Maverick Philosopher

Eliminative Materialist T-Shirt

On the front:  There are no beliefs!

On the back:  You'd better believe it!

Wisdom from Putnam on Science and Scientism

Hilary Putnam, Mathematics, Matter and Method (Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. xiii (emphasis added):

. . . I regard science as an important part of man's knowledge of reality; but there is a tradition with which I would not wish to be identified, which would say that scientific knowledge is all of man's knowledge. I do not believe that ethical statements are expressions of scientific knowledge; but neither do I agree that they are not knowledge at all. The idea that the concepts of truth, falsity, explanation, and even understanding are all concepts which belong exclusively to science seems to me to be a perversion . . .

Putnam does not need the MP's imprimatur and nihil obstat, but he gets them anyway, at least with respect to the above quotation. The italicized sentence is vitally important. In particular, you will be waiting a long time if you expect evolutionary biology to provide any clarification of the crucial concepts mentioned. See in particular, Putnam's "Does Evolution Explain Representation?" in Renewing Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1992).

Jihadist T-Shirt

On the front: Islam: a religion of peace since A.D. 622.

On the back: Say otherwise and we'll blow you up.

Stephen Toulmin Dies

On December 4th, in Los Angeles, at age 87.  NYT obituary here.  (HT: Seldom Seen Slim)

Intentionality, Potentiality, and Dispositionality: Some Points of Analogy

The influential Austrian philosopher Franz Brentano took intentionality to be the mark of the mental, the criterion whereby physical and mental phenomena are distinguished. For Brentano, (i) all mental phenomena are intentional, (ii) all intentional phenomena are mental, and (iii) no mental phenomenon is physical. (Franz Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874), Bk. II, Ch. 1.)

What is intentionality? ‘Intentionality’ is Brentano's term of art (borrowed from the Medievals) for that property of mental states whereby they are (non-derivatively) of, or about, or directed to, an object. Such states are intrinsically such that they 'take an accusative.'  The state of perceiving, for example is necessarily object-directed. One cannot just perceive; if one perceives, then one perceives something. The idea is not merely that when one perceives one perceives something or other; the idea is that when one perceives, one perceives  some  specific object, the very object of that very act.  The same goes for intending (in the narrow sense), believing, imagining, recollecting, wishing, willing, desiring, loving, hating, judging, knowing, etc. Such mental states refer beyond themselves to objects that may or may not exist, or may or may not be true in the case of propositional objects. Reference to an object is thus an intrinsic feature of mental states and not a feature they have in virtue of a relation to an existing object. This is why Brentano speaks of the "intentional in-existence of an object." It is also why Husserl can 'bracket' the existence of the object for phenomenological purposes. Intentionality is not a relation, strictly speaking, though it is relation-like.  This is an important point that many contemporaries seem incapable of wrapping their heads around. 

There are some interesting points of analogy between intentionality and potentiality. An intentional state exhibits

Marcel Duchamp and the Superiority of the Useless

Marcel Duchamp abandoned art for chess because of the latter's superior uselessness. Art objects, after all, have exchange value as commodities, and may make the artist some money. But with few exceptions chess lies entirely beyond the sphere of the utile. In this sense, the art of the 64 squares is the highest art. There is little danger that Caissa's acolytes will fill their bellies from her service. There is just no market for the artistry of chess games, not even those of the very highest quality. Here you can review some of Duchamp's games.

Can Religious Notions be Naturalized?

I continue to mull over Jim Ryan's naturalization project with respect to salvation. It seems to me that salvation is but one of several religious 'objects' that resist naturalist reduction. God and sin are two others. But if God, sin, and salvation cannot be reduced to anything natural, they can be eliminated. Thus I recommend to Ryan that he take an eliminativist line. Actually, I would like to see him abandon his naturalism. That is not likely to happen. But I do hope to be able to convince him that it is folly to try to capture the content of religious notions in naturalist terms. The better approach, and more honest to boot, is for the naturalist to deny that these notions correspond to anything real.

An Old Chestnut of a Chess Joke for the Holiday Season

A group of chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel and were standing in the lobby discussing their recent tournament victories. After about an hour, the manager came out of the office and asked them to disperse. "But why," they asked.  "Because", he said, "I can't stand chess-nuts boasting in an open foyer."

Compensations of Advancing Age

You now have money enough and you now have time. The time left is shrinking, but it is your own. There is little left to prove. What needed proving has been proven by now or will forever remain unproved. And now it doesn't much matter one way or the other. You are free to be yourself and live beyond comparisons with others. You can enjoy the social without being oppressed by it. You understand the child's fathership of the man, and in some measure are able to undo it. You have survived those who would define you, and now you define yourself. And all of this without rancor or resentment. Defiant self-assertion gives way to benign indifference, Angst to Gelassenheit. Your poem might be:

Brief light's made briefer
'Neath the leaden vault of care
Better to accept the sinecure
Of untroubled Being-there.

You enjoy the benefits of a thick skin or else it was never in the cards that you should develop one. You have been inoculated by experience against the illusions of life. You know that the Rousseauean transports induced by a chance encounter with a charming member of the opposite sex do not presage the presence of the Absolute in human form. Less likely to be made a fool of in love, you are more likely to see sisters and brothers in sexual others.

The Grim Reaper is gaining on you but you now realize that he is Janus-faced: he is also a Benign Releaser. Your life is mostly over, but what the past lacks in presentness it gains in necessity and certainty. What you had, though logically contingent, now glistens in the light of necessitas per accidens: it is all there, accessible to memory as long as memory holds out, and no one can take it from you. What is over is over, but it has been. The country of the past is a realm of being. Kierkegaard's fiftieth year never was, yours was. Better has-been than never-was. Not much by way of compensation, perhaps, but one takes what one can get.

You know your own character by now and can take satisfaction in possessing a good one if that is what experience has disclosed.

Ciardi on Kerouac: The Ultimate Literary Put-Down?

A few years back the indefatigable Douglas Brinkley  edited and introduced the 1947-1954 journals of Jack Kerouac and put them before us  as Windblown World (Viking, 2004).

Reading Windblown World reminded me of John Ciardi's "Epitaph for the Dead Beats" (Saturday Review, February 6, 1960), an excellent if unsympathetic piece of culture critique which I dug out and re-read. Here is the put-down directed at Kerouac's 'spontaneous prose':

Whether or not Jack Kerouac has traces of a talent, he remains basically a high school athlete who went from Lowell, Massachusetts to Skid Row, losing his eraser en route.

In a similar vein there is the quip of Truman Capote: "That's not writing, it's typewriting!"

But Jack's sweet gone shade has had the last laugh.  Whatever one thinks of Kerouac's influence, he has altered the culture.  But Ciardi?  I'll bet you've never heard of him ^__ until now.

Good Advice from John Ciardi

Poet John Ciardi (pronounced Chyar-dee, emphasis on first syllable, not See-ar-dee) was born in 1916 and died in 1986. A brilliant line of his sticks with me, though I cannot recall where he said it, and Mr. Google didn't help: "Never send a poem on a prose errand." Tattoo that onto your forearms, you would-be poets. (I myself am no poet, I know it, so I can't possibly blow it.  I hereby allude to a certain troubadour who, though I would not call him a poet, others would.)

Here is the epitaph Ciardi composed for himself:

Here, time concurring (and it does);
Lies Ciardi. If no kingdom come,
A kingdom was. Such as it was
This one beside it is a slum.

UPDATE (14 December):  The ever-helpful David Gordon, and that indefatigable argonaut of cyberspace, Dave Lull, inform me that Ciardi's exact words were, "But I have learned not to send a poem on a prose errand."  The quotation can be found on p. 60 of Ciardi Himself: Fifteen Essays in the Reading, Writing, and Teaching of Poetry.

Jim Ryan on Salvation

Yesterday, I posted some thoughts about salvation, and in order to test and refine them, I will confront them with some rather different thoughts of Jim Ryan on the topic. See his Salvation I and Salvation II.

Since Ryan is a naturalist, it is quite natural that what he should offer us is salvation naturalized, in his phrase. My counter is that salvation naturalized is rather thin beer, so thin in fact that I don't think it deserves the name 'salvation.' Salvation naturalized is salvation denatured. But I don't want to denigrate in the least what is positive in Ryan's suggestions. My point is rather that he does not go far enough. Ryan does not deliver salvation; what he delivers is a substitute for salvation.

According to Ryan,

 

. . . salvation is an achievement of deep and genuine patience accomplished through a calming of the mind and a contemplation of the fact that the frustration, resentment, and anger with which it frequently reacts to the course of mundane events are: (a) inappropriate, given the fact that on the whole life and the world are very good and (b) unnecessary, given the fact that the mind can replace resentment and the others with patience.

If You Send E-Mail to a Blogger . . .

. . . bear in mind that it is liable to be posted for all the world to see.  Most bloggers are permanently on the prowl for interesting 'blog fodder.'  This blogger is no different.  What I find interesting, what I find suits my philosophical or pedagogical or polemical purposes, is liable to be posted in whole or in part.  Of course, I am typically discreet and reasonable by my lights.  But what counts as discretion and reasonableness by my lights may not count as such by yours.  So if you send me something and want to be sure it doesn't enter the 'sphere, append some such annotation as:  Not for public consumption.  I will respect your wishes if you are a decent and honorable person. 

I used to supply the names and sometimes the e-mail addresses of correspondents who submitted material, but in many cases I no longer do this, both to protect the young and not-yet-established who are trying to make their way in a world increasingly polarized and dirempted by political antagonisms, a world in which almost anyone can find out almost anything about almost anyone with a few keystrokes, but also to save myself work later on when said individuals, out of a fear that is often excessive, ask me to remove their names and other identifying information.

Own your words.  Accept responsibility for what you say and do.  Don't hide behind handles.  These are sound conservative maxims.  I will enforce them on some, but I cannot in good conscience enforce them on all in the present social and political climate.  The years to come will be interesting indeed, as things 'heat up' ever more.  And I am not talking about global warming.

From the Mail Bag: Dogmatism in Academe

This just over the transom:

I wish I could express to you just how much of a blessing your blog has been (and continues to be) to me.

I am a grad student in a Ph.D. program here in the states.   I read your site for enjoyment, but also because I find that you tend to very acutely and eloquently crystallize objections and points that I find appearing in my own mind in a very rudimentary and unrefined way.  It is a great reassurance when I find you making a point so clearly that has occurred to me, but that I haven't known quite what to do with.

And, of course, this is to say nothing of your topics and insights that are well beyond me and never would have occurred to me.

I have a love/hate relationship with this field.  I love it, but I suffocate within it because of predominating paradigms.   I was recently instructed by a professor in one of my courses that "no reasonable person needs to argue for naturalism" when I pointed out that a certain author never once argued for the naturalism he was presupposing.

Three Concepts of Salvation: Physical, Mystical, Religious

Salvation is a religious concept, and every religion includes a doctrine of salvation, a soteriology. Or can you think of a religion that does not? It is not essential to a religion that it be theistic, as witness the austere forms of Buddhism, but it is essential to every religion as I define the term that it have a soteriology. A religion must show a way out of our unsatisfactory predicament, and one is not religious unless one perceives our life in this world as indeed a predicament, and one that is unsatisfactory. Sarvam dukkham!  But the definition of 'religion' is not what I want to discuss.  Surely some religions include a soteriology (think of Hinduism, Buddhism, and the three Abrahamic religions) and so it is worth inquiring into just what salvation is or could be.

Choose Your Advisors Carefully

The barber is hardly the one to ask whether you need a haircut.

Causes, Causation, the Uncaused

The scientist wants to know what causes what; the philosophical analyst wants to know what causation is; the true philosopher wants to know the Uncaused.

Causes of Death of Philosophers

Here. For example, Rescher died of incoherence while Spinoza died of substance abuse. Miguel de Unamuno expired from a tragic loss of sense. Plantinga perished of necessity, and Augustine by a Hippo. As you can see, some are nasty and one needn't be dead to have a cause of death assigned. Last I checked, Professor Rescher was still happily scribbling away. And that reminds me of a joke.

A student goes to visit Professor Rescher. Secretary informs her that the good doctor is not available because he is writing a book. Student replies, "I'll wait."

Addicted to Food?

Can one be addicted to food? If yes, then I am addicted to exposing liberal nonsense. What I have said more than once about the non-addictiveness of tobacco can be applied mutatis mutandis to food 'addiction':

Bilingual Education and the Left's Diversity Fetish

My mother was born near Rome and didn't come to the United States until she was ten years old. She quickly learned English, she became completely fluent, and she spoke without an accent. But I wonder what would have happened if there had been a bilingual education program in place in the New York schools and she had been forced to participate in it. I think the answer is obvious: she would have had more difficulty learning English and she would not have learned it as well as she did.

And that fact would have impeded her assimilation. So why is there any support for bilingual education? It is a foolish idea on the face of it, and it harms those it is supposed to help.

Liberals don't understand the importance of assimilation. If they did, they wouldn't support programs that work against it. How can there be comity without commonality? How can there be social harmony with groups who refuse to assimilate, refuse to become Americans, do not share our classically liberal values, and are here only to exploit the economic opportunities that our country provides?  Not to mention the jihadists that come here to destroy us, and are of course shown every consideration by the nimrods of the Left.  Do I need to give examples?  Not to anyone who has been following the news.

Now  why don't liberals understand the value of assimilation? One factor is their fetishization of diversity, which is explained in Diversity and Divisiveness.  Diversity and the Quota Mentality extends the thought.

Related articles

Tribal America

Undocumented Injun

Diversity and the Quota Mentality

Liberals emphasize the value of diversity, and with some justification. Many types of diversity are good. One thinks of culinary diversity, musical diversity, artistic diversity generally. Biodiversity is good, and so is a diversity of opinions, especially insofar as such diversity makes possible a robustly competitive market place of ideas wherein the best rise to the top. A diversity of testable hypotheses is conducive to scientific progress. And so on.

Remembering John Lennon

John Lennon was gunned down this night in 1980 by Mark David Chapman. I remember that night well: a student of mine called me in the middle of it to report the slaying.  Lennon was my least favorite Beatle due to his silly utopianism, but this tune of his from the 1965 Rubber Soul album is a gem, and more than fit to remember him by.

John Heidenry's Zero at the Bone

There is serious reading and there is bed reading.  Serious reading is for stretching the mind and improving the soul.  It cannot be well done in bed but requires the alertness and seriousness provide by desk, hard chair, note-taking and coffee-drinking.  It is a pleasure, but one stiffened with an alloy of discipline.  Bed reading, however, is pure unalloyed pleasure.  The mind is neither taxed nor stretched or improved, but entertained.

I came across Heidenry's Zero at the Bone: The Playboy, the Prostitute, and the Murder of Bobby Greenlease (St. Martin's 2009) by chance at a local library.  I would never buy a book like this because at best it is  worth reading only once.  But its skillful noir recounting of a 1953 kidnapping and murder most definitely held my interest over the few days it took me to read it in those delicious intervals lying abed before nod-off.  But I have to wonder about books that anatomize depravity while eschewing all moral judgment.  A large topic this, one that I will get around to eventually.

I now hand off to Janet Maslin's NYT review.

A Philosopher's Motto

Distinguo ergo sum.

Like, What Does It Mean? Notes on Nagel

Thomas Nagel’s “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” (Philosophical Review, 1974, reprinted in Mortal Questions, Cambridge, 1979, pp. 165-180) is a contemporary classic in the philosophy of mind, and its signature ‘what is it like’ locution has become a stock phrase rather loosely bandied about in discussions of subjectivity and consciousness. The phrase can be interpreted in several ways. Clarity will be served if we distinguish them.

The Sociology of Philosophy: A PhilPapers Survey

What percentage of philosophers are atheists?  What percentage theists?  Are there more compatibilists than libertarians when it comes to the freedom of the will?  More libertarians than deniers of free will?  These are questions in the sociology of philosophy.  The general public has wildly inaccurate beliefs in this area, but practicing philosophers also cherish misconceptions.  Here are the results of a sophisticated PhilPapers survey.

Mildly interesting, but what does this contribute to philosophy?  I was pleased to see that a solid majority favors the analytic-synthetic distinction.  But surely I cannot use this merely sociological fact as any part of my justification for accepting the  distinction.  Or can I?

Amiel Blames the Absolute for his Maladjustment

Henri-Frederic Amiel, journal entry of 12 September 1861:

I think the Absolute has rendered you forever incapable of attaching yourself to relative things . . . .

Against Postponing Self-Mastery

Wait too long to develop self-control and you may find that your vices have abandoned you before you have had a chance to abandon them. In divorces of all kinds it is better to be the one who sends packing rather than the one sent packing.

Aff-ability

Success in this world often depends as much on affability as on ability.

Are the Souls of Brute Animals Subsistent? Considerations Anent the Unity of Consciousness

We have been discussing the view of Thomas Aquinas according to which (i) the soul is the form of the body, and (ii) the souls of some animals, namely rational animals, are subsistent, i.e. capable of an existence independent of matter. I have registered some of my misgivings. Here is another. If our souls are subsistent forms, then why are not the souls of non-human animals also subsistent? If that in us which thinks is a life-principle and the substantial form of our bodies, and subsistent to boot, by what principled means do we not ascribe subsistent souls to all living things or at least to many non-human living things?

Aquinas discusses this question in Summa Theologica, Q. 75, art. 3. He attempts to navigate a middle course between a form of materialism according to which sense and intellect are both "referred to a corporeal principle," and the view he takes to be Platonic according to which both sense and intellect are "referred to an incorporeal principle." On the Platonic view, both sensing and understanding "belong to the soul as such." Thomas points us to Theaetetus 184 c. This is a fascinating passage which, according to Paul Natorp, anticipates Kant's transcendental unity of apperception.

In this passage, Socrates puts the following question to Theaetetus: ". . . which is more correct — to say that we see or hear with the eyes and with the ears, or through the eyes and through the ears?" Theatetus obligingly responds with through rather than with. Socrates approves of this response:

Yes, my boy, for no one can suppose that in each of us, as in a sort of Trojan horse, there are perched a number of unconnected senses which do not all meet in some one nature, the mind, or whatever we please to call it, of which they are the instruments, and with which through them we perceive the objects of sense. (Emphasis added, tr. Benjamin Jowett)

The issue here is the unity of consciousness in the synthesis of a manifold of sensory data. Long before Kant, and long before Leibniz, the Plato was well aware of the problem of the unity of consciousness. (It is not for nothing that Whitehead described Western philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato.)

Sitting before a fire, I see the flames, feel the heat, smell the smoke, and hear the crackling of the logs. The sensory data are unified in one consciousness of a selfsame object. This unification does not take place in the eyes or in the ears or in the nostrils or in any other sense organ, and to say that it takes place in the brain is not a good answer. For the brain is a partite physical thing extended in space. If the unity of consciousness is identified with a portion of the brain, then the unity is destroyed. For no matter how small the portion of the brain, it has proper parts external to each other. Every portion of the brain, no matter how small, is a complex entity. But consciousness in the synthesis of a manifold is a simple unity. Hence the unity of consciousness cannot be understood along materialist lines.

This argument from the unity of consciousness, which of course needs to be more rigorously developed, is present in nuce in Plato in the passage cited. According to Aquinas, if this argument is sound, ". . . it follows that even the souls of brute animals are subsistent." This seems to be a correct inference.

Aquinas hopes to block the inference with the help of Aristotle's De Anima 429 a 24. Thomas gives an argument that I interpret as follows:

1. Although understanding alone is performed without a corporeal organ, as Aristotle maintains, sensation and the operations of the sensitive soul are accompanied by changes in the body at our sensory receptors.

Therefore

2. The sensitive soul has no per se operation of its own, and every operation of the sensitive soul belongs to the soul-body composite.

Therefore

3. The souls of brute animals, having no per se operations, are not subsistent.

Unfortunately, I cannot see that this is a good argument. The gist of the argument is that while there are specific corporeal organs for seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching, namely, eyes, ears, etc., there is no corporeal organ for understanding. From this it is concluded that there is a crucial difference between sensing and understanding: it is broadly logically possible that there be understanding without a body; but it is not broadly logically possible that there be sensing without a body. And since we alone among animals are rational, or capable of understanding, we alone have subsistent souls.

What this ignores is that sensing is not merely a mechanical or material process. When my cat simultaneously sees, smells, and tastes her food (or my food as she much prefers) there is a unity of consciousness in her no less than there is one in me when I lay into my food. There is no specific corporeal organ that does this unifying of sensory data, neither in me nor in my cat. The unity-of-consciousness argument against materialism can be 'run' both for man and cat. If it works for me it should work for her. So if the possibility of my disembodied existence follows from there being no physical organ that unifies my consciousness, then we get the same result for my cat, and the difference between man and brute in respect of subsistence of souls cannot be maintained.

To sum up. Thomas wants to say that men, but no brutes, have subsistent souls. This is because men, but no brutes, understand. But sensing is a form of consciousness, and consciousness cannot be understood in materialist terms. Sensing is not a mere collision of atoms in the void. Sensory consciousness, besides displaying unity across its several modalities, reveals qualia. And qualia are a well-known stumbling block to materialism. It is difficult to see why, if understanding supports the possibility of disembodied existence, sensing should not also support this possibility. There is after all only one soul which both senses and understands. The phrases 'sensitive soul' and 'intellective soul' are not to be taken to refer to distinct souls.

Carl Schmitt on Romanticism as a Form of Occasionalism

One of the theses advanced by Carl Schmitt in his Political Romanticism (MIT Press, 1986, tr. Guy Oakes; German original first appeared in 1919 as Politische Romantik, 2nd ed. 1925) is that romanticism is a form of occasionalism. As Schmitt puts it, “Romanticism is subjectified occasionalism.” (PR 17) In this set of notes I attempt to interpret and develop this thought. I will take the ball and run with it, but I won’t quit the field of Schmitt’s text. Before proceeding, a preliminary point about metaphysics needs to be made.

Public Education and Intelligent Design

A 2008 article by Thomas Nagel.  Ladder Man calls it "comically bad."  You decide who the joker is.

Imago Dei in Relation to Aquinas and Christology

This just over the transom from Will Duquette:

 A fool rushes in...

In your comment on Peter Lupu's guest post, you say

> Man was not created in God's material image, since he has none; he 
> was created in God's spiritual image.  But this implies that what is 
> essential to man is not his animal body which presumably can be 
> accounted for in the naturalistic terms of evolutionary biology, but 
> his spirit or consciousness.

However, St. Thomas would say that it is man's nature to be a
rational animal, and hence man's animal body most certainly is
essential.  I appreciate that you might be working in a broader
theistic context rather than an explicitly Christian context; but
given that Christ is God Incarnate, and now dwells in eternity,
it seems to me that man now just is created in God's image, body
and soul both.  From the standpoint of eternity God created the
universe, man in it, and become incarnate as a man as one single
act.

I enjoy your blog; it's part of my continuing education.  Thanks
for providing it.

You're welcome, Mr. Duquette.  Your comment is pertinent and raises a number of difficult and important questions. 

A Modal Fallacy to Avoid: Confusing the Necessity of the Consequence with the Necessity of the Consequent

No one anywhere can utter 'I am talking now' without saying something true. Indeed, that is necessarily the case: it doesn't just happen to be the case. Letting T = 'I am talking now,' we can write

1. Necessarily, for any speaker S, if S utters T, then T is true.

But it would be a mistake to infer

2. For any speaker S, if S utters T, then T is necessarily true.

 

The same goes for 'I exist now.' It cannot be tokened, in language or thought, without it being the case that a truth is expressed; but it does not follow that the one who tokens it necessarily exists. Its negation, 'I do not exist now,' cannot be tokened in language or thought without it being the case that a falsehood is expressed; but it does not follow that the nonexistence of the one who tokens it is impossible.

The illicit inferential move from (1) to (2) illustrates the ancient modal fallacy of confusing the necessitas consequentiae with the necessitas consequentiis, the necessity of the consequence with the necessity of the consequent.

The point is not to confuse 'Nec(p --> q)' with 'p --> Nec q.'

A sophomoric fatalist might argue like this. "Necessarily, whatever happens, happens. Therefore, whatever happens, necessarily happens, so that whatever occurs could not have been otherwise." But this reasoning commits the modal fallacy in question.

Or take someone who argues that, necessarily, whatever is known is true; ergo, whatever is known is necessarily true. This reasoning likewise confuses the necessity of the consequent with the necessity of the consequence.

If someone argues that 'I exist' is not a first-level predication of existence on the ground that if it were then the sentence in question would be necessarily true -- which it isn't -- then I would tax such a person with the modal fallacy in question.

And if someone were to argue that 'I do not exist' is nonsense on the ground that it is necessarily false, then I would suspect him of falling into the same trap.

A Double Standard

The wrongs done us seem so real, so inexcusable, so unjust. But the wrongs done others by ourselves and by others appear in a less unfavorable light: not that important, excusable, and horribile dictu ^__ entertaining.

A Sense/Reference Objection to the Irreducibility of Phenomenally Conscious States

I agree with Thomas Nagel, John Searle, and others that conscious experiences are irreducible to physical states. I have endorsed the idea that felt pain, phenomenal pain, pain as experienced or lived through (er-lebt), the pain that hurts, has a subjective mode of existence, a "first-person ontology" in Searle's phrase. If this is right, then phenomenally conscious states cannot be reduced to physical states with their objective mode of existence and third-person ontology. As a consequence, an exclusively third-person approach to mind is bound to leave something out. But there is an objection to irreducibility that needs to be considered, an objection that exploits Frege's distinction between sense and reference.

Imago Dei and the Meaning of Life (I)

This is a guest post by Peter Lupu. Lightly edited by BV with his comments in blue.

In a post titled Imago Dei, (December 4, 2009), Bill clarifies the meaning of this important theistic concept. However, in his typical way, he does much more. He offers us guidelines to see and appreciate the broader implication of a proper understanding of imago Dei. In the present post I shall confine myself to the task of fleshing out these implications, as I understand them. In subsequent posts, and with the gracious cooperation of Bill, I will try to wrestle with these implications to the best of my abilities. I should make clear at the outset that I agree with Bill’s exposition of the meaning and significance of imago Dei within a theistic conception. If there is anything with which I disagree, or have some reservations, is the principal conclusion Bill draws from the concept of imago Dei regarding the meaning of life.

A Note on Analytic Style

The precise, explicitly argued, analytic style of exposition with numbered premises and conclusions promotes the meticulous scrutiny of the ideas under discussion. That is why I sometimes write this way. I know it offends some. There are creatures of darkness and murk who seem allergic to any intellectual hygiene. These types are often found on the other side of the Continental divide. "How dare you be clear? How dare you ruthlessly exclude all ambiguity thereby making it impossible for me to yammer on and on with no result?"

Ortega y Gasset somewhere wrote that "Clarity is courtesy." But clarity is not only courtesy; it is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of resolving an issue. If it be thought unjustifiably sanguine to speak of resolving philosophical issues, I have a fall-back position: Clarity is necessary for the very formulation of an issue, provided we want to be clear about what we are discussing.

So we should try to be as clear as possible given the constraints we face. (In blogging, one of the constraints is the need to be pithy.) But it doesn't follow that one should avoid, or legislate out of existence, topics or problems that are hard to bring into focus. It would be folly to avoid God, the soul, Mr. Bradley's Absolute, the meaning of life and all the Big Questions just because it is hard to be clear about them. To give up metaphysics for logic on the ground of the former's messiness, makes no sense to me: the good of logic is intrumental not intrinsic. (See Fred Sommers Abandons Whitehead and Metaphysics for Logic.)   We study logic to help us resolve substantive questions. If all you ever do in philosophy is worry about such topics as the logical form of 'Everyone who owns a donkey beats it,' then I say you have not been doing philosophy at all, but something preliminary to it.

Clarity, then, is a value. But it ceases to be one if it drives us to such extremes as the logical positivist's Verifiability Princiople of cognitive signicance, or the extreme of a fellow who once said that "If it cannot be said in the language of Principia Mathematica, then it can't be said." My response to that would be: so much the worse for the language of Principia Mathematica.

A Language Rant: 'Perks'

A C-Span segment one morning bore the title, 'Congressional Perks.' It was a good program, as almost all C-Span offerings are, but would it have killed them to use the right word, 'perquisites'? 

If this were an isolated example, then you could accuse me, with justification, of being a pedantic ass. Some of you will do so in any case. But I could give a hundred similar examples, and you hope I won't.

Slang and slovenliness have their places and there is some here. But shouldn't C-Span be held to a higher standard than this weblog? For a blogger to blur the boundary between slang and formal discourse is par for the course: we bloggers are experimenting, often playfully, with a new medium. But there should be precincts in which formal discourse is preserved.

I once had an idiot of a student who complained about my 'high-brow' language. I felt disgust for her and her ilk: the people (including administrators and professors) who think a university exists to pander to a paying clientele and sink to the level of the surrounding society. But that's a separate rant with several subtopics: abdication of authority; the misuse of student teaching evaluations; the political correctness that allows a moron such as Ward Churchill to be hired and get tenure. . . .

Imago Dei

Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram . . . (Gen 1, 26) Let us make man in our image and likeness. . .

Et creavit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam. . . (Gen 1, 27) And God created man in his image. . .

I used to play chess with an old man by the name of Joe B., one of the last of the WWII Flying Tigers. Although he had been a working man all his life, he had an intellectual bent and liked to read. But like many an old man, he thought he knew all sorts of things that he didn’t know, and was not bashful about sharing his ‘knowledge.’ One day the talk got on to religion and the notion that man was created in the image and likeness of God. Old Joe had a long-standing animus against the Christianity of his youth, an animus probably connected with his equally long-standing hatred for his long-dead father.

Recalling some preacher’s invocation of the’ image and likeness’ theme, old Joe snorted derisively, "So God has a digestive tract!?" In Joe’s mind this triumphal query was supposed to bear the force of a refutation. Joe’s ‘reasoning’ was along these lines:

1. Man is made in God’s image.
2. Man is a physical being with a digestive tract, etc.
Therefore
3. God is a physical being with a digestive tract, etc.

But that’s like arguing:

1. This statue is made in Lincoln’s image.
2. This statue is composed of marble.
Therefore
3. Lincoln is composed of marble.

A Common Liberal Fallacy: The Diachronic Red Herring

Much opposition to contemporary political conservatism involves a curious argumentative fallacy that I shall dub the Diachronic Red Herring. A liberal succumbs to this fallacy when he (i) appeals to the past accomplishments of liberalism to justify contemporary liberalism while ignoring the ways in which contemporary liberalism has come to occupy extreme positions; and (ii) criticizes contemporary conservatism by bringing up past failings of conservatives while ignoring the fact that contemporary conservatism accepts many of the advances of paleo-liberalism.

 

Kindness

Small acts of kindness have the power to transfigure the bleak face of existence. While gratefully remembering the words and gestures I have been fortunate to receive, I also regret the occasions I let slip where, at no cost to myself, I could have offered a word of encouragement or support to someone in need.

Intellectual Hypertrophy

Weight lifters and body builders in their advanced states of muscular development appear ridiculous to us. All that time and money spent on the grotesque overdevelopment of one's merely physical attributes ^___ when in a few short years one will be dust and ashes. But isn't the intellectual equally unbalanced who overdevelops his logical and analytical skills to the neglect of body, emotions, and spirit? Is the intellectual wrestler all that superior to the physical one? Is one kind of hypertrophy better than another? What good is discursive hypertrophy if it is paid for in the coin of mystical and moral and physical atrophy?

Nihilist T-Shirt

On the front: Nothing matters!

On the back: And what if it did?

Mangan's Blog Has Been Removed

If you try to access Dennis Mangan's weblog you receive the message: Sorry, the blog at mangans.blogspot.com has been removed.  (HT: Malcolm Pollack)  If you were to ask me to speculate I would say that the forces of political correctness have something to do with this.  I quit using the Blogger/Blogspot platform almost six year ago, and I don't understand why people stick with it, apart from the fact that it is free.  Note the link to "report abuse" and "objectionable content" at the top of the Blogger homepage.  You can bet that idiots in great numbers will abuse this link, idiots who do not appreciate the good old classically liberal values of toleration, open inquiry, and free speech.

For more discussion of the Mangan case, see Malcolm Pollack's post Thoughtcrime, and a post by Laurence Auster. 

UPDATE (5:15 PM):  Mangan informs me that he is back in the saddle, here, at Typepad.

UPDATE (4 December):  I see that Mangan's old blog has been restored by the powers that be.  Interestingly, if you Google 'Mangan's' you are shown a link to his Racial Consciousness.  It  is but speculation on my part, but I should think that it is posts like this that certain people find objectionable, and that got him blacked out,  if only temporarily.

Go read the post and ask yourself if there is anything in it that a reasonable person could find 'hateful' or 'racist' or sufficiently objectionable to warrant censure.  If you answer in the affirmative, then you brand yourself as hopelessly obtuse, both morally and intellectually.

The Perils of Pleasure

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis:

The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a FLANEUR, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility. (Emphasis added.)

Compare the words Plato puts in the mouth of Socrates in the Phaedo:

. . . every pleasure and pain has a kind of nail, and nails and pins her [the soul] to the body, and gives her a bodily nature, making her think that whatever the body says is true. (tr. F. J. Church St. 83)

Sophocles on the Root of All Evil

Via Mike Gilleland, we read in Sophocles, Antigone 295-301 (tr. Hugh Lloyd-Jones):

There is no institution so ruinous for men as money; money sacks cities, money drives men from their homes! Money by its teaching perverts men's good minds so that they take to evil actions! Money has shown men how to practise villainy, and taught them impiousness in every action!

Mike has the Greek for you purists and elitists.

The Sophoclean sentiment, however, is quite false.  For a view with a much better chance of being true, see Radix Omnium Malorum.

Radix Omnium Malorum

One often hears that money is the root of all evil. But this cannot be true, since money is an abstract form of wealth, wealth is a good thing, and the root of all evil cannot be something good. Perhaps it is the love of money that is supposed to be the root of all evil. But this too is false. Given that money is a good thing, a certain love or desire for its acquisition and preservation is right and proper. To fail to value money would be as foolish as to fail to value physical health. Well then, is it the inordinate love of money that is the root of all evil? Not even this is true. For there are evils whose root is not the inordinate love of money. The most we can truly say is that the inordinate love of money is the root of some evils.

Visualize Using Your Turn Signals

This is one of my favorite bumper stickers, and not just because there are all too many motorists clogging the roads who seem unacquainted with the function of turn signals. The sticker is a parody of ‘Visualize World Peace’ (‘Visualize Whirled Peas’). Visualizing something as nebulous and utopian as world peace is about as pointless as the sort of visualizing going on in John Lennon’s silly ditty, “Imagine.”

If you want to improve the world, try visualizing some concrete action that it is in your power to perform such as letting a motorist enter your lane. Better, visualize an entire day in which you gratuitously offend no one in word or deed. Then take the next step: visualize an entire day in which you gratuitously offend no one in word or deed, and entertain no negative thoughts to boot. In the end, there is only one person over whose behavior you have any real control, namely, yourself. So if you are serious about improving the world, you can start with that guy. If you desire peace in the world, begin by making war against your lower self.

I am not saying that this is sufficient for world peace, but it may well be necessary.

From the Journal of a Discarded Man

I love reading journals, both of the famous and of the obscure. Among the latter, I find my own especially intriguing for some reason. Here is an excerpt from Journal of a Discarded Man by one Walter Morris. He was in his mid-fifties at the time of this entry and has recently lost his job:

29 December 1962, Saturday. Five more makes sixty. This thing is moving right along. At twenty-one I thought I was going to be twenty-one forever.("The feeling of immortality in youth," as old Hazlitt put it.) At thirty, one is taken aback; at forty, startled; at fifty, incredulous and depressed. Midway between fifty and sixty, time’s fleet foot seems fully revealed and I see no logical reason for being taken by surprise from now on out – but who’s logical? Today is a day for homilies and platitudes, old saws and bitter-sweet droppings. "If I had to do it all over again. . ." "If I knew then what I know now. . ." These pious exercises are all right, though. They take us away from our close work and present a vista, and in this focus Everyman is a philosopher.

All right. If I had to do it over again, I’d learn a trade (for bread and butter) and for the high, orbital shot I’d concentrate on painting. The pip-squeak world of the white-collar employee I’d avoid like the plague. This is hindsight, pure, fatuous and futile. . . (From Michael Rubin, Men Without Masks: Writings from the Journals of Modern Men, Addison-Wesley, 1980, p. 194.)