Conor Stark

🇺🇸🇻🇦

Ancient Language Pedagogy
Greek, Arabic, Latin, and German Philosophy
τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι.

[Conor Stark @StarkConor]

In the Gorgias, Socrates tells Callicles that the three conditions, or rather virtues, required for dialectic are frankness, benevolence, and intelligence.

Together, they constitute an excellent rule of thumb for discerning who (and who not) to engage with on this app.

[Conor Stark @StarkConor]

@jonatanpallesen @MattWalshBlog If you want “more births,” you might consider not defending abortion.

Just a thought.

[Conor Stark @StarkConor]

@MichaelMcGetti6 You can’t think non-being :: you can’t see non-color.

[Conor Stark @StarkConor]

Study philosophy!

“He knows absolutely nothing in the full sense who does not pursue philosophy. For he will know neither himself nor anything apart from himself, just as an eye existing in potency sees absolutely nothing when it is not act by means of a visible object. . . For it is impossible to see oneself, while not seeing, just as it is impossible to see nothing at all.”

Albert, De Intellectu et Intelligibili

-You only know your own activity insofar as it is in act.
-Your intellect fully goes into act by means of an intelligible object (i.e., the objects of the speculative sciences/philosophy in Albert’s time sensu lato).

Therefore, if you do not study philosophy, you know neither youself nor an intelligible object/universal.

Intellect and intelligible object exhaust the per se knowable

Therefore, one who does not study philosophy knows nothing per se.

[Conor Stark @StarkConor]

@litteraechristi On the meaning and causes of intelligibility in Aquinas and his Greek, Latin, and Arabic sources

[Conor Stark @StarkConor]

mens humana . . . est semen quoddam omnis veritatis, et ideo similis est per aliquem modum omni vero et dissonans a falso.

The human mind is a kind of seed of all truth, and for this reason it is similar, in a way, to all truth and out of tune with all falsehood.

—Albert, De intellectu et intelligibili II.8

After my dissertation is done, one of my first projects will be to translate this magnificent work into English so more people can read it.

[Conor Stark @StarkConor]

Interesting to see Albert the Great quoting Hermes Trismegistus as a philosophical authority on the intellect.

In my view, perhaps the best thing about Albert is his capacious and generous “Peripatetic ecclecticism.”

He sees truth everywhere from Farabi, Plato, Aristotle (ofc), Avicenna, Isaac Israeli, etc.

He’s willing to criticize them all, to be sure, but primarily he wants to appropriate their best insights—which is why ends up with something like ~sevenfold analysis of intellectual states/growth.

Aquinas’s account is far simpler, but both have their merits.

[Conor Stark @StarkConor]

Had a major break through in the dissertation this week, and it was caused (of all things) by thinking about angels…

People make fun of scholasticism for arguing about angels, etc., but the notion of a purely immaterial intellect is quite helpful for bringing into view the various peculiarities of our more limited kind of cognition.

[Conor Stark @StarkConor]

As someone whose school specializes in the history of philosophy, I want to second this point re. archaeology as a sufficient justification of HoP against the charge of dilettantish doxography (examples of which are readily available).

Moreover, I want to add that working in a tradition (e.g., Aristotelianism) provides another justification for HoP.

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel from first principles as philosophers. We can see how people (much smarter than ourselves) have dealt with objections to a tradition’s core principles and how they have assimilated the best insights of rival traditions.

Such work trains you to do the same thing in your time, and in a way that preserves the best of what came before.

Such work is, I submit, how one makes “progress” in philosophy.

[Alex Priou @alexpriou]

History of philosophy should not be a catalogue of positions. It’s an archaeology of our institutions and opinions.

In the best case, it attempts to recover how great thinkers made the case for what we take for granted, in a world deeply opposed to it.

[Conor Stark @StarkConor]

@MichaelMcGetti6 More like, having learned what one *is.*

[Conor Stark @StarkConor]

A great rejoinder to Nietzsche….depending on how one takes the μαθών.

[𝚛𝚊𝚠𝚊𝚝 @rawatthekiid]

in pindar’s pythian odes (c. 470 bc), he writes, “become who you are, having learned what that is” (γένοι᾽ οἷος ἐσσὶ μαθών).

[Conor Stark @StarkConor]

In the coming post-literate dark age, let us recover Plato’s contempt for writing (as a mere reminder) vis-à-vis the living logos of the soul.

As the former’s importance is degraded by AI, so much more should we recognize the perennial relevance of latter.

“Eating” the truth and appropriating it must take center stage.

[Conor Stark @StarkConor]

Abstraction as akin to angelic purification:

Thinking about abstraction the way Thomas talks about angelic purgation is quite illuminating (pun intended, of course).

When one higher angel purges the nescientia (not-knowing) of a lower angel, it does not change the latter’s species, e.g., the way adding reason to a donkey would cause the donkey to cease being a donkey.

Rather, the higher angel gives the lower one a capacity and mode of being that it is ordinarily incapable of having, as when a child passes from his natural ignorance when he learns something from another, or as when a man acquires grace.

In these cases, the form of the recipient remains, but becomes more perfect in its mode of being.

It is in this sense, I think, that a form is “abstracted” from matter. It remains the same form, but it is given the “grace” to act according to the immaterial mode of an intellect.

One could thus think of abstraction as the activity of purifying, or even sanctifying, material forms, giving them a kind of intellectual “grace.”

[Conor Stark @StarkConor]

One of the reasons I framed the definition in terms of act and potency and unity was because I wanted to couch it as a logical definition. There is, in my view, no per se definition of intelligibility in terms of its own intrinsic per se principles: like verum or form.

Intelligibility is about being measured by some unity. It’s a per se definition, but it’s drawn from the nature of the measure and thus has to do with participation and similitudo.

Moreover, once you get outside the predicamental order of finite, material substances proportioned to our intellect, then intelligibility gets really tricky.

Angels, for instance, are in the genus of substance—but Aquinas is clear that substance is not a real genus, only an analogous one, or what he calls a metaphysical genus in one place.

Hence, for angels (and in a way all things) intelligibility means being measured by God’s simple esse (which, of course, is also verum and unum—but those also don’t have real definitions taken from a single nature. Everywhere we look for the first in some order, and we determine the nature of the posterior by its “defection” “distance” or “determinate negation” from the first).

[Conor Stark @StarkConor]

A first pass at a quasi-definition of intelligibility in Aquinas: determinate negation of some measure (i.e., unity) within an order of act and potency.

This covers the various kinds of intelligibility found among various kinds of multiplicity: (1) matter and form vis-à-vis the unity of the individual; (2) individuals to a species (though I’m still not exactly clear as to how this relation works); (3) various species of a genus to a paradigm species of that genus; (4) various genera to a primary analogate (I feel much more confident about 3 and 4).

In all these cases, the perfection of the one qua measure is what is most relevant.

Hence, just as for Plato, the Good/One is the cause of all knowability for Aquinas.

However, Aquinas follows Aristotle insofar as he does not posit a One or a Good whose essence is just Unity and Goodness. In each case, that which contains the ratio of the first measure is such just on account of what that thing is—its οὐσία or esse.

[Conor Stark @StarkConor]

The relation of one and many, I think, is prior to even truth as regards intelligibility (though obviously they are connected), since Aquinas follows Aristotle in Meta Iota that the one qua measure is the principal of the knowable as such.

Intelligibility is a “kind” of knowability, though not exhaustive of it

[Conor Stark @StarkConor]

What I’ve given is, I think, what Aristotle would have called a tupō definition, or what Aquinas would call the logical consideration of a subject genus.

Intelligibility is connected with esse primarily for Aquinas(unsurprisingly God’s esse), and then in derivative ways across various kinds of multiplicity.

The details of more “regional” kinds of intelligibility would need to be worked out accordingly to the particular natures of the “one” manifest in those orders.

For instance, the intellect’s intelligizing of a phantasm is, I think, its understanding some material form as a determinate negation of its own simple being and life. Take a concrete example like snubness. The intellect understands the form as concavity in a nose. Concavity and nose act as material conditions (though in different respects, since concavity is more like a form and nose is more like matter) according to which a snub nose is a snub nose. Per impossible, without those conditions, snubness would be an immaterial form (and so self-thinking and alive, according to Aquinas, by definition). Thus, the question arises, with what am I contrasting this form in the phantasm? How am I measuring its essential relation to matter? My theory is that the mind (mens vel intellectus) is effecting this contrast by means of itself. Consequently, the knowledge of an essence is always self-knowledge (knower and known are one) insofar as the intellect’s knowledge of a form is always the knowledge of its own determinate negation.

[Conor Stark @StarkConor]

God’s esse does not itself have the property of the One qua measure of creatures. He is that too, of course.

But since God is not really related to creatures—rather the contrary is true insofar as we are really related to Him—His esse is not reducible to the nature of the One, which, for Aquinas and Aristotle, primarily means maximally indivisible measure.