Personalism

I have long thought that personalism is an ideal conceptual or philosophical 'vehicle' for expressing per-personal (and thus pro-animal) sentiments conceptually, abstractly, philosophically.  The later Peter A. Bertocci, a well-known Personalist, taught at Boston University.  He is often cited in papers about complex moral matters, particularly about sex and love, but the moral status of the person in distributed moral obligations is a concern for principled persons of all kinds, including those of us with profound respect for personhood in every species.

Peter Anthony Bertocci

May 13, 1910-October 13, 1989

Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy, Boston University, where he taught for thirty-one years. B.A., Boston (1931); M.A., Harvard (1932); Ph.D., Boston (1935).  Dissertation: The Empirical Argument for God in Late British Thought (published in 1938 by Boston University Press; advisor: Frederick Robert Tennant - the process metaphysician).

Other books include 
The Human Venture in Sex, Love, and Marriage (1949); 
Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (1951);
Free Will, Responsibility, and Grace (1957); 
Religion as Creative Insecurity (1958);
Sex, Love, and the Person (1967); 
The Person God Is (1970); and 
The Goodness of God (1981)

On This Site:a

• The Person, Obligation, and Value [1959]
  
• Susan K. Langer’s Theory of Feeling and Mind[1970]
  

Materialism: Failing before Life’s Challenges

In 1951, Bertocci wrote:

“. . . no matter how narrow the gap between the chemical and the living becomes—and discoveries about the nature of viruses and colloids do indeed narrow that gap—we must remember that the gap is a qualitative and not a spatial one.  Suppose we consider the colloids the ‘missing link’ between living and dead matter.  This may impress our minds with the wondrous continuity of degree between one order of being and another.  But let us take a closer look.  Has the gap between life and matter really been crossed, let alone explained?  Even though a colloid may reproduce as living things do, it otherwise behaves like a chemical.  But a cell acts throughout like a living being and not like a chemical.  The fact still remains that when life appeared,life appeared. . . . This collocation of events, this close interrelation of living and nonliving beings, is an opaque fact unless we postulate a purpose which uses one order as an aid to the continuance of another.  Obviously this appeal to a broader purpose will not explain how the food enters the stomach becomes part of the living blood, bone, nerve, and brain.  Any biochemist can give us the sequence, but he is as silent before this fact of transmutation as we are.  However, we’re not trying to introduce a Purposer to describe what science has not so far described; here we seek to explain the harmony between two orders of being, the harmony between two differing and interacting qualities of existence.   We are seeking a view which, far from denying established scientific facts, will allow them to fit into a broader scheme which decreases the mystery.  What mystery?  The fact that living beings should appear and be so closely interconnected with nonliving beings—especially if all there was to begin with was the nonpurposeful, nonliving, nonthinking hustle and bustle of units of energy. . . .”

“. . . Our interest here is to emphasize the greater coherence which comes into our thinking if we consider the interrelation of the physical universe and life and the developing evolution of species as the handiwork of a creative Intelligence intent on producing a world rich in life, and, in the existence of man, rich in mind and value.  The evidence so far adduced enables us to envisage a Mind which is responsible not only for the ultimate physical preparations for life but for the first appearance of life in its many forms and for the additional mutations and variations discovered by our scientists.”

Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, 1951, pp. 333-34, 337 (italics in the original).

Fifty years later, the atheist Antony Flew wrote:

“[We may now know] how—by evolution through natural selection—one or more very primitive kinds of organism evolved into the enormous variety of species now known either still to exist or to have existed during some period in the past.  But that is a very different thing from knowing the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life or even of any life.  For, so far as I know, no one has as yet contrived to produce any plausible conjecture as to how even the most primitive kind of organism with a disposition to reproduce and thus to expose itself to natural selection might have evolved from a mixture of the many kinds of complex molecule which are now known to be required for that construction.  [My italics; Flew has been dealing with these issues for over fifty years.]

“Conway sees here a threefold challenge to the materialist, of which I consider two of the elements to be much more formidable than the third.  The first of these two is to produce a materialistic explanation for ‘the very first emergence of living matter from non-living matter. In being alive, living matter possesses ateleological organization that is wholly absent from everything that preceded it.’  The second challenge . . . is to produce an equally materialist explanation for the emergence, from the very earliest life-forms which were incapable of reproducing themselves, of life-forms which a capacity for reproducing them-selves.”

Review of David Conway, The Rediscovery of Wisdom, Philosophy, January 2001, p. 161.

Posted October 13, 2007

The meaning of agnosticism

"I think we're really just guessing!"

"When you don't know, you don't know." - Maynard S. Clark

Is God bound by rationality?

In my work at HMS and HSPH, I do a fair amount of research into previously-published work. In the course of joining ResearchGATE (the ResearchGATE Scientific Network), I bumped into a discussion on this (above-stated) topic, "Is God bound by rationality?" You can follow the preceding philosophy discussion, to which I appended my own comment:

If there's room for ontological reflection here (e.g. Anselm: God is greater than that which can be conceived, traditionally, "God IS that than which nothing greater can be conceived), mortal rationality (in any species, not merely our own speciesist species is derivative (according to theological conceptions) and, despite periodic (weekly?) times of reflection (to which some give themselves full-time or intermittently), mortal rationality is best (in the spirit of religious liberalism, but quite consistent with the canons of more 'orthodox' schools of Christian thinking) dedicated to making life better here (in the mortal domain) for everyone, beginning with our own individual and shared responsibilities.

Perhaps the question should be reframed as:

Do soul-searching humans have an obligation to bind themselves to rationality of intention and behavior?

Indeed, in that kind of care, healthcare and other costs likely would plummet and the strategic obstacles to realizing the better world for everyone could be expected to diminish significantly.

Believing Untruths - The Dangerous Lack of Critical Thinking

Monday, August 31, 2009

Believing Untruths - The Dangerous Lack of Critical Thinking

Sharon Begley has written an important essay in Newsweek, “Lies of Mass Destruction,” that every educator should read. Begley explores the strange, but ubiquitous, tendency of people to believe untruths even when there is massive evidence to contradict them. Whether it’s the persistent belief among many that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, or the current beliefs about “death panels” (among other misinformation) in the pending health care reform proposals, we humans consistently believe things that simply are not true.

At the risk of raising the ire of my readers who believe in many unsupported things (and I’m not naming any of these for fear of inciting that ire), I can only say that Begley has just touched the tip of the iceberg. We believe in countless unfounded, unproven, even preposterous ideas and religious dogmas (not to mention what might make for good scifi or fairy tales), and many of us don’t even flinch when we present these unfounded beliefs as truth and seek to proselytize.

One of my favorite bumper stickers reads: “Don’t let your mind be so open your brain falls out.” I worry that between the poles of open-mindedness and close-mindedness (often resulting in the same sorts of beliefs in untruths), there lies a vast arena that we are failing to cultivate: critical thinking.

Critical thinking was a hot button subject in the 90s, and every school was eager to ensure it was teaching this skill. Now it’s been relegated by many “back to basics” proponents as soft, liberal, untestable and far less important that passing those standardized tests.

But it is dangerous to neglect critical thinking. An inability to access information critically, especially in an Internet age of massive information and misinformation, leads to an inability to participate honestly and realistically in a democracy.

In the 20th century, a few dystopian novels, such as Brave New World and 1984, exposed the danger of mass thought. Ironically, there are plenty of people who believe silly things who consider themselves disciples of such books, whether on the left or the right. They may believe in unfounded conspiracies or false information, perceiving themselves as the true critical thinkers and the rest of us as duped.

The only solution I see to this pervasive tendency among people is to commit fully and wholeheartedly to cultivating critical thinking and inculcating healthy skepticism among youth. Yes, it means they may question their parents beliefs. Yes, it means they may question their teachers. Yes, it means they may question entrenched institutions and systems. It also means they may question peer pressure, advertisers’ unhealthy manipulations, and the health value of their cafeteria food (I just had to throw that in).

If we teach the next generation to be deep and hard-working thinkers, we will give them perhaps the most important skill people need to create healthy, productive, fair and just societies and systems.

~ Zoe Weil

Image courtesy of rossgram via Creative Commons.