Maverick Philosopher

Zombie Girl: But She's Not There!

This Halloween Saturday Night at the Oldies features The Zombies,  a 1960's British Invasion rock group that had a couple of smash singles before vanishing into the oblivion whence they sprang. Out and about the other day, surfing the FM band, I came across one of their hits, She's Not There. I have heard it countless times, and it is probably playing in your head right now, dear reader. (I apologize for the meme infestation.)

Suddenly, after all these years, the song assumed New Meaning, Deep Meaning. The Zombies were singing about a philosophical zombie! The refrain, "But she's not there" referred to the light (of consciousness) being out in the poor lass.

A Heideggerian can gloss the situation as follows. To be there is to be a case of Dasein, Da-Sein. The girl was vorhanden all right, and perhaps even zuhanden (as a tool for sexual gratification), aber sie war nicht da, nicht ein Fall vom Dasein. She was a Black Forest zombie.  There was no 'there'  there.

Fake Halloween Tombstones and the Brevity of Life

A neighbor's fake halloween tombstone bore the inscription:

Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
Life is short
So party we must.

But why not:

Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
Life is short
So work out your salvation with diligence!

John Gay's Epitaph

Life is a jest; and all things show it.
I thought so once; but now I know it.

John Gay (1685-1732), "My Own Epitaph" from The Oxford Book of Death, ed. D. J. Enright, 1983, p. 322.

Exercise for the reader: Explain the connection between John Gay and Bobby Darin.  Answer below the fold.

Zombies on the Web

An outstanding page put together by David Chalmers to satisfy all your zombic needs. Learn about philosophical zombies, Hollywood zombies, Haitian zombies, functional zombies and much else besides.

Hartshorne and Immortality Subjective and Objective

The following is excerpted from a letter from an uncommonly astute correspondent, Brodie Bortignon:

. . . some time ago I read a series of your posts on immortality. You covered what are the orthodox views on immortality, including the various materialist denials. What you didn't address was one of the views of some process theologians, one that has a claim to being the 'orthodox' process view. Immortality, for them, is the eternal, unblemished remembrance of the individual in the divine mind: 'objective immortality'. This, they say, is all the immortality worth wanting. In the words of Hartshorne, to desire 'a career after death' is, in a sense, blasphemous: it is the vaunted wish to attain the everlasting existence distinctive of God, and only God. In Dombrowski's words, 'To think that we should live forever in subjective immortality is hubris. What makes God distinctive is necessary existence and other perfections' (Rethinking the Ontological Argument, p.134).

For my own part, this is deeply inadequate. Take the example of a child who was born into an abusive family; she was beaten, sexually assaulted, emotionally abused. She finally dies from neglect. That God will eternally remember her abuse, or that he will somehow 'redeem the memories' he has of her life, seems wholly inadequate--perhaps not to God, but certainly to the girl. Such a view of immortality would then, to my mind, reflect negatively on the love and justice of God, which process theologians of this stripe do not wish to deny. 'God will remember your horrible life' is hardly recompense for that horrible life; there is no redemption there, or justice.

What is supposed to be the philosophical basis for this 'divine memory' view of immortality seems to me obviously unsound. It is based, I think, on a false equivocation between everlastingness and immortality. When people, such as you, speak of personal immortality, they are not speaking of everlastingness in the sense of being wholly uncreated, that is, of having existed at all times necessarily (I assume most people don't believe in the pre-existence of individual souls). There was a time when I came into existence; if human immortality is true, there will never be a time when I go out of existence. But this sort of immortality isn't the same as divine everlastingness. To put it differently, all everlasting persons are immortal, but not all immortal persons are everlasting. This conflation of two clearly distinct types of immortality--created and uncreated--renders the charge of 'hubris' against believers in an unending afterlife philosophically unjustified. Or so it seems to me.

There is one more objection leveled against the believer in subjective immortality by the orthodox process theologian: the claim that such a belief leads to an immoral and socially dangerous renunciation of material existence. But this objection is not unique to process theology, so I won't go into it. Needless to say I don't find it very convincing.

Do you have any opinion on the 'objective immortality' view of process theology?

If I understand it, then, the 'orthodox process view' of Charles Hartshorne and some of his students is that (i) we are objectively immortal in that our lives, in every last detail, continue to exist as objects of divine memory, and that (ii) subjective immortality -- immortality as a continuing subject of experience -- is neither available to us in the nature of things nor worth wanting.  My reaction to this is that it is a rather sorry substitute for the Genuine Article.

Why Are We Bothered by our Temporal but not our Spatial Limitations?

Our lives have definite limits both in space and in time. At any given time, my body occupies a vanishingly small portion of space, and if one were to plot my path over time, the resulting space-time ‘trajectory’ would pass through an exceedingly small number of spatiotemporal positions. And yet my spatial limitations do not bother me. What bothers me is that my life is approaching a temporal limit. Setting aside questions of a possible survival of bodily death, this temporal limit looms as a sort of calamity, unlike my spatial limits which I accept with equanimity. It bothers me that my life will not extend much beyond three score and ten, but it bothers me not at all that my height does not extend beyond 6' 1". I suspect that this difference in attitude, the difference between dread at coming to an end in time, and equanimity at coming to an end in space, is shared by most of us. If the difference in attitude is justified, it would seem to point to a fundamental difference between spatial and temporal limits, and thus between space and time.

To put it more sharply: A justifiable difference in attitude (dread vs. equanimity) seems to entail a fundamental difference between space and time. Contrapositively, the lack of a fundamental difference seems to entail that the difference in attitude is not justifiable.

Is Religion Dangerous? Is Philosophy?

Is Religion Dangerous? is the title of a very good book by Keith Ward (Lion Hudson, 2006).  It is a good answer to the Dawkins-Hitchens junk-critique of religion as dangerous.  I've got the book on loan from the local university library, but some fellow had the chutzpah to issue a recall.  So I must return the book today, and cannot say anything further about it until I get it back again.

Consider the parallel question, Is philosophy dangerous? 

The question makes little sense seeing as how there is no such thing as philosophy as doctrinal system.  There are only philosophies, many of them, in conflict with one another.  At most one could say that there is philosophy as a type of inquiry.  (But the minute we ask what type of inquiry, by what method or methods, we will find ourselves confronted with a host of competing metaphilosophical  answers.  The nature of philosophy is itself a philosophical question, and metaphilosophy, despite the meta, is a branch of philosophy.)

One cannot therefore sensibly ask whether philosophy is dangerous.  There is no such doctrinal system as philosophy.  One can, however, sensibly ask whether, say, Kant's philosophy is dangerous.  The same goes for religion.  It makes little or no sense to ask whether religion is dangerous.  For there is no such thing as religion as a system of doctrines and practices.  One can however ask, with a show of sense, whether Islam is dangerous.  But even here one must be careful.  No doubt certain sects of Islam are dangerous as hell, but would you say the same about Sufism, Islam's mystical branch?  The Whirling Dervishes of Konya seem not to be much of a threat to anyone.

Why Must the Left be Totalitarian?

A reader inquires,

I was wondering if you could expand on a statement you made in Political Correctness and Gender Neutral Language . . . .  The statement is as follows: "The Left is totalitarian by its very nature and so it cannot leave any sphere of human concern unpoliticized."  I wholeheartedly agree with your statement, but I was wondering if you would explain why the Left must be totalitarian.  All I know right now is that it is, and has been from at least the days of Woodrow Wilson and especially FDR.  

A huge and daunting topic, but I'll hazard a little sketch.

My statement telescopes two subclaims and an inference.  The first subclaim is that the Left is totalitarian, while the second is that it totalitarian by its very nature (as opposed to accidentally).  From these two subclaims the conclusion is drawn that the Left cannot (as opposed to does not) leave any sphere of human concern unpoliticized.

Free Speech and the Fairness Doctrine

(Written 29 July 2007)

Philip Terzian gets it right in his piece Radio Free America:

Revival of the Fairness Doctrine is not intended to facilitate "both sides of the story" but to shut down conservative talk radio. Why? Because efforts to invent a successful left-wing Limbaugh have consistently failed, and what Jim Hightower, Mario Cuomo, and Al Franken's Air America cannot manage on the air might be accomplished by congressional action. This has been a forlorn cause of the left since the Fairness Doctrine was repealed 20 years ago; but now that Democrats control Congress, new life has been breathed into the effort. A Democratic president could appoint enough compliant commissioners to the FCC to accomplish the mission. Or Congress could act.

The threat is not idle. Left-wing activists are not especially enamored of free speech--especially when the open marketplace of ideas puts them at a political disadvantage. [. . .]

Oakeshott on the Conservative Temperament

Before one is a conservative or a liberal ideologically, one is a conservative or a liberal temperamentally, or by disposition. Or at least this is a thesis with which I am seriously toying, to put it oxymoronically. The idea is that temperament is a major if not the main determinant of political commitments. First comes the disposition, then comes the theoretical articulation, the arguments, and the examination and refutation of the arguments of adversaries. Conservatism and liberalism are bred in the bone before they are born in the brain.

If this is so, it helps explain the bitter and intractable nature of political disagreement, the hatreds that politics excites, the visceral oppositions thinly veiled under a mask of mock civility, the mutual repugnance that goes so deep as to be unlikely to be ascribable to mere differences in thinking. For how does one argue against another's temperament or disposition or sensibility? I can't argue you out of an innate disposition, any more than I can argue you out of being yourself; and if your theoretical framework is little more than a reflection at the level of ideas of an ineradicable temperamental bias, then my arguments cannot be expected to have much influence. A certain skepticism about the role and reach of reason in human affairs may well be the Oakeshottian upshot.

But rather than pursue the question whether temperament is a major if not the main determinant of political commitments, let us address, with the help of Michael Oakeshott, the logically preliminary question of what it is to be conservatively disposed. Here are some passages from his On Being Conservative (from Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, Basic Books, 1962, pp. 168-196, bolding added):

October in the Railroad Earth

Jack Kerouac reads from "The Railroad Earth," a chapter of Lonesome Traveler.  I bought my copy on 12 April 1973 on Bourbon Street, in New Orleans.   I had been accepted at East Coast graduate schools and was traveling east from California to check them out, a copy of On the Road in my rucksack.

Political Correctness and Gender Neutral Language

I am writing a review of J. P. Moreland's The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism (SCM Press, 2009).  It is a very good book, and J. P. Moreland is one of my favorite philosophers.  I don't know the man personally, but I rather doubt that he is politically liberal.  And yet throughout his book one find sentences like the following: "If a naturalist is going to admit into his/her ontology an entity whose existence cannot be explained naturalistically, then he or she must adopt a dismissive strategy that in some way or other shows why it is no big deal that we do not have such an explanation." (p. 169)

Why the political correctness as indicated by "his/her" and "he or she"?  The PC jargon might have been foisted upon him by an editor, but if so, Moreland could have removed it.  For Ed Feser's adventures with a PC copy editor, see here.

The Woman's Body Argument

The following is an abortion argument one often hears.  It is sometimes called  the Woman's Body Argument.  I will argue that it is not rationally compelling.

1. The fetus is a part of a woman's body.
2. A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with any part of her body.
Therefore
3. A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with the fetus, including having it killed.

Fetal Rights and the Death Penalty: Consistent or Inconsistent?

Is it consistent to support both fetal rights and the moral acceptability of capital punishment? That depends on what is meant by 'consistent.' Let us begin by asking whether the following propositions are logically consistent.

P1. A living human fetus has a right to life which cannot be overridden except in rare cases (e.g. threat to the life of the mother).

P2. Capital punishment for certain offences is morally justified.

Arguments and Conditionals

The early Stoic logicians were aware of a distinction that most of us make nowadays but that certain medieval logicians, according to David H. Sanford (If P, then Q: Conditionals and the Foundations of Reasoning, p. 31), either missed or did not make. I am referring to the difference between arguments and conditional statements. Note the difference between

1. Since murder is wrong, suicide is wrong

and

2. If murder is wrong, then suicide is wrong.

An Elementary Confusion Regarding Dispositions and Potentialities

C. B. Martin, "Dispositions and Conditionals," The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 174, January 1994, p. 1:

We must see that dispositions are actual, though their manifestations may not be. It is an elementary confusion to think of unmanifesting dispositions as unactualized possibilia, though that may characterize unmanifested manifestations.

Consider two panes of thin glass side by side in a window. The two panes are of the same type of glass, and neither has been specially treated. A rock is thrown at one, call it pane A, and it shatters. The other pane, call it B, receives no such impact. We know that A is fragile from the fact that it shattered. ("Potency is known through act," an Aristotelian might say.) We don't have quite the same assurance that B is fragile, but we have good reason to think that it is since it is made of the same kind of glass as A.

'Probative Overkill' Objections to the Potentiality Principle

Here is a simple version of the Potentiality Argument (PA):

1. All potential persons have a right to life.
2. The human fetus is a potential person.
-----
3. The human fetus has a right to life.

Does PA 'prove too much'? It does if the proponent of PA has no principled way of preventing PA from transmogrifying into something like:

1. All potential persons have a right to life.
4. Everything is a potential person.
-----
5. Everything has a right to life.

Rock Salt and Nails

Enjoy it before it is pulled.  If I may wax pedantic, the jilted lover loads her shotgun with two sorts of stuff, not three: rock salt and nails, not rock, salt, and nails. Pedantry aside, a most haunting tune from the pen of Utah Phillips sung by the angel-voiced Joan Baez.

Oh the nights are so long/Lord sorry runs deep/And nothing is worse than a night without sleep/I walk out alone/I look at the sky/Too lonesome to sing, too empty to cry.

If the ladies was blackbirds and the ladies was thrushes/ I'd lie there for hours in the chilly cold marshes/ If the ladies was squirrels with high bushy tails/ I'd fill up my shotgun with rock salt and nails.

Three Friends

The blogosphere has been good to me, having brought me a number of friends, some of whom I have met face to face.  For now I will mention just three. 

Having read my announcement that PowerBlogs will be shutting down at the end of November, Keith Burgess-Jackson kindly sent me a number of unsolicited e-mails explaining how I could import the  PowerBlogs posts, together with comments, en masse into this Typepad site.  I had forgotten that the Typepad platform allows for multiple blogs.  Keith's idea was simply to set up an archival blog and dump the old posts there.  As usual, the devil is in the details.  But a  careful perusal of his-emails gave me all the clues I needed to get this project underway.  Eventually, I will install a link to the PowerBlogs archive on my front page.

Keith is one my oldest blogospheric friends. We met early in 2004 not long after I had entered the 'sphere.  He has been more than kind in promoting my efforts over the years.  I fear that I have not reciprocated sufficiently.  So I want you to go to his site right now and read his current batch of offerings.  I should also mention that if it weren't for Keith I would never have met philosopher Mike Valle who lives a few miles from here. 

I can't recall how exactly I met Ed Feser; it may have been via Keith's old Conservative Philosopher group blog.  In any case, we have had a number of invigorating discussions.  We have our differences, but our common ground makes their exfoliation fruitful.  I am presently gearing up for another round as I study his latest book, Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide (One World, 2009), an inscribed copy of which he kindly sent me.  Ed chimes in on his blog in agreement with my recent rant about copy editors and their political correctness.  Please check it out.

Last but not least, Peter Lupu, who, though not a blogger, is the Real Thing as philosophers go.  Such birds are rarely sighted even within (especially within?) the academic aviary.  He discovered me via the old PowerBlogs site and left the best comments there that I have received in five years of blogging.  To my great good fortune he flourishes here in the Zone and we see each other regularly. Last Thursday he came by and we talked from 2 to 9 P.M.  He would have gone on til midnight had I let him.  I have met in my entire life only one other philosopher with whom I could have as deep and productive a discussion, and that is my old friend Quentin Smith who I met in my early twenties.  Like Smith an avis rara, Lupu has become the Smith of my late middle age.

So the blogosphere has been good to me.  Today's stats hit an all-time high of 1,212 page views.  I have nothing to complain about.  Thanks for reading.

Unbelievable if True: Illiteracy and Innumeracy

David K. Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), p. 139:

Some 37 percent of American adults cannot figure a 10 percent discount on a price, even using a calculator. (Emphasis added.) The same percentage cannot read a bus schedule or write a letter about a credit card error. According to the National Adult Literacy Survey, last taken in 1992 by the Department of Education, 14 percent cannot total a deposit slip, locate an intersection on a map, understand an appliance warranty, or determine the correct dosage of a medicine.

This is astonishing, if true. One thing that struck my conservative eye was 'Department of Education.' One wonders what the percentage of incompetents was before the inauguration of this behemoth agency. I'll bet it was less.

David K. Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), p. 139:

Some 37 percent of American adults cannot figure a 10 percent discount on a price, even using a calculator. (Emphasis added.) The same percentage cannot read a bus schedule or write a letter about a credit card error. According to the National Adult Literacy Survey, last taken in 1992 by the Department of Education, 14 percent cannot total a deposit slip, locate an intersection on a map, understand an appliance warranty, or determine the correct dosage of a medicine.

This is astonishing, if true. One thing that struck my conservative eye was 'Department of Education.' One wonders what the percentage of incompetents was before the inauguration of this behemoth agency. I'll bet it was less.

David K. Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), p. 139:

Some 37 percent of American adults cannot figure a 10 percent discount on a price, even using a calculator. (Emphasis added.) The same percentage cannot read a bus schedule or write a letter about a credit card error. According to the National Adult Literacy Survey, last taken in 1992 by the Department of Education, 14 percent cannot total a deposit slip, locate an intersection on a map, understand an appliance warranty, or determine the correct dosage of a medicine.

This is astonishing, if true. One thing that struck my conservative eye was 'Department of Education.' One wonders what the percentage of incompetents was before the inauguration of this behemoth agency. I'll bet it was less.

The Human Predicament: Not to be Taken Too Seriously

I've been loved, hated, feared, loathed, respected, scorned, unjustly maligned, praised for what I should not have been praised for, lionized, demonized, put on a pedestal, dragged through the mud, understood, misunderstood, ill-understood, well-understood, ignored, fawned upon, admired, envied, tolerated, and found intolerable. And the same most likely goes for you.

Why Physical Culture?

In part it is about control. I can't control your body, but I can control mine. Control is good. Power is good. Physical culture as the gaining and maintaining of power over that part of the physical world which is one's physical self. Self-mastery, as the highest mastery, must involve mastery of the vehicle of one's subjectivity. Control of one's vehicle is a clear desideratum. So stretch, run, hike, bike, swim, put the shot, lift the weight. In short: rouse your sorry ass from the couch of sloth and attend to your vehicle. 'Ass' here refers to Frate Asino, Brother Jackass, St Francis' name for his body. Keep him in good shape and he will carry you and many a prodigious load over many a pons asinorum.

(Interesting that Ger. Arsch, when it crossed the English Channel became 'arse,' but in the trans-Atlantic trip it transmogrified into the polyvalent 'ass.' Whatever you call it, get it off the couch.)

Fun With English: Is 'None' Singular or Plural?

To my ear, the following sounds grammatical:

1. None of the members were present at the meeting

whereas the following sounds ungrammatical:

2. None of the members was present at the meeting.

But isn't 'none' just a contraction of 'no one'? If it is, then (2) is grammatical and (1) is not. Now compare

3. All of the members were present at the meeting

4. All of the members was present at the meeting.

(3) sounds grammatical to me, while (4) sounds decidedly ungrammatical.

But surely (3) is logically equivalent to the ungrammatical

3*. Each of the members were present at the meeting

and (4) is logically equivalent to the grammatical

4*. Each of the members was present at the meeting.

Let this serve as a warning to school marms and copy editors  and those who would imitate them: be careful when you criticize another's English. He may have thought a lot harder and deeper than you. Your petty rules may collapse under logical scrutiny.

The Paltry Mentality of the Copy Editor

The copy editor, like a testosterone-crazed male cat, likes to mark his territory. His territory is your manuscript. But like a cat, he is lazy and easily bored, which leads to inconsistency. He starts out changing every occurrence of ‘identical with’ to ‘identical to,’ but then tires of this game so that the end result is a mishmash. He would have spared himself the bother had he appreciated the simple fact that in the English language ‘identical with’ and ‘identical to’ are stylistic variants of each other.

My advice to editors: stick to questions of formatting, and to the correction of obvious spelling and grammatical errors. Keep your political correctness to yourself.  Don't replace the gender neutral 'his' with the abomination 'his/her.'  Keep your stinking leftist politics out of my manuscript.  And don’t try to be what the Germans call a Besserwisser: don’t presume to know better what I want to say and how I want to say it. My writing is an exacting labor of love; your editing is a lousy chore you can’t wait to be done with.

Now, having vented my spleen, I look at the other side of the question. Where would the journals, and we who publish in them, be without editors and their grunt work? May they be adequately compensated! May their teaching loads be reduced! May 72 black-eyed virgins greet them at the portals of paradise!

The Potentiality Universality Principle and Feinberg's "Logical Point"

I have already introduced  PIP, PEP, and PAP as three principles governing potentiality in the precise sense relevant to the Potentiality Argument. Now I introduce a fourth principle for your inspection which I will call the Potentiality Universality Principle:

PUP: Necessarily, if a normal F has the potentiality to become a G, then every normal F has the potentiality to become a G.

The Potentiality Argument Against Abortion and Feinberg's Logical Point About Potentiality

I claim that the standard objections to the Potentiality Argument (PA) are very weak and can be answered. This is especially so with respect to Joel Feinberg's "logical point about potentiality," which alone I will discuss in this post. This often-made objection is extremely weak and should persuade no rational person. But first a guideline for the discussion.

The issue is solely whether Feinberg's objection is probative, that and nothing else. Thus one may not introduce any consideration or demand extraneous to this one issue. One may not demand of me a proof of the Potentiality Principle (PP), to be set forth in a moment. I have an argument for PP, but that is not the issue currently under discussion. Again the issue is solely whether Feinberg's "logical point about potentiality" refutes the PA. Progress is out of the question unless we 'focus like a laser' on the precise issue under consideration.

Identity, Constitution, and Potentiality With a Little Help from PIP, PEP, and PAP

Pointing to a lump of raw ground beef, someone might say, "This is a potential hamburger." Or, pointing to a hunk of bronze, "This is a potential statue." Someone who says such things is not misusing the English language, but he is not using 'potential' in the strong specific way that potentialists -- proponents of the Potentiality Principle -- are using the word. What is the difference? What is the difference between the two examples just given, and "This acorn is a potential oak tree," and "This embryo is a potential person?"

Palin Derangement Syndrome: Another Case

(Written 5 October 2008)

Here is how Richard Cohen begins a recent column:

Thank God for Sarah Palin. Without her jibes, her sarcasm, her exaggerations, her smug provincialism, her hypocrisy about family and government, her exploitation of mommyhood and her personal attacks on Barack Obama, the Democratic base might never be consolidated. This much is certain: Obama could never do it.

Travel Disruptive but Good for the Soul

For me travel is disruptive and desolating. A little desolation, however, is good for the soul, whose tendency is to sink into complacency. Daheim, empfindet man nicht so sehr die Unheimlichkeit des Seins. Travel knocks me out of my natural orbit. Even an overnighter can have this effect. And then time is wasted getting back on track. I am not cut out to be a vagabond. I Kant hack it. I do it more from duty than from inclination. But I'm less homebound than the Sage of Koenigsberg.

Some Principles of a Financial Conservative

(Written 11 October 2008)

A correspondent with whom I disagree pretty thoroughly on financial matters e-mails:

An interesting poll of IFP's (Independent Financial Planners) reported today on Kuldow's MSNBC programme that 85% don't believe investors over 55 should be in equities at all. AT ALL, because the 10 year recovery horizon is dubious. I agree.

Here are some thoughts of mine on matters monetary. Call it chutzpah if you will, but I think my thoughts are as good as, if not better than, those of most financial planners. My thoughts derive from reading good books, independent reflection, and experience. And I don't charge for them! Be aware that I have no credentials in this area. (Be also aware that credentials are only a rough and defeasible guide to a person's competence.) You absolutely must think for yourself, and since its inception in 2004, this site and its ancestors has been devoted to promoting independent thinking. That is part of what the 'maverick' appellation is supposed to convey.

Teleological and Axiological Aspects of Existential Meaning

What do we mean by 'meaning' when we ask about the meaning of life? It is perhaps most natural to take the meaning of life or of a life to be its purpose, point, end, goal, or telos. Accordingly, (human) life is meaningful only if it has a central organizing purpose. Existential of life meaning bears a teleological aspect in that a meaningful life is a purpose-driven life.

Having a purpose, even if necessary for the meaningfulness of a life, is not sufficient. A meaningful life must also embody positive intrinsic value. The lives of terrorists and mass murderers can be purpose-driven, subjectively meaningful, and satisfying to their agents, but we ought to resist the notion that such lives are objectively meaningful. At best, such destructive lives are subjectively meaningful only. If so, existential meaning is not merely a teleological concept but a teleological-cum-axiological concept.  An objectively meaning ful life must be both purpose-driven and such as to realize positive objective intrinsic value.

Condign Punishment

There are qualifiers that occur only with the word they happen to qualify but  not with any other word.   A punishment and a remark can both be fitting or appropriate, but only a punishment is condign. One does not hear or read 'condign remark.' Is 'condign' ever used apart from 'punishment'? That is one question. A second: What is the technical term for this linguistic phenomenon? There is one, but I can't remember what it is.

A reader supplied this bit of linguistic evidence that answers my first question:  "Scotus's proposed replacement way of drawing the distinction between condign merit and congruous merit is quite complicated. Underlying it is the claim that the reward for condign merit is everlasting life, and that the reward for congruous merit is the gift of sanctifying grace (i.e., justification)."  (Richard Cross,  Duns Scotus, p. 105)

As for  the second question, I thought the answer might be hapax legomenon.  But that term refers to a word or phrase that occurs but once in a corpus, a phenomenon which is similar to but distinct from the phenomenon I am referring to.

A Charming Malapropism

I heard a pretty lady the other day refer to a barista as a barrister. Barista is Italian for bartender. Bartenders here and abroad mix and serve alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages hot and cold. Entering English the word has suffered semantic shrinkage: a barista typically mixes coffee drinks only.

Baristas and barristers ply their trade in the vicinity of bars: standing behind them or before them, respectively. So the malapropism has a certain 'logic.'

A Checkered Past

Having recently compared two lunch companions to each other in point of having checkered pasts, but aware of recent shifts in the meaning of the phrase, and not wishing to give offense, I quizzed one of them on the meaning of 'has a checkered past' as applied to a woman and to a man. He replied that it suggests that the woman was a prostitute and the man a crook. That answer is not wrong and accords with current usage. But the phrase origninally had no such pejorative connotation as far as I can tell. My old Webster's defines checker, vt, as to vary with contrasting elements or situations and gives the example of a checkered career as a racer. Nothing pejorative about that: the racer's career had its ups and downs. Or one might describe a man whose 20s were spent in the Jesuits, his 30s teaching philosophy, his 40s as a soldier of fortune, and his 50's as an exterminator of insects as having had a checkered past. Nothing pejorative about that either.

Only an idiot thinks that change qua change is good.  And so I hold to the old way of using 'checkered past.'

Some Theses on Possible Worlds

Here are some of my (mostly unoriginal) thoughts on the topic of possible worlds.  If I had more time I would organize these ideas better. But look, this is just a weblog, an online notebook! A natural-born scribbler, I bash these things out quickly. And you get what you pay for, muchachos. Double your money back if not completely satisfied.

To Understand the Religious Sensibility . . .

. . . two books are essential: Augustine's Confessions and Pascal's Pensées. If you read these books and they do not speak to you, if they do not move you, then it is a good bet that you don't have a religious bone in your body. It is not matter of intelligence but of sensibility. "He didn't have a religious bone in his body." I recall that line from Stephanie Lewis' obituary for her husband David, perhaps the most brilliant American philosopher of the postwar period. He was highly intelligent and irreligious. Others are highly intelligent and religious. Among contemporary philosophers one could mention Alvin Plantinga, Peter van Inwagen, and Richard Swinburne. The belief that being intelligent rules out being religious casts doubt on the intelligence of those who hold it.

Why We Should Accept the Potentiality Principle

The idea behind the Potentiality Principle (PP) is that potential personhood confers a right to life. For present purposes we may define a person as anything that is sentient, rational, and self-aware. Actual persons have a right to life, a right not to be killed. Presumably we all accept the following Rights Principle:

RP: All persons have a right to life.

What PP does is simply extend the right to life to potential persons. Thus,

PP. All potential persons have a right to life.

PP allows us to mount a very powerful argument, the Potentiality Argument (PA), against the moral acceptability of abortion. Given PP, and the fact that human fetuses are potential persons, it follows that they have a right to life. From the right to life follows the right not to be killed, except perhaps in some extreme circumstances.

But what is the argument for PP?

Persons and the Moral Relevance of Their Capacities

Those who accept the following Rights Principle (RP) presumably also accept as a codicil thereto a Capacities Principle (CP):

RP. All persons have a right to life.

CP. All persons have a right to life even at times when they are not exercising any of the capacities whose exercise confers upon them the right to life.

I take it that most of us would take CP as spelling out what is implicit in RP. Thus few if any would hold RP in conjunction with the logical contrary of CP, namely

CCP. No person has a right to life at a time when he is not exercising at least one of the capacities whose exercise confers upon an individual its right to life.

Pavel Tichý on Descartes' Meditation Five Ontological Argument

This post is the fourth in a series on Pavel Tichý's "Existence and God" (J. Phil., August 1979, 403-420). In section II we find a critique of Descartes' Meditation Five ontological argument. Tichý claims to spot two fallacies in the argument. I will argue that only one of them is a genuine fallacy. One could present the Cartesian argument in Tichý's jargon as follows:

1. The requisites of the divine office include all perfections.
2. Existence is a perfection.
Therefore
3. The divine office is occupied.

Pavel Tichý on Whether 'God' is the Name of an Individual

This post is the third in a series on Pavel Tichý's "Existence and God" (J. Phil., August 1979, 403-420). So far I have sketched his theory of existence, made a couple of objections, and refuted his argument for it. I now turn to section II of his article (pp. 410-412) in which he discusses Descartes' Meditation Five ontological argument. But in this post I will address only the preliminaries to the discussion of Descartes. Tichý writes,

We have seen that 'Jimmy Carter' and 'the U. S. president' are terms of completely different typological categories: 'Jimmy Carter' denotes an individual, and 'the U. S. president' denotes something for an individual to be, an individual-office. Which of the two categories does the term 'God' belong to? It would be patently implausible to construe it as belonging to the former category. If 'God' were simply the name of an individual, it would be a purely contingent matter whether God is benevolent or not; for any individual is conceivably malicious. But of course the notion of a malevolent God is absurd. If so, however, God cannot be an individual; God is bound to be rather something for an individual to be, and benevolence must be part of what it takes for someone to be it. In other words, 'God' must stand for an individual office, and benevolence must be one of the requisites that make up the essence of that office.

It is only because 'God' denotes an individual-office that we can sensibly ask whether God exists. To ask, Does God exist? is not to ask whether something is true regarding a definite individual; for which individual would it be? It is rather to ask whether, of all the individuals there are, one has what it takes to be God. It is to ask, in other words, whether the divine office is occupied. (410-411)

More on Tichý on Existence: One of His Arguments Examined

This post is a sequel to Pavel Tichý on Existence. There I explained Tichý's theory as a variation on the Fregean theory and made a start on a critique of it. Here I examine an argument of his for it. He writes,

If existence were a property ascribable to individuals, then the force of such an ascription could only be to the effect that the individual in question is indeed one of the individuals there are. But since any individual is, trivially, one of the individuals there are, all ascriptions of existence would be tautologically true. If existence were properly raised in regard to individuals, then a negative answer to such a question would be self-defeating: it would suggest that no question has in fact been asked and that, accordingly, no answer is called for in the first place. Genuine existence questions would be answerable wholesale and a priori in the affirmative. ("Existence and God," Journal of Philosophy, August 1979, pp. 404-405)

Pavel Tichý on Existence

This post consists of some notes and commentary on Section I of Pavel Tichý's "Existence and God," The Journal of Philosophy, vol. LXXVI, no. 8, August 1979. Section I of Tichý's article is about designation and existence. Section II exposes two fallacies in Descartes' ontological argument. Section III provides a valid reconstruction of Anselm's Proslogion III ontological argument. This post comments on section I only. I didn't discuss Tichý in my otherwise rather thorough book on existence, so this post is yet another postscript to A Paradigm Theory of Existence.

Notes on Philosophical Terminology and its Fluidity

The Fact of Terminological Fluidity

If Peter and Bill are talking philosophy, the first thing that has to occur, if there is is to be any forward movement, is that the interlocutors must pin each other down terminology-wise. Each has to come to understand how the other is using his terms. It is notorious that key philosophical terms are used in different ways by different philosophers.

The following is a partial list of terms used in different ways by different philosophers: abstract, concrete, object, subject, fact, proposition, world, predicate, property, substance, event.

Note to Long-Time Readers

I have just learned that PowerBlogs will shut down permanently on 30 November 2009.  Those of you who left comments at the old blog and who wish to copy them are advised to do so by the end of November.  Between now and then you may expect a flurry of reposting at this site as I bring over the posts that I consider worth preserving.  Quite a number have already been transferred, but, scribbler that I am, there remains an astonishing number left to revise and repost.

The Tal and the Short of It

Why, with so many painful losses to my 'credit,' do I continue to submit my aging self to the rigors of tournament chess? Because the strenuous life has a property Bobby Fischer once ascribed to 1. P-K4: it is "best by test."

Chess: A Road to Health and Wealth?

H. J. R. Murray, A History of Chess (Oxford UP, 1913), p. 164:

Hippocrates and Galen apparently found in chess a potent antidote to diarrhoea and erysipelas, and prescribed it with success, while Aristotle figures among the many hypothetical inventors of chess. Another story tells how Galen once met a friend whom he had not seen for some time, and learnt that he had been into the country to see a farm which he had purchased with the result of his gains at chess, whereupon the physician exclaimed with what sounds like a strong flavour of irony, 'What a fine thing chess is, and how profitable!' Pure fiction, the whole of it, of course.

Superman: The Moral of the Story

George Reeves (1914-1959) was the original 'Superman.' You know the character: "Faster than a speeding bullet . . . ." Reeves was murdered (or was it suicide?) in June of 1959. I remember a comment of my Uncle Ray at the time of Reeves' death: "He could stop other people's bullets, but not his own."

I hope Reeves won't mind it too much if I take moral instruction from the mistakes that killed him. It has long been my policy to let others pay my tuition at the School of Hard Knocks.

Reeves succumbed to sex, booze, and career-identification. It is hard enough to get the sex monkey off your back, but if you allow him to form a tag-team with the booze monkey you have double trouble. But of course I would never say that he was 'addicted' to these two 'monkeys': I believe in free will, self-discipline, self-reliance, and in strengthening one's will by exercising it. With respect to temptations, a good maxim is this: Resistance strengthens; indulgence weakens. And if you are a conservative, don't talk like a liberal.

After his first wife left him, he became involved with two women, sequentially, both of whom had it in them to kill him because of jealousy vis-à-vis  the other. The Bard hath said it well, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." Reeves left the first for the second, but near the end was about to return to the first. Both were loose-living, hard-drinking, party animals, especially the second to whom he was drawn like a moth to the flame.

Alcohol fueled the fires of his delusion. Near the end he had become a full-time boozer. Hopelessly type-cast, his career was at an end.

The moral of the story: sex, booze, and worldly ambition are of the devil. But how attractive they are! And how seemingly flat, stale, and boring the life of 'moral virtue.'  And as every leftist 'knows,' morality is but bourgeois ideology and all moral striving but hypocritical posturing.

Evil appears warm and inviting; good, cold and forbidding. Evil seems fascinating and lively; good, boring and dead. Such is the world — in which reality is illusion and illusion reality.

Above the Urinal at the Chess Tournament

Urine check!

I didn't make that up. It was at some cheesy Knight's Inn or similar venue in Phoenix in the early-to-mid 'nineties, when Myron Lieberman presided in his inimitable manner over well-attended tournaments and Ed Yetman, bandanna around his neck and sidearm strapped to his hip, manned the book concession. Say what you want about the chess scene, it is chock full of colorful characters.

The Neuroanatomy of a Chess Player

Sweet Gone Jack Forty Years Down the Road

Jack Kerouac was a big ball of affects ever threatening to dissolve in that sovereign soul-solvent, alcohol. One day he did, and died.  The date was 21 October 1969. Today is the 40th anniversary of his release from the wheel of the quivering meat conception and the granting of his wish:

The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . .
. . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel
and safe in heaven dead. (Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus)

I own eight Kerouac biographies and there are a couple I don't own.  The best of them, Gerald Nicosia's Memory Babe (Grove Press, 1983), ends like this:

The night of Sunday October 19, he couldn't sleep and lay outside on his cot to watch the stars.  The next morning after eating some tuna, he sat down in front of the TV, notebook in hand, to plan a new novel; it was to be titled after his father's old shop: "The Spotlight Print."  Just getting out of bed Stella heard groans in the bathroom and found him on his knees, vomiting blood.  He told her he didn't want to go to the hospital, but he cooperated when the ambulance attendants arrived.  As they were leaving, he said, "Stella, I hurt," which shocked her because it was the first time she had ever heard him complain.  Then he shocked her even more by saying, for the second time since they had married, "Stella, I love you."

Less than a day later, on the morning of October 21, after twenty-six blood transfusions, Jean Louis Kerouac died in St. Anthony's Hospital of hemorrhaging esophageal varices, the classic drunkard's death.

On Dizzy Gillespie's birthday. (p. 697)

He was 47.  I was 19.  On a restroom wall at my college, I scribbled, "Kerouac lives."  A day or two later a reply appeared, "Read the newspapers."