Russell Brand Documentary filmmaker Deeyah Khan is determined to confront hate and prejudice by meeting some of the most extremist groups in the world. She has sat down with White Supremicists in the US and interviewed former Jihadists to further understand what drives people to join these groups. Her film “White Right: Meeting The Enemy” won an Emmy and is available on Netflix. We discuss the role politics, class, feminism and everything in between plays in relation to this issue. Listen to all the latest episodes of my Under The Skin podcast only on Luminary – sign up for free here: http://luminary.link/russell Check out more Under The Skin videos here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list… Subscribe to my channel here: http://tinyurl.com/opragcg (make sure to hit the BELL icon to be notified of new videos!) Listen to my Under The Skin podcast here: http://luminary.link/russell Get my book “Recovery” here: https://amzn.to/2R7c810 Get my book “Mentors” here (and as an audiobook!): https://amzn.to/2t0Zu9U Instagram: http://instagram.com/russellbrand/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/rustyrockets Produced by Jenny May Finn (Instagram: @jennymayfinn)

Does what you remember determine who you are now?

5th October 2017 (iai.tv)

Helen Beebee 

| Samuel Hall Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester

It’s no coincidence that a lot of philosophers are big fans of science fiction. Philosophers like to think about far-fetched scenarios or ‘thought experiments’, explore how they play out, and think about what light they can shed on how we should think about our own situation. What if you could travel back in time? Would you be able to kill your own grandfather, thereby preventing him from meeting your grandmother, meaning that you would never have been born in the first place? What if we could somehow predict with certainty what people would do? Would that mean that nobody had free will? What if I was really just a brain wired up to a sophisticated computer running virtual reality software? Should it matter to me that the world around me – including other people – is real rather than a VR simulation? And how do I know that it’s not?

Questions such as these routinely get posed in sci-fi books and films, and in a particularly vivid and thought-provoking way. In immersing yourself in an alternative version of reality, and by identifying or sympathising with the characters and seeing things from their point of view, you can often get a much better handle on the question. Philip K. Dick – whose Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, first published in 1968, is the story on which the 1982 film Blade Runner is based –  was a master at exploring these kinds of philosophical questions. Often the question itself is left unstated; his characters are generally not much prone to philosophical rumination on their situation. But it’s there in the background nonetheless, waiting for you to find it and to think about what the answer might be.

Some of the questions raised by the original Dick story don’t get any, or much, attention in Blade Runner. Mercerism – the peculiar quasi-religion of the book, which is based on empathy and which turns out to be founded on a lie  – doesn’t get a mention in the film. And while, in the film as in the book, the capacity for empathy is what (supposedly) distinguishes humans from androids (or, in the film, replicants; apparently by 1982 ‘android’ was considered too dated a word), in the film we don’t get the suggestion that the purported significance of empathy, through its role in Mercerism, is really just a ploy: a way of making everyone think that androids lack, as it were, the essence of personhood, and hence can be enslaved and bumped off with impunity.

__

“A philosophical issue that is raised in the film – and to some extent in a more interesting way than in the book – is the issue of personal identity and its connection with memory. Does what you can remember make a difference to who you are?”
___

That said, the question of personhood is still very much alive and well in the film. The rogue Nexus 6 replicants, who have illegally escaped from the off-world colonies to Earth, are unhappy with their status as mere possessions – slaves, basically. And they are particularly unhappy with their four-year life-spans (genetically engineered to stop them developing their emotional capacities too much); their aim in coming to Earth is to find a way to live longer. They have, they think, been treated unfairly – and they want to get out of the terrible predicament inflicted on them by their makers, the Tyrell Corporation. While all the replicants apart from Rachael (who is not an escaped slave but an employee of the Tyrell Corporation on Earth) have decidedly psychopathic tendencies, it’s hard not to sympathise. If you were enslaved and were facing imminent ‘retirement’, you would most certainly, and rightly, think that you had been unfairly treated, and perhaps you would go to similar lengths to try and put the situation right. And of course Rachael, who gets pretty close to passing the Voight-Kampff empathy test, is even more difficult to conceive as a mere machine and not a genuine person.

But another philosophical issue that is raised in the film – and to some extent in a more interesting way than in the book – is the issue of personal identity and its connection with memory. Does what you can remember make a difference to who you are? In one sense of ‘who you are’, the answer is clearly yes. Our character, our hope and fears and ambitions, why we love some people and are indifferent to others – these are all shaped by our memory. Some of the replicants – including Rachael – have been endowed with false memories. As Tyrell puts it: ‘If we gift them with a past … we create a cushion or pillow for their emotions and consequently we can control them better’.

For Tyrell, then, ‘implanting’ false memories is a means of controlling the replicants: perhaps it makes them more emotionally stable and hence less prone to unpredictable outbursts. The more easily you can predict a replicant’s behaviour, the easier it is to keep it under control. But what about the role of these false memories for a replicant herself? (Or should it be ‘itself’? That’s the question of personhood again.) In the case of the rogue replicants, it’s unclear what role the false memories play. One of the replicants, Leon, keeps photographs, some of which presumably connect in some way with false memories. Apparently he feels some kind of emotional attachment to them, even though he has (we may assume) never been under the illusion that they are photographs of his real past; he must always have known that he was a replicant, given his enslaved status.

For Rachael, things are different. She finds out in the course of the film that she is a replicant; she previously thought she was a human being. She starts out thinking that those memories are really her memories. So for her, the discovery that she is a replicant is a double shock: she discovers not only that she is not a human being (and therefore that she does not have very long to live; she’s likely to be bumped off by a blade runner, but in any case only has a four-year lifespan), but also that her entire life has been a lie: the childhood she remembers never really happened.

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“[Blade Runner] is manna from heaven to a philosopher teaching personal identity, because Rachael personifies a tricky concept: the concept of a ‘q-memory’.”
___

It’s at this point that – at least with a certain amount of imagination –things get really interesting, because what Rachael previously thought of as her childhood did really happen: it happened to Tyrell’s niece. The things she thought that she had done or experienced in her childhood were really things that Tyrell’s niece did or experienced. (This marks an interesting difference with the book. In the book, Rachael starts out thinking she is Tyrell’s (Rosen’s) niece – but we don’t know whether Rosen ever had, or still has, a niece, or whether Rachael’s false memories are simply fabricated. In the film, by contrast, it seems that Rachael never thought she was Tyrell’s niece; she just thought she had a childhood. She didn’t realise it was that childhood. But we do know that her false memories are not simply fabricated: they are memories of someone else’s experiences.)

All of this is manna from heaven to a philosopher teaching personal identity, because Rachael personifies a tricky concept: the concept of a ‘q-memory’. As we already saw, there is a sense in which what you can remember makes a difference to who you are. But does what you can remember literally make a difference to who you are, in the sense that the fact that the human being that’s currently reading these words can remember doing X, Y and Z twenty years ago, or last Tuesday, is at least part of what makes the human being who did all those things you can now remember the very same person as you, now?

Back in the late 17^th Century, the philosopher John Locke thought so. He came up with what’s often referred to as the ‘memory theory’ of personal identity: person A (at some time t2) is the very same person as person B (at some earlier time t1) just in case A can remember some of B’s experiences. So for example suppose that Dr Jekyll really can’t remember any of the heinous crimes perpetrated by Mr Hyde. Then on Locke’s view Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde really are two different people – and, correspondingly, Dr Jekyll is not morally responsible for Mr Hyde’s crimes. (Though presumably he would still be indirectly responsible for them as a kind of accessory, having knowingly brought Mr Hyde into existence through drinking the serum.)

There is something very appealing about the memory theory (or I think so anyway). But it suffers from a number of major flaws as it stands, one of which is that the theory is blatantly circular. That’s because it’s just part of the concept of memory that you can only genuinely remember your own experiences. If you claim to remember starring as Deckard in Blade Runner, your claim is only going to be true if you are Harrison Ford. So we can’t use whether or not you remember starring in Blade Runner to establish whether or not you are Harrison Ford; we’d already need to know the answer to the second question in order to answer the first one. So we can’t use memory as the criterion for personal identity.

Enter – nearly three centuries later – two philosophers, Sydney Shoemaker and Derek Parfit, who in the early 1970s tried to solve this problem. They appealed to the idea of a ‘quasi-memory’ or q-memory. A q-memory is just like a real memory, except without the requirement that the experience that you q-remember must be a memory of your experience. And the (hotly contested) idea is that we can define personal identity over time in terms of q-memory rather than memory, thus neatly sidestepping the circularity objection.

What exactly is a q-memory, though? Well, a q-memory must be a q-memory of somebody’s experience – if you seem to remember visiting the rings of Saturn, then that’s definitely just a delusion and not a q-memory, because nobody has had that experience.

Also, the q-memory must bear the right sort of causal connection to the original experience. So for example imagine you have a particularly vivid imagination and have been obsessively following Donald Trump’s activities recently. One day you have a really vivid seeming-memory as of giving his speech to the Boy Scouts of America. It’s not like just remembering the footage of the speech; the seeming-memory, let’s suppose, is as of actually giving the speech. And imagine that this seeming-memory is exactly like Trump’s real memory of giving the speech. Trump’s seeming-memory is a real memory all right; it was him giving the speech in the first place. Yours isn’t a real memory; you weren’t even there. And – crucially – it isn’t a q-memory either, because there isn’t the right kind of causal connection to the original experience (that is, to Trump’s experience of giving the speech). You have somehow managed to concoct your seeming-memory on the basis of seeing the footage and imagining yourself in Trump’s position. So the causal history of your seeming-memory is completely different to the causal history of Trump’s (real) memory, which has whatever kind of causal history memories normally have (the experience was somehow encoded and stored in his brain for later retrieval, however that works). So – according to Shoemaker and Parfit – your seeming-memory isn’t a q-memory any more than is your seeming-memory of visiting the rings of Saturn; it’s just another delusion.

This is where Rachael from Blade Runner comes in. From what we’re told in the film, it looks like she really does have genuine q-memories of Tyrell’s niece’s experiences. (Tyrell’s niece in the film doesn’t have a name, but let’s call her Jane.) Jane saw that spider outside her window, and she didn’t tell anyone about it – not even her mother. And yet Rachael has a seeming-memory of that experience just as it actually happened to Jane. So it looks as though the only way that seeming-memory could have found its way into Rachael’s head is if it was somehow extracted from Jane’s head and fed into Rachael’s. (It’s not as though the seeming-memory could have been concocted in something like the way you concocted your seeming-memory of giving Trump’s speech. There are no videos, no transcripts, no basis on which Rachael or Tyrell or anyone else could have done that.) Rachael’s seeming-memory, that is, has the right kind of causal connection to the original experience. So it really is a q-memory.

__

“If you do think that Rachael would then be the same person as Tyrell’s niece, what should you say in a slightly different case where the ‘original’ is still alive? They can’t, surely, both be Jane.”
___

Where does that get us? Well, as I said, the point of the notion of q-memory is to use it – instead of the notion of memory – as the basis for a version of the ‘memory theory’ of personal identity. But we can’t just substitute q-remembering for remembering in Locke’s requirement (so that A is the same person as B just in case A can q-remember B’s experiences), since that would make Rachael the same person as Jane, just by virtue of q-remembering the spider. That definitely seems wrong. So – at the very least – we would have to require that A q-remembers a lot of B’s experiences. (How many? That’s a tricky question, and any answer is going to seem pretty arbitrary. But let’s ignore that problem.)

But what if Rachael was given a much more comprehensive ‘implant’ of Jane’s (real) memories – say, the full set of Jane’s memories up to the age of 20? Would that make her the same person as Jane? Imagine that Jane was suffering from a terminal illness, and – perhaps as a way of ensuring her survival but in a different physical form – Tyrell implanted all of her memories into a Nexus 6: Rachael. Maybe then it would be right to say that Rachael is the same person as Jane? After all, maybe this isn’t so different from what happens all the time in Star Trek: when Captain Kirk is ‘beamed up’ to the alien planet, his body (on the ship) is destroyed and an exact duplicate is constructed on the planet. It’s a new body, definitely; but it looks as though Kirk-on-the-planet is the same person as the previous Kirk-on-the-ship: it’s still Captain Kirk. Or at any rate, that’s what the Star Trek narrative requires us to think. So maybe our Jane/Rachael case is like that?

Well, this question raises a whole host of other questions. One is the question raised earlier about whether a Nexus 6 is a person at all. If Rachael isn’t a person, then she definitely can’t be the same person as Jane; she’s just a replicant non-person that’s had a q-memory implant. And if you do think that Rachael would then be the same person as Jane, what should you say in a slightly different case where the ‘original’ Jane is still alive and well and living in Ohio? They can’t, surely, both be Jane.

Questions, questions. That’s the trouble with philosophy: you try and fix a problem to make your theory work, and a whole host of others then come along that you have to fix as well. But I hope one thing is clear: if you’re a science fiction fan, you’re probably a philosopher at heart.

 Image Credit: Sean Young and Harrison Ford in Blade Runner (Warner Bros, 1982)

Helen Beebee
5th October 2017

Musical Society of Algemesí (Spain) WANT CANNONS? Watch our live performance for cannons, fireworks and tower bell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUpuA… The Year 1812 Solemn Overture, Op. 49, popularly known as the 1812 Overture, is a concert overture in E♭ major written in 1880 by Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky to commemorate the successful Russian defense against Napoleon’s invading Grande Armée in 1812. In 1974, the Boston Pops added cannons, church bells and fireworks to draw crowds to their Independence Day concert. It was so successful that the inclusion of the “1812 Overture” became a staple. Flash Mob performed by Banda Simfònica d’Algemesí on September 3rd 2016 at Algemesí city (Spain), playing Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture”; after the success achieved with the Ravel’s Bolero flashmob in 2013. Director/Conductor: Alberto Ferrer i Martínez www.societatmusicalalgemesi.com

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.”

by Frederick Douglass 

Born a slave in 1818 on a plantation in Maryland, Douglass taught himself to read and write. In 1845, seven years after escaping to the North, he published Narrative, the first of three autobiographies. This book calmly but dramatically recounts the horrors and the accomplishments of his early years—the daily, casual brutality of the white masters; his painful efforts to educate himself; his decision to find freedom or die; and his harrowing but successful escape.

An astonishing orator and a skillful writer, Douglass became a newspaper editor, a political activist, and an eloquent spokesperson for the civil rights of African Americans. He lived through the Civil War, the end of slavery, and the beginning of segregation. He was celebrated internationally as the leading black intellectual of his day, and his story still resonates in ours.

(Goodreads.com)

Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from the Original Epicenter

by Fang Fang, Michael Berry (Translator) 

FROM ONE OF CHINA’S MOST ACCLAIMED AND DECORATED WRITERS COMES A POWERFUL FIRST-PERSON ACCOUNT OF LIFE IN WUHAN DURING THE COVID-19 OUTBREAK.

On January 25, 2020, after the central government imposed a lockdown in Wuhan, acclaimed Chinese writer Fang Fang began publishing on online diary. In the days and weeks that followed, Fang Fang’s nightly postings gave voice to the fears, frustrations, anger, and hope of missions of her fellow citizens, reflecting on the psychological impact of forced isolation, the role of internet as both community lifeline and source of misinformation, and most tragically, the lives of neighbors and friends taken by the deadly virus.

A fascinating eyewitness account of events as they unfold, ‘WUHAN DIARY’ captures the challenges of daily life as changing moods and emotions of being quarantined without reliable information. Fang Fang finds solace in small domestic comforts and is inspired by the courage of friends, health professionals and volunteers, as well as the resilience and perseverance of Wuhan’s nine million residents. But, by claiming the writer’s duty to record she also speaks out against social injustice, abuse of power, and other problems which impeded the response to the epidemic and gets herself embroiled in online controversies because of it.

As Fang Fang documents the beginning of the global health crisis in real time, we are able to identify patterns and mistakes that many of the countries dealing with the novel coronavirus have later repeated. She reminds us that, in the face of the new virus, the plight of the citizens of Wuhan is also that of citizens everywhere. As Fang Fang writes: “The virus is the common enemy of humankind; that is a lesson for all humanity. The only way we can conquer this virus and free ourselves from its grip is for all members of humankind to work together.”

Blending the intimate and the epic, the profound and the quotidian, ‘WUHAN DIARY’ is a remarkable record of an extraordinary time.

(Goodreads.com)

The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

by Michael Lewis 

The morning after Trump was elected president, the people who ran the US Department of Energy waited to brief the administration’s transition team on the agency it would soon be running. Nobody appeared. Across all departments the stories were the same: Trump appointees were few and far between; those who did show up were shockingly uninformed about the functions of their new workplace.

Michael Lewis’s brilliant narrative of the Trump administration’s botched presidential transition takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its leaders through willful ignorance and greed. The government manages a vast array of critical services that keep us safe and underpin our lives, from ensuring the safety of our food and medications and predicting extreme weather events to tracking and locating black- market uranium before the terrorists do. The Fifth Risk masterfully and vividly unspools the consequences of what happens when the people given control over our government have no idea how it works.

(Goodreads.com)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Peter Abelard
Petrus Abaelardus  • Pierre Abaelardus
Born	1079 Le Pallet near Nantes, France
Died	21 April 1142 (age 62 or 63) Abbey of Saint-Marcel near Chalon-sur-Saône, France
Notable work	Sic et Non
Era	11th-century philosophy Medieval philosophy
Region	Western philosophy French philosophy
School	Scholasticism Conceptualism
Main interests	Metaphysics, logic, philosophy of language, theology
Notable ideas	Conceptualism, Limbo Moral influence theory of atonement[1][2]
Influences[show]
Influenced[show]

Peter Abelard (/ˈæb.ə.lɑːrd/; Latin: Petrus Abaelardus or Abailardus; French: Pierre Abélard, pronounced [a.be.laːʁ]; c. 1079 – 21 April 1142) was a medieval French scholastic philosopher, theologian, teacher, musician, composer, poet, and preeminent logician.^[4] He is best known in popular culture for his passionate love affair and intense philosophical exchange with his brilliant student and eventual wife, Héloïse d’Argenteuil. He is described as “the keenest thinker and boldest theologian of the 12th century”^[5] and as arguably the greatest logician of the Middle Ages.^[4] “His genius was evident in all he did”; as the first to use ‘theology’ in its modern sense, he championed “reason in matters of faith”, and “seemed larger than life to his contemporaries: his quick wit, sharp tongue, perfect memory, and boundless arrogance made him unbeatable in debate”–“the force of his personality impressed itself vividly on all with whom he came into contact.”^[4] He is furthermore considered the most significant forerunner of the modern self-reflective autobiographer, paving the way and setting the tone with his publicly distributed letter, “The History of My Calamities”, for both celebrity tell-alls and later religious autobiographies such as Augustine’s Confessions.^[6]

Life

Youth

Abelard, originally called “Pierre le Pallet”, was born c. 1079 in Le Pallet,^[7] about 10 miles (16 km) east of Nantes, in Brittany, the eldest son of a minor noble French family. As a boy, he learned quickly. His father, a knight called Berenger, encouraged Pierre to study the liberal arts, wherein he excelled at the art of dialectic (a branch of philosophy), which, at that time, consisted chiefly of the logic of Aristotle transmitted through Latin channels. Instead of entering a military career, as his father had done, Abelard became an academic. During his early academic pursuits, Abelard wandered throughout France, debating and learning, so as (in his own words) “he became such a one as the Peripatetics.”^[6] He first studied in the Loire area, where the nominalist Roscellinus of Compiègne, who had been accused of heresy by Anselm, was his teacher during this period.^[5]

Rise to fame

Jean-Baptiste Goyet, Héloïse et Abailard, oil on copper, c. 1829.

Around 1100, Abelard’s travels finally brought him to Paris. In the great cathedral school of Notre-Dame de Paris (before the current cathedral was actually built), he was taught for a while by William of Champeaux, the disciple of Anselm of Laon (not to be confused with Saint Anselm), a leading proponent of Realism.^[5] Around this time he changed his surname to “Abelard”, sometimes written “Abailard” or “Abaelardus”. Retrospectively, Abelard portrays William as having turned from approval to hostility when Abelard proved soon able to defeat the master in argument.^[a] While Abelard’s thought was closer to William’s thought than this account might suggest,^[8] William thought Abelard was too arrogant.^[9] It was during this time that Abelard would provoke quarrels with both William and Roscellinus.^[7] Against opposition from the metropolitan teacher, Abelard set up his own school, first at Melun, a favoured royal residence, then, around 1102–4, for more direct competition, he moved to Corbeil, nearer Paris.^[6]

His teaching was notably successful, but the stress taxed his constitution, leading to a breakdown and a trip home to Brittany for several years of recovery. On his return, after 1108, he found William lecturing at the hermitage of Saint-Victor, just outside the Île de la Cité, and there they once again became rivals, with Abelard challenging William over his theory of universals. Abelard was once more victorious, and Abelard was almost able to hold the position of master at Notre Dame. For a short time, however, William was able to prevent Abelard from lecturing in Paris. Abelard accordingly was forced to resume his school at Melun, which he was then able to move, from c. 1110-12, to Paris itself, on the heights of Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, overlooking Notre-Dame.^[10]

From his success in dialectic, he next turned to theology and in 1113 moved to Laon to attend the lectures of Anselm on Biblical exegesis and Christian doctrine.^[7] Unimpressed by Anselm’s teaching, Abelard began to offer his own lectures on the book of Ezekiel. Anselm forbade him to continue this teaching, and Abelard returned to Paris where, in around 1115, he became master of the cathedral school of Notre Dame (though the present cathedral was not yet begun) and a canon of Sens (the cathedral of the archdiocese to which Paris belonged).^[6]

Héloïse

Héloïse d’Argenteuil lived within the precincts of Notre-Dame, under the care of her uncle, the secular canon Fulbert. She was famous according to contemporary lore as the most well-educated and intelligent woman in Paris, renowned for her knowledge of classical letters, which extended beyond Latin to Greek and Hebrew.Abelard and Heloïse in a manuscript of the Roman de la Rose (14th century)

At the time Heloise met Abelard, he was surrounded by crowds—supposedly thousands of students—drawn from all countries by the fame of his teaching. Enriched by the offerings of his pupils, and entertained with universal admiration, he came to think himself the only undefeated philosopher in the world. But a change in his fortunes was at hand. In his devotion to science, he claimed to have lived a very straight and narrow life, enlivened only by philosophical debate: now, at the height of his fame, he encountered romance.^[6]“Abaelardus and Heloïse surprised by Master Fulbert”, by Romanticist painter Jean Vignaud (1819)

Upon deciding to pursue Heloise, Abelard sought a place in Fulbert’s house, and by in 1115 or 1116 began an affair. (While he describes the relationship as a seduction in his autobiography, Heloise’s letters contradict and depict a relationship of equals kindled by mutual attraction.) Abelard boasted of his conquest using example phrases in his teaching such as “Peter loves his girl” and writing popular poems and songs of his love that spread throughout the country. Once Fulbert found out, he separated them, but they continued to meet in secret. Héloïse became pregnant and was sent by Abelard to be looked after by his family in Brittany, where she gave birth to a son whom she named Astrolabe, after the scientific instrument.^[7][6][b]

To appease Fulbert, Abelard proposed a secret marriage so as not to mar his career prospects. Héloïse initially opposed it, but the couple were married. When Fulbert publicly disclosed the marriage, and Héloïse denied it, Abelard sent Héloïse to the convent at Argenteuil, where she had been brought up, in order to protect her from her uncle. Héloïse dressed as a nun and shared the nun’s life, though she was not veiled.

Fulbert, most probably believing that Abelard wanted to be rid of Héloïse by forcing her to become a nun, arranged for a band of men to break into Abelard’s room one night and castrate him. Roscellinus would later belittle Abelard for being castrated.^[11] Later, Abelard decided to become a monk at the monastery of St Denis, near Paris.^[7] Before doing so he insisted that Héloïse take vows as a nun. Héloïse sent letters to Abelard, questioning why she must submit to a religious life for which she had no calling.^[6]

Later life

Now in his early forties, Abelard sought to bury himself as a monk of the Abbey of Saint-Denis with his woes out of sight.^[12] Finding no respite in the cloister, and having gradually turned again to study, he gave in to urgent entreaties, and reopened his school at an unknown priory owned by the monastery. His lectures, now framed in a devotional spirit, and with lectures on theology as well as his previous lectures on logic, were once again heard by crowds of students, and his old influence seemed to have returned. Using his studies of the Bible and — in his view — inconsistent writings of the leaders of the church as his basis, he wrote Sic et Non (Yes and No).^[7]

No sooner had he published his theological lectures (the Theologia Summi Boni) than his adversaries picked up on his rationalistic interpretation of the Trinitarian dogma. Two pupils of Anselm of Laon, Alberich of Reims and Lotulf of Lombardy, instigated proceedings against Abelard, charging him with the heresy of Sabellius in a provincial synod held at Soissons in 1121. They obtained through irregular procedures an official condemnation of his teaching, and Abelard was made to burn the Theologia himself. He was then sentenced to perpetual confinement in a monastery other than his own, but it seems to have been agreed in advance that this sentence would be revoked almost immediately, because after a few days in the convent of St. Medard at Soissons, Abelard returned to St. Denis.^[8]

Life in his own monastery proved no more congenial than before. For this Abelard himself was partly responsible. He took a sort of malicious pleasure in irritating the monks. As if for the sake of a joke, he cited Bede to prove that the believed founder of the monastery of St Denis, Dionysius the Areopagite had been Bishop of Corinth, while the other monks relied upon the statement of the Abbot Hilduin that he had been Bishop of Athens. When this historical heresy led to the inevitable persecution, Abelard wrote a letter to the Abbot Adam in which he preferred to the authority of Bede that of Eusebius of Caesarea‘s Historia Ecclesiastica and St. Jerome, according to whom Dionysius, Bishop of Corinth, was distinct from Dionysius the Areopagite, bishop of Athens and founder of the abbey; although, in deference to Bede, he suggested that the Areopagite might also have been bishop of Corinth. Adam accused him of insulting both the monastery and the Kingdom of France (which had Denis as its patron saint); life in the monastery grew intolerable for Abelard, and he was finally allowed to leave.^[13]

Abelard initially lodged at St Ayoul of Provins, where the prior was a friend. Then, after the death of Abbot Adam in March 1122, Abelard was able to gain permission from the new abbot, Suger, to live “in whatever solitary place he wished”. In a deserted place near Nogent-sur-Seine in Champagne, he built a cabin of stubble and reeds, and a simple oratory dedicated to the Trinity and became a hermit. When his retreat became known, students flocked from Paris, and covered the wilderness around him with their tents and huts. He began to teach again there. The oratory was rebuilt in wood and stone and rededicated as the Oratory of the Paraclete.^[13]Statue of Abelard at Louvre Palace in Paris by Jules Cavelier

Abelard remained at the Paraclete for about five years. His combination of the teaching of secular arts with his profession as a monk was heavily criticized by other men of religion, and Abelard contemplated flight outside Christendom altogether.^[14] Abelard therefore decided to leave and find another refuge, accepting sometime between 1126 and 1128 an invitation to preside over the Abbey of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys on the far-off shore of Lower Brittany. The region was inhospitable, the domain a prey to outlaws, the house itself savage and disorderly.^[13] There, too, his relations with the community deteriorated.^[14]Abelard receives the monastery of the Paraclete Héloïse (1129)

Lack of success at St Gildas made Abelard decide to take up public teaching again (although he remained for a few more years, officially, Abbot of St Gildas). It is not entirely certain what he then did, but given that John of Salisbury heard Abelard lecture on dialectic in 1136, it is presumed that he returned to Paris and resumed teaching on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. It is presumed his lectures included logic, at least until 1136,^[c] but were mainly concerned with the Bible, Christian doctrine, and ethics. Then he produced further drafts of his Theologia in which he analyzed the sources of belief in the Trinity and praised the pagan philosophers of classical antiquity for their virtues and for their discovery by the use of reason of many fundamental aspects of Christian revelation.^[14]

While Roscellin accused Abelard of having maintained ties with Heloise for some time, it is at this point that Abelard came back into significant contact with Héloïse. In April 1129, Abbot Suger of St Denis succeeded in his plans to have the nuns, including Héloïse, expelled from the convent at Argenteuil, in order to take over the property for St Denis. Héloïse had meanwhile become the head of a new foundation of nuns called the Paraclete. Abelard became the abbot of the new community and provided it with a rule and with a justification of the nun’s way of life; in this he emphasized the virtue of literary study. He also provided books of hymns he had composed, and in the early 1130s he and Héloïse composed a collection of their own love letters and religious correspondence ^[14] containing, amongst other notable pieces, Abelard’s most famous letter containing his autobigraphy, Historia Calamitatum (The History of My Calamities). This moved Héloïse to write her first Letter;^[15] the first being followed by the two other Letters, in which she finally accepted the part of resignation, which, now as a brother to a sister, Abelard commended to her. Sometime before 1140, Abelard published his masterpiece, Ethica or Scito te ipsum (Know Thyself), where he analyzes the idea of sin and that actions are not what a man will be judged for but intentions.^[7] During this period, he also wrote Dialogus inter Philosophum, Judaeum et Christianum (Dialogue between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian), and also Expositio in Epistolam ad Romanos, a commentary on St. Paul‘s epistle to the Romans, where he expands on the meaning of Christ‘s life.^[7]

Conflicts with Bernard of Clairvaux

Abelard was to face, however, another challenge which would put a final end to his teaching career. After 1136, it is not clear whether Abelard had stopped teaching, or whether he perhaps continued with all except his lectures on logic until as late as 1141. Whatever the exact timing, a process was instigated by William of St Thierry, who discovered what he considered to be heresies in some of Abelard’s teaching. In spring 1140 he wrote to the Bishop of Chartres and to Bernard of Clairvaux denouncing them. Another, less distinguished, theologian, Thomas of Morigny, also produced at the same time a list of Abelard’s supposed heresies, perhaps at Bernard’s instigation. Bernard’s complaint mainly is that Abelard has applied logic where it is not applicable, and that is illogical.^[16] Amid pressure from Bernard, Abelard challenged Bernard either to withdraw his accusations, or to make them publicly at the important church council at Sens planned for 2 June 1141. In so doing, Abelard put himself into the position of the wronged party and forced Bernard to defend himself from the accusation of slander. Bernard avoided this trap, however: on the eve of the council, he called a private meeting of the assembled bishops and persuaded them to condemn, one by one, each of the heretical propositions he attributed to Abelard. When Abelard appeared at the council the next day, he was presented with a list of condemned propositions imputed to him.^[17]

Refusing to answer to these propositions, Abelard left the assembly, appealed to the Pope, and set off for Rome, hoping that the Pope would be more supportive. However, this hope was unfounded. On 16 July 1141, Pope Innocent II issued a bull excommunicating Abelard and his followers and imposing perpetual silence on him, and in a second document he ordered Abelard to be confined in a monastery and his books to be burned. Abelard was saved from this sentence, however, by Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny. Abelard had stopped there, on his way to Rome, before the papal condemnation had reached France. Peter persuaded Abelard, already old, to give up his journey and stay at the monastery. Peter managed to arrange a reconciliation with Bernard, to have the sentence of excommunication lifted, and to persuade Innocent that it was enough if Abelard remained under the aegis of Cluny. Abelard was treated not as a condemned heretic, but as a revered and wise scholar.^{[citation needed]} He spent his final months at the priory of St. Marcel, near Chalon-sur-Saône, before he died on 21 April 1142.^[17] He is said to have uttered the last words “I don’t know”, before expiring.^[18] He died from a combination of fever and a skin disorder, most likely scurvy.^[19]

Disputed resting place/lovers’ pilgrimage

Dedicatory panel in the Père Lachaise Cemetery

Abelard was first buried at St. Marcel, but his remains were soon carried off secretly to the Paraclete, and given over to the loving care of Héloïse, who in time came herself to rest beside them in 1163.

The bones of the pair were moved more than once afterwards, but they were preserved even through the vicissitudes of the French Revolution, and now are presumed to lie in the well-known tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery in eastern Paris.^[20] The transfer of their remains there in 1817 is considered to have considerably contributed to the popularity of that cemetery, at the time still far outside the built-up area of Paris. By tradition, lovers or lovelorn singles leave letters at the crypt, in tribute to the couple or in hope of finding true love.

This remains, however, disputed. The Oratory of the Paraclete claims Abelard and Héloïse are buried there and that what exists in Père-Lachaise is merely a monument, or cenotaph. According to Père-Lachaise, the remains of both lovers were transferred from the Oratory in the early 19th century and reburied in the famous crypt on their grounds.^[21] Others believe that while Abelard is buried in the tomb at Père-Lachaise, Heloïse’s remains are elsewhere.

Philosophy and theology

Philosophical thought

The general importance of Abelard lies in his having fixed more decisively than anyone before him the scholastic manner of philosophizing, with the object of giving a formal, rational expression to received ecclesiastical doctrine. Though his particular interpretations may have been condemned, they were conceived in essentially the same spirit as the general scheme of thought afterwards elaborated in the 13th century with approval from the heads of the Church.

He helped to establish the ascendancy of the philosophical authority of Aristotle which became firmly established in the half-century after his death. It was at this time that the completed Organon, and gradually all the other works of the Greek thinker, first came to be available in the schools. Before his time, Plato‘s authority was the basis for the prevailing Realism. As regards his so-called Conceptualism and his attitude to the question of universals, a discussion can be found in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Scholasticism.

Outside of his dialectic, it was in ethics that Abelard showed greatest activity of philosophical thought. He stressed the subjective intention as determining, if not the moral character, at least the moral value, of human action. His thought in this direction, anticipating something of modern speculation, is remarkable because his scholastic successors accomplished least in the field of morals, hardly venturing to bring the principles and rules of conduct under pure philosophical discussion, even after they were made fully aware of Aristotle’s great ethical inquiries.

Regarding the unbaptized who die in infancy, Abelard—in Commentaria in Epistolam Pauli ad Romanos—emphasized the goodness of God and interpreted St. Augustine of Hippo‘s “mildest punishment” as the pain of loss at being denied the beatific vision (carentia visionis Dei), without hope of obtaining it, but with no additional punishments. His thought contributed to the forming of Limbo of Infants theory in the 12th–13th centuries.^[22]

Philosophical works

• Logica ingredientibus (“Logic for Advanced”) completed before 1121
• Petri Abaelardi Glossae in Porphyrium (“The Glosses of Peter Abailard on Porphyry”), c. 1120
• Dialectica, before 1125 (1115–1116 according to John Marenbon, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard, Cambridge University Press 1997).^[23]
• Logica nostrorum petitioni sociorum (“Logic in response to the request of our comrades”), c. 1124–1125
• Tractatus de intellectibus (“A treatise on understanding”), written before 1128.^[24]
• Sic et Non (“Yes and No”) (A list of quotations from Christian authorities on philosophical and theological questions)^[25]
• Theologia ‘Summi Boni’,^[26] Theologia christiana,^[27] and Theologia ‘scholarium’.^[26] His main work on systematic theology, written between 1120 and 1140, and which appeared in a number of versions under a number of titles (shown in chronological order)
• Dialogus inter philosophum, Judaeum, et Christianum, (Dialogue of a Philosopher with a Jew and a Christian) 1136–1139.^[28]
• Ethica or Scito Te Ipsum (“Ethics” or “Know Yourself”), before 1140.^[29]

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Abelard

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another

by Matt Taibbi 

Part tirade, part confessional from the celebrated Rolling Stone journalist, Hate Inc. reveals that what most people think of as “the news” is, in fact, a twisted wing of the entertainment business

In this characteristically turbocharged new book, celebrated Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi provides an insider’s guide to the variety of ways today’s mainstream media tells us lies. Part tirade, part confessional, it reveals that what most people think of as “the news” is, in fact, a twisted wing of the entertainment business.

In the Internet age, the press have mastered the art of monetizing anger, paranoia, and distrust. Taibbi, who has spent much of his career covering elections in which this kind of manipulative activity is most egregious, provides a rich taxonomic survey of American political journalism’s dirty tricks.

Heading into a 2020 election season that promises to be a Great Giza Pyramid Complex of invective and digital ugliness, Hate Inc. will be an invaluable antidote to the hidden poisons dished up by those we rely on to tell us what is happening in the world.

(Goodreads.com)

Consider Mahatma Gandhi, a rather busy fellow who was trying to drive a colonial power out of his homeland and keep Hindus and Muslims from slaughtering one another. At the start of one especially busy day, Gandhi said, “I have so much to accomplish today that I must meditate for two hours instead of one.”

–From “You Know You Should Meditate, So Why Don’t You?” by Philip Goldberg on huffpost.com.

Russell Brand Another episode of The Russell Brand BookClub – this week is Encounter With The Self. You can get a copy of the book here: Instagram: http://instagram.com/russellbrand/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/rustyrockets Produced by Jenny May Finn (Instagram: @jennymayfinn)