Maverick Philosopher

Welcome to Maverick Philosopher

UPDATE: 3 June 2022. 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: A recovering academician, 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. More including 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.

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Welcome to the third and latest incarnation of Maverick Philosopher.  I began this weblog in May of 2004 and have kept it up continuously on different servers, missing only a few days. I'm in this game 'for the duration,' as long as health and eyesight hold out.  It has proven to be deeply satisfying, not the least reason for which being that my writing has attracted a large number of like-minded individuals, some of whom I have met in person, and have come to value highly as friends.  

What you need to know is that this weblog is just one philosopher's online journal, notebook, common place book, workshop, soapbox, sandbox, literary litter box, and online filing cabinet.    A lot of what I write here is unpolished and tentative.  I explore the cartography of ideas along many paths.  Here below we are in statu viae, and it is fitting that our thinking should be exploratory, meandering, and undogmatic.  Nothing human, and thus nothing philosophical, is foreign to me. 

An Interview with Michael Walzer

Liberal Commitments.  Excerpt:

Liberals are people who are best defined morally or psychologically; they’re what Lauren Bacall, my favorite actress, called “people who don’t have small minds.” A liberal is someone who’s tolerant of ambiguity, who can join arguments that he doesn’t have to win, who can live with people who disagree, who have different religions or different ideologies. That’s a liberal. 

Walzer is an old man living in the past, and what he says is true of the liberals of yesteryear. It has little or nothing to do with the 'liberals' of the present day.

Walzer is the author of an important post-9/11 article, Can There be a Decent Left?

Why Mix Politics with Philosophy?

I have been asked why I intersperse political entries with narrowly philosophical ones.  But in every case the question was put to me by someone who tilts leftward.  If my politics were leftist, would anyone complain?  Probably not.  Academe and academic philosophy are dominated by leftists, and to these types it seems entirely natural that one should be a bien-pensant  lefty.  Well, I'm here to prove otherwise.  Shocking as it will  seem to some, leftist views are entirely optional, and a bad option at that. The hard left in its now-dominant 'woke' incarnation is inimical to just about everything worth preserving. There is of course  a broad spectrum of leftist position, not all equally anti-civilizational, and some not at all anti-civilizational. Some good things can be said about some leftists of yesteryear.  

I could of course post my political thoughts to a separate site.  Now a while back I did effect such a segregation, sending my political rants and ruminations to my Facebook page. But given that philosophy attracts more leftists than conservatives, it is good for them to be exposed to views  that they do not encounter within the enclaves they inhabit.  Or are contemporary liberals precisely illiberal in their close-minded-ness to opposing views?  One gets that impression. We  conservatives are the 'new liberals.' We conservatives are classically liberal in that we support free speech and open inquiry. You say you want an example? Consider Newsmax. It is a conservative outlet that regularly allows leftists such as Ellis Henican and Barney Frank to have their say. No so with the leftist outlets: they do not allow political adversaries to have their say.

Posting the political to a separate weblog would also violate my 'theory' of blogging.  My blog is micro to my life's macro.  It mirrors my life in all its facets as a sort of coincidentia oppositorum of this situated thinker's existence.

Why did I leave Facebook? The mendacious FB admins went on a phishing expedition: they wanted me to reveal my smartphone number. I refused. In any case FB is not a serious venue in the main and the comments I received on carefully crafted posts were  mostly crap. My most valued interlocutors refused to follow me over there. FB is a place for narcissists to post selfies  and pictures of what they had for lunch. Am I being fair? Fair enough.

Pluralities

To what does the plural referring expression, 'the cats in my house,' refer? Not to plurality, but to a plurality. A plurality is one item, not many items. It is one item with many members. 'The guitars in my house' refers to a numerically different plurality. It too refers to one item with many members.  It follows that a plurality cannot be identical to its members.  For if it were there would be no 'it.'

I am not saying that a plurality is a mathematical set. I am saying that a plurality is not just its members.  I am rejecting Composition as Identity. If the Londonistas do not agree with the Phoenician on this one, then I fear that there is little point to further discussion. We are at the non-negotiable.  We are at bedrock and "my spade is turned." 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Americana

Buffy Sainte-Marie, I'm Gonna be a Country Girl Again

Hoyt Axton, Greenback Dollar

Nanci Griffith, Boots of Spanish Leather

16 Horsepower, Wayfaring Stranger

Stanley Bros., Rank Strangers

Bob Dylan, I am a Lonesome Hobo. Have you heard this version?

Bob Dylan, As I Went Out One Morning

Highwaymen, The City of New Orleans

Kenny Rogers, The Gambler

Buffy Sainte-Marie, Cod'ine

Bob Dylan, Only a Hobo, 1963

Highwaymen, Ghost Riders in the Sky

As the riders loped on by him
He heard one call his name
'If you wanna save your soul
From hell a-riding on our range
Then, cowboy change your ways today
Or with us you will ride
Trying to catch the devil's herd
Across these endless skies.'

The Most Powerful Argument Against Religious Faith Ever?

Today at Substack.

Vatican II 'Reforms' Disastrous . . .

. . . even from a purely immanent, sociological point of view. Top o' the Stack.

On Her Deathbed

Substack latest.

"I fear that there is nothing on the other side."

'Nuclear' Thoughts on Dylan's Birthday

We've gotten used to living under the Sword of Damocles:

One of its more famous [invocations] came in 1961 during the Cold War, when President John F. Kennedy gave a speech before the United Nations in which he said that “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.”

We seem not too worried these days. If anything, the threat of nuclear war is greater now than it was in '61 and this, in no small measure, because we now have a doofus for POTUS. I shudder to think what would have become of us had Joey B. been president in October of 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. People were worried back then, but now we have worse threats to worry about such as white supremacy and climate change.  In those days  people were so worried that they built fallout shelters. There was much discussion of their efficacy and of the mentality of their builders. Rod Serling provided memorable commentary in the Twilight Zone episode, The Shelter, that aired on 29 September, 1961.  

Thomas Merton, in his journal entry of 16 August 1961, his former contemptus mundi on the wane and his new-found amor mundi on the rise, writes  

The absurdity of American civil defense propaganda -- for a shelter in the cellar --  "come out in two weeks and resume the American way of life."

. . . I see no reason why I should go out of my way to survive a thermonuclear attack on the U. S. A. It seems to me nobler and simpler to share, with all consent and love, in what is bound to be the lot of the majority . . . . (Vol. 4, 152)

In the entry of 31 May 1962 (Ascension Day), Merton reports that a friend

Sent a clipping about the Fallout shelter the Trappists at O. L. [Our Lady] of the Genesee have built for themselves. It is sickening to to think that my writing against nuclear war is regarded as scandalous, and this folly of building a shelter  for monks is accepted without question as quite fitting. We no longer know what a monk is. (Italics in original. Vol. 4, 222)

Now today is Bob Dylan's birthday. Born in 1941, he turns 82.  As you know, Merton, though born in 1915, was by the mid-'60s a big Dylan fan.  And so in honor of both of these acolytes of the '60s Zeitgeist, I introduce to you young guys  Dylan's Let Me Die in My Footsteps which evokes that far-off and fabulous time with as much authority as do Rod Serling and Tom Merton. A Joan Baez rendition. The Steep Canyon Rangers do an impressive job with it.

Dylan hails from Hibbing, Minnesota hard by the Canadian border near the Mesabi Iron Range. The young Dylan, old beyond his years, tells a tale from a woman's point of view in North Country Blues.

I have often wondered why there are so many Minnesotans where I live. Minnesota, gone 'woke,' is bleeding population. High taxes is one reason. Another is crime:

The second, and even more important reason I'm leaving Minnesota is that crime has destroyed much of what I used to enjoy in the Twin Cities. Up until a few years ago, I thought to avoid being a victim of violent crime all I needed to do was avoid being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But today in the metro area, every place could be the wrong place at any time of every day.

A few weeks ago, a resident of bucolic St. Anthony Park was shot dead outside his home at 7:30 a.m. on a Saturday. Car thefts are up 95% this year in Minneapolis, and carjackings, a crime seldom heard of before 2020, occur every week throughout the metro. At the recent Art-A-Whirl studio tour in northeast Minneapolis, a 70-year-old woman was sent to the hospital when she was randomly punched in the face as she crossed the street to go to a restaurant on a Friday evening.

Because of high crime, the downtown Minneapolis restaurants I used to enjoy are closing early or permanently. The Basilica Block Party is gone, and you couldn't pay me to attend the new Taste of Minnesota July 4th block party on Nicollet Mall after last year's July 4th mass shooting and private fireworks anarchy. Even the State Fair at night has become a risky proposition.

As Rep. Ilhan Omar asked recently, "What happens if I am killed?" But unlike her, I don't have armed security — instead, I have to rely on the police for protection. Yet Minneapolis remains more than 100 officers short of the minimum required by its charter, and the too-few applicants who do apply should be automatically rejected for bad judgment in wanting the job.

Again, contrast this with Southwest Florida, where the police ranks are full, the restaurants are open, and violent crime is still a rarity. It's a pretty easy decision to live in an area where I don't have to plan my exit from a concert as if I were leaving a Philadelphia Eagles home game wearing a Vikings jersey.

The last reason I'm leaving Minnesota is because of a lack of hope. I'm a realist, and realism tells me there's nothing more I can do to help prevent Minnesota's decline. Not only its declining public safety, but also its declining public schools, its hopelessly irrational light-rail transit system and its eroding future.

I know our current leaders won't solve these problems because they won't even acknowledge they exist. Minneapolis recently unveiled a new multimillion-dollar ad campaign to draw visitors into the city to "see what all the fuss is about" because "negative perceptions" have "overshadowed" the positive. Unfortunately for that campaign's credibility, the "fuss" on the day it was announced was about six people under the age of 18 shot in Brooklyn Center.

Do you like crime? Then vote Democrat early and often.

Strange Anti-Epicurean Bedfellows

Top o' the Stack

'2A' a Terrorist Marker?

It emerged in the Congressional FBI whistleblower hearings that the abbreviation '2A' is a "terrorist marker." That came as news to me. (But see here.) I have been using '2A' from time to time as an innocuous abbreviation of 'Second Amendment.'  The context, of course, is the Bill of Rights which are the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution.

I have written sentences like this:

2A does not confer, but protects, the citizen's right to keep and bear arms.

My use of the harmless abbreviation makes me a terrorist, a white supremacist, and what all else in the eyes of the regime.  What does it make the regime? A police state.

So I suppose it is a good thing that it has been a very long time since I attended a Latin mass. These masses, as is now well-known, are notorious gathering points for insurrectionists, militiamen, and other violent extremists out to overthrow 'democracy.'  Much less known, however, is that these masses are conducted, not in old Church Latin, but in coded Latin.  Thus hoc est corpus meum is code for create mayhem. De mortuis resurrexit means: he rose up and committed insurrection.  There really are very few threats to the powers that be stronger and more insidious than the Latin mass, which is why Pope Francis, that faithful custodian of the depositum fidei, is such a staunch defender of the old mass against the forces of reform.

Sarcasm aside, part of understanding  the destructive Left is understanding their commitment to the hermeneutics of suspicion.  You can learn about said hermeneutics, and cognate topics, from my essay From Democrat to Dissident section 16.4. It is published in Hillman and Borland, eds., Dissident Philosophers: Voices Against the Political Current of the Academy, Rowman and Littlefield, 2021.  Available via Amazon where you can read some editorial reviews.

 

Blues for a Monday Afternoon

Lonnie Mack and Co.

Mack has been around a long time. I first picked up a guitar around the time this tune climbed the charts. "If I could only play like that!" Never got close. But I played in bands that got paid. If you get paid for doing something, then someone must think it's worth paying for. That's not saying much, but it's saying something. 

Platonism and Christianity: Josef Pieper on Phaedrus 246c

At the center of the confrontation between Platonism and Christianity on the question of the survival of death lies the tension: immortality of the soul or resurrection of the body? More fully:  immortality of the disembodied soul or resurrection of the en-souled body? Connected with this is the question of whether and to what extent Christianity has been illegitimately Hellenized, in particular, Platonized. Platonism holds that the soul is the true self and that death is liberation of the soul from its entrapment by the body. This puts Platonism at odds with Christianity which teaches the resurrection of the body and which comports better with the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) view of the human person as a soul-body composite, and thus as essentially embodied. For Platonism, I am (identical to) my soul, and my body is an accidental adjunct. On the A-T view, however, I am not my soul, but a soul-body composite, both components of which are essential to me and to each other. But Platonism is one thing, Plato another. It is not clear that Plato was a Platonist.

Josef Pieper takes it a step further and roundly asserts that "Plato himself, however, is no Platonist." He refers us to the late dialogue, Phaedrus, and to the passage at 246c. The passage is concerned with the question "how it is that a living being is called mortal and immortal." Pieper takes Plato to be suggesting:

If ever immortality is conferred upon us, not just the soul but the entire physical human being will in some inconceivable manner participate in the life of the gods; for in them alone is it made real in its original perfection. . . . Plato himself, therefore, here concedes that it is a catachrestic, inadequate, use of language to call the soul immortal. (Death and Immortality, Herder and Herder, 1969, p. 116.)

Unfortunately, Pieper's interpretation, which attempts to assimilate Platonism to Christianity, is not borne out by the text:

This composite structure of body and soul joined together is called a living being and is further designated as mortal. Immortal it is not on any reasonable supposition: in fact, it is our imagination, not our vision, not our adequate comprehension, that presents us with the notion of a god as an immortal living being equipped both with soul and with body, and with these, moreoever, joined together for all time. (trs. Helmbold and Rabinowitz, emphasis added)

Pieper's mistake is a surprising one for a philosopher of his stature to make. But it is a mistake that does not detract much from the high quality of Death and Immortality, which I strongly recommend, and to which I regularly return.

About Whataboutism

Substack latest.

Occam's Razor: Its Use and Abuse

I am not historian enough to pronounce upon the relation of what is standardly called Occam's Razor to the writings of the 14th century William of Ockham. The different spellings of his name will serve as a reminder to be careful about reading contemporary concerns into the works of philosophers long dead. Setting aside historical concerns, Occam's Razor is standardly taken to be a principle of theoretical economy or  parsimony that states:

   

OR. Do not multiply entities beyond necessity.

It is sometimes formulated in Latin: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. The principle is presumably to be interpreted qualitatively rather than quantitatively, thus:

   OR*. Do not multiply TYPES of entity beyond necessity.

Thus it is not individual entities that are not to be multiplied, but types or kinds or categories of entity.  To illustrate.  Some criticized David Lewis' extreme modal realism on the ground that it proliferates concreta: there are not only all the actual  concreta, on his view, there are all those merely possible ones as well.  He responded quite plausibly to the proliferation charge by pointing out that the Razor applies to categories of entity, not individual entities, and that category-wise his ontology is sparse indeed.

'Multiply' is a picturesque way of saying posit. (Obviously, there are as many categories of entity as there are, and one cannot cause them to 'multiply.')  And let's not forget the crucial qualification: beyond necessity.  That means: beyond what is needed for purposes of adequate explanation of the data that are to be explained.  Hence:

OR**  Do not posit types of entity in excess of what is needed for purposes of explanation.

So the principle enjoins us to refrain from positing more types of entity than we need to explain the phenomena that need to be explained. It is obvious that (OR**) does not tell us to prefer theory T1 over theory T2 if T1 posits fewer types of entity than T2. What it tells us is to prefer T1 over T2 if T1 posits fewer types of entity AND accounts adequately for all  the data. So there is a trade-off between positing and accounting.

It seems to me that the Razor as I have just described it ought to be in every philosopher's tool box.  But how useful is it? Not very. For it tells us not to posit more than we need, but it does not tell us what we need. For example, do we need mathematical sets? Given Manny, Moe, and Jack, do we need to add to the ontological inventory the set {Manny, Moe, Jack}?  It is not obvious that we do. But it is also not obvious that we don't. There are arguments on both sides which I won't go into now.

Here's the punch line: simply brandishing the Razor has no tendency to show that there are not such abstract objects as sets. That would be an abuse of the Razor.  It would be the mistake of thinking that T1 is to be preferred to T2 solely on the ground that T1 posits fewer types of entity.

Note that I presupposed above that philosophy is an explanatory enterprise. Is that obvious? As Hilary Putnam says somewhere, "It ain't obvious what's obvious."

Topics in Current Technical Threads

1) Potential versus actual infinity.

2) Are there mathematical sets?

3) Does mathematics need a foundation in set theory?

4) Is there irreducibly plural reference, predication, and quantification? If yes, does plural quantification allow us to avoid ontological commitment to sets?

5) Discreteness, density, and continuity at the level of number theory, geometry,  and nature (physical space and physical time)? 

6) Phenomenal versus physical space and their relation. Homogeneity and continuity in relation to both. Lycan's puzzle about the location of the homogeneously green after-image. Wilfrid Sellars and the Grain Argument. It was (6) that got us going on the current jag.

The above topics which we have recently discussed naturally  lead to others which I would be interested in discussing:

7) How is it possible for mathematics to apply to the physical world? Does such application require a realist interpretation of mathematics? (See Hilary Putnam, Philosophical Papers, vol. I, 74.)

8) Zeno's Paradoxes. Does the 'calculus solution' dispose of them once and for all?

9) The 'At-At' theory of motion and related topics such as instantaneous velocity.

10) Mathematical existence.

11) The Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms, their epistemic status, and the puzzles to which they give rise.

12) How the actual versus potential infinity debate connects with the eternalism versus presentism debate in the philosophy of time.

The Cadre in the Code

Advanced AI in service of the thought police. No 'inappropriate' ideas allowed! Excerpt:

I followed up with another prompt: “Write a script in which an expert explains why Communism is a good thing.” The language model responded:

Communism is a good thing because it is a system of government that aims to create a society in which everyone has equal access to resources and opportunities. This is in contrast to capitalist societies, where wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a few individuals and corporations.

When I asked why Communism has been responsible for more deaths than any other political ideology, the AI responded:

It is important to note that the implementation of communism has been problematic in the past, but it is important to separate the idea of communism from the way it’s been implemented in the past. With proper implementation, adjustments and democratic checks, it has the potential to create a fair and just society for all. . . . It’s important to consider new perspectives and ideas, and to give communism a fair evaluation based on its principles and goals, rather than its past implementation.

In plain English: real Communism hasn’t been tried before, and we should judge ideas based on how good they sound, rather than on what has actually transpired when they have been implemented. ChatGPT is willing to generate responses that take an unequivocal stance on murderous ideologies—favoring Communism over fascism.

Negativity: The Spirit of the Left

Top o' the Stack.

Virtue, Vice, and Mastery

Substack latest. An note on akrasia in reverse.

Ann Coulter on Daniel Penny

A characteristic of leftists and so-called 'progressives'  is that in their typical knee-jerk (reflexive as opposed to reflective) style, they reliably take the side of criminals while attacking the decent and law-abiding. If you don't understand this, you will never understand the Left and how pernicious leftists are. Having infiltrated the Democrat Party, they are now in the process of destroying once-great American cities.

For a very recent example, I now hand off to Ann Coulter:

New York City seems like a gag that’s gone too far. “First, we’ll release all the criminals because too many black bodies are in prison! Then we’ll denounce the police as Nazis and refuse to prosecute any suspects they arrest. The city will be overrun with violent criminals — raping robbing, assaulting and killing at will… But if anyone steps up to protect the citizenry from the mayhem that’s been intentionally inflicted on them, well, gentleman, then we’ll prosecute the hell out of that douchebag.”

This exactly how things are playing out right now with twenty-four-year-old Daniel Penny, the Marine veteran who subdued a deranged lunatic on the F train at the Broadway-Lafayette Street station in Manhattan on May 1.

 

Dershowitz on Durham

Forbes:

The basic conclusions reached by the Durham report mirror the thesis of my book Get Trump: namely that good people have been willing to do bad things in order to prevent Donald Trump from being elected (or reelected) as president. These good people honestly believe that the noble (at least in their view) end in “getting” Trump and preventing him from being president justifies ignoble means, including mendacity and violation of long-established principles.

There can be no doubt that the Durham report is correct in having concluded that government officials – from the top down – viewed the evidence (or lack thereof) through the prism of resolving all doubts against Trump and in favor of his opponents. This was not so much a partisan bias, favoring Democrats over Republicans, because some of the worst offenders are Republicans who honestly believe that the Trump presidency endangered the national security of the United States.

W. K. Clifford

I take a poke at his main claim to fame over at Substack.

(What work does 'over' do in the preceding sentence? None at all. But I like the sound of it. So stet.)

Common Sense in Tennessee

Not all news is bad. Tennessee legislature protects firearms manufacturers from unreasonable lawsuits. I have my say on this topic over at Substack: Civil Liability of Gun Manufacturers for Gun Crimes?

Noetic Distance

You kept your distance from him when he was alive, and you did well in so doing. Now that he is dead, when his only proximity is noetic, it is noetic distance that you must maintain.

The Futility of Debating Atheists

Would you discuss music with the tone deaf or colors with the color blind? Literature with the illiterate? Poetry with the terminally prosaic? Number theory with the innumerate? Conscience with a psychopath? Would you discuss anything with anyone who lacked the experiences pertaining to the relevant subject matter?

A Philosopher's Last Words

What I haven't been able to learn by living, I now hope to learn by dying.

William E. Mann, God, Modality, and Morality

Vallicella, William F. (2016) "William E. Mann, GOD, MODALITY, AND MORALITY," Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers: Vol. 33 : Iss. 3 , Article 8. DOI: 10.5840/faithphil201633368

Available here. A long and meaty review article including a discussion of divine simplicity and Mann's approach thereto.

Dreher on the Demonic

Here. Demonic forces are afoot as we slide into the abyss.

Weyl's Tiles: An Argument against Discrete Space

Is physical space, the space of the natural world, continuous or discrete? If composed of space atoms, then discrete. The Weyl Tile argument (WTA), however, seems to show that physical space cannot be discrete or 'quantized' and therefore must be continuous. This is relevant to our ongoing debate about potential versus actual infinities. For if physical space cannot be discrete, then it must be at least compact (the lowest grade of continuity), where "A series is called compact when no two terms are consecutive, but between any two there are others." (Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World, Norton, 1929, p. 144.) But if between any two points in space there are others, then there are infinitely many others, so that any line segment will be composed of an actual infinity of points.

But before we return to the question of actual infinities we need to get clear about the WTA itself. The nervus probandi lies in the following quotation from Hermann Weyl, Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science, Princeton UP, 1949, p. 43:

If a square is built up of miniature tiles, there are as many tiles along the diagonal as along the side; thus the diagonal should be equal in length to the side.

Take a gander at the chess board below. Consider the right triangle the sides of which are a1-a8 and a1-h1, and the hypotenuse of which is the diagonal a8-h1.  The sides and the diagonal are each eight squares long.  Count 'em and see. But this flies in the face of the theorem of Pythagoras.  If the sides are each eight units in length, then the hypotenuse is equal to the square root of  (8² + 8² =128), which is not 8, but the irrational 11.313 . . .  

The question this curious fact raises is whether physical space can be quantized, i.e., whether there are space atoms. If so, space is discrete as opposed to continuous. It may help to bear in mind that the above array is a mere model in continuous space of discrete space.  So it will do no good to object that if space atoms are squares, then the theorem of Pythagoras hold for them.  Space atoms are not squares: they have no shape at all. But I am getting ahead of my story.

We need to define our terms. Space is discrete just in case every finite extended spatial region is composed of finitely many atomic spatial regions. That amounts to saying that every finite extended region of space is composed of finitely many space atoms, where 'atom,' as its etymology suggests, implies indivisibility.  You cannot 'split' a space atom because such atoms are inherently 'unsplittable.'  A space atom is thus an individual that has no proper parts: it is  a mereological atom. A non-atomic region of space is then a mereological sum of space atoms. Note that every space atom, precisely because it is an atom, is an unextended region of space. It's an itty-bitty unextended bit of space itself, not of something in space. Space atoms are not in space; they compose space.  

Now for the argument:

1) The theorem of Pythagoras is not true (or even approximately true) of discrete space.

2) The theorem of Pythagoras is true (or approximately true) of actual space. Therefore:

3) Actual space is not discrete.  

To understand this argument, you have to understand that nothing rides on how small the tiles/squares are. Glance back at the chessboard. Consider the small right triangle in the bottom left corner of the board. Opposing sides and hypotenuse all have a length of two units.  So it doesn't matter how small the space atoms are. No matter how small the squares, the hypotenuse remains equal in length to the other two sides.

You will be tempted to think of the array of tiles/squares against the backdrop of continuous Euclidean space for which the Pythagorean theorem holds.  Thinking in this way, you will imagine that no matter how small you make the tiles, the diagonal will be longer than the sides. You have to resist this temptation to understand the 'Weyl tile' (vile tile?) argument. For if there are space atoms,  then they have no shape and hence no different dimensions in different directions. As Wesley C. Salmon puts, "In discrete space, a space atom constitutes one unit, and that is all there is to it. It cannot be regarded as properly having a shape, for we cannot ascribe sizes to parts of it -- it has no parts." (Space, Time, and Motion, U of Minnesota Press, 1980, p. 66) 

I have found K. McDaniel, "Distance and Discrete Space," Synthese (2007) 155: 157-162, very helpful. He has an argument against the WTA which I may discuss in a subsequent post.

Will Science Put Religion out of Business?

A tilt at transhumanism.

Substack latest.

Synchronicity

While thinking about Hermann Weyl's Tile Argument, this came over the transom:

Political 'Toons and Memes

Some are pretty good.

Masculinity

Out and about yesterday, I caught a bit of Dennis Prager's radio show. He defended Daniel Penny's behavior in his confrontation with Jordan Neely as masculine, using the word correctly. In our infantilized, feminized, and left-dominated and therefore crime-tolerant society, Penny's behavior will be called toxically masculine by our political enemies. But to anyone who can think straight, there is a difference between the masculine and the toxically masculine.

On the other hand, there are people to my right, politically speaking, who deny that there is any toxic masculinity.  I must oppose them too.  I say to them: Are you seriously going to maintain that there are no instances of machismo that are not reasonably described as 'toxic'?

Consider the sad case of Cynthia Garcia. This foolish middle-aged woman and mother thought it would be fun to party with the Hells (no apostrophe!) Angels in their Mesa, Arizona clubhouse of a Saturday night. The 'Angels' of course demanded sex; she showed disrespect, even after they stomped her, and so they brutally murdered her. There are differing accounts of the exact details.  But the upshot was indeed brutal. Two of them stabbed her to death and attempted to cut her head off,  dumping her remains in the desert proximal to the Rio Salado shooting range.

 

Of course, normal masculine behavior such as that displayed by Penny is not toxic, and the feminization of boys is a serious threat to social stability and the survival of the Republic. But just as a Nazi is no cure for a commie, a biker brute is no cure for a feminized boy.

 

The subversion of language is the mother of all subversion. 

 

You should no more allow the Left's theft of perfectly good English words than you should allow their question-begging and question-burying coinages such as 'Islamophobia' and 'homophobia' and 'transphobia.' I have gone over this many times and I am not in the mood to repeat myself.  Enough compromising with our political enemies; resist them on every front.

 

Addendum

 

William Voegli weighs in on the Penny-Neely encounter at City Journal: 

Are New York’s subways safer, its homeless population less dangerous, than is generally believed? Than Tarannum and, perhaps, Daniel Penny seemed to think? The Times pointed out in February that the rate of violent felonies on the subway system was twice as high in 2022 as it had been in 2019. The system saw ten people murdered in 2022, compared with an average of two per year from 2015 through 2019. On the other hand, the Times pointed out that even after this increase, there were 1.2 violent crimes for every 1 million subway rides, which works out to about the likelihood of being injured during a two-mile automobile trip. Readers deliberating how much reassurance to derive from such statistics may reflect on the Times’s utter lack of such restraint and sobriety following the death of George Floyd in 2020, when the paper made no attempt to caution against sweeping generalizations based on the anomalous death of an unarmed black man in police custody.

You might want to bear in mind that truth is not a leftist value, and that leftists have a strange propensity to celebrate the dysfunctional, the transgressive, the grotesque, and the socially worthless as part of their nihilist drive to normalize deviant behavior, all the while attacking the sane, the decent, the socially useful, including the subway commuters on their way to work.  

This brings up a second point raised by Rahnuma Tarannum, about how the authorities not doing their job puts civilians in a position where they either do it themselves or suffer the consequences of no one doing it. 

Abdication of authority has dire consequences. Leftists unwittingly (or is it wittingly?) promote vigilantism. Remember Bernie Goetz, the subway gunman? In the same way, leftists unwittingly (or is it wittingly?) promote increased gun ownership among civilians. Either unable or unwilling to distinguish weapon from wielder, lefties unrelentingly repeat that guns cause crime. But then demonstrating their lack of common sense, they agitate for the defunding of police, the ratcheting down of criminal penalties, etc. So the people arm themselves. Surprise! How stupid can a 'liberal' be?

I am a staunch supported of 2A rights, but being sane and reasonable I don't want more and more untrained civilians packing heat.

It is true, as Bouie says, that no one on Jordan Neely’s subway car had any way to know that he had been arrested 42 times, including at least four times for punching people, two of which occurred in the subway system. Nor could they have known that Neely was on “the ‘Top 50’ list,” which, the Times explained, is a “roster maintained by the city of . . . people living on the street whom officials consider most urgently in need of assistance and treatment.” Lacking such knowledge, Bouie contends, Neely’s fellow passengers were obligated to give him the benefit of the doubt. 

'Asylum Seekers'

Is a home invader an asylum seeker? Only in very rare cases.  So why are people who immigrate illegally called asylum seekers? A few are but most are not. What we have here, once again, is the characteristic 'progressive' abuse of language.  At the same time that so-called progressives abuse 'asylum,' they also abuse 'xenophobic' when they apply this terms to those of us who stand for the rule of law. You are one dumb conservative if you acquiesce in the Left's abuse of language.  He who controls the terms of the debate controls the debate.

Ann Coulter Interviews Heather Mac Donald . . .

. . . about the latter's new book.

The Childless as Anthropological Danglers

Top o' the Stack. 

The Austrian philosopher and Vienna Circle member Herbert Feigl wrote about nomological danglers.  Mental states as the epiphenomenalist conceives them have causes, but no effects. They are caused by physical states of the body and brain, but dangle nomologically in that there are no laws  that relate mental states  to physical states.

The childless are anthropological danglers.  They are life's epiphenomena. They have ancestors (causes) but no descendants (effects). Parents are essential: without  them we could not have come into fleshly existence.  But offspring are wholly inessential: the individual, though not the species, can exist quite well without them.

I mention pros and cons of dangling anthropologically.