!). That there is also a very clear Hebraic root in Yacob [!] and all the figures discussed in the Beginnings of Modern Africana Philosophy (with perhaps partial exception of Amo) is, thus, non-trivial (if only because the bondage and exodus of Israel resonate within it). It also may facilitate discussion today among Africana philosophers and those philosophers that takes Hebraic sources seriously. This is no small matter given the polarizing effects of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism in our world.
 
Including the Hebraic tradition(s) into the narrative may also be epistemically useful if Yacob is right. Because he thinks that when different traditions agree, we are more likely to find truth, whereas their differences reveal their errors--and in religious conflict we de facto always defend error. It's probably more natural to read him as saying that this is so because when traditions agree they latch onto the truth (a thought like this can be found in Montaigne, too). But I'd like to read him Spinozistically as suggesting, and I'd like to argue for this at some point that this is his view, that through dialogue when we find ways to agree, and so live in peace with each other, we instantiate or generate the truth.*
 
 
 
+I am not quoting from any editions because I have only access to rather (manifestly) imperfect translations, and I don't want to rest my case any any matters of detail.
 
*Obviously, this mechanism does not work if the truth is imposed.
 
 
 

By: ayjay

Wesley Hill:

It could be that what we have in Esther isn’t just a theology of divine providence and protection but also something like a doctrine of “the justification of the ungodly” (Rom. 4:5), God’s commitment to stand by God’s people when they’re at their covenant-keeping worst and see them through anyway. In this way, there may be more theology, not less, in what Dunne calls this most “secular” of biblical books. God not only intervenes; God intervenes precisely at the point when no human virtue or piety would compel him to do so, where the only hope is the sheer divine intention to bless, save, and protect, regardless of whether it’s acknowledged by the saved ones at all.

Mrs. Betty Bowers, America's best Christian, made a useful flowchart for interpreting the Bible, MAGA style

By: Mark Frauenfelder

Are you a MAGA cultist who needs guidance interpreting the Holy Bible? Don't be ashamed; it's a very thick book with a lot of complicated words. Let Mrs. Betty Bowers show you how to make anything in the Good Book fit the far-right party platform! — Read the rest

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