Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"While working on this project I have gradually come to the conclusion that modern macroeconomics, macro history, and the history of thought are a seamless whole; it is impossible to really understand any one filed without also having deep knowledge of the other two." -- Scott Sumner, The Midas Paradox , p. 357

"the practical problem of pain is not how to avoid it but how to lift it to a heroic level; and the presence of pain in the world is not a contradiction or an abatement of the world's value and perfection. Pain may make the world difficult to live in; but do we really want an easier world? And if we sometimes think we do, do we not recognise that the wish is unworthy? "At any rate, the wish is useless. I do not think it serves any purpose to imagine hypothetical worlds in which this or that element of the real would be absent. And it does seem to me that pain is such an element. Whether or no it is always due to our own imperfection or sin or the sin or imperfection of others, it cannot ever be eliminated, simply because a perfection of the type required can surely never exist in a world of free agents; because even if no one did wrong, the effort of doing right would still be difficult and painful just so long as the practical problems offered by the world were worth so...

Hegel partially solved the problem of the relationship of the forms and their particulars with the idea of the " concrete universal ." As Collingwood expressed this, the universal is only the universal of its particulars. But even with this, we are only two-thirds of the way there. The concrete universal as a static entity is a dead thing. Its full meaning can only be realized by witnessing it unfold in time . And now we have arrived, again, at the Trinity (or the Trikaya ): the Father (Dharmakaya) is the universal, the Son (Sambhogakāya) the concrete, and the Holy Spirit (Nirmāṇakāya), proceeding from the Father and the Son, unfolds the concrete universal in time. And this is why, contra Strauss, their is no opposition between Reason and Revelation. Revelation shows us truths that naked reason would never discern, but which, once revealed, are correctly understood as supra -rational, rather than ir rational.

Edward Feser here argues against certain philosophical ideas because they "lead to" certain other ideas. In particular, he rejects a Platonic view of form and occasionalism as a way of understanding efficient causation. In arguing against them, he resorts to this sort of thing: "So, avoiding occasionalism and thus pantheism also requires affirmation of immanent causal power and immanent teleology -- again, Aristotelian efficient and final causes." But if occasionalism or the Platonic theory of forms are, in fact, true, it is no argument against them to say that they lead to pantheism: that would just mean pantheism is true as well! And in any case, there is no inevitable slide from such views into pantheism. For instance, Berkeley 's understanding that the world is God's ideas is not pantheistic: God's ideas are not God! This blog post is my idea, but you can't kill me by shooting it on the server where it resides. As Collingwood noted in Th...

I offer again Mises' characterization of choice: "All human values are offered for option. All ends and all means, both material and ideal issues, the sublime and the base, the noble and the ignoble, are ranged in a single row and subjected to a decision which picks out one thing and sets aside another. Nothing that men aim at or want to avoid remains outside of this arrangement into a unique scale of gradation and preference." --  Human Action Mises is explicitly stressing the notion that there is one kind of choice, and that all choices pick out an item from a "unique scale" of preferences. Collingwood say, "No, moral choices are of a distinct type from economic choices, although they are both purposeful." If we adopt Mises' view, we have to picture Jesus surveying an array of possibilities, engaged in considerations like: "Well, I certainly have a great absolute advantage at producing loaves and fishes. And I do think that Galile...

Mises famously treated moral choices as just another species of economic choice: "All human values are offered for option. All ends and all means, both material and ideal issues, the sublime and the base, the noble and the ignoble, are ranged in a single row and subjected to a decision which picks out one thing and sets aside another. Nothing that men aim at or want to avoid remains outside of this arrangement into a unique scale of gradation and preference." -- Human Action Collingwood saw the important difference between merely economic action and moral action that Mises missed: "It is thus possible to distinguish three types or forms of action. First, the doing something because it is what we want to do; secondly, the doing it because it is expedient; thirdly, the doing it because it is right. The first is the sphere of impulsive action; the second, of economic; the third, of moral. These three are not mutually exclusive species of a genus. There is no action ...

When I noted that Collingwood held that all exchange is at its bottom with oneself, some readers were perplexed. But Mises (who admired Collingwood's philosophy of economics) says much the same thing : "Action is an attempt to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory one. We call such a willfully induced alteration an exchange. A less desirable condition is bartered for a more desirable. What gratifies less is abandoned in order to attain something that pleases more. That which is abandoned is called the price paid for the attainment of the end sought. The value of the price paid is called costs. Costs are equal to the value attached to the satisfaction which one must forego in order to attain the end aimed at." (Italics mine.) This exchange is clearly between one state of affairs for an agent ("eating the bread") and another, for the same agent ("eating the cheese"). In such exchanges, we often use other agents to...

"This distinction between the mediate and the immediate sides of an economic act is mythologically represented by the distinction between two persons called the purchaser and vendor, producer and consumer, or the like. 'The purchaser' and 'the vendor' are obviously abstractions, for no one can be purchaser without being at the same time a vendor, and vice versa: every sale is an exchange, and each party sells what he gives and buys what he takes. But they are more than abstractions; they are mythological figments; for there is no such thing as an exchange between persons. What one person gives, the other does not take. I may give a piece of bread for a cup of milk; but what I give is not the bread, but my eating of the bread, and this is not what the other party gets; he gets his eating of the bread, which is an utterly different thing. The real exchange is my giving up the eating of bread and getting the drinking of milk; and there is another exchange, that of hi...

"This duality [between means and end] is peculiar to economic action. It is not present in impulsive actions, for here the distinction between means and end is simply nonexistent. If we take the case of the shouting child, or of an angry man kicking a chair, and try within this act to distinguish means and end, we find no room for such a distinction. It is a misrepresentation of the facts to say that the man kicks the chair as means to work off his anger; if that were true account of the case, it would not be an impulsive act. A man may perhaps say to himself: 'I feel angry; how can I work off this passion? Perhaps kicking a chair would do it; let us try;' but if he did, it would be a case not of impulsive, but of economic action." -- R.G. Collingwood, "Economics as a Philosophical Science," International Journal of Ethics , 1926

Thus we get a wholly new metaphysical position. Taking the elements of the traditional seventeenth-century cosmology and simply rearranging them, Berkeley shows that, if substance means that which exists in its own right and depends on itself alone, only one substance need be asserted to exist, namely, mind. Nature as it exists empirically for our everyday perception is the work or creature of mind; nature in Galileo's sense, the purely quantitative material world of the physicist, is an abstraction from this, it is so to speak the skeleton or armature of the nature we perceive through our senses, and create in perceiving it. To sum up: we first, by the operation of our mental powers, create the warm, living, coloured, flesh-and-blood natural world which we know in our everyday experience; we then, by the operation of abstractive thinking, remove the flesh and blood from it and are left with the skeleton. This skeleton is the ‘material world’ of the physicist. In the ...

My curiosity piqued by my own remarks of a couple of days ago, I looked up Christie's Wikipedia bio, and discovered that she was, in fact an accomplished archaeologist (which as R.G. Collingwood, himself a renowned archaeologist , noted, is merely history done with artifacts instead of documents). Her husband, a professional archaeologist, once told here that she knew "more about prehistoric pottery than any woman in England." So my guess proves correct.

"Here [in Galileo] the character of the mind-dependent or merely phenomenal character of secondary qualities, as taught by Locke, is already full-grown. English students of philosophy, finding this doctrine in Locke, do not always realize that it is by no means an invention of his, but had been long ago taught by Galileo as an important truth, and was in fact one of the leading principles of the whole scientific movement of the preceding two centuries; and that by the time it reaches Locke it is already somewhat out of date, and ready to collapse at the first touch of Berkeley's finger." -- R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature , p. 102

Collingwood likened the historian to a detective in The Idea of History : both regard narratives from the past not as "the facts," but as evidence to be analyzed to get at the facts. Agatha Christie seemed to understand the resemblance as well: "You are at least right in this -- not to take what has been written down as necessarily a true narrative. What has been written may have been written deliberately to mislead." -- Murder in Retrospect , p. 183

At some point along the way, with some very important help from R.G. Collingwood and others, I learned to think like a researcher. When presented with a newspaper story, a "fact" from a friend, or a seemingly plausible argument, I learned to treat it like a witness to be interrogated*, instead of a truth revealed. As I was walking to the store tonight, an example struck me. I just saw an envelope on the floor from Con Edison bearing the inscription, "I used to be a tree." (I think there was something urging customers to switch to online billing involved.) I then recalled an argument from, I think, P.J. O'Rourke, one that seemed quite convincing to me for many years. O'Rourke said something to the effect, "It is ridiculous to try to save trees by conserving paper, since the trees that are used to make paper were grown for that use, and would not have been grown otherwise." The plausibility of this argument arises from this: yes, the particula...

The chief characteristic of inference in the exact sciences, the characteristic of which Greek logicians tried to give a theoretical account when they formulated the rules of the syllogism, is a kind of logical compulsion whereby a person who makes certain assumptions is forced, simply by so doing, to make others. He has freedom of choice in two ways: he is not compelled to make the initial assumption (a fact technically expressed by saying that 'the starting-points of demonstrative reasoning are not themselves demonstrable'), and when once he has done so he is still at liberty, whenever he likes, to stop thinking. What he cannot do is to make the initial assumption, to go on thinking, and to arrive at a conclusion different from that which is scientifically correct. In what is called 'inductive' thinking there is no such compulsion. The essence of the process, here, is that having put certain observations together, and having found that they make a pattern, we extr...