A form of special divine action often considered central to the everyday experience of Christiani... more A form of special divine action often considered central to the everyday experience of Christianity is that of a personal interaction with God. For example, in The Second Person Perspective in Aquinas's Ethics (2012), Andrew Pinsent characterises this interaction in terms of mutually empathic relations that serve to "infuse" virtues and other attributes into a person. Such interaction requires that causal relations exist between a necessary being and the contingent universe. This paper addresses a central problem of special divine action: that the empirically identifiable causes of physical events are modally ill-suited for (and epistemically distinct from) the action of an eternal, non-composite, necessary being.
Accounts of what brings about physical events are standardly empirical accounts, grounded upon experience of the world. In contrast, accounts of how God acts are standardly non-empirical exercises of reason. But as a result, theories about the causality of divine action usually bear no clear relation to the empirical causal modes that, judging by our experience, function to bring about events which God somehow also causes. This is a modal problem in the causal relations of divine action.
To solve this problem, I make an (empirical) distinction between material and merely intelligible mind-independent being. From this develops an account of a novel type of causality definitively clarified by the scholastic philosopher John Poinsot, extrinsic formal specification, which is as empirically observable as it is amenable to speculative reason, particularly sacramental and Trinitarian theology.
The transcendentals entered Western intellectual discourse as “vagrants” (ens vagans) – which roa... more The transcendentals entered Western intellectual discourse as “vagrants” (ens vagans) – which roamed Aristotle’s categories, impervious to univocal abstraction. To traditional realists with an interest in distinguishing the mind-dependent from the real, these properties carried the unwelcome implication that it is not possible to state univocally how individuals exist in their own right, independently of how we think about them. Instead, properties like “thing,” “otherness,” “unity,” “goodness,” and “truth” pervade every category.
As a result, it is perhaps unsurprising that thinkers in the Western realist tradition have usually accorded transcendentals merely mind-dependent status for one reason or another – even though Aquinas also attributes to God the transcendentals in a mind-independent subsistent mode unavailable to our experience. However, in the philosophies of Aquinas, John Poinsot, and Ralph Austin Powell, there are also reasons to consider the opposing view, and not only when the “natural knowledge” of Thomism is understood to emerge from experience of ens primum cognitum (the first and undifferentiated experience of being), which secures a terminus in the real for experience of the transcendentals.
In my view, what decisively resolves both the old problem of describing beings independently of how we think about them, and the perplexing nature of the transcendentals themselves, is to consider the implications of Poinsot’s work on real relation, the significance of which Powell rediscovered in the 20th century, and which John Deely later realised resolves a pivotal difficulty with the Aristotelian category of relation, namely that relatio rationis have “as their positive essence exactly the same positive structure as their mind-independent counterparts,” making the mind-independence of categorial relation a mere accident, not something essential to relations. This paper articulates the respect in which this development implies that transcendentals are real, contra the traditional views of the foregoing authors upon whom my argument relies.
When Joshua came to Jericho and encountered the captain of the LORD's host, his stance appears mu... more When Joshua came to Jericho and encountered the captain of the LORD's host, his stance appears much like the theodicist, who, facing the awful facts of suffering, evil, or death, seeks assurance from God, asking, "are you for us or our adversaries?" Yet the angel's reply is not "yes," as typical theodicies seek to answer on God's behalf, but "No; rather I indeed come now as captain of the host of the LORD." The implication is political: the angel seeks to alter Joshua's aim from one of self-concern to one of serving the LORD.
Like the theodicies of Aquinas, C.S. Lewis, and Richard Swinburne, Eleonore Stump's "defence," Wandering in Darkness, principally takes recourse to the nature of love and of free will to explain the presence of suffering, with a familiar problem: it does not sufficiently establish why a theistic God must create a world where, to preserve our capacity to freely love him, suffering is caused or permitted. Paul Draper notes four further problems: it is difficult to see how Stump's argument accounts for (a) suffering which predictably diminishes the sufferer or (b) natural disasters that indiscriminately affect people, when the healing of individual psychological fragmentation is the goal of suffering on Stump's account; (c) how trivial suffering (like scraping one's shin) could aid sanctification, and (d) why humans and animals suffer similarly, when animals seem incapable of undergoing a process of justification and sanctification. The theodicy presented in this paper avoids the above problems by employing Joshua's narrative as "Franciscan knowledge" to adjust our stance to the problem. I rely on an empirical claim, from the nature of sign action, that "kenosis" (self-sacrificial "love") is pervasive, and therefore that suffering is pervasively part of the actual world. Now if love is the greatest virtue and "unites everything in perfect harmony," then the world in which we experience and come to know love, namely, the actual world, is what should guide our conception of the world a theistic God would create. Empirically, this is a world continually acquiring being, and approaching perfection, through kenosis. It does so partially through our working self-sacrificially to modify where, and how much, suffering is borne.
The thread of the study of signs can be traced from Augustine through the formation of indigenous... more The thread of the study of signs can be traced from Augustine through the formation of indigenous European philosophical thought, to the scholastic controversies over nominalism and Scotism, and the enduring difficulty of accounting for categorial relation under an Aristotelian system. It continues through the perennial modern “problem of the external world,” the semiotic explorations of Charles Peirce, and the intelligent realism of Ralph Austin Powell. The thread is a broken one, and only partially recovered, yet it is unlikely that a more significant rediscovery awaits us than Powell’s, in 1986,1 that the causality proper to signs was definitively identified in 1632 by the great Iberian scholastic, John Poinsot. It is a discovery and a synthesis foundational to the understanding of sign action, as it equips philosophers with a tool both to recognise the pervasive presence of signs and to identify the teleology implicit in their action, while distinguishing this from final causation.
This paper explores the implications of Poinsot’s and Powell’s work, and with a minimum of technical terminology, introduces the notion of sign action as the fundamental and pervasive constituent of a universe (notably, the real one). By way of literature review, the account will first introduce key concepts historically, focusing briefly on key figures and discursive turning points. The second part of this paper will sketch my positive account of the nature and action of signs as functioning like “machine code” for the universe. That is, just as machine code is what is directly executed by a computer, sign action can be empirically verified to be the “native tongue” of a universe, its fundamental currency.
In the early 1980s, Ralph Austin Powell, a little-known genius in the vein of what is today calle... more In the early 1980s, Ralph Austin Powell, a little-known genius in the vein of what is today called “semiotic Thomism,” wrote an argument for human freedom in his book-length work, Freely Chosen Reality. The book almost immediately dropped out of view for its radically idiosyncratic approach, despite its close engagement with analytical philosophical questions of the day. Regardless of this, the argument is notable for many reasons, perhaps especially that it marries a thoroughgoingly empirical (testable) approach with an essentially Thomist model of experience. Whether Powell’s argument is ultimately acceptable or not, it bears many fruits for those interested either in experiential bases for arguments for human freedom, or in the general technique of philosophising in a manner amenable to experimental verification. For example, Powell marshals a commanding view of the entire Western philosophical tradition to establish that philosophers of diverse and conflicting stripes, across the ages, believe in real relations under his definition. Finding near-universal – but largely unargued – agreement about the reality of real relations, he proceeds to give an argument for real relations founded upon “common experience,” that is, experiences that may be reproduced and tested by every reader. In Powell’s thought, it is experiences of testing that are used to form and verify philosophical principles, in contrast to the still-common habit among even professional philosophers of importing clear but empirically unfalsifiable distinctions into discussion, which invariably result in unproductive and undecidable debate, if not entrenched and incommensurable positions. This paper articulates Powell’s argument, and offers commentary on his method along the way, without committing to a position on its truth and with a focus on its power to resolve questions of how human freedom could be possible while granting the assumption that minds reduce materially to brains. I aim further to answer some nominalistic concerns about merely formal (nonmaterial) reality by noting Powell’s distinction of his own position from moderate realism. Finally, some comments will be made about the (later discovery of) some more fundamental tools in Poinsot with which to construct Powell’s position.
Philosophical Theologies in South Africa Genealogies, Traditions, and Speculations, 2024
The action of signs appears to support an empirically verifiable account of how value or normativ... more The action of signs appears to support an empirically verifiable account of how value or normativity can emerge from the natures and interactions of real entities, which, in a human context, flowers into what we know of as morality. This chapter is an account of the process by which morality emerges.
First delivered (in incipient form) at the Ian Ramsey Centre conference, “Religion, Society, and the Science of Life”, St. Anne’s College, Oxford University, 21 July 2017.
A form of special divine action often considered central to the everyday experience of Christiani... more A form of special divine action often considered central to the everyday experience of Christianity is that of a personal interaction with God. For example, in The Second Person Perspective in Aquinas's Ethics (2012), Andrew Pinsent characterises this interaction in terms of mutually empathic relations that serve to "infuse" virtues and other attributes into a person. Such interaction requires that causal relations exist between a necessary being and the contingent universe. This paper addresses a central problem of special divine action: that the empirically identifiable causes of physical events are modally ill-suited for (and epistemically distinct from) the action of an eternal, non-composite, necessary being.
Accounts of what brings about physical events are standardly empirical accounts, grounded upon experience of the world. In contrast, accounts of how God acts are standardly non-empirical exercises of reason. But as a result, theories about the causality of divine action usually bear no clear relation to the empirical causal modes that, judging by our experience, function to bring about events which God somehow also causes. This is a modal problem in the causal relations of divine action.
To solve this problem, I make an (empirical) distinction between material and merely intelligible mind-independent being. From this develops an account of a novel type of causality definitively clarified by the scholastic philosopher John Poinsot, extrinsic formal specification, which is as empirically observable as it is amenable to speculative reason, particularly sacramental and Trinitarian theology.
The transcendentals entered Western intellectual discourse as “vagrants” (ens vagans) – which roa... more The transcendentals entered Western intellectual discourse as “vagrants” (ens vagans) – which roamed Aristotle’s categories, impervious to univocal abstraction. To traditional realists with an interest in distinguishing the mind-dependent from the real, these properties carried the unwelcome implication that it is not possible to state univocally how individuals exist in their own right, independently of how we think about them. Instead, properties like “thing,” “otherness,” “unity,” “goodness,” and “truth” pervade every category.
As a result, it is perhaps unsurprising that thinkers in the Western realist tradition have usually accorded transcendentals merely mind-dependent status for one reason or another – even though Aquinas also attributes to God the transcendentals in a mind-independent subsistent mode unavailable to our experience. However, in the philosophies of Aquinas, John Poinsot, and Ralph Austin Powell, there are also reasons to consider the opposing view, and not only when the “natural knowledge” of Thomism is understood to emerge from experience of ens primum cognitum (the first and undifferentiated experience of being), which secures a terminus in the real for experience of the transcendentals.
In my view, what decisively resolves both the old problem of describing beings independently of how we think about them, and the perplexing nature of the transcendentals themselves, is to consider the implications of Poinsot’s work on real relation, the significance of which Powell rediscovered in the 20th century, and which John Deely later realised resolves a pivotal difficulty with the Aristotelian category of relation, namely that relatio rationis have “as their positive essence exactly the same positive structure as their mind-independent counterparts,” making the mind-independence of categorial relation a mere accident, not something essential to relations. This paper articulates the respect in which this development implies that transcendentals are real, contra the traditional views of the foregoing authors upon whom my argument relies.
When Joshua came to Jericho and encountered the captain of the LORD's host, his stance appears mu... more When Joshua came to Jericho and encountered the captain of the LORD's host, his stance appears much like the theodicist, who, facing the awful facts of suffering, evil, or death, seeks assurance from God, asking, "are you for us or our adversaries?" Yet the angel's reply is not "yes," as typical theodicies seek to answer on God's behalf, but "No; rather I indeed come now as captain of the host of the LORD." The implication is political: the angel seeks to alter Joshua's aim from one of self-concern to one of serving the LORD.
Like the theodicies of Aquinas, C.S. Lewis, and Richard Swinburne, Eleonore Stump's "defence," Wandering in Darkness, principally takes recourse to the nature of love and of free will to explain the presence of suffering, with a familiar problem: it does not sufficiently establish why a theistic God must create a world where, to preserve our capacity to freely love him, suffering is caused or permitted. Paul Draper notes four further problems: it is difficult to see how Stump's argument accounts for (a) suffering which predictably diminishes the sufferer or (b) natural disasters that indiscriminately affect people, when the healing of individual psychological fragmentation is the goal of suffering on Stump's account; (c) how trivial suffering (like scraping one's shin) could aid sanctification, and (d) why humans and animals suffer similarly, when animals seem incapable of undergoing a process of justification and sanctification. The theodicy presented in this paper avoids the above problems by employing Joshua's narrative as "Franciscan knowledge" to adjust our stance to the problem. I rely on an empirical claim, from the nature of sign action, that "kenosis" (self-sacrificial "love") is pervasive, and therefore that suffering is pervasively part of the actual world. Now if love is the greatest virtue and "unites everything in perfect harmony," then the world in which we experience and come to know love, namely, the actual world, is what should guide our conception of the world a theistic God would create. Empirically, this is a world continually acquiring being, and approaching perfection, through kenosis. It does so partially through our working self-sacrificially to modify where, and how much, suffering is borne.
The thread of the study of signs can be traced from Augustine through the formation of indigenous... more The thread of the study of signs can be traced from Augustine through the formation of indigenous European philosophical thought, to the scholastic controversies over nominalism and Scotism, and the enduring difficulty of accounting for categorial relation under an Aristotelian system. It continues through the perennial modern “problem of the external world,” the semiotic explorations of Charles Peirce, and the intelligent realism of Ralph Austin Powell. The thread is a broken one, and only partially recovered, yet it is unlikely that a more significant rediscovery awaits us than Powell’s, in 1986,1 that the causality proper to signs was definitively identified in 1632 by the great Iberian scholastic, John Poinsot. It is a discovery and a synthesis foundational to the understanding of sign action, as it equips philosophers with a tool both to recognise the pervasive presence of signs and to identify the teleology implicit in their action, while distinguishing this from final causation.
This paper explores the implications of Poinsot’s and Powell’s work, and with a minimum of technical terminology, introduces the notion of sign action as the fundamental and pervasive constituent of a universe (notably, the real one). By way of literature review, the account will first introduce key concepts historically, focusing briefly on key figures and discursive turning points. The second part of this paper will sketch my positive account of the nature and action of signs as functioning like “machine code” for the universe. That is, just as machine code is what is directly executed by a computer, sign action can be empirically verified to be the “native tongue” of a universe, its fundamental currency.
In the early 1980s, Ralph Austin Powell, a little-known genius in the vein of what is today calle... more In the early 1980s, Ralph Austin Powell, a little-known genius in the vein of what is today called “semiotic Thomism,” wrote an argument for human freedom in his book-length work, Freely Chosen Reality. The book almost immediately dropped out of view for its radically idiosyncratic approach, despite its close engagement with analytical philosophical questions of the day. Regardless of this, the argument is notable for many reasons, perhaps especially that it marries a thoroughgoingly empirical (testable) approach with an essentially Thomist model of experience. Whether Powell’s argument is ultimately acceptable or not, it bears many fruits for those interested either in experiential bases for arguments for human freedom, or in the general technique of philosophising in a manner amenable to experimental verification. For example, Powell marshals a commanding view of the entire Western philosophical tradition to establish that philosophers of diverse and conflicting stripes, across the ages, believe in real relations under his definition. Finding near-universal – but largely unargued – agreement about the reality of real relations, he proceeds to give an argument for real relations founded upon “common experience,” that is, experiences that may be reproduced and tested by every reader. In Powell’s thought, it is experiences of testing that are used to form and verify philosophical principles, in contrast to the still-common habit among even professional philosophers of importing clear but empirically unfalsifiable distinctions into discussion, which invariably result in unproductive and undecidable debate, if not entrenched and incommensurable positions. This paper articulates Powell’s argument, and offers commentary on his method along the way, without committing to a position on its truth and with a focus on its power to resolve questions of how human freedom could be possible while granting the assumption that minds reduce materially to brains. I aim further to answer some nominalistic concerns about merely formal (nonmaterial) reality by noting Powell’s distinction of his own position from moderate realism. Finally, some comments will be made about the (later discovery of) some more fundamental tools in Poinsot with which to construct Powell’s position.
Philosophical Theologies in South Africa Genealogies, Traditions, and Speculations, 2024
The action of signs appears to support an empirically verifiable account of how value or normativ... more The action of signs appears to support an empirically verifiable account of how value or normativity can emerge from the natures and interactions of real entities, which, in a human context, flowers into what we know of as morality. This chapter is an account of the process by which morality emerges.
First delivered (in incipient form) at the Ian Ramsey Centre conference, “Religion, Society, and the Science of Life”, St. Anne’s College, Oxford University, 21 July 2017.
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Papers by Arlyn Culwick
Accounts of what brings about physical events are standardly empirical accounts, grounded upon experience of the world. In contrast, accounts of how God acts are standardly non-empirical exercises of reason. But as a result, theories about the causality of divine action usually bear no clear relation to the empirical causal modes that, judging by our experience, function to bring about events which God somehow also causes. This is a modal problem in the causal relations of divine action.
To solve this problem, I make an (empirical) distinction between material and merely intelligible mind-independent being. From this develops an account of a novel type of causality definitively clarified by the scholastic philosopher John Poinsot, extrinsic formal specification, which is as empirically observable as it is amenable to speculative reason, particularly sacramental and Trinitarian theology.
Also available in the following languages:
- Mandarin: https://www.blocknet.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Blocknet-Whitepaper-Mandarin.pdf
- Korean: https://www.blocknet.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Blocknet-Whitepaper-Arabic.pdf
- Arabic: https://www.blocknet.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Blocknet-Whitepaper-Arabic.pdf
As a result, it is perhaps unsurprising that thinkers in the Western realist tradition have usually accorded transcendentals merely mind-dependent status for one reason or another – even though Aquinas also attributes to God the transcendentals in a mind-independent subsistent mode unavailable to our experience. However, in the philosophies of Aquinas, John Poinsot, and Ralph Austin Powell, there are also reasons to consider the opposing view, and not only when the “natural knowledge” of Thomism is understood to emerge from experience of ens primum cognitum (the first and undifferentiated experience of being), which secures a terminus in the real for experience of the transcendentals.
In my view, what decisively resolves both the old problem of describing beings independently of how we think about them, and the perplexing nature of the transcendentals themselves, is to consider the implications of Poinsot’s work on real relation, the significance of which Powell rediscovered in the 20th century, and which John Deely later realised resolves a pivotal difficulty with the Aristotelian category of relation, namely that relatio rationis have “as their positive essence exactly the same positive structure as their mind-independent counterparts,” making the mind-independence of categorial relation a mere accident, not something essential to relations. This paper articulates the respect in which this development implies that transcendentals are real, contra the traditional views of the foregoing authors upon whom my argument relies.
Like the theodicies of Aquinas, C.S. Lewis, and Richard Swinburne, Eleonore Stump's "defence," Wandering in Darkness, principally takes recourse to the nature of love and of free will to explain the presence of suffering, with a familiar problem: it does not sufficiently establish why a theistic God must create a world where, to preserve our capacity to freely love him, suffering is caused or permitted. Paul Draper notes four further problems: it is difficult to see how Stump's argument accounts for (a) suffering which predictably diminishes the sufferer or (b) natural disasters that indiscriminately affect people, when the healing of individual psychological fragmentation is the goal of suffering on Stump's account; (c) how trivial suffering (like scraping one's shin) could aid sanctification, and (d) why humans and animals suffer similarly, when animals seem incapable of undergoing a process of justification and sanctification. The theodicy presented in this paper avoids the above problems by employing Joshua's narrative as "Franciscan knowledge" to adjust our stance to the problem. I rely on an empirical claim, from the nature of sign action, that "kenosis" (self-sacrificial "love") is pervasive, and therefore that suffering is pervasively part of the actual world. Now if love is the greatest virtue and "unites everything in perfect harmony," then the world in which we experience and come to know love, namely, the actual world, is what should guide our conception of the world a theistic God would create. Empirically, this is a world continually acquiring being, and approaching perfection, through kenosis. It does so partially through our working self-sacrificially to modify where, and how much, suffering is borne.
This paper explores the implications of Poinsot’s and Powell’s work, and with a minimum of technical terminology, introduces the notion of sign action as the fundamental and pervasive constituent of a universe (notably, the real one). By way of literature review, the account will first introduce key concepts historically, focusing briefly on key figures and discursive turning points. The second part of this paper will sketch my positive account of the nature and action of signs as functioning like “machine code” for the universe. That is, just as machine code is what is directly executed by a computer, sign action can be empirically verified to be the “native tongue” of a universe, its fundamental currency.
Whether Powell’s argument is ultimately acceptable or not, it bears many fruits for those interested either in experiential bases for arguments for human freedom, or in the general technique of philosophising in a manner amenable to experimental verification. For example, Powell marshals a commanding view of the entire Western philosophical tradition to establish that philosophers of diverse and conflicting stripes, across the ages, believe in real relations under his definition. Finding near-universal – but largely unargued – agreement about the reality of real relations, he proceeds to give an argument for real relations founded upon “common experience,” that is, experiences that may be reproduced and tested by every reader. In Powell’s thought, it is experiences of testing that are used to form and verify philosophical principles, in contrast to the still-common habit among even professional philosophers of importing clear but empirically unfalsifiable distinctions into discussion, which invariably result in unproductive and undecidable debate, if not entrenched and incommensurable positions.
This paper articulates Powell’s argument, and offers commentary on his method along the way, without committing to a position on its truth and with a focus on its power to resolve questions of how human freedom could be possible while granting the assumption that minds reduce materially to brains. I aim further to answer some nominalistic concerns about merely formal (nonmaterial) reality by noting Powell’s distinction of his own position from moderate realism. Finally, some comments will be made about the (later discovery of) some more fundamental tools in Poinsot with which to construct Powell’s position.
It is still useful as a brief and intuitive introduction to the ideas in the above paper.
Books by Arlyn Culwick
First delivered (in incipient form) at the Ian Ramsey Centre conference, “Religion, Society, and the Science of Life”, St. Anne’s College, Oxford University, 21 July 2017.
Accounts of what brings about physical events are standardly empirical accounts, grounded upon experience of the world. In contrast, accounts of how God acts are standardly non-empirical exercises of reason. But as a result, theories about the causality of divine action usually bear no clear relation to the empirical causal modes that, judging by our experience, function to bring about events which God somehow also causes. This is a modal problem in the causal relations of divine action.
To solve this problem, I make an (empirical) distinction between material and merely intelligible mind-independent being. From this develops an account of a novel type of causality definitively clarified by the scholastic philosopher John Poinsot, extrinsic formal specification, which is as empirically observable as it is amenable to speculative reason, particularly sacramental and Trinitarian theology.
Also available in the following languages:
- Mandarin: https://www.blocknet.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Blocknet-Whitepaper-Mandarin.pdf
- Korean: https://www.blocknet.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Blocknet-Whitepaper-Arabic.pdf
- Arabic: https://www.blocknet.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Blocknet-Whitepaper-Arabic.pdf
As a result, it is perhaps unsurprising that thinkers in the Western realist tradition have usually accorded transcendentals merely mind-dependent status for one reason or another – even though Aquinas also attributes to God the transcendentals in a mind-independent subsistent mode unavailable to our experience. However, in the philosophies of Aquinas, John Poinsot, and Ralph Austin Powell, there are also reasons to consider the opposing view, and not only when the “natural knowledge” of Thomism is understood to emerge from experience of ens primum cognitum (the first and undifferentiated experience of being), which secures a terminus in the real for experience of the transcendentals.
In my view, what decisively resolves both the old problem of describing beings independently of how we think about them, and the perplexing nature of the transcendentals themselves, is to consider the implications of Poinsot’s work on real relation, the significance of which Powell rediscovered in the 20th century, and which John Deely later realised resolves a pivotal difficulty with the Aristotelian category of relation, namely that relatio rationis have “as their positive essence exactly the same positive structure as their mind-independent counterparts,” making the mind-independence of categorial relation a mere accident, not something essential to relations. This paper articulates the respect in which this development implies that transcendentals are real, contra the traditional views of the foregoing authors upon whom my argument relies.
Like the theodicies of Aquinas, C.S. Lewis, and Richard Swinburne, Eleonore Stump's "defence," Wandering in Darkness, principally takes recourse to the nature of love and of free will to explain the presence of suffering, with a familiar problem: it does not sufficiently establish why a theistic God must create a world where, to preserve our capacity to freely love him, suffering is caused or permitted. Paul Draper notes four further problems: it is difficult to see how Stump's argument accounts for (a) suffering which predictably diminishes the sufferer or (b) natural disasters that indiscriminately affect people, when the healing of individual psychological fragmentation is the goal of suffering on Stump's account; (c) how trivial suffering (like scraping one's shin) could aid sanctification, and (d) why humans and animals suffer similarly, when animals seem incapable of undergoing a process of justification and sanctification. The theodicy presented in this paper avoids the above problems by employing Joshua's narrative as "Franciscan knowledge" to adjust our stance to the problem. I rely on an empirical claim, from the nature of sign action, that "kenosis" (self-sacrificial "love") is pervasive, and therefore that suffering is pervasively part of the actual world. Now if love is the greatest virtue and "unites everything in perfect harmony," then the world in which we experience and come to know love, namely, the actual world, is what should guide our conception of the world a theistic God would create. Empirically, this is a world continually acquiring being, and approaching perfection, through kenosis. It does so partially through our working self-sacrificially to modify where, and how much, suffering is borne.
This paper explores the implications of Poinsot’s and Powell’s work, and with a minimum of technical terminology, introduces the notion of sign action as the fundamental and pervasive constituent of a universe (notably, the real one). By way of literature review, the account will first introduce key concepts historically, focusing briefly on key figures and discursive turning points. The second part of this paper will sketch my positive account of the nature and action of signs as functioning like “machine code” for the universe. That is, just as machine code is what is directly executed by a computer, sign action can be empirically verified to be the “native tongue” of a universe, its fundamental currency.
Whether Powell’s argument is ultimately acceptable or not, it bears many fruits for those interested either in experiential bases for arguments for human freedom, or in the general technique of philosophising in a manner amenable to experimental verification. For example, Powell marshals a commanding view of the entire Western philosophical tradition to establish that philosophers of diverse and conflicting stripes, across the ages, believe in real relations under his definition. Finding near-universal – but largely unargued – agreement about the reality of real relations, he proceeds to give an argument for real relations founded upon “common experience,” that is, experiences that may be reproduced and tested by every reader. In Powell’s thought, it is experiences of testing that are used to form and verify philosophical principles, in contrast to the still-common habit among even professional philosophers of importing clear but empirically unfalsifiable distinctions into discussion, which invariably result in unproductive and undecidable debate, if not entrenched and incommensurable positions.
This paper articulates Powell’s argument, and offers commentary on his method along the way, without committing to a position on its truth and with a focus on its power to resolve questions of how human freedom could be possible while granting the assumption that minds reduce materially to brains. I aim further to answer some nominalistic concerns about merely formal (nonmaterial) reality by noting Powell’s distinction of his own position from moderate realism. Finally, some comments will be made about the (later discovery of) some more fundamental tools in Poinsot with which to construct Powell’s position.
It is still useful as a brief and intuitive introduction to the ideas in the above paper.
First delivered (in incipient form) at the Ian Ramsey Centre conference, “Religion, Society, and the Science of Life”, St. Anne’s College, Oxford University, 21 July 2017.