Tag Archives: Higher Education

Three Ologies

Three Ologies – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, talking through three terms I’ve historically had trouble understanding: epistemology, ontology, and teleology.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, talking through three terms I’ve historically had trouble understanding.

A major turning point in my life came at the end of 2014 when I decided to drop my philosophy major to a minor and not take the final class that I needed to complete that major. The class in question was Continental Philosophy, and it remains one of those decisions that I regret because it closed some doors for me in the long run even while it seemed like a reasonable decision in the short term. A year later, now working on my master’s degree in International Relations and Democratic Politics at the University of Westminster, I was reminded daily that I really should’ve just taken that last class because so much of what we were studying was based in continental philosophy.

I initially pursued a triple major in History, Philosophy, and Theology and a double minor in French and Music at Rockhurst University. I was quite proud of the fact that up to that point in my seven completed semesters at Rockhurst that I’d been able to juggle those three majors and the two minors while still having an active and fulfilling social life on campus. I went into Rockhurst with several vague ideas of what I might want to do with these degrees when I was finished; notably I remember both considering doing a Ph.D., likely in History, and possibly going from Rockhurst either into the Jesuit novitiate or into a diocesan Catholic seminary to become a priest. The first four years of Catholic seminary is comprised of that philosophy bachelor’s degree, so it felt like a good idea to undertake that at Rockhurst and keep the door open.

Now ten years after I would’ve finished my undergraduate with that philosophy degree, I realize that even as I continued to consider holy orders that I may well have properly begun to close that door in my early twenties, not feeling that the priesthood was the right fit for me in spite of what many people have said. Even then, most of the other professions that I’ve considered have been shrinking in one way or another in my lifetime. It feels here as in so many other aspects of my life that I was born at a high point in our society’s capacity to consider the arts, humanities, and even the sciences and that as I’ve gotten older that capacity has diminished time and again. Even while I continue to be frustrated to remain in these wilderness years, I nevertheless continue to learn and to grow in my understanding of what is possible for me to do in my career.

In the last seven years I’ve reasserted myself as a historian first and foremost, settling into the Renaissance as my period of study in late 2017 and gradually shifting from considering the history of Englishwomen’s education to the history of translation to now the history of natural history. Yet all of these disciplines lie under the common umbrella of intellectual history. My manner of writing the history I craft tends to speak toward French notions of mentality and perception, while the economics I still occasionally encounter in my work speak to Max Weber’s notions of capitalism as a broader Cross-Channel enterprise including Brittany and Normandy alongside England, Picardy, Flanders, and the Dutch Republic. I’m beginning to try out a new method of writing history that draws on the natural sciences to better understand the animals and other natural things described by my Renaissance cosmographers and natural historians.

Amid all of this, three words continue to appear, three words which I have often had trouble remembering their meaning. These three are epistemology, ontology, and teleology. In spite of my training in Ancient Greek, I still have trouble keeping these three apart. They represent three central tenants of philosophy which help make sense of how we understand things. It may not sound like the strongest topic for a riveting podcast episode, but for those of you listening bear with me.

Descartes’s tomb, photo by the author.

Epistemology is the theory of knowledge. It distinguishes things which are justified from mere opinions. This theory of knowledge considers propositions about facts, practices which form knowledge, and familiarity with an object thus allowing the subject to know it. This word episteme in Greek (ἐπιστήμη) translates into English as both knowledge and science. Science itself is a word which at its core refers to knowledge, for the root Latin verb sciō means “to know.” We know for instance that we exist because we can recognize our existence, in Descartes’s famous words “I think, therefore I am.” I made a point of visiting Descartes’s tomb in the Abbey Church of St. Germain-des-Prés when I was in Paris in October 2023 because so much of my own philosophy is Cartesian in its origins. I reject the principle that we could be living in a simulation on the grounds that based on what we can know and perceive we are not inclined to accept such a suggestion.

The second of these words is ontology, a branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being. This word derives from the present participle of the Greek to-be verb εἰμί. I stand by my assertion that the life we are living is real because we can recognize it in large part because the best explanation that I’ve found for the course our history has taken is reliant on us having the freedom to decide the courses of our own lives. This free will explains how a society can seem to take steps backward even while the chaos those retreats cause is to the society’s detriment. The method which I am developing in my research to understand the nature of historical animals using modern scientific research is ontological in character. I can test if this method will work by applying it to particular individual animals who appear in the historical record and determining their true character by a process of eliminating candidate species until the animal’s own species is determined. In this search for the nature of these animals I hope to prove that the historical past, before the development of the scientific method in the seventeenth century, is valuable to the natural sciences as a means of understanding the longer-term nature of other animals during the period in which human influence upon nature was growing toward the Anthropocene which we find ourselves in today.

I like to think of ontology in the linguistic context of how the copular to be verb appears in our literature. Think, for instance, of how God is identified in the Bible. In the story of the burning bush, the Divine is referred to as “I Am that I Am,” or rather the purest expression of existence. For this reason, when I was an undergraduate in my theology major, I began to refer to God as the Divine Essence owing to the root of essence in the Latin copular verb. English recognizes a far wider set of states of being than does Irish. Where in English I might say “I am sad,” in Irish I would say “sadness is upon me,” or “Tá brón orm.”

The third of these words is teleology. This is the explanation of phenomena in terms of their purpose rather than the manner of their invention. Τέλος (telos) is the Greek word for an end, an aim, or a goal. The purpose of something’s existence then is at focus here. I do question this idea that we have a specific purpose in life, perhaps because mine has not gone quite how I expected. In my Catholicism, the most teleological concept we retain is the idea of a vocation either to holy orders, marriage, or to the single life. The teleology at play here speaks to some sense of destiny which I feel stands in opposition to our free will. Perhaps there is some purpose to life, at its initial conception in the first moments that matter began to form in the void that became our Universe, yet I do not believe that I can perceive any intended influence beyond the flick of the first domino at the Big Bang. We may not even be sure that the Big Bang was the beginning of everything, after all there had to be energy to build up to cause such a tremendous explosion in the first place. In a theological view I would point to the Incarnation of Jesus as an example of telos in our history, I am a Catholic after all. My lingering question is where should that theological teleology interact with the other ways of knowing?

I’ve written here before about my view that belief and knowledge are two distinct yet interrelated things. One must believe in one’s senses to know, yet there are things in which one can believe without knowing which one cannot know without believing. The prime example of this is God; “I believe in One God,” it’s something I say every week at Mass in the Creed, “Credo in unum Deum,” in the Latin original of our Roman Missal. Yet God alone is a tremendous challenge to know because God is both paradoxical and far greater than the extent of my knowledge. For this reason, we had the Incarnation, as we recite in the Creed:

“I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,

The Only Begotten Son of God,

Born of the Father before all ages.”

For God to be knowable God needed to come down to our human level in the person of Jesus, God the Son. This was Jesus’s telos, to be known, to be heard, and as we believe restore faith in God and cleanse humanity of original sin. Here there is a collision of belief and knowledge, where something clearly happened about 2,000 years ago because a new profusion of faith occurred, beginning in Judaea and spreading around the Mediterranean World in the Roman Empire and beyond to become Christianity. That new religion adapted to fit the cultures it encountered, so as to be more acceptable to its new converts. Today that collision continues in the Eucharist, the most sacred of all seven sacraments, in which we Catholics alongside our Orthodox brothers and sisters believe that God becomes flesh again in the sacramental bread and wine. Can we know that it happens? Not by any scientific measure, yet something does happen. That something is perceptible through belief, and it is the Great Mystery of the Faith that has kept me in the Catholic Church in spite of the ecclesiastical politics and divisions of our time.

My Irish Gaelic ancestors understood Christianity in their own way, aspects of which survive into the present day. That collision of belief and knowledge looks to some lingering folk belief, or superstition if you will, that I’ve inherited of particular days in the calendar when the worlds of the living and the dead could collide. We see this most pronounced in the old Gaelic calendar on Samhain, which developed through Catholicism into Halloween, the Day of the Dead, and All Souls’ Day around the beginning of November. I see All Saints’ Day fitting into this as well, after all the Saints are our honored dead all the same. Likewise, Bealtaine, the celebration of the coming of Summer at the beginning of May is also the Catholic celebration of the Crowning of Mary, something I attended at Rockhurst on several occasions.

What in all of this can I actually know? I know the stories that have survived from before St. Patrick and the coming of Christianity to my ancestors 15 centuries ago, even if those stories are Christianized in some way or another. I know this just as much as I know that Jesus existed in the first century CE because there are effects of these stories in the lives and histories that are remembered down the generations. If these stories have any teleology, it’s to teach us lessons about life that our ancestors learned so that we might not have to face the same trouble all over again. The folly of humanity is that we are resistant to having a clear purpose or end to our aims. Through our free will we know that there are always many options to choose between.I don’t know if I made the right choice in dropping that philosophy major at the last moment. In many respects, it was a poor decision. I learned from that experience and many others in my early life to stick with things until their conclusion. This learning is something that has been tested to grow beyond mere opinion through belief into something that is verifiable. When I look at my prospects in my doctoral program, I always decide to stick with it because I don’t yet know what my prospects will be like once I’ve earned it, something that I do know having 2 master’s degrees and a bachelor’s degree to my name. I have gained a great deal of epistemic experience through all these memories that have informed the nature of my character. Yet where they lead I cannot say, for the purpose of my life is something I continue to decide day by day.

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Understanding the Classics to Understand Ourselves

I’m writing this having just read a stirring article in Commonweal by Cathleen Kaveny, a professor of law and theology at Boston College, on the merits of reading St. Augustine’s Confessions in the original Latin. Professor Kaveny’s article was in response to Princeton’s Classics department’s much noted decision to cut the requirement for its undergraduate majors to prove proficiency in Latin and/or Ancient Greek in order to earn their degrees. I’ve had a number of discussions with friends and colleagues about that particular decision, being a current student of Latin myself, and an off-again-on-again student of Classical and Koine Greek. While I personally haven’t yet read Augustine in the original Latin, in part from a personal dislike for what I perceive as the grumpiness of St. Augustine’s writings (of the early Church Fathers I prefer St. Gregory of Nyssa), I can relate to the thrill and benefit of reading these texts in their original languages.

A page from my copy of Ovid’s Ars Amorita

There’s something lost in the translation of any text. English, for all its excessive complexity, lacks the imperfect tense for verbs, meaning that when I am trying to express an idea in any of the languages my sources are written in that uses imperfect verbs, I’m often left struggling to find a really good clear way of expressing that the action is in the past but not quite completed. Think about particular words or phrases in English that sound like other words; the planet Uranus has a funny name depending on how you pronounce it, but that relation between the seventh planet and your posterior anatomy is lost if you try to translate it into practically any other language.

Beyond just understanding literature as its authors intended, the study of Latin and Ancient Greek is critically important to understanding the origins of our civilization, however problematic that word may well have become. The civilization of the peoples whose cultural origins are drawn from Europe, both eastern and western, derive in their origins from the ancient civilizations of the Greeks and the Romans. Those cultures, those powers, those memories have had such a profound and lasting influence on our world today that it would be profoundly shortsighted to stop teaching about them to such a detailed level as many programs do. Our political systems have their origins at least in part in the Classical World, modern representative governments can draw some of their lineage from the democracy of Athens as well as from the Roman Republic.

Generation after generation following the fall of the Western Roman Empire tried in their own way to set themselves up as the heirs of Rome, from Theodoric and the Ostrogoths based at Ravenna in the fifth century CE through Charlemagne and his successors the Holy Roman Emperors in the German-speaking lands north of the Alps, to the Tsars of Russia, the revolutionaries of France, and the founders of the United States. I once wrote in my book Travels in Time Across Europe that to me, Paris today feels as close to what I’d imagine an idealized vision of Rome during the height of the Republic would’ve been like two thousand years ago. The symbols of those governments, particularly of the Roman Republic and the later Roman Empire, remain so present in so many aspects of our world today.

I study the history of French natural history texts written in the second-half of the sixteenth century right at the tail end of the Renaissance that began in Florence in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The whole idea of a renaissance is that it was a period when classical culture, literature, architecture, politics, and philosophy saw a revival, a rebirth as is the etymology of the word “renaissance” itself. Advocates of this “renaissance” at the time saw themselves as rekindling the light of the classical world, of restoring the course of what at that time was beginning to be understood as European (aka Western) civilization.

The accidental realization that the Americas existed in 1492 thanks to Columbus resulted in one of the greatest changes in the history of humanity, the opening of the Atlantic and the beginning of permanent contact between the peoples of the Americas and those of Eurasia and Africa. It’s because of this that I prefer not to refer to our civilization as “Western” or “European,” but rather as an Atlantic civilization. It is still the descendant of the civilization of Christian Europe, itself a descendant of the older Mediterranean civilizations of Greece and Rome, but since 1500 our civilization has been profoundly altered by its encounters with civilizations beyond Europe’s waters.

I concede that many of the worst aspects of our Atlantic civilization, from colonialism to slavery can trace some of their origins back to the Greeks and Romans, and that ideas like Manifest Destiny here in the United States have been argued to have drawn influence from older ideas like Rome’s right to rule the world, but even in the historical periods when these claims were being made they were incredibly flimsy. That said, of any problem today, one cannot tie modern ideas of race back to the classical world, as our ideas about race didn’t really begin to develop until 1500; it’s development in the Americas is a central theme to my research.

All this said, we need to understand our history to understand who we are and how we got here, and to do that we need to understand the classical foundations upon which our civilization has been built. The best way to understand those foundations is to be able to read the books they left behind in their original languages. Since the Renaissance we’ve remained generally in the same steady period of knowledge about the classical past; in fact one could argue that the beginnings of all modern fields of research can draw their origins back to the humanists of the Renaissance who sought to revive the sciences of the classical past. Language barriers speak more so to the problems with our education system in general than to anything else. Language education isn’t prioritized in this country, where assimilation and Americanization have been the standards for generations; we come to expect schoolchildren to only know American English because anything else would be unpatriotic. Even if a student comes into a Classics program with a foundational knowledge of one of the Romance languages, in this country likely Spanish, they’ll have a way into beginning to understand Latin. There are strong connections between languages as much as there are between cultures of different ages, we just have to know where to look.