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The BBC is having a vote to determine the greatest (western) philosophers of all time. The voting is closed, – UPDATE: Thanks to Jack Perry I see now that the voting is not closed; it’s the nominations that are closed. My mistake. So, go vote if you want a say! – and the results will be announced in July.

I’m not entirely sure what the value of this kind of exercise is, but here’s the short list:

1. Aquinas
2. Aristotle
3. Descartes
4. Epicurus
5. Heidegger
6. Hobbes
7. Hume
8. Kant
9. Kierkegaard
10. Marx
11. Mill
12. Nietzsche
13. Plato
14. Karl Popper
15. Bertrand Russell
16. Sartre
17. Schopenhauer
18. Socrates
19. Spinoza
20. Wittgenstein

No really obvious omissions, though one could quibble. How about Locke, Berkeley, or Leibniz? And does anyone seriously think Karl Popper is the greatest philosopher who ever lived? Or Sartre?

And how are we measuring greatness anyway? Influence? Originality? Approximation to the truth? Surely only the latter is the truly philosophical way of measuring greatness.

Also, it’s somewhat misleading to list Plato and Socrates separately since virtually everything we know about Socrates’ philosophy comes from Plato.

I cursed his aunts and his uncles and him and all the rest of the family.

‘Do you know that Lady Florence has broken off her engagement with me?’

‘Indeed, sir?’

Not a bit of sympathy! I might have been telling him it was a fine day.

‘You’re sacked!’

‘Very good, sir.’

He coughed gently.

‘As I am no longer in your employment, sir, I can speak freely without appearing to take a liberty. In my opinion you and Lady Florence were quite unsuitably matched. Her ladyship is of a highly determined and arbitrary temperament, quite opposed to your own. I was in Lord Worplesdon’s service for nearly a year, during which time I had ample opportunities of studying her ladyship. The opinion of the servants’ hall was far from favourable to her. Her ladyship’s temper caused a good deal of adverse comment among us. It was at times quite impossible. You would not have been happy, sir!’

‘Get out!’

‘I think you would also have found her educational methods a little trying, sir. I have glanced at the book her ladyship gave you — it has been lying on your table since our arrival — and it is, in my opinion, quite unsuitable. You would not have enjoyed it. And I have it from her ladyship’sown maid, who happened to overhear a conversation between her ladyship and one of the gentlemen staying here — Mr Maxwell, who is employed in an editorial capacity by one of the reviews — that it was her intention to start you almost immediately upon Nietzsche. You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.’

–P.G. Wodehouse, “Jeeves Takes Charge”

Pastor Frontz and Camassia have both been discussing Catholic-turned-Episcopalian priest and guru of “Creation Spirituality” Matthew Fox’s new “95 theses” which he recently posted to the cathedral door in Wittenberg (what is it with these revisionist Episcopalians and their self-important Luther impersonations?).

Some of Fox’s theses are silly, some are eminently debatable, some are just politically correct bromides, but the thing that I’ve always wondered about folks like Fox and Spong is why, if the Christian Church is as despicable as they say it is, would they want anything to do with it? For them it seems to be a near-continuous history of imperialism, militarism, sexism, partriarchy, homophobia, punitive Father-god worship, exploitiation, abuse of the environment, etc. etc.

I mean, if it’s that bad wouldn’t it make more sense just to start over from scratch?

Here’s another noteworthy piece from Steve Chapman, “Stem Cell Debate Myths”:

Start with the claim that 400,000 frozen embryos otherwise would go to waste. The truth is that most of them are anything but “surplus.” According to a 2003 survey by researchers at the RAND Corp., a California think tank, 88 percent of them are being stored for their original function: to make babies for their parents.

Just 2.2 percent of the embryos have been designated for disposal and less than 3 percent for research. The latter group amounts to about 11,000 embryos.

When the president had a White House event hosting parents who adopted embryos from fertility clinics, his critics ridiculed the suggestion that this approach could accommodate 400,000 embryos. Finding parents for 11,000 embryos, however, is not so far-fetched. Every year, 125,000 adoptions take place in this country.

[…]

The biggest myth, though, is that scientists will be content with using existing, leftover embryos. The 11,000 embryos, according to the RAND study, would yield no more than 275 stem-cell lines. For the task of curing major diseases, an article in Scientific American last year said “hundreds of thousands” of lines may be needed–which “could require millions of discarded embryos.”

But there is no prospect of getting millions of discarded embryos. So what will advocates of embryonic stem-cell research do when their needs exceed the supply? They will ask for government subsidies to produce additional embryos for experimentation.

Even among folks who opposed the Iraq war, the general consensus (apart from the far Left) has been that now that we’re there, we have to stay.

Two op-eds worth noting say it ain’t necessarily so.

First, George McGovern and Jim McGovern (no relation, apparently) say it’s time to start bringing the troops home:

Our continuing presence in Iraq feeds the insurgency and gives the insurgents a certain legitimacy in the eyes of much of the world. We know from our own history that armies of occupation are seldom welcome.

There have been elections in Iraq, and yet it remains unclear whether the different political, ethnic, and religious factions want to work together. ]

One thing, however, is clear: Washington cannot determine Iraq’s destiny. It doesn’t matter how many times Condoleezza Rice or Donald Rumsfeld visit. It doesn’t matter how many soldiers we deploy. The myriad factions in Iraq themselves must display the political will to demand a system of government that respects the diversity that exists in their country.

There are no easy answers in Iraq. But we are convinced that the United States should now set a dramatically different course — one that anticipates US military withdrawal sooner rather than later. We should begin the discussions now as to how we can bring our troops home.

Meanwhile, Steve Chapman says that only withdrawal will stop the suicide bombings:

In Iraq, everything that should be rising is falling, and everything that should be falling is rising. Fatalities from car bombings and suicide bombings have soared fivefold since November. Attacks on U.S. forces have been running at 70 a day, double the rate in March and April.

We are not seeing major progress.

One reason is that we’re fighting a new kind of war that our leaders don’t understand.

Suicide bombings are part of a conscious strategy that has a record of success in other places. Suicide bombing has gained adherents not because so many fanatics are looking for an excuse to throw away their lives, but because it works.

[…]

Americans have trouble imagining how the insurgents could hope to succeed without any positive vision of Iraq’s future – and without any apparent agenda except slaughtering people. But the core of their appeal is the same as that of most other suicide bombing campaigns: nationalistic opposition to a foreign military presence.

[…]

The dilemma the United States faces in fighting the insurgents is that military methods are not enough to solve the problem, and may make it worse. If the movement is a reaction to the U.S. military presence, keeping American troops in Iraq amounts to fighting a fire with kerosene.

That explains why the longer we stay, the more suicide attacks we face. And it suggests that the only feasible strategy is to withdraw from Iraq and turn the fight over to the Iraqi government.

I’m not sure if McGovern, McGovern, and Chapman are right, but one does wonder how long we’re expected to stay on, with some saying we’ll be there for years to come. Certainly a far cry from the quick in and out war we were led to expect.

I’ve noticed a spate of articles recently on churches trying to make themselves more “hip” to appeal to teens and twentysomethings (Here’s one for instance. Here’s another.). This seems at least loosely connected to the “emerging church” phenomenon which is, among other things, trying to recover (or invent?) a more “authentic” and “meaningful” style of worship than you might find at your typical suburban megachurch. Often this takes the form of trying to incorporate more pop-cultural elements into worship.

From the Inquirer article:

The unconventional outreach also happens through the “emerging-church” movement, a loose conglomeration of congregations in Philadelphia and elsewhere that provide worship with a flair for the tattooed generation.

Philadelphia native Tommy Kyllonen, a pastor at hip-hop oriented Crossover Community Church in Tampa, Fla., is at the forefront of that movement. He dims the lights and pumps fog through his sanctuary to evoke a concert atmosphere – saying it calms the many teens and 20-somethings, most of them Latino, at the services.

Kyllonen, 31, estimated that about 80 percent of them rarely attended church before coming to Crossover. He said he gets gushing praise for the MTV knockoffs he plays during sermons, the live DJ who performs on Sundays, and the reformed strippers, ex-cons and drug dealers who testify at services.

Now I don’t want to downplay the importance of reaching out to people in a way that will resonate with them and draw them into the life of the church, but I’ve always been skeptical that the best approach for the church was to mimic (usually in an inferior way) the trappings of a market-driven mass culture that constantly thirsts after the latest fad. Nowadays “authenticity” can be as much a marketing gimmick as anything.

Moreover, should the church be involved in the kind of cultural and social one-upmanship and status-seeking that the quest to be “cool” or “hip” necessarily entails? In fact, isn’t a sign of maturity when you give up on the quest to be cool? I would hope that most of us have abandoned the desire to be hip by at least sometime in our late 20’s, if “hip” means aping what the culture is feeding us.

If we’re going to talk about making the church “relevant,” I think this bit of advice from Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson has a lot to commend itself:

One of many analogies between postmodernity and dying antiquity-in which the church lived for her most creative period-is that the late antique world also insisted on being a meaningless chaos, and that the church had to save her converts by offering herself as the narratable world within which life could be lived with dramatic coherence. Israel had been the nation that lived a realistic narrative amid nations that lived otherwise; the church offered herself to the gentiles as their Israel. The church so constituted herself in her liturgy.

For the ancient church, the walls of the place of Eucharist, whether these were the walls of a basement or of Hagia Sophia or of an imaginary circle in the desert, enclosed a world. And the great drama of the Eucharist was the narrative life of that world. Nor was this a fictive world, for its drama is precisely the “real” presence of all reality’s true author, elsewhere denied. The classic liturgical action of the church was not about anything else at all; it was itself the reality about which truth could be told.

In the postmodern world, if a congregation or churchly agency wants to be “relevant,” here is the first step: it must recover the classic liturgy of the church, in all its dramatic density, sensual actuality, and brutal realism, and make this the one exclusive center of its life. In the postmodern world, all else must at best be decoration and more likely distraction.

In the liturgy we are transported to heaven and given a vision of the Eschaton:

Late antiquity suffered and lamented the same blindness with which postmodernity is afflicted, the same inability to see any Fulfillment up there before us. Gradually, as the church worked out the theology, the church made herself a place of such seeing. She did this with the icons of the East and the windows and statues of the West. Protestantism supposed that folk in the civil society already envisioned glorious Fulfillment, and needed no specific churchly envisioning, and therefore Protestantism for the most part eliminated the images and even where it retained them forgot how to use them. Protestantism’s reliance on the world was here too an illusion, but here too an illusion it got away with for modernity’s time. That time is over.

If we are in our time rightly to apprehend the eschatological reality of the gospel promise, we have to hear it with Christ the risen Lord visibly looming over our heads and with His living and dead saints visibly gathered around us. Above all, the church must celebrate the Eucharist as the dramatic depiction, and as the succession of tableaux, that it intrinsically is. How can we point our lives to the Kingdom’s great Banquet, if its foretaste is spread before us with all the beauty of a McDonald’s counter?

If Jenson is right, then the issue is less about “traditional” vs. “contemporary” hymns or whether the church should feature a praise band, but more about recovering the eschatological heart of the Gospel. Only when the church has something that can’t be found in the MTV world will it really be “relevant.”

I’ve just started Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World, which is, among other things, about the Eucharist as the heart of what it means to be human and Christian, and what he says seems to echo Jenson in crucial respects. In the liturgy, says Schmemann, we are “immersed in the new life of the Kingdom”:

The early Christians realized that in order to become the temple of the Holy Spirit they must ascend to heaven where Christ had ascended. They realized also that this ascension was the very condition of their mission in the world, of their ministry to the world. For there-in heaven-they were immersed in the new life of the Kingdom; and when, after this “liturgy of ascension,” they returned into the world, their faces reflected the light, the “joy and peace” of that Kingdom and they were truly its witnesses. … They were witnesses, and when they were asked, “Whence shines this light, where is the source of this power?” they knew what to answer and where to lead men. In church today, we so often find we meet only the same old world, not Christ and His Kingdom. We do not realize that we never get anywhere because we never leave any place behind us. (p. 28)

• Steven Riddle has a series of posts on the practice of lectio divina (here, here, and here).
• via David Koyzis, an interesting-looking site: Ron Dart, Red Tory and High-Church Anglican.
• Josh has found something very disturbing.

Also, while searching for something else I came across this interesting document: A Theologians’ Brief on the place of the human embryo within the Christian tradition. Endorsers include Orthodox Bishop Kallistos Ware, Abp. Rowan Williams, Lutheran ethicist Gilbert Meilaender, and heavyweight Anglican theologians John Milbank and Oliver O’Donovan.

I’m about 35 pages into John Howard Yoder’s Karl Barth and the Problem of War. The text is an account and critique of Barth’s views on war, based on Barth’s writings as well as personal conversations Yoder had with him.

Chapter 3 offers a general overview of Barth’s approach to the ethics of killing. While Barth doesn’t embrace an absolute prohibition on killing, he does think that the New Testament has pushed back the boundaries on acceptable instances of it to the point where only in the rarest of cases is it permissible.

Yoder writes:

It is indeed a matter of surprise, Barth remarks (CD 400), that after the incarnation in which human life was taken up by God himself in Christ, after the crucifixion where human death was likewise assumed and absorbed by Christ, and after the resurrection when death’s power was broken, the New Testament does not simply declare all killing to be out of the question. It is clear that the New Testament reckons much less than the Old Testament with the possibility of cases where killing is necessary; the improbability and infrequency of such cases in the New Testament clearly calls us to vigilance and to hesitancy before we may conclude that we have come to the point where the taking of life is commanded. Yet the New Testament clearly does not forbid killing. “On the basis of the incarnation and crucifixion the protection of life has received the sharpness and intensity which obliges us to push further and further back the border between killing which may be commanded as ultima ratio and murder which is forbidden” (KD 456). This pushing back of the border between legitimate and illegitimate killing is undeniably the burden of the New Testament; yet it still has not been pushed back infinitely. There is still room beyond it for killing. (pp. 29-30)

Yoder goes on to offer Barth’s take on specific issues such as capital punishment:

There are logically three possible kinds of grounds for judicial penalties. The first is the protection of society. But a protection which is so absolute as to require the absolute elimination of any menace is justifiable only if the state which is to be protected, or the nation which intends to protect itself, is also an absolute. The absolute value of the state or the human social order is, however, something which the Christian cannot affirm. The second general reason for penalties is the expiation of an offense against the moral order; yet the Christian knows taht there can and need be no more expiation since the cross of Christ. The third general ground for judicial penalties is the argument that through punishment the criminal may be rendered a more useful citizen. In this case killing is conceivable only if we are sure ahead of time that no improvement is possible; this also is something which a Christian may not affirm. Thus Barth concludes that the death penalty normally is never acceptable; capital punishment may not legitimately be a state institution. However, in exceptional cases the death penalty might become a necessity. Such cases arise in wartime, e.g., as treason or perhaps as the necessity to assassinate a tyrant. Both these possibilities belong in the field of warfare rather than in the field of normal judicial procedure; we shall therefore defer their discussion. (p. 34)

I find the second and third arguments convincing, but the firts can be questioned I think. To say that “society” or “the state” cannot for Christians be an absolute value is undeniable. However, what about cases where capital punishment may be the only way to prevent other people from being killed? Granted that their lives are not absolute values either (for Barth, according to Yoder, physical life has value in that it is the vehicle of our obedience to God), doesn’t it still seem that if one had to choose between the life of a murderer and the life (lives) of his victim(s) that the murderer should be put to death? Still, as John Paul II pointed out in Evangelium Vitae, this situation generally doesn’t obtain in modern industrialized nations where murderers can be restrained by non-lethal means.

Yoder’s discussion of Barth’s view of abortion is also worth noting:

Again it is clear that the will of God is the preservation of life. Again it is clear that man has no right to make exceptions. Again there can be the extreme case in which it can be the will of God for the life of an embryo to be sacrificed intentionally. Contrary to his general procedure elsewhere, Barth enumerates certain conditions (CD 421 ff.); these conditions, however, are not to be understood in a casuistic sense, but rather as attempts to make still more clear how extreme the case must be for it ever to be possible to say that God commanded the killing. For example, the first condition is that it must be a matter of life against life. Abortion for the sake of convenience, for the avoidance of psychological shock, to avoid illegitimate birth even as the result of rape, for economic reasons, or for reasons of health cannot be justified. Only if it is clear that a developing pregnancy really threatens the life of a mother can it be permitted to take the life of the unborn child. The second condition is that once the question has been weighed, the decision before God must be made courageously–conscientiously, but also with certainty. Third, the decision can be made only as a response to the command of God, and fourth, it must be made in the knowledge of and in faith in the forgiveness of God in Christ. (p. 32)

In later chapters Yoder is going to question whether Barth’s concept of the Grenzfall (the “borderline case” or “extreme case”) that may permit killing is adequate for the use Barth makes of it.

Salon has an interesting article on the great Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-Man. It notes the role Ditko’s exteme political individualism came to influence his art:

Sixties hipsters thought that Ditko’s urban realism and trippy visions meant that he was one of them. They couldn’t have been much more wrong. Around the time that Ditko fell out with Marvel Comics in 1966, he became fascinated with Ayn Rand and objectivism, and his work started to take on a severe and increasingly strident right-wing tone. He spent a few years working for the small company Charlton Comics, where his most significant creation was the Question: a hero in a suit, hat and tie, with no face — just a blank pink blot — and a ruthless contempt for moral relativism. At a subsequent stint with DC Comics, he created the Hawk and the Dove (a pair of superhero brothers, whose personalities were exactly what you’d guess) and the Creeper (a yellow-skinned, green-haired, red-maned, screeching maniac).

And then, by the end of the ’60s, Ditko retreated into the world of the small press — fanzines and self-published comics — where he could write and draw whatever he pleased. Comics like “Mr. A” and “Avenging World” became his venue to rant semi-intelligibly about objectivism, how there’s no middle ground or gray area in morality, and so on. He spent most of the next 30 years creating Rand-inspired comics that are beautifully designed and composed but almost unreadable; they’re explicitly didactic, but so heavy-handed that it’s impossible to imagine them swaying anyone’s opinions. (Ditko continued to draw hundreds of pages a year through the ’90s but hasn’t published any new work since 2000.)

Of course, Spider-Man is arguably the least Randian superhero imaginable. He is constantly sacrificing his personal life to altruistically protect others.

The wife is out of town for a few days, so I loaded up the Netflix queue with things I knew she wouldn’t want to watch.

Last night’s offering was Shenandoah, a 1965 Jimmy Stewart vehicle in which Stewart plays Charlie Anderson, a farmer and widower living on his Viriginia farm with his seven children (and one daughter in law) during the last stages of the Civil War. Anderson steadfastly refuses to take sides in the war, and the dramatic tension comes from his efforts to protect his family caught between the two clashing armies from the chaos that war unleashes.

The synopses of the movie almost invariably describe Anderson as a “pacifist” becuase of his refusal to take up arms on behalf of the Confederacy or the Union. But that doesn’t seem quite right, since Anderson and his boys aren’t afraid to mix it up when the situation calls for it, for instance in beating the tar out of some federal purchasing agents who’ve come to confiscate some of their horses for the Union cavalry.

Rather, what Anderson seems to be is essentially an anarchist who refuses to fight on behalf of any government. We see this clearly in one exchange between Anderson and a Confederate officer who’s come to recruit Anderson’s six boys for the army.

Officer: Virginia needs all her sons Mr. Anderson.

Anderson: That might be so, Johnson, but these are my sons. They don’t belong to the state. When they were babies I never saw the state comin’ around here with a spare tit! We never asked anything of the state and never expected anything. We do our own living, and thanks to no man for the right.

The anti-slavery Anderson isn’t about to send his boys to fight for a cause he doesn’t believe in. But he’s also not going to be bossed around by Yankees coming in to confiscate his property and kill his countrymen (and who end up taking his youngest son prisoner when the boy is mistaken for a “Johnny Reb”). For Anderson loyalty to his family trumps whatever loyalty he may have to the state, whether it be Virginia, the Confederacy, or the Union.

Stewart is in fine form here, and, in fact, my one criticism of the film would be that most of the other actors (which include Katherine Ross from The Graduate in an early role as well as Glenn Corbett from Route 66) look positively mediocre in comparison.

Definitely a melodramatic weepie, but overall a good flick with a stellar performance by the great Stewart.