Spiderman: Shouting at Skateboard Crime on the Streets of Toronto

            I still had the same pain in my shoulder on Thursday morning that had started early on Wednesday.

            I arrived about fifteen minutes early for Philosophy class and so I set up my laptop and did some writing.

            Professor Black told us we are allowed to refer to the period between the 6^th and 8^th Centuries as “The Dark Ages”. After the fall of the Roman Empire Italy came under the control of the Byzantine Empire. There was not much intellectual life during this time and very little philosophy. In the 9^th Century Charlemagne brought stability and established schools. Boethius was rediscovered in these places of learning thanks to Alcuin, who set up schools in Charlemagne’s palaces.
            Deborah Black’s husband is a scholar working on Alcuin’s liturgical works.

            Calcidius had translated and commented on part of Plato’s Timaeus in the 4^th Century.

            A major thinker of the Carolingian renaissance was Eriugena, who worked with Charlemagne’s grandson, Charles the Bald. He was a Greek scholar. He and Calcidius both became important in the 12^th Century.

            This was an up and down period that suffered from the Viking and Norman invasions. The learning was kept alive in monasteries.

            Anselm of Bec or Canterbury was born in Italy in 1033. He became a Benedictine Monk and later the Archbishop of Canterbury. He wrote a lot of theological works and some grammar, but he is best known as a philosopher. He used the basic Augustinian maxim: “Faith seeking understanding”. His arguments were reason on steroids as he tried to explain how Satan could have fallen even though he had knowledge of god and why he incarnated at Christ. He said one has to be a believer from the start. He wrote the Proslogian and gave it a Greek name to be cool though he couldn’t speak the language. A proslogian is an address. A monologian is a soliloquy. He wanted to be able to condense his proof for the existence of god into one argument. The first five chapters are on the proof that god is the greatest conceivable being. Professor Black referred to Anselm’s argument as a zombie because it keeps coming back from the dead. It’s an ontological argument, though Kant coined the term and hadn’t directly read Anselm. He read Descartes and Leibniz but they had probably read Anselm. An ontological argument is an argument for the existence of god but one extracts for all experience and argues a priori for the existence of a supreme cause. Features of the physical world are traced to a first cause. For example, for motion to be possible in the physical world it needs a cause. Aristotle refers to cause as the prime mover. This captures a particular method of philosophy.

            Both Anselm and Descartes think you can examine being in the mind and conclude content of concepts that provide a map to god.

            Philosophy can be divided by those that think ontological arguments work and those that don’t.

            During the dark ages the Islamic philosophers were far more sophisticated.

            Anselm used the word reality to mean the necessary.

            Augustine needed something immutable for his formula. Anselm concluded that god equals that than which nothing greater can be thought. This is not a particularly religious notion and god so defined would be hard to pray to. Anselm probably took this from paganism, specifically from the Roman Stoic philosopher, Seneca. Seneca asked natural questions. His statement was that god’s magnitude is that than which nothing greater can be thought. Augustine uses “better” rather than greater. Later philosophers wonder what is meant by “greater”. It would imply autonomy and that god depends entirely on itself.

            Kant said the idea of a pile of 100 coins in the mind and 100 coins in reality have the same value. For the coins to actually exist does not make them more valuable but rather only affirms their value. Therefore existence in reality is not a special attribute of god because it adds nothing to the idea of god. God can be defined as perfect without existing. The quantitative notion is a problem. Kant claims that one can’t do the comparison. Existence is not a predicate.

            Anselm cites the Bible: “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no god’”

            “Greater than thought can be denied”. His word for “thought” is “cogitari” and it’s more about the entertaining of an idea rather than understanding.

            To deny x you must think x. No greater thought being in intellect of a fool. Existence in both the mind and reality is greater than existence in just the mind. Anselm tries to establish that existence in reality is superior. A painter before making a painting has a vision that is understood in the mind. The mind can differentiate mere ideas from existence in reality.

Proof – deductio ad absurdum. Assume the opposite of what you want to prove.

            Anselm died in the 12^th Century.

            After class I rode up to the OISE library to renew my French books, then I went to Spadina and down to stop at Ten Editions to look for Nella Larsen’s “Passing”, which I think is the only text I hadn’t yet acquired for my 20^th Century US Lit course. It wasn’t there, so I continued south to College and swung west to go into She Said Boom. They had two Nella Larsen books, both of which contained “Passing” and the cheaper of the two had the complete works.

            When I purchased the book the owner asked if I needed a bag. I said I’d take one but then she didn’t give me one. I reminded her and she apologetically explained that her least favourite customer would be coming in shortly and so she was feeling distracted.

            As I was unlocking my bike, a guy in a very authentic looking Spiderman costume, including a Spiderman backpack, was skateboarding east along College. At the same time an ordinarily dressed guy was also skateboarding east, but on the sidewalk. Spiderman called out to him, “Hey guy, it’s a against the law to skate on the sidewalk!” I’ve seen lots of people dressed up as super heroes but this was the first time I’d actually seen one of them fighting crime, or at least arguing with it.

            I stopped at Freshco on the way home. Grapes were on sale for an extremely low price, so I got three bags. The very skinny Portuguese cashier with the braces, who’s been working there a long time, informed me that it was good that I’d bought the grapes on the first day of the sale because that way I’d get the best ones. This was the first time she’s made conversation with me in years. I wonder if it’s my new haircut.

            I was down to my last five episodes of the fourth season of Maverick. Now that both James Garner as Bret and Roger Moore as Beau were gone, they introduced Robert Colbert as the suddenly existing third Maverick brother, Brent. They dressed him in the exact same costume worn by Garner in the series, right down to the way he wore his black hat tilted back to always reveal the front of his hair. If they had brought in Colbert from the start as Bret’s brother, it would have been more convincing than using Jack Kelly, who looked nothing like Garner. Robert Colbert though could very well have passed for James Garner’s brother. He later became a star on the hit series Time Tunnel.