Descende caelo, Horace's ode 3.4, challenges the reader with an elaborate Pindaric architecture embracing seemingly disparate elements. After an opening invocation, the poet discourses at length on how the Muses protect him, then abruptly notes that those goddesses also nourished Octavian after his recent military campaign. This breaks off into a composite Titanomachy/Gigantomachy, followed by a set of maxims which the poet further illustrates with other mythical exempla. This paper contends that the relationship among these various parts comes into clearest (...) focus in the five-line description of the god Apollo that closes the Gigantomachy. This passage lies at the heart of the entire poem's major interpretive issuespoetics, panegyric, allusion, and structure but its pivotal role in the ode deserves fuller acknowledgement. (shrink)

In his “Theology and Falsification” Professor Antony Flew challenges the sophisticated religious believer to state under what conceivable occurrences he would concede that there really is no God Who loves mankind: ‘Just what would have to happen not merely to tempt but also, logically and rightly, to entitle us to say “God does not love us” or even “God does not exist”? I therefore put…the simple central questions, “What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you (...) a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of, God”?’. (shrink)

In every domain, the philosopher finds some principle which is unfalsifiable in so far as all experience is interpreted in accordance with it. This principle is tautologous or analytic-within-its domain in that it defines fundamental terms with which it characterizes experiences: Newton’s Laws define “mass” and “the equality of times”; the Principle of the Rectilinear Propagation of LIght defines “light”; the Principle of Evolution defines “adaptation” and “natural selection”; and the Principle of the Conservation of Energy defines “a closed system.” (...) Moreover, each principle is employed as a methodological rule or a tacit imperative to the investigator to interpret experience or to draw inferences in accordance with it. Nevertheless, each principle has empirical content: not only by virtue of its place within its respective domain but also because there are sufficient rules of correspondence which make the statement-form empirically relevant; not only because the principle itself is taken to be true but also because empirical inferences are drawn in accordance with it. To construe these principles as mere counterfactuals would be clearly incorrect. Counterfactuals, as Rescher would characterize them, are “belief-contravening suppositions” because certain beliefs are excluded if one is to be consistent. Although this is certainly true of these principles, the range of beliefs contravened is far larger than those beliefs excluded in mere laws of nature. For, to give up these principles would be to give up explaining the entire domain of experience to which they are applicable. (shrink)