The Fred Martinez Report

http://theradtrad.blogspot.com/2013/08/book-review-banished-heart-origins-of.html Book Review: The Banished Heart: Origins of Heteropraxis in the Catholic Church by Dr. Geoffrey Hull (minor update) Dr Geoffrey Hull source: Wikipedia.org Once every now and then one finds an author capable of approaching a daunting subject with remarkable clairvoyance, not muddling himself among polemics or minutiae. Dr. Geoffrey Hull is one such author. His  The Banished Heart: Origins of Heteropraxis in the Catholic Church  recalls that old saying that the truth is not between two positions, but rather above them. Hull examines the roots of the twentieth century liturgical overhaul by rising above the disputes between liberals and traditionalists that have raged on for five decades and taking a long, far-sighted look back centuries more, to the late first millennium, when the Roman liturgy was maturing, the Roman patriarchate was expanding its missionary presence in Western and Eastern Europe, and the

https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2019/03/artificial-intelligence-and-magical.html Artificial intelligence and magical thinking Arthur C. Clarke famously said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  Is this true?  That depends on what you mean by “indistinguishable from.”  The phrase could be given either an epistemological reading or a metaphysical one.  On the former reading, what the thesis is saying is that if a technology is sufficiently advanced, you would not be able to  know  from examining it that it is not magic, even though in fact it is not.  This is no doubt what Clarke himself meant, and it is plausible enough, if only because the word “sufficiently” makes it hard to falsify.  If there was some technology that  almost  seemed like magic but could be shown not to be on close inspection, we could always say “Ah, but that’s only because it wasn’t  sufficiently  advanced.”  So the thesis really just amounts to the claim that people can be