tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post112844815987920805..comments2024-03-28T08:37:58.136+01:00Comments on Limited, Inc.: suspensio legis naturaeRoger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-1128966418433655632005-10-10T19:46:00.000+02:002005-10-10T19:46:00.000+02:00Whoever is stealing A. Tucker's comments, please r...Whoever is stealing A. Tucker's comments, please return them. And explain to me exactly how you are doing it. I thought I was the only one who had control over the comments delete button.Roger Gathmannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-1128920497858825812005-10-10T07:01:00.000+02:002005-10-10T07:01:00.000+02:00Aviezer, talk about miracles -- really, you didn't...Aviezer, talk about miracles -- really, you didn't take your comments off? Damn, somebody has been stealing my comments! I don't exactly know how to get them back, either. Comments theft -- a whole new kind of crime. Or vandalism, or something. <BR/><BR/>I know that Voltaire had made the points about Jesus' miracles as magic, and that this was an Enlightenment trope. But I think, from Hume's perspective, Jesus' miracles count as the kind of miracles he is writing about. Or don't they? In fact, the account of the miracles in the gospels does add up to a meta-miracle, insofar as they all confirm prophecies made earlier. <BR/><BR/>I'll have to think about all of this.<BR/><BR/>I hope the comments thief doesn't steal your comments.Roger Gathmannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-1128898567932496192005-10-10T00:56:00.000+02:002005-10-10T00:56:00.000+02:00I put the above comment up as a response to Avieze...I put the above comment up as a response to Aviezer Tucker. For some reason, he took down his comment. Too bad, it was interesting to me.Roger Gathmannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-1128869128106090612005-10-09T16:45:00.000+02:002005-10-09T16:45:00.000+02:00Aviezer, First let me say I liked your article, an...Aviezer, <BR/>First let me say I liked your article, and I think that the idea of the miracle as a divine feat of strength has a great deal going for it.<BR/><BR/>Second -- your readings of the miracle at the battle of Givon all work within your general framework, in which the God of the Joshua is triumphing over other Gods. But -- I am not sure that this sense of miracle carries over into the Christian sense of miracle. Before Hume, I think that the Christian sense drops the competitive feature of the miracle. Which would take us to<BR/><BR/>Three. A miracle like the resurrection of Jesus. Here, I think the idea that the miracle is only a feat of strength is strained. This is why I think that the miracle story (and other miracle stories in the New Testament) make such a point of emphasizing witnesses. And this, I think, is not as far from Hume's account as you suppose. There might be a tiny anachronism in assuming that Hume's notion of the laws of nature is as Newtonian as Laplace's -- while Hume genuflected verbally to Newton, there is little evidence that he was very conversant with Newton. I think Hume simply assumed that what Newton said was identical with Hume's own sense of cause and effect. <BR/>So - in conclusion -- I don't think Hume's definition of the miracle distorted the concept as much as you would have it. Rather, I'd say the distortion -- the dropping of the sense that a miracle is a feat of strength -- occured much earlier, and was part of the Christian interpretation of miracle.Roger Gathmannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-1128610489699291542005-10-06T16:54:00.000+02:002005-10-06T16:54:00.000+02:00Oh, and a big shout out to all the gravediggers in...Oh, and a big shout out to all the gravediggers in Washoogle Wash this cool morningRoger Gathmannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-1128610435873661282005-10-06T16:53:00.000+02:002005-10-06T16:53:00.000+02:00Anonymous, thanks for the correction. Of course, H...Anonymous, thanks for the correction. Of course, History and Theory.<BR/><BR/>However, I'm think we disagree about what Tucker is doing. I'm not sure what "including miracles in the accounts of historians" means, but if it means that it is rational for historians to consider miracle stories, that is precisely what Tucker is advocating. However, it is hard to know what this means, since, as I point out, Tucker both takes the line that Hume's account of miracles is anachronistic and the line that miracles are to be interpreted in terms of probability, which is a line of thought that goes back to Hume. My point was that a feat of strength is not as different from a violation of physical law as Tucker contends, which is why the objection to Hume shades into a variant of discussing miracles in terms of probabilities, and that Tucker shifts between how an event may be believed to be a miracle and what a miracle is. And this is why Tucker is not totally clear when he writes "Hume’s definition of miracles as breaking the laws of nature is anachronistic. The concept of immutable laws of nature was introduced only in the seventeenth century, thousands of years after the Hebrews had introduced the concept of miracles. Holder and Earman distinguish the posterior probability of the occurrence of a particular miracle from that of the occurrence of some miracle. I argue that though this distinction is significant, their formulae for evaluating the respective probabilities are not useful. Even if miracle hypotheses have low probabilities, it may still be rational to accept and use them if there is no better explanation for the evidence of miracles."Roger Gathmannhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-1128596445706016362005-10-06T13:00:00.000+02:002005-10-06T13:00:00.000+02:00Washoogle,Washington applauds you.Washoogle,Washington applauds you.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-1128586224448742292005-10-06T10:10:00.000+02:002005-10-06T10:10:00.000+02:00Tucker's article is in the current issue of Histor...Tucker's article is in the current issue of History and Theory, not History and memory.<BR/>More significantly, the article does not advocate including miracles in the accounts of historians. Rather it presents historiography (the writings of historians) as the best among competing explanations of the evidence. One possible such explanation is that a miracle in the biblical sense of feats of strength (the reference is to Festivus, the holiday that was introduced by George's father in Seinfeld) indeed occurred. Much better explanations are usually available, e.g. that the texts involved were written centuries after they were supposed to take place for contemporary political reasons.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com