Ruminations: December 2021

Tuesday, December 14, 2021

Future Contingents in Leibniz

I. Leibniz has a problem in his philosophy, namely, the relationship between God, determinism, free will, and moral responsibility. Famously he thought that when God created the world, he chose to create the best of all possible worlds out of an infinite number of possible worlds. This means that what will happen in the world is decided in advance, including all of the sin, evil, and divine punishment. If this is true how can we ultimately be responsible for our actions, how could anyone deserve divine punishment? In other words are we not determined by God, necessarily, to act in a certain way? Leibniz has a clever way of trying to get around this. He argues that while the future is determined in advance, those events are still not necessary, they are contingent.

Thursday, December 9, 2021

Contributions to 'On Human Excellence'

This post is a collection of contributions from friends of mine to my earlier essay "On Human Excellence". As I noted in that essay, there is some peculiar utility in using others as evidence of this phenomenon. This is because, more often than not, human excellence as I have defined it is not even perceptible by some, or even most, unless you have some specific expertise or discernment in any given field of practice. Spending hours of one's life dedicated to studying and immersing yourself in some field or craft allows you to get inside its peculiar technical contours. It allows you to better see the excellence in the first place.

Thus, I had the thought that I could solicit those smart and interesting people around me as to whether they had their own thoughts about, or examples of, human excellence. What follows are their ideas and interpretations, meant as an accompaniment to the ideas sketched out in my original essay.

If you read the original essay and these others' essay's and have your own ideas for examples of human excellence, reach out to me and I'd be happy to publish anything here alongside these pieces!

Follow the link provided to read each piece. Here they are, in the order I received them:

To The Reader

Reader, thou hast here an honest [blog]; it doth at the outset forewarn thee that, in contriving the same, I have proposed to myself no other than a domestic and private end: I have had no consideration at all either to thy service or to my glory. My powers are not capable of any such design. I have dedicated it to the particular commodity of my kinsfolk and friends, so that, having lost me (which they must do shortly), they may therein recover some traits of my conditions and humours, and by that means preserve more whole, and more life-like, the knowledge they had of me...I desire therein to be viewed as I appear in mine own genuine, simple, and ordinary manner, without study and artifice: for it is myself I paint. My defects are therein to be read to the life, and any imperfections are my natural form, so far as public reverence hath permitted me.

Thus, reader, myself am the matter of my book: there’s no reason thou shouldst employ thy leisure about so frivolous and vain a subject.

Therefore, farewell.

- [Rowan] De [Anderson], "To the reader"