Maverick Philosopher

Welcome to Maverick Philosopher

Online since May 2004. I publish both here and at Substack. I began posting at Substack in early 2021 under the rubric "Philosophy in Progress." The Substack entries are intended to assist educated non-philosophers in clarifying their thinking about matters of moment.  My PhilPeople page links to my Substack articles and my weblog Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical, and provides a list of my professional publications. 

 

Two-line biography:  I taught philosophy at various universities in the USA and abroad. At the relatively young age of 41 I resigned from  a tenured position to live the eremitic life of the independent philosopher in the Sonoran desert. Contact information on the About page on the right sidebar.

Interests: Everything. Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto. from Terentius. "I am a man: I consider nothing human foreign to me." Nothing human, but also nothing nonhuman. 

Much more below the fold. Best wishes to all men and women of good will who love truth, seek it, and strive to incorporate it in their lives.

On the 'Congressional Catfight'

Some friends to my Right think women have no place in politics. I strongly disagree. But there's no denying that the recent 'catfight' in Congress supplies these extreme Righties with ammo.  

Tulsi Gabbard is one member of the distaff contingent who has more right to be in politics than a lot of men I could mention. Here she takes on the stupidest bunch of women on TV. 

"Murder Your Darlings"

Good advice. I should take it. I am too enamored of my own formulations, which I tend to repeat. Anthony Flood, a hard-working editor who is doing some editing for me, just sent me this:

The phrase "murder your darlings" is often attributed to the English writer and critic Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. He used a version of this expression in his 1914 lecture titled "On Style," which is part of his book "On the Art of Writing." The original quote is:

"Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscripts to press. Murder your darlings."

This advice encourages writers to remove their most cherished or self-indulgent passages for the sake of overall clarity and quality in their writing. Over time, the phrase has been popularized and widely used by writers and writing instructors to emphasize the importance of being ruthless in editing and prioritizing the work's overall effectiveness over individual beloved segments.

I've said some unkind things about editors, but they do provide a check on one's vanity and self-indulgence.

Why Physical Culture?

Top o' the Stack.

Leftists Love Criminals

You will never understand the Left until you understand that they reliably take the side of  criminals, who comprise their clientele and path to power, over the law-abiding.   And with lefties it is always about power and control, first, foremost,  and forever.

Here we read about a 78-year-old Englishman who, in defending himself against a screwdriver-wielding home invader, caused the miscreant's death and is now facing a murder charge.

Dear old England, the mother country. It is sad to see your mother, senile and decrepit, go down the toilet, having lost all her moral sense and the will to live.

Examples such as this one, like entities, are easily multiplied; unlike entities, however, citations of leftist assaults on justice  are not likely to be multiplied beyond necessity.

Here is another example, a recent one, from Minnesota, for your delectation, or rather, disgust.

Once again one sees the justification for my political burden of proof:

As contemporary 'liberals' become ever more extreme, they increasingly assume what I call the political burden of proof.  The onus is now on them to defeat the presumption that they are so  morally and intellectually obtuse as not to be worth talking to.

Actually, that is far too mild a statement. Perhaps tomorrow I will tell you what I really think.

Over-Belief and Romans 1: 18-20

Substack latest.

Is the Pauline passage an example of Jamesian over-belief?

Why Isn't There a Palestinian State?

A history lesson in under five minutes.

A more nuanced narrative from eight years ago.

Is there an historian in the house?

Bad and Good Self-Censorship

'Censorship' and 'self-censorship' are not dirty words.  There are good and bad forms of each.

Bad self-censorship

The spreading virus of wokeness has transformed not only publishing but the entire information economy. At every level of it from school lectures to movies to Substack blogs, participants are vulnerable to having their careers ruined by a woke criticism. Everyone I know in publishing is aware of this danger and must reckon on the consequences. As a result, we now have self-censorship. It is far worse than the McCarthyism of the 1950’s because its enforcers among the woke have the ability to create instant twitters storms for which there are few effective defenses. (Edward Jay Epstein)

 Good self-censorship

Self-censorship and self-regulation of words, thoughts, desires, and emotions are essential to the moral life. 

Sebastian Gorka Makes the Case for Trump before the Oxford Union

Magnificent

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Weather Conditions

Earl Scruggs and Friends, Foggy Mountain Breakdown

Ella Fitzgerald, Misty. Beats the Johnny Mathis version. A standard from the Great American Songbook.

Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze. Not from the Great American Songbook. And presumably not about weather conditions.  'Scuse me while I kiss the sky? Or: 'Scuse me while I kiss this guy?

Cream, Sunshine of Your Love

Tom Waits, Emotional Weather Report

Art Garfunkel and James Taylor, Crying in the Rain. Written by Carole King and popularized by the Everly Bros.

Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain. Written by Fred Rose and performed by Roy Acuff in the '40s.

Now my hair is turned to silver
All my life I've loved in vain
I can see her star in heaven
Blue eyes cryin' in the rain.

Someday when we meet up yonder
We'll stroll hand in hand again
In a land that knows no parting
Blue eyes crying in the rain.

Allman Bros., Blue Sky

Kansas, Dust in the Wind

Eric Clapton, Let It Rain

Dave van Ronk and the Hudson Dusters, Clouds ("Both Sides Now").  This beautiful version by "The Mayor of MacDougal Street" goes out to Oregon  luthier Dave Bagwill who I know will appreciate it. Judy Collins made a hit of it. And you still doubt that the '60s was the greatest decade for American popular music?  Speaking of the greatest decade, it was when the greatest writer of American popular songs, bar none, Bob Dylan, made his mark. Some generational chauvinism is justified! 

Joan Baez, A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall Could Johnny Mercer write a song like this?

Eva Cassidy, Over the Rainbow. Another old standard from the Great American Songbook.

Tom Waits, On a Foggy Night

Rolling Stones, She's a Rainbow

Dan Fogelberg, Rhythm of the Rain

Cascades, Rhythm of the Rain. The original.

Dee Clark, Raindrops. Manny Mora:

"Raindrops" is a 1961 song by the American R&B singer Dee Clark. Released in April of that same year, this ballad peaked at position 2 on the Hot 100 and at position 3 on the R&B chart.  [. . .]

Clark's biggest hit was also his last. [. . .]

Clark had a brief revival in 1975 when his song "Ride a Wild Horse" became a surprise Top 30 hit in the UK Singles Chart, becoming his first chart hit in the UK since "Just Keep It Up." Afterwards, Clark performed mostly on the oldies circuit. By the late 1980s, he was in dire straits financially, living in a welfare hotel in Toccoa, Georgia. Despite suffering a stroke in 1987 that left him partially paralyzed and with a mild speech impediment, he continued to perform until his death on December 7th 1990, in Smyrna, Georgia, from a heart attack at the age of 52. His last concert was with the Jimmy Gilstrap Band at the Portman Lounge in Anderson, South Carolina.

Dave Bagwill sends us to a clip in which Dave van Ronk talks a bit about the days of the "Great American Folk Scare" and then sings his signature number, "Green, Green, Rocky Road."

Mass Migration and Crime

Eva Vlaardingerbroek. Under 13 minutes. HT: Dave Bagwill.

Dave adds:

Elon Musk later weighed in on Eva’s remarks.

“The problem with “Great Replacement Theory” is that it fails to address the foundational issue of low birth rates.

Record low birth rates are leading to population collapse in Europe and even faster population collapse in most of Asia. Immigration is low in Asia, so there is no “replacement” going on, the countries are simply shrinking away.

If this doesn’t turn around, then any countries on Earth with low birth rates will become empty of people and fall into ruin, like the remains we see of the many long dead civilizations.”

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 28, 2024

Eva’s speech already has 36.7 million views in less than 48 hours.

This speech is the reason why the Biden administration and Western elites are so desperate to control speech. They can’t allow the people to have access to free thoughts and differing ideas. Because the elites are leading Western civilization to ruin. It appears that was their plan all along.

The Dark Heart of Modern Chess

Hyperventilatory. Consume cum grano salis.

Here is much better writing about chess by Grandmaster Raymond Keene.

Who Are These Hamas Supporters?

This just in from Tony Flood:

"From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” chant the useful idiots at elite institutions and parades in the West. Who are these people? Atheists who support theocratic lunatics, democrats who endorse medieval tyrants, feminists who defend misogynists who parade with the desecrated corpses of women, gays who defend maniacs who would joyfully hang them or toss them off the roof of a tall building. They talk of a secular, democratic and socialist Palestine. As George Orwell observed: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” 

Walter E. Block, "The Moral Duty to Destroy Hamas." (Emphasis added.) This is the text of the 927-word WSJ op-ed, published October 11, 2023, behind their paywall; Block posted it the next day on his Substack. 

Austrian School economist and first-generation Rothbardian (i.e., anarcho-capitalist libertarian), Block is a co-author of the 962-page The Classical Liberal Case for Israel (Springer 2021). For me, this book is prohibitively expensive; its argument, however, can be read for free in a documented-to-the-hilt article that the authors had published five years earlier in a peer-reviewed journal: Block WE, Futerman AG, and Farber R, The Legal Status of the State of Israel: A Libertarian Approach, Indonesian Journal of International & Comparative Law, No. 11, July 2016, 435-554. This link will open a 119-page pdf. 

I reiterate my stock disclaimer: Linkage does not constitute plenary endorsement.  I stand for free speech and open inquiry, and thus against those leftists, and in particular those leftists in cahoots with Islamists, who dishonor these classically liberal and traditionally American values. That being said, I fully endorse the material from Block quoted by Flood supra.

 

Addendum. Here is Hans-Hermann Hoppe's reply to Walter E. Block's "The Moral Duty to Destroy Hamas," above cited.  I am not qualified to enter this debate, but I will repeat the following from my partially autobiographical essay From Democrat to Dissident:

We were friends for a time, but friendship is fragile among those for whom ideas matter. Unlike the ordinary nonintellectual person, the intellectual lives for and sometimes from ideas. They are his oxygen and sometimes his bread and butter. He takes them very seriously indeed and with them differences in ideas. So, the tendency is for one intellectual to view another whose ideas differ as not merely holding incorrect views but as being morally defective in so doing. Why? Because ideas matter to the intellectual. They matter in the way doctrines and dogmas mattered to old-time religionists. If one’s eternal happiness is at stake, it matters infinitely whether one “gets it right” doctrinally. If there is no salvation outside the church, you had better belong to the right church. It matters so much that one may feel entirely justified in forcing the heterodox to recant “for their own good.”

 

Related (5/11):  Douglas Murray, Choose Life, not the Death Cults.  If, like me, you have no time to spend during working hours listening to slow-moving speeches, Murray provides an article adaptation of his speech before the Manhattan Institute, which adaptation is accessible via an internal link. 

 

And then there is this: Why Edmund Wilson Saw Judaism as the Key to America's Cultural Survival.

 

Finally, I see that Malcolm and 'Jacques' are debating, civilly but trenchantly, over at Pollack's place.

Four Kinds of Ontological Argument

A Substack typology.

Is Hegel the Protestant Aquinas?

Substack latest.

UPDATE (5/8/2024).  This from Kai Frederick Lorentzen:

You write:

" . . . It does annoy  me, however, that  Kainz doesn't supply any references.  For example, we read:

Hegel was critical of Catholicism at times, in his writings and lectures. For example, he once made a scurrilous remark about the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist . . . .

Very interesting, but what exactly does he say and where does he say it?  Inquiring minds want to know . . . . " 

That's from § 552 of the Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften where it says in context of the thought that religion is for the Selbstbewußtsein [self-consciousness] the basis of ethics and the state:

Es kann aber das Verhältnis der Unfreiheit [of the Selbstbewußtsein on the one and the content of truth on the other side - kfl] der Form nach stattfinden, obgleich der an sich seiende Inhalt der Religion der absolute Geist ist. Dieser große Unterschied, um das Bestimmtere anzugeben, findet sich innerhalb der christlichen Religion selbst, in welcher nicht das Naturelement den Inhalt des Gottes macht, noch auch ein solches in den Gehalt desselben als Moment eintritt, sondern Gott, der im Geist und in der Wahrheit gewußt wird, der Inhalt ist. Und doch wird in der katholischen Religion dieser Geist in der Wirklichkeit dem selbstbewußten Geist starr gegenübergestellt. Zunächst wird in der Hostie Gott als äußerliches Ding der religiösen Anbetung präsentiert (wogegen in der lutherischen Kirche die Hostie als solche erst und nur allein im Genusse, d.i. in der Vernichtung der Äußerlichkeit derselben, und im Glauben, d.i. in dem zugleich freien, seiner selbst gewissen Geiste, konsekriert und zum gegenwärtigen Gotte erhoben wird). Aus jenem ersten und höchsten Verhältnis der Äußerlichkeit fließen alle die anderen äußerlichen, damit unfreien, ungeistigen und abergläubischen Verhältnisse; namentlich ein Laienstand, der das Wissen der göttlichen Wahrheit wie die Direktion des Willens und Gewissens von außen her und von einem anderen Stande empfängt, welcher selbst zum Besitze jenes Wissens nicht auf geistige Weise allein gelangt, sondern wesentlich dafür einer äußerlichen Konsekration bedarf. Weiteres, die teils nur für sich die Lippen bewegende, teils darin geistlose Weise des Betens, daß das Subjekt auf die direkte Richtung zu Gott Verzicht leistet  und andere um das Beten bittet, - die Richtung der Andacht an wundertätige Bilder, ja selbst an Knochen, und die Erwartung von Wundern durch sie, - überhaupt, die Gerechtigkeit durch äußerliche Werke, ein Verdienst, das durch die Handlungen soll erworben, ja sogar auf andere übertragen werden können, usf., - alles dieses bindet den Geist unter ein Außersichsein, wodurch sein Begriff im Innersten verkannt und verkehrt und Recht und Gerechtigkeit, Sittlichkeit und Gewissen, Zurechnungsfähigkeit und Pflicht in ihrer Wurzel verdorben sind. 

(G.W.F. Hegel, Werke 10, Frankfurt a.M. 1986, pp. 356-357)

Here it is in  English:

As the inseparability of the two sides has been indicated, it may be worth while to note the separation as it appears on the side of religion. It is primarily a point of form: the attitude which self-consciousness takes to the body of truth. So long as this body of truth is the very substance or indwelling spirit of self-consciousness in its actuality, then self-consciousness in this content has the certainty of itself and is free. But if this present self-consciousness is lacking, then there may be created, in point of form, a condition of spiritual slavery, even though the implicit content of religion is absolute spirit. This great difference (to cite a specific case) comes out within the Christian religion itself, even though here it is not the nature-element in which the idea of God is embodied, and though nothing of the sort even enters as a factor into its central dogma and sole theme of a God who is known in spirit and in truth. And yet in Catholicism this spirit of all truth is in actuality set in rigid opposition to the self-conscious spirit. And, first of all, God is in the ‘host’ presented to religious adoration as an external thing. (In the Lutheran Church, on the contrary, the host as such is not at first consecrated, but in the moment of enjoyment, i.e. in the annihilation of its externality. and in the act of faith, i.e. in the free self-certain spirit: only then is it consecrated and exalted to be present God.) From that first and supreme status of externalization flows every other phase of externality - of bondage, non-spirituality, and superstition. It leads to a laity, receiving its knowledge of divine truth, as well as the direction of its will and conscience from without and from another order - which order again does not get possession of that knowledge in a spiritual way only, but to that end essentially requires an external consecration. It leads to the non-spiritual style of praying - partly as mere moving of the lips, partly in the way that the subject foregoes his right of directly addressing God, and prays others to pray - addressing his devotion to miracle- working images, even to bones, and expecting miracles from them. It leads, generally, to justification by external works, a merit which is supposed to be gained by acts, and even to be capable of being transferred to others. All this binds the spirit under an externalism by which the very meaning of spirit is perverted and misconceived at its source, and law and justice, morality and conscience, responsibility and duty are corrupted at their root.

BV: I see no reason to think that Kainz is to referring to the above passage from Hegel's Encyclopedia. In a later article I just now found, Corpus Christi and Reality, Kainz writes,

My reference was to one of Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of religion, in which he criticized the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, causing a Catholic student to report him to the authorities. Hegel had attempted what we might call a sick joke: he asked whether, if a mouse had come across a consecrated Host and eaten it, Catholics might be obliged to act worshipfully to the mouse, and so forth.

But again Kainz gives no reference! So I consulted Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1827), but found no reference to any host-eating mouse in the passage in which Hegel refers to communion, which he calls Genuss which means enjoyment but also partaking of  as in the eating or drinking of something. (In some contexts, geniesßar has the connotation, edible.) 

Back to Lorentzen:

Heavy stuff, no? Well, with a little stretch you could say that Hegel is more Lutheran here than Martin Luther himself. Luther's theological approach, as I recently learned from Volker Leppin's brilliant study Die fremde Reformation: Luthers mystische Wurzeln (München 2016: C.H. Beck), was rooted in medieval mysticism in the line of Johannes Tauler and Meister Eckhart, whose idea to give birth to an inner divine child was strongly appreciated by Luther. Regarding extensive philosophical framing of the religious practice he became more and more critical. Here Luther's negative view of the traditional doctrine of the Eucharist finds its place: It's the Scholastics with their detailed Aristotelian understanding of the Eucharist that Luther has a problem with. The flesh and the blood of Christ is absolutely real, but no philosopher can prove how! Instead, the affection of the baptized members of the community validates the ritual. Same problem in the other direction with the merely symbolic understanding of bread and wine, as we find it expressed by Zwingli and his successors like Calvin. Here Luther suspects Neo-Platonist hubris against God.    

Lorentzen's take strikes me as basically correct. Here is a  little under four minutes of  Volker Leppin.

In his 1827 lectures on the philosophy of religion Hegel mentions three views about the host or communion wafer:

According to the first, the host -- this external, sensible thing -- becomes by consecration the present God, God as a thing in the manner of an empirical 'thing.' The second view is the Lutheran one . . . here there is no transubstantiation . . . the presence of God is utterly a spiritual presence -- the consecration takes place in the faith of the subject. The third view is that the present God exists only in representation, in memory, and to this extent he does not have this immediate subjective presence. (Hodgson one-volume edition, U. of Cal Press, 1988, 480-481.)

Alles klar? 

This may help: Transubstantion, Consubstantiation, or Something Else?

Also of interest: Must Catholics Hate Hegel?

Herr Lorentzen signs off:

With best wishes!
Ex toto corde

Kai (who likes your recent Sunday meditation - Hyperkinetic and Hyperconnected - a lot!)

Dale Tuggy on Origen on John

I have a Twitter/X  account, but I don't post there often. Today I took a peek and found this:

https://x.com/DaleTuggy/status/1786943516922306708.  The following is from Tuggy:

An interesting passage from Origen's commentary on John. Some readers still make the same mistake!

"Those, however, who are confused on the subject of the Father and the Son bring together the statement, "God . . . raised up Christ' [1 Cor 15:14]. . . and words like these which show him who raises to be different from him who has been raised, and the statement [in Jn 2:19], "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." They think that these statements prove that the Son does not differ from the Father in number, but that both being one, not only in essence, but also in substance, they are said to be Father and Son in relation to certain differing aspects, not in relation to their reality.

Comment: Yup, some still look at that text from John and conclude that Jesus and God are one and the same ("same in number"). Back to Origen,

For this reason, we must first quote to them the texts capable of establishing definitely that the Son is other than the Father, and we must say that it is necessary that a son be the son of a father and that a father be the father of a son. After this we must say to them that it is not strange for him, who admits that he can do nothing except what he sees the Father doing, and who says that whatever the Father does, the Son likewise also does, to have raised the dead, (which was the body), since the Father, who we must say emphatically has raised the Christ from the dead, grants this to him."

Comment: I think if you're a dualist you could accept this solution. If you're not, I think you can simply understand Christ to mean that after God would bring him back to life, he'd get up!

Hyperkinetic and Hyperconnected

The typical American's life is frantic, frenetic, hyperkinetic, and hyperconnected. For any really good reason? What's the rush?  Quo vadis? Whither goest thou, thoughtless hustler? 

From time to time we need to slow down and unplug. Try to go deviceless for a few days. Haul off to some desert spot and rest incommunicado, out of range of worldly noise.  Stop jabbering and listen for signals from beyond the human horizon.

In our ever-accelerating descent into national dementia we are building a spiritual Faraday cage to 'shield' us from intimations from Elsewhere. We are sinking ever deeper into our empty immanence. 

Twenty Years Into It

Today is my 20th 'blogiversary.' Can you say cacoethes scribendi?

I've missed only a few days in these twenty years so it's a good bet I'll be blogging 'for the duration.' Blogging for me is like reading and thinking and meditating and running and hiking and playing chess and breathing and eating and playing the guitar and drinking coffee. It is not something one gives up until forced to.  Some of us are just natural-born scribblers.  We were always writing, on loose leaf, in notebooks, on the backs of envelopes, in journals

daily kept.  Maintaining a weblog is just an electronic extension of all that. 

Except that now I conduct my education in public.  This has some disadvantages, but  they are vastly outweighed by the advantages.  I have met a lot of interesting and stimulating characters via this blog, locally and in far-away places, some in person.  You bait your hook and cast it into the vasty deeps of cyberspace and damned if you don't call forth spirits or at least snag some interesting fish.  The occasional scum sucker and bottom feeder are no counterargument.

I thank you all for your patronage, sincerely, and I hope my writings are of use not just to me. I have a big fat file of treasured fan mail that more than compensates me for my efforts.

I am proud to have inspired a number of you Internet quill-drivers.  Some of you saw my offerings years ago and thought to yourself, "I can do this too, and I can do it better!" And some of you have. I salute you.

I had more to say on an earlier year's anniversary if you care to look.

Blog on!

I've missed only a few days in these twenty years so it's a good bet I'll be blogging 'for the duration.' Blogging for me is like reading and thinking and meditating and running and hiking and playing chess and breathing and eating and playing the guitar and drinking coffee. It is not something one gives up until forced to.  Some of us are just natural-born scribblers.  We were always writing, on loose leaf, in notebooks, on the backs of envelopes, in journals

daily kept.  Maintaining a weblog is just an electronic extension of all that. 

Except that now I conduct my education in public.  This has some disadvantages, but  they are vastly outweighed by the advantages.  I have met a lot of interesting and stimulating characters via this blog, locally and in far-away places, some in person.  You bait your hook and cast it into the vasty deeps of cyberspace and damned if you don't call forth spirits or at least snag some interesting fish.  The occasional scum sucker and bottom feeder are no counterargument.

I thank you all for your patronage, sincerely, and I hope my writings are of use not just to me. I have a big fat file of treasured fan mail that more than compensates me for my efforts.

I am proud to have inspired a number of you Internet quill-drivers.  Some of you saw my offerings years ago and thought to yourself, "I can do this too, and I can do it better!" And some of you have. I salute you.

I had more to say on an earlier year's anniversary if you care to look.

Blog on!

On this Date in 1970

Kent State Shootings. Comparison with current campus  unrest. Neil Young's Ohio.

The Spook Stuff Chronicles

Danny Dennett meets Caspar the Friendly Ghost.

Stack leader.

In Dennett's case, de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est has expired.

On Climate 'Theology'

and the secularization of religious terminology.

Top o' the Stack

 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Road Tunes

This life is a via dolorosa through a vale of ambiguity. We trudge along veiled in ignorance of the ultimate whence, whither, and wherefore. But the way is not wholly dolorous and unmarked. There are some stunning vistas, exalted moments, intimations of Elsewhere, glimpses and vouchsafings, cloud-partings, fog-liftings, pointers and prospects.  We live by faith and hope in this life and beyond it. In any case, we are taking it to the end of the line.

Merle Haggard, Lonesome Fugitive

Eddy Rabbit, Driving My Life Away

Doors, Roadhouse Blues

Dave Dudley, Six Days on the Road

Tom Waits, Phantom 309

Charley Ryan, The ORIGINAL Hot Rod Lincoln

Jackson Browne, Running on Empty

Eagles, Take it Easy

Dr Feelgood, Route 66

Johnny Cash, I've Been Everywhere

Leon Russell, Truck Drivin' Man

Hank Williams, Lost Highway

Take a lesson, muchachos.  

Dave Alvin, Highway 61 Revisited.  Wow!

UPDATE (5/2). Duane Eddy died three days ago on 29 April at age 86.   Here he is interviewed by Ray Stevens. Trivia question: which politically incorrect song is Stevens most famous for? I'm sure Catacomb Joe knows the answer. 

UPDATE (5/8). Canned Heat, On the Road Again, alternate take, with lyrics. This one didn't make it 'into the can,' but it is better than the one that did.  

Is Mariology a Part of the Presuppositionalist 'Package Deal'? A Question for Flood

Full disclosure: I am not a theologian. I am a philosopher of religion who, as part of his task, thinks about theologoumena which, on a broad interpretation of the term, are simply things said about God, a term which therefore includes not only official, dogmatic pronunciamenti of, say, the RCC's magisterium, but also includes conjectures, speculations, and opinions about God that are not officially promulgated.

.............................

Anthony Flood writes,

The Christian worldview, expressed on the pages of the Bible, is a revelatory “package deal,” if you will, not a buffet of optional metaphysical theses. The organic connectedness (within the divine decree) of creation, trinity, and incarnation—even the so-called “contingencies of history,” e.g., Joshua’s impaling the King of Ai on a pole after slaughtering all of his subjects (Joshua 8)—await clarification in God’s good time, if He sees fit to provide it, but are put before us for our assent today.

Flood is a presuppositionalist who believes that "intelligible predication" presupposes the truth of the Christian worldview.  Thus, "The Christian does not avail himself of his birthright (Christian theistic) worldview because it confers omniscience on him, but rather because (a) it saves intelligible predication and (b) no competing worldview does."

We are being told that the Christian worldview, as Flood understands it, offers the best and indeed the only explanation of the fact of intelligible predication.  That intelligible predication is indeed a fact I do not question. But I do have some questions about Flood's explanation of the fact. One of them concerns what he includes in his explanation.  It is clear that he includes more than the existence of God where 'God' refers to a purely spiritual being, of a personal nature, endowed with the standard omni-attributes, who exists of metaphysical necessity, and who created out of nothing everything distinct from himself, or at least everything concrete distinct from himself. One reason for this 'more' is because Flood's God is not just personal, but tri-personal: one God in three divine persons. This is not intended as tri-theism, of course, but as monotheism: one God in three divine persons. 

Furthermore, in the Christian worldview as Flood understands it, the second person of the Trinity, variously known as the Logos, the Word, God the Son, became man in a particular man, Jesus of Nazareth, at a particular time in a particular place. One and the same person, the Son, without ceasing to be fully divine, became fully human, with a human body and a human soul, by being born of a virgin named 'Mary' in a stable in Bethlehem.  So it seems that the 'package deal' must include, in addition to Trinity and Incarnation, some version of Mariology.  Why must it? Because Jesus Christ, the God-Man, had to have gotten his human nature from somewhere. He inherited his human nature from his human mother.

Let's think about this.  God the Son is not a creature. Is Jesus a creature? His earthly mother is a creature. Jesus had no heavenly mother, at least not until the Assumption of Mary, body and soul, into heaven.  But that was long after the Incarnation event; I won't say anything more about the Assumption here. And Jesus had no earthly father. Joseph was his step-father, and a step-father is not a father in the earthly or biological sense of the term. The father of Jesus is a purely spiritual being.  So Jesus Christ, the God-Man, at the moment of Incarnation, has a heavenly father but no earthly father, and an earthly mother but no heavenly mother.

Mary became pregnant.  What was the nature of the inseminating seed? It had to be purely spiritual. Why? Because it came from God who is purely spiritual. What about the inseminated egg? It had to be physical. Why? Because it was the ovum of an earthly woman. It was a miraculous pregnancy by supernatural agency.

Now the God-Man had to be free of original sin to be able to do his redemptive work and restore right relations between man and God. So he could not have 'contracted' original sin from his earthly mother. Hence the logic of the soteriological narrative required that Mary be conceived without original sin. Hence the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.

It therefore seems that Mariology must be part of Flood's 'package deal,' and indeed a Mariology that includes Immaculate Conception.  So my first question to Flood is this:

Do you hold that the only possible explanation of  intelligible predication must be in terms of a Christian worldview that includes not only Trinity and Incarnation but also Immaculate Conception?

This is not a rhetorical question. It is a genuine question raised so that I might understand what exactly Flood's position is.  Tony is making a mistake if he thinks I am being polemical here. I am not. I honestly find presuppositionalism puzzling and I am trying to understand it.

My second question to Flood which I cannot develop and defend in this installment is this:

Given the well-known logical conundra that arise when we try to render intelligible to ourselves such doctrines as Trinity and Incarnation, conundra that seem to threaten the intelligibility of these doctrines, and therefore seem to threaten the intelligibility of any explanation of intelligible predication in terms of a worldview committed to them, how do you respond?  Do you maintain that the supposed logical puzzles are easily solved and that Trinity and Incarnation in their orthodox formulations are logically and epistemically unobjectionable? If that is not the tack you take, what tack do you take?

The Difference between Posing and Begging a Question

I found the nifty graphic below over at Flood's place.  It is a pithy and pictorial presentation of a point I have been hammering away at online for the last twenty years. Here is a Substack hammer-job. Some say we should give up the fight and let the forces of linguistic decadence obliterate the distinction between posing and begging a question. I am inclined to say that we should fight on against the anti-civilizational forces while well aware that fighting-on may be nothing more than a pointless rear-guard action.

What say you?

 

Health Equity?

Well, why not? 

Students in their first year of medical school typically learn what a healthy body looks like and how to keep it that way. At the University of California, Los Angeles, they learn that "fatphobia is medicine’s status quo" and that weight loss is a "hopeless endeavor."

Those are two of the more moderate claims made by Marquisele Mercedes, a self-described "fat liberationist," in an essay assigned to all first-year students in UCLA medical school’s mandatory "Structural Racism and Health Equity" class. Launched in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the course is required for all first-year medical students.

The Left destroys everything it touches, and it touches everything. Problem is, few physicians, comfortable and lazy as they are in their tony suburbs, have the civil courage to speak out against this nonsense.

Christianity and Intelligibility: A Response to Flood

Anthony Flood writes,

Beneath a post on his blog, Bill Vallicella commented on a matter of common interest. I stress that Bill wrote a comment, not a paper for a peer-reviewed journal, and that’s all I’m doing here. I offer the following only as a further, not a last word.

Last Sunday, in responding to one Joe Odegaard, Bill wrote:

While I agree that Christianity makes sense of the world and in particular of the scientific enterprise, and while I myself have argued against materialism/physicalism/naturalism and in favor of Divine Mind as source of the world’s intelligibility, it must be borne in mind that Xianity [Christianity] is a very specific religion with very specific tenets such as Incarnation and Trinity. Why should anyone think that such apparently unintelligible doctrines are necessary for the intelligibility of the natural world? (Emphasis added.—A. G. F.)

The short answer is that appearances can be untrustworthy. Unless it can be shown that those tenets are really, not just apparently, unintelligible, the implicit objection (in the form of a rhetorical question) has no force.

BV: Not so, and for two reasons.  Trinity and Incarnation may or may not be intelligible doctrines.  Either way, the question remains why an account of the intrinsic intelligibility of nature in terms of Divine Mind requires them.  That is the question I am posing to Joe, and indirectly to C. S. Lewis, and it is not rhetorical. I am genuinely asking it. But I have found that some people do not understand what a rhetorical question is. In fact, one night I caught the astute Mark Levin of Life, Liberty, and Levin (Fox News) misusing the phrase. So permit me a brief digression. 

A rhetorical question is a grammatically interrogative form of words that is not logically interrogative but either logically indicative or logically imperative.  Such a form of words is used to issue a command or to make a statement, not to ask a question.   For example, Daddy says to teenage girl, "Do you have to talk on the phone while driving?"  Clearly, the old man is not asking a question despite the grammatically interrogative formulation.  He is issuing a command, or perhaps a recommendation, in a polite way. A second example is from Hillary Clinton. "Do you really think Donald Trump has the temperament to be commander-in-chief?" When she said that in a speech, she was not asking whether Trump has the requisite temperament, but stating or asserting that he does not. And this despite her use of the grammatical interrogative.

Here is an interesting case. Someone sincerely asks, "Does God exist?" and receives the reply, "Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the Moon?" (Ed Abbey).  The first question is genuine; the second is rhetorical.  Another curious case: an uniformed person sincerely asks a genuine question, "Is Mayorkas lying about border security?" and receives in response a rhetorical question that expresses either a tautology, "Is a cat a cat?" or an analytic truth, "Is the Pope Catholic?" End of digression.

And so my question is not rhetorical. I am not asserting anything, I am genuinely asking why Joe or C. S. Lewis, to whom Joe links, or anyone thinks that an account of the intelligibility of nature (including its uniformity, regularity, and predictability) in terms of Divine Mind must also include such specifically Christian doctrines as Trinity and Incarnation.  By the intelligibility of nature I mean its intrinsic understandability by minds such as ours.  The natural world is intrinsically such as to be understandable by us. As opposed to what? As opposed to deriving its intelligibility from us via our conceptual schemes. If the latter derivation were the case, then the intelligibility would not be intrinsic but relational: relative to us and our conceptual frameworks.  (I note en passant that there are other ways of accounting for intelligibility without God. The late Daniel Dennett would probably say that it 'evolves.' I'll come back to Dennett later.)

After all, a Jew who rejects Trinity and Incarnation could  hold that nature is intrinsically intelligible only if it is a divine creation. And a Muslim could as well.  And our friend Dale Tuggy too! He is a  unitarian Christian.

So again: Why does an account of the intrinsic intelligibility of the natural world in terms of Divine Creative Mind require the specific doctrines of normative Christianity?  That and that alone is the question I am raising in my response to Joe and C. S. Lewis. 

Tony may have a defensible answer to my question. Or he may not. We can discuss it if he likes. But all of this is irrelevant to the initial post and the comment thread it generated.  The question I raised in the initial post was whether the knowledge involved when a person knows that the Sun has risen is exactly the same sort of knowledge involved  when a person knows -- if he does know --- that Christianity is true.

Intentionality in Locks and Keys?

Daniel Dennett on the 'evolution' of intentionality.  

Substack latest.

When we have gold we are in fear . . .

. . . when we have none we are in danger.  (English proverb)

A proverb whose pertinence is proven  by  recent  developments. Gold hit 2400 USD/oz. a day or two ago, but has backed off some.   Joe Biden and his shills lie their heads off about everything including the health of the economy, but, with respect to the latter,  the surging price of gold suggests otherwise.

Skeptical and Credulous

Remember Bernie Madoff?

A Substack retrospect.

God as Uniquely Unique

Top o' the Stack

Correctly used, 'unique' is three-way polyvalent. It  can mean that which is one of a kind, that which is necessarily one of a kind, and that which is uniquely unique in that it transcends the kind-instance distinction. 

 

Earth Day 2024

Substack latest.

The Intifada Comes to America

Well, what did you expect?

Intifada refers specifically to two separate uprisings of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank over the past four decades, but more broadly, it pertains to the continued resistance of the Palestinians to the existence of Israel. When they shout “Death to Israel,” they mean it. It should be a top priority of Congress now to determine whether they mean it when they shout “Death to America.”

The rise of pro-Palestinian hatred in the United States should not be a surprising development to anyone. Even before President Biden opened the southern border to millions of unvetted “newcomers,” as the global elites like to call the invaders, there has been a reckless U.S. policy going back two decades to resettle Muslim refugees from Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Afghanistan in the U.S. heartland. And because immigration policy no longer treats assimilation as a worthwhile goal, many of those refugees are loyal to their homeland and their religion much more than to the nation that offered them safety and security.

I suppose that is an inevitable result of the globalist agenda of border dissolution and the merging of disparate populations for the purpose of sharing wealth and assuaging billionaires’ guilt.

But it is only inevitable if the rest of us tolerate it.

The Sun Also Rises: On Solar and Christian Belief

A reader sends us to an article that begins like this:

The need for a return to God is clearly evident in today’s deranged and dysfunctional world. It is a need, exceeding all others, that must be fulfilled in order to keep enemies of God from interfering with human life. 

And then a little later we get an unsourced quotation from C. S. Lewis replete with a non-functioning hyperlink:

C.S. Lewis: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” This points directly to the essence of the faith in Christianity and to its need in life. A short explanation, found here, includes the observation: “At first glance, this quote may appear simple, but upon closer examination, its deep meaning and profound importance become evident. Essentially, Lewis suggests that his faith in Christianity is not solely based on tangible evidence but also on the transformative impact it has on his perception of the world.” [My emphasis.]

Since the quotation is unsourced, I cannot check whether Lewis said what he is quoted as saying. If he did, it is a silly thing to say. Let me explain.

This morning I observed a beautiful sunrise. And so I believe that the Sun rose this morning. I also believe that the Sun is the source of the natural light we enjoy on Earth.  But it is false, and indeed silly, to say that one who believes in Christianity believes in the very same way.  The difference is obvious. I cannot help but believe that the Sun rose this morning: I saw it with my own two eyes!  Seeing is believing in a case like this.* That the Sun rose is given, if not indubitably, then for all practical purposes.** There is no need for a leap of faith beyond the given.  The will does not come into it. In no way do I decide to believe that the Sun has risen. Examples like this one refute a universal doxastic voluntarism.

But if you believe that God became man in Jesus of Nazareth, if you believe that the God-Man is fully divine and fully human, that he is one person in two natures, then you believe beyond the sensorily given.  (You also arguably believe beyond what is intelligible to the discursive intellect.) You cannot see God the way you see the Sun. To 'see' God in Jesus you need the 'eye' of faith which is quite obviously not a physical eye but a spiritual 'eye.'  The last sentence in the quotation reads:

Essentially, Lewis suggests that his faith in Christianity is not solely based on tangible evidence but also on the transformative impact it has on his perception of the world.

Better, but still bad. Someone who comes to embrace Christianity comes to view the world in a way very different from the way he viewed it prior to his becoming a Christian. True! So, yes, his worldview has been transformed. But that transformation is no part of the evidence of the truth of Christianity; if it were, then the transformation that occurs in someone who goes from being a Christian to an atheist or a Christian to a Communist  or a Christian to a Buddhist, etc. is a transformation that is evidence of the truth of atheism, Communism, Buddhism respectively, etc.

Article here.

______________

*There may be other cases in which seeing does not suffice for belief. I am thinking of G. E. Moore's putative counterexample: "I see it, but I don't believe it!"

** The hyperbolic skepticism of Descartes is not to the point here.

Social Utility and the Value of Free Inquiry

Top o' the Stack.

Daniel Dennett died yesterday at age 82. A philosophical provocateur of influence, his brilliance far outstripped his insight. But a day after his demise, de mortuis nil nisi bonum remains in force. So I will say something good about him. I agree entirely with what he says in the following passage:

Daniel Dennett (1942-2024)

Daniel Dennett died today.  I heard the news from Malcolm Pollack whose obituary refers us to a very recent discussion between him and Jordan Peterson. I have been very critical of Dennett's work over the years, but I won't rehearse any of my critique so near the hour of his death. Let the watchword be: De mortuis nil nisi bonum.

Faith: Life-Enhancing Only if True?

In July of 2022 I published a post entitled Faith's Immanent Value.  Here are the opening paragraphs slightly redacted:

Suppose you sincerely believe in God and the soul but that your faith is in vain. You die and become nothing. Your faith was that the curtain would lift, but it falls, irrevocably.  My question is whether that possible upshot would matter. If it should turn out there is nothing on the other side of the Great Divide, would that retroactively remove your faith's immanent value?

My answer is that it won't matter because you won't know it. You will not learn that your faith was in vain. There will be no disappointment. You will not discover that your faith was a life-enhancing illusion. You will have had the benefit of a faith which will have sustained you until the moment of your annihilation as an individual person. You will not die alone for you will die with the Lord-believed-in, a Lord never to be known, but also never to be known not to be.   If the Lord-believed-in is enough for this life, and this life turns out to be the only life, then the Lord-believed-in is enough, period.

Your faith will have had immanent value. If this life is the only life, then this immanent value is the only value your faith could have had. 

The post received a strong response positive and negative. I return to the topic now, as I re-read for the third time Dietrich von Hildebrand's Jaws of Death: Gate of Heaven (Sophia Institute Press, 1991, tr. Alice von Hildebrand. The German original appeared in 1980 under the title Über den Tod (On Death)).

On pp. 109-110, von Hildebrand says things that seem to contradict what I am saying. My purpose in this entry is to re-think the question so as to test my view against his. Here is the paragraph that gives me pause and prompts me to re-examine my position:

Nothing would be more absurd than for us to regard the subjective happiness that results from the supernatural view of death as an end, and to see faith as a means for obtaining this end. To do so would mean detaching from truth both faith and the supernatural view of death. Such a pragmatic interpretation of faith comes close to a total misunderstanding of it. We must, therefore, condemn as blind nonsense the idea that, because it cheers and comforts us, supernatural view of death is worth nourishing even if it is an illusion. Faith gives comfort only if it is true. (110, emphasis added)

The pragmatic interpretation of faith as described by von Hildebrand is not mine.  My first  task, then, is to explain why. I turn then to an evaluation of von Hildebrand's positive view.

I

My claim is that religious faith has an immanent value, a value for this life in the here and now, whether or not the objects of this faith, God and the soul,* really exist. This is equivalent to saying that faith has immanent value whether or not the faith is objectively true. I am not saying that that faith has immanent value whether or not the believer really believes in God and the soul. I assume that he really does believe, and shows that he really does believe by living his faith, by 'walking the walk' and and not merely by 'taking the talk.'   My claim is that a believer who really believes derives an important life-enhancing benefit from his sincere belief whether or not the objects of his belief  really exist.

It is important to understand that one who really believes in God and the soul believes that they really exist whether or not he or anyone else believes that they do. His believing purports to target transcendent entities that exist independently of his believing. But note that this purport to target the transcendent is what is whether or not the targets exist.  In other words, from the fact that one really believes that a transcendent God exists, it does not follow that a transcendent God really exists.

Am I saying that faith is a means to the end of subjective happiness? No. The sincere believer does not make himself believe in order to make himself feel good or to comfort himself.  He is not fooling himself so as to comfort himself.  To fool himself, he would have to know or strongly believe that God does not exist and then hide that fact from himself.

The believer believes because of various experiences he has had: he feels (what he describes as) the presence of the Lord on certain occasions; he senses the absoluteness of moral demands and the gap between what he is and what he ought to be; he feels the bite of conscience and cannot bring himself to believe any naturalistic explanation of conscience and its deliverances; he has religious and mystical experiences that seem to tell of an Unseen Order; he takes the beauty, order, and intelligibility of the world to point beyond it to a transcendent Source of this beauty, order, and intelligibility; he feels that life would be meaningless if there were no God, that there would be no ultimate justice; he senses the presence of purely spiritual demonic agents interfering with his attempts to pray and meditate and conform to the demands of morality. 

Or it may be that a sincere religious believer never has any experiences that purport to reveal the reality of God and the soul, and has never considered any of the arguments for God and the soul; he believes because he was brought up to believe by people he admires and respects and trusts.  Even in this case the believer is not making himself believe as a means to the end of feeling good or comfortable or subjectively happy; he believes simply because he has taken on board the beliefs of others he trusts and respects.  I seem to recall Kierkegaard somewhere saying that he believes because his father told him so.  Some imbibe belief with their mother's milk. 

II

Despite these clarifications of my position, it still seems that if von Hildebrand is right, then I am wrong, and vice versa.  He holds that "Faith gives comfort only if it is true." I will take that to mean that faith confers an important life-enhancing benefit only it is objectively true and not merely believed to be truth by a sincere believer.  What I am saying, however, is that faith confers an important life-enhancing benefit to the sincere believer  whether or not  it is objectively true.

Who is right? In all intellectual honesty, it seems to me that I am right. Why should it be necessary that the faith be true for it be life-enhancing, for it to be good for me to believe it? An analogy may help me get my point across.

At age 60 I attempted a marathon. At the starting line I did not know whether I could cover the 26.2 miles within the allotted time (under seven hours). I did not know whether I could pull it off, but I strongly believed that I could, and surely this strong belief, whether true or false, was good for me to believe: it had race-immanent value in that with this belief I performed better than I would have performed without it.  As things turned out, I completed the marathon in six hours.  But suppose I hadn't.  Suppose that my belief in my ability to complete the marathon in the allotted time was false. It would still have been the case that my belief  in completion had race-immanent value.  I would still have been better off with that belief than without it.

Now in the Great Race of Life we compete against our own hebetude, decrepitude, and sinfulness  for the crown of Eternal Life, the Beatific Vision. But here below we cannot know whether we will attain the crown, or even whether it exists, so here below we need faith.  Living by faith we live better than we would have lived without it. We run the Race better, with more enthusiasm, commitment, and resoluteness.  Clearly, or so it seems to me, we reap the benefits of this faith in the here and now whether or not there is anything on the other side of the Great Divide.

So I say that von Hildebrand does not understand the pragmatics of faith. One problem is that he caricatures the pragmatic approach as I showed in the first section.  The other problem is that he is a dogmatist: his doxastic security needs are so strong that he cannot psychologically tolerate the idea that he might be wrong.  He wants objective certainty about ultimates, as all serious philosophers do, but he confuses his subjective certainty, which falls far short of knowledge,  with objective certainty, which knowledge logically requires.

He claims to know things that he cannot possibly know. He writes,

We ought to have faith because by our belief in God we give the response to which He is entitled. We ought to believe in divine Revelation because it is absolute truth. (110)

What von Hildebrand is doing here is simply presupposing the existence of God and the absolute truth of  divine revelation.  If God exists, then of course we ought to have faith in him. And if divine revelation is absolute truth, then we ought to believe in it. But how does von Hildebrand  know that God exists and that revelation is true? He doesn't t know these things, he merely believes them.  He is claiming to know what he cannot know, but can only believe.  

___________________________

*'Soul' in the Platonic sense, not the Aristotelian one according to which the soul is the mere life-principle of the body.