1. So, I chatted with my philosopher friend for a few minutes last night to clear up a few things.
First, about the If A, then B conditional. Here's what you can do with it:
a) If -B, then -A. Pretty simple.
b) To prove -B, from -A, you need to use an if and only if conditional. Example: If and only if Jeff dies, Jeff stops drinking coffee. Therefore, if I haven't stopped drinking coffee (-B), then I haven't died (-A). Compare with: If Jeff dies, then Jeff stops drinking coffee. For this -B, one could imagine a number of scenarios in which I would have stopped drinking coffee, but haven't died (-A). Like that I drank all of it. In the world.
So I think this is what I said in class, but wanted to be sure, so I checked. There's more you can do with this, but I can't talk to my friend about logic for too long or he'll prove that I don't exist. And I hate that.
2. Which brings us to the possibility of a contradiction in Luke, especially 9.50 and 11.23. I think we actually did make some sense of this in class, but I felt like there was still some confusion, so I'll go over the point again here. So let me first establish my terms. In Luke 9.50, the statement is "he is that is not against you is for you." In Luke 11.23: "he who is not with me is against me." So I'll make the following suppositions. First, as someone said (Zach I think?), that "for" is equivalent to "with." Second, that there are three possible groups: those against (-), the neutral (0), and those for (+). Using this symbols, I think 9.50 reads "if 0 or +, then +" and 11.23 reads "if 0 or -, then -." The contradiction, then, is in categorizing the neutral, or "0," group. This is a purely formal look and I'm sure there are other ways of looking at it. And, as I think Sierra and someone else (maybe Elisabeth) were suggesting, reading the context of each of this claims might be important.
Whether or not this is a "real" contradiction, my main point here was to suggest that there was a move from a more inclusive world-view to a more narrow, circumscribed one. I'll leave it to you to decide what you think is going on here.
3. Finally, about Paradise Lost (a 17th Century epic poem describing the banishment of Man from the Garden of Eden). I did a little research on Milton's influences and the answer is not as simple as the "he made most of that shit up" that I, inexcusably glibly, offered in class. In short, Milton drew upon a myriad of sources, from both the Old and New Testaments, to the Apocrypha, early Christian and Jewish occult writings, and later scholarly and religious commentary. The "angelology" that is so prominent in Paradise Lost is present in earlier texts, but most scholars seem to agree that Milton's worldview does indeed represent a new take on it. So I was wrong to say that it was mostly poesis, but there's also not a single Biblical or other textual passage that explains all that is included in the poem. Hope that remedies , even partially, the injustice I did it in class.
Jeff
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