USUPhilosophy

I’ve posted before on what I see as the dangers and shortcomings of blogging (or “blogologuing” as I like to call it).  Here is a nice article on that point.

This is a religious studies post more than a philosophy post.

A few days ago Pope Benedict XVI canonized some new saints.  One was Father Damien (a priest known for his work with lepers in Hawaii in the 19th century).  Well, it turns out the LDS Church had posthumously baptized him into the LDS Church (read about it here).  Not only that, they posthumously married him (remember – he was a celibate priest!), sealing him for eternity to someone named Marie.  I had never heard of posthumous marriage, and I find it hard to come up with any justification for it.  Setting that aside, I rather suspect that Fr. Damien – assuming he was interested in giving up his celibacy – would have liked being able to choose his wife!

Of course there has been quite a lot of controversy around the LDS practice of baptism for the dead with regards to Nazis and Holocaust victims.  For my part, I am not sure how I feel about it.  On one hand, I simply find it silly and I don’t care.  I’ll be frank without intending any disrespect:  why should I care about this any more than I would care about someone vesting Fr. Damien posthumously in a Zeus religion, since I think both religions are false and so neither ritual exercise makes any difference?

On the other hand, it is hard to not find it rather disrespectful (even though I can see that it is likely done out of good intentions).  Perhaps not only disrespectful but also harmful.  I am referring to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics I.11 where he argues that posthumous events can have an effect on the dead (if misfortune befalls descendants, or if the deceased person comes to be associated with evil then his reputation that lives on in memory will be harmed).  It is worth noting, though, that Aristotle thinks none of these effects are “of such a kind and degree as neither to make the happy unhappy nor to produce any other change of the kind.”  So Saint Damien will (or rather is) resting in peace.

Sherlock and I are both Red Sox fans.  Stomach punch end to the season this weekend.  I always feel sad for a while after it ends, in part because baseball is a game that gives our life a pace – for a few weeks I don’t quite know what to do with myself without the rituals of checking box scores in the morning and listening to the WEEI radio call of games in the evening. And I miss baseball too because, more than other sports, baseball asks fundamental questions (about faith, hope, dreams, despair, the call of home, etc).  Another for instance, the statistic fetish in baseball is illustrative of something very basic to the human condition: a desire to apprehend patterns and order in a world that is often marked more by drama than predictability.

No one has offered a better reflection on the end of the baseball season that the late A. Bartlett Giamatti:

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.”

Here is a nice article on liberal education.  It first gives what I take to be a nice summary of what liberal eduction is (couched in terms of “stewardship”).  It strikes a nice balance between the requirement for attentive listening (submission) and later critical judgment in our reading of great books.  Perhaps most interesting are the final points in the article concerning the “cosmopolitan temptation”.  Liberal education can make us lovers of abstractions, people who move so easily through different times and places (through our reading of great western works) that we find ourselves not properly “situated” in a concrete time and place of our own, sacrificing our own particularity and hence our own capacity to really flourish as human beings (the kind of beings for whom flourishing is always “caught up in” the particular time and place of their lives).  Here is a little taste of the article:

“In such a context, stewardship suffers, for the mind given to abstract universal concepts will readily gravitate toward saving “the world” or “ending hunger” but will find it less natural to consider how to preserve a local community or care for the poor widow around the corner. In short, if a liberal arts education makes it more difficult for human beings to live lives suited to human beings, then it has fallen victim to the temptation of abstraction. A properly conceived liberal education must, to be sure, include an appreciation of abstract universal principles, but at the same time, it must include resources that equip the student to return to the particulars better suited than before to engage the local community of which the student is a part.”

Here it is, from the pen of the inimitable Harry Caines. I cannot resist recording a few of my disagreements: phil majors don’t resemble Comic Book Guy, anthropogenic global warming is no myth, and I’m no Zen Humanist (I’m just a timid smartass). But as for Harry’s thesis, that we should have more philosophers in the program: “Yea-Yuh!” I bray.