David Oderberg - Recovering the Hierarchy of Being

[Music] okay good evening and welcome to this another installment of the humane philosophy Ian Ramsey Center seminar series which is this year run in collaboration with a grant we have received from the John Templeton Foundation science philosophy and religion in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond I should probably dispatch with my obligation to thank our sponsors to begin with who are the Institute of philosophy at the University of also obviously Ian Ramsey Center and our hosts Blackfriars hall of the University of Oxford and most importantly it is my great pleasure to introduce today's speaker professor david oder Berg who's professor of philosophy at Reading University and who did his DPhil here at Oxford and previously completed his education at Melbourne University in Australia he is a self-described non-consequentialist and in opposition to philosophers like Peter Singer he has authored over 30 papers in philosophy a few more than that over 30 includes any number over 30 and at least four books including including essentialism applied ethics moral theory and the metaphysics of identity over time and today he's going to be speaking to us on a topic in metaphysics recovering the hierarchy of being so please join me in giving our speaker a very very warm welcome this evening thanks very much Nicolai so the first thing is am I being heard okay yeah and how long am I instructed to speak for before I draw it to her and okay that should be fine I'm not quite sure because this is in the form of a PowerPoint rather than my usual thing which is you know to kind of present fully written paper I'm not quite sure whether I'm gonna finish too early too late or what but I'll try and make sure that I'll string it out if necessary to make sure that it it goes to finishes write on it off 40 40 40 45 minutes absent thanks very much folks for coming to this talk so yeah the topic recovering the hierarchy of being is something that I've been thinking a lot about recently and kind of in the process of developing a paper hopefully for publication in not too distant future it's a topic that I'd been interested in for a while but it just sort of had an opportunity an opportunity presented itself to actually work something out in a more kind of rigorous way than just simply having a few intuitions the intuition I mean the intuition being yeah some things are better than others some things are not just morally not just you know normatively but some things are metaphysically better than others basically is the intuition so I'm gonna try and explain what that actually means and why I think the this concept of the hierarchy of being is so important and why it is contrary to appearances capable of being recovered basically so here's a famous quote from Alexander Pope yesterday on man talking about what's usually called the great chain of being that I'm sure you'll be familiar with the term and probably some of you'll be familiar with the quote vast chain of being which from God began nature's ethereal human angel man beast bird fish insect what no I can see no glass can reach from infinite to thee from thee to nothing I I'm not a huge poetry expert shall we say not really a huge poetry reader but I really admire poets who are able to put abstruse philosophy into quite pithy lines in the way that Pope does because there's so much philosophy just to capsulated in a really genial way in that in that passage um so when we think of the great chain of being which I will sometimes refer to the great chain of being but I don't like the terminology I prefer just the more neutral bland term the hierarchy of being he's associated most famously with the book by Arthur Lovejoy and called the great chain of being which came out in 1936 it's a monumental work in the history of ideas and arguably it is the book which kind of created the history of ideas as a discipline really many people attribute the history of ideas to Lovejoy and his famous book the great chain of being and the book is a history of the idea of the great chain of being in the kind of sub ideas which are part of that from Plato right through to the Enlightenment and Lovejoy describes it as a part of the history of Western man's long effort to make the world he lives in appear to his intellect a rational one and he quotes th green why should the world as a whole be what it is and the great chain of being is supposed to be an answer to that perennial question he goes on to say if the world's being or extend to a range of diversity which is components exhibit have no intelligible reason than they might equally well have been other than they are the Constitution of the world would be but a whim or an accident so the great chain the idea the great chain of being or the hierarchy of being is probably the most I think one of the most significant attempts in the history of thought to answer questions like why is the universe the way it is and rather than some other way and you know why does the world have a kind of Constitution that it has and importantly Lovejoy's very quick to kind of dispense with any crude kind of science the answer to the question which would appeal to say the laws of fundamental laws of nature or something like that he says well you know what we're interested in is also the conformity of the world to the very curious set of primary laws which empirical science discovers these can't just be brute facts now obviously probably most people nowadays I guess well no no many philosophers nowadays would say well no there are brute facts and and and so on so we can you know that's something we can we can discuss but he and I'm with him on this thing that these can't just be brute facts but you know if there is going to be an explanation in the offing it's got to be an explanation which encompasses both the fundamental laws and the particular constitution of the world in conformity with those laws so historically the great chain of being was the way in which Western man from Plato's right through to the 18th century made the world intelligible so this is hard I mean it's hard for me and it's hard for I'm sure I would say probably everyone in this room to understand to appreciate the the importance of that last fact that law historical facts so when I first came across the Lovejoy's book many many years ago I country when I first saw it in some bookshop and I immediately dismissed as some kind of weird pseudo new-agey kind of thing which it was not the sort of thing that would be on any respectable philosophy syllabus it's not something that I ever encountered as a student it's just it's just not something you would have expected any philosopher to teach other than perhaps in a specific course on the history of ideas so it didn't seem to media to me it's just one of those kind of things a bit like okay so I'm gonna be this is okay I was gonna say a bit like books by Mortimer Adler but that's really unfair because although he's not taught there's you know a lot of good stuff in Mortimer Adler but there's kind of books which came out of America in the thirties and forties they're just kind of somewhere on the periphery if you like a philosophical mainstream Western philosophical thinking but you know once you get into it you realize that that's such a wrong way of looking at things and what Lovejoy is exploring it a great chain of being is this is a concept which from plate I mean this is no exaggeration from Plato to the 18th century so we're talking you know over two thousand years this was the way in which Western man made the world intelligible not the only way it was if there other things going on of course but that was one of the main conceptual tools that were you or conceptual kind of structures or frameworks which Western men used to make well and held 2,000 years well where is it now it's gone and you know you really need to pause and reflect when you think about the fact that any idea that was so prevalent in philosophical thinking for you know two millennia or more is virtually absent from the intellectual landscape you must have asked yourself why is that was it such a bad idea you know is there not anything of value there given that for 2,000 years where the man made the world intelligible by appeal to it and that's kind of a starting point for me you know the the you know if philosophers have thought of something so fun you know so fundamental to their worldview and not just philosophers but you know people of all kinds and stations in life have had something like this in mind for such a long period of time it's something to it well the chain of being as Lovejoy analyzes it is broken up into three fundamental principles one is the principle of plentitude and I've actually it's hard to find I mean so it's okay so Lovejoy zone formulation I just wrote as a missing quotation mark there sorry about that Lovejoy says the universe is a plenum for mahram in which the range of conceivable diversity of kinds of living things is exhaustively exemplified and actually ya see when you the problem with one of the problems with the book is that when you look when you go hunting in the book for a rigorous statement of the principle of the fundamental principles they're actually quite hard to find the principles are kind of enunciated sort of in passing but he never stops in the way he kind of warned to released it as a kind of analytical philosopher I want to say right here's the principle give it a label and give me that principle in a more rigorous way so you know living things actually it's not just living things and even Lovejoy recognized not just living things clean and form our room but he's mentions living things Daniel Wilson who has written a very interesting at least one now couple of commentaries on the reception his there was the content and reception of Lovejoy his book says frames that as all conceptual possibilities must be realized in actuality the principle of plentitude again that's not as rigorous as it could be but it's maybe I'll you know it's maybe a little bit better or at least an acceptable alternative to the slightly more restricted version given by Lovejoy the principle of continuity again it's a tough one to to to make more rigorous he states it as if there is between two given natural species now he's not talking about living things necessarily not just natural species if there is between two given natural species a theoretically possible intermediate type that type must be realized because if not then the principle of plentitude would be false the continuity is false then plenitude is false plenitude entails continuity and then as he puts it really echoing the kind of the neoplatonist the good or the absolute would be lacking there'll be something missing in the absolutes manifestation of itself by the diversity of forms and then the principle of gradation he says all things may be arranged in a single graded scale and at or according to their degree of perfection so the scale and at your eye just a very familiar concept on the ladder of nature no no no the the fifties that's our Lovejoy so the picture again this this is a luxury talking but the conception of the plan and structure of the world which through the Middle Ages and down to the late 18th century many philosophers most men of science and indeed most educated men were to accept without question the conception of the universe is a great chain of being again the universe composed of an immense or by the strict but seldom rigorously applied logic of the principle of continuity of an infinite number of Link's ranging in hierarchical order from the meatiest kinds of elements which barely escaped non-existence through every possible grade up to the ends perfect to see mum or in a somewhat more orthodox version to the highest possible kind of creature between which and the absolute being the disparity was assumed to be infinite every one of them differing from that immediately above and that immediately below it by the least possible degree of difference there's a lot to take in there and we can go back to that and maybe try and tease something out if you like I mean again it's there's a lot of question marks over the formulation how to understand it well the great chain of being broke and the evidence for that is that no one believes it anymore it broke I mean Lovejoy does his best to kind of you know trace that he does really an amazing job you know I mean the patience required to do the kind of conceptual kind of archaeology that he does is quite astounding sometime in the 19th century sometime in the 19th century over a period of time that we don't know exactly the extent of people just not believing it why did the chain break well I think there are reasons that are both moral and metaphysical and this is a bit of Lovejoy talking and a bit of me talking here so I'm not saying that all of this would be something that Lovejoy would agree with but quite a bit of it he would be he's most interested in the fifth reason that I've listed here evolution is and that's by far the dominant cause for the break of the chain according to Lovejoy but but the way I see it you got a number of things one the Protestant Reformation these are overlapping causes - I'm just picking sort of things picking events and moments in history out there are overlaps between them but each one you know has things going on in it which I think explain why it was that the chain kind of melted away as it were so the Protestant Reformation which obviously has many many facets to it but I think the kind of leveling that you get at least among some of the Protestant sects that broke away from the Catholic Church the kind of leveling effect you find and a kind of democratization of religion if you want to put it that way tend to the democratization and privatization of religion I think contributed to a more skeptical attitude towards divinely ordained hierarchies I guess now that's very rough-and-ready and again I'm sure there were people in the audience who will have you know views about that and we can maybe talk about that but so there's one cause that I identify which Lovejoy doesn't put as much emphasis on then you've got Galileo Newton and the Copernican principle right the idea that man was dethroned from the center of the universe through the work of first Galileo but primarily Newton Kepler and and the whole heliocentric theory you know there was just no longer a place for man at the center of that there was no evident way in which you could get you could you could extract any kind of metaphysical hierarchy from the whole heliocentric system and the Copernican principle which stands to this day that there is no kind of privileged you know a point of reference in the universe and there is no the earth is not the center of the universe the universe really has no center and so on and don't ask me more of them not a physicist again we could perhaps you know talk about that if people want to but anyway Copernican principle no privileged center of the universe anti feudalism and egalitarian egalitarianism again the leveling that you get through various social movements and Adi hierarchical movements is going to naturally feed into a loss of belief in any kind of transcendent hierarchy that somehow ordered the universe the Enlightenment again in some respects now in the Enlightenment you find there's the the the hierarchy of being still held on to you very strongly in the enlightenment by Enlightenment thinkers man is the crown of all creation and the creator is maybe kind of some sort of de stick impersonal kind of being but man is the crown of creation I'm man as in control of nature so all that kind of rationalism that you get from the Enlightenment is all there and so that's not particularly inimical to the hierarchy as such but again within the Enlightenment you know you have political movements which have tend to have a more democratizing and flattening effect on the way in which the universe and and mankind and and living creatures and so on are structured LEvolution ism which which Lovejoy places the most emphasis on and he thinks that you have to replace the hierarchy of being which is static with dynamic metaphysics of becoming you know I mean evolutionism as a theory as a kind of metaphysical view of the world feeds in to of course evolution is a kind of biological theory and so hierarchies get replaced with constantly changing and mutating and transforming species and you have extinctions and you have new species being created or coming into existence and so on and so forth and finally the other thing which I should I should have said reliever to these two things are what Lovejoy is really concerned by the evolutionism and romanticism in fact actually I sort of misspoke a bit earlier because really romanticism which for him is the main cause of the end of the heart of the chain heard shelling schleiermacher the again theologies of becoming of no self development development of something development of a cosmos all of these kinds of dynamic field of dynamical views of theology are in opposition to a more static hierarchical view of the universe another so there was there was that that fact and also just to kind of zoom in a little bit the fact is that the great chain of being the whole hierarchy of being brought with it a lot of baggage that was not put too fine a point on it a bit ridiculous so Lovejoy says since every place and the scale must be filled since each is what it is by virtue of the special limitations which differentiated from any other man's duty was to keep his place and not to seek to transcend it the good for a being of a given grade it seemed evident must consist in conformity to its type no great improvement in men's political behavior or in the organization of society could be hoped for the principles of plenitude ingrid ation could in this way among their many uses be made to serve the purposes of a species of pessimistic and backhanded apologetic both for the political status quo and for the accepted religion whatever the religion that happened to be at in that particular area of europe or and again pope says order is heaven's first law and this confess summer and must be greater than the rest more rich more wise so again so for what happens here is that the the metaphysical hierarchy gets transformed into a kind of social hierarchy with social stratification often in minut degrees here and these two things from Diego validation on the one hand the kind of classical hierarchy and then the temporal hierarchy with me please your hat please yeah Stickle hierarchy of course you have the various ranks of clergy and so on and then within the temporal hierarchy you have you know masters and servants and you know workers and more intellectually endowed people and what-have-you all the different kind of social examples of social stratification so a God will tied up with all of that which is I think overall a mistaken view of the way to used or apply the hierarchy and Richardson's novel pamela has a very interesting statement here so he has one of the characters saying wise Providence does various parts of various minds dispense the meanest slaves or those who hedge and ditch are useful by their sweat to feed the rich the rich in do return in part their store which comfortably feeds the laboring poor nor let the rich the lowest slave disdain he's equally a link of nature's chain Labor's to the same and joins in one view and both alike the will divine pursue and at the last hour level King and slave without distinction in the silent grave so he's just really mouthing there a kind of typical kind of view of the social stratification of the hierarchy of being which he's not necessarily endorsing or anything he's just this is the people started you know people did use the hierarchy at least implicitly as a way of reinforcing existing social stratification and social hierarchies you also get metaphysical and scientific accesses as well not just social and moral ones so this is an extract from shall shall born a and he's created dance technology and you know you get ideas which I suppose it's easy to laugh at these things but I mean it's easy to laugh it's all science done before you know the modern period or something and so I don't want to be trying to get cheap laughs out of it but you know I mean he's got you know a hierarchy with shellfish above tubeworms above there's that moths or something insects gall insects I had to look at what a gall insects they you know gall insects that create little kind of nests and things on trees and plants to keep their eggs and keep their young inside yeah tapeworms polyps right I mean I don't know is a tapeworm better than a polyp or a gall insect superior to a tapeworm I've absolutely no idea I'm sure born out had his reasons the thing is you know I again okay so I'm kind of rubbishing it a bit but I don't want to be too harsh because presumably did have his reasons and I'm bonnie was no fool but it's just that you know if you take the hierarchy to such minut depths to such my new to extense then then you end up with kinds of strata which just don't look plausible they just they just don't look right I mean you'd have to argue really hard to be able to prove that a goal insect was better than a tapeworm in some biological way or something so you get these metaphysical biological scientific and also moral political and social excesses attached sort of like I think of them as kind of these encrustations or you know attaching to the basic hierarchy and which cause the hierarchy in a way to collapse now what I'm trying to recover is maybe something in the hierarchy that can be rid of belief most of these in crustaceans and present something that gives food for thought so can we do better well I think we should put aside the moral and political excesses as either wrong or as not at least not directly founded on any kind of metaphysical truth so you know the idea well the king is superior to the subjects or the king is superior to the queen the queen is superior to the Prince the Prince is superior to the princess now this is what people believe you know and then all the other various ranks in there in the in the kingdom you know and then down to the Vino I got your dukes and your oils and your Barons and all the way down to the meanest serfs right I think we need to put those excess and moral and political excesses to one side I think for metaphysical reasons not just so we say yeah why why would we think the king is in somehow metaphysically superior to I don't know anyone else in the kingdom the king does not have a man our kacal essence right there's no such thing as a monarchical essence for human beings so no king is essentially a king in that sense the King's essence is the same as the essence that we all have which is to be a rational animal the essence of a human so what has the monarchical essence is the role the minar kacal role has the essence of being minar kacal obviously you know the Menaka core role has as its essence certain Menaka core features that whatever the features are of a king so the role does now if that role attaches to a human being in such a way that we are entitled to say that that human being is superior to other human beings then that's not going to be for metaphysical reasons it's going to be for moral reasons or political reasons it will be because somehow that role has a moral superiority to other roles and I think we can all kind of be on board with that in some way you know the even in our highly egalitarian society we still believe that we you know we should obey those who govern us at least to some degree I don't know Bay the law and obey our judges and whatever so we can accept all of that but it's not gonna be for metaphysical reasons or the metaphysical essence of a judge it'll be for the essence of the roles and the roles will attach for moral reasons and carry certain moral moral features with them also we shouldn't treat the hierarchy of being as a corollary of the absolute to use a term from from Lovejoy which think I mean so the neo-platonist impetus given to the hierarchy of being I think is very interesting and I don't want to you know say bad things about the neoplatonist though it's just that it gets it gets difficult to fathom I guess when you start thinking about corollary the absolute and the absolute having to somehow be being obliged to manifest itself through a stratum or strata of forms which reflect the infinite diversity somehow inherent within the absolute you have to do a lot of work to make something graspable out of that in my view I don't want to create dismiss that I just don't think we should approach the hierarchy of being through the neoplatonist gate that's all I want to say I also think and this might be a little bit more controversial particularly in a you know given the location and the audience I don't think we should we should assume the existence of God or for that matter any other immaterial agents as part of the hierarchy so if we're going to defend the hierarchy Shaw and you will see that you know I'm God is going to have a place in hierarchy but I don't think it's something you should just assume you know if you assume the hierarchy must contain God then you know P a lot of people or people will I think well why you know I mean they've it's it's likely that one might think well if that's the kind of assumption that you have to make then there must be something wrong with the hierarchy in the first place if that's what you have to assume and I don't think we need to assume that but I mean we can paint the picture that has God as part of the hierarchy without assuming that God has to be in the hierarchy you know maybe that sounds a bit obscure but maybe try and make that a bit clearer later I'm certainly not you know I certainly don't think as justly the the hierarchy can be used any in any direct way as a proof of the existence of God put it that way I think we need to define the hierarchy in terms of essential powers that is to say the powers that are of the essence of the beings within the hierarchy so what we need to do in my view is to look towards a highly generic hierarchy compatible with specific non hierarchical arrangements and I think this is likely the view that Aristotle himself had in had in in his books on the animals and elsewhere he allows and and endorses as far as I can tell the idea that although there are hierarchies in a very generic you know there's a kind of a generic hierarchy of essential powers among beings that within a particular local kind of region you're not going to be able to find hierarchies between different species of biological species of animal and so on that there's no reason why we should expect there to be maybe there is but it's not obvious that there is and he points out examples where it's not the case so I think that's more you know more in line with Aristotle's view and I think what we need to do is to make the principle of gradation the centerpiece of the hierarchy north principle of cleaner to toward principle of continuity is the principle of Grenache in' which in might to me is the heart of the hierarchy so here's one formulation of the principle of gradation from a wonderful book a book that is like right next to my you know well it's that on my iPad of course and right next to my desk you know whenever I'm working recently reprinted by a very good friend of mine in Germany so it's in available in print by Bernard Mullen I called the summary of scholar summary scholastic principles principle 210 says in material and living bodies we find an ascending order of perfections in which the higher beings have their own perfections as well as those of the lower level of being lower levels of being that seems to me to be a much better way of thinking of a principle of gradation well that continuity and plenitude well Lovejoy says if there is between two given natural species of theoretically possible intermediate type that type must be realized and again why believe it because well if you didn't believe that plenitude would be false because there'd be theoretically possible entities which didn't exist and Wilson all conceptual possibilities must be realized in actuality his pool of plenitude why should we believe this either I mean it might be true that continue it might be that continuity is true and plenitude is faulting plenitude implies continuity I don't think continuity implies plenitude I'm not denying that there might be some form of those two principles that is true I don't think it's going to be the forms that you typically see as enunciated in in Lovejoy and and in some of the Neo plateless and so on it's going to be something a bit different from that but either say I think gradation is really at the heart of the hierarchy so a principle of continuity here's a version given by wool no two versions given by wool no principle 2:12 the order of the universe displays a gradual scale of perfections from end to end through all essentially different intermediate steps to 14 every superior nature in its lease perfection or operation borders on the highest perfection or operation of the nature ranking explode in the scale of being again I think those are more plausible ways of thinking of continuity a gradual scale obviously the devil being the deal what you mean by gradual essentially different and bordering and so on I think we could say things about that and as I developed this into the paper that it hopefully will become I will have more to say about about that and the reference to the the numbers here so it's it's a it's a constant theme of much of a near plateless thought and near platens thought on this topic and also in the the I include here the Renaissance platanus vicino and so on that to draw an analogy with numbers that you know each number I've just talked about the natural numbers the natural integers each each integer contains where is made up of units right nothing's super sophisticated here so in other words each each each integer contains within it you it's lower in the scale and that if we think of the gradation or the if we think of the scale of being that way then we kind of think of at any level you have a being that kind of wraps up within it the perfections in the lowest scales but also has that has more right wraps up those perfections and has something extra as each number does this is just an analogy right this is not supposed to be some sort of proof it's just I think it is quite a suggestive analogy principle of plenitude so walnut two one six and two one seven two and six by the free choice of the creator the universe of being contains all essential levels of perfections and of nature's and also two on seven the superior one is represented by many inferior beings again I think these are much more fruitful ways of thinking about plenitude rather than some extremely strong principle to the effect that every possible every conceptual possibility to use Wilson's term has to be realized in reality or something like that just too strong but something like like these are a bit more plausible I think one has to do a bit of finessing on what it what what Mullen could mean by essential levels something essential levels is a bit maybe not the most helpful term but I think that can be made a bit more precise yeah I'm really kind of guessing what Wilma had in mind but I'm do my best to kind of come to a reasonable interpretation and I you know all I'm doing here is come into you an excellent book by Colin touch called the variety of life if you want to be convinced of the incredible diversity of life then have a look at this book and you'll be absolutely amazed so how do we define superiority all comes down to metaphysical definition of superiority we need a concept of metaphysical superiority so informally members of species yes I've been it was I'll just say species members all species s1 is superior to species s2 means it's defined as s1 can do what s do can s2 can do and more that's the informal idea so recall in material and living bodies we find an ascending order of perfections in which the higher beings have their own perfections as well as those of the lower being they can do what the lower beings can do and more that's the heart that's the intuition at the heart of the idea of metaphysical superiority and we need to explicate can do in terms of essential powers otherwise we wouldn't be talking about species Quay species right so you might have you know to to bird species that are extremely similar to each other but you know one has an ability to I don't know build nests that are stronger than the other one we want to say that bird is superior to the other one you know this could be a purely contingent matter depending on what the environment the niches that they're in and so on you need to do a lot of work to show that you know one of the bird species was superior to other the other just because of a certain kind of nest building capability that's just not strong enough so we need to talk about the essential powers of the species Quay species and the species that we need to talk about I think are the most generic in the hierarchy and that sounds weird until you realize that we're talking about metaphysical species which may or may not be biologically recognized so you know we have to get over this hurdle of thinking that when some went when you when a meta physician says species they mean biological species well maybe most of them do but I don't when I say species I mean metaphysical species unless I say specifically biological so it's not that weird we want the most generic species in our hierarchy to be to be able to explain superiority in terms of most genetic species the most generic species in how hierarchy and these species are and there's nothing original or you know unfamiliar at least to some of you here to recapitulate purely material bodies flower it's animals humans and then quick query in square brackets disembodied minds and brackets divine being now divine being is not a species God is not a specie isn't God is not a species God as an individual but it's not crucial that God be a species in order to be in the hierarchy it's not crucial to something be a member of a species or in some way itself a species or to be in the hierarchy it could be done with individuals the main factor is essence essential powers and God has an essence even though God is not a genus or species or a member of a genus member of a species God has an essence and and that's enough in my view so the powers the we're concerned with must be the most generic so again you know you might have a cryptic plant species these are plants that again morphologically are almost identical but they have an essential difference for example in toxicity you can have different fungi here which have a produce a different kind of toxicity with respect to grapes and blueberries but you don't want to say well that fungus is superior to that fungus because that one can do this kind of poisoning but the other one can well then the other one can also do certain kind of poisoning the first one can't as well that's not going to be good enough so merely having an extra highly specific power does not make for superiority and it won't be absolute superiority of s1 and s2 each have one such power that s2 has can do something s1 card and this one can do something there's two card then they'll be superior to each other and that's won't work what we want is the kind of absolute superiority not relative superiority so what we're after are the most generic powers of the essences are the most generic metaphysical species of things the most generic powers are the essences of the most generic metaphysical species of things so the hierarchy will look something like this and again nothing original here you know I've tweaked it a little bit in the way that I like it to look and and and and what I wanted to express but basically you know I think the Aristotelian - mystic view of this thing is pretty much it so you know kind of speaks for itself in a way just I want to point out just a couple of things so one I so with God and angels both of which are traditionally in the hierarchy we're talking about a bracket of them together is mind without body whereas in the case of God you have kind of active intellect without reason so God does not God's not rational right God nor irrational being God has no reason God has just an active intellect which just it's pure act God just uses his intellect angels on the other hand as Aquinas points out have passive intellects they are told things by God right thing that they don't have reason either at least on you know some thomas's of you they don't they don't have reason they they are given what they need to know by by their creator you have here bodies body without life body in life without mind body life among without reason body life might and reason then it starts to get a bit kind of wrinkly at the top then you have prime matter matter without form and then you have pure you have got the top pure act pure mind rational sense sent it and the other thing I just want to point out well two things one is that my class the rational sentient and the vegetative is a subclass within a broader class of living things so in that sense angels and a divine being a God are living right they're living they're just not organic right so they're living so I do organic to be a subclass of a living and pure potency is a receiver of the forms that are expressed in these various kinds of thing except for right only up to a certain period not in the case of God and equivocally in the case of angels because angels have potency if they don't have prime matter so you know there are a little things you have to add there and then you know pure actors the creator of the things below and pure potencies the receiver of the things above is the basic kind of picture here so there are some facts that we do need to account for so one plants are superior to mere bodies plants are not just another kind of body right so so basically if you're a reductionist this is not for you right I'm not going to convince any reductionist here about any of it you just think that plants are just more matter and there's nothing sort of essentially special about living things and you can all be reduced to physics and chemistry if we just knew enough then you know this is going to be a very little interest to you angels are superior to humans because they are obviously not just another kind of human I mean that's just should be pretty obvious I mean yeah there are religions in which people think the humans can turn into angels or were all the angels really or something like that but not not where I come from humans are angels are not another kind of kind of human and bats are not superior to mammals right so we don't want to have our definition of superiority better not yield the result of bats are superior to mammals because bats are just another kind of mammal to say the bats are superior to mammals is the borders on the incoherent so we don't want that result we do want the first two we don't want to say well we want all of these results wouldn't we want plans to be superior to me ibadat we want angels to be superior to humans we we don't want bats to be superior to mammals so definition that I've got at least for a moment until someone comes up with a counterexample is usually half as usually it happens in we do these things I can only do ones best species s1 is superior to species s2 is defined by two clauses one the set of s2 s generic powers or a non redundant proper subset of them is a proper subset P of S ones generic powers and 2's ones generic powers minus P are not explained by its being a species of s2 so s2 s2 generic powers are not or some non redundant proper subsets of them which I'll explain is a proper subset of s once generic powers but s ones generic called - all those PTO's those that the ones in P are not explained by its being a species of s2 so let me try and explain that in the time that we've got left maybe five minutes or so hopefully can get through this so the set of s2 s generic powers or a non redundant proper subset of them is a proper subset P of s ones generic powers so for example the powers of a body are a proper subset of the powers of a plant because plants are bodies they're just not mere bodies contre the reductionist right they're not mere bodies with our bodies so the powers of body are a proper subset of the powers of a plant if you know plants obey mechanics just like rocks do the powers of a human are not a proper subset of the powers of an angel for example humans have reason but have bodies so they're not a proper subset of the powers of an angel angels don't have reason or bodies but there is a non redundant proper subset of the powers of a human that is a proper subset of the powers of an angel namely intellect and will so angels have intellects and wills and humans have intellects and Will's so you have a non redundant proper subset of the powers of human that is a proper subset of the powers of an angel but for angels reason is but a non-trivial II question mark non-trivial irredundant and the body is trivially redundant so reason I think probably nontrivial e redundant because God tells angels what they need to know so because he does it it's redundant for angels to have reason now the question is non-trivial or could they have raised it could they begin if God withholds information are they capable of reasoning don't know no idea but as is officialy because they're told what they need to know their reason would be redundant for them and body is trivially redundant because angels don't have bodies essentially right so of course it's trivially redundant they don't need bodies and they couldn't have them intellect and will however are non redundant because they're essential it's essential to angels angels wouldn't be angels if they didn't have intellects and wills and to so s ones generic powers - P are not explained by its being a species of s - so how does that work well take the powers of a bat and subtract the mammalian powers or what have you got left well this is extremely biologically rough right this is not supposed to be some sort of you know textbook precision it would take a lot of slides to do that but just let's keep it simple for the sake of the presentation that power - mammalian power is the power of flight because bats are the only flying mammals so bets are the only flying mammals like all the other stuff other mammals have in various full shapes and sizes one flight is unique - two bats now the power of flight in bats appreciate presupposes and is explained by bats being mammals that's the key point so remember Clause 2's ones generic powered - P and not explained by its being a species of s - first one to be superior to s - now bat flight is explained by the fact that bats are mammals so that's the standard biological kind of analysis that shows the you know the kind of homology of the bat for limb and for example the for limb of a mouse so that's fine so bats do not turn out on my formulation bats do not turn out to be superior to mammals and that's just the way I want it they're not because they're not superior to mammals so lucky me they don't come out as superior to mammals that would be a bad result but you know I don't think you know I haven't gerrymandered I mean I just this make sense I think that the definition I've given is is I think intuitively plausible so it's not like you know here's the result I don't I don't well partly here's a result I don't want I need a formula that it's gonna make sure I don't get that result but also here's an intuitively plausible formulation and let's hope it doesn't actually yield a result I don't want and actually it doesn't yield a result but I don't want not here anyway vegetative powers presupposed but are not explained by bodily powers so yeah vegetation if you have vegetative powers you're a plant then you're gonna have bodily powers but these vegetative powers are not explained by bodily powers remember if you're reductionist this is not for you I don't believe and I've written extensively on this doesn't mean it's right but you know I have a developed view on this that vegetative powers are not explained by bodily powers so so on that on that score plants do come out of superior to me Abad ease now angelic powers - non-redundant human powers give you the angelic intellect which is passive and non-discursive the angelic intellect is not explained by angels being a species of humans which by definition they're not so angels are superior to humans by the definition of superiority that I give they have a passive and non-discursive intellect which is not explained by their being a species of human why because they're not species of humans and the same argument would apply to the superiority of god over angels and humans just substitute divine intellect for angelic intellect again the divine intellect is not explicable by gods being a kind of anything else lower in the hierarchy because the God is not a kind of anything else lower in the hierarchy so yeah it gets wrinkly at the top it gets tricky but I think we can we can fit these in again it's not supposed to be no argument for God or for angels and I'm just saying if you want God and disembodied spirits to be in the high Archy as for two thousand years people did then I think you can do it if you think about it carefully you can do it so to sum up the basic Aristotelian to mystic hierarchy of being I think can be defended and if you put aside metaphysical prejudices I think it is actually in accord with common sense now there might be further sub hierarchies but I think we should rightly reject many that were held until the 19th century so I'm not leaving I'm not ruling out other sub hierarchies within biological species I don't know how it would work out you have to think very carefully about it but I don't think it's essential to the hierarchy in the Aristotelian to mystic tradition at least there's nothing that I've argued here which is inconsistent with thinking of the hierarchy more loosely in terms of God likeness which is very common theme in in the neoplatonist than others or an increase in power and or nobility and the retreat from matter which is also extremely important in in the defenders of the hierarchy these this kind of concept that you see among people who defend the hierarchy are not excluded by anything that I've said it's just that I'm not defending the hierarchy in those terms the hierarchy also does not exclude local cyclicality so for example the food chain right we end up as food for worms and Ash Wednesday is the perfect opportunity for us to reflect on that very important point so our worms superior to us because they end up eating us well there are places where people eat worms as well we then they eat us you know well I don't know I could make some very crew unpleasant topically unpleasant jokes at the moment about eating various kinds of animal I won't so you know are they screwed us we spew to them well you know it's a sight the food chain is only a chain in one sense it's a cycle in another sense and it also doesn't include local reverse superiority so in other words there are senses in which very animals that seem quite low in the hierarch you actually superior to us so they are it's the old trope isn't it that no cockroaches are more likely than us to survive a nuclear war yeah probably are they're very you know very Hardy creatures cockroaches and turtles live much longer than us et cetera etc etc well there might be a kind of reverse superiority in a very local sense if you're thinking just about longevity or health or flourishing or something like that that's all compatible in my view with the hierarchy of being and finally you won't find an argument if the existence of God here but I think what you will find is a kind of suggestive schema that's the strongest that I would put it in other words if you think of the hierarchy as a bit like a kind of a jigsaw puzzle sort of going from linear are going from one-dimensional to two-dimensional here so it's not brilliant but if you think of the schemer as a bit like a jigsaw puzzle then you might think it's a bit puzzling that there are certain pieces that weren't there and you really might want to fill them in with some extra pieces like well disembody mines mines that are embody where disembodied Minds you can have you no matter without form or at least you know pure potency well what about pure actuality which god has identified with etc etc so I think there's suggestive thing but I don't think the hierarchy was ever or maybe not consistently offered as an argument for the existence of God it was it was more an explanation of given the existence of God how God would fit into a hierarchy and what makes God superior to other creatures and how others creatures are superior to each other so that's it thank you very much for your patience [Applause] thank you very much for a fascinating very rich thought-provoking and more generally provoking talk we've got roughly the full time for questions I can see many hands already but we'll start at the front here with Professor trig and if you could just wait until the microphone gets to you as we've mentioned it won't make you speak louder but it will make sure that your comments and questions are recorded and Ralph will come round and give the microphone to you one of the things that strikes me about the principle of plentitude that war concept your possibilities must be realized next reality is that it actually renders empirical science pointless because we could do all of our research by just sitting in an armchair thinking what must be the case and hey presto it is the case so therefore that there is no point in empirical science so you need a gap between necessity and contingency between possibility and actuality unless you want to say well actually empirical science is what we are about at all so and if that's how you frame the principle of plentitude and I don't want to frame it that way so so to the extent so all I want to say is that I think that there might be a defense of a principle of plentitude not that one and I think that you're right I think 1/2 right so what I would say is yes if the job of science is to find out what there is kind of empirically speaking then yeah you could do it from the armchair if something like that strong version of plenitude were correct however I think there is more to science than just simply finding out what there is empirically there's also finding out what things I like and it might be that although a strong principle of plentitude could tell you that there are things that have certain kinds of features sufficient to put them in the kind of the interstices between other known existence or maybe even other possible existence that it wouldn't follow from that that you would know everything about what that thing was like so there might still be some empirical work to find out what these things like in their my new show so I think it's half right what you're saying I just add that in actually in physics this principle plenitude does seem to be alive because when people are talking about many worlds they say some mathematicians and others would say well there is an infinite number of possibilities and there are actual helps and there are an infinite number of universes yeah some people say that well I did and I think they're quite wrong but but but but I mean very officious of plenitude yeah me and you both yeah thank you I'm concerned about different senses of hierarchy of being which were employing it seems to me that it's the case that one can talk about the hierarchy of created being but it is a mistake I think and on Thomas footik think it's mistake to put God in that hierarchy that God is not part of the hierarchy of being so when you talk about God's being God is in a sense beyond any category of created being and therefore there sometimes a can I think there's a sort of a proper sense of a hierarchy of being which does not have God as a part and there's a kind of metaphorical sense in which one talks about God as the highest element the hierarchy of being but I think it's dangerous not to make that distinction to make sure so that we're not putting the creator and this was simply a metaphysical argument we're not putting the creator as part of the hierarchy of being yeah so thanks again I think so I think that's half right haha again I'll tell you why I think that's half right so there was an extensive debate throughout the entire life of the great chain of being as to whether God belongs in the hierarchy and if so in what sense this is a debate it was an endless endless and maybe to some extent tedious debate about whether God was in the hierarchy now you had both sides you had those sides saying kind of what you're saying that God is kind of to put God in the hierarchy is in a way to categorize God to put God as part of some overall taxonomy to think of God as just another being only superior to all the other beings and and that's all mistaken because God is infinitely distant from all the other beings so there's no way in which something which is infinitely distant for everything else could it could be superior to everything else and then you had others who said well yeah but we need to think about certain things God is creator and God is superior to the creation if you think God is not superior to the creation then that's looking I would say to say God was not superior to the creation but just morally but metaphysically would be if I could put it in this way offensive to Pius II is it's not thus it's timmer areas to make a claim like that even if you do it in good faith you know and you're trying to make a good point it doesn't sound right God is superior to the creation so then and also you know God humans are made in the image of God and we're made in the image of God but we're not co-equal with God we're in the image of God chiefly in the soul but all chiefly in the soul as the Catechism says not solely in the soul chiefly in the soul so how do we account for that if we don't want God to be in some way superior to humans but yet capable of being you know in a hierarchy with humans such a vast superiority show some kinds of commonality just to put it in a very loose sense very loose analogical sense some kinds of commonality and I think the answer is to say well yeah to the extent that you won the height you think of God as just another being to fit in the taxonomy in the puzzle and that's wrong that is wrong I agree with you to think that there's some immeasurable distance and I don't even know how you would do that between God and creatures is also wrong and yet and yet I think we do we should say the goddess superior to all other creatures and that God is above them all and-and-and the definition I give although I didn't go into the details that the definition I give would achieve that for God the God would come out as you would hope superior to all of the creation without as I actually said in passing requiring us to think of God as being in a species or a species or a genus or inner genus or just another being you know you can just say God is an individual and God is individual in fact you know in terms of natural reason pure natural reason God is just a particular individual be a you know a being not a kind of being just a being and and God has an essence right there's a divine essence so surely well surely it's not an argument but it seems to me intuitive that that essence the essential powers of God and God has essential powers is going to be the source of the explanation of why it is that this other intuition is true namely that God is is is is wholly dominant over and this wholly distinct and superior to all of the creation so that's how I would answer that kind of question so I think is really interesting intuitively attractive and solves a lot of the normal problems of people base with this and so I'm not sure I've got this in my mind I'm just trying to work out what the significance of metaphysical superiority is so so I've got I think you know some of these kinds of chains of being in the past I've got a kind of foggy notion is quite normatively significant so the old classical theory of beauty people talk about beauties of pursuit of perfection or the idea of ideals of classicism it's absurd perfection and then there are ideals of human conduct which is supposed to you about kind of trying to approximate perfectionism and that's that makes this all extremely important if something like that's right then it's great but I can just I can just imagine this challenge to what you're saying which is you've told us that some things have powers are other things don't have we knew that I told that there are some general species of things which have highly generic powers that other gentleman don't have we knew that as well but so what what what does the claim of superiority add to the mere claim of some things have powers or other things don't have and if it's if it's like oh well what adds are these normative implications about beauty or the good life then how does how do those if you I don't know if you want to add this but if there's our water added how do those implications follow from from the mere fact of differential powers so I made a real point of not going down that alley right as you can tell right I've very carefully issued any attempt to draw out shall we say I think I think you've got a normative consequences of this hierarchy I'm not even sure in my own mind whether I want to go down that that path at this stage I think it can you know part of part of what I'm doing here is you know what I had to do was to kind of tear away the hierarchy that I think is plausible from the kind of accretions which are largely kinda normative and moral which have built up over and over the center and built up on top of it over the centuries which caused the whole thing to collapse actually so I think in a way in a way and this can probably sound like a bit of a cop-out but I just I think now's the right time to talk about that sort of thing let's try and see if we if people any philosopher in the world is willing to agree with some of this before we begin to think about whether there are any normative consequences so that's kind of a cheap answer now I mean I think that you know the obvious thought that comes to mind is that well inferior being furious species in the hierarchy are in some sense for the beings that are above them now question is well if that were true what kind of fallenness would that be they subserve them what kind of now yeah but erm subservience you say subservient and then immediately you start thinking about oh you know the master is superior to the slave and all this that that's why I just think that this gets us in the wrong text in the wrong direction talk about fullness in what senses you know the other bodies the mere bodies for the plants and and the animals and humans and in what sense are the plants for the humans are and more tense are the animals for the humans well you know Aquinas talks about this at length as do others I think there is a kind of notion of fullness to be had here in again pretty intuitive in the way in which things that are superior in the hierarchy make use of things lower in the hierarchy for their own well-being and flourishing so there's that kind of normative aspect which is not by the way in itself a moral feature so I think it's a normative feature so I think the the next step if you were to try and think about water you know what are the consequences of this if it were true what would follow well I think the fact that if it were true that would be pretty important in itself but you know what would follow from that normatively speaking well you don't immediately get into anything moral you you you you have to look at kind of the normativity of the setup and the fact is you know minerals feed plants and plants feed animals and animals feed people but people don't feed angels thank God and angels don't feed God and we don't feed God so you know obviously it starts to break down so I think this not the normative aspect of it is going to be if there is one is going to be it'll be multi-dimensional it's going to be I think it will be some sort of scale but it's going to be multi-dimensional and it's going to probably have some interesting features to it so I'm just not going to say more at this stage because I just think now's not the right time for that kind of investigation I've got to get my head around you know this first yep thanks very much fascinating presentation I want to just rich a couple of historical considerations in relationship to what Bill and Roger have said in relationship to modern science and doctrine of God respectively first of all it could be argued and I think there's plot very strong argument that actually what got Christians persecuted was that they were seditious because they were seen as rejecting the hierarchy of being whether understood on Neoplatonic or on stoic lines second point would be that the doctrine of creation out of nothing as it developed was a rejection of the hierarchy of being as it had been expressed in pagan philosophy and and in forms of Christianity which we now reject because we call them Gnostic thirdly from the doctrine of creation out of nothing it becomes possible to talk about Jesus Christ as having his own distinctive identity and reality so that the Platonic Demiurge as a principle of continuity drops out of the cosmic hierarchy and you have a gap as it were between God and creation and and that enables the Christians to understand the saving work of Jesus Christ so again to understand the saving work of Jesus Christ one has to drop platonic or stoic hierarchy of being and fourthly there will be some in this room we will agree in some who will disagree that in fact an atomistic understanding of analogy secures the distinction between God and creation and the two mystic outside the SCOTUS univer cala t doctrine of religious language actually serves to promote a hierarchy of being so okay so there are three I think three oh there's another point that's very doing yeah there was persecution there was creation of nothing saving work of Christ and then something about Scotties yeah I mean I certainly look to do yeah I will unsurprisingly I would disagree with pretty much all of that although I think maybe I'm just having trouble understanding so look just to dispense with the fourth point I mean you know I've I've never once read SCOTUS without being completely baffled by what he's talking about so you know SCOTUS enters into the debate over the hierarchy primarily in terms of the tension between the kind of Neoplatonic understanding of creation as emanation and God has freely creating so yeah you could probably make a case that SCOTUS is understanding of the totally inscrutable will of God to create is in some sense inimical to the hierarchy I wouldn't necessarily dismiss that but you know I'm no SCOTUS and I'm no expert on Scouter so just gonna leave it there in terms of the three previous points I'm not quite sure I understand them so just to pick one I did I didn't get the point about person sorry when you talk about Christians being persecuted when Christians have been persecuted ever since they've been Christians so also in history are we talking so this is about where the hierarchy of being gets broken up right and priest yeah I recognize the president Reformation was damaging for Christendom but I would want to say that there are other trends already in place that break up the hierarchy of being including all those four things which I've mentioned so how does the person and in facendo because there is a stoic near platonic conception of the hierarchy of being here where where as above so below so if you don't worship the Emperor your your metaphysics is out of order and and both of those are unacceptable in that worldview and Christians repudiate that worldview by refusing both the metaphysics and the earthly hierarchy in refusing to pay obeisance this is we're talking about the first fuses yeah nice yeah I understand what you're saying just that I mean that seems to me a real stretch I mean there may be something to that but just boy you'd need to fill in a lot of gaps in order to make that case you know the Christians of the early the early centuries of the church were far less interested in hierarchies and they were in surviving to say that they you know repudiated the Emperor I mean even that is a highly tendentious way of putting the attitude of Christians towards their earthly masters and even if they did in some how implicitly if they were seen as rejecting the pagan hierarchy that doesn't mean that they rejected all hierarchies they rejected the pagan hierarchy and the deification of the emperor and and and you know that sort of thing doesn't mean I rejected all hierarchies so I think there'd be a lot of steps in that story that you'd need to fill in to make a plausible case I mean in terms of again I couldn't understand and feel free to shut me out and chop me off your honor but creation ex nihilo has for how does that how does creation ex Nilo militate against hierarchy I missed the argument how does creation ex Nilo how how does that militate against the higher because it introduces an absolute distinction it's right God and creation and it's that absolute distinction which makes science possible Ryan Ryan values of many rise right so this harks back to the point that was made made earlier um well yes I don't think that undermines the hierarchy it just makes clear how you should understand the hierarchy so you know there's one thing to repudiate the hierarchy it's another thing to misinterpret the hierarchy creation ex nila means that you need to understand the hierarchy you know very carefully right that you can't just put God at you know the diagrams and and kind of medieval kind of pictures I showed you and angels are sitting at the top and there's just God is above everything as though God is just another thing in the hierarchy these are just ways of presenting these things to popular consciousness of course you know God is is God is completely utterly distinct from and to the extent that one wants to use this terminology I'm not infinitely distanced from creation again I'm not quite sure how to understand infinite distance here other than metaphorically but God is utterly distinct from an infinitely distant from creation I don't think that of itself at least if my definition is correct would you may or may not be but if it is plausible at least it's not clear why God would not come out as superior to his creation at the same time as being utterly distinct from it and why one what why one would expect that God wouldn't be metaphysically superior to his creation why would one resist that the only reason I can see for resisting that would be to say well because if you do that then you're just treating God you're conflating the creator and the creature and your taxon amazing God it's a but I'm saying no I don't think you need to go down that route you don't need to any of that in order for God to come out as superior to to the other crew to to other creatures and you know one could spell that out so I mean so okay I'm just going to throw this out there and I don't know I need to work on this and to make sure I'm getting it right but just to throw it out if you don't say what okay so I can understand how God is superior to angels because as a non redundant proper subset of the Angels generic powers namely intellect and will which are also God's powers but God has powers which are not explained by being any kind of angel because God obviously isn't a kind of angel but then what about God being superior to rocks and God a spirit of rock how does that work well are there any non is there a non redundant proper subset of rock powers which also belong to God well no because that really would be conflating the create creator in the creature if you started wanting to give God some kind of body or something like that other than you know not talking about the Incarnation now I'm just oh man God as a as a spirit that wouldn't look good so one has to say something like well you know it's then it's the null you know it's the null set there are there are no generic powers of rocks which are the sorry the the the the P the non redundant proper subset of God's generic powers that are found in rocks is just the null set that's what I don't I don't see why why that wouldn't be a problem and so of course you know the null set is going to be one of the subsets of proper subsets of God's powers and of course God has powers not explained by being a kind of body because God isn't the kind of body so you know it kind of I think it can work out okay but nothing that I'm saying there I think commits me to conflating the Creator you the creator and the creature or anything like that so anyway so what one of the things you dismissed is an excess or now an accretion is the applying this notion of the hierarchy of being to political and social questions it strikes me Edmund Burke and and Joseph de Maistre both begin their works criticizing the French Revolution with an affirmation of the hierarchy of being and I worry that your dismissal of this presupposes a two-shot distinction between or division between the metaphysical and the moral so yes I know I have to be short okay so so something like this presumably the the the king at the the beginning of the dynasty or is just a conqueror and a marauder or whatever might not have that moral claim but after four generations of the accumulation of the wisdom for reg native prudence or whatever and then then now you have someone who has actuated a potency of their nature that no one else in the kingdom has and therefore this is actually a very sound application of the hierarchy of being so how is that a sound application just to get the last bit I miss the last bit that if you if if you grade nature's in the hierarchy of being it at least in part according to there capacity's both in act and in potency then you've got one person down the dynasty who actually has actuated a potency namely reg native prudence that no one else in the kingdom has if say my cloak shot is right that it takes four generations - too cute to acquire the generator the the virtues necessary to govern well you're talking about the virtues which shows that precisely then when it comes to something like the superiority of the monarch in them you know that the superiority of the monarch is a moral superiority if there is any superiority it's moral not metaphysical you don't have the virtues of the ruler then if there is a superiority there will be moral it won't be it will be you know it'll be a right to a certain kind of obedience and a right to a certain kind of rule and a right to assert - to practice certain kinds of virtues that other proper to a monarch or proper to a ruler that subjects are not entitled to exercise [Music] none of that shows that you know there is such a thing as the monarchical essence other than the essence that belongs to the role not to the person so it doesn't matter how many generations pass you know you know it doesn't matter how many Kings a king is born from it doesn't make them any more essentially a king than if they are the first king ever to be crowned you know I mean it doesn't matter whether you're King Saul or whether you're you know Jeroboam or something like that you know it it doesn't matter when you no more have them anarchical essence by a flexion of time then you do by some kind of miracle other than what other than a specific divine intervention I guess - - to confirm Authority as on in the case of Saul but you know I mean these things happen in in various ways there's an approach whereby one becomes a king it's not there's no such thing as the kingly essence that attaches to the king it attaches to the function and so again if you're going to move from a metaphysical account to a moral account you're going to have to go through a number of steps that I don't go through and and I'm not quite sure how that how that would work and in a way again this could be just a bit a bit much here and a bit kind of to kind of top of the head stuff but in a way I wouldn't want that to work I would be very surprised and find that a bit disconcerting if you could generate moral hierarchies just out of metaphysical hierarchies just like that as though some sort of metaphysical superiority just entailed without further argument a kind of moral superiority because then what what work is morality actually doing what is you know what is morality what is moral authority what is moral superiority if it just falls out of a metaphysical account of everything that looks so that's like the higher that would be it could be the hierarchy and the worst possible sense you know the sense that I could understand why and early romantic who who thought who was confronted with that kind of thinking would just reject it there's got to be more give-and-take here there's got to be a kind of you know discursive process whereby you get from a metaphysical hierarchy of some kind or other to a moral hierarchy of some kind or other and it was part of the fate of the hierarchy that I think those steps weren't taken at least in the latter stages it just became such commonplace you find that in poetry you know when you get to the point that you're finding philosophy just kind of routinely turned out in poetry for the you know for large numbers of people via probably something's gone wrong probably you know this is not being represented correctly so I just would want to say that they didn't have to go through a lot more steps to get to where you're suggesting from from where I am if that kind of makes sense I was interested in your comment that evolutionism was one of the things that came to it puzzled me because though of course there are lots of different fairy varieties have changed and of evolutionism Lavar for example seems to have a something like a chain of being at the center of in his evolutionary coming darwin also talks about higher and lower sometimes for example in Addis in Amman where he talks about animals having in court versions of powers well-developed in human beings yeah I mean that's right and Lovejoy when he discusses this points out that it's not that evolutionist thinking in a very broad sense that it does away with all hierarchies he doesn't say that and it doesn't what he says is that evolutionist thinking turns a static kind of self-contained hierarchy into a dynamic gappy hierarchy where you have for example extinction so one of the things that really started to upset the apple cart for beliefs in the hierarchy was when people discovered extinctions was like well hold on everything is supposed to be instantiated so what about these extinct creatures well of course you can play you can do it temporal bit of you know work on that and say well actually you know instantiated at some time or other in the Earth's history but you know that might look like a bit of a cheat the fact that extinctions does seem to make the hierarchy look more dynamic rather than static so you're right that the evolutionist thinking doesn't do away with hierarchies and but these kind of hierarchies are going to look so different to the metaphysical hierarchy that I'm talking about because the kind of superior powers are going to be very narrowly circumscribed they're going to be very particular they're going to be multi-dimensional and as Aristotle says in you know in in his commentaries on in his books on the animals that you know you have cases of animals where you know one has one particular kind of power superior to another because it can do things the other car but the other one has another kind of power that you know bats can fly mice can't fly if you're a bat in some ways you're superior because you can escape certain kinds of predators that a mouse can't escape you can escape a cat much more easily than a mouse can escape a cat but on the other hand that's can't run you know and if a bat happens to fall to the ground and hurt its wing then you know it's gonna be in be trouble whereas a mouse can scurry off right so so you can have all that so it doesn't but those kinds of hierarchies you know they're they are very kind of messy and you know not very orderly and so on they gotta look quite different super as I said many more questions but there are still some refreshments at the back so for those of you who want to hang around and ask our speaker a few more questions we might have a little bit of time for that still but before we do please join me in thanking professor Oda Berg once again [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: IanRamseyCentre

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Id: AUV9dfmIr8I

Length: 90min 16sec (5416 seconds)

Published: Tue May 12 2020