I referred to the controversy over what seemed to be tainted vaccines in Kenya in a comment, and have been thinking ever since that I wished I had waited for one more round of clarification, first. Well, retrospectively, let’s clarify.

Acton’s report of the original controversy is well-sourced and clear:

In Kenya, the United Nations has been working to eradicate tetanus. That’s a noble effort. Unfortunately, they seem to have taken it a step further. The Kenya Catholic Doctors Association released a statement this week saying they have found an antigen that can cause miscarriages and sterilization³ in women and girls.

(source: United Nations Charged With Birth Control Subterfuge In Kenya | Acton PowerBlog)

However, the laboratory results the Bishops and doctors relied on in voicing their concerns appear to have been flawed.  The record has been amended by multiple groups that can be expected to share the principles that led the Bishops to speak out on the matter (i.e., concern for women whose ability to bear children is too often treated as a pathology, concern for babies too often killed or mutilated by those who refuse to treat them as objects of moral concern, and concern for those who the elite classes of the global West have too often used as guinea pigs).  The reports seem credible, and I hope that these studies–and the outcry against a lack of transparency and local accountability that spurred the crisis–will lead to more constructive efforts in the future:

While the tests of the vaccine the Bishops had done at four separate laboratories were marred and showed false positive results for the infertility hormone, Matercare Internaitonal also said “the best solution is for the Kenyan authorities to communicate directly with the WHO in Geneva to offer support and encouragement to expeditiously test samples supervised by both parties in independent, reputable and competent laboratories.”

“Once the absence of hCG [hormone] is unequivocally confirmed,” Matercare said,  “a public statement and campaign of support for the immunization programme will be necessary to minimize the potential for further damage.”

(source: Worldwide Catholic Health Group: Tests for Birth-Control Drug in Kenya Tetanus Vaccine Were False Positive | CNS News)

“In brief, the results of the [October] tests of the Kenyan tetanus vaccine which caused concern were false positives, due to the cross reactivity of some of the components of the vaccine, and the fact that the testing ordered was invalid,” said the [American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists].

(source: Worldwide Catholic Health Group: Tests for Birth-Control Drug in Kenya Tetanus Vaccine Were False Positive | CNS News)

The article also cites some useful background.  The fear that these tests were happening proved to be unfounded, and (as is also pointed out in the same statement) upon examination are also unlikely to be true on the scale they would have to be.  Continue reading →

A fresh article in the Chronicle of Higher Education has a few home truths all ’round.  I quite agree that the bifurcation of research from teaching as goals of the university has produced bad results, though I also agree that almost every radical reform of that system has introduced far worse evils in the place of the ones we now have.

[My solution, tentatively, is to keep teaching for all I’m worth, ratcheting up the intellectual demands I make on students while directing them to research better understandings and solutions, and hope for better days.  Unfortunately, government finance and government meddling combine to make reading, writing, and teaching much harder than it needs to be–and to divert time and effort into compliance with memos and forms dear only to educrats and administration, those self-replicating evils of the (education) SYSTEM to which we are indentured.]

One source of my frustration is the blinkered understanding of education espoused by politicians right and left, which amounts to a substitution of the goals of single-axis-of-value political economics for the goals of educators:

On his website, McCrory speaks of the need to “align higher education with changing market needs.” […] To a certain extent, the Obama administration, with its blurry vision of rating colleges according to “labor-market outcomes,” shares this rationale. […]

It’s a deceptively difficult argument to neutralize. Scholars generally push back by uttering something about “critical-thinking skills.” We’ve been reflexively mouthing that line for decades. As we say it, however, our thoughts are actually concentrated on making next week’s deadline for a research grant. What we really need to argue, or, better yet, prove, is that the college classroom and its personnel transmit lessons and intangibles that are invaluable to the nation’s well-being.

(source: Teach or Perish – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education)

Agreed.  But there is a cultural feedback loop problem, here; how does one demonstrate the worth of textiles in a culture where salt and arable land, rather than wearable clothes and cattle, are the marks of wealth?  How does one justify Socrates to Athens, or Locke to Genghis Khan Continue reading →

Jack walked into Azucar Bakery last March and asked for two cakes, both in the shape of Bibles. That wasn’t a problem for Marjorie Silva, the bakery’s owner. It was what Jack wanted her to write on the cake: Anti-gay phrases including “God hates gays” and an image of two men holding hands, covered in a big, red “X.”

(source: No, bakeries don’t have to take orders for cakes that say ‘God Hates Gays’ – The Washington Post)

The bakery refused.  Jack sued.  Jack lost.

Go home, Jack.  You are just plain wrong on this one.  And you need to think about what makes such unwarranted hostility make sense to you. Continue reading →

In which I stayed up too late citing Aquinas and Locke,

and could really have used the sleep,

and some dinner.

Hmmmm…..

In the sections of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding that are dedicated to empirical science, Locke shows at length how the whole scholastic method of philosophy is intrinsically hostile to empirical science. He was no fool; he knew at whose works he was really aiming. And while I, like you, have made the journey from nominalism to realism, I think we can have realism without the scholastic method of philosophy, and if we value empirical science we must do so.

In short, you seem to think the only really important fight is between Aquinas and Augustine, who occupies the more militantly anti-rationalist space on Aquinas’ metaphysical “Right,” to use a political metaphor. But there is also space on Aquinas’ metaphysical “Left,” and the question between you and I is whether the golden mean lies where Aquinas is, or further to his Left.

(source: Et Seq. | Hang Together)

I’m just struggling to understand your stake in all of this, Greg.  I do understand that Locke had to make choices in a pretty highly charged environment, and we both have friends who have to do the same, but I really don’t see how that figures into a general understanding of their place in the history of ideas.

More to the point, I’m not sure why we’re discussing this when the salient fact remains that there is no significant difference between “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Act” and “Kicking Unborn Child Act” to discuss; it makes no difference what level of medical knowledge you have, if you are committed to ignoring it to save a false principle.

From my perspective, Augustine and Aquinas are high points in an unfolding of Christian understanding of all things; Augustine’s work was perhaps the most developed expression of the relationship of divine revelation to all human knowing available, and the most tightly integrated with the period from Christ through the great Councils recognized by all Christians, and the most capable in using secular/pagan categories of understanding and rhetoric to relate revelation to all areas of thought and life.

There is a vulnerability in the tradition after Augustine, as there always is after a seminal thinker achieves a durable synthesis:  reduction to a flawed, less-than-the-reality-discussed, syllabus of rote points.  In the case of Augustine, the achievement and limitations of Boethius in transmitting the Platonic elements of the tradition combined with Augustine’s own Platonic antecedents and stylistic preferences.  (We also have to include the popularity of Dionysius the Aeropagite [pseudo-Dionysius] and the constant inroads of Gnostic/Manichaean/Paulician/Bogomil/Cathar heresy, as well.)  The difficulty in tying the Platonic tradition down–of recapturing the synthesis that seemed possible when reading Augustine–was the lack of articulation with reality.  As a result, unbalanced secularization or spiritualization threatened the effort to articulate divine truth with human lived experience in every area of life–politics, medicine, cosmology, sanctification, agriculture, etc.

What Aquinas achieved, I am convinced, was to recover Augustine from that reduction–to defend against that vulnerability to dualistic misinterpretation–by judicious application of Aristotle.  Aristotle had improved on Plato precisely by better articulating the junctures of world/mind, matter/form, real/ideal; he made it “philosophical” to build up an understanding of real things from observations of their properties.

Aquinas was not a scientist, himself, nor primarily concerned with such knowledge.  Nobody would claim that he was.  Albert the Great, his mentor, was profoundly interested in such knowledge, and defends empirical study, but spent his career bringing all the knowledge already recorded in Aristotle forward to a Western Europe that had been groping about for some sufficiently rich understanding of the world.

I see no reason to conclude that Aquinas believed himself to have advanced a best or final method of primary research, either. Continue reading →

Quoth my very estimable host and interlocutor:

The idea that Aquinas is somehow a patron of the empirical sciences seems to me to involve an unjustified assumption that any advance in learning must somehow owe a debt to Aquinas.

I have to intervene, here.  I really don’t see how any such false enthymeme is involved.  I can think of no standard account of the significance of Aquinas for thought that does not involve his defense of natural reason, which proceeds from the readily known to the finally to-be-known, by means of a synthesis of Aristotle (from whom attention to particular beings as such, rather than as mere examples of ideals) and Augustine (from whom attention to the method of coming to understand eternal realities by means of both things and words, culminating in charity rather than comprehension).  I mean, Aquinas is not a scientist, himself, to be true.  In fact, I would argue that he is only a philosopher insofar as he finds it necessary to prevent theology students from following speculations into error, and to defend the proper use of natural reason in the elucidation of truth.  But it is precisely insofar as he found it obligatory and was chiefly notable for that defense of a true synthesis over against rival bifurcating errors (true to the Dominican emphasis on anti-dualist polemic) that Aquinas became first controversial and then essential to philosophy.

Here’s how things look to those of us who don’t take your line. From the moment modern empirical science began to develop, the Thomas Aquinas Fan Club began to spit on it. For centuries, they did everything in their power to destroy it. (Locke was denied a chair at Oxford because he wanted to do empirical science – in fact, medical science – and the Platonists couldn’t put up with that.) And now, with the Thomas Aquinas Fan Club having been proved disastrously wrong about empirical science, suddenly y’all want us all to forget about that, and you even strut around claiming credit (“you can’t have Francis Bacon without Aquinas” – really?) for developments that you did everything in your power to discredit and prevent.

(source: Follow-Through! | Hang Together)

I really don’t want to offer a ham-handed criticism of your History of Ideas, here, but I can’t follow you either on the standard-ish Heideggerian line, or on the line I learned as a teenager reading my way through as much of the Britannica Great Books and the Harvard Five-Foot Shelf of Books as I could–starting with Locke, then wending my way back to Descartes, then forward again…and especially not on the line I’ve been following since I reached the conclusion of my post-structuralist inquiry and tipped over into metaphysical realism (quite by accident, from my own point of view; I knew theology and ecclesiology demanded Real Presence, and the rest followed as a matter of analogical fitness).

To take just one pull at untying this knot, the Platonists who set up an opposition between natural reasoning and divine revelation came primarily from among the Franciscans and Augustinians (and received the doubtful succour of the “double truth” Averroists like the Siger), and they were against Albert the Great (whose risky and often inaccurate work, as well as his mentoring of Aquinas, was CRUCIAL to the unfolding of Western interest in empirical science) and Aquinas and the Dominicans from the first, although Aquinas defended the mendicants as a whole when they were under attack. The endless bifurcations that happen whenever Platonic thought touches down on planet Earth without a careful set of Aristotelian (or Aristotle-like) distinctions–when rhetoric is conceived as the opponent of dialectic rather its unfolding–are precisely what Albert and Aquinas were set against.  I mean, really, Aquinas is the textbook example of a theorist of the concord of reason and revelation!

That “Thomism” lapsed into something rather less than what Aquinas made of it is pretty unremarkable–see under any “ism” derived from the work of a seminal thinker.  Wooden copying of cherry-picked conclusions is pretty much what we lesser minds end up doing with the greats, after all.  It is important to notice that “High Scholastic” thought is almost entirely dominated by opponents of Aquinas, though; and that the new Aristotelian thought he championed was what rescued Augustine from Platonic reduction and reversed the poles of aprioristic Ptolemaic thought.

What Aquinas did not do was simply take the other side of a Platonic bifurcation between Ideal and Real, or assimilate revelation to one and reason to the other.  He argued that natural reason could operate on its own because it was created, and the revelation was necessary to complete the created purpose of natural reason.  BOTH were divine gifts to real humans, and BOTH gave humans access to reality.

Again, you really have to take the measure of the narrowing of the discourse that happened from the 13th century to the time of Locke.  Locke’s argument with the Platonists was an intramural argument among Ockhamist, Scotist, Platonist inheritors of the Franciscan/Augustinian heritage, and that argument tended to center on the priority or the subsequent harmony of two faculties presumed to have radically different principles.  Within that strain, Locke is a pre-eminent champion of the possibility of concord, but his efforts are limited by his need to justify himself in terms of that narrowed discussion.

More empirical facts are better than fewer, but they are not a good apart from and incommensurable with other goods, such as the respect for the integrity of human bodies that should have prevented a science from founding itself on stolen corpses and bodies in Bell jars.