Beyond Anglican Identities

 

Fr. Charles Erlandson is a professor of Church History and Pastoral Theology at Cranmer Theological House. He holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Lancaster University (U.K.)

Alice C. Linsley


In his book, Orthodox Anglican Identity: The Quest for Unity in a Diverse Religious Tradition, Fr. Charles Erlandson explores orthodox Anglican identity in the context of an ongoing identity crisis within the global Anglican Communion. Erlandson recognizes that Anglicanism is “a microcosm of the entire Christian church,” because its identity reflects its diversity. He notes that religious traditions are not immune to identity crises, and orthodox Anglicans have been struggling to define their identity since the 2003 consecration of V. Gene Robinson, a partnered homosexual.

The Anglican Communion is a theological mutt with adherents who identify as Protestant, Reformed, Catholic, Evangelical, Rationalist, Empirical, and Mystical. If you seek an Anglican religious identity, you can find it here.

Reformed Catholicism can be experienced in parishes of the Anglican Province of America, The Anglican Catholic Church, The Anglican Church in North America, The Traditional Anglican Church, and The Orthodox Anglican Church. They uphold catholic doctrine and discipline, hold a high view of the sacraments, and have male priests only.

Revisionists are comfortable in most Episcopal churches where theology and practice accommodate contemporary culture and resource in Modernism. Though some of the leaders of liberal revisionism have died - Louie Crew, John Spong, and Desmond Tutu - the Episcopal Church, the Church of England, the Anglican Church of Australia, and the Anglican Church of Canada are largely allied in this innovative Anglican identity with its acceptance of women priests and same-sex unions.

Evangelical Anglicans in America find a place of comfort in most parishes of the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA). Some of their heroes - John Stott and J. I. Packer – also have passed to their reward, but their legacy remains strong among the Evangelical Anglicans globally. Charles Erlandson is among the rising Evangelical Anglican voices.

Some Evangelical Anglicans identity themselves as “Protestant” while others prefer the term “Reformed.” In my thinking, "Protestant" refers to Christian denominations that emerged after the Continental Reformation. These groups are removed from catholicity. They claim Sola Scriptura, ignoring the fact that the Scriptures themselves reflect a very ancient Messianic tradition. While Scripture is said to be their foremost authority, they invent doctrines that do not align with the whole counsel of Scripture: Young Earth Creationism, Antinomianism, Preterism, Pentecostalism, and the Rapture.

American Protestants show evidence of being confused about the substance of the Gospel, often posing it as a self-help message, a higher moral code, or an enlighten ethics. I rarely hear Protestants speak about the Trinity and the two natures of Jesus Christ.

They ignore the seasons of the Church year and rush to Christmas and Easter celebrations without periods of preparation. Most deny the sacramental nature of Baptism and Holy Communion, and the very ancient office of priest is disdained.

The Communion of Saints appears to be a foreign concept to Protestants. That the justified living and the justified at rest are united in Christ and not separated by death is regarded by some as heretical. The iconoclastic Puritans under Cromwell did a great deal of damage and in that same spirit, many Protestant churches do not have a cross in the sanctuary.

The Incarnation is barely spoken of, and the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary is generally misunderstood and usually misrepresented as idolatry. This reveals how poorly most Protestants understand Genesis 3:15 and other biblical references to the promised “Seed” or Son of God.

The attitude of "reformed and always reforming" leads to continual efforts to update worship, preaching styles, and congregational structures to make them relevant. This expresses itself in contemporary praise band music, largely passive audiences, a consumer mindset, and sermons that tickle the ears.

A 2019 Pew Research Center survey found that “only half of Millennials (49%) describe themselves as Christians; four-in-ten are religious ‘nones,’ and one-in-ten Millennials identify with non-Christian faiths.”

As Gracey Olmstead wrote in a 2014 article that appeared in the American Conservative: “America’s youth are leaving churches in droves. One in four young adults choose ‘unaffiliated’ when asked about their religion, according to a 2012 Public Religion Research Institute poll, and 55 percent of those unaffiliated youth once had a religious identification when they were younger. Yet amidst this exodus, some church leaders have identified another movement as cause for hope: rather than abandoning Christianity, some young people are joining more traditional, liturgical denominations—notably the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox branches of the faith. This trend is deeper than denominational waffling: it’s a search for meaning that goes to the heart of our postmodern age.”

It appears that the search for meaning has turned some from shallow and enculturated Christianity to the sacred mysteries experienced only through the full sacramental life of the Church. They want to belong to the "one, holy, catholic, and apostolic" Church.

At least there is a consensus today among Anglicans that the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Articles of Religion constitute essential characteristics of Anglicanism. One answer to the question "What is an Anglican" was given in an address at Canterbury House in Dallas by George Sumner: "In fact the most concise and compelling answer to the question What is an Anglican? is a prayer book Christian." Most would also agree on the necessity of the priesthood and the importance of Apostolic Succession. In that, we have made progress since the 19th century.

In his 1866 treatise “Catholic Orthodoxy and Anglo-Catholicism”, the English Churchman Julian J. Overbeck wrote: "First of all, what is the Anglican Church? The definition is more than difficult. For if I say, it is that Christian Denomination, the basis of which is the Bible, the Prayer-book, and the Thirty-nine Articles, at once the Evangelical party will rise and cry: "The Bible, and the Bible only is our foundation. We disapprove a great deal of what the Prayer-book retained from Popery. No Ritualism, no Sacerdotalism! No sham of Apostolical Succession! We all are priests. There is no Hierarchy divino jure, clergymen and laymen are not essentially different, there is only a distinction for order's sake.”



The Limits of Sola Scriptura

Having experienced different cultures while living abroad, and after teaching for many years in Protestant institutions, I could not embrace the trappings of Protestant enculturated religion or fully ascribe to the doctrine of Sola Scriptura.

The Reformers themselves recognized the limits of Sola Scriptura. The original intent was to assert that the Bible is the final and infallible authority and arbiter, rather than the Pope, the Roman Catholic Magisterium, or ecclesial councils. The doctrine upheld the role of reason in understanding what is clearly stated in Scripture concerning “all things necessary for salvation.”

Martin Luther placed the authority of the Bible over the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. He stated that "a simple layman armed with Scripture is greater than the mightiest pope without it". Luther recognized that some biblical texts are difficult to understand, and he attempted to elucidate these in his sermons.

The 1646 Westminster Confession of Faith (Chapter 1, Section VII) spoke of "the ordinary means" used to understand Scripture and these include turning to learned pastors and teachers. “All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.”

Luther’s intention was to correct abuses that arose in the Medieval Church. He clearly did not deny the role of tradition as he observed many practices such as oracular confession and the veneration of the Virgin Mary.

Today we approach the Bible less polemically. We can understand difficult passages because of the work of learned Bible scholars, textual criticism, biblical archaeology, biblical anthropology, and the study of biblical languages and biblical populations. Today the available “ordinary means” are vastly greater and more diverse.

Nevertheless, the attitude of many to church authority is indifference, and traditions, especially those regarded as “Christian” are disdained. The cultural context of our day is very different from that of the Reformers. We are heirs to the empiricism of the 20th century, and we can legitimately draw on that heritage when investigating the Scriptures as objectively as possible. As Francis Bacon reminds us, “Prudent questioning is one half of knowledge.”

The Anglican Way relies on the faculty of reason in opposition to sensation and emotion. It is a reasonable faith that finds expression in the works of great thinkers such as Anselm of Canterbury, Richard Hooker, and John Keble. Empiricism flourished in the British Isles among members of the Church of England, and though British Empiricism took an anti-Church turn, it owes much to the Anglican intellectual environment.

Those Anglicans who hold the Bible as a first authority and those who hold Scripture and Tradition together are obligated to read it thoroughly and regularly. Daily reading of the Bible characterizes The Anglican Way. It is a fundamental spiritual obligation that pertains to all Anglicans regardless of how they self-identify.

I am not advocating return to the Bible as the remedy for all conflict within the Anglican Communion. That would be as reductionist as the reductionism I object to in Protestantism. Rather, I believe that the Bible informs the mind and shapes the inner person; that it is a book that profoundly changes people. We will never change the Anglican Communion, but the Holy Spirit changes people who read the Bible, and changed people form a more perfect union. Dostoevsky was converted in a Siberian prison after reading the only book he was allowed: the New Testament.


Related reading: Review of Erlandson's Book; Anglican Communion in Crisis; Anglicans Divided

Divide Opinion as Derrida Did

 

By Peter Salmon

There have been few thinkers in the history of philosophy who have divided opinion as completely as Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). For some, he is one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, whose brilliant analyses of the text of philosophy and literature overturned many of the fundamental assumptions of each. To others, he is a charlatan: his honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1992 was opposed in a letter to The Times that accused him of not meeting accepted standards of clarity and rigour. His work, the signatories argued, consisted in no small part of elaborate jokes and puns, making French philosophy ‘an object of ridicule’.

Handsome, charismatic, pipe-smoking, Derrida looked like everything a French philosopher should. Pop songs were written about him, films were made in which he played himself, while his aphorisms appeared on T-shirts and coffee mugs: ‘There is nothing outside the text’; ‘To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend’; and ‘I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.’

He was born in Algeria on 15 July 1930, and his real name was, in fact, Jackie – named after Jackie Coogan, star of the film The Kid (1921), by his Charlie Chaplin-loving parents. Jewish, French, Algerian, Derrida’s identity was complicated, and he strove to apply this complexity to all he touched. Part of thinking like Derrida involves taking those things we take most for granted – such as our identity, such as our language – and looking for unexplored assumptions, contradictions and absences. Thinking like Derrida is a form of close reading, not just of texts, such as those of philosophy and literature, but of everything – art, religion, politics, even ourselves.

Read it all here.

Related reading: A Thumbnail Sketch of Jacques Derrida; New Leading Thinkers Course on Derrida; Levi-Strauss and Derrida on Binary Oppositions

Four Women Revived Metaphysics

 

A young Elizabeth Anscombe

Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman looks at Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley and Philippa Foot, women who studied philosophy at Oxford in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

In the late 1930s, British philosophy, at least at Oxford, was dominated by AJ Ayer, whose groundbreaking book Language, Truth and Logic was published in 1936. Ayer was the chief promoter of logical positivism, a school of thought that aimed to clean up philosophy by ruling out large areas of the field as unverifiable and therefore not fit for logical discussion.

In a sense, it sought to rid philosophy of metaphysics, those abstract questions of being and knowing that students have traditionally liked to explore late at night after one too many stimulants. It also rendered much of moral philosophy as little more than an expression of emotional preferences.

Anscombe, Murdoch, Midgley and Foot were not fans of logical positivism dogmatism or conclusions. Fortunately for them, if not for the world, the second world war intervened in their studies, removing Ayer and his acolytes from Oxford, and bringing a large influx of European émigré philosophers.

Suddenly metaphysics was back in fashion, or at least no longer frowned upon. The four women all committed to establishing themselves as philosophers, and sought to refute Ayer and his ilk.

Read more here.

The philosophical movement of Logical Positivism can be traced to the Vienna Circle (1922), a group of philosophers in Austria who held that experience is the only source of knowledge, and logical analysis using symbolic logic is the proper method for solving philosophical problems. This approach was popularized in Great Britain by A. J. Ayer and in America by Rudolf Carnap.

Logical Positivism held two key beliefs: (1) absolute confidence in empirical experience as the only source of knowledge; and (2) logical analysis performed with the help of symbolic logic is the single method for solving philosophical problems. This group of philosophers attempted to exclude metaphysics from philosophical investigation in favor of strict logical and mathematical analysis. They also stripped ethics of aspects considered important from the earliest time: conscience, intuition, emotion, etc. The result was a materialist and empirical skepticism about all truth claims. Some Logical Positivists were atheists, though this represents an opinion which cannot be proved by even the strictest logic. Others regarded the existence of God as impossible to verify and would be considered agnostics.

Logical Positivists were skeptical about truth claims that were mathematically reducible, yet optimistic about the potential of science to better the human race and life on earth. These shared a commitment to Unified Science, that is, the construction of a system in which every legitimate statement is logically reduced to a direct experience. The Vienna Circle’s Manifesto stated that “The endeavor is to link and harmonize the achievements of individual investigators in their various fields of science.”

Related reading: Elizabeth Anscombe on Justice; Elizabeth Anscombe; Princeton Students Form Anscombe Society; Thumbnail Sketch of Phillipa Foot; The Dearth of Women in Philosophy

Plato and Dionysian Mania

 

An 8th century Corinthian skyphos (wine-drinking cup).

"A careful reading of the Symposium reveals that Plato’s comparison of Socrates with the Satyrs relies exactly on the discrepancy between appearances and essence."


Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides
November 8, 2021 


In this piece I discuss Plato’s description of Socrates’ philosophical inspiration as “drunkenness” and/or Dionysian mania; Plato’s metaphor draws on earlier Greek poetry, including Euripides and his popular play The Bacchants, where Dionysus is praised as the inventor of “liquid drink of the grape” (line 279).

Importantly, Plato also draws on Solon, the famous lawgiver and poet of archaic Athens, who discussed extensively the drinking etiquette of ancient communities as a reflection of their civic character. Yet, the application of this metaphor on Socrates and his philosophical genius was fraught with difficulties since Socrates, known for conversing with the so-called daimonion, the inner voice or sign that guided him, and frequently undergoing trances in public, could be easily misunderstood as a common drunkard or even a madman — especially since wine abuse was also believed to cause madness.

To avoid the risk of contributing to the misperceptions of the Athenians about Socrates, Plato insisted that Socratic ecstasy is utterly sober (even though it can involve wine-drinking and may occur in a sympotic context). Drunkenness is a culturally embedded comparison that allowed Plato to articulate the mind-altering abilities of philosophy while offering a concrete example of how to prepare ourselves for that kind of philosophical revelation. Furthermore, Plato defends the valuable contribution of “drunken” or inspired philosophers and their insights to the city.

Read it all here.

Related reading: Wine Use in Antiquity; Two Passovers and Two Drunken Fathers; Wine Drinking and Alcoholic Drinks in Ancient Greece

Eudaimonia: On the natural resources of the soul

Eye of Providence Window, Santa Maria Assunta (Baselga del Bondone, Trento)

Lynn Merrill-Paduck

Our cognitive identities are thinking ourselves into being, into becoming ‘more than’. Yet it is easy to fall prey to intellectually reducing the three living values of Nous-Soma-Psyche (the Triunity), into a mere mind-body-spirit disjunction (the tripartite self) which necessarily diminishes access to true unity. Without a deep awareness of our triune souls, humans are trapped in a poverty of consciousness, lacking any teleological direction to attain the existential love that restores us to the Divine. The gifts of the triune may be placed within us, fleshly temporal matter, yet are not of it, for they come to us from the Aeternal, and continually draw us back unto that incontrovertible reality, as an assent towards the heavenly divine (the Good, the One). The tripartite self that we experience in the flesh can be balanced, integrated, and lived as an actualized soul, nearly unencumbered by the egoistic concerns of the mind-spirit, or the demands of carnal reality.

The soul seed is natively positioned at the center of the disjunctive tripartite self, unactivated. It remembers residing amongst the Aeternal Form of the Triunity, the greater totality of our being before birth, and it wants to recollect its indivisible wholeness. The triune soul depends on intellect to lead the way methodologically back to its source. Using our intellect we reach forth, as witnesses of the ancient promise of theorific contemplation, yet this is only one of the three portions. We must necessarily make our peace with the other portions of our being as well, body and spirit, which conform not to our will to ‘become’, but ever refute our ascent by drawing us back down into those relationships that primarily partake of the carnality of man (the fodder of concupiscence). There is no peace to be had however, in the denial of the flesh. Minimum maintenance and respect is always required, as are the relationships of the spirit of man to his total community. Neither is respite to be had by a complete ‘outsourcing’ of our inner authority to Doctors, Psychiatrists, or Ministers. Blind adherence is self-abnegating when we force ourselves into the ideal of the ‘other’, whether medical, therapeutic or doctrinal. Becoming a non-self doesn’t help anyone. Individuation is required, to orphan the soul from its excess attachments, because only a searing loneliness or deliberate isolation can provide the intentionality to reunite with the Divine. Keeping busy with earthly matters is the greatest trap, and is a direct avoidance of that very precondition.

It seems that all souls have the capacity for revelatory insight at whatever level of health, reclusion and intellect they are at, IF they integrate these tripartite resources into a quest for personal meaning. For most persons however, they place undue emphasis on only one leg of these three, and therefore miss out on their integrative gifts. Rejecting parts through scientific reductionism, mythic reductionism or apatheticism will block the pathway to The Ineffable Good. Clinging to any third(s) is vain illusion and defeats the soul quest; only a subsuming integration leads to the Divine. These three are ontologically inseparable, and even clinging to all three thirds without integration results in a conflicted humanity, the dualistic actor who juggles. There is no sufficiency to be had in a fragmented nature.

Polemicists make resolution look easy, since they are only balancing two attenuated ideas. Finding the midpoint of a duality can remain solely intellectual, a logoistic endeavor.

 
Yet since this objective - subjective reality has no ‘witness’, no Paraclete, no Divine Home for the soul, humanity is still bereft, without providence. Not so with a Triunity. This is never a thesis-antithesis-synthesis, which is actually only a resolved polemic. Nor is I-thou-we a Triunity. That level of We-ness is most desirable from an ecopsychological vantage, yet still it is completely material and earthly in content. This is the most mature phase of integrating our fragmented collectivity into an awareness of our participation mystique in the Holy Ghost. Neither private nor collective, ‘we’ are now acting members of the Imaginal Realm, lucid participants of the conscious (non-dreaming) tertiary engagement. Getting this far with uniting ones mind-body-spirit is a profound blessing indeed. Deeply comforting, but it is not yet truly Universal.

One cultivates the tripartite self through appropriate investment in its multiple parts, all the while looking through the lens of Divine Contemplation. To put down the haggardlinesses of our polemics is the one great task on the Divine chore list, and we must therefore turn to the Christos. He provides the place; wherever two or more are drawn together, the sincere gift of dialectical conversation resolves many lower mysteries, freeing the higher qualities of mind to true contemplation of the Divine. This becomes the fortitude of a new morality, this quest for ‘meaning’ as we discover the Ethical Divine together, non-conscripted to affections or temporal matter. Interior self control is the key to this sophrososynetic virtue. We need to empty ourselves of egoism.

Once actualized, there is no going back to sit in only one corner of your tripartite being, for the change is permanent, transcendent and epiphanic. The Anagoge itself is a depiction of ascent past the point of the personal, to ‘become’ in the depths of our mind-spirit-body at the point of passing it all up (a truer depth psychology there may never be) a type of personal pleroma that generates the most proficiently Divine Nous possible. Ones personality still has edges, yet there remains no private content, for all has been shed, shuffed off as material relations that hinder actualization. Once integrated, it seems that these bonds are inseparable, and the inner vision becomes the outer reality. (And now we might have reached the point where we truly have nothing to say for ourselves.) Things that can be explained are not transcendent knowledge, but rather are symbols of the unexplainable, which contain the direct transference of the One Ineffable Good into the actualized soul.

The separate values of the tripartite self need to be blended, integrated, to provide access to the divine mind within, sparking into life the ‘soul seed’, latent within all men, as an ‘eye’, like the triangular iconographic image of God of medieval days. Even though we cannot sustain a constant participation in it, we cannot escape what we now KNOW. We must reach forth from there to the Triunity of: personal pleroma / ethics of the eternal forms / contemplation of Divine Nous, to find and awaken the Eye of GOD within all of us.

Plotinus’ anti-fleshliness arises from the (seeming) utter dependence of the intellect on the flesh as the vehicle for soulful communion, to the exclusion of the other aspect of equally great import, the spirit. This keening awareness may have resulted in part from having a slave wet-nurse for eight years, because the inequities of our dependencies usually horrifies the evolved mind. Plotinus was (on the way to) purporting the hypostases of the Triunity, yet he placed the ineffable within one triadic corner, rather than transcendently centering it above, and we know that Porphyry was not a Christian sentimentalist, and (may have) misrepresented his master's mind. The monad is only described so painstakingly for the sake of the unintegrated tripartite soul as a signpost along the way, to avoid dualism. The ordering of the ‘emanations’ is confusing when ‘a God’ (Aedonai) is your personal spirit guide, and yet you’re still a pagan.

Humility, self restriction, practical justice unto others, intellectual inquiry, regular communion with like seekers, gender indistinction, shunning base interests, personalized ritual prayer; any beautiful list of tools and practical skills can get us up to the point of parading as Pharisees, but getting beyond that point requires an interiority, an inward integration. Open-hearted Prayer is the call outward and upward, silent meditation containing no thoughts is the receipt inward, for the Henosis has no room for our ego.

To trust the Grace in which we are already immersed, as the present Parousia of the Christos is the great gift. Like a joyous fish in water, we cannot truly describe it.

END

Sartre and Camus on Politics

 

Camus and Sartre

Albert Camus (1913-1960) was born into poverty in Mondovi, Algeria. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was reared in high French society. They met in Paris during the Nazi Occupation and became close friends after the War. As Europe began to rebuild, they became prominent political voices.

The two Existentialists were pursued by reporters and often quoted. Their eventual falling out received a great deal of media attention.

As Sam Dresser notes, "Readers looked to Sartre and Camus to articulate what that new world might look like." 

"We were," Simone de Beauvoir observed, "to provide the postwar era with its ideology."

Both men believed that the workers were oppressed and that new political systems were needed to liberate them from poverty. Camus leaned toward Socialism and Sartre favored Communism. In Paris, Camus wrote editorials for the underground Resistance journal Combat, to which Sartre contributed articles. 

In October 1951, Camus published The Rebel in which he articulated his idea of freedom as a process of constant non-violent re-balancing. He wrote, "Absolute freedom is the right of the strongest to dominate," while "absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction: therefore it destroys freedom." The conflict between justice and freedom required political moderation, and acceptance of the limitations of our humanity. Camus recognized that institutionalized political bodies must impose authoritarian actions, and all one can do is shout, No!

Concerning his ideology of the French Resistance: “If we have a doctrine to formulate,” Camus wrote in a 1943 letter, “it would be one of a balance of justice and of liberty, certainly difficult to realize, but outside of which nothing can be done.”

The Rebel declared Camus' preference for a peaceful socialism. The news from the USSR appalled him. Under Soviet Communism there was no freedom at all. Sartre reported that Camus "hated Communism."

Sartre disliked Camus' approach considering it "bad faith." He felt that Communism was the best system to address the dehumanizing effects of poverty, and he was prepared to endorse violence. Sartre continued to advocate Communism until 1956, when the Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest and brutally crushed the Hungarian freedom movement. Thousands were killed and wounded and nearly a quarter-million Hungarians fled their homeland.

Though Sartre distanced himself from Soviet style Communism, he never abandoned the idea that revolutionary violence might be warranted. His commitment to violent overthrow of unjust systems became acute after the 1968 May-June student riots in France. Well into his advanced years he participated in Leftist marches, some of which turned violent. He is described by Agnès Poirier as having the "sparkle of the perpetually angry man." 

Doubtless, his 1940 captivity in a Fascist prison camp colored Sartre's world. Sartre described his experience in an interview with a family friend John Gerassi. He said, "The Germans were the elite. The fascistoid prisoners were the enforcers of the elite. And the rest of us, the exploited who could only surpass the feeling of exploitation by bonding together." (J. Gerassi, Talking With Sartre: Conversations and Debates, Yale University Press, 2009, p. 105)

Related reading: How Camus and Sartre split up over how to be free; A Lost Wartime Letter From Albert Camus; INDEX of Topics at Ethics Forum

Can Computer Debates Advance the Philosophical Project?

 

Descartes and Heidegger fight it out

Justin Wienberg explores the potential of computers to do philosophy. His article was prompted by an article in Nature about the work of Noam Slonim (IBM), Yonatan Bilu (KI Institute), and Ranit Aharonov (IBM) to develop Project Debater, an autonomous computer system, that can argue with and debate humans as well the progress made with the language and communication skills of artifical intelligence, as demonstrated by GPT-3.

Weinberg writes:

As I tell my students, philosophy isn’t debate (the former is oriented towards understanding, the latter towards winning). But some of the work that goes into debate is similar to the work that goes into philosophy. What’s provocative about Project Debater, GPT-3, and related developments to me is that it suggests the near-term possibility of computing technology and language models semi-autonomously mapping out, in natural language, the assumptions and implications of arguments and their component parts.

One way to understand the body of knowledge philosophy generates is as a map of the unknown, or set of maps. Philosophical questions are points on the maps. So are premises, assumptions, principles, and theories. The “roads” on the maps are the arguments, implications, and inferences between these points, covering the ground of necessity and possiblity.

Individual philosophical works that pose questions, develop arguments, justify premises, and explore the implications of positions make small maps of small bits of the vast terrain of the unknown, and often provide “directions” to others about how to navigate it."

 

Justin wonders "What should we be doing now in regard to the development of such technology, or in regard to other prospects for the integration of computing into philosophy?"

Read the full article here.

Related reading: “Computational Philosophy” at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Does Philosophy Have Value?; Ontology and the Philosophical Project