Maverick Philosopher

A Difference Between Me and David Lewis

David Lewis is (or rather was) living proof that being a genius  is no guarantee of having sound ideas.  I am living proof that having sound ideas does not require being a genius!

The Spiritual Conservative

A new blog born on this Fourth of July.  Well worth a look, and open for comments.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: 'Reason' Titles

We need a list of 'Reason' titles.  Here are three: You're the Reason I'm Livin; You're the Reason (I Don't Sleep at Night); Reason to Believe.  Last week or so I've been forcing myself to listen to Michael Jackson stuff to see if maybe, just maybe, I may have missed something of merit.  But it's just robotic crap compared to tunes of human meaning like these that can give a man pleasure from 8 to 80.  I can't imagine anyone but a freak relating to Jackson's "Bad" at the age of 80 even if he could relate to it at 8 or 18.

Patriotism and Jingoism

It is not uncommon to hear people confuse patriotism with jingoism. So let's spend a few moments this Fourth of July reflecting on the difference.

Dennett on the Deformation of the God Concept

I had an excellent discussion with Mike Valle on a number of topics yesterday afternoon.  The following post exfoliates one of the themes of our discussion.

One of the striking features of Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking 2006)  is that Dennett seems bent on having a straw man to attack. This is illustrated by his talk of the "deformation" of the concept of God: "I can think of no other concept that has undergone so dramatic a deformation." (206) He speaks of "the migration of the concept of God in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) away from concrete anthropomorphism to ever more abstract and depersonalized concepts." (205)

Whittaker Chambers on Beethoven

Whittaker Chambers (Witness, p. 19) on the Third Movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony:

. . . that music was the moment at which Beethoven finally passed beyond the suffering of his life on earth and reached for the hand of God, as God reaches for the hand of Adam in Michaelangelo's vison of the creation.

Well, either the adagio movement of the 9th or the late piano sonatas, in particular, Opus 109, Opus 110, and Opus 111. To my ear, those late compositions are unsurpassed in depth and beauty.

In these and a few other compositions of the great composers we achieve a glimpse of what music is capable of.  Just as one will never appreciate the possibilities of genuine philosophy by reading hacks such as Ayn Rand or positivist philistines (philosophistines?) such as David Stove, one will never appreciate the possibilities of great music and its power of speaking to what is deepest in us if one listens only to contemporary popular music.

Ideals

Not only do we fail to live up to the ideals we have, we fail to have the ideals we ought to have. There are two problems here, the first pertaining more to the will, the second more to the intellect, or rather to the faculty of moral discernment.  Let us consider the second problem.

It is not enough to have ideals, one must have the right ideals. This is why being idealistic, contrary to common opinion, is not always good. Idealism ran high among the members of the Sturmabteilung (SA) and the Schuetzstaffel (SS). The same is true of countless millions who became Communists in the 20th century: they sacrificed their 'bourgeois' careers and selfish interests to serve the Party.  (See Whittaker Chambers, Witness, required reading for anyone who would understand Communism.) But it would have been better had the members of these organizations been cynics and slackers. It is arguably better to have no ideals than to have the wrong ones.  Nazism and Communism brought unprecedented amounts of evil into the world on the backs of idealistic motives and good intentions.  Connected with this is the point that wanting to do good is not good enough: one must know what the good is and what one morally may and may not do to attain it.

Linguistic Smuggling

Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchy, p. 72:

Only religious superstition or the folly of idealist metaphysics could encourage us to assume that nature will prove ultimately rational . . . .

Linguistic smuggling has all the advantages of theft over honest toil. The mere phrase 'religious superstition' smuggles in the proposition that all religion is superstition, while 'the folly of idealist metaphysics' insinuates the proposition that idealist metaphysics is foolish. Both propositions are false; but even if you disagree with me on that, you must agree that they cannot be assumed to be true.

A critical reader doesn't let himself be bullied by verbiage of the above sort. He unpacks the loaded phrases and tests their explosive power, if any.

Hume: Occasionalism Without God?

I wonder if I can get any of my esteemed readers to swallow the following suggestion. Ten years or so ago it came into my head that Hume's analysis of causation in terms of (i) temporal precedence, (ii) spatiotemporal contiguity, and (iii) constant conjunction can be reasonably viewed as occasionalism without God.

My Preferred Modes of Locomotion

Ambulatory and cursory, primarily, and then in distant second and third places respectively, natatory and saltatory.

Ducasse on the Nature and Observability of the Causal Relation

0. Herewith, some interpretative notes on Curt Ducasse, "On the Nature and Observability of the Causal Relation," in Causation, eds. Sosa and Tooley, Oxford 1993, pp. 125-136.

 

1. Assuming that causality is a relation (not entirely obvious!), the question arises as to what sorts of entity can serve as its relata. Following Schopenhauer, whom he cites, Curt Ducasse holds that in strict propriety only events can be causes and effects. An event is either a change or an absence of a change. Thus a tree's losing its leaves is an event, but a tree is not. In strict propriety, it makes no sense to say that Bill was killed by a mountain lion. One has to say something like: Bill was killed by the attack of a mountain lion. In the attack the lion is the agent as Bill is the patient, but the latter is no more the effect than the former is the cause. The cause is the lion's attack, the effect is Bill's death. Some theorists distinguish between agent-causation and event-causation, but for Ducasse, there is no such thing as agent-causation: causation just is event-causation.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The King

The lately bruited hosannahs to a certain pretender to the throne notwithstanding -- may peace finally be upon him -- there is but one king.  She Thinks I Still Care.  He'll Have to Go.  This is music with human meaning.

Apples and Sparkplugs

All too frequently people say, ‘You’re comparing apples and oranges’ in order to convey the idea that two things are so dissimilar as to to disallow any significant comparison. Can’t they do better than this? Apples and oranges are highly comparable in respects too numerous to mention. Both are fruits, both are edible, both grow on trees, both are good sources of fiber, both contain Vitamin C, etc.

Why not say, ‘You are comparing apples and sparkplugs’? Apples are naturally occurrent and edible while sparkplugs are inedible artifacts. That’s a serious difference.

This reminds me of a story I read as a boy in my hometown newspaper, the Post Advocate. (We paper boys called it the Pest Aggravate.) A man  ate an entire car, sparkplugs and all. A feat of automotive asceticism to rival the pillar antics of Simon Stylites.  He did it by cutting the car and its parts into small pieces that he then washed down with generous libations of buttermilk.

But a car is not just solid parts, but various fluids. You’ve got your gasoline, your crankcase oil, your tranny fluid, not to mention coolant, windshield wiper liquid, and what all else. How did he negotiate that stuff? Well, I suppose anything can be passed throught the gastrointestinal system if sufficiently watered down. So if a man gets it into his head to eat an entire car, he can do it. As my 4th grade teacher Sr. Elizabeth (Lizard) Marie used to say, "Where there’s a will there’s a way."

The Medical-Industrial Complex, Part II

Part I is here.

The liberal-leftist animus against corporations is undoubtedly excessive, as is their pollyannish trust in Big Government solutions to every problem under the sun; but this should not blind us to corporate irresponsibility especially when the corporate types work hand-in-hand with liberals to 'medicalize' the ordinary difficulties of life.

Meaning and Immortality

Some feel that if the fact of bodily death spells the extinction of the person, then this fact, if it is a fact, consigns human life to meaninglessness. This is a very strong intuition among those who have it, and I have it. But there are certain arguments from the naturalist camp that need to be addressed. I will now examine some of these arguments.

One can imagine a naturalist conceding arguendo that our lives do not end with bodily death, but then proceeding to question the bearing this could have on the meaning of life. For how could an extension of life beyond the grave give meaning to life this side of the grave? Wouldn't the same problems about existential meaning that arise on this side also arise on the far side? If this is so, then the postulation of an afterlife would accomplish nothing towards giving life a meaning.

The Medical-Industrial Complex

No doubt you have heard of ADD. Recently I learned of a new medical condition known as ADHD: attention deficit hyperactive disorder.

What could be called the medical-industrial complex is a curious alliance of soft-headed liberals eager to invent diseases and celebrate their 'victims' and money-grubbing corporate types out to turn a quick buck. Liberals invent the diseases and syndromes, while the big pharmaceutical companies supply the drugs for their alleviation. Compliant shrinks and medicos write the prescriptions and serve as go-betweens while Big Government programs divert tax dollars from legitimate uses to enrich the doctors and drug companies.

Emerson on Thoreau's Lack of Ambition

Ralph Waldo Emerson, journal entry from June, 1851:

Thoreau wants a little ambition in his mixture. Fault of this, instead of being the head of American engineers, he is captain of [the] huckleberry party. (Bliss Perry, ed., The Heart of Emerson's Journals, Houghton Mifflin, 1926, p. 256.)

As a former student of engineering, I am glad Thoreau stuck to his walking and writing. Like Kierkegaard, he served as a much-needed corrective to the hustle and frenzy of his age.  There is need of slackers to counterbalance the go-getters, and if slackers need a patron saint, Henry David would be a fine choice as would Walt Whitman. 

Of E-Mail and Doing Nothing

I do appreciate e-mail, and I consider it rude not to respond; but lack of time and energy in synergy with congenital inefficiency conspire to make it difficult for me to answer everything. I am also temperamentally disinclined to acquiesce in mindless American hyperkineticism, in accordance with the Italian saying:

Dolce Far Niente

Sweet To Do Nothing

which saying, were it not for the inefficiency lately mentioned, would have been by now inscribed above my stoa. My paternal grandfather had it emblazoned on his pergola, and more 'nothing' transpires on my stoa than ever did beneath his pergola.

So time each day must be devoted to 'doing nothing': meditating, traipsing around in the local mountains, contemplating sunrises and moonsets, sunsets and moonrises, and taking naps, naps punctuated on one end by bed-reading and on the other by yet more coffee-drinking. Without a sizeable admixture of such 'nothing' I cannot see how a life would be worth living.

Abandoning Ambition, Let Us Repair to the Portico. . .

Thanks to open library stacks, I stumbled across the epigrams of Martial a while back. (Therein lies an argument for open stacks.) Marcus Valerius Martialis was so-named because he was born on March 1. He first saw the light of day circa A.D. 40 at Bilbilis in Hispania Tarraconensis. So far to me he seems a scribbler of no great importance, though he is entertaining, and, like Samuel Pepys, another scribbler of no great importance, he affords an insight into the times in which he lived and into the invariability of human folly. If I knew more of Martial, and more of Truman Capote, perhaps I would compare them: superficial, sycophantic, but prodigious in their quill-driving. In any case, here for leisurely consumption is one of Martial's more substantial epigrams, addressed to another Martial, his old friend Iulius Martialis:

Idiotic Marginalia From Marginal Idiots

Have you noticed that the same people who are morally obtuse enough to underline and annotate public library books tend to be the same people who are too intellectually obtuse to make good comments? If they are going to deface public property, they should at least have the decency to stun us with the brilliance of their commentary, the magnificence of their marginalia, the glory of their glosses. I don't believe I have ever read a good marginalium in a public library book.

And why do the cretins return the volumes?  Having littered the margins with their precious observations, they would have some reason to keep the books.

Library Stacks: Open or Closed?

Some punk having badly defaced a  book I was about to check out, I had the librarian make a note to that effect lest I be accused of the barbarism.  I mentioned to the librarian that the widespread disrespect shown to public property is an argument against socialism.  He responded that it is an argument against open stacks.  He had a point, but on the other side of the question:

Open library stacks allow for browsing and finding books that otherwise might have gone undetected. I was on the prowl in the BDs a while back looking for BonJour's In Defense of Pure Reason and Searle's Mind: A Brief Introduction. Searle's book hangs out at BD 418.3.S4. Nearby, at BD 418.3.S78, I spied Leopold Stubenberg, Consciousness and Qualia (1998). Though published by an obscure press, and obviously a reworking of the author's dissertation, it is turning out to be an outstanding resource. I'm glad he wrote it, and I'm glad I found it. But I might not have, had the stacks been closed.

On the other hand, open stacks allow any Tom, Dick, or Mary to cause mischief by stealing, defacing, hiding and otherwise mishandling books. A common problem is the removal of a volume and its return to the wrong position. Such a book is as as good as lost. A librarian acquaintance tells me that the problem is worse than one might think.

No doubt there are other considerations relevant to the open/closed question. But for the moment, I'm for open stacks. In a society as tolerant of bad behavior as ours is, however, one wonders how long libraries can remain unprotected. 

Islam and the Euthyphro Problem

Horace Jeffery Hodges  has a couple of informative and well-documented posts, here and here, on the divine will and its limits, if any, in Judaism and Christianity on the one hand, and in Islam, on the other. One way to focus the issue is in terms of the Euthyphro dilemma.

The locus classicus is Stephanus 9-10 in the early Platonic dialog, Euthyphro. This aporetic dialog is about the nature of piety, and Socrates, as usual, is in quest of a definition. Euthyphro proposes three definitions, with each of which Socrates has no trouble finding fault. According to the second, "piety is what all the gods love, and impiety is what all the gods hate." To this Socrates famously responds, "Do the gods love piety because it is pious, or is it pious because they love it?" In clearer terms, do the gods love pious acts because they are pious, or are pious acts pious because the gods love them?

But the Euthyphro problem assumes its full trenchancy and interest in the following generalized form of an aporetic dyad:

Learn Italian in Ten Minutes

Here.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Sleepwalk

First off, a beautiful version by Joe Satriani.  Admirably restrained given Satriani's incendiary chops.  Then a very satisfying  Leo Kottke-Chet Atkins duet presided over by Garrison Keillor.  Finally the original version by Santo and Johnny, 1959. 

Four Kinds of Ontological Argument

The essence of ontological argumentation is the inferential move from the concept/essence of F to the existence/nonexistence of F. We are all familiar with ontological arguments for the existence of God. They have been a staple of philosophy of religion discussions from Anselm to Plantinga. But there is nothing in the nature of ontological argumentation to require that God be the subject matter, or that the argument conclude to the existence of something. There are nontheistic ontological arguments as well as ontological disproofs. Thus there are four possible combinations.

Alypius and the Gladiators

At the time of the Nicholas Berg beheading, a correspondent wrote to say that he watched the video only up to the point where the knife was applied to the neck, but refused to view the severing. He did right, for reasons given in Book Six, Chapter Eight of Augustine’s Confessions.

 Alypius was a student of Augustine, first in their hometown of Thagaste, and later in Carthage. In the previous chapter, Augustine writes that in “the maelstrom of Carthaginian customs” Alypius was “sucked down into a madness for the circus.” Later, when Alypius preceded Augustine to Rome to study law, some friends persuaded him against his will to attend a gladiatorial show. Alypius thought he could observe the scene calmly and resist the temptation to blood lust. But he was wrong. When a gladiator fell in combat, and a mighty roar went up from the crowd, Alypius, overcome by curiosity, opened his eyes, drank in the sight, “...and was wounded more deeply in his soul than the man whom he desired to look at was wounded in his body.” Augustine continues:

As he saw that blood, he drank in savageness at the same time. He did not turn away, but fixed his sight on it, and drank in madness without knowing it. He took delight in that evil struggle, and became drunk on blood and pleasure. He was no longer the man who entered there, but only one of the crowd that he had joined, and a true comrade of those who had brought him there. (Tr. J. K. Ryan)

In our decadent culture, we are not yet at the nadir of Roman brutality. But we are at the point where vast numbers of people find entertainment in, and see nothing wrong with, blood lust by itself or in permutation with sexual lust. For such people, and the legal sophists who misuse the First Amendment, the story of Alypius and the Gladiators can mean nothing. To borrow a line from a 1997  Dylan song, “It ain’t dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there.”

Five Kinds of Reviewer

Five Kinds of Reviewer

(adapted by Roger Shiner from Susan Swan, ‘Nine ways of looking at a critic’, Toronto Globe and Mail 30th November 1996. E23)

1.      The Spankers are out to administer discipline over anything from ill-conceived plot-lines to misplaced commas.

2.      The Young (and Old) Turk sees the review solely as an opportunity to demonstrate her or his own intellectual superiority and above-average intelligence.

3.      The Self-Abusers feel they could have written a better book on the subject, given half the chance, and describe it at great length.

4.      Gushers skip over discussion of the book; they just want to communicate the enjoyment of reading it.

5.      The Good Reviewer will represent the book (without lapsing into long-winded summaries) so the reader gets a sense of what the book is like whether the reviewer likes it or not. The good reviewer will also offer an interesting or revealing point of view from which the book can be perceived critically.

The above was found here.

More on Texts and Translations

A regular reader responds to  On Reading Philosophical Texts in Their Original Languages: 

 

Nice piece on the necessity of studying texts in their original languages. The very question puzzles me. Why would someone assume he knows what Kant said and meant by reading Kemp Smith? I don't know what shape the Kant MSS are in---are there serious problems with some works?--- but the problem of working with translations becomes even more acute with classical texts like Cicero and Aristotle. Often the texts are in bad shape with extensive lacunae and obvious ancient editioral tampering. Restorations rely on ancient paraphrases in languages like Arabic or Syriac. Or the restorations are pure conjectures (the 19th century German scholars were very quick to restore).

 

All of this is concealed in a typical English translation. The Greekless young scholar thinks he is reading Aristotle, but perhaps only 80-90% of his text is well established. Crucial passages often turn out to be corrupt in big or small ways. The scholar who wishes to be able to say "Aristotle said..." instead of "W.D. Ross' translation says..." needs to be familiar with his text at the level of the so-called critical or variorum edition, where (hopefully) all the textual problems are owned up to and the scholar can make his own informed judgment about what the best text is.

 

 For this reason, college reading editions like the Loeb texts are not good enough, because they are not critical texts. Some editors do a better job than others in noting problems, but the Loeb Greek or Latin is once again often a heavily restored text. You need to work with the Teubners or the OCT's or special critical editions by individual scholars.

 

The truly dedicated scholar should in fact go one step further back and consult the MSS themselves. Often no one has taken a good critical look at the MSS in the years since some German did the original MSS work in the 19th century. The Germans made mistakes! And they restored and otherwise edited. The MS is not the same in many ways as their transcription. With the new optical technology, it is time and overtime for scholars to revisit the MSS and recover better texts. Where some competent scholar has just done this work, perhaps new MSS work is unnecessary, but where the critical text is 100+ years old, it is not reasonable to trust it.

 

If you are a young philosopher or classicist and reading this story does not excite and challenge you, if you are too unmotivated to master a language and its texts, then for God's sake don't pretend to be doing scholarship in the history of philosophy with a bunch of translations at hand. I'm preaching to the converted, right?

On Reading Philosophical Texts in Their Original Languages

From the mailbag:  

What are your thoughts on reading philosophical texts in the original language?  Do you think it's preferable -- or do you suppose it even makes a difference?  The idea of reading philosophy in the original is very interesting to me, because I've found that when you study texts in the history of philosophy at a university you'll for the most part be reading them in translation -- whereas whatever department is in charge of teaching the language in which the text was originally written usually will not offer it if it is too technical or specialized to be of general interest.

Hist-Analytic

A tip of the hat to Bob Koepp for reminding me of Hist-Analytic, an extensive repository of analytic materials some of them hard to locate.  No doubt you have heard of W. E. Johnson's determinable/determinate distinction.  Perhaps you even understand it.  But I'll bet you didn't get it from the horse's mouth.  You can, here.