Conceptual Loomings

Currently drafting a response to Tyler Vela's take on Molinism. He's got a series here for anyone interested. Either I am being a pedantic rube or Vela and I have read completely different material on the subject. I'm finding myself offering (what I think are substantive) correction after correction and I'm beginning to wonder if I've misunderstood what I thought I had a pretty good handle on. Perhaps this is the nature of engaging in a controversy where each party has brought to that controversy two different, non-overlapping sets of books and essays they've read. 

Just read through the SEP article on Divine Foreknowledge and Free Will. Very good! Learned a lot. There's a rigid, logical space in this debate, and it's very interesting slowly finding its contours. I used to think I had this figured out to some extent, but (as with anything, I suppose) I have a lot to learn. I'm still undecided about whether theological fatalism reduces to logical fatalism and I'm not sure whether or not accidental necessity applies to the truth of past tense propositions or the obtainment of past events or states of affairs (a debate I didn't realize existed): the past event or state of affairs of having a belief, or (more specifically) God's having a belief. I did learn that there's a distinction between Okhamism and Molinism in terms of how they handle the foreknowledge/free-will dilemma: Okhamism thinks that the relevant accidental necessities are 'soft' facts and so counterfactually dependent on future, free will decisions; Molinism thinks that accidental necessity isn't closed under entailment. I had thought that these could go together, and, lo and behold, I found a dissertation that goes to show just that: Human Freedom in a World Full of Providence: An Ockhamist- Molinist Account of the Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Creaturely Free Will by Christopher J. Kosciuk. (I've started it today.) It has been tortuous trying to understand the semantics of counterfactuals, with David Lewis, Robert Stalnaker, and others, giving different twists (I don't pretend to fully understand them yet); also, some of the concepts are still too murky for me, so murky that I can't satisfactorily explain them yet: concepts like, forward-looking and backward-looking (sometimes called back-tracking) counterfactuals, the special and standard resolutions for vagueness for determining which worlds are more similar to the actual world than other worlds, how this plays out when you have the same past and a different present, or different pasts with the same present: there's so many knots to disentangle. The nature of the knot might be due to mistaken of interpretation on my part, which comes with the territory of reading without the presence of the author. I'll find that I think I have a handle on a concept, and then I'm met a paragraph later with a sentence that contradicts the helpful principle I conjured for myself, but which still makes sense relative to the original context in which it was conjured! I don't know. I press on. 

Started to get into the Great Courses. These are great resources. Going through one on Classical Mythology, The Peloponnesian War, The Divine Comedy, Becoming a Great Essayist, Classics of American Literature, and Philosophy of Science. 

Working my through Anna Karenina, Moby Dick, Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Princess and the Goblin, Bleak House, 1984, Brave New World, and the Collected Essays of C.S. Lewis. I'll be working my way through the chapter on Ockham in The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge by Linda Zagzebski tomorrow morning. I find this a most satisfying alternative to binge watching TV shows on Netflix. There's a parallel, of course, but this alternative is so much more imaginatively enriching. You whisk back and forth, from this chapter in that world to another chapter in another world, from the foggy, sublimely haunted world of Transylvania (Dracula has been the most surprising to me as to how gripping the story is and how well Stoker's descriptions are crafted) to riding on board the Pequod, the foam of the sea spraying in my face, the smell of the salty ocean, with a crazed, monomaniacal Captain on his quest for revenge against the iconic, white whale. Each experience is illimitable; each transition is thrilling. I remember thinking how my imaginative experience would be spoiled if I had already seen the movie based on the books. How wrong I was! Ahab is neither Peck nor Stewart in my imagination; he is someone with qualities I've never met in the world of extra-imaginary experience. I thought this would have been especially true of Mr. Hyde, but no! His grotesqueness isn't terrifying, though I understand why it is for those in that world; it is, on the other hand, eerie, anchored as it is in a perennial existential condition that can be described with a certain degree of dread. I'm having the most trouble with Bleak House, but I think it will be good exercise to push through - the literary guides summarizing each chapter are lots of help. I'll be sure to blog my impressions as I (without rushing!) go through the books. (As an aside, I've finished Is Theology Poetry? and The Funeral of a Great Myth so far in Lewis' collected essays.) 

I've been trying to get to chapter 2 in Bright Shadow of Reality by Corbin Scott Carnell, but I've been getting interrupted. I got through a page of it but had to attend to other things. He made a claim I found peculiar though. He called Lewis' critique of 'The Personal Heresy' an 'overstated corrective' and something along the lines of Lewis not abiding by that corrective in writing his autobiography. I think Carnell completely missed the point of the corrective. It's not supposed to make it impossible to talk about oneself. It's that in 'talking about oneself', you're supposed to attend to what is being said, the Reality that the uttered propositions are about, rather than analyzing the subject behind the utterances (especially when reading those utterances in a specific, written, or spoken context). It's a delightful book so far and I can't wait to see where Carnell's exploration takes me.