Maverick Philosopher

This Site Will Not Harm Your Computer!

Using the Google search engine this morning, I noticed that every search I did brought up sites flagged with the 'This site may harm your computer' warning.  I even Googled 'Google' and got the same result!  Could Google be flagging every site brought up by its engine?  That would be such an obvious piece of fear-mongering and traffic-reducing stupidity that I hesitate to impute it to them.  Any thoughts from the computer cognoscenti?

Despite my catchy title, it is your responsibility take precautions whenever you connect with anything in any way.  I am responsible for the content of this site, including in some measure the content of the comments, which is why I delete stupid and otherwise offensive comments and block those who send them.  But I take no responsibility for what goes on at the server end.

UPDATE: 9:30 AM.  Alexander Pruss informs me that the problem has been fixed.

UPDATE: 1:30 PM. Google explains the origin of the error.

From Possibilities to Possible Worlds

1. One cannot do modal logic, let alone modal metaphysics, without both modal concepts and  'modal intuitions.' One has to start from a pre-thematic understanding of modal concepts such as possibility and necessity and how they are interrelated and also from certain prior convictions about what counts as possible and  necessary. (The same is true in other disciplines such as ethics: if you don't grasp the distinctions and interconnections among the permissible, the impermissible, the obligatory, and the supererogatory, and have some reasonably firm intuitions about what particular actions and ommissions fall under these categories, then there is no point in doing ethics.)

Is the Existence of God Entailed by Alternative Ways Natural Things Might Have Been?

This post is a sequel to Ayn Rand on Necessity, Contingency, and Dispositions.  There we were examining this quotation:

What do you mean by "necessity"? By "necessity," we mean that things are a certain way and had to be.  I would maintain that the statement "Things are," when referring to non-man-made occurrences, is the synonym of "They had to be."  Because unless we start with the premise of an arbitrary God who creates nature, what is had to be. (IOE, 2nd ed., p. 299)

Rand's argument may be set forth as follows:

1. If there are alternative ways non-man-made things might have been, then an arbitrary (free) God exists.

2. It is not the case that an arbitrary (free) God exists. Ergo,

3. There are no alternative ways non-man-made things might have been.

I rigged the argument so that it is valid in point of logical form: the conclusion follows from the premises.  But are the premises true?  A more tractable question: Do we have good reason to accept them?

Notes on Van Inwagen on Modal Epistemology

Herewith, some interpretive notes and critical comments on Peter van Inwagen's paper, "Modal Epistemology" (Philosopical Studies 92 (1998), pp. 67-84; reprinted in van Inwagen, Ontology, Identity, and Modality, Cambridge UP, 2001, pp. 243-258.)

1. Van Inwagen describes his position as "modal scepticism" (245) but a better name for it would be 'mitigated modal scepticism' since he does admit that we have modal knowledge: "I think we do know a lot of modal propositions . . . ." (245)

2. In one sense it is trivially true that we have modal knowledge. Here is an example of my own. Suppose I see that the cat has escaped into the backyard. The cat's escape is an actual fact. But whatever is actual is possible: ab esse ad posse valet illatio. Therefore, knowing that the cat has escaped, I know that it is possible that the cat has escaped. So I have modal knowledge.

But this knowledge of the possible from the actual is uncontroversial, and of course there is no special problem about its epistemology. What is controversial is whether we have knowledge of unrealized possibilities, knowledge of possibilities that have not been, are not now, and perhaps never will be actual. And if we do have such knowledge, it will presumably be difficult to explain how we have such knowledge.

3. Van Inwagen has no doubt that we do have knowledge of some unrealized possibilities. "I know that it is possible that . . . the table that was in a certain position at noon have then been two feet to the left of where it in fact was." (246) Van Inwagen also cites the possibility of John F. Kennedy having died from natural causes. In both of these cases, we have knowledge about an unrealized possibility that will forever remain unrealized.

But there is also modal knowledge of the impossible and the necessary: "it is impossible for there to be liquid wine bottles, and . . . it is necessary that there be a valley between any two mountains that touch at their bases." (246)

4. So we have (nontrivial) modal knowledge. But how is this possible? I know that JFK might have died from natural causes. But how do I know this? The proposition JFK died of natural causes is known to be false. So how can I know that it is possibly true? It isn't true and never will be true. There seems to be nothing for my knowledge to grab onto.

We need to rub our noses in the problem a bit longer. I know that my table is now two inches from the wall. How do I know this? By sense perception aided perhaps with a tape measure. But I also know that my table might now have been three inches from the wall. (Observe that the last two occurrences of 'now' pick out the very same time.) Van Inwagen insists (251) that in cases like this we have genuine knowledge: "We certainly do know" things like this. (251)

I find it hard to disagree with van Inwagen on this score. I am blogging now. But surely I might have been swimming now. My swimming now is a part of a total way things might have been. Surely there is nothing intrinsically impossible about my swimming now. Surely it cannot be logically necessary that I be blogging now. Or am I exaggerating with these three uses of 'surely'? How can I be so  sure that what I am saying is possible is really possible and not just a reflection of my ignorance?

5. Unfortunately, van Inwagen supplies no answer to how we have modal knowledge. He finds it mysterious. (250) But of course, from the fact that we cannot explain how we have it, it does not follow that we do not have it. The following are logically consistent: I know that JFK might have died of natural causes and I do not know how I know this.

Still, if I cannot explain how I have modal knowledge, that casts some doubt on my possession of it. If I cannot explain how I have it, how can I be sure that I do have it?

6. Let me float a suggestion. Among my abilities is the ability to move furniture. Suppose I move my table, which is two inches from the wall, to a position three inches from the wall. Actually executing the action, I prove that this type of action is possible. Can I use this fact to understand the unrealized possibility of my table's being three inches from the wall at a time at which it is in fact two inches from the wall? What is wrong with this analysis: The unrealized possibility of the table's being in a different position from the one it is in is identical to the unexercised ability of an agent with sufficient power to move the table in question.

The idea is that some mere possibilities are unexercised abilities of agents. A merely possible state of affairs — the table's being three inches from the wall — is just my or someone's unexercised ability to move the table to that position.

I know that it is possible for the table to be three inches from the wall by knowing that I have the ability to move the table to that position. And I know I have that ability from my actually having moved pieces of furniture of similar size and shape.

Knowing a merely possible state of affairs, then, is knowing something actual, namely, an agent's actual, but unexercised, ability to bring about the state of affairs in question.

7.  Unfortunately, this suggestion seems to presuppose the very thing it is supposed to be accounting for, namely, unrealized possibilities.  My suggestion was that some unrealized possibilities are identifiable with unexercised abilities of agents.  An unexercised ability is an ability the agent could exercise but does not.  But an ability that could be exercised but is not is an unrealized possibility.  So it seems that one moves in a circle if one tries to reduce unrealized possibilities to the abilities of agents.  Perhaps we are forced to say that the concept of an unrealized possibility is a primitive or irreducible concept, one that cannot be illuminated in terms of anything more basic.

But then we seem left with an ontological  and an epistemological puzzle.  The ontological puzzle is that unrealized possibilities, though not nothing, are yet nothing actual.  How can something be without being actual?  The epistemological puzzle is to explain how one comes to know that there are unrealized possibilities in general and how one knows that a particular unrealized possibility is indeed an unrealized possibility.

Harry Binswanger Defends Rand

I thank Dr. Binswanger for commenting on the post, Modal Confusion in Rand/Peikoff.  His  stimulating comments deserve to be brought to the top of the page.  I have reproduced them verbatim below.  I have intercalated my responses  in blue.  The ComBox is open, but the usual rules apply: be civil, address what is actually said, argue your points, etc. 

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

As an actual Objectivist philosopher, let me attempt to address Bill's critique of Peikoff's article.

First, there's a significant typo in the first line of his reproduction of Peikoff's last paragraph. Peikoff did *not* write: "Truth is the identification of a fact WITH reality." (As someone pointed out, that is nonsensical.) The actual sentence is: "Truth is identification of a fact OF reality." (emphasis added by me)

(For the merely connotative difference between "fact" and "fact of reality," see _Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology_, p. 243).

BV: Guilty as charged. I apologize for the unintentional typographical error.

Now on to the main point. The Objectivist position is twofold:

Why God Cannot be the Creator of the Universe

Leonard Peikoff writes, "Is God the creator of the universe? There can be no creation of something out of nothing. There is no nothing."

Peikoff is arguing that God cannot be the creator of the universe because creation is creation of something out of nothing, and there is no nothing.  Is this a good argument or a bad argument?  Justify your answer.  Be clear and concise.

Rand Entry in the Philosophical Lexicon

Here we find:

rand, n. An angry tirade occasioned by mistaking philosophical disagreement for a personal attack and/or evidence of unspeakable moral corruption. "When I questioned his second premise, he flew into a rand." Also, to attack or stigmatise through a rand. "When I defended socialised medicine, I was randed as a communist."

Ayn Rand on Necessity, Contingency, and Dispositions

Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 2nd ed., p. 299, Rand speaking:

What do you mean by "necessity"? By "necessity," we mean that things are a certain way and had to be.  I would maintain that the statement "Things are," when referring to non-man-made occurrences, is the synonym of "They had to be."  Because unless we start with the premise of an arbitrary God who creates nature, what is had to be.  We have to drop any mystical premise and keep the full context in mind.  Then, aside from human action, what things are is what they had to be.

The alternative of what "had to be" versus "what didn't have to be" doesn't apply metaphysically.  It applies only to the realm of human action and human choice."

First of all, 'Things are' and 'Things had to be' cannot be synonyms since they obviously have different meanings as anyone who understands English knows.    But let's be charitable.  What Rand is trying to say is that every non-man-made occurrence is such that 'had to be' applies to it, and every man-made occurrence is such that 'did not have to be' applies to it.  Charitably construed, she is not making a false semantic point, but two modal points.  The first is that nothing non-man-made is contingent or, equivalently, that everything non-man-made is necessary.  The second modal point is that the man-made is contingent.  I will discuss only the first modal point.  It is not obvious and is denied by many philosophers both theists and atheists.  So it is legitimate to demand an argument for the thesis. 

Existence, God, and the Randians

This is a follow-up to yesterday's  Rand and Existence Again. The following is by Leonard Peikoff:

Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics . . . .

Existence exists, and only existence exists. Existence is a primary: it is uncreated, indestructible, eternal. So if you are to postulate something beyond existence—some supernatural realm—you must do it by openly denying reason, dispensing with definitions, proofs, arguments, and saying flatly, “To Hell with argument, I have faith.” That, of course, is a willful rejection of reason.

Objectivism advocates reason as man’s sole means of knowledge, and therefore, for the reasons I have already given, it is atheist. It denies any supernatural dimension presented as a contradiction of nature, of existence. This applies not only to God, but also to every variant of the supernatural ever advocated or to be advocated. In other words, we accept reality, and that’s all.

In this passage we meet once again our old friend 'Existence exists.'  And we note the sort of linguistic mischief that Rand/Peikoff engage in.   It cannot be denied that existing things exist, and only existing things exist.  This is entirely trivial.  Anyone who denies it embraces a contradiction:  There are existing things that do not exist. We should all agree, then, with the first sentence of the second paragraph. So far, so good. 

But then Peikoff tells us that to postulate something supernatural such as God is "to postulate something beyond existence."  Now it may well be that there is no God or anything beyond nature.  It may well be that everything that exists is a thing of nature.   But the nonexistence of God does not follow from the triviality that everything that exists exists.  Does it take a genius to see that the following argument is invalid?

1. Existence exists, ergo

2. God does not exist.

One cannot derive a substantive metaphysical conclusion from a mere tautology. No doubt, whatever exists exists.  But one cannot exclude God from the company of what exists by asserting that whatever exists exists.  Now it is not nice to call people stupid, but anyone who cannot appreciate the simple point I have just made is, I am afraid, either stupid, or not paying attention, or willfully obtuse. Here is an example of a valid argument:

3. Nothing supernatural exists

4. God is supernatural, ergo

5. God does not exist.

For Peikoff to get the result he wants, the nonexistence of God, from the premise 'Existence exists,' he must engage in the linguistic mischief of using 'existence' to mean 'natural existence.'  Instead of saying "only existence exists," he should have said 'only natural existence exists.' But then he would lose the self-evidence of "Existence exists and only existence exists."

Conflating a trivial self-evident thesis with a nontrivial controversial thesis has all the advantages of theft over honest toil as Russell said in a different connection.  It would take a certain amount of honest philosophical toil to construct a really good argument for the nonexistence of any and all supernatural entities.  But terminological mischief is easy.  What Peikoff is doing above is smuggling the nonexistence of the supernatural into the term 'existence'  Now if you cannot see that that is an intellectually dispreputable move, then I must say you are hopeless.

It is like a bad ontological argument in reverse.  On one bad version of the ontological argument, one defines God into existence by smuggling the notion of existence into the concept of God and then announcing that since we have the concept of God, God must exist.  Peikoff is doing the opposite: he defines God and the supernatural out of existence by importing their nonexistence into the term 'existence.'  But you can no more define God into existence than you can define him out of existence.

There are other egregious blunders in the above passage.  But if I were to expose every mistake of the Randians, I might attain the age of a Methuselah and still not be done.  Or perhaps I should liken it unto a Sisyphean labor, one of endless and futile toil.  Futile, because the Randians I have so far encountered seem quite unteachable.

 

 

Rand and Existence Again

One of my Rand posts has inspired some vigorous discussion at Triablogue.  My nominalist sparring partner 'Ocham' over at Beyond Necessity comments here on part of the Triablogue discussion:

Tennant points out the 'Existence exists' is incoherent - existence is commonly regarded as a second-order property. Not by everyone, I should point out, but certainly Frege's view that existence is a second-order predicate is accepted by nearly all those in mainstream analytic philosophy. Nor is Donohue's restatement, "whatever exists exists" in any way useful, because it is either merely tautological and doesn't tell us anything, or it is equally incoherent (for it dubiously assumes that existence is a first-order predicate).

Let me try to sort this out.  Neither Tennant nor 'Ocham' understand what Rand is saying.  Donohue may understand it, but he doesn't see what is wrong with it.

In All Fairness to Ayn Rand and the Randians . . .

. . . I should point out that there are professional philosophers who take Rand's work seriously.  See The Ayn Rand Society.  Some years ago I read something by Douglas Rasmussen, one of the members of the society, and I found it quite good. 

I suppose one could compare Rand with Nietzsche on the score of professional respectability.  There are philosophers who have utter contempt for Nietzsche and deny that he is a philosopher at all.   In the early '90s I had a conversation with the late Gregory Fitch, then chairman of the Arizona State University Philosophy Department.  I asked him if anyone in his department had an interest in Nietzsche.  He snorted that that no one there was interested in "that junk."   But not all analytic philosophers are narrow Fitch-style bigots.  There are other analytic philosophers who find Nietzsche's ideas worthy of study and reconstruction. 

Like Nietzsche, Rand is untrained in philosophy, rants and raves, argues in an abominably slovenly fashion when she argues at all, is supremely confident  of her own towering significance, is muddled and  idiosyncratic -- Existence exists! -- , expresses contempt for her opponents, all the while psychologizing them and making little attempt to understand their actual positions.  And like Nietzsche, she is immensely attractive to adolescents of all ages.  Still, there are ideas there worth discussing, if only to show how one can go wrong.  Same with Nietzsche: he goes wrong in very interesting ways.

Recall what got me started on this current Rand jag.  It was 'Ocham's' question whether Rand counts as a professional or an amateur.  I have been making a case that she and Peikoff are amateurs.  (This is consistent with their ideas being worth discussing.) But it is no surprise to me that amateurs fail to appreciate the merits of my case.  More to come.

Triablogue

A tip of the hat to Paul Manata of Triablogue for a clever link entitled A = A:  Rand = Hack Philosopher. One might pedantically raise a quibble over an identity sentence sporting a proper name on one side and a general term on the other.  But you catch the drift, which is similar to 'CNN = News.'  Other examples that might be fun to analyze: the loony Left's 'Bush = Hitler' and Chrysler's 'Drive = Love.'

Modal Confusion in Rand/Peikoff

Comments are on.  If you have something intelligent and civil to contribute, please do.  But I have zero tolerance for cyberpunks.  If you fail to address what I actually say, or thoughtlessly spout the Rand party line, or show the least bit of disrespect to me or my commenters, then I will delete your comment.

Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology includes an essay by Leonard Peikoff entitled "The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy."  The section "Necessity and Contingency" concludes with the following paragraph:

Truth is the identification of a fact with reality. Whether the fact in question is metaphysical or man-made, the fact determines the truth: if the fact exists, there is no alternative in regard to what is true. For instance, the fact that the U.S. has 50 states was not metaphysically necessary -- but as long as this is men's choice, the proposition that "The U.S. has 50 states" is necessarily true.  A true proposition must describe the facts as they are.  In this sense, a "necessary truth" is a redundancy, and a "contingent truth" a self-contradiction. (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 2nd ed., eds. Binswanger and Peikoff, NAL Books, 1990, p. 111, emphasis in original.) 

I have no objection to part of what is being said in this passage, in fact I heartily agree with it, namely, that facts determine truths.  The non-man-made fact of the moon's having craters makes-true the proposition expressed by 'The moon has craters.'  And similarly for the man-made fact regarding the 50 states cited by Peikoff.  So I cheerfully agree that "if the fact exists, there is no alternative in regard to what is true."  We can put the point as follows given that there is a fact F and a proposition p that records F:

Near-Death Experiences: Do They Prove Anything?

Richard Neuhaus, who recently died,  reports a near-death experience in his essay Born Toward Dying:

It was a couple of days after leaving intensive care, and it was night. I could hear patients in adjoining rooms moaning and mumbling and occasionally calling out; the surrounding medical machines were pumping and sucking and bleeping as usual. Then, all of a sudden, I was jerked into an utterly lucid state of awareness. I was sitting up in the bed staring intently into the darkness, although in fact I knew my body was lying flat. What I was staring at was a color like blue and purple, and vaguely in the form of hanging drapery. By the drapery were two “presences.” I saw them and yet did not see them, and I cannot explain that. But they were there, and I knew that I was not tied to the bed. I was able and prepared to get up and go somewhere. And then the presences—one or both of them, I do not know—spoke. This I heard clearly. Not in an ordinary way, for I cannot remember anything about the voice. But the message was beyond mistaking: “Everything is ready now.”

That was it. They waited for a while, maybe for a minute. Whether they were waiting for a response or just waiting to see whether I had received the message, I don’t know. “Everything is ready now.” It was not in the form of a command, nor was it an invitation to do anything. They were just letting me know. Then they were gone, and I was again flat on my back with my mind racing wildly. I had an iron resolve to determine right then and there what had happened. Had I been dreaming? In no way. I was then and was now as lucid and wide awake as I had ever been in my life.

Tell me that I was dreaming and you might as well tell me that I was dreaming that I wrote the sentence before this one. Testing my awareness, I pinched myself hard, and ran through the multiplication tables, and recalled the birth dates of my seven brothers and sisters, and my wits were vibrantly about me. The whole thing had lasted three or four minutes, maybe less. I resolved at that moment that I would never, never let anything dissuade me from the reality of what had happened. Knowing myself, I expected I would later be inclined to doubt it. It was an experience as real, as powerfully confirmed by the senses, as anything I have ever known. That was some seven years ago. Since then I have not had a moment in which I was seriously tempted to think it did not happen. It happened—as surely, as simply, as undeniably as it happened that I tied my shoelaces this morning. I could as well deny the one as deny the other, and were I to deny either I would surely be mad.

“Everything is ready now.” I would be thinking about that incessantly during the months of convalescence. My theological mind would immediately go to work on it. They were angels, of course. Angelos simply means “messenger.” There were no white robes or wings or anything of that sort. As I said, I did not see them in any ordinary sense. But there was a message; therefore there were messengers. Clearly, the message was that I could go somewhere with them. Not that I must go or should go, but simply that they were ready if I was. Go where? To God, or so it seemed. I understood that they were ready to get me ready to see God. It was obvious enough to me that I was not prepared, in my present physical and spiritual condition, for the beatific vision, for seeing God face to face. They were ready to get me ready. This comports with the doctrine of purgatory, that there is a process of purging and preparation to get us ready to meet God. I should say that their presence was entirely friendly. There was nothing sweet or cloying, and there was no urgency about it. It was as though they just wanted to let me know. The decision was mine as to when or whether I would take them up on the offer.

Jonathan Bennett's Argument Against Explanatory Rationalism

Explanatory rationalism is the view that there is a satisfactory answer to every why-question. Equivalently, it is the view that there are no brute facts, where a brute fact is a fact that neither has, nor can have, an explanation.  Are there some truths which simply must be accepted without explanation? Consider the conjunction of all truths.  Could this conjunctive truth have an explanation?  Jonathan Bennett thinks not:

Let P be the great proposition stating the whole contingent truth about the actual world, down to its finest detail, in respect of all times. Then the question 'Why is it the case that P?' cannot be answered in a satisfying way. Any purported answer must have the form 'P is the case because Q is the case'; but if Q is only contingently the case then it is a conjunct in P, and the offered explanation doesn't explain; and if Q is necessarily the case then the explanation, if it is cogent, implies that P is necessary also. But if P is necessary then the universe had to be exactly as it is, down to the tiniest detail -- i.e., this is the only possible world. (Jonathan Bennett, A Study of Spinoza's Ethics, Hackett 1984, p. 115)

Bennett's point is that explanatory rationalism entails the collapse of modal distinctions.

The world-proposition P is a conjunction of truths some of which are contingent. So P is contingent. Now if explanatory rationalism is true, then P has an explanation in terms of a Q distinct from P. Q is either necessary or contingent. If Q is necessary, and a proposition is explained by citing a distinct proposition that entails it, and Q explains P, then P is necessary, contrary to what we have already established. On the other hand, if Q is contingent, then Q is a conjunct of P, and again no successful explanation has been arrived at. Therefore, either explanatory rationalism is false, or it is true only on pain of a collapse of modal distinctions.

That is a cute little argument, one that impresses van Inwagen as well who gives his own version of it, but I must report that I do not find it compelling. Why is P true? We can say that P is true because each conjunct of P is true. We are not forced to say that P is true because of a proposition Q which is a conjunct of P.

I am not saying that P is true because P is true; I am saying that P is true because each conjunct of P is true, and that this adequately and noncircularly explains why P is true. Some wholes are adequately and noncircularly explained when their parts are explained. Suppose three bums are hanging around the corner of Fifth and Vermouth. Why is this theesome there? The explanations of why each is there add up (automatically) to an explanation of why the three of them are there. Someone who understands why A is there, why B is there, and why C is there, does not need to understand some further fact in order to understand why the three of them are there. Similarly, it suffices to explain the truth of a conjunction to adduce the truth of its conjuncts. The conjunction is true because each conjunct is true. There is no need for an explanation of why a conjunctive proposition is true which is above and beyond the explanations of why its conjuncts are true.

Suppose the three bums engage in a ménage à trois. To explain the ménage à trois it is not sufficient to explain why each person is present; one must also explain their 'congress': not every trio is a ménage à trois. A conjunction, however, exists automatically if its conjuncts exist.

Bennett falsely assumes that "Any purported answer must have the form 'P is the case because Q is the case'. . ." This ignores my suggestion that P is the case because each of its conjuncts is the case. So P does have an explanation; it is just that the explanation is not in terms of a proposition Q which is a conjunct of P.

I conclude that Professor Bennett has given us an insufficient reason to reject the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

I apply a similar critique to Peter van Inwagen's version of the argument in my "On An Insufficient Argument Against Sufficient Reason," Ratio, vol. 10, no. 1 (April 1997), pp. 76-81.

Is Ayn Rand a Good Philosopher? Rand on the Primacy of Existence

I thank our old friend Ockham for adding links to two of my Rand posts to the Wikipedia Ayn Rand entry. (See note 4.) I am about to repost a slightly emended version of the more technical of the two posts,  the one on existence.  This is from my first weblog and was originally posted May 28, 2004.  But first I refer you to Ockham's post Ayn Rand and Wikipedia in which he reports a disagreement at Wikipedia ". . . about whether the article about her should qualify her as a 'popular' or 'commercially successful' philosopher, or an 'amateur philosopher' (as Anthony Quinton did in his article on popular philosophy in the Oxford Companion to philosophy), or whether she is a philosopher without qualification."

Is Rand a philosopher?  Yes.  But she is not very good if among the criteria of goodness you include rigor of thought and objectivity of expression.  No reputable professional journal or press would publish her work.  So in one sense of the term she is not a professional, which makes her an amateur philosopher.  But then so is Nietzsche.  Both are well worth reading by amateurs and professionals alike.  Both are passionate partisans of interesting and challenging ideas.  If nothing else, they show pitfalls to avoid. If you seek respite from the buttoned-down prose of dessicated academicians, they provide it.

Since I am about to lay into Rand, let me begin with something nice about her.  In the 20th century, she brought more people to philosophy than Immanuel Kant, let alone John Rawls.  That can't be bad.  She came to our shores, mastered our difficult language, and made it her own way by her own efforts.  She understood the promise and greatness of America, and did it her way, celebrating the traditional American values of self-reliance and rugged individualism. She gave leftists hell.

So what's my beef?

The Post-Modern Protocols of War: Victor Davis Hanson on the Gaza Rules

Required reading from the pen of Victor Davis Hanson.  Since I cannot do better than him, I will simply provide excerpts of five key points he makes.  Be sure and read the whole piece.  Here are Hanson's Gaza rules in his words but with material omitted:

First is the now-familiar Middle East doctrine of proportionality. Legitimate military action is strangely defined by the relative strength of the combatants. World opinion more vehemently condemns Israel's countermeasures, apparently because its rockets are far more accurate and deadly than previous Hamas barrages that are poorly targeted and thus not so lethal.

Second, intent in this war no longer matters. Every Hamas unguided rocket is launched in hopes of hitting an Israeli home and killing men, women and children. Every guided Israeli air-launched missile is targeted at Hamas operatives, who deliberately work in the closest vicinity to women and children.

Third, culpability is irrelevant. The "truce" between Israel and Hamas was broken once Hamas got its hands on new stockpiles of longer-range mobile rockets — weapons that are intended to go over Israel's border walls.

Yet, according to the Gaza rules, both sides always deserve equal blame. Indeed, this weird war mimics the politically correct, zero-tolerance policies of our public schools, where both the bully and his victim are suspended once physical violence occurs.

Fourth, with instantaneous streaming video from the impact sites in Gaza, context becomes meaningless. Our attention is glued to the violence of the last hour, not that of the last month that incited the war.

Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 to great expectations that the Palestinians there would combine their new autonomy, some existing infrastructure left behind by the Israelis, Middle East oil money and American pressure for free and open elections to craft a peaceful, prosperous democracy.

Fifth and finally, victimization is crucial. Hamas daily sends barrages into Israel, as its hooded thugs thump their chests and brag of their radical Islamic militancy. But when the payback comes, suddenly warriors are transmogrified into weeping victims, posing teary-eyed for the news camera as they deplore "genocide" and "the Palestinian Holocaust." At least the Japanese militarists did not cry out to the League of Nations for help once mean Marines landed on Iwo Jima.

Companion posts:  Weakness Does Not Justify, Hezbollah Disproportionality 

Hezbollah Disproportionality

I wrote the following in the summer of 2006 in response to the Left's asinine and morally obtuse bandying-about of such phrases as 'disproportionality' and 'asymmetry of power,' but it is relevant to current events.  Substitute 'Hamas' for 'Hezbollah' and make minor factual adjustments as necessary. Of course, I don't mean to suggest that Hezbollah plays no role in the current aggression against Israel. See here.

1. Hezbollah hides their fighters and their installations among the civilian population using them in effect as human shields. Israel does not do this.

2. Hezbollah attacks indiscriminately and without warning, lobbing rockets into population centers with the aim of killing as many civilians as possible. Israel does not do this. Instead, it gives advance warning and aims to target only combatants and their materiel.

3. Hezbollah's avowed aim is the destruction of the State of Israel. It is not Israel's aim to eliminate any state.

4. Hezbollah uses suicide/homicide bombers. Israel does not.

5. Hezbollah is a proxy of Iran whose president since June 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel. Israel, by contrast, though supplied by the USA, is not a proxy of the USA: the USA is not attacking Lebanon or any other country via Israel. There is a clear difference here. The USA arms Israel so that it can defend itself, not so that it can attack other countries; Iran arms Hezbollah so that it can attack Israel with the aim of wiping it off the face of the earth.

A curious fact about Ahmadinejad is that, while he prepares a holocaust for Israelis, he denies the Holocaust.

6. Hezbollah loads its warheads with ball bearings so as to cause maximum damage to human beings. Israel does not.

7. Hezbollah and Islamic terrorists generally hate life and seek death. Israelis and Jews generally love life and seek to avoid death, their own, and other people's. The following from a TNR article says it all:

As Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, once said: "We have discovered how to hit the Jews where they are the most vulnerable. The Jews love life, so that is what we shall take away from them. We are going to win because they love life and we love death."

On Forever Putting One's Tool Kit in Order

I had friends in graduate school who belonged to the class of those we jokingly referred to as graduate student emeriti. They were the perpetual students who were "not hung up on completion," to borrow a memorable line from William Hurt's character Nick in The Big Chill (1983). Free of the discipline of undergraduate school, they took incompletes in their courses and then spent years completing them. Some never completed them. Others finished their course work and actually wrote dissertations and won the degree -- some fifteen years after they started. They supported themselves with adjunct teaching and odd jobs, loans and parental hand-outs.

 

One fellow in particular sticks in my mind. I’ll call him Mel. Mel never finished and dropped out of sight. With Mel, the problem was three-fold: unrealistically high standards, performance anxiety, and an obsession with the board game Go. His performance anxiety manifested itself mainly as an obsessive fixation on getting his tool box in order. What I mean is that he felt he could not get down to the business of writing any good philosophy until all his tools were in place. So he had to have a complete library stocked with all the classics, in the original languages. He once unloaded a copy of Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony on me on the ground that it was in English, when he wanted to read everything in its original language. Many an hour did he spend on foreign languages. But to do philosophy, one has to be able to think correctly, so logic was also on his agenda. Time was spent acquiring an impressive logic library, and somewhat less time on actually reading his acquisitions.

The physical act of writing required, Mel thought, the very best of tools. Since those were the days before word processing, he had to have the very latest IBM Selectric electric typewriter, the model with an erase key! That erase key was a big deal in those days. Luckily, Mel’s father worked for IBM which fact translated into a substantial discount. Mel once showed me his typewriter’s different ‘balls’: different ones for different character sets. Of course, he had one for Greek since he planned to write on Aristotle.

But no office is complete without all the peripherals: wastebasket, organizers stocked with various sizes of paper clips, etc., staplers of different sizes, staple extractors, paper, pencils, pencil sharpeners electric and manual, pens ballpoint and fountain in different colors, magic markers, erasers, all accomplices of his evasion of beginning the dissertation.  A psychologist might refer to this as evasion of an anxiety-producing task by displacement activity.  I suppose we all displace, but some of us are much better at it than others.

Somewhere Schopenhauer quips, "Forever reading, never read." Apropos of Mel, I would say: Forever preparing to write, never read.

Knowledge, Certainty, and Exaggeration

As I explained the other day, I am inclined to accept Butchvarov's view of knowledge as the impossibility of error. If I know that p, then it is not enough that I have a justified true belief that p; I must have a true belief whose justification rules out the possibility of error. Anything short of this is just not knowledge. But then what are we to say about the knowledge claims that people routinely make, claims that that don't come near satisfying this exacting requirement? We won't say that they are mere beliefs, for many of them will be rationally held beliefs. For example, an air traveler who claims to know that he will be in New York tomorrow has a rational belief that will in all probability turn out to be true; but by Butchvarov's lights, a true belief for which one has reasons does not amount to knowledge unless the reasons entail the belief's truth. Since the air traveler's reasons for believing he will be in New York tomorrow do not entail his being there tomorrow, his belief, though rational, is not a case of knowledge. How then do we explain his use of the word 'know'? Should we say that there is a weak sense of 'know' as rational true belief short of certainty?

One idea, also from Butchvarov (The Concept of Knowledge, pp. 54-61), is that the various loose claims of knowledge can be understood as cases of exaggeration. But I'll try to develop this idea in my own way.

Transitive Sets and the Distinctness of Sets From Their Members

Vlastimil asked for examples of transitive sets.  A transitive set is a set every element of which is a subset of it.  (Hrbacek and Jech, Introduction to Set Theory, p. 50) There is no lack of examples.  The null set vacuously satisfies the condition 'if x is an element of S, then x is a subset of S.'  The set consisting of the null set -- {{ }} -- is also transitive:  it has exactly one element, the null set, and that element is a subset of it because the null set is a subset of every set.

Now consider the set consisting of the foregoing two sets, the null set and the set consisting of the null set:  {{ }, {{ }}}.  This set has two elements and both are subsets of it.  The null set is a subset of every set, and the set consisting of the null set is also a subset of it in virtue of the fact that the null set is an element of it.

If we identify 0 with the null set, and 1 with the set consisting of the null set, and 2 with the set consisting of the null set and the set consisting of the null set, then 3 will be the set whose elements are the elements of 0, 1, and 2 which is:  {{ }, {{ }}, {{ }, {{ }}}}.  This last set has three elements and each is a subset of it.  One can continue like this and generate as many transitive sets as one likes.  For each natural number there is a corresponding transitive set.

Now how does all this bear upon my assertion that a (mathematical) set is an entity 'over and above' its members (elements)?  That sets are treated in set theory as single items 'over and above' their members can be seen from the fact that some sets have sets as members without having their members as members.   The power set of {Socrates, Plato} has {Socrates} and {Plato} as members, but it does not have Socrates and Plato as members. Therefore, {Socrates} is distinct from Socrates, and {Plato} from Plato.  For if these singletons were identical to their members, then the power set would have Socrates and Plato as members.

Vlastimil seems to think that the existence of transitive sets is somehow at odds with the claim that sets are distinct from their members.  Or perhaps he thinks that some sets are distinct from their members and some are not.  So consider {{ }, {{ }}}.  This is a transitive set since every member of it is a subset of it, which is equivalent to saying that every member of a member of it is a member of it.  Thus { } is a member of {{ }}, which is a member of {{ }, {{ }}}.  But although every member of the set in question is a subset of it, this does not alter the fact that the set is distinct from its members.

So I'm not sure what Vlastimil is driving at.

Note that if every member of a set is a subset of it, this is not to say that every subset of it is a member of it.  {{ }, {{ }}} has itself and {{{ }}} as subsets but not as elements.  Only if there were a set all of whose members are subsets of it and all of whose subsets are members of it could one argue that there are sets for which the membership and subset relations collapse, and with it the distinction between a set and its members.

Butchvarov: Knowledge as Requiring Certainty

We begin with an example from Panayot Butchvarov's The Concept of Knowledge, Northwestern University Press, 1970, p. 47. [CK is the red volume on the topmost visible shelf.  Immediately to its right is Butch's Being Qua Being.  Is Butch showing without saying that epistemology is prior to metaphysics?] There is a bag containing 99 white marbles and one black marble. I put my hand in the bag and without looking select a marble. Of course, I believe sight unseen that the marble I have selected is white. Suppose it is. Then I have a justified true belief that a white marble has been selected. My belief is justified because of the fact that only one of the 100 marbles is black.  My belief is true because I happened to pick a white marble.  But surely I don't know that I have selected a white marble.  The justification, though very good, is not good enough for knowledge. I have justified true belief but not knowledge.

Knowledge, says Butchvarov, entails the impossibility of mistake. This seems right. The mere fact that people will use the word 'know' in a case like the one described cuts no ice.  Ordinary usage proves nothing.  People say the damndest things.  They are exaggerating, as a subsequent post may show.  'Know' can be used in non-epistemic ways -- think of carnal knowledge for example -- but used epistemically it can be used correctly in only one way: to mean absolute impossibility of mistake.  Or as least that is Butchvarov's view, a view I find attractive.

Would Schopenhauer Allow Comments?

If Schopenhauer were a blogger, would he allow comments on his weblog, The Scowl of Minerva?

I say no, and adduce as evidence the following passage that concludes his Art of Controversy, a delightful essay found in his Nachlass, but left untitled by the master:

As a sharpening of wits, controversy is often, indeed, of mutual advantage, in order to correct one's thoughts and awaken new views. But in learning and in mental power both disputants must be tolerably equal: If one of them lacks learning, he will fail to understand the other, as he is not on the same level with his antagonist. If he lacks mental power, he will be embittered, and led into dishonest tricks, and end by being rude.

The only safe rule, therefore, is that which Aristotle mentions in the last chapter of his Topica: not to dispute with the first person you meet, but only with those of your acquaintance of whom you know that they possess sufficient intelligence and self-respect not to advance absurdities; to appeal to reason and not to authority, and to listen to reason and yield to it; and, finally, to cherish truth, to be willing to accept reason even from an opponent, and to be just enough to bear being proved to be in the wrong, should truth lie with him. From this it follows that scarcely one man in a hundred is worth your disputing with him. You may let the remainder say what they please, for every one is at liberty to be a fool - desipere est jus gentium. Remember what Voltaire says: La paix vaut encore mieux que la verite. Remember also an Arabian proverb which tells us that on the tree of silence there hangs its fruit, which is peace.

Here is the same passage in the German original:

Das Disputieren ist als Reibung der Köpfe allerdings oft von gegenseitigem Nutzen, zur Berichtigung der eignen Gedanken und auch zur Erzeugung neuer Ansichten. Allein beide Disputanten müssen an Gelehrsamkeit und an Geist ziemlich gleichstehn. Fehlt es Einem an der ersten, so versteht er nicht Alles, ist nicht au niveau. Fehlt es ihm am zweiten, so wird die dadurch herbeigeführte Erbitterung ihn zu Unredlichkeiten und Kniffen [oder] zu Grobheit verleiten.

Die einzig sichere Gegenregel ist daher die, welche schon Aristoteles im letzten Kapitel der Topica gibt: Nicht mit dem Ersten dem Besten zu disputieren; sondern allein mit solchen, die man kennt, und von denen man weiß, daß sie Verstand genug haben, nicht gar zu Absurdes vorzubringen und dadurch beschämt werden zu müssen; und um mit Gründen zu disputieren und nicht mit Machtsprüchen, und um auf Gründe zu hören und darauf einzugehn; und endlich, daß sie die Wahrheit schätzen, gute Gründe gern hören, auch aus dem Munde des Gegners, und Billigkeit genug haben, um es ertragen zu können, Unrecht zu behalten, wenn die Wahrheit auf der andern Seite liegt. Daraus folgt, daß unter Hundert kaum Einer ist, der wert ist, daß man mit ihm disputiert. Die Übrigen lasse man reden, was sie wollen, denn desipere est juris gentium, und man bedenke, was Voltaire sagt: La paix vaut encore mieux que la vérité; und ein arabischer Spruch ist: »Am Baume des Schweigens hängt seine Frucht der Friede.«

Why Not Stick to Pure Philosophy?

I ask myself this question.

Why not stick to one's stoa and cultivate one's specialist garden in peace and quiet, neither involving oneself in, nor forming opinions about, the wider world of politics and strife? Why risk one's ataraxia in the noxious arena of contention? Why not remain within the serene precincts of theoria? For those of us of a certain age the chances are good that death will arrive before the barbarians do.

Those in the arena may be admired for their courage, but doubts arise as to their wisdom.

So why bother one's head with the issues of the day? We will collapse before the culture that sustains us does. The answer is that the gardens of tranquillity and the spaces of reason are worth defending, with blood and iron if need be, against the barbarians and their leftist enablers. Others have fought and bled so that we can live this life of solitude and beatitude. And so though we are not warriors of the body, we can and should do our tiny bit as warriors of the mind to preserve for future generations this culture which allows us to pursue otium liberale in peace, quiet, and safety.

An Advantage of Ignorance

Of those I do not know well, I can think well.  And I should.

Weakness Does Not Justify

Might does not make right, but neither does impotence or relative weakness. That weakness does not justify strikes me as an important principle, but I have never seen it articulated. The power I have to kill you does not morally justify my killing you. In a slogan: Ability does not imply permissibility.  My ability to kill, rape, pillage & plunder does not confer moral justification on my doing these things.  But if you attack me with deadly force of magnitude M and I reply with deadly force of magnitude 10 x M, your relative weakness does not supply one iota of moral justification for your attack, nor does it subtract one iota of moral justification from my defensive response.  If I am justified in using deadly force against you as aggressor, then the fact that my deadly force is greater than yours does not (a) diminish my justification in employing deadly force, nor does it (b) confer any justification on your aggression.

Suppose a knife-wielding thug commits a home invasion and attacks a man and his family. The man grabs a semi-automatic pistol and manages to plant several rounds in the assailant, killing him. It would surely be absurd to argue that the disparity in lethality of the weapons involved diminishes the right of the pater familias to defend himself and his family.

The principle that weakness does not justify can be applied to the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict from the summer of 2006 as well as to the current Israeli defensive operations against the terrorist entity, Hamas.  The principle ought to be borne in mind when one hears leftists, those knee-jerk supporters of any and every 'underdog,' start spouting off about 'asymmetry of power' and 'disproportionality.'

Which Is More Certain: God or My Hand?

A reader inquires, " I'm curious, if someone asked you what you were more certain of, your hand or belief in the existence of God, how would you respond?"

The first thing a philosopher does when asked a question is examine the question.  (Would that ordinary folk, including TV pundits, would do likewise before launching into gaseous answers to ill-formed questions.)  Now what exactly am I being asked?  The question seems ambiguous as between:

Q1. Are you more certain of the existence of your hand or of the existence of God?

Q2. Are you more certain of the existence of your hand or of your belief in the existence of God? 

Rod Serling Rules: Twilight Time Again

The semi-annual Twilight Zone marathon is under way at the Sci Fi channel and will continue through New Year's Day and into the wee hours of January 2nd. Here is your chance to view some of the episodes you may have missed.  The best of them are phenomenally good and bristling with philosophical content. I have just given you my analysis of "The Lonely" which aired in November, 1959.  I just now viewed the The Dummy for the nth time, and I note that the ascriptivist theory of personhood I mentioned in my analysis of "The Lonely" also figures in "The Dummy."

The original series ran from 1959 to 1964. In those days it was not uncommon to hear TV condemned as a vast wasteland. Rod Serling's work was a sterling counterexample.

The hard-driving Serling lived a short but intense life. Born in 1924, he was dead at age 50 in 1975. His four pack a day cigarette habit destroyed his heart. Imagine smoking 80 Lucky Strikes a day! Assuming 16 hours of smoking time per day, that averages to one cigarette every twelve minutes.  He died on the operating table during an attempted bypass procedure.

But who is to say that a long, healthy life is better than a short, intense one fueled by the stimulants one enjoys? That is a question for the individual, not Hillary, to decide.

Philosophy From the Twilight Zone: "The Lonely"

Rod Serling's Twilight Zone was an outstanding TV series that ran from 1959-1964. The episode "The Lonely" aired in November, 1959. I have seen it several times, thanks to the semi-annual Sci Fi channel TZ marathons. There is one in progress as I write.  One can extract quite a bit of philosophical juice from "The Lonely" as from most of the other TZ episodes. I'll begin with a synopsis.

 

 

Synopsis.James A. Corry is serving a 50 year term of solitary confinement on an asteroid nine million miles from earth. Supplies are flown in every three months. Captain Allenby, unlike the other two of the supply ship's crew members, feels pity for Corry, and on one of his supply runs brings him a female robot named 'Alicia' to alleviate his terrible loneliness. The robot is to all outer appearances a human female. At first, Corry rejects her as a mere robot, a machine, and thus "a lie." He feels he is being mocked. "Why didn't they build you to look like a machine?" But gradually Corry comes to ascribe personhood to Alicia. His loneliness vanishes. They play chess with a set he has constructed out of nuts and bolts. She takes delight in a Knight move, and Corry shares her delight. They beam at each other.

But then one day the supply ship returns with news that Corry's sentence has been commuted as part of a general abolition of punishment by banishment to asteroids. Allenby informs Corry that there is room on the ship only for him and 15 lbs of his personal effects. Alicia must be left behind. Corry is deeply distressed. "I'm not lonely any more. She's a woman!" Allenby replies, "She's a robot!" Finally, after some arguing back and forth, Allenby draws his sidearm and shoots Alicia in the face revealing her electronic innards. Corry's illusion of Alicia's personhood — if it is an illusion — dissipates and regretfully he boards the ship. The thirty minute episode ends with Serling's powerful closing narration:

On a microscopic piece of sand that floats through space is a fragment of a man's life. Left to rust is the place he lived in and the machines he used. Without use, they will disintegrate from the wind and the sand and the years that act upon them; all of Mr. Corry's machines — including the one made in his image, kept alive by love, but now obsolete — in the Twilight Zone.

Philosophical Analysis. The episode raises a number of philosophical questions.  Here are some of them.

The End of Moderation

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (Pantheon, 1950, tr. Dru), p. 29:

Many a man thinks to satisfy the great virtue of moderation by using all his shrewdness and bringing all his experience to bear upon limiting his pleasure to his capacity for pleasure. But simply by the fact of setting enjoyment as the end, he has radically violated the virtue.

A penetrating observation.  What is the end or goal of moderation? Haecker is rejecting the notion that the purpose of moderation, conceived as a virtue, is to maximize the intensity and duration of pleasure. Of course, moderation can be used for that end -- but then it ceases to be a virtue. For example, if I am immoderate in my use of alcohol and drugs, I will destroy my body, and with it my capacity for pleasure. So I must limit my pleasure to my capacity for pleasure. And the same holds for immoderation in eating and sexual indulgence. The sex monkey can kill you if you let him run loose. And even if one's immoderation does not lead to an early death, it can eventuate in a jadedness at odds with enjoyment. So moderation can be recommended merely on hedonistic grounds. The true hedonist must of necessity be a man of moderation. If so, then the ill-starred John Belushi, who took the 'speedball' (heroin + cocaine) express to Kingdom Come, did not even succeed at being a very good hedonist.

But if enjoyment is the end of moderation, then moderation as a virtue is at an end. Haecker, however, does not tell us what the end of moderation as a virtue is. He would presumably not disagree with the claim that the goal of moderation as a virtue is a freedom from pleasure and pain that allows one to pursue higher goods. He who is enslaved to his lusts his simply not free to pursue a truer and higher life.

For the New Year: Looking Away Shall Be My Only Negation

One of the elements in my personal liturgy is a reading of the following passage every January 1st. I must have begun the practice in the mid-70s. My copy of The Gay Science was purchased in Boston and is dated 15 September 1974. (You mean to tell me that when you buy books, you do not note where you bought them, and when, and in whose presence?)

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book Four, #276, tr. Kaufmann:

For the new year. -- I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought: hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year -- what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn to see more and more as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all and all and on the whole: someday I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

(Amor fati: love of fate.)