Category: Uncategorized

Overview and Themes

The book of Isaiah has had enormous influence on Christian thought and piety. Based on the materials in the Gospels, Jesus’ self-identity seems to have been shaped deeply by Isaiah. The Gospels, the letters of Paul, and the New Testament’s apocalyptic literature are saturated with direct references and allusions to Isaiah. The Church Fathers and Doctors likewise frequently drew on Isaiah as they struggled to illuminate how the God we worship is one God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, while at the same time establishing their claim that Jesus Christ is God incarnate. Our study of Isaiah therefore offers us an opportunity to delve more deeply into the mystery of God’s redemption of the world through Christ — a beautiful opportunity, particularly as we move through the Autumn season towards Advent.

That opportunity, however, also comes with a challenge. As discussed below, some of the Christological resonances drawn out of Isaiah in the New Testament and in the history of Christian thought seem to go beyond the meaning of the original text, both in historical context and in its original Hebrew language. Our study of Isaiah therefore also offers us an opportunity to reflect on the nature of the Hebrew Scriptures as Christian scripture. How can we as Christians approach this text that was and is first central to Jewish thought and piety? What does the New Testament’s use of the Hebrew Scriptures, including notably Isaiah, tell us about Biblical interpretation?

Our reflection on Christian interpretations of Isaiah also will bring us back to the historical meaning of the collection of texts that make up the canonical book. We’ll see that before — or, perhaps better stated, connected with — the Christian Christological reading are deep, hopeful themes about God’s providence, justice, love, and ultimate restoration of a broken and chaotic world.

Historical Background and Canonical Context

Before we consider the date and authorship of Isaiah itself, it’s helpful to put the book into context within the canon of the Hebrew Scriptures. The narrative arc of the Hebrew Scriptures begins with the “protohistory” of Genesis 1-11 — creation, Noah’s Flood, the Tower of Babel, and the scattering of the nations. The remainder of the Pentateuch — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy — concern the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob), the enslavement of the Jews in Egypt, the exodus from Egypt, and the giving of the law through Moses.

The period of the protohistory is impossible to date. Genesis 1-11 includes literary, poetic, and mythic elements drawn from surrounding ancient near eastern cultures, meaning that the protohistory, in a very real sense, falls “outside” ordinary time. The period of the Patriarchs, the Exodus, and the Conquest is similarly impossible to date precisely and likely includes literary ornaments and embellishments — although a historical basis for the founding of the people of Israel by these key figures, a rescue from slavery in Egypt, and a movement into Canaan always was and still remains central to Jewish identity.

The “historical” books in the Hebrew Scriptures — Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemia, and Esther — cover:

• The Jewish conquest of the land of Canaan and entry into the promised land;
• A period when the people of Israel were led by “Judges” (charismatic military / political leaders);
• The beginning of the monarchy under King Saul;
• The glorious, though tumultuous, period of King David;
• The reign of David’s son, King Solomon;
• The tragic division of the nation into the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah;
• Various good and bad (mostly bad) Kings in Israel and Judah;
• The subjugation of the Northern Kingdom by Assyria and the Assyrian attack on Jerusalem and the Southern Kingdom;
• The destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon and the start of the Babylonian Exile.

The historical books relate more closely to information from archeology and other extra-Biblical historical sources, particularly as they move closer to the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests. This doesn’t mean the Biblical historical books are straightforwardly historical in a modern sense. The historical books sometimes don’t agree with each other, much less correlating in any clear way with extra-Biblical archeological or textual sources. There are intense, intractable disagreements among scholars in the field of Biblical Archeology about whether the Bible’s historical books are broadly historically reliable (“maximalists”) or mostly made up as a kind of later propaganda (“minimalists”).

In addition to the Pentateuch and the historical books, the canon of the Hebrew Scriptures includes the wisdom books and theprophetic books. Jewish readers divide the books somewhat differently than this. The Torah (“teaching” or “law”) is most immediately the Pentateuch; the Nevi’im (“prophets”) include the prophetic books and some of the historical books; and the Ketuvim (“writings”) include the wisdom books along with Chronicles, Ruth, Esther, Daniel, and Ezra-Nehemiah. Thus, Isaiah is part of the Nevi’im. The prophetic books, including the book of Isaiah, are mostly about why God allowed this destruction by the Assyrians and Babylonians and whether or how God will keep the covenant He made with Abraham and David and restore the nation.

Canonical Context, Dating, and Authorship of Isaiah

In the modern period, the nature of the text of the canonical book of Isaiah, and its role in Christian thought, has come under significant scrutiny. Even during the Medieval period, scholars suggested that the canonical text almost certainly was written and ended in multiple stages. Modern textual and critical scholarship shows that the canonical text of Isaiah may have taken shape in three or four stages over about two hundred years.

Although the historical and prophetic books of the Hebrew Scriptures raise many questions about their relationship to history as understood through modern archeology and textual analysis, there is no doubt about the fact of the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions of Israel and Judah or about the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians and the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. There is also little doubt that Isaiah ben Amoz was an important figure during this time. Tantalizingly, archeologist Eliat Mazar recently uncovered a bulla (clay seal) that might be the ancient equivalent of Isaiah’s personal signature, although, as is usually the case with Biblical archeology, Mazar’s interpretation is contested.

The role of the “prophet” in ancient Israel and Judah is interesting and complex. It appears that from early times there were prophets or seers attached to popular shrines, not only dedicated to the God of the Israelites, Yahweh, but also to Canaanite or other gods or to a syncretistic mix of Yahwism and Canaanite religions./1/ In fact, much of the Bible’s prophetic literature sharply criticizes this kind of syncretism, depicting fidelity to Yahweh alone as the key to the nation’s success. It also appears that there were prophets related to the Priestly class that became connected with the Temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem first constructed under King Solomon.

There also seem to have been independent prophets who were popular teachers or spokesmen outside the Priestly class and who had some kind of authority, recognition, or at least fearful respect, among the political leadership. These prophets often were highly critical of the political class, but at the same time, the Kings often consulted them about weighty matters such as the prospects for a military campaign. Isaiah ben Amoz seems to have been one of these important prophets who lived at the time of the Assyrian invasion of Judah.

Scholars today generally do not attribute the entire text of the canonical book to Isaiah ben Amoz. Contemporary scholars speak of chapters 1-39 as “First Isaiah,” which was probably originally written during the lifetime of the prophet Isaiah ben Amoz, when the Assyrians invaded Israel and Judah in 742-701 BCE; chapters 56-66 as “Second Isaiah,” written by an anonymous prophet who lived during the Babylonian Exile; and chapters 56-66 as “Third Isaiah,” a collection of sayings from various prophets who lived during early Persian-period restoration of Jerusalem in the 6th century BCE. This is based on both textual criticism (study of the language and grammatical forms of the text) and historical criticism (careful attention to historical references that inform the text). Scholars debate the exact periodization and attribution of the different parts of the text, but mainstream scholars generally agree that it was edited and updated at various times over a period of about 200 years to address contemporary circumstances.

Christian Interpretation of Isaiah

From the First Century CE — that is, from the time of Jesus — through today, Christians have claimed that the book of Isaiah points to Jesus as the savior of Israel and of the world. Some Christian readers have argued that the original purpose of specific texts in Isaiah and elsewhere in the Old Testament was to make specific prophecies about Jesus. In this view, the original authors of these texts knew they were foretelling an individual Messiah who would suffer and die for our sins.

These varied circumstances addressed in the canonical text of Isaiah, however, were different from, although in some ways related to, the Second Temple setting of Jesus’ life and ministry. The original writers and editors of texts such as Isaiah likely were not usually themselves intending to make the specific claims later attributed to these texts by Christian readers.

A related problem is that the New Testament authors often allude to or quote from a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures that was commonly used by Greek-speaking Jews in the first century, the Septuagint (or LXX). The New Testament literature was produced in Koine Greek, the common everyday language in the Hellenistic Roman world (with occasional snatches of Aramaic)./2/ In some places the Greek translation of the LXX does not accurately reflect the meaning of the Hebrew of the original text, sometimes with significant theological ramifications.

The Christian claim that Isaiah points to, and sometimes directly prophesies about, Jesus as the Messiah, therefore raises numerous exegetical, hermeneutical, and theological problems. One fruitful response to these problems is to set aside the Christological biases of the New Testament and later Christian interpretation and simply to encounter a text like Isaiah on its own terms for what it tells Jewish and Christian (and Islamic) readers about God. Here is a video from Old Testament scholar Chris Hays of Fuller Seminary highlighting some of those themes: (1) Yahweh alone is Lord; (2) God is in control and will bring His salvation to pass; (3) the central importance of social justice.

There is also a long Christian tradition of suggesting an allegorical or figural interpretation of texts such as Isaiah that is teased out in the New Testament and in later Christian thought. This tradition goes all the way back to the early Church Fathers, and indeed, arguably, to the New Testament writers. It remains important today among Christian scholars associated with the “theological interpretation” movement.

For example, in his book Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness, New Testament scholar and former Duke Divinity School Dean Richard Hays says

[T]he Gospel writers summon us to a conversion of the imagination. . . . [W]e will learn to read Scripture rightly only if our minds and imaginations are opened by seeing the scriptural text — and therefore the world — through the Evangelists’ eyes. In order to explore that hermeneutical possibility, we must give close consideration to the revisionary figural ways the four Gospel writers actually read Israel’s Scripture.

Hays, Reading Backwards, 4.

Hays draws out three general interpretive themes based on his figural reading:

(1) The OT [Old Testament] teaches us to take seriously God’s word of judgment: those who oppress the alien, the widow, and the orphan and shed innocent blood will come under God’s fearful judgment, whether in Jermiah’s Judah in the seventh century B.C.E., in Jerusalem in Jesus’ lifetime, or in our own time. . . .

(2) The OT teaches us that all our prayer and action should be ordered toward Isaiah’s vision of a restored and healed new creation; that is to say, the salvation proclaimed in the Gospels is neither merely individual nor otherworldly. . . .

(3) How will such a redemptive ending take place? The OT hints mysteriously that God’s beloved Son will suffer rejection . . . but that he will also ‘become the head of the corner’ as an exalted king . . . . The Christological treasure [in the OT] is subtly wrapped, but [the New Testament] starts to unwind it. . . .

Hays, Reading Backwards, 13.

As we work through our study of Isaiah we’ll try to keep in mind both of these interpretive strategies — the text within its various original contexts and the text read figurally from the perspective of our experience of Christ — and the ways in which these strategies can be connected. In the end we’ll see that Isaiah’s vision is finally one of justice and hope for the restoration of all of creation, a promise of justice and hope that we as Christians see fulfilled in Christ.

Notes:

/1/ The original Hebrew text had no vowels. The name is thus represented in the Hebrew text as יהוה (YHWH). Yahweh or Yehovah are therefore extrapolations of what the name might have sounded like, though today scholars think Yahweh was the likely pronunciation. Many Jews consider the name too holy to pronounce aloud and substitute other words such as Adonai (my Lord) or HaShem (The Name).

/2/ Aramaic was the common Hebrew-related tongue in First Century Palestine. Aramaic was almost certainly the language spoken by Jesus and his immediate disciples. Some scholars suggest that some of the sayings of Jesus in what became the canonical Gospels were first written in Aramaic and subsequently translated into Koine Greek.

Stephen R.L. Clark is a philosopher I never quite warmed to, until now. His work is in the Christian Platonist vein of some of the Radical Orthodoxy folks I studied under at Nottingham. I suppose I’m still too modern and Protestant to consider myself a Christian Platonist, but I do agree with that school of thought that modern theology and philosophy need to recover some things from Platonist substance metaphysics and Aristotelian causality. In any event, Clark’s Can We Believe in People?: Human Significance in an Interconnected Cosmos (Brooklyn: Angelico Press 2020) is a delightful and accessible study of human significance and purpose in our vast, evolving cosmos. With endorsements ranging from David Bentley Hart to Simon Conway Morris, you can be sure you’re in for an eclectic treat.

Clark presents an argument against scientism that I make in some of my own work and that I find inescapable: popular advocates of scientism argue like moral realists even though their position must reject moral realism. They’re convinced they are right about the world-as-it-is, and they argue as if it’s morally blameworthy to believe otherwise. But in claiming to be right about the world-as-it-is, they claim more knowledge than their reductive origin story would allow. As Clark notes,

Darwinian selection does not produce what would probably, in the abstract, be ‘the best’ or most successful outcome: the very point of the theory is that the competing variations have been thrown up at random. . . . We are, perhaps, fairly well adapted as wandering primates in and between Ice Ages: how should we expect that our talents are well suited to discovering the powers and principles that rule the world at large? Why should we expect any congruity between those principles and those that govern human thought? (Can We Believe in People, 21.)

The “atheistical cases against God and against ‘religion,'” Clark notes, “must chiefly be founded on moral indignation of a kind that only makes sense if there indisputably are Absolute Moral Norms which we can at once discern, which are more than maxims drawing their strength from the likely consequences of obeying or disobeying them, and if things could, somehow or other, be otherwise.” (Can We Believe in People, 52.) But if this is so, then the argument against God and religion is self-contradictory.

Clark acknowledges that this epistemological argument has been hashed out endlessly without resolution since it was advanced in the literature by Plantinga, but in fact, I think Plantinga’s version of it is mistaken. Plantinga, as I read him, argues for the plausibility of some kind of intelligent design theory based on the claim that human knowledge capacity shows that the theory of evolution by natural selection must in some basic way be false or incomplete. Plantinga’s overall project ends up looking like a kind of ontotheology — even though, within his Reformed Epistemology, Plantinga offers a non-naturalistic basis for knowledge of God — because Plantinga’s view of causality is flat. This is where a Christian Platonist / Aristotelian like Clark can do better: even though the efficient cause of the structure of the human brain and mind is natural selection (or more accurately, biological evolution, including by natural selection), the formal cause is the “form” of the human and the final cause is the human end in God, both of which transcend matter by participation in God. Or, in Thomistic terms, the primary cause of human knowledge is God while the secondary cause is our physical, evolved capacities.

In a marvelous chapter titled “Is Human Kind a Natural Kind,” Clark does do better. There’s a persistent myth that Plato, Aristotle, and their early Christian heirs rejected the possibility of change in nature because they were chary of difference. By the time of the Medieval Synthesis, the story goes, Christian / Western thought was rigidly wedded to a static kind of Aristotelianism, which impeded the development of science, art, and culture, until the Renaissance weakened the glue that ultimately came apart at the seams in the Enlightenment. It’s not that this story is completely false, but it’s become a lazy way to dismiss the past. In fact, as Clark notes, “the classical Greek philosophers were much more open, in principle, to the thought that one creature can change into another, or beget creatures of another sort than itself, than is usually supposed.” (Can We Believe in People, 78.)

Clark’s argument is not, however, yet another tiresome, absolutist diatribe by a right-wing apologist against The Evil Atheists. It’s a much more subtle and beautiful celebration of truth within difference, or maybe better put, the truth of difference. As Clark says, “[d]ifferences are not diseases. And variations are always variations on a theme.” (Can We Believe in People, 89.) More to the point of the book, Clark argues, “[d]ifferences need not be defects, and there is no one right way of being human (or canine or what you will).” (Can We Believe in People, 91.) Later, discussing the possibility of other non-human intelligence in the Universe, Clark notes that “[i]t is after all a primary claim of Christians both that one and the same Logos makes creatures ‘logikoi‘ and that “to all who have yielded him their allegiance he gave the right to become children of God, not born of any human stock, or by the fleshly desire of any human father, but the offspring of God himself (Jn 1:12-13).” (Can We Believe in People, 99.) The various kinds of creatures, not least human creatures, proceeding from God’s creative Word and returning to their source in God, are the dance of creative difference united in the plenitude of the One infinite God. (That is my gloss on what Clark is saying, in the Christian Platonist key, which I find compelling).

There are places where I disagree with the direction of Clark’s thought. Clark is an important philosopher of animal rights and correctly, I think, emphasizes and ethic of creation care. At times, though, I’m not sure he thinks humans are unique enough. I’ll say something quite unpopular in the area of modern Christian ecological ethics, but I do think the material creation, at least the Earth we inhabit, is in part given to us humans for our thoughtful, curated use. Even if you’re a vegetarian or vegan (I’m not either), I think you have to agree, or give up eating altogether — along with wearing clothes and living in any sort of constructed dwelling. And, as I suggested at the outset, I find Christian Platonism helpful in small doses, as a path to reflection, a set of insights, subject to the reminder from Protestant thought (not least from Barth) that God remains completely Other and that the Word is always surprising. But I’ll leave those qualms aside and suggest that this is one of the most winsome “theology and science” books I’ve read in a very long time.

This is a section of a book I’m working on about law, neuroscience, and theology, drawn from my Ph.D. dissertation.

As discussed in Chapter 1, neurolaw is one manifestation of the “new moral science” critiqued by James Davidson Hunter’s and Paul Nedelisky’s in their excellent book Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality.[1]  One of Hunter’s and Nedelisky’s central claims is that the new moral science fails because it violates the “is-ought” rule.  According to Hunter and Nedelisky, the facts of human evolution and neurochemistry do not entail ethical imperatives because they are merely facts about what is.   The are several reasons why this is the wrong line of critique, even though the critique is important.

First, Hunter and Nedelisky do not really grapple with how neuroscientific reductionists handle the “is-ought” problem.  Second, Hunter and Nedelisky overlook the “naturalistic fallacy,” which is related to but in this case more powerful than the “is-ought” distinction.  Third, and most importantly, Hunter and Nedelisky do not address the central question of metaphysics.

A good conversation partner here is Patricia Churchland.  In her book Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality, Churchland notes that Hume’s “is-ought” rule is a narrow claim that refers to deductive logic.[2]  Churchland grants that an “ought” statement cannot be derived from an “is” statement as a matter of formal logic.  She argues, however, that “ought” statements can be inferred from “is” statements, “drawing on knowledge, perception, emotions, and understanding, and balancing considerations against each other.”[3]  As Churchland notes, “I ought to go to the dentist” is a valid inference from the fact that “I have a horrendous toothache.”[4]  Similarly, Churchland suggests, more complex social practices, including moral behavior, usually develop through inferences from various facts rather than from cold deductive logic.[5]  Given Churchland’s understanding of what an “ought” can comprise, she escapes the “is-ought” rule.

The understanding of what an “ought” can comprise, however, is the rub.  Churchland’s description of how most people navigate moral issues certainly is correct, and in fact is consistent with millennia of reflection on virtue ethics:  ethical frameworks and moral choices are lived out in the complexity of the real world, not only in the sterile chamber of deductive logic. 

Because of her commitment to naturalism, Churchland cannot refer the “ought” to higher purpose or end.  Instead, she refers generally to human wellbeing and suggests that some kind of consequentialism is the best basis for legal rules that support human wellbeing.[6] This seems to catch Churchland in a problem related to the “is-ought” rule – the naturalistic fallacy.  As G.E. Moore first argued, human wellbeing, defined as health, pleasure, or any other property natural to humans, cannot define the “good.”[7]  As Moore noted, when people say “Pleasure is good, we cannot believe that they merely mean Pleasure is pleasure and nothing more than that.”[8]

Churchland thinks Moore constructed a “mystical moat around moral behavior.”[9]  Her response to the naturalistic fallacy is that a scientific term can include more than one aspect of meaning.  She suggests, “consider these scientifically demonstrated identifications: light (A) is electromagnetic radiation (B), or temperature (A) is mean molecular kinetic energy (B).  Here, the A and B terms are not synonymous, but the property measured one way was found to be the same as the property measured another way.”[10]  As another more prosaic example, she suggest, “Suppose I discover that my neighbor Bill Smith (A) is the head of the CIA (B): are the expressions ‘my neighbor Bill Smith’ and ‘the head of the CIA synonymous?’  Of course not.”[11]

Churchland is of course correct that a term can include more than one aspect of meaning, but that is not what her examples demonstrate, and in any event, she completely misses Moore’s point.   

Churchland’s second example is irrelevant.  “Bill Smith” and “Head of the CIA” are not categories that overlap at all except for the contingent historical fact that at some point in time Bill Smith serves in that role.  Obviously, Bill Smith cannot be reduced to his role as Head of the CIA, nor can the role of Head of the CIA be reduced to the individual who currently occupies it, Bill Smith.  If Bill Smith ceases to serve as Head of the CIA, he will still be Bill Smith and there will still be a Head of the CIA.  If anything, this example reinforces Moore’s arguments against reductionism.  Not only are the terms not “synonymous,” they are not even close to coextensive.

Churchland’s example of light and electromagnetic raditaion is no more availing.  First, “radiation” is, in fact, a synonym for “light.”[12]  In at least one range of meaning – particularly the range of meaning employed by the natural sciences – “electromagnetic radiation” does mean “light” and “light” does mean “electromagnetic radiation,” without remainder.  So, in the scientific domain that is Churchland’s immediate concern, this example belies her point. 

“Light,” of course, carries a much broader semantic range of meaning than this narrow scientific one.  To say “you light up my life,” for example, has nothing to do with electromagnetic radiation.  Churchland might respond that the experience of having one’s life lit up by a lover can be described in the entirely material terms of hormones and neurochemistry.  But this response only begs the question whether a person’s subjective conscious experience can be reduced to such material terms.  And, in any event, “light” now signifies something very different than “electromagnetic radiation.”

The example of “temperature” and “mean molecular kinetic energy,” which invokes the Boltzmann constant, is more interesting.  While it is true that the average kinetic energy of molecules in a gas is proportional to temperature, mean molecular kinetic energy is not a precise measure of some absolute quantity of temperature.  A measurement of mean kinetic energy assumes that every molecule in the gas acts like an independent point mass.  This is important for measuring heat transfer and entropy.  It is not, however, a real measure of the specific heat of a gas, because each molecule has some degree of freedom in its rotation and vibration and does not act like an independent point mass.  Moreover, kinetic theory only applies to gases, and even for gases, is only one way of thinking about temperature.  And things become even more interesting when “quantum thermodynamics” enters the picture, which raises major unresolved questions about the relationship between the classical laws of thermodynamics and the thermodynamics of systems at the quantum level.[13]

Even if Churchland wants to suggest something like “mean molecular energy : temperature :: (individual brain chemistry + social evolution) : altruism,” the analogy breaks down on several levels.  First, as discussed above, the left side of the analogy only applies to one specific set of conditions.  Moving to the right side of the analogy, this would mean that “altruism” can be related to “individual brain chemistry + social evolution” only if “altruism” is used here in a unique way in relation to a specific kind of system.  But this would once again beg the question whether this relation describes anything about a real world or is only a specific, limited kind of model.   And even if it were otherwise a fair model within its own limited sphere, it would leave open the question whether, as with quantum thermodynamics, there are other levels of possible description, perhaps even with different rules.

This, however, is a quite generous account of the analogy.  Mean molecular energy and temperature are related to each other proportionately, which is why one can be used to measure the other.  Brain chemistry and evolution, in contrast, are not in the same kind of proportionate relation to altruism or any other kind of ethically significant conduct.  We can’t take the mean level of serotonin in the brains of humans in a society and come up with any predictable measure of altruism.  Brains and social structures are too complex for correlations here, outside very broad normal distributions, much less for inferring causation between any discrete element of brain chemistry or social evolution and something like levels of altruism.  The notion that there might be a Boltzmann constant for moral behavior is statistically absurd.

Finally, and most importantly, “mean molecular energy : temperature :: (individual brain chemistry + social evolution) : altruism,” is not really the right analogy.  The right analogy is “mean molecular energy : temperature :: (individual brain chemistry + social evolution) : the goodness of altruism.”  Again, the analogy breaks down here on its own terms.  Behavior described as altruistic might be morally good, or morally bad, or morally indifferent, or any of these things under different circumstances.  Measuring the sheer instances of a behavior is not a moral judgment.  A moral judgment entails a measure of value the leads to some kind of imperative, prohibition, or exhortation:  altruism is good so people ought to be altruistic if they have extra and others are in need.  No one says “that container of oxygen ought to obey Boltzmann’s constant or we will judge it to be bad oxygen.”  The oxygen has no agency and Boltzmann’s constant invariably will apply in the domain of classical physics.  This means Churchland cannot avoid the naturalistic fallacy after all.

It also hints at the deeper metaphysical questions Churchland refuses to address.  She describes the individual components of each set — light (A) and electromagnetic radiation (B); and temperature (A) and mean molecular kinetic energy (B) – as “properties.”  As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, however, “[q]uestions about the nature and existence of properties are nearly as old as philosophy itself.”[14]  Any discussion of “properties” invokes the distinction between universals and particulars and other basic problems in metaphysics and ontology.[15]  Churchland cannot dismiss these enormous metaphysical problems with a hand-wave and then discourse about supposedly interchangeable “properties” of light and radiation.  Yet this is exactly what she does, when she confidently asserts that “[w]hat does not exist is a Platonic Heaven wherein the Moral Truths reside – no more than there is a Platonic Heaven wherein the Physical Truths reside.”[16]  No contemporary philosopher would frame an answer exactly as Plato did, but the question whether “properties” are real, and whether any such realist claim can be justified absent immaterial entities, is the same kind of question Plato asked.

---

[1] James Davidson Hunter and Paul Nedelisky, Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality (New Haven: Yale University Press 2019).

[2] Patricia Churchland, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us Abut Morality (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2011), 6-7.

[3] Braintrust, 6.

[4] Braintrust, 7.

[5] Braintrust, 8.

[6] Brainstrust, 175-181.

[7] G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1903), § 10 ¶ 3.

[8] Principia Ethica, § 11(2).

[9] Churchland, Brantrust, 188.

[10] Braintrust, 188.

[11] Braintrust, 188.

[12] See Thesaurus.com, “light,” available at https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/light?s=t.

[13] See Davide Castelvecchi, “Battle Between Quantum and Thermodynamic Laws Heats Up,” Nature, March 30, 2017, available at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/battle-between-quantum-and-thermodynamic-laws-heats-up/; Natalie Wolchover, “The Quantum Thermodynamics Revolution,” Quanta Magazine, May 2, 2017, available at https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-quantum-thermodynamics-revolution-20170502/.

[14] Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Properties,” available at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties/.

[15] See Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Properties.”

[16] Braintrust, 181.