Maverick Philosopher

Russell's Teapot: Does it Hold Water?

Here is a famous passage from Bertrand Russell's Is There a God?

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

One thing Russell is doing in this passage is making an unexceptionable point about burden of proof and/or the ad ignorantiam fallacy. If the existence of X has not been disproven, it does not follow that X exists, or even that it is reasonable to believe that X exists. So if anyone were to affirm the existence of something like Russell's celestial teapot or Edward Abbey's angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon, then the onus probandi would be on him to support his outlandish claims. The burden of proof would not rest on those who deny or dismiss such claims.

So far, so good. Russell is of course doing more than underscoring a couple of obvious points in the theory of argumentation. He is applying his points of logic to the God question. Here too I have no complaint. If the existence of God has not been disproven, it does not follow that God exists or even that it is reasonable to believe that God exists.

But the real appeal to atheists and agnostics of the Teapot passage rests on a third move Russell makes. He is clearly suggesting that belief in God (i.e., belief that God exists) is epistemically on a par with believing in a celestial teapot. Just as we have no reason to believe in celestial teapots, irate lunar unicorns (lunicorns?), flying spaghetti monsters, and the like, we have no reason to believe in God. But perhaps we should distinguish between a strong and a weak reading of Russell's suggestion:

S. Just as we cannot have any reason to believe that an empirically undetectable celestial teapot exists, we cannot have any reason to believe that God exists.

W. Just as we do not have any reason to believe that a celestial teapot exists, we do not have any reason to believe that God exists.

Now it seems to me that both (S) and (W) are plainly false: we have all sorts of reasons for believing that God exists. Here Alvin Plantinga sketches about two dozen theistic arguments. Atheists will not find them compelling, of course, but that is irrelevant. The issue is whether a reasoned case can be made for theism, and the answer is in the affirmative. Belief in God and in Russell's teapot are therefore not on a par since there are no empirical or theoretical reasons for believing in his teapot.

Another suggestion embedded in the Russell passage is the notion that if God existed, he would be just another physical thing in the physical universe. But of course this has nothing to do with anything maintained by any sophisticated theist. God is a purely spiritual being.

Another problem with the teapot analogy is that God as traditionally conceived in the West is not an isolani — to use a chess expression. He is not like an isolated pawn, unsupported and unsupporting. For if God exists, then God is the cause of the existence of every contingent being, and indeed, of every being distinct from himself. This is not true of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. If there is a lunar unicorn, then this is just one more isolated fact about the universe. But if God exists, then everything is unified by this fact: everything has the ground of its being and its intelligibility in the creative activity of this one paradigmatic being.

This is connected with the fact that one can argue from general facts about the universe to the existence of God, but not from such facts to the existence of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. Thus there are various sorts of cosmological argument that proceed a contingentia mundi to a ground of contingent beings. But there is no similar a posteriori argument to a celestial teapot. There are also arguments from truth, from consciousness, from apparent design, from desire, from morality, and others besides.

The very existence of these arguments shows two things. First, since they move from very general facts (the existence of contingent beings, the existence of truth) to the existence of a source of these general facts, they show that God is not a being among beings, not something in addition to what is ordinarily taken to exist. Second, these arguments give positive reason for believing in the existence of God. Are they compelling? No, but then no argument for any substantive philosophical conclusion is compelling.

People like Russell, Dawkins, and Dennett who compare God to a celestial teapot betray by so doing a failure to understand, and engage, the very sense of the theist's assertions. To sum up. (i) God is not a gratuitous posit in that there are many detailed arguments for the existence of God; (ii) God is not a physical being; (iii) God is not a being who simply exists alongside other beings. In all three respects, God is quite unlike a celestial teapot, a lunar uncorn, an invisible hippopotamus, and suchlike concoctions.

I am quite at a loss to explain why anyone should think the Teapot analogy any good. It leaks like a sieve.

Bradley's Regress and the 'Adicity' of Compresence: Is it Dyadic, Triadic, or N-Adic?

This is an addendum to Trope Theory Meets Bradley's Regress.  In that paper I touched upon the question whether the compresence relation is dyadic or not, but did not delve into the matter in any depth.  Now I will say a little more with the help of George Molnar's excellent discussion in Powers: A Study in Metaphysics (Oxford 2003), pp. 48-51.  Molnar draws upon Peter Simons, "Particulars in Particular Clothing: Three Trope Theories of Substance (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, September 1994, 553-575), which I have also consulted.

Don't Say 'Turkey Day'

Say 'Thanksgiving' and give thanks. You don't need to eat turkey to be thankful. Gratitude is a good old conservative virtue. I'd expatiate further, but I've got a race to run. You guessed it: a 'turkey trot.' In Mesa, Arizona, 10 kilometers = 6.2 miles.

With only a couple of exceptions I've run this race every year since 1991.  Today is the first case of cold and rainy weather.  But I am thankful for the rain since it will 'inspire' me to run faster and harder.  I will run as if the Grim Reaper (the ultimate Repo man) is right behind me with the scythe of hypothermia at the ready.

UPDATE (11/28):  The rain let up  before the 9 AM starting gun went off.  My official time: 1:05:15.  A shamefully slow time especially given that I lost 23 lbs for this event.  In mitigation, I plead the fact that I went on a mere 19 training runs in preparation for the race beginning on September 7th.  That, age, and a paucity of fast-twitch fibers add up to my being no favorite of the goddess of running.  Nevertheless, I remain her humble acolyte.

 

Gratitude: A Thanksgiving Homily

We need spiritual exercises just as we need physical, mental, and moral exercises. A good spiritual exercise, and easy to boot, is daily recollection of just how good one has it, just how rich and full one's life is, just how much is going right despite annoyances and setbacks which for the most part are so petty as not to merit consideration.

Start with the physical side of your life. You slept well, and a beautiful new day is dawning. Your breath comes easy, your intestines are in order. Your mind is clear, and so are your eyes. Move every moving part of your body and note how wonderfully it works, without any pain to speak of.

Brew up some java and enjoy its rich taste, all the while rejoicing over the regularity of nature that allows the water to boil one more time, at the same temperature, and the caffeine to be absorbed once more by those greedy intercranial receptors that activate the adrenalin that makes you eager to grab a notebook and jot down all the new ideas that are beginning to percolate up from who knows where.

Finished with your body, move to your mind and its wonderful workings. Then to the house and its appliances including your trusty old computer that reliably, day after day, connects you to the sphere of Nous, the noosphere, to hijack a term of Teilhard de Chardin. And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.

A quotidian enactment of something like the foregoing meditation should do wonders for you.

Trope Theory Meets Bradley's Regress

This is the paper I am scheduled to present at the Bradley Conference at the University of Geneva in early December, warts and all. No doubt it needs more work.  So comments and criticism are welcome.

Trope Theory Meets Bradley's Regress

William F. Vallicella

1. Introduction

One of the perennial tasks of ontology is that of analyzing a thing’s having of properties. That things have properties is a datum consistent with different theories as to what properties are, what the things are that have the properties, and how best the having is to be understood. Any theory will have to provide a three-fold answer to this three-fold question. In so doing, it must show how the elements it distinguishes fit together to form the unified phenomenon of a thing having properties. Analysis is not enough for understanding; synthesis is also needed to show how the elements separated out by analysis form a unity. One of the criteria of adequacy for any theory is whether or not it can avoid the threat to unity known as Bradley’s regress.

This paper argues that trope theory may have trouble passing the Bradley test. In particular, what it argues is that (i) trope theory requires a compresence relation to account for the difference between a unified thing and its disparate property-constituents; (ii) the compresence relation is external and therefore open to Bradleyan challenge; (iii) the various attempts to defuse Bradley’s regress are unsuccessful; hence, (iv) Bradley’s vicious infinite regress is unavoidable and trope theory in its current versions may be untenable.

Carl Schmitt on Compassion

Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947-1951, p. 284, entry of 20 December 1949:

Mitleid beruht auf Identifikation; daraus machen die Mystiker des Mitleids, Rousseau und Schopenhauer, eine magische Identität. Aber das Mitleid, dessen man sich bewußt ist, kann nur Selbstmitleid sein und ist deshalb nur Selbstbetrug.

Compassion rests upon identification; the mystics of compassion make of it a magical identity. The compassion of which one is conscious, however, can only be self-compassion and is therefore only self-deception. (tr BV)

 

The old Nazi's cynical thought is that one deceives oneself when one thinks one is feeling compassion for another. What one is feeling, in truth, is compassion for oneself.

I wonder if Schmitt's thought is coherent. Compassion requires both identification and differentiation. On the one hand, I must identify with you in some manner and in some measure if I am to feel compassion for you. There must be some recognition of common humanity. If I have completely dehumanized you, like the Nazi the Jew, or the Commie the bourgeois class enemy, then there is no question of compassion. On the other hand, compassion as a conscious state is a state of me as distinct from you. So Schmitt is only half right. Compassion is at once self-compassion and other-compassion.

Example. A schoolmate of mine, Lee Didier, was killed at the age of 19 in a motorcycle accident. Ten years later, his mother Mabel was at my mother's funeral. Our eyes met and she gave me a look of compassion such as I have never experienced before or since. She had lost her only child; I had lost my only mother. It is not that Mabel felt my grief, which is impossible; she felt something analogous to my grief. She felt her own grief at the loss of a loved one and at the same time co-suffered (mit-leidet) my grief as an affect analogous to hers. Thus Mabel identified with me, but without any mystical or magical becoming identical with me. It was an identification presupposing differentiation, as opposed to an identification issuing in identity.

So I say Schmitt is wrong. He mistakenly thinks that identification entails identity. He does not see how there can be compassion along with differentiation. Failing to see this, he falls into the cynical view that compassion is at bottom compassion for oneself. If that were true, there would be no compassion.

The Enmity Potential of Thought

Carl Schmitt, Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947-1951, hrsg. v. Medem (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1991), S. 213 (14. I. 49):

Das Feindschaftpotential des Denkens ist unendlich. Denn man kann nicht anders als in Gegensätzen denken. Le combat spirituel est plus brutal que la bataille des hommes.

The enmity potential of thought is infinite. For one cannot think otherwise than in oppositions. Spiritual combat is more brutal than a battle of men. (tr. BV)

There is something to this, of course. Philosophy in particular sometimes bears the aspect of a blood sport. But thinking is just as much about the reconciliation of oppositions as it is about their sharpening. A good thinker is rigorous, precise, clear, disciplined. These are virtues martial and manly. But there are also the womanly virtues, in particular, those of the midwife. Socratic maieutic is as important as ramming a precisely formulated thesis down someone's throat or impaling him on the horns of a dilemma. The Cusanean coincidentia oppositorum belongs as much to thought as the oppositio oppositorum.

There is more to philosophy than "A thing is what it is and not some other thing." There is also, "The way up and the way down are the same."

But it is no surprise to find the unrepentant Nazi onesided on the question. We shall have to enter more deeply into the strange world of Carl Schmitt.

He Was a Friend of Mine

John F. Kennedy was assassinated 45 years ago today.  Here is The Byrds' tribute to the slain leader. They took a traditional song and redid the lyrics.  The young Bob Dylan here offers an outstanding interpretation of the old song.

I was in the eighth grade when Kennedy was gunned down. We were assembled in an auditorium for some reason when the principal came in and announced that the president had been shot. The date was November 22, 1963. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was seated behind my quondam inamorata, Christine W. My love for her was from afar, like that of Don Quixote for the fair Dulcinea, but at the moment I was in close physical proximity to her, studying the back of her blouse through which I could make out the strap of her training bra . . . .

By the way, if you want to read a thorough (1,612 pages with notes on a separate CD!) takedown of all the JFK conspiracy speculation, I recommend Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy.

It was a tale of two nonentities, Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. Both were little men who wanted to be big men. Oswald, acting alone, shot Kennedy. Ruby, acting alone, shot Oswald. That is the long and the short of it. For details, I refer you to Bugliosi.

An Ambiguous Translation from Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837)

Nessun maggior segno d'essere poco filosofo e poco savio, che volere savia e filosofica tutta la vita.

There's no greater sign of being a poor philosopher and wise man than wanting all of life to be wise and philosophical. (Giacomo Leopardi, Pensieri, tr. W. S. Di Piero, Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1981, p. 69)

Do you see how the translation imports an ambiguity that is not present in the Italian original? 'Poor philosopher and wise man' could mean either (poor philosopher) and wise man or poor philosopher and poor wise man.  There is no such ambiguity in the original since poco qualifies both filosofo and savio.

I will be told that the aphorism as a whole makes clear the intended meaning.  Indeed, it does, but I have just wasted time on disambiguation.  Why not write it right the first time so that the reader needn't puzzle over the meaning?  It is relevant to point out that a philosopher is not the same as a wise man. A philosopher is a lover, not a possessor, of wisdom. 

"You, sir, are a pedant."  And proud of it.  We could use more scrupulosity in all areas of life.

Nascimur uno modo, multis morimur

We are born in  one way, we die in many ways.

Commentary here at AudioLatinProverbs.com.  (A tip of the hat to Seldom Seen Slim)

What is Language? Tool, Enabler, Dominatrix?

I have spoken before, romantically no doubt, of the mother tongue as our alma mater, our dear mother to whom we owe honor. Matrix of our thoughts, she is deeper and higher than our thoughts, their sacred Enabler.

So I was pleased to come across a similar, albeit more trenchant, observation in Karl Kraus' Beim Wort Genommen, pp. 134-135:

Ich beherrsche die Sprache nicht; aber die Sprache beherrscht mich vollkommen. Sie ist mir nicht die Dienerin meiner Gedanken. Ich lebe in einer Verbindung mit ihr, aus der ich Gedanken empfange, und sie kann mit mir machen, was sie will. Ich pariere ihr aufs Wort. Denn aus dem Wort springt mir der junge Gedanke entgegen und formt rueckwirkend die Sprache, die ihn schuf. Solche Gnade der Gedankentraechtigkeit zwingt auf die Knie und macht allen Aufwand zitternder Sorgfalt zur Pflicht. Die Sprache ist eine Herrin der Gedanken, und wer das Verhaeltnis umzukehren vermag, dem macht sie sich im Hause nuetzlich, aber sie sperrt ihm der Schoss.

I do not dominate language; she dominates me completely. She is not the servant of my thoughts. I live in a relation with her from which I receive thoughts, and she can do with me what she will. I follow her orders. For from the word the fresh thought springs, forming retroactively the language that created it. The grace of language, pregnant with thought, forces me to my knees and makes a duty of my expenditure of trembling conscientiousness. Language is a mistress of thought. To anyone who would reverse the relationship, she makes herself useful but denies access to her womb.

I might have translated Herrin as dominatrix if I wanted to accentuate the masochistic tone of the passage. 'Mistress' is obviously to be read as the female counterpart of 'master.'

Karl Kraus on the Art of the Aphorism

Beim Wort Genommen, p. 132:

Einen Aphorismus zu schreiben, wenn man es kann, ist oft schwer. Viel leichter ist es, einen Aphorismus zu schreiben, wenn mann es nicht kann.

It is often difficult to write an aphorism, even for those with the ability. It is much easier when one lacks the ability. (tr. BV)

Karl Kraus on the Two Kinds of Writers

Karl Kraus (1874-1936), Beim Wort Genommen (Muenchen: Koesel Verlag, 1955), p. 111:

Es gibt zwei Arten von Schriftstellern. Solche, die es sind, und solche die es nicht sind. Bei den ersten gehören Inhalt und Form zusammen wie Seele und Leib, bei den zweiten passen Inhalt und Form zusammen wie Leib und Kleid.

There are two kinds of writers, those who are and those who aren't. With the first, content and form belong together like soul and body; with the second, content and form fit together like body and clothing. (tr. BV)

Karl Kraus on Blogging

Karl Kraus, Beim Wort Genommen, p. 124:

Warum schreibt mancher? Weil er nicht genug Charakter hat, nicht zu schreiben.

Why do many write? Because they don't have enough character not to write. (tr. BV)

Having It Both Ways

Karl Kraus, Beim Wort Genommen, p. 194:

Wenn einer sich wie ein Vieh benommen hat, sagt er: Man ist doch nur ein Mensch! Wenn er aber wie ein Vieh behandelt wird, sagt er: Man ist doch auch ein Mensch!

A person who has behaved in a beastly manner excuses himself by saying, "I am only human!" But when he is treated in a beastly manner, he protests, "I too am a human being!" (trans. BV)

In Sartrean terms, we invoke either our facticity or our transcendence depending on which serves us better at the moment. Well, our nature is metaphysically dual; we may as well get some use out of that fact.

Infinite Regresses: Vicious, Benign, Virtuous?

I haven't yet said anything particularly illuminating about the criteria of viciousness, the criteria that would allow us to sort infinite regresses into the vicious and the non-vicious. I should address the problem of criteria.  But in this installment I want to suggest that we may need to make a tripartite distinction among vicious, benign, and virtuous regresses.  If a regress is not vicious, then it is non-vicious. But it may be that non-vicious regresses come in two kinds, the benign and the virtuous.  Here is a crude analogy.  Fearing cancer, I have a certain growth checked out by a medico.  It is determined that the growth is not malignant, but benign. But no one will say that the growth serves a useful purpose.  If something is harmless, it does not follow that it is helpful.  And if something is not vitiating, it does not follow that it is 'empowering.'

Thus I am suggesting that we not refer to non-vicious regresses as virtuous, as some writers do.  For if a regress is merely benign or harmless or innocuous, it does not follow that it is explanatorily useful or helpful.  And it may be that there are some infinite regresses that serve an explanatory purpose.  These would deserve to be called virtuous.  But we need some examples.

I don't endorse the following example, but it is worth thinking about.  Suppose we want to explain why the universe exists, and we want to do so without recourse to anything transcendent of the universe: we seek a satisfactory immanent explanation.  Suppose further, contrary to current cosmology, that the universe always existed.  Let's also assume that to explain the parts of a whole is to explain the whole.  To adapt an example of Paul Edwards, suppose the Three Stooges are hanging out at the corner of Hollywood and Vine on a certain afternoon.  To explain why the boys are there at that time it suffices to explain why Larry is there, why Moe is there, and why Curly Joe is there.  Having explained why each is there, one has explained why the trio is there.  It would be senseless to demand an explanation of why the trio is there after one has been given satisfactory explanations of why each member of the trio is there.  The trio is not something over and above its members.

Applying this Hume-Edwards principle -- the principle that to explain the parts of a whole is to explain the whole -- to the universe, one could say that to explain why the universe exists it suffices to explain why each phase of the universe exists, so that, if each phase of the universe has an explanation, then eo ipso the universe has an explanation.  Now if the universe is temporally infinite in the past direction, and each phase of the universe is caused by an earlier phase, then every phase of the universe has a causal explanation in terms of an earlier phase.  Since no phase, no temporal part, of the universe lacks an explanation, and since the universe as process just is the whole of these temporal parts, and since to explain the parts of a whole is to explain the parts, it seems to follow that the universe is self-explanatory, that its existence can be accounted for in wholly immanent terms. It looks as if a beginningless universe could be causa sui. Let us assume arguendo that this very bad argument I have just inflicted on you is not bad.

In this argument it appears that the infinite regress of causes does positive explanatory work.  For if there were a temporally first event, or a temporally first phase of the universe, then one could demand an explanation of it, and this demand could not be immanently satisfied.  But if every event or phase has an explanation in terms of an earlier event or phase, then this demand cannot be made.  What we have then is a putative example of an actually infinite regress that is not merely harmless, but positively helpful unto explanation.

Hence my suggestion:  we ought to make a three-fold distinction among vicious, benign (harmless), and virtuous (helpful) infinite regresses.  And thus we ought not conflate benign regresses with virtuous regresses.  Virtuous regresses are a proper subset of benign regresses (since every explanatorily hepful regress is explanatorily harmless), which implies that there are benign regresses that are not virtuous.

Now the example I gave of a virtuous infinite regress is not a very convincing one, or at least it is not convincing to me.  Are there better examples of virtuous infinite regresses, infinite regresses that do positive explanatory work?

What say you, Jan?  Francesco?

World Philosophy Day

Seldom Seen Slim apprised me of the fact that today is World Philosophy Day.  BBC story here.  I got a kick out of this:

As Princeton philosopher David Lewis once said: "When philosophers follow where argument leads, too often they are led to doctrines indistinguishable from sheer lunacy."

This from a philosopher whose mad dog modal realism is itself hard by the boundary of lunacy.  Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!

 

 

Vicious and Benign Regresses Again

What is the difference between a vicious and a benign infinite regress?  We ought to look at a number of examples.  Here is one.  An entailment of a proposition p is any proposition that is a logical consequence of p.  Now consider

1. Every proposition has entailments.

2. To know a proposition one must know its entailments.

(1) gives rise to infinite series.  The entailments of a proposition are themselves propositions, so that if every proposition has entailments, then for every proposition there is an infinite series of propositions.  For example, p entails ~~P, which entails ~~~~P, and so on ad infinitum. There is nothing problematic here.

(2), however, engenders a vicious infinite regress.  For if to know a given proposition I must know its entailments, then to know a given proposition I must know infinitely many propositions.  But I cannot know infinitely many propositions.  So (2) implies that I cannot know any proposition. 

What makes the regress vicious in the second case?  What does viciousness consist in? It has to do with (2)'s being explanatory.  (2) proposes a philosophical explanation: one knows a proposition by knowing its entailments.  (2) proposes a theory as to what knowing a proposition consists in.  But the explanation is faulty.  Suppose p entails q which entails r which entails s, and so on.  The theory proposes that in order to know p, I must know q. But to know q I must know r, and so on.  This implies the impossibility of my knowing p.  Viciousness, then, is the property of being explanatorily unsuccessful.

Perhaps we can hazard the following general formulation. A vicious infinite regress is an infinite regress that arises in the context of an attempted philosophical explanation when the explanation given permits the question that was to be answered to arise at successively higher levels ad infinitum.  In the above example, to know that p one must know p's entailments, but to know them, one must know their entailments, and so on endlessly.

Now consider this pair:

3. Every event has a cause.

4. To explain an event one must explain its causes.

(3) engenders an infinite series: if every event has a cause, and causes are events, then there is an infinite regress of events. But the regress is benign.  (4), however, is the answer to a philosophical question about the nature of explanation: What is it to explain an event?  (4) proposes a philosophical explanation of explanation, namely, that to explain an event one must explain its causes.  But this theory leads to a vicious infinite regress.  Suppose z has y as a cause.  The theory implies that to explain z one must explain y.  But y is an event, so to explain it one must explain its cause x, and so on infinitely.  The regress is vicious because it sets an impossible standard of explanation: if to explain an event one must explain every event in its causal ancestry, then no event can be explained. So (4) is false.

 

Infinite Regresses: Vicious and Benign

The peripatetic (not Peripatetic) Kevin Kim once asked me:

Are all infinite regresses (regressions?) vicious? Why the pejorative label? Of the many things I don't understand, this must be near the top of my list, and it's an ignorance that dates back to my undergrad Intro to Philosophy days. When I first read the Thomistic cosmological proofs, I found myself wondering why Aquinas had such trouble countenancing the possibility that, as the lady says, "it's turtles all the way down."

Without a first, there can't be a second... so what? It doesn't follow that there must be a first element to a series. What makes a temporally infinite series (of moments, causes/effects, etc.) impossible?

Here is the answer I gave him, considerably expanded and updated:

1. No, not all infinite regresses are vicious. Some are, if not 'virtuous,' at least benign. The term 'benign' is standardly used. The truth regress is an example of a benign infinite regress. Let p be any proposition. And let 'T' stand for the operator 'It is true that ( ).' Clearly, p entails T(p). The operation is iterable. So T(p) entails T(T(p)). And so on, ad infinitum or ad indefinitum if you prefer. The resulting infinite series is wholly unproblematic. Whether you call this a progression or a regression, it doesn't cause any conceptual trouble.

Comatose at Rest, Mad in Action

Epicurus, et al. Vatican Sayings XI (tr. Geer):

Most men are in a coma when they are at rest and mad when they act.

A Protreptic Puzzler

A curious passage from Aristotle's Protrepticus:

. . . the fact that all men feel at ease in philosophy, wishing to dedicate their whole lives to the pursuit of it by leaving behind all other concerns, is in itself weighty evidence that it is a painless pleasure to dedicate oneself wholeheartedly to philosophy. For no one is willing to engage in exhausting work for a long time. (#53, p. 24)

To set the Stagirite straight, I should like to shunt his shade into some Philosophy 101 classroom for a spell.

Friends and Enemies

Making enemies is worse than making friends is good.

A Reason to Blog

Chary of embalming in printer's ink ideas that may be unworthy of such preservation, due perhaps to underdevelopment, or lack of originality, or some more egregious defect, the blogger satisfies his urge to scribble and publish without burdening referees and editors and typesetters, and without contributing to the devastation of forests. He publishes all right, but in a manner midway between the ephemerality of talk and the finality of print.

Athens and Benares

Every morning it is the same for me, a struggle between 'Athens' and 'Benares.' Let me explain.

Is Bradley's Regress Already in Aristotle?

At Metaphysics Zeta (Book VII, Chapter 17, Bekker 1041b10-30), there is a clear anticipation of Bradley's Regress and an interesting formulation of what may well count as the fundamental problem of metaphysics, the problem of unity. What follows is the W. D. Ross translation of the passage. It is a mess presumably because the underlying Greek text is a mess. The Montgomery Furth and Richard Hope translations are not much better. But the meaning is to me quite clear, and I will explain it after I cite the passage:

Francesco Orilia on Facts and Bradley's Regress Part II

In Part I of this series I provided a preliminary description of the problem that exercises Orilia and me and a partial list of assumptions we share. One of these assumptions is that there are truth-making facts. We also both appreciate that Bradley's Regress ('the Regress') threatens the existence of facts. Why should this be so? Well, the existence of a fact is the unity of its constitutents: when they are unified in the peculiar fact-constituting manner, then the fact exists. But this unity needs an explanation, which cannot be empirical-causal, but must be ontological. The existence of facts cannot be taken as a brute ontological fact. But when we cast about for an explanation, we bang into the Regress. Let me now try to clarify this a bit further. We distinguish between an internal Regress and an external Regress, and in both cases we must investigate whether it is vicious or benign.

Acting With Others Versus Talking With Others

An excellent insight from Alain's essay, "The Ills of Others":

To act with others is always good; to talk with others for the sake of talking, complaining, and recriminating, is one of the greatest scourges on earth . . . . (Alain on Happiness, Frederick Ungar 1973, p. 160)

I once built a small dock with another man. We had little or nothing in common intellectually or spiritually. You could say we lived on different planets. Conversation with him about any matter beyond the sensibly present was pointless or worse. But with tools in hand, confronting the recalcitrance of matter, with a definite physical end in view, engaged in a common project, his words found guidance and anchorage, and our words together served a purpose. Acting together we achieved something. The job done, the handiwork admired, I found myself actually liking the guy. But had we been just talking, I would have found it a moral challenge not to be disgusted with him. Few possess the mental equipment and discipline to engage in fruitful conversation that is not anchored in the mundane.

Again I note, as in an earlier Alain post, the French love of the universal quantifier: "To act with others is always good. . . ." Obviously, acting with others is not always good. for reasons you an easily supply yourself. So why the exaggeration? For literary effect.

Please don't accuse me of committing a hasty generalization. I am not inferring some such proposition as 'French writers misuse universal quantifiers for literary effect' from this one instance, or this instance plus the one cited in the earlier post; what I am doing is illustrating an antecedently established general proposition. This is a distinction one should observe, but is too often not observed, namely, the distinction between generalizing and illustrating. Someone who illustrates a general claim by providing an example is not inferring the general claim from the example.

Why I am Such a Hot Ticket on the Party Circuit

Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar . . . Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes, Abrams Image 2007, pp. 183-184:

Contemporary philosopher William Vallicella writes, "Metaphilosophy is the philosophy of philosophy. It is itself a branch of philosophy, unlike the philosophy of science, which is not a branch of science, or the philosophy of religion, which is not a branch of religion."

It is statements like this that have made Vallicella such a hot ticket on the party circuit.

I haven't read the book, so I can't tell you what I think of it. The only reason I know about the above citation is because Dymphna of Gates of Vienna drew it to my attention.

Amiel on Duty

"Duty has the virtue of making us feel the reality of a positive world while at the same time detaching us from it." (See here.)

This is a penetrating observation, and a nearly perfect specimen of the aphorist's art. It is terse, true, but not trite. The tip of an iceberg of thought, it invites exfoliation.

If the world were literally a dream, there would be no need to act in it or take it seriously. One could treat it as one who dreams lucidly can treat a dream: one lies back and enjoys the show in the knowledge that it is only a dream. But to the extent that I feel duty-bound to do this or refrain from that, I take the world to be real, to be more than maya or illusion. Feeling duty-bound, I realize the world.

And to the extent that I feel duty-bound to do something, to make real what merely ought to be, I am referred to this positive world as to the locus of realization.

But just how real is the world of our ordinary waking experience? Is it the ne plus ultra of reality? Its manifest deficiency gives the lie to this supposition, which is why great philosophers from Plato to Bradley have denied ultimate reality to the sense world. Things are not the way they ought to be, and things are the way they ought not be, and everyone with moral sense feels this to be true. The Real falls short of the Ideal, and, falling short demonstrates its lack of plenary reality. So while the perception of duty realizes the world, it also and by the same stroke de-realizes it by measuring it against a standard from elsewhere.

The sense of duty detaches us from the world of what is by referring us to what ought to be. What ought to be, however, in many cases is not; hence we are referred back to the world of what is as the scene wherein alone ideals can be realized.

It is a curious dialectic. The Real falls short of the Ideal and is what is is in virtue of this falling short. The Ideal, however, is not but only ought to be. It lacks reality just as the Real lacks ideality. Each is what it is by not being what it is not. And we moral agents are caught in this interplay. We are citizens of two worlds and must play the ambassador between them.

Existence as a Property: A Response to David Brightly

David Brightly commented: "Why bother with existence as a property since everything has it and it does not help distinguish individuals? Is there an argument that convinces you that existence is a property, or is this in some way a matter of 'philosophical taste'?"

1. Existence can be a property without being a property of individuals. It might be a property of properties or concepts or propositional functions or Tichian offices or some cognate item. But our concern is whether, and in what sense, existence is a property of individuals.

2. If existence is a property of individuals, then one can ask whether it classifies individuals into two groups, the existent and the nonexistent. If existence is classificatory in this way, then the individuals it classifies cannot, in themselves, be existent: they must be nonexistent individuals. But I mention this (Meinongian) theory only to set it aside for the space of this post. I maintain that there are no nonexistent individuals, that all individuals exist. This is not self-evident. Nor is it a logical truth that every individual exists. If it were, then it would be a formal-logical contradiction to say that some individuals do not exist, but it is not. For more on this topic, and a critique of van Inwagen, see here.

Alain on Keeping to the Present

Emile-Auguste Chartier (1868-1951) was a French professor of philosophy among whose students were Raymond Aron and Simone Weil. Chartier's sunny disposition, however, did not rub off on the brooding Weil. Under the pseudonym 'Alain,' Chartier published thousands of two-page essays in newspapers. Were he alive and active today he would most likely be a philosoblogger.

Speaking of the Stoics, Alain writes,

One of their arguments which I have always found good, and which has been useful to me more than once, is their concept of the past and the future. "We have only the present to bear," they said. "Neither the past not the future can harm us, since the one no longer exists and the other does not yet exist."

[. . .]

. . . keep your mind on the present; keep your mind on your life, which moves onward from minute to minute; one minute follows another; it is therefore possible to live as you are living, since you are alive. But the future terrifies me, you say. That is something you know nothing about. What happens is never what we expected; and as for your present suffering, you may be sure that it will diminish precisely because it is so intense. Everything changes, everything passes away. This maxim has often saddened us; the very least it can do is console us once in a while. (Alain on Happiness, Frederick Ungar 1973, trs. R. D. and J. E. Cottrell, pp. 144-145)

The literary merit of Alain's writing is in evidence in the concluding sentence. My only quibble is with the typically Gallic exaggeration: what happens is never what we expected? Ah, the French love of the the universal quantifier!

Companion post: Can You Get Through the Next Hour?

The Glutton and the Lecher

The glutton’s belly betrays his vice: the bigger the belly, the more entrenched the vice. It is a good thing for the lecher that there is no similar correlation between the depth of his vice and the size of the offending organ. A good thing for his body, if not for his soul.

Three Kinds of Idle Talk

Intellectual talk can be as bad as mundane trivial talk, an empty posturing, a vain showmanship without roots or results. But worst of all is ‘spiritual talk’ which can distract us from both action and (what is better) contemplative inaction.

The Direction of This Weblog

This from a reader:

I have been following your blog for some time, from the move to PowerBlogs to the recent move to TypePad. I have two questions I'd like to ask:

First, are you going to post your opinions on the election? I have particularly enjoyed reading the reactions of several conservatives . . . . As such, I would love to hear your own thoughts on the issues.

Second, why have you never taken Brian Leiter to task? His utter distaste for anything conservative; his mockery of anyone who votes Republican as "war mongers," religious fanatics, etc.; his politicizing of philosophy, and his obsession for status, fame, and power; all these appear to run directly counter to everything you stand for and believe in. [. . .]

This e-mail gives me an opportunity to comment on the direction of this blog.

1. I am by nature apolitical. The political sphere impresses me as a realm of mendacity and illusion and a distraction from what truly matters, namely, one's self-actualization. At the moment this impression is very much in the ascendancy. This explains why I haven't posted anything about the election. Thus I expect this incarnation of Maverick Philosopher to contain less material on currect political events. But one cannot ignore this stuff since one's ability to live in freedom is put in jeopardy by government. So I will continue to keep an eye on developments and will speak out when sufficiently moved to do so.

2. I will however disallow comments on all posts except those of a technical philosophical nature. Discussions of politics and religion, and indeed of anything that cannot be precisely and rigorously articulated, are often a waste of time, and almost always a waste of time when there is insufficient common ground between the interlocutors.

3. My reader asks why I have never taken Brian Leiter to task. My reader and I seem to share the view that Leiter is a contemptible fellow, a status-obsessed careerist, and a living example of how corrupt academic philosophy can become. To pay any attention to him or his ravings would be a waste of time. I've done my bit to counter the ideas of the Left, and it is ideas, not persons, that count in the end.

Can You Get Through the Next Hour?

The present can always be borne – if sliced thinly enough – and it is only the present that must be borne.

This aphorism of mine is in the Stoic spirit. It illustrates the Stoic method of division. Any process or procedure or undertaking which seems overwhelming or unbearable when surveyed as a whole can be managed if one breaks it down into its parts. Since it is not all at once, it needn't be managed and borne all at once. One does not run the marathon all at once, but stride by stride. The wise marathoner at the starting line does not remind himself that he must run the daunting distance of 26.2 miles, he just starts running. Near the end, when he is spent, he thinks only of the next step. One can always take another step, and only one step needs to be taken at each time.

Here is Pierre Hadot (The Inner Citadel, p. 133) quoting from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (XI, 3):

A seductive melody . . . you can despise it if you divide it into each of its sounds, and if you ask yourself if you are lesser than each one of them taken separately; if you are you would be filled with shame. The same thing will happen if you repeat this procedure in each figure . . . In general, then, and with the exception of virtue and its effects, remember to head as quickly as you can for the parts of a process, in order, by dividing them, to get to the point where you have contempt for them. Transpose this method, moreover, to life in its entirety.

Analysis destroys the seductiveness but also the fearfulness of processual wholes by decomposing them into temporal parts that can be easily negotiated. How will I get through this life of trial and tribulation? How will I bear up under sickness, old age, and dying? I will do it day by day, hour by hour. One can always get throught the next hour, minute, second. As Hadot puts it, "No object can make us lose our mastery over ourselves if we submit it to this method of division." (133)

There is a comparison worth exploring between the soteriological use to which Stoics put analysis and the use to which Buddhists put it, as in Milinda's Chariot. But that is a large topic for later.

Fool, Philosopher, Sage

The fool is never satisfied with what he has, but is quite satisfied with what he is. The philosopher is never satisfied with what he is, but is satisfied with what he has. The sage is satisfied with both, with what he is and what he has. Unfortunately, there are no sages, few philosophers, and a world full of fools.

On the Suffering of Animals

Animal life is “poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.” But this gloomy Hobbesian description must be balanced by the recognition that a suffering animal is not a man suffering as an animal. We must discipline our tendency to project and imagine. To imagine that a cat dying of cancer suffers as a man dying of cancer suffers is to engage in anthropomorphic projection. “Nature red in tooth and claw” is perhaps less horrible than we imagine it to be. This is not to deny that animals suffer, let alone to embrace the Cartesian absurdity that animals are machines. The point is to not make things worse than they are through inept mental moves.

Suffering Pleasure

We suffer pain, but we also suffer pleasure. Fundamentally, to suffer is to be passive, to be acted upon, to be at the mercy of what is not oneself. Excessive pleasure and pain should both be avoided as one avoids heteronomy, the heteronomy of the not-self. Compare Plato, Timaeus 86c:

. . . excessive pains and pleasures are justly to be regarded as the greatest diseases to which the soul is liable. For a man who is in great joy or in great pain, in his unseasonable eagerness to attain the one and to avoid the other, is not able to see or hear anything rightly, but he is mad and is at the same time utterly incapable of any participation in reason.

It is useful to practice distancing oneself from one’s sensations in order to study them objectively. To sensations good and bad, say: “You are only a sensation, an external occurrence whose effect on me, for good or ill, is partly due to my cooperation and is therefore partly under my control.” The worldling seeks pleasure (‘excitement,’ ‘thrills’) and shuns pain. The sage accepts both as byproducts of worthwhile activities. Tha mastery of desire and aversion is not easy, and it is a good bet that one won't advance far in it; but any advance is better than none.

How Not to Begin the Day

A thoroughly bad way to begin the day is by reading a newspaper. For it is not only the hands that get dirty, and the house cluttered; the mind in its early morning freshness is degraded by useless facts, polluted with badly written opinions, and suborned by seductive advertising. There is plenty of time later in the day to load up on the sort of drivel with which one must deal in order to survive in an imperfect world. The mornings should be kept free and clear under the aegis of Thoreau’s admonition, “Read not The Times, read the The Eternities.”

The morning is to the night as virtue is to vice. It follows that one should so arrange one’s life as to secure the maximum quantity of morning. Arise early, before the birds. The true lover of silence finds even the birds too noisy. In the morning all is cool, clean, and quiet. The worldlings are asleep, the universe is yours. Now read something worth reading, something that inspires, improves, ennobles, challenges. There are the great scriptures to choose from: the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Dhammapada, the Old and New Testaments. There are great writers such as Shakespeare and Melville. Great philosophers such as Plato and Augustine wait patiently to engage us from across the centuries. If if it is self-help you need, why read the latest New Age hucksters when Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca lie to hand?

A Contradictory Being Who Issues Contradictory Demands

We want a subordinate, a friend, a spouse to do our bidding, to embody in action our intention, but also to show initiative, to anticipate our unstated wants and needs. Not content to command the other's body, making of it an extension of our will, we want also to command the other's freedom, making of it an instrument of our freedom.

I say to wifey: "Bring me back a case of Fat Tire Ale." Upon her return, no ale is in evidence. Inquiring why not, I am told that it was unavailable. "Why then did you not fetch me a case of Sam Adam's Boston Ale?"

"Because that is not what you asked for, and had I brought back Sam Adam's you would have complained that it was not Fat Tire."

The Joy of Teaching and the Case of Santayana

Here are some negative assessments of the worth of teaching from my own experience. There are good things about teaching too. I'll leave them for the reader to supply if he can.

Teaching is the feeding of people who aren't hungry.

Teaching philosophy is the feeding of people who neither hunger nor know what food is.

Teaching is like agitating water in a glass with one's forefinger. As long as the finger is in motion, the water is agitated; but as soon as the finger is removed, the water returns to its quiescent state.

The classroom is a scene of unreality. No one takes it quite seriously. Not the students, from whom little is expected and less demanded. Not the teachers, who waste their time in discipline and remediation.

According to an apocryphal story about George Santayana, one day, while lecturing at Harvard, he suddenly intuited the absurdity of teaching. Stopping in mid-sentence, he walked out of the classroom never to return. The truth is less dramatic: he dutifully finished the semester, turned in his grades, resigned his professorship, and embarked for Rome where he spent the rest of his life in cultured retirement.

See here for a couple more negative views of teaching.

Stumbling Block or Stepping Stone?

One man's stumbling block is another's stepping stone. The cross for example.

First Live, Then Philosophize

Primum vivere deinde philosophari. But if after and while living one neglects to philosophize, then one is like the vintner who gathers grapes but neglects to press them for their wine. What is the point of gathering the grapes of experience if one fails to press them for the wine of wisdom?

Existence: Some Responses to Pavel Materna

For context see Pavel Tichy on Existence, the posts chained to it, and the comments to these posts.

My view is that existence belongs to individuals in the way it would not belong to them if Frege and Russell and Pavel Tichy were right about existence. These three maintain that existence is exclusively a property of concepts, propositional functions, and offices, respectively. I maintain that there are legitimate first-level uses of 'exist(s)' in addition to the legitimate second-level uses. This commits me to saying that, in a suitably broad sense of 'property,' existence is a property of individuals. No doubt it is a very peculiar property, indeed a sui generis property, but it is a property nonetheless. Or so I maintain. Sometimes I avoid the potentially misleading term 'property' altogether and simply say that existence belongs to individuals in the way it would not belong to them if Frege and Russell were right. If Russell is right, then existence is like numerousness. Plainly, one cannot predicate being numerous of an individual, e.g., 'Socrates is numerous' and 'This pencil is numerous' are nonsense. I say Russell's view is mistaken. Although second-level uses of 'exist(s)' are like the uses of 'numerous,' 'exist(s)' has legitimate first-level uses unlike 'numerous' which has no legitimate first-level uses.

The Presumptuousness of Blogging

Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties/Der Streit der Fakultäten, tr. Gregor (University of Nebraska Press, 1979), p. 177:

To want to entertain others with the inner history of the play of my thoughts, which has subjective importance (for me) but no objective importance (valid for everyone), would be presumptuous, and I could justly be blamed for it.

There is no doubt about it: we bloggers are a presumptuous and vain lot. We report daily on the twists and turns of our paltry minds. In mitigation, a couple of points. First, I don’t force my posts on anyone. If you are here, it is of your own free will. Second, there is something fascinating to me about the origin of my own and others' ideas and how they in their abtractness percolate up out of the concretion of their authors' Existenz. The blogs of most interest to me combine the existential with the theoretical, the autobiographical with the impersonal. The question of the origin of ideas must not be confused with the question of their validity or lack thereof. (Got that, Fritz?) But both questions are fascinating, and how exactly they connect is even more so. Now if I find the intertwinement of the existential and the theoretical interesting, then perhaps you do as well; herein may reside some justification for reports on "the inner history of the play of my thoughts."

I oppose the nomenclature whereby individual weblogs (as opposed to group weblogs) are referred to as ‘personal’ weblogs. This blog is more impersonal than personal and I fret over the ratio. Objektive Wichtigkeit should predominate over subjektive. But by how much?

By the way, Streit der Fakultäten is a fascinating book. I’m an old Kant man; I wrote my dissertation on the ontological status of the transcendental unity of apperception in the Critique of Pure Reason. But it is only recently that I cracked The Conflict of the Faculties. This is a nice edition: German Fraktur on the left, good English translation on the right.

Nature's Jealousy and Modesty

During almost any solitary hike through the wild there comes a moment of enchantment when the beauty of nature stands forth as if enframed. But the qualifier ‘solitary’ is necessary. Bring along a companion and you bring along society – and drive away nature. She is both jealous and modest: she doesn’t like to share her charms, and she won’t expose them to the merely social animal with his endless yap, yap, yapping about noth, noth, nothing.

The Perversity of the Philosophy Professors

The philosophy professors treat philosophy as a means to an end when it is an end in itself. And they treat it as a means to something, whether money, social status, or whatever, which cannot be an end in itself but only a means to an end. They pursue philosophy for the sake of money when they ought to pursue money for the sake of philosophy. Doubly perverse, they turn an end into a means, and a means into an end. I like the Turkish word for human being, Insan, because it reminds me of ‘insane.’

You will tell me that there are exceptions. No doubt. But they prove the rule.

What It Takes to Appreciate Nature

Those who must wrest a living from nature by hard toil are not likely to see her beauty, let alone appreciate it. But her charms are also lost on the sedentary city-dwellers for whom nature is little more than backdrop and stage-setting for what they take to be the really real, the social tragi-comedy. The same goes for the windshield tourists who, seated in air-conditioned comfort, merely look upon nature as upon a pretty picture. The true acolyte of nature must combine in one person a robust and energetic physique, a contemplative mind, and a healthy measure of contempt for the world of the human-all-too-human. One thinks of Henry David Thoreau. Of the same type, but not on the same lofty plane: Edward Abbey.

Francesco Orilia on Facts and Bradley's Regress Part I

I was invited to attend a workshop on Bradley's Regress at the University of Geneva this December. Francesco Orilia will also be in attendance. He and I corresponded about Bradley and facts four or so years ago. He has read some of my work and I have read some of his. This series of posts is a new attempt at understanding his position and differentiating it from mine. It is based on his "States of Affairs: Bradley vs. Meinong" in Venanzio Raspa, ed., Meinongian Issues in Contemporary Italian Philosophy, Ontos Verlag, 2006, pp. 213-238.

1. The Problem in a First Rough Formulation

A fact or state of affairs (STOA) is a contingent unity of certain ontological constituents, for example, a (thin) particular and a universal. It is this unity that is responsible for a fact's being a truth-maker, as opposed to a mere collection of entities. Obviously, it is Al’s being fat, rather than the mere collection of Al and fatness, that makes true the proposition that Al is fat. We take as given the difference between a fact and its constituents, between a's being F, on the one hand, and the set or sum consisting of a and F-ness, on the other. The difference is clear if one notes that, for example, Al and fatness can exist without it being the case that Al is fat. (The converse of course does not hold.) There is more to Al's being fat than Al and fatness. The problem is to give an account of this 'more.' What is it that makes a fact more than its constituents?

Louis Lavelle on the Stoic Wisdom

I am a lover of the Stoics. Why waste time on New Age hucksters when one can read Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius? But while the Stoics can take us a good stretch down the road to wisdom, they cannot bring us to the end — a fact long appreciated by first-rate minds. In late antiquity, Aurelius Augustinus offered a critique of the Stoics in Book XIX, Chapter 4 of The City of God, a critique worthy of being called classical. We will have to examine that critique one of these days. But today I want to draw your attention to some passages from Chapter 10, Section 4 of Louis Lavelle's The Dilemma of Narcissus (Allen & Unwin, 1973, tr. Gairdner):