Maverick Philosopher

Saturday Night at the Oldies: 'Sunny' Songs

Last time the theme was 'rainy' songs.  To balance things out, here are some 'sunny' songs.  Donovan, To Try For the Sun.  Forgot what a great tune that is.  Might have been the mid-60's since I last heard it.  And then there's the moody Sunny Goodge Street by the same artist.  The Beatles, Here Comes the Sun. 

Jimi Hendrix, Third Stone From the Sun from his first album.  A bit of psychedelia from '67.  It's good to see that Mose Allison is still at it, at age 83.  Here is his quirky verson of "You Are My Sunshine."  I used to catch Mose at The Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, California, at the end of the '60s.  Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan try to do a duet of the same song.  If you can't stomach either of those versions, there is always Doris Day.

Cream, Sunshine of Your Love.  Bobby Hebb, Sunny (1966).  I had to reach my long arm far back into the musty mausoleum of moldy oldies for this Benny Goodman and Peggy Lee version of the old standard, The Sunny Side of the Street (1941). 

Finally, The Sun Also Rises, a tune that I heard in 1968 and have had in my head for four decades but haven't heard again until just now. For the last 42 years I have been trying without success to remember the name of the band and locate the tune.  'Fever Tree' it is, an obscure group that I heard together with Canned Heat at an L.A. club in '68.  If you remember them, I'll buy you a beer. 

An Atom Walks Into a Bar . . .

. . .  looking dejected. The bartender says, "What's wrong, pal?" The   atom replies, "I lost an electron." Bartender: "Are you sure?" Atom:  "I'm positive!"

Aquinas on Why Being Cannot Be a Genus

At 998b22 of his Metaphysics, Aristotle argues that being cannot be a genus. Thomas Aquinas gives his version of the argument in Summa Contra Gentiles, Book I, ch. 25, para. 6. I find the presentation of the doctor angelicus clearer than that of the philosophus. After quoting Thomas' argument, I will offer a rigorous reconstruction and explanation of it. The argument issues in an important conclusion, one highly relevant to my running battle with the partisans of the 'thin' conception of being.

The Anton C. Pegis translation reads as follows:

Now, that being cannot be a genus is proved by the Philosopher in the following way. If being were a genus we would have to find a difference to contract it to a species. But no difference shares in the genus in such a way that the genus is included in the notion of the difference, for thus the genus would be included twice in the definition of the species. Rather, the difference is outside what is understood in the nature of the genus. But there can be nothing that is outside that which is understood by being, if being is included in the concept of the things of which it is predicated. Thus, being cannot be contracted by any difference. Being is, therefore, not a genus. (127)

Quod autem ens non possit esse genus, probatur per Philosophum in hunc modum: Si ens esset genus, oporteret differentiam aliquam inveniri, per quam traheretur ad speciem; nulla autem differentia participat genus, ita scilicet quod genus sit in ratione differentiae; quia sic genus poneretur bis in diffinitione speciei. Sed oportet differentiam esse praeter id quod intellegitur in ratione generis. Nihil autem potest esse quod sit praeter id quod intelligitur per ens, si ens sit de intellectu eorum de quibus praedicatur; et sic per nullam differentiam contrahi potest. Relinquitur ergo quod ens non sit genus.

I think it best to reconstruct the argument as a reductio ad absurdum. In such a style of proof one attempts to derive a contradiction (a logical absurdity) from an assumption together with premises that are believed by the producer and the consumers of the argument to be incontrovertible. The emergence of a contradiction shows that the assumption is false.

Ralph McInerny (1929-2010)

Ralph McInerny has died.

Augustine and the Child at the Seashore: Trinitarian Metatheory

I was told this story as a child by a nun. One day St. Augustine was walking along the seashore, thinking about the Trinity. He came upon a child who had dug a hole in the sand and was busy filling it with buckets of seawater.

Augustine: "What are you doing?"

Child: "I am trying to empty the ocean into this hole."

Augustine: "But that’s impossible!"

Child: "No more impossible than your comprehending the Trinity."

The point of the story is that the Trinity is a mystery beyond our comprehension.  It is true, even though we cannot understand how could it be true, where 'could' expresses epistemic possibility.  It is a non-contradictory truth that lies beyond our mental horizon.  Could there be such truths?

Note that there are at least three other ways of thinking about the Trinity doctrine.  One could take the view that the doctrine is both true and contradictory, along the lines of dialetheism according to which there are some true contradictions. (b) Or one could take the view that the doctrine is all of the following: true, non-contradictory, and intelligible to us, even though we cannot know it to be true by reason unaided by revelation.  Under this head would fall putative solutions to the consistency problem that aim to provide an adequate model or analogy, a model or analogy sufficient to render the orthodox doctrine intelligible to us.  (c) Finally, one could take the line that the doctrine is contradictory and therefore false.

Thus there appear to be at least four meta-theories of the orthodox Trinity doctrine.  These are theories about the logico-epistemic status of the doctrine.  We could call them Mysterianism, Dialetheism, Intelligibilism, and Incoherentism.  The last two terms are my own coinages.

Note that I have been talking about  orthodox (Athanasian) Trinity doctrine.  But religion and theology are, I would urge, open-ended, analogously as science is, and so there is no bar to theological innovation and development.  Perhaps one of the doctrines that got itself branded 'heretical' can be rehabilitated and made to work. It is worth pondering that the orthodox are heretics to the heretics:  had a given heretical sect acquired sufficient power and influence, had it drawn to its side the best minds and most persuasive exponents, then it would not be heretical but orthodox.

Everyone likes to think of his own doxa as orthotes but not every doxa can be such on pain of contradiction.  So we ought to be humble.  Apply the honorific 'orthodox' to your doctrine if you like, but smile as you do so.

Trinity and Set Theory

Let S and T be mathematical sets. Now consider the following two propositions:

1. S is a proper subset of T.

2. S and T have the same number of elements.

Are (1) and (2) consistent? That is, can they both be true? If yes, explain how.

If you think (1) and (2) are consistent, then consider whether there is anything to the following analogy. If there is, explain the analogy. There is a set G. G has three disjoint proper subsets, F, S, H. All four sets agree in cardinality: they have the same number of elements.

Of Blood and Blog

I don't think my experience is unusual: our blood relatives tend not to give a hoot about our blogging activities. They say blood is thicker than water, but consanguinity  sure doesn't seem to translate into  spiritual affinity. No matter, the community that we can't find by blood, we'll find by blog.

The people who know us take us for granted. Is it not written that "no prophet is welcome in his hometown"? (Luke 4, 24: nemo propheta acceptus est in patria sua.)

One could call it the injustice of propinquity. We often underestimate those nearby, whether by blood or space, while overestimating those afar.

An Escape From Reality?

If someone tells you that philosophy is an escape from reality, reply: "You tell me what reality is, and I'll tell you whether philosophy is an escape from it."

The point, of course, is that all assertions about reality and its evasions are philosophical assertions that embroil the objector in the very thing from which he seeks to distance himself.

From the Mail: Trinity and Incarnation

Dr. Vallicella,

Thank you for some exceptionally helpful posts lately! Regarding your point

(1) “Is there a clear scriptural basis for the doctrine of the Trinity?”

It would seem that a part of that question, or perhaps a prior question to it is:

 (1*) “Is there a clear scriptural basis for the doctrine of the Incarnation?”

It was because early Christians came to believe that Jesus of Nazareth was divine/God  that the question of how a divine Christ/God-Christ related to the ‘Father God’ to whom he prayed and in whom the Christians also first believed.  As a theologically-trained former minister, who still tries to keep up with contemporary work on the historical Jesus, I must confess that I fail to see that (1*) is the case, therefore I fail to see that (1) is the case.

 Mark Weldon Whitten, PhD   

The Reclusive J. D. Salinger Dies at 91

Here.

We who are obscure ought to be grateful for it.  It is wonderful to be able to walk down the street and be taken for an average schmuck.  A lttle recognition from a few high-quality individuals is all one needs.  Fame can be a curse.   The unhinged Mark David Chapman, animated by Holden Caulfield's animus against phoniness, decided that John Lennon was a phony, and so had to be shot.

The mad pursuit of empty celebrity by so many in our society shows their and its spiritual vacuity.

 

 

UPDATE (1/30/10):  Apparently, today's teens cannot relate to Holden Caulfield.

Some Questions About the Trinity Distinguished

It may help to distinguish the following questions.

1. Is there a clear scriptural basis for the doctrine of the Trinity?

2. Is the doctrine, as formulated in the Athanasian creed and related canonical documents, true?

3. Is it possible for human reason, unaided by divine revelation, to know the doctrine to be true?

4. Is the doctrine of the Trinity possibly true?

5. Is the doctrine thinkable (conceivable) without contradiction?

I have little to say about the exegetical (1) since it is beyond my competence as a philosopher. I cannot pronounce upon (2), either for or against, until I have decided (4) and (5). The same goes for the epistemological question, (3). My present interest is in (4) and (5), which are logically prior to the first three, with (5) being logically prior to (4). 

(4) and (5) are distinct questions. An affirmative answer to (5) does not entail an affirmative answer to (4). This is because conceivability is no sure guide to real (extramental) possibility. Of the two questions, (5) comes first in the order of inquiry: if we cannot think the Trinity without contradiction, how could we advance to the further question of whether it is really possible?

(5) is the question at the center of my interest.

It is difficult to get some people to appreciate the force and importance of (5) because they are dogmatists who accept the Trinity doctrine as true simply because they were brought up to believe it, or because it is something their church teaches.  Since they accept it as true, no question of its logical coherence arises for them.  And so they think that anyone who questions the doctrine must not understand it.  To 'set the objector straight' they then repeat the very verbal formulas the logical coherence of which is in question.  "What's the problem? There is one God in three divine Persons!"  They think that if they only repeat the formulas often enough, then the objector will 'get it.'  But it is they who do not get it, since they do not understand the logical problems to which the doctrinal formulations give rise.

Or the adherent may think that the objector is merely 'attacking' or polemicizing against his faith; it doesn't occur to the adherent that there are people whose love of truth is so strong that they will not accept claims without examination.  Now if one examines the creedal formulations, one will see that the gist of the Trinity doctrine is as follows:

1. Monotheism: There is exactly one God.

2. Divinity of Persons:  The Father is God; the Son is God; the Holy Ghost is God.

3. Distinctness of Persons:  The Father is not the Son; and the Holy Ghost is not the Father or the Son.

The problem is to show how these propositions are logically consistent, that is, how they can all be true, but without falling into heresy.  If you cannot see the problem, you are not paying attention, or you lack intelligence, or your thought-processes are being distorted by ideological commitments.  Whatever you think of Brower and Rea's solution to the problem, their exposition of it is very clear and I recommend it to you.  My reason for not accepting their solution is here.

 

Haiku Commentary on Marx's 11th Thesis on Feuerbach

The Marxist Nowhere Man
Attempts to change
What he does not understand.

Bertrand Russell on Arabic Philosophy

The following passage is from Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1945), p. 427. I found it here, but without a link and without a reference. So, exploiting the resources of my well-stocked library, I located the passage, and verified that it had been properly transcribed. Whether Russell is being entirely fair to the Arabs is a further question.

Arabic philosophy is not important as original thought. Men like Avicenna and Averroes are essentially commentators. Speaking generally, the views of the more scientific philosophers come from Aristotle and the Neoplatonists in logic and metaphysics, from Galen in medicine, from Greek and Indian sources in mathematics and astronomy, and among mystics religious philosophy has also an admixture of old Persian beliefs. Writers in Arabic showed some originality in mathematics and in chemistry; in the latter case, as an incidental result of alchemical researches. Mohammedan civilization in its great days was admirable in the arts and in many technical ways, but it showed no capacity for independent speculation in theoretical matters. Its importance, which must not be underrated, is as a transmitter. Between ancient and modern European civilization, the dark ages intervened. The Mohammedans and the Byzantines, while lacking the intellectual energy required for innovation, preserved the apparatus of civilization, books, and learned leisure. Both stimulated the West when it emerged from barbarism; the Mohammedans chiefly in the thirteenth century, the Byzantines chiefly in the fifteenth. In each case the stimulus produced new thought better than that produced by the transmitters -- in the one case scholasticism, in the other the Renaissance (which however had other causes also).

What Explains the Hard Left's Toleration of Militant Islam?

From 1789 on, a defining characteristic of the Left has been hostility to religion, especially in its institutionalized forms. This goes together with a commitment to such Enlightenment values as individual liberty, belief in reason, and equality, including equality among the races and between the sexes. Thus the last thing one would expect from the Left is an alignment with militant Islam given the latter’s philosophically unsophisticated religiosity bordering on rank superstition, its totalitarian moralism, and its opposition to gender equality.

So why is the radical Left soft on militant Islam?  The values of the progressive creed are antithetic to those of the Islamists, and it is quite clear that if the Islamists got everything they wanted, namely, the imposition of Islamic law on the entire world, our dear progressives would soon find themselves headless. I don’t imagine that theylong to live under Sharia, where ‘getting stoned’ would have more than metaphorical meaning. So what explains this bizarre alignment?

On the Trinity: A Medievalist Takes Me to Task

 Long-time reader Michael Sullivan e-mails:

In my experience a lot of the problems in modern philosophy of religion come about from not taking enough care to get right the religious position the philosopher is analyzing. Part of this difficulty stems from the way terminology shifts across the centuries, so that the modern philosopher takes for granted an anachronistic understanding of key terms.

I think something like this is happening in your most recent post "Some Water Analogies for the Trinity". You write: " The sense in which water is a substance is not the sense in which God is a substance. Water is a substance in the sense of a stuff; God is a substance in the sense of a hypostasis (that which stands under) orhypokeimenon (that which is placed under), or as I prefer to say, an individual."

From the standpoint of traditional, classical Trinitarian theology, this is incorrect. God is a substance neither in the sense of stuff (hyle) nor in the sense of individual (hypostasis). Here's a representative explanatory snippet from St John of Damascus, showing the universal traditional use of the terms, from "De Fide Orthodoxa" c.48: "Substantia quidem communem speciem et complectivam speciem homoiodon (id est earum quae unum sunt specie) hypostaseon (id est personarum) significat, utputa Deus, homo; hypostasis autem atomon (id est individuum) demonstrat, scilicet Patrem, Filium, Spiritum Sanctum, Petrum, Paulum."

So "substance" here means something like "essence" or "being" (in the sense of ousia) rather than hypostasis; the whole doctrine of the Trinity depends on this distinction between the one nature, substance, being, essence, etc. on the one hand and the three individual persons or hypostases on the other. In most cases where there is one existing human nature (man), there is one individual hypostasis (Peter or Paul); in the case of the Trinity there is one divine nature (God) instantiated in three hypostases (Father and Son and Holy Spirit); conversely, in the Incarnation there are two existing natures (God and man), but only one hypostasis (Christ the Incarnate Logos).

I hope you don't think this too presumptuous; but Christian doctrine really does turn to unintelligible mush in these crucial distinctions are not carefully preserved.

Does Trinity Entail Quaternity?

Christianity, like the other two Abrahamic religions, is monotheistic. But unlike Judaism and Islam, Christianity holds to a trinitarian conception of God. The idea, spelled out in the Athanasian Creed, is that there is one God in three divine Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Each person is God, and yet there is exactly one God, despite the fact that the Persons are distinct from one another. How is this possible? How can Christians convince Jews and Muslims that their position is logically tenable and does not collapse into tritheism, and thus into polytheism to the detriment of the divine unity and transcendence?

Here is one problem. God is said to be tripersonal: the one God somehow includes three numerically distinct Persons. But none of these Persons is tripersonal. The Father is not tripersonal. The Son is not tripersonal. The Holy Ghost is not tripersonal. Now if two things differ in a property, then they cannot be identical. (This is the irreproachable principle of the Indiscernibility of Identicals expressed in its contrapositive form.) Now God and each of the Persons differs in point of tripersonality: God is tripersonal while no Person is tripersonal.  It follows that God is not identical to the Father, nor to the Son, nor to the Holy Ghost. Therefore, God is not identical to any of the Persons, whence it follows that God is distinct from each of the three Persons. And if God is distinct from each of the Persons, then he is a Fourth. 

Is God a divine person? If you say yes, then we are on our way to the Quaternity, the doctrine that there is one God in four divine Persons. For if God is not identical to the Father, or to the Son, or or to the Holy Ghost, each of which is a person, and God is a person, then there are four – count ‘em – four Persons.

Some doctrines in philosophy threaten to collapse into others. Thus mind-brain identity theory threatens to collapse into eliminativism about the mind. Other doctrines seem to want to expand. How do we keep the Trinity from expanding into the Quaternity? The attentive reader will have noticed that the argument can be iterated. If the Three-in-One becomes a Four-in-One, how avoid a Five-in-One, ad infinitum?

Some Water Analogies for the Trinity

The following is based partially on H. A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers, Volume One: Faith, Trinity, Incarnation (Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 359-363.

Hippolytus: The Logos comes from the Father as water from a fountain.

Tertullian: The Father is to the Logos as fountain is to river. One substance assumes two forms.

Lactantius: The Father is an overflowing fountain, the Son a stream flowing from it.

Zeno of Verona: Father and Son are two seas filled with the same water which, though two, are yet one.

Vallicella of Arizona: Water occurs in three distinct states, the gaseous, the liquid, and the solid. One and and the same quantity of water can assume any of these three states. Distinctness of states is compatible with oneness of substance.

Of the water analogies, I like the last one best (!) despite its being as worthless as the others. All four involve an equivocation on ‘substance.’ The sense in which water is a substance is not the sense in which God is a substance. Water is a substance in the sense of a stuff; God is a substance in the sense of a hypostasis (that which stands under) or hypokeimenon (that which is placed under), or as I prefer to say, an individual. Note also that a quantity of H₂O can be in the three states only successively not simultaneously whereas God is 'simultaneously' the three Persons.

Of course, there are better physical analogies, light for example, and also nonphysical analogies such as the soul (Augustine). Something on this later. My only point is that these water analogies do nothing to render the Trinity doctrine intelligible, hence no one should be convinced by them.

Neglected Philosophers

It is unfortunate that a philosopher like Heidegger receives a vast amount of attention, and indeed more than he deserves, while a philosopher such as Wolfgang Cramer is scarcely read at all. I have German correspondents who have first heard of Cramer from me, an American. I admit to being part of the problem: I have published half a dozen articles on Heidegger, but not one on Cramer, or on Maurice Blondel, or on Constantin Brunner, or on Brand Blanshard.

Jacques Derrida is another philosopher who has received an excess of attention. (Because he out-Heidegger's Heidegger?)  Why read him when you can read Blondel or Blanshard? Just because he has made a big splash and people are talking about him? Are you a philosopher or a fashionista?  Form your own opinion. Try this. Set a volume of Derrida side by side with a volume of Blanshard. Read a few pages back and forth. Then ask who you are more likely to learn something from. But being as perverse as we are, we often prefer the far-out, novel and radical, even when  incoherent, to the boringly solid and sensible.

Trinitarian Reading Material

Dale Tuggy's Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, Trinity, provides a good overview.  The specialist blog, Trinities, to which he contributes will also be of interest.  Here is Richard Cartwright's excellent "On the Logical Problem of the Trinity."  Caveat lector: it contains a few scanning errors. Essential reading nonetheless.  Cartwright rejects Peter Geach's relative identity solution.  For a defense of the relative identity approach, see A, P. Martinich, Identity and Trinity. (Requires access to JSTOR.  What? You say you don't have access to JSTOR?  How do you live without it?)

Jeffrey Brouwer and Michael Rea, Material Constitution and the Trinity.  For William Lane Craig's critique, see Does the Problem of Material Constitution Illuminate The Doctrine of The Trinity? 

That barely scratches the surface, but should keep you busy for a while.

By the way, don't confuse the diagram with the doctrine.  It is a graphic 'aid' which probably does more harm than good.  Philosophical thinking is not picture-thinking.  As Hegel might have said, Philosophisches Denken ist nicht vorstellendes, sondern begriffliches, Denken.

The Naturalist's Version of Fides Quaerens Intellectum

Theism in its various forms faces numerous threats to its truth and coherence. Christianity, for example, is committed to doctrines such as the Trinity whose very coherence is in doubt. And all classical theists face the problem of evil, the problem of reconciling the fact of evil with the existence of a God who is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Faced with an objection like the one from evil, theists typically don’t give up their belief; keeping the faith, they seek an understanding both of it and its compatibility with the facts and considerations alleged to be inconsistent with it.

What I want to argue is that naturalists employ the principle of Faith Seeking Understanding no less than theists. Naturalism faces numerous threats to its truth and coherence. Let’s start with what philosophers call the phenomenon of intentionality, the peculiar directedness to an object that characterizes (some) mental states. It is very difficult to understand how a purely physical state, a state of the brain for example, could be of, or about, something distinct from it, something that need not exist to be the object of the state in question. How could a physical state have semantic properties, or be true or false? How could a piece of meat be in states that MEAN anything? How do you get meaning out of meat? By squeezing hard? By injecting it with steroids? Does a sufficiently complex hunk of meat suddenly become a semantic engine? How could a brain state, for example, be either true or false? This suggests an argument:

Chess: Game or Sport?

Paul Weiss, Sport: A Philosophic Inquiry (Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), pp. 142-143:

Hockey demands bodily exertion. Like every other sport, it tests what a rule-abiding man can bodily be and do. Though chess also has rules, and these have a history, and though a masterly game makes considerable demands on the stamina of the players, chess is not a sport because it does not test what a man is as a body. Mind and body more or less reverse their roles in these two cases. In hockey judgment and determination are subservient to bodily achievement, but in chess the body is used only to make possible a more effective judgment and determination.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Rain Theme

Here in the Zone and elsewhere in the West we are getting a much-needed soaking. And that puts me in mind of my favorite rain songs. 

Fire and Rain is particularly appropriate for California: first the wildfires strip the land of vegetation, then the rains come and bring on mudslides.  Didn't James Taylor have an album called Mudslide Slim? 

Dee Clark, Raindrops.  Cascades, Rythm of the Rain (1963). 

The Beatles' Rain 'blew my mind' back in '66.

And of course there is the lovely Gordon Lightfoot composition, Early Morning Rain, here performed in 1966 by PP&M.  Dylan's version is also very nice.

Speaking of America's troubadour, we cannot omit his Hard Rain, written in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Dylan was a great writer of topical songs because he knew how to make them poetic and not too obvious.

Rainy Day Women #12 & 35?  Dylan's worst song.  Doesn't deserve a link.  But his "Buckets of Rain" (from Blood on the Tracks) is another story.  Here is Maria Muldaur's version.  Remember her?  And Dave van Ronk's.

De Trinitate: The Statue/Lump Analogy and the 'Is' of Composition

Thanks to Bill Clinton, it is now widely appreciated that much rides on what the meaning of ‘is’ is. Time was, when only philosophers were aware of this. In our Trinitarian explorations with the help of our Jewish atheist friend Peter we have discussed the ‘is’ of identity and the ‘is’ of predication. We saw that ‘The Father is God’ could be construed as

1. The Father is identical to God

or as

2. The Father is divine.

Both construals left us with logical trouble. If each of the Persons is identical to God, and there is exactly one God, then (given the transitivity and symmetry of identity) there is exactly one Person. On the other hand, if each of the Persons is divine, where ‘is’ functions as copula, then tri-theism is the upshot. Either way, we end up contradicting a central Trinitarian tenet.

But there is also the ‘is’ of composition as when we say, ‘This countertop is marble,’ or in my house, ‘This countertop is faux marble.’ ‘Is’ here is elliptical for ‘is composed of.’ Compare: ‘That jacket is leather,’ and ‘This beverage is whisky.’ To say that a jacket is leather is not to say that it is identical to leather – otherwise it would be an extremely large jacket – or that it has leather as a property: leather is not a property. A jacket is leather by being made out of leather.

Suppose you have a statue S made out for some lump L of material, whether marble, bronze, clay, or whatever. How is S related to L? It seems clear that L can exist without S existing. Thus one could melt the bronze down, or re-shape the clay. In either case, the statue would cease to exist, while the quantity of matter would continue to exist. It follows that S is not identical to L. They are not identical because something is true of L that is not true of S: it is true of L that it can exist without S existing, but it is not true of S that it can exist without S existing.   I am assuming the following principle, one that seems utterly beyond reproach:

(InId)  If x = y, whatever is true of x is true of y, and vice versa.

(This is a rough formulation of the Indiscenibility of Identicals.  A more careful formulation would block  such apparent counterexamples  as:  Maynard G. Krebs believes that the morning star is a planet but does not believe that the evening star is a planet.)

Returning to the statue and the lump, although S is not identical to L, S is not wholly distinct, or wholly diverse, from L either. This is because S cannot exist unless L exists. This suggests the following analogy: The Father is to God as the statue is to the lump of matter out of which it is sculpted. And the same goes for the other Persons. Schematically, P is to G as S to L. The Persons are like hylomorphic compounds where the hyle in question is the divine substance. Thus the Persons are not each identical to God, which would have the consequence that they are identical to one another. Nor are the persons instances of divinity which would entail tri-theism. It is rather than the persons are composed of God as of a common material substance. Thus we avoid a unitarianism in which there is no room for distinctness of Persons, and we avoid tri-theism. So far, so good.

Something like this approach is advocated by Jeffrey Brower and Michael Rea, here.

But does the statue/lump analogy avoid the problems we faced with the water analogy? Aren’t the two analogies so closely analogous that they share the same problems? Liquid, solid, and gaseous are states of water. Similarly, a statue is a state of a lump of matter. Modalism is not avoided. If the Persons are like states, then they are not sufficiently independent. But a statue is even worse off than a state of water. Water can be in one of its states whether or not we exist. But a hunk of matter cannot be a statue unless beings like us are on the scene to interpret it as a statue. Thus my little ceramic bust of Beethoven represents Beethoven only because we take it as representing the great composer. In a world without minds, it would not represent anything. The Persons of the Trinity, however, are in no way dependent on us for their being Persons of the Trinity.

It might be counterargued that water is not to its states as lump to statue. Water must be in one of its three states, but a lump of bronze need not be in any statue-state. That is indeed a point of disanalogy between the two analogies. But notice that God and the Persons are necessarily related: God cannot exist without the Persons. A lump of bronze can exist without being a statue. In this respect, the water analogy is better: water must be in one its three states just as God must be composed of the three Persons.

Besides the threat of modalism, there is also the fact that God is not a substance in the sense in which clay and water are substances. Thus God is not a stuff or hyle, but a substance in the sense of a hypostasis or hypokeimenon. And it does no good to say that God is an immaterial or nonphysical stuff since what must be accommodated is the divine unity. The ground of divine unity cannot be matter whether physical or nonphysical. We saw that one and the same quantity of H₂0 cannot be simultaneously and throughout liquid, solid, and gaseous. Similarly, one and the same quantity of bronze cannot be simultaneously and throughout three different statues. Connected with this is how God could be a hylomorphic compound, or any sort of compound, given the divine simplicity which rules out all composition in God.

In sum, the statue/lump analogy is not better than the water/state analogy. Neither explains how we can secure both unity of the divine nature and distinctness of Persons.

Is The Doctrine of the Trinity Logically Coherent? (Peter Lupu)

In this installment, Peter Lupu, atheist, defends the logical coherence of the doctrine of the Trinity.  My critical comments follow in blue.

It may be somewhat of an astonishment to those who know me well that I should venture to defend the doctrine of the Trinity. I am not a Christian; I am not religious; I am an atheist; and I have at least on one occasion privately expressed to Bill my reservations about the coherence of the Trinity doctrine. Nevertheless, there is a question here that deserves exploring. What is the question?

Gratry on Trinity and Mystery

Alphonse Gratry (1805-1872), Logic, tr. H and M. Singer (Open Court, 1944), p. 336:

What does Catholic theology have to say about unity in the Trinity, and of the Trinity in unity? It teaches that the unity and the Trinity are not expressed in the same respect but in two different respects: absolute unity of nature; absolute trinity of persons. The nature of God, which is one, is not triple; that would be a contradiction in terms . . . ; the nature is purely, simply, and absolutely one. The persons, in their turn, which are three, are not one at all; they are purely, simply, and absolutely three. Doubtless the mystery still remains, but reason . . . is completely maintained here, veiled, it is true, but unimpaired: indeed, instead of unimpaired, I might say that it is divinely sustained.

I'm a Racist Because I Disagree with You?

Then you are a racist for disagreeing with me. For I have a race too.  I'm a sexist because I dissent from your opinion?  Then you are a sexist for disagreeing with me.  For I have a sex too.  I'm an ageist because I don't buy your point of view?  Then you are an ageist for disagreeing with me.  For I have an age too.

And one more thing.  It is your liberal-left adherence to the double standard that make it impossible for you to 'get it.'

Could It Be LIke This?

Every finite thing is vain, empty, fleeting, devoid of self-nature or own-being, ontologically and axiologically ambiguous, an admixture of being and nonbeing, of value and disvalue, anatta.  And the system of these finitudes, the whole lot of them?  The same.  And beyond the system?  Nothing.

On Owning Land

Blaise Pascal, Pensées #113 (Krailsheimer tr., p. 59):

It is not in space that I must seek my human dignity, but in the ordering of my thought. It will do me no good to own land. Through space the universe grasps me and swallows me up like a speck; through thought I grasp it. 

Pascal is right:  what good will owning acres and acres of land do me? In the end a man needs only -- six feet.  And before the end I should be seeking truth, not lusting after land.  So I remind myself when the urge to buy land grips me.

Henri Frederic Amiel on the French Mind

From The Private Journal of Henri Frederic Amiel, tr. Brooks and Brooks (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1935), pp. 428-429:

22 December 1874. Written in the South of France. – Gioberti says that the French mind assumes only the form of truth and, by isolating this, exaggerates it, in such a way that it dissolves the realities with which it is concerned. I express the same thing by the word speciousness. It takes the shadow for the object, the word for the thing, the appearance for the reality and the abstract formula for the truth. It does not go beyond intellectual assignats. Its gold is pinch-beck, its diamond paste; the artificial and the conventional suffice for it. When one talks with a Frenchman about art, language, religion, the State, duty, the family, one feels from his way of talking that his thought remains outside the object, that it does not enter its substance, its marrow. He does not seek to understand it in its inwardness, but only to say something specious about it. This spirit is superficial and yet not comprehensive; it pricks the surface of things shrewdly enough, and yet it does not penetrate. It wishes to enjoy itself in relation to things; but it has not the respect, the disinterestedness, the patience and the self-forgetfulness that are necessary for contemplating things as they really are. Far from being the philosophic spirit, it is an abortive counterfeit of it, for it does not help to resolve any problem and it remains powerless to grasp that which is living, complex and concrete. Abstraction is it original vice, presumption its incurable eccentricity and speciousness its fatal limit.

The French language can express nothing that is budding or germinating; it depicts only effects, results the caput mortuum, and not the cause, the movement, the force, the becoming of any sort of phenomenon. It is analytical and descriptive, but it does not make one understand anything. . .

The thirst for truth is not a French passion. In everything, what appears is more relished than what is, the outside than the inside, the style than the stuff, the glittering than the useful, opinion than conscience. . . .

Conceivability and Epistemic Possibility

My disembodied existence is conceivable (thinkable without apparent logical contradiction by me and beings like me). But does it follow that my disembodied existence is possible? Sydney Shoemaker floats the suggestion that this inference is invalid, resting as he thinks on a confusion of epistemic with metaphysical possibility. (Identity, Cause, and Mind, p. 155, n. 13.)  Shoemaker writes, "In the sense in which I can conceive of myself existing in disembodied form, this comes to the fact that it is compatible with what I know about my essential nature . . . that I should exist in disembodied form.  From this it does not follow that my essential nature is in fact such as to permit me to exist indisembodied form."

We need to think about the relation between conceivability and epistemic possibility if we are to get clear about the inferential link, if any, between conceivability and metaphysical possibility.   Pace Shoemaker, I will suggest that the inference from conceivability to metaphysical possibility need not rest on a confusion of epistemic with metaphysical possibility.  But it all depends on how we define these terms. 

The Aporetics of Reference to Past Individuals

'Ocham' responds: 

You say "Although Caesar no longer exists, he did exist, and so it is reasonable to take 'Caesar' as having a referent. " It would be correct to say that the proper name 'Caesar' *had* a referent. But does it *have* a referent? If it has (present tense) a referent, then there is a relation:

refers('Caesar', Caesar)

between the word and *something*. And if we accept that a *something* has to be an existing thing, we have the paradox that Caesar does not exist, but that 'Caesar' refers to *something*, and so he does exist after all.

The medievals were more conscious of this paradox because they were before Einstein. After Einstein, we have this sense that things that existed in the past are in some sense still existing, because time is a dimension of space, and because everything in space exists. So we don't see the problem of the referent of 'Caesar' in the way we see a problem with the referent of 'Zeus'.

I tend to side with the medievals. Einstein gives us no philosophical justification for the view that things do not *change* over time, which includes a change from existing to not existing. And if the referent of a proper name may cease to exist through being corrupted, how is it that a semantic relation can still exist between the name (which admittedly still exists) and the referent (which doesn't)?

This is an excellent objection and it shows that what I said is far from self-evident. The problem may be set forth as an aporetic triad:

1.  Reference is a relation that presupposes the existence of its relata.

2.  There is reference to past individuals.

3.  Presentism: The present alone exists; past and future items do not exist.

The limbs of this triad cannot all be true.  The conjunction of (1) and (2) entails the negation of (3).  The conjunction of (1) and (3) entails the negation of (2).  And the conjunction of  (2) and (3) entails the negation of (1). 

The triad is interesting because each of its limbs has a strong claim on our acceptance.  And yet they cannot all be true.  To solve the problem one must reject one of the limbs.  But which one?  It seems to me that (2) is the least rejectable of the three.  Surely we do refer to past individuals using proper names.  Boston's Scollay Square no longer exists.  But I nonetheless refer to it when I say 'My father visited Scollay Square while on shore leave during WWII.'  I should think that 'Scollay Square' is just as referential as 'Harvard Square.'  Since (2) is the most datanic of the three limbs, it is the least rejectable.  This leaves (1) and (2). 

One could reject (1) by maintaining that reference is a relation that presupposes the existence or the having existed of its relata.  Or one could reject (3) by adopting a B-theoryof time according to which past, present, and future items all enjoy tenseless existence.  Neither of these solutions is without difficulty.

Nun Run

Some in the habit of running run in a habit.  Might be fun to run with a nun.

Balık baştan kokar

Balık baştan kokar is Turkish for "The fish stinks from the head."  Quite apropos of the Obama administration the corruption, incompetence, and stupidity of which boggles the mind. He's done everything wrong.  But there is hope: Obama's fiscal irresponsibility and liberty-destroying socialist malfeasance has suffered a massive rebuke in, of all places, the People's Republic of Taxachusetts. Here are the precinct-by-precinct statistics of Brown's win over Coakley in the Bay State.  (Perhaps it should be called the Pay State.)  The results for Cambridge precinct show a whopping 84% for Coakley (DEM) and a paltry 15% for Brown (GOP).  No surprise there, of course.  You know what Cambridge is home to.

Hallmark of the Left: The Double-Standard

Here.

Still More on Alienans Constructions

Our old friend 'Ocham' writes:

I read your discussion of 'alienans' with interest. It is another of those interesting words (like 'inexistence') that look as though it comes from scholastic philosophy, but apparently doesn't. I use my Latin site searcher  in cases of doubt - this analyses texts of specific writers and periods. None of the great scholastic writers, not even so late a one as Suarez, use the term in this sense - indeed they hardly use it at all. They did use the term 'deminuens' in a very similar context. From the Scotus I am currently busy with:

Et sic potest concedi quod Caesar non est homo vivus, sed mortuus; et quod mortuum illo modo non deminuit ab homine, nec infert non-hominem. (And so it can be conceded that Caesar is not a living man, but dead; and that being ‘dead’ in this way does not take away from ‘man’, nor imply [that Caesar is] a non-man).

The context is the question whether 'Caesar is a man' is true or false. Scotus thinks it is true. Simon of Faversham says it is false. Roger Bacon, rather like Gareth Evans and the modern direct referentialists, think it has no truth value at all. (" ‘Caesar is Caesar’ signifies nothing... nor is it a proposition nor does it signify either what is true or false, because the whole ‘statement’ does not signify because of one or two parts that do not signify"). Note the appeal to the Fregean idea of compositionality here - the meaning of the whole is determined by the meaning of its parts. If one or more parts are meaningless, so is the whole.

Bacon's view was rightly derided by his contemporaries in Oxford and Paris.

I learned about alienans adjectives from Barry Miller who I believe borrowed the terminology from Peter Geach.  From which writers Geach got the term I don't know.  An interesting question is whether 'dead' in 'Caesar is a dead man' is an alienans adjective as I have explained this term in the post linked to above.  Clearly, artificial leather is not leather.  So 'artificial' in this context is alienans.  And if so-and-so is the alleged assailant, it does not follow that he is the assailant.  So 'alleged' in this context is alienans.  Is a dead man a man?  Although it is not so clear, I am inclined to say that a dead man is a man in agreement with Scotus.

I am also inclined to agree with Scotus that 'Caesar is a man' is true.  Although Caesar no longer exists, he did exist, and so it is reasonable to take 'Caesar' as having a referent.  (Once referential, always referential.) It is not like 'Pegasus.'  There was an individual, Caesar, but there is no individual, Pegasus.  'Pegasus' has sense but no referent.  Furthermore, Caesar's having died did not remove him from the class of men.  A dead man is a man. (I grant that this is not obvious.) Simon of Faversham, I take it, thinks the sentence false because he thinks a dead man is not a man.  Ths is not obviously wrong. 

As for Bacon's view, it sounds crazy, a piece of wildly revisionary philosophy of language.  Of course, 'Caesar is a man' has a truth-value!  And this, even if we say that 'Caesar' lacks a referent.  For whether or not it has a referent it has a sense.  What exactly did those Medieval dudes mean by 'signify'?  Were they riding roughshod over Frege's Sinn/Bedeutung distinction -- to put it anachronistically?

So I agree with 'Ocham' that Bacon's view was rightly derided.

 

Another Example of a Vicious Infinite Regress: Philosophical Investigations, Sec. 239

I am collecting examples of infinite regress arguments in philosophy. See the category Infinite Regress Arguments.  Here is one that is suggested by section 239 of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. When I hear the word 'red,' how do I know which color is being referred to?  The following answer might be given:  'Red' refers to the color of the mental image that hearing the word elicits.  But then the question arises once again:  How do I know that the color of the mental image is the color to which 'red' refers?  Do I need a criterion for that as well?  If I do, then I am embarked upon an infinite regress, one that is vicious.

Why is it vicious?  Most of us know which color 'red' refers to.  But how do we know it?  To ask how we know this is to request an epistemological (and therefore a philosophical) explanation.  But if the explanation is that 'red' refers to the color of the mental image that hearing the word elicits, then, although we have answered the initial question, we have  answered it in a way that allows the posing of a second question of the same form as the first.  And so on.

The Citadel of the Here and Now

Retreat ever and again into the citadel of the Here and Now, and the dragons of elsewhere and elsewhen will turn to chimeras.

Conceivability, Possibility, Self, and Body

A reader sent me the following argument which he considers a good one:

1. It is conceivable that I exist without my present body (or any part of it).
2. Therefore, it is possible that I exist without my present body (or any part of it).
3. Therefore, I have a property P that my body does not, namely, being such that possibly, I exist when my body (or any part of it) doesn't.
4. Therefore, I am not my body (or any part of it).

The argument as it stands is enthymematic.  The inferential move from (3) to (4) requires an auxiliary premise, one which is easily supplied.  It is the contrapositive of the Identity of Indiscernibles, and so we can call it the Discernibility of the Diverse, to wit: If two things differ in respect of a property, then they are numerically diverse (not numerically identical).  That is a rough formulation, but it is good enough for present purposes.  With the assistance of DD, the move from (3) to (4) is unproblematic.

I should think the move from (2) to (3) is also unproblematic.  The inference from (1) to (2), however, puzzles me and troubles me.  I accept the conclusion: I cannot for the life of me see how I could be strictly and numerically identical to my body or any part of it.  So I would like the above argument, or a reasonable facsimile, to be valid. But I stumble over the move from (1) to (2).  To validate this inference we need some such principle as

CEP. For any proposition p, conceivably p entails possibly p.

CEP is what I want to discuss.  The possibility in question is not epistemic but real, and is that species of real possibility called broadly logical or metaphysical.  Now here is a reason why I have doubts about CEP.  I accept that there is an Absolute.  Now any decent Absolute (the One of Plotinus is a good candidate as is the God of Aquinas) will be a necessary being, one whose possibility entails its actuality.  An Absolute, then, cannot not exist if it exists: it either exists in every possible world or in no world.  To prove that an Absolute exists all I need is the premise, Possibly an Absolute exists.  I may think to infer this proposition from Conceivably an Absolute exists, by way of CEP.  Unfortunately, it seems I can just as easily conceive of the nonexistence of a an Absolute.  To paraphrase Hume, whatever I can conceive as existent I can just as easily conceive as nonexistent.  We can call that Hume's Existence Principle:

HEP.  Everything (concrete) is such that its nonexistence is conceivable.

If HEP is true, then every being is contingent.  But if CEP is true, then at least one being is noncontingent.  This shows that either CEP is false or HEP is false.  Since I am strongly inclined to accept HEP, I have doubts about CEP.

Clearly, much depends on what we mean by 'conceivable.'  Trading Latin for Anglo-Saxon, to be conceivable is to be thinkable.  But since there is a sense in which logical contradictions are thinkable, we must add: thinkable without broadly logical contradiction.  By whom?  The average schmuck?  Or the ideally penetrative intellect?  If an ideally penetrative intellect examines a proposition and detects no broadly logical contradiction, then there will be no gap between conceivability in this sense and possibility.  But our intellects are not ideally penetrative.  Suppose a person reads and understands Zorn's Lemma, reads and understands the Axiom of Choice, and then is asked whether it is possible that the first  be true and the second false.  He examines the conjunction of Zorn's Lemma with the negation of the Axiom of Choice and discerns no contradiction.  So he concludes that it is possible that the Lemma be true and the Axiom false.  He would be wrong since the two are provably equivalent.  This shows, I think, that for intellects like ours one cannot in general validly infer possibility from conceivability.

Returning to our opening argument, I would say that it is plausible and renders dualism rationally acceptable.  But it doesn't  establish dualism.  For the move from (1) to (2) is questionable.

What is to stop a materialist from running the argument in reverse?  He denies the conclusion and then denies (2).    If you insist that your non-identity with your body is conceivable and therefore possible, he tells you that it only seems so to you, and that seeming is not being. Or else he rejects CEP

 

Three Senses of 'Fact'

Ed Feser has a very useful post which clears up some unfortunately common confusions with respect to talk about facts and opinions.  I agree with what he says but would like to add a nuance.  Feser distinguishes two senses of 'fact,' one metaphysical (I prefer the term 'ontological') the other epistemological:

Fact (1): an objective state of affairs

Fact (2): a state of affairs known via conclusive arguments, airtight evidence, etc.

 

I suggest that we distinguish within the metaphysical Fact(1) between facts-that, which are true propositions, and facts-of, which are worldly states of affairs that function as the truth-makers of true propositions.  If I say that table salt is NaCl, what I say is a fact in the epistemological sense of being something known to be the case, but it is also a fact in two further senses.  Uttering 'Table salt is NaCl' I express a true proposition.  (I take a Fregean line on propositions: they are the senses of context-free declarative sentences.) Clearly, the proposition expressed by my utterance is true whether or not anyone knows it.  So this is an ontological use of 'fact.'  But it is arguable that (contingent) propositions, which are truth-bearers, have need of truth-makers.  Truth-makers are plausibly taken to be worldly (concrete) states of affairs.  (Not to be confused with the abstract states of affairs of Chisholm and Plantinga.)  Thus the proposition expressed by 'Table salt is NaCl' is made-true by the concrete state of affairs, the fact-of, table salt's being sodium chloride.

 

One way to see the difference between a proposition, a truth-bearer,  and its truth-maker is by noting that Tom himself, all 200 lbs of him, is not a constituent of the Fregean proposition expressed by 'Tom is tired,' whereas Tom himself is a constituent of the fact-of Tom' s being tired.  More fundamentally, if you have realist intuitions, it should seem self-evident that a true proposition cannot just be true; it is in need of an ontological ground of its truth.  It is true that my desk is littered with books, but this truth (true proposition) doesn''t hang in the air so to speak, it is grounded in a truth-making fact involving concrete books and a desk.

 

Many, many questions can be raised about truth-bearers, truth-makers, and so on, but all that comes later.  For now, the point is merely to sketch a prima facie three-fold distinction that one ought to be aware of even if, later down the theoretical road one decides that facts-that can be identified with facts-of, or that a conflation of  facts in the epistemological sense with facts-that can be justified, or whatever.  Such theoretical identifications and conflations presuppose for their very sense such preliminary prima facie distinctions as I have just made.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Woman as Devil Theme

 The question is posed in this 1955 Clovers number.  But perhaps you are more familiar with the Bobby Vee cover.  Elvis Presley learns that appearances can deceive.  Marty Robbins succumbs to temptation and begs his Mary for forgiveness.  An aging Mitch Ryder gets it up one more time in this rousing version of Devil with the Blue Dress.

I Get a Rise Out of Aristotle

Michael Gilleland, the Laudator Temporis Acti, in his part-time capacity as 'channel' of Aristotle, submits this delightful missive:

Dear Dr. Vallicella:

You wrote:

"Society and its various coercive and noncoercive arrangements exist for the sake of the individual and not the other way around. Given that the individual is the locus of value and the reason for the being of state and society, the latter cannot be ends in themselves, whence it follows that the political life, useful as it is, cannot be the highest life."

I once argued otherwise, in my Nicomachaean Ethics 1.2.8 (tr. H. Rackham):

"For even though it be the case that the Good is the same for the individual and for the state, nevertheless, the good of the state is manifestly a greater and more perfect good, both to attain and to preserve. To secure the good of one person only is better than nothing; but to secure the good of a nation or a state is a nobler and more divine achievement."

Regards,

Aristotle the Stagirite

Dear Aristotle,

I will begin by thanking your for your interest in my humble weblog. If it were not for you and your teacher Plato -- to whom, if I may say so, you do not accord sufficient respect in your otherwise outstanding writings -- none of us epigoni would be so much as thinkable. But now to the matter at hand.

You do indeed argue that politics is the master science of the good in Book I, Chapter 2 of your excellent Nicomachean Ethics, and you do indeed state at 1094b8 that the good of the state is nobler than the good of the individual. But I must remind you of what you say in the tenth and last Book of Eth. Nic. beginning in Chapter 6 and continuing until the concluding Chapter Nine. May I be so bold as to summarize the immortal thought of these inspiring chapters?

Chapter Six: Happiness and Activity. Happiness is a an active state, not one of passivity or amusement. Happiness, as the ultimate goal of human striving, cannot be identified with pleasure as certain 19th century English blockheads thought, and certainly not with bodily pleasures. (The German philosopher Nietzsche, whom you may have heard of, once quipped, "Man does not seek pleasure, only the Englishman does." I think you would approve of that line.) Happiness is an activity of the soul, not the body, in accordance with virtue.

Chapter Seven: Happiness, Intelligence, and the Contemplative Life. Now if happiness, eudaimonia, is an activity of the soul, an ergon of the psyche, in accordance with virtue or excellence, then it ought to be an activity in accordance with the highest virtue or excellence. You wisely distinguished the moral from the intellectual virtues and gave precedence to the latter. But among the intellectual virtues theoretical knowledge or contemplation, what you call theoria, stands in first place. Thus the highest life is the bios theoretikos, the life of theory, of contemplation, of philosophy. This is what your students in the Middle Ages called the vita contemplativa.

One of the arguments you give for the superiority of the theoretical life is the argument from sufficiency (1176b25 ff.) One who practices such virtues as justice, courage, and self-control needs other people. Thus a just legislator, a just judge, and a just executive requires other people as a condition of his virtuous behavior, a fact which brings in its train a lack of self-sufficiency. But he who follows the bios theoretikos needs little beyond the necessities of life. As you put it, "a wise man is able to study even by himself, and the wiser he is the more he is able to do so."

You go on to point out that the theoretical life is legitimately regarded as an end in itself and is a life of true leisure. By contrast, those who engage in military and political pursuits live in unleisurely and servile fashion, and insofar forth can do little to advance the cause of culture. As you point out, we are busy in order to have leisure just as we wage war for the sake of peace. The vita activa is for the sake of the vita contemplativa. Have you read Josef Pieper's Leisure The Basis of Culture? He does an excellent job of expounding this idea of yours. All neg-otiation, whether econonomic or political, is for the sake of otium, leisure. Sorry to employ the inferior language, Latin, but it is nearer to me and my readers than Greek.

Your view, then, is that the contemplative life stands higher than the political life. As the first to investigate logic systematically, you will not take it amiss if I set forth your view in a syllogism:

1. The highest activity is self-sufficient, an end in itself, and productive of the highest pleasure attainable.
2. Only theoretical, but not political, activity is self-sufficient, an end in itself, and productive of the highest pleasure attainable.
Therefore
3. The highest activity is theoretical, not political, activity.

Chapter Eight: The Advantages of the Contemplative Life. The contemplative life is the happiest life since it is the life in accordance with the best in us, nous or intelligence, that in us which make us godlike and self-sufficient.

Chapter Nine: Ethics and Politics. If I may say so, this chapter, something of a grab bag of tentative considerations, does not attain the level of the chapters I have just summarized, and indeed leaves unresolved a tension that you must have felt while composing the various parts of your excellent book.

Is politics the master science of the good, as you say in Book One, so that ethics is a branch of politics? That would seem to suggest that the good of the polis is superior to the good of the individual, and that the happiness and self-realization of the individual must be subordinated to the welfare of the state. But this conflicts with your plain commitment to the thesis that the theoretical life is superior to the political life, not to mention the economic life and the pleasure-seeking life.

I don't need to point out to you that the theoretical life is the individual life par excellence. Indeed, you underscore its solitariness and self-sufficiency as key advantages of it. It is not a group life. And its thinking is not group-think. Indeed, your god, the primum mobile (pardon the Latin!) is noesis noeseos, thought thinking itself, in your beautiful phrase. And you would be the first to admit that no group of thinkers is a thinker.

So I think there is a bit of a tension here. Is politics the master science of the good, or is ethics? Which is subordinated to which? You can't have it both ways, and I would resolve the tension by giving the palm to ethics and to the happiness of the individual. And I would do so invoking your authority!

If over the centuries you have come to any further conclusions on this weighty matter, I should like to hear them, either directly, or via the good graces of your acolyte the estimable Dr. Gilleland.

Yours in the love of wisdom,

MP

Catitude

You talkin' to me?

Freud on Illusion, Delusion, Error, and Religion

I found the discussion in the thread appended to Is There a 'No God' Delusion?  very stimulating and useful.  My man Peter is the 'rock' upon which good discussions are built.  (I shall expatiate later on the sense in which Lupu is also a 'wolf.') The thread got me thinking about what exactly a delusion is.  It is important that I have an explicit theory of this inasmuch as I routinely tag leftist beliefs as delusional. 

If belief is our genus, the task is to demarcate the delusional from the illusory species and both species from beliefs in general.  In this context, and as a matter of terminology, a delusion is a delusional belief, and an illusion is an illusory belief.  (I won't consider the questions whether there are illusions or delusions that do not belong to the genus belief.)  Let us push forward by way of commentary on some claims in Sigmund Freud's The Future of an Illusion (tr. Strachey, Norton, 1961).

1. Freud distinguishes between illusions and errors. (p.30) Eine Illusion ist nicht dasselbe wie ein Irrtum . . . .  There are errors that are not illusions and there are illusions that are not errors.  Given that our genus is belief, an error is an erroneous or mistaken belief. So now we have three species of belief to contend with: the erroneous, the illusory, and the delusional.  "Aristotle's belief that vermin are developed out of dung . . . was an error." (30)  But "it was an illusion of Columbus's that he had discovered a new sea-route to the Indies." (30)  What's the difference?  The difference is that illusions are wish-driven while errors are not.  "What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes." (31)  Für die Illusion bleibt charakteristisch die Ableitung aus menschlichen Wünschen . . .

2. Every erroneous belief is false, but no erroneous  belief is derived from human wishes. Every illusory belief is derived from human wishes, and may be either true or false.  So if a belief is illusory one cannot infer that it is false.  It may be false or it may be true.  By 'false' Freud means "in contradiction to reality." (31)  Suppose that a middle-class girl cherishes the belief that a prince will come and marry her.  And suppose the unlikely occurs: a prince does come and marry her.  The belief is an illusion despite the fact that it is true, i.e., in agreement with reality.  The belief is illusory because its formation and maintenance have their origin in her intense wish.  The example is Freud's.

3.  The difference between an illusory belief and a delusional belief is that, while both are wish-driven, every delusional belief is false whereas some illusory beliefs are true and others false.  "In the case of delusions we emphasize as essential their being in contradiction with reality." (31)  An der Wahnidee heben wir als wesentlich den Widerspruch gegen die Wirklichkeit hervor, die Illusion muß nicht notwendig falsch, d. h. unrealisierbar oder im Widerspruch mit der Realität sein. To sum up:

Errors:  All of them false, none of them wish-driven.

Delusions:  All of them false, all of them wish-driven.

Illusions:  Some of them false, some of them true, all of them wish-driven.

4.  Now that we understand what an illusion is, we are in a position to understand Freud's central claim about religious ideas and doctrines:  "they are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind." (30) ". . . all of them are illusions and insusceptible of proof." (31)  Sie sind sämtlich Illusionen, unbeweisbar, . . .. 

To say of a belief that it is an illusion is to say something about its psychological genesis or origin: it arises as the fulfillment of a wish.  It is not to say anything about the belief's truth-value (Wahrheitswert).  So even if some religious doctrines were susceptible of proof, they would still be illusions.  For again, what makes a belief an illusion is its stemming from a wish.  Since Freud admits that there are true illusions,  he must also admit at least the possibility of there being some provably true illusions.  It could therefore turn out that the belief that God exists is both demonstrably true and an illusion.

But although this follows from what Freud says, he does not explicitly say it.  Indeed, he says something that seems inconsistent with it.  After telling us that "the truth-value of religious doctrines does not lie within the scope of the present inquiry," he goes on to say that "It is enough for us that we have recognized them as being, in their psychological nature, illusions.  But we do not have to conceal the fact that this discovery also strongly influences our attitude to the question which must appear to many to be the most important of all." (33)  That question, of course, is the question  of truth or falsity.

So the good Doktor appears to be waffling and perhaps teetering on the brink of the genetic fallacy.  On the one hand he tells us that a belief's being an illusion does not entail that it is false.  He himself gives an example of a true illusion.  On the other hand, from what I have just quoted him as saying it follows that showing that a belief arose in a certain way, in satisfaction of certain psychological needs or wishes, can be used to cast doubt on its truth.  But the latter is the genetic fallacy.  If a third-grader comes to believe the truths of the multiplication table solely on the strength of her teacher's say-so, this fact has no tendency to show that the beliefs formed in this way are false.

Jabez Clapp: A 'Philosopher' of the Superstitions

The mountains attract misfits, oddballs, outcasts, outlaws, questers of various stripes, and even a few 'philosophers.'  Here is the story of one of them, one of many who found his way into the mountains but never found his way out.  He who marches to the beat of a different drummer, in the famous phrase of Henry David Thoreau, runs certain risks.  He may march himself right into Kingdom Come.  But the very same Thoreau also observed that a man sits as many risks as he runs.

Which risks to sit and which to run is for the individual to decide.  There is  no algorithm.

Richard Peck, Seeker of Lost Gold

Living as I do in the foothills of the Superstition Mountains, I am familiar with the legends and lore of the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine. And out on the trails or around town I sometimes run into those characters called Dutchman Hunters. One I came close to meeting was Richard Peck, but by the time I found out about his passion from his wife, Joan, he had passed away. Sadly enough, Joan unexpectedly died recently.

Joan had me and my wife over for dinner on Easter Sunday a few years years ago, and my journal (vol. XXI, pp. 34-35, 28 March 2005) reports the following:

Joan's dead husband Rick was a true believer in the Dutchman mine, and thought he knew where it was: in the vicinity of Weaver's Needle, and accessible via the Terrapin trail. A few days before he died he wanted Joan to accompany his pal Bruce, an unbeliever, to a digging operation which Bruce, a man who knows something about mining, did not perform. Rick to Joan, "I want you to be there when he digs up the gold."

Via the wonders of the Internet I found a Time Magazine article, "Adventure and the American Individualist," dated 19 November 1965. On p. 4, we read about Richard Peck:

Richard Peck, 44, is a Princeton graduate, the father of three children and the owner of a Cincinnati advertising agency. He has spent the past 16 months trying to find the famed Lost Dutchman gold mine in Arizona's barren Superstition Mountain range. "The more I read about the Lost Dutchman," he recalls, "the more I kept coming back to it. Finally, I was sure I knew where the Lost Dutchman was. I was going to tear this thing open. I thought I was going to have it wrapped up in two weeks." So far his search has cost him $80,000. "I had to try something like this because it was so impossible. But if this mine is ever found it's still going to hurt in a lot of ways. Something is going to be lost out of this world."

What a story! A successful, educated, 44 year old man, possibly in the grip of a midlife crisis, spends 16 months and $80,000 grubbing around in wild and unforgiving (but not "barren"!) country searching for an almost certainly nonexistent mine. Unlike Adolph Ruth, another white-collar type who sought adventure in them thar hills, Peck came out of the mountains alive. And that was back in the '60s. Peck, whose name was shortened from 'Peckstein' according to Joan, lived on for another 40 years or so. It thus appears that the quest for the lost gold was the main passion of his life. He believed in its existence until the end of his life.

As I write this, I look out my window at Superstition mountain wreathed mysteriously in low-lying clouds and reflect that to live well, a man needs a quest. Without a quest, a life lacks the invigorating "strenuosity" that William James preached. But if he quests for something paltry such as lost treasure, it is perhaps best that he never find it. For on a finite quest, the 'gold' is in the seeking, not in the finding. A quest worthy of us, however, cannot be for gold or silver or anything finite and transitory. A quest worthy of us must aim beyond the ephemeral, towards something whose finding would complete rather than debilitate us. Nevertheless, every quest has something in it of the ultimate quest, and can be respected in some measure for that reason.

Seldom Seen Slim on 'Tautologies' That Ain't

Seldom Seen Slim in a characteristic back-to-the-camera pose evaluates the shooting skills of the man we call 'Doc' (in allusion to Doc Holliday).  Slim writes:

Whilst I'm mulling over your thoughts on souls and salvation, here's a trifle you might agree with.

You write "There are many examples of the use of tautological sentences to express non-tautological propositions."

Indeed, my favorite ordinary language example is the use of the double identity "a=a and b=b"   to assert that a and b are quite different (in some salient respect under discussion), and to imply that the listener is rashly ignoring this obvious fact!

 

"Why did she do that?"  Men are men and women are women. 

"The hell they are!" does not reject the identities, but the salient difference.

An exercise I used to give to my (brighter) logic students was to formalize what "men are men and women are women" is trying to assert in the Predicate Calculus.

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

 

 'Men are men and women are women,' which appears to be a conjunction of two tautologies and thus a tautology, is, however,  typically used to express the non-tautological proposition that men and women are different as Slim suggests. The idea is not that each man is numerically different from each woman, but that there are properties had by men, but not by women, which render men and women  qualitatively different.  So perhaps we can symbolize the intended non-tautological proposition as follows using second-order predicate logic:

 

There is a property P such that for every x and every y, if x is a man, then x has P, and if y is a woman, then y does not have P.  Symbolically:

 

(EP)(x)(y)[(Mx -->Px) &  (Wy -->~Px)]

 

where 'E' is the existential quantifier, 'x' and 'y' are individual variables, 'M' and 'W' are predicate constants, 'P' is a predicate variable, '&' is the sign for truth-functional conjunction, and '-->' denotes the material or Philonian conditional.

 

But on second thought, this doesn't seem right.  For when we say that men are men and women women, we do not mean that there is one particular property that all men have and all women lack that renders them qualitatively different; what we we mean is that there are some properties which render them different, allowing that these could be different properties for different men and women.  To illustrate:  consider a universe consisting of  just two men and two women: Al, Bill, Carla, and Diana.  The property of having lousy social skills might be had by both Al and Bill and lacked by both Carla and Diana.  But it might also be that there are two properties, the property of being ornery and the property of being highly unemotional such that Al is highly unemotional but not ornery and Bill is ornery but not highly unemotional while neither of the ladies has either.  In that case there would be no one propery that distinguishes the men from the women.

 

So let's try:

 

(x)(y)[(Mx & Wy --> (EP) (Px & ~Py)] 

 

What say you, Slim?

 

 

Lycan, Rationality, and Apportioning Belief to Evidence

Is William G. Lycan rational? I would say so. And yet, by his own admission, he does not apportion his (materialist) belief to the evidence. This is an interesting illustration of what I have suggested (with no particular originality) on various occasions, namely, that it is rational in some cases for agents like us to believe beyond the evidence. (Note the two qualifications: 'in some cases' and 'for agents like us.' If and only if we were disembodied theoretical spectators whose sole concern was to 'get things right,' then an ethics of belief premised upon austere Cliffordian evidentialism might well be mandatory. But we aren't and it isn't.)

In Giving Dualism Its Due, we read:

Being a philosopher, of course I would like to think that my [materialist]stance is rational, held not just instinctively and scientistically and in the mainstream but because the arguments do indeed favor materialism over dualism. But I do not think that, though I used to. My position may be rational, broadly speaking, but not because the arguments favor it: Though the arguments for dualism do (indeed) fail, so do the arguments for materialism. And the standard objections to dualism are not very convincing; if one really manages to be a dualist in the first place, one should not be much impressed by them. My purpose in this paper is to hold my own feet to the fire and admit that I do not proportion my belief to the evidence.

In sum:

1. The arguments for dualism and the arguments for materialism both fail.
2. The standard objections to dualism are not very convincing.
3. It is rational to be a materialist.

In my opinion (1)-(3) is a consistent triad. If so, what does 'rational' mean? It cannot have the Cliffordian meaning according to which one apportions one's belief to the evidence. For that would require suspension of belief on the issues that divide dualists and materialists given the truth of (1) and (2). But Lycan does not suspend belief; he remains a committed materialist. He believes beyond the evidence in that he believes on insufficient evidence. The evidence is insufficient because it is counterbalanced by the evidence for the position he disbelieves. However we define 'insufficient evidence,' it seems clear that if the evidence for p and the evidence for ~p are equal, then the evidence for either is insufficient.

Lycan's is an interesting case because it doesn't display all of the Jamesian marks. The issue is live for Lycan and for the people here present, but is it forced and momentous? An issue is forced in the sense of William James if it is such that one's remaining theoretically agnostic about it is tantamount to deciding it in a particular way. James gives the example of a man who hesitates to get married. "It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married someone else?" (Will to Believe, p. 26) The man who refuses to commit himself to marriage commits himself to bachelorhood nolens volens.

But surely dualism versus materialism is not a forced option in the Jamesian sense. For one thing, one might reject both in the manner of the idealist. The positions are not logical contradictories of each other but logical contraries: they can't both be true, but they can both be false. Second, it is not the case that a suspension of judgment is tantamount to an opting for one side. If you take no position on dualism versus materialism, how does that commit you to one side or the other? On the God question, if one takes no position on whether or not God exists, then it it strongly arguable that one is a practical atheist: the agnostic lives as if God does not exist. And similarly for the immortality of the soul: to take no position is to live as if the soul is mortal. Or at least this is plausibly arguable. But the dualist need not be a substance dualist, and if he is not a substance dualist, then it is very difficult to see how the dualism versus materialism option is forced. And even if the dualist is a substance dualist, one might be a substance dualist without being committed to the immortality of the soul or mind.

A momentous option is one in which "We are supposed to gain, even now, by our belief, and lose by our nonbelief a certain vital good." (WB, 26) But I think it would be a stretch to think that the rather technical and abstruse issues that divide materialists and dualists are momentous in James' sense.

All this notwithstanding, the Lycan quotation above illustrates how rationality needn't require apportioning one's belief to the evidence. Or will you argue that Lycan is irrational in remaining a materialist despite his newfound insight that the arguments for it are not compelling?

More on Alienans Adjectives: Relative Truth and Derived Intentionality

I am sitting by a pond with a child. The child says, "Look, there are  three ducks." I say, "No, there are two ducks, one female, the other  male, and a decoy."

The point is that a decoy duck is not a duck, but a piece of wood  shaped and painted to appear (to a duck) like a duck so as to entice  ducks into range of the hunters' shotguns. Since a decoy duck is not a duck, 'decoy' in 'decoy duck' does not function in the way 'male' and   'female' function in 'male duck' and 'female duck,' respectively. A   male duck is a duck and a female duck is a duck. But a decoy duck is not a duck.

'Decoy' is an alienans adjective unlike 'male' and 'female' which are specifying adjectives. 'Decoy' shifts or alienates the sense of 'duck' rather than adding a specification to it. The same goes for 'roasted' in 'We are having roasted duck for dinner.' A roasted duck is not a  duck but the cooked carcass of a duck. Getting hungry?

How Bob Dylan Got Unpoliticized

The story is told in My Back Pages.  "Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."

How Joan Baez Got Politicized

David Hajdu, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina, 2001, p. 147:

Dylan nestled his guitar on his lap and began strumming a C chord in three-quarter time. He repeated it until the small room hushed, then he slid into the opening of "With God on Our Side." By the end of the song's nine verses, Joan Baez was no longer indifferent to Bob Dylan or irked by his crush on her sister Mimi. She was startled by the music she heard and fascinated with the fact that the enigma in the filthy jeans had created it. "When I heard him sing 'With God on Our Side,' I took him seriously," said Joan. "I was bowled over. I never thought anything so powerful could come out of that little toad. It was devastating. 'With God on Our Side' is a very mature song. It's a beautiful song. When I hear that, it changed the way I thought of Bob. I realize that he was more mature than I thought. He even looked a little better." Social consciousness as an aphrodisiac? [. . .]

Dylan played a few more of his topical songs, including "The Death of Emmett Till," "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," and "Masters of War." They astounded Spoelstra, who had not kept up with his old Village cohort's development as a songwriter, and they seemed to overwhelm Baez. (In one interview, Baez recalled "The Death of Emmett Till," not "With God on Our Side," as the Dylan song that changed her view of him and prompted her to take up protest music; "I was basically a traditional folksinger," she said. "I was not 'political' at that time. When I heard 'Emmett Till' I was knocked out. It was my first political song. That song turned me into a political folksinger."