tired fools

i’ve been reading duns scotus. the trigger for this is his influence on charles sanders peirce, and it’s possible to see, in scotus, peirce’s jumping off points. but what strikes me, as it often does when reading philosophical writers from several hundred years ago, is the god stuff. it is everywhere. one asks oneself how any of it can be taken seriously when there is a constant reaching out to a cosmic being. this is a great example, in the middle of, what would be, a sound essay:

Therefore, if substance immediately moved the intellect naturally to know the substance itself, it would follow that when a substance was absent, the intellect could know that it was not present. Hence, it could know naturally that the substance of bread does not exist in the Consecrated Victim of the Altar, which is clearly false.

Sometimes, like with Spinoza, you get the feeling that the god stuff is placed in the correct places so that the writer doesn’t get lynched. Spinoza does away with the big cheese neatly but mentions his devotion in passing, thereby enabling him to get on with the job. admittedly this didn’t make him popular. It’s often difficult to tell what is a truly held religious belief from a pragmatic wish not to be persecuted as a heretic.
of course we shouldn’t forget that god, or monotheism, was an important step in the evolution of science. where once there were many gods (explanations for individual experiences), there emerged one (a general explanation). a general catch-all explanation allows individual processes that can be analysed. it’s all about how, not who.