Invincible Ignorance Research Articles

The smog of ignorance: Knowledge and wisdom in postnormal times

Using the Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom (DIKW) hierarchy as a template, this paper explores futures of knowledge and wisdom. It suggests that Big Data is generating gargantuan information that would radically transform what we understand as knowledge. Emergent knowledge will be a combination of objective knowledge, as defined by Popper, and toxic knowledge, an amalgam of different verities of ignorances. Plain ignorance generated by fake news, alternative facts, manufactured fake science, false history, the paranoia of anonymous on-line mobs and ‘bullshit’. Vincible ignorance produced by knowledge that generations of scholars, philosophers, writers, novelist and religious thinkers have cautioned against – attempts to create a perfect human being, or autonomous weapons of mass destruction, or to cheat death, as well as racist algorithms, weaponised disciplines, and deliberate creation of chaos for political expediency. And invincible ignorance that is the outcome of our (western civilization’s) Unthought – things we have never thought simply because they are out of the framework of the dominant paradigms, myopic disciplinary boundaries, theories, principles, assumptions, and axioms. Emergent knowledge shrouded in the smog of ignorance will make the conventional exercise of wisdom almost impossible. If wisdom is defined simply as knowledgeable expert decision making based on experience, understanding and insight, then Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be perfectly suitable for the job. Indeed, some scholars and thinkers are already suggesting that AI can, and should, be the repository of all wisdom. This paper argues that postnormal times require a new order of wisdom capable of circumnavigating the smog of ignorance. We need to move away from the notion of wisdom as a repository of individual quality, the prerogative of sagely (mostly) men, to a more profound understanding: wisdom as a collective, communal, enterprise; a social and cultural quest for life we are losing in postnormal times.

The Salamanca School on Slavery: From Naturalism to Culture and Awareness

This article examines the reflections on slavery by a group of 16th-century scholastics considered members or followers of the so-called School of Salamanca. I show that a gradual process of critical awareness developed regarding both the concept of natural slavery and its justifications. After pointing to the fact that Native Americans and Africans were the first victims of the modern application of the concept of natural slavery, I identify the most important milestones leading up to the intellectual dismantling of the concept, effectively leaving it without a recognizable point of reference in the real world. In a further step, I point out that, despite the theory of natural slavery having been abandoned, the practices that protected legal slavery since antiquity persisted in Spanish America, especially when applied to African slaves. Some of these thinkers contributed to a first wave of accusatory pleadings against the persistent deception intentionally used by slave sellers and owners to circumvent the legal clauses dictated by the Spanish Monarchy governing the release of Africans unjustly deprived of freedom. Nevertheless, and despite the pioneering critiques offered by figures such as Bartolome de Las Casas and Tomas de Mercado, the Salamanca scholars were not unanimous in their support of this criticism. In fact, we can identify in the writings of Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto the core of the legal and moral-theological argumentation utilized by many buyers and sellers all the way up to the 19th century. As I show, at this time, an alleged invincible ignorance about the conditions under which a slave brought to the Western Indies had been enslaved was sufficient to warrant a just title, thus granting the ownership to holders in the Americas.

Defeating Ignorance – Ius ad Bellum Heuristics for Modern Professional Soldiers

Just War Theory debates discussing the principle of the Moral Equality of Combatants (MEC) involve the notion of Invincible Ignorance; the claim that warfi ghters are morally excused for participating in an unjust war because of their epistemic limitations. Conditions of military deployment may indeed lead to genuinely insurmountable epistemic limitations. In other cases, these may be overcome. This paper provides a preliminary sketch of heuristics designed to allow a combatant to judge whether or not his war is just. It delineates the sets of relevant facts uncontroversially accessible and inaccessible to contemporary professional soldiers. Relevant facts outside these two sets should by default be treated as inaccessible until proven otherwise. Even such a rudimentary heuristic created in this way demonstrates that practical recommendations of MEC-renouncing Just War Theory are not too challenging to follow and still signifi cantly impact a compliant combatant’s behavior.

Invincible Ignorance and the Americas: Why and How the Salamancan Theologians Made Use of a Medieval Notion

Invincible ignorance is defined as the state in which one cannot overcome his ignorance, despite one’s utmost diligence, and hence cannot be blamed for the acts resulting from that circumstance. It is particularly relevant with regard to law and principles that one is bound to know. The main problem with the admission that such a state may occur results from the difficulty of assessing the subjective element present in such a state: How can we know that one applied his diligence to the utmost extent? This notion emerged in the 12th century. But while medieval theologians elaborated such a notion, they nonetheless stressed that in reality no one could be guiltlessly ignorant of natural and divine law. The arrival of the Spaniards to the Americas triggered the awareness that entire nations could, in fact, be invincibly ignorant of Christianity. The Spanish theologians then started to use this notion, admitting the existence of invincible ignorance of some principles of divine and natural law. Their argumentative strategy rested on emphasising the subjective element of invincible ignorance. In this article, I examine Vitoria’s Relectio de Indis against the medieval doctrinal background. I also analyse Vitoria’s, Domingo de Soto’s and Juan Gil de Nava’s unedited lectures on Aquinas’s Summa theologiae as well as the works by Matias de Paz, Juan Lopez de Palacios Rubios, Juan de Celaya and Bartolome de Las Casas.

Matías De Paz and the Introduction of Thomism in the Asuntos De Indias: A Conceptual Revolution

Most of the writings dedicated to assessing the contribution of the Spanish Second Scholasticism to the controversial issue of infidels’ dominion began their analyses with the well-known Francisco de Vitoria’s Relectiones (1532). This article offers a reconstruction of the history of the theological and juridical debates on this key issue on the Iberian Peninsula since the late 13th century. Special attention is paid to friar Matias de Paz, who was asked to offer his advice on the early patterns of rule and domination imposed on the Native Americans at the Junta de Burgos (1512), introduced to the discussions about asuntos de Indias the Thomist conceptual framework later employed by Vitoria, Soto, Suarez and many other prominent members of the so-called School of Salamanca. The article shows that it was, in fact, De Paz who first considered the Amerindians infidels affected by an »invincible ignorance«, and he tried to curb some of the many abuses committed against them by applying the distinctions between different types of dominium and principatus.

Unjust War and a Soldier's Moral Dilemma

This paper explores the central question of why soldiers in democratic societies might decide to fight in wars that they may have reason to believe are objectively or questionably unjust. First, I provide a framework for understanding the dilemma caused by an unjust war and a soldier's competing moral obligations; namely, the obligations to self and state. Next, I address a few traditional key thoughts concerning soldiers and jus ad bellum. This is followed by an exploration of the unique and contradicting moral problems that confront modern soldiers and their officers. I argue that although traditional positions such as invincible ignorance provide a rather dangerous ‘head-in-the-sand’ mentality, soldiers serving a democratic government are nonetheless very limited in their legal and moral ability to interpret what is a justifiable war. However, a very few select senior officers are in positions to make such legal and moral decisions concerning jus ad bellum.

What Does the Catholic Church Teach about Mission to the Jewish People?

The article outlines and critiques three important arguments advanced by those who hold that the Catholic magisterium teaches that there should be no mission to the Jewish people. The author raises two important background issues: invincible ignorance and the difference between supersessionism and fulfillment. He argues that the trajectory of magisterial teaching from Vatican II to the present day supports mission but advises prudential judgment regarding practice.

JUDGING THE JUDGES: EVALUATING CHALLENGES TO PROPER AUTHORITY IN JUST WAR THEORY

The article criticizes the trend of reformulating the traditional just-war criterion of Proper Authority, which was designed to de-legitimize force by non-state actors, into a requirement that decisions to resort to force be multilateral. The article illustrates several shortcomings of the judgment processes of the UN Security Council and General Assembly, the World Court, and states’ populations, and argues among other things that reformulating Proper Authority would render other criteria meaningless, especially Just Cause. Finally, the article rebuts the strongest objection to a system in which states judge their own causes for war: the problem of invincible ignorance.

Sine Culpa? Vatican II and Inculpable Ignorance

Lumen gentium no. 16's genuine optimism for the salvation of non-Christians is nonetheless a heavily qualified one. Among other things, it applies only to those “who are, without fault, ignorant [sine culpa, ignorantes] of the Gospel of Christ and his Church.” This article examines (1) Vatican II's understanding of such “inculpable ignorance” and its relationship to the traditional concept “invincible ignorance” and (2)—more speculatively—the extent to which it might apply in modern, Western societies.

“All So Morbid”: The Gothic in Conrad’s Lord Jim

“All So Morbid”:The Gothic in Conrad’s Lord Jim Mark Alan Williams (bio) In his June 1917 “Author’s Note” to Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad claimed to be “puzzled and surprised” by a woman’s complaint that his book was “all so morbid” (vii, ix). While Conrad admitted that her judgment provided “food for an hour’s anxious thought,” he dismissed the woman’s perception, by denying “anything morbid in the acute consciousness of lost honour” and assuring his readers that Jim was “not the product of coldly perverted thinking,” nor “a figure of Northern Mists either” (“Author’s” ix). He stated that Jim was a man he’d seen “pass by” on a roadstead, “appealing,” “one of us” (“Author’s” ix). But these arguments surely do not answer the woman’s charge. For throughout Lord Jim, Conrad persistently juxtaposes Jim’s solid, healthy good looks with his elusive mind and untrustworthy behavior. Charlie Marlow even once declares that it was precisely Jim’s familiar, wholesome appearance which made his internal weakness “a thing of mystery and terror” (Lord 46): to then appeal to Jim’s appearance as re-assuring proof of his sound nature—much less the sound nature of the novel—rings hollow. In truth, Conrad’s rebuttals were bound to lack substance. Whatever morbid was intended to suggest—gloom, melancholy, disease, disturbance, death—Lord Jim is “all so morbid” by any definition (“Morbid”; “Author’s” ix). The novel offers a dark vision of a world rife with horror and death, a broad observation to which Conrad’s “Author’s Note” offers no rebuttal. That an hour’s anxious consideration from Conrad on the possibly morbid nature of Lord Jim produced only these tenuous and myopic arguments against such a reading suggests that just such a reading is in order. Late in Lord Jim, Marlow abruptly interrupts his narration of events on Patusan to pose a dark question: “How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?” (Lord 296). By the [End Page 1] time this anguished question breaks through the surface of the tale, Marlow’s audiences have become so used to the Gothic strains of Conrad’s prose that this chilling supernatural metaphor may entirely escape notice. Just more Marlovian melodramatics, perhaps. But the darkness of the question is quickly surpassed by the gloom of Marlow’s answer. He says of killing this specter, [i]t is an enterprise you rush into while you dream, and are glad to make your escape with wet hair and every limb shaking. The bullet is not run, the blade not forged, the man not born; even the winged words of truth drop at your feet like lumps of lead. You require for such a desperate encounter an enchanted and poisoned shaft dipped in a lie too subtle to be found on earth. (Lord 296) In this passage, at least, the aforementioned specter is fear, not a literal ghost. Jewel is afraid because of what she can’t know about Jim, what Marlow calls her “invincible ignorance,” and she is looking to Marlow to “exorcise” her anxiety with words (Lord 296). This brief interaction with Jewel mirrors Marlow’s basic project in all of Lord Jim. The novel’s compiled narrative details and enacts Marlow’s “desperate encounter” with fear and uncertainty (Lord 296). The oft-told story Marlow brandishes is his attempt at managing the fears and uncertainty arising from the events of Jim’s life. Hoping to “exorcise” these haunting doubts, he imbues his tale with unearthly elements, subtle fictions (Lord 296). This doubt is figured throughout the narrative by pervasive Gothic elements such as the specter. Conrad’s language in this passage, mixing as it does metaphors of dreams and ghosts, is indicative of his utilization of the Gothic and the liminal—together, the liminoid, as explained below—to express this uncertainty and its accompanying horror. Lord Jim should be read as a liminoid Gothic novel, trappings and all: hauntings; dark sins against humanity; deserted, sinister, enchanted locations; rituals; and, most importantly, the Un-Dead.1 All are characteristic of the liminal and the Gothic...

A Curious Condition of Being: The City and the Grove in Chaucer's Knight's Tale

THE citizens of Chaucer's Knight's Tale?divine, semi-divine, human?occupy a curious universe.1 It is a place where the prin ciple of contradiction does not hold: Thebes is demolished by line 900 but is somehow reconstituted by line 1283; the grove is razed to make room for the amphitheater and razed again to provide place and material for Arcite's funeral. In this cosmos, the writ of the high god Jupiter does not run?at least not in the fundamental matter of resolving the strife in heaven between Venus and Mars. Both city and grove are crucial sites in the Tale's action, and their moving in and out of existence establishes the Tale's elastic ontology, while the displacing of Jupiter by Saturn unsettles the Tale's presumed theological hierarchy. The inhabitants of this universe find nothing remarkable in such physi cal, or metaphysical, eccentricities, for such are the conditions of their being. They are simply unaware of the heavenly friction. The audience, both Chaucer's contemporaries and ourselves, thus discover a situation in which the characters with whom we might identify are as ignorant of the fabric of the universe they inhabit as they are blind to the laby rinthine ways of the gods who, they suppose, rule it. This is, arguably, the impression that Chaucer wanted to achieve, since he changed his primary source?Giovanni Boccaccio's II Teseida delle nozze di Emilia?to create his characters' invincible ignorance. I look first at Thebes, then the grove, finally at Theseus's First Mover lecture and the circumstances surrounding it.

The Enlightened Grunt? Invincible Ignorance in the Just War Tradition

This essay addresses one of the central questions in the ongoing debate about just war theory: are soldiers morally responsible for serving in unjust wars? Francisco de Vitoria addressed this question in the sixteenth century using the concepts of invincible and vincible ignorance. He excused soldiers serving in unjust wars, if they did not know the war was unjust and if they did not have the means to overcome their ignorance; if they had the means, they were morally culpable. In modern just war theory, ignorance is still used both to blame and excuse military service in unjust wars. This essay identifies ten different ways that scholars have used ignorance to argue about the moral responsibilities of soldiers. It then applies the different meanings of ignorance to soldiers serving in Western nations and, using Vitoria's means tests, evaluates if modern soldiers do indeed have the means to overcome their ignorance. Since many soldiers do have the means, invincible ignorance should no longer be used as an excuse for their service in unjust wars; furthermore, soldiers may, in fact, be morally culpable for serving in them.

The Impossibility of Local Skepticism

According to global skepticism, we know nothing. According to local skepticism, we know nothing in some particular area or domain of discourse. Unlike their global counterparts, local skeptics think they can contain our invincible ignorance within limited bounds. I argue that they are mistaken. Local skepticism, particularly the kinds that most often get defended, cannot stay local: if there are domains whose truths we cannot know, then there must be claims outside those domains that we cannot know even if they are true. My argument focuses on one popular form of local skepticism, ethical skepticism, but I believe that the argument generalizes to cover other forms as well.

The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535-1603 (review)

Reviews 191 Parergon 21.2 (2004) Dillon,Anne,TheConstructionofMartyrdomintheEnglishCatholicCommunity, 1535-1603 (StAndrews Studies in Reformation History),Aldershot,Ashgate, 2003; pp. xxvii, 474; 69 b/w plates; RRP £59.50; ISBN 0754603059. This is a stimulating and thought-provoking book on a currently fashionable topic. Subversion of the accepted images of justice is one of the more difficult but effective ways of altering the perceptions of generally accepted authority. The representation of individuals executed with the full panoply of the law for the highest crime against the state was contested between the English Protestant rulers and those who adhered to the Catholic and Roman faith. Within the small group of self-confessed Recusants who constituted those still in communion with Rome there was an urgent need for a focus for a new identity. The success of the Jesuits in presenting the priests hanged, drawn and quartered as martyrs served this purpose for over four hundred years. From the popular hymn ‘Faith of our fathers, living still in spite of dungeon, fire and sword’ to Robert Hugh Benson’s novel Come rack, Come rope which was virtually mandatory reading in my convent youth, Edmund Campion and his peers were the heroes of Catholic England. Victory in the struggle over the iconography seems to have gone to the Jesuits, a fact that James, the man about to be king, implicitly acknowledged when he criticised the English government in 1602 saying ‘I greatly wonder from whence it can proceed that not only so great flocks of Jesuits and priests dare both resort and remain in England but so proudly do use their functions through all the parts of England without any controlment or punishment these divers years past’(Akrigg, Letters, p. 201). For many years the way in which the idea that these men were martyred, not lawfully executed for treason, was achieved remained unexamined. There has, however, been considerable research in the last decade on the way in which governments used public execution to legitimise their authority that is the matrix from which Dillon’s examination springs. Ideally the delinquent confessed to the crime committed and repented on the scaffold. The whole ritual took on its own purificatory flavour as part of a macabre theatre of horror. Dillon has carefully worked through the struggle to revamp the image of the execution of those who did not accept the religion of the state in which they lived. Protestant and Catholic both sought to present the death of their co-religionists as martydom while relegating the deaths of their opponents to invincible ignorance of the true way. Dillon examines the pamphlet warfare in which both sides 192 Reviews Parergon 21.2 (2004) sought the moral high ground of a direct link to the primitive church and the arguments employed. She then seeks to deconstruct the images printed in the propaganda works produced for the edification of Catholic continental audiences, and the murals painted in the chapel of the English College in Rome to inspire the postulants to aspire to martyrdom. This painstaking analysis of images, and the subtle changes introduced into them, that are by no means self-evident to modern eyes enables her to show the sophisticated use of iconography to relate the sufferings of the priests executed on the scaffold at one level to the sufferings of the long-established primitive martyrs of England, and at another to Christ’s atonement for mankind on the cross. Symbolically they are representing Christ in his eternal sacrifice. Dillon’s examination of the story of Margaret Clitherowe leads her to conclude that the Catholic writers needed a layperson and a woman whose sufferings could offset the use that Protestant hagiography made of the death of Anne Askew. The presentation of her virtues is designed to emphasis the qualities that a lay and probably illiterate person needed if they were to be successfully promoted as martyr material in a context in which education, scholarship and reason were paramount requirements for a true martyr. Dillon concludes with a chapter in which she discusses the recreation of history to provide a Protestant line of dissent and the Catholic response to it. The debate, she shows...

From Disobedience to Toleration: William of Ockham and the Medieval Discourse on Fraternal Correction

In order to tackle the problem of ecclesiastical heresy, late medieval theologians elaborated on the idea of fraternal correction. Alexander of Hales laid the foundation of the standard theological discourse, which was developed by Thomas Aquinas. In applying this concept to the problem of papal heresy, William of Ockham questioned and reversed the hierarchical assumptions and premises in the traditional discourse. Drawing on his ethical theory of invincible ignorance, he also provided a moral basis for an inferior's dissent from ecclesiastical authority. Ockham's emphasis on the inalienable obligation of conscience in defence of ecclesiastical disobedience shows a striking similarity to some of John Locke's ideas on religious toleration.

Teaching Joseph Conrad and Henry James

Teaching Joseph Conrad and Henry James Richard A. Hocks How I wish my title, “Teaching Joseph Conrad and Henry James,” referred to a long successful career of teaching these two authors at the University of Missouri. The truth is, I offered my course on Conrad and James for the first and only time during Winter semester, 1995, and I did so primarily because of the upcoming Canterbury conference in July of that year. I have taught Henry James for many years, but in my specialized department, Conrad is considered to be outside my field, American Literature, and therefore is taught by my colleagues with appointments in early modern British Literature. On the other hand, I began to notice in recent years that, as certain colleagues in the Conradian slot have retired or moved on, Conrad has been offered less frequently than in the past (incidentally, I suspect the same may happen with James when I retire in not too many years). In any event, I finally proposed a James/Conrad graduate class with some hesitation, and having completed it, must now report that I never did feel as though my presentation of Conrad was nearly as satisfactory as was my instruction of James. Moreover, I never felt as though what I myself learned along with the students, with our various assignments and reports, left me sufficiently informed of the mystery and the magnitude of Conrad. I felt instead, and still do, that it would probably take me the same number of years to become as truly knowledgeable about Conrad as it has with James, which only increases my admiration for colleagues like Elsa Nettels and Paul Armstrong, whose work on the two I shall cite throughout the course of this essay. So there came to be a sort of subtle imbalance to my class, not an imbalance of assignments or of attention, but of deeper understanding and cumulative wisdom. Since this was one of my principal discoveries after the fact, that same imbalance, alas, may govern these remarks—much as a key signature governs even the simplest piece of music—despite my efforts to compensate. [End Page 264] The seminar pre-enrolled ten beginning graduate students and all except one quickly admitted to invincible ignorance of both Conrad and James, the one exception being a British student on exchange from the University of Manchester. Since they were starting from scratch and had no preferred titles except “Daisy Miller,” Heart of Darkness and The Turn of the Screw—about the only texts they professed to know—I configured the readings without consulting their wishes further. Representing the two writers equally would mean examining about five major fictions apiece together with appropriate scholarship. My first decision, therefore, was to eliminate the early James corpus on the grounds it would be better to read works by both authors composed approximately during the same time period, while occasionally allowing some flexibility in order to combine works by each that invited comparison on other grounds. We began with The Princess Casamassima (1886) and followed it with The Secret Agent (1907) despite some disparity in chronology, because the two novels invited comparison thematically. With the help of earlier critics like Lionel Trilling and more recent ones like Mark Seltzer, John Carlos Rowe, and Deborah Esch, the students developed a certain appreciation for The Princess after initial puzzlement. F. R. Leavis and Armstrong primarily guided us through The Secret Agent, along with Nettels’ helpful comments about its grotesque elements. These students seemed confused, however, about a novel that at times appeared to veer from cynicism to lugubriousness (although no one in class ever used that particular word). They began to nod with agreement, however, when they encountered Eileen Sypher’s Althusserian essay on “Anarchism and Gender in The Princess Casamassima and The Secret Agent,” where she asserts that both male authors domesticate political acts in an attempt to deal with the frightening “new Woman” and gender relations. Interestingly, I found that The Secret Agent held up magnificently just because of the issues they found confusing, especially the irony, which, as Armstrong points out, presupposes a relation of mutuality with the reader, even a shared ironic awareness of...

Invincible Knowledge

As there is a condition of mind which is characterized by invincible ignorance, so there is another which may be said to be possessed of invincible knowledge; and it would be paradoxical in me to deny to such a mental state the highest quality of religious faith,—I mean certitude. (J. H. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 138–139)‘She's an artist. She keeps saying the same thing without repeating herself. (Iris Murdoch, The Good Apprentice, 66)In being initiated into our life as human beings we are subject to causal influences; guiding, teaching, restraint, compulsion, incentives, rewards, warnings, penalties. Until such influences have achieved their most important work we do not share the human understanding within which there can be ratiocination, evidence, argument. So there is and must be a causal story of how we come to acquire a human understanding; a causal story for the species as a whole and a causal story for each of us; and there is not and could not be any acceptable account, either for the species or for the individual, of how we reasoned or argued our way into our initial and fundamental understanding. I say the same thing without repeating myself if I call such knowledge and understanding invincible. It is not possible to Overthrow it by reasoning any more than it is possible to establish it by reasoning.

Conjectures sur la Bible (review)

Hebrew Studies 33 (1992) 172 Reviews critical editions of the QT. A list of abbreviations frequently used in the apparatus of the Biblia Hebraica (BH and BHS) is attached and the tenns explained. This brief outline of its contents cannot do justice to the extraordinary qualities of this book, which was written by an excellent teacher and outstanding scholar. Its style is lucid, and the subject matter is presented in a didactically solid way. Along with the presentation of the aim, it describes the problems and methods of textual criticism and sketches the discipline's history. General statements are always supported by several pertinent examples. The biographical lists heading each chapter are practically exhaustive. Five indices (Bible verses, rabbinical references, Qumran documentation, authors, and topics) facilitate the search for specific infonnation. One may hope-and expect-that this book will shortly be translated into European languages and thus find the broader audience it deserves. It is safe to predict that it will become the standard reference book on the subject of textual criticism. Benjamin Kedar-KopJstein Haifa University Haifa 31999 Israel CONJECTURES SUR LA BIBLE. By Marco Treves. Pp. 347. Quvrage en souscription, 1990. Paper. Upon receipt of this book, I made a curious discovery. The late author (d. November, 1990) prefaces his volume with the following statement: "Ceux qui croient qu'un mort puisse ressuciter, qu 'une vierge puisse enfanter, qu'un homme puisse parler avec Ie bon Dieu, je les prie de ne pas lire ce livre." Disregarding this monitum, I, who confess to believe all three of Treves' propositions, proceeded with my perusal and emerged with credulity intact. Such is the power of invincible ignorance! Treves' work comprises some fifty-five short essays (several cover less than a page), ranging over the writings of the OT (proto- and deuterocanonical ) and NT, as well as the Qumran documents. Most are in French; three in English; and one in Italian, Treves' native language. In date they extend over almost forty years from the early 1950s to the late 1980s (in 1988 Treves published a small book, The Date oj the Psalms). Several of them appeared originally is such reputable biblical journals as JBL and VT. Hebrew Studies 33 (1992) 173 Reviews Unfortunately, the volume fails to provide the sort of complete publication data concerning the component essays that is usual in such collections. Although not without its intellectual forebears (Treves explicitly acknowledges his debt to, for example, R. H. Kennett, H. S. Reimarus, and J. Turmel), Treves' conjectures can certainly claim a high degree of novelty in the current exegetical context. That novelty is above all a matter of Treves' dating of the biblical material, wherein vast portions of the OT (Prov 1-9, numerous psalms, Obadiah, Isa 40-66*, Job, Canticles, Qoheleth) stem from the second century BC, while the Letter to the Hebrews originated c. 150 AD. But the surprises Treves has in store for readers by no means end here. Such readers will further discover that the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 is the High Priest Onias III, the so-called "wonderful counselor" of Isa 9:6 is a young Davidic pretender of the year 164 BC, while the depiction in Wisdom 1-5 of the conflict between the righteous and his impious persecutors has in view tensions between John the Baptist and Herod Antipas. Indeed, the (second century BC) Decalogue stands under the influence of a Buddhist monastic rule! The novelty and surprising nature of Treves' conjectures, it must be said immediately, far exceed the solidity of the case made for them. Here, the basic problem is Treves' summary, "once over lightly" mode of presentation . His "Observations sur Ie livre d'Isai'e," for instance, consist of little more than a series of jottings in which Treves sets down his impressions about the date of this or that passage for readers to take or leave. Thus, for example, Isa I:3-9 "seems to be" a description of the great apostasy of the years 167-164 BC (p. 57). That is all. Not so much as a word acknowledges the fact that to the majority of exegetes the passage "seems" to reflect conditions of 701...

The invincible ignorance of science

Abstract Apart from minor editorial changes, this is the text of the Eddington memorial lecture delivered to a general audience at Cambridge, 28 January 1988. Its principal theme is that science, by its very nature, is excluded from studying the primary experience of consciousness. It is further argued that this does not merely limit the scope of science, but that it is central to the irreconcilability of the physicist's view of reality, at the atomic level, and everyday assumptions about the real world.

Identity in Cocchiarella's T*

No topic, except perhaps The Counterfactual Conditional and The Ontological Argument (singly or together), has been of more interest to philosophers of a generally analytic stripe than Leibniz's principle of the identity of indiscernibles. We are content for present purposes to take that principle roughly as follows. (1) If two objects have all their properties in common, they are identically the same. In a logic rich enough to admit quantification over whatever properties there are of whatever things there are, (1) may be pleasantly put as follows. (2) (P)(Pa Pb) = a =b Hardly anyone wants to deny the converse of (1), and those who do must be suspected of invincible ignorance on the topic of usemention. I. e., it is obvious that (3) Every object has exactly the properties that it has. In symbols, (4) a = b (P)(Pa Pb) All of this has suggested to logicians since Russell and Whitehead, at least, that identity may be profitably thought of as a defined notion. I.e., (5) a_ b df (P)(Pa Pb) Formal justification for (5) can be found in that fact that, for all kinds of logics, type theories, set theories, and so forth, identity as construed by (5) turns out to have just the right properties-