Maverick Philosopher

Bleg: Divine Simplicity

The editors of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy want me to revise my Divine Simplicity entry by March 20th.  Written in 2006, it needs revision.  If anyone who knows this subject has any constructive comments on the style, content, coverage, or organization of the present entry, I'd like to hear them.  In particular, references to recent literature not included in the present bibliography would be helpful.

New Search Engine: Duck Duck Go

While on 'ego surfari' I came upon this page.  What a wonderful time to be alive, despite the general horrors of existence, not to mention those particular to our time and place and individual circumstances.  See the Whole from many sides.  There is much more to it than your foreshortened persepctives allow.  Don't obsess over the those crushed in Haitian and Chilean earthquakes when there is also bliss and beauty and beatitude in the world.  If you decry the shit, don't ignore the beautiful roses it fertilizes. 

As for the ego, it is ugly and odious  -- Le moi est haïssable said Pascal famously and pensively -- but that is only its night side: ego betokens spirit in us.  Only a spiritual being can say 'I' and mean it.  An answering machine can say it but not mean it.  Only an I can recognize and love a Thou and stand master of the universe in thought.  An ambiguous structure, the ego is a principle of  both alienation and union.

MACRUES, Semantic Defeaters, and Epistemic Defeaters (Peter Lupu)

(A guest post by Peter Lupu.  Editing and commentary by BV.) 

As Bill notes, we are attempting to secure and study a copy of James Anderson’s book,  Paradox in Christian Theology.  (Publication details here, including links to reviews.)  Meanwhile, I will propose here some tentative observations that Anderson’s book may or may not have addressed. These observations are inspired by the following point Bill makes in a post above as well as by some conversations we had about the subject:

“…if I cannot see that a proposition is rationally acceptable (because it appears contradictory to me) then I wouldn't know what proposition I was accepting.”

A similar point is made by Richard Cartwright in On the Logical Problem of the Trinity:  "Nor is a mystery supposed to be unintelligible, in the sense that the words in which it is expressed simply cannot be understood. After all, we are asked to believe the propositions expressed by the words, not simply that the words express some true propositions or other, we know not which."

1). Let us agree that a Trinitarian Sentence (TS) is such that

 (i) The Bible entails TS;

(ii) The surface structure (SS) of TS exhibits the logical form of a contradiction;

(iii) We are not in the position currently and may not be in the position in our present form of existence ever to construct a contradiction free formulation or deep structure (DS) for TS;

Example of a TS: "The Father is God, the Son is God, the Father is not the Son, and there is exactly one God."  The surface structure of this sentence is contradictory.

'No News is Good News'

Spencer Case, 'on the ground' in Afghanistan, writes:

Try translating the following sentence into logic:  "No news is good news."

Whenever I try it, I end up saying that there isn't any good news and that's not what I mean to say. If you're not too terribly busy, I'd like to see how the trick is done.

Also, the Idaho State Journal has been publishing my blog online. It is available here.

Clearly, the translation cannot be: (x)(Nx --> ~Gx).  For what the sentence means is not that no news report is a good news report.  What it means is that it is good not to receive news reports. (For if one receives no news, one will not receive any bad news.)  But even this  is not quite right.  To be precise, what the target sentence expresses in standard contexts of use is that every report that there is nothing to report is a good report.  For any x and y, if x is a first-order report of recent events, and x expresses the proposition *There is nothing to report*, then x is a good report.  In symbols: (x)(y)(Rx & Exy & y = *There is nothing to report* -->Gx).

But there may be a better parsing.

 

Saturday Night at the Oldies II: Three Suicide Songs

You're getting a double dose this Saturday, muchachos -- to make up for last Saturday.  These go out to S.S. Slim.  We begin on a humorous note with James Darren's hit from 1961, Goodbye Cruel World.  And then to a rather more somber number of the same name by Pink Floyd.  But neither can hold a candle to Tom Waits, Shiver Me Timbers.

Leavin' my family, I'm leavin' my friends
My body's at home but my heart's in the wind
Where the clouds are like headlines on a new front page sky
Tears are salt water and the moon's full and high

And I know Martin Eden is gonna be proud of me
Many before me who've been called by the sea
To be up in the crow's nest and singin' my say
And shiver me timbers I'm a-sailin' away

The fog's liftin' and the sand's shiftin' and I'm driftin' on out
Ol' Captain Ahab ain't got nothin' on me
So come on and swallow me, don't follow me, I'll travel alone
Blue water's my daughter an' I'm skippin' like a stone

And please call my missus and tell her not to cry
My goodbye is written by the moon in the sky
And nobody knows me, I can't fathom my stayin'
And shiver me timbers, I'm a-sailin' away

The fog's liftin' and the sand's shiftin' and I'm driftin' on out
Ol' Captain Ahab ain't got nothin' on me
So come on and swallow me, don't follow me, I'll travel alone
Blue water's my daughter an' I'm skippin' like a stone

And I'm leavin' my family, and I'm leavin' my friends
My body's at home but my heart's in the wind
Where the clouds are like headlines on a new front page sky
And shiver me timbers, I'm a-sailin' away.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Magic '60s

I'm So Glad to join you, My Best Friend, as we follow Mr. Tambourine Man on an Embryonic Journey to hear the Chimes of Freedom as we Break on Through to the Other Side.

God, Gratitude, and Gladness

Jim Ryan of Philosoblog posts infrequently, but always interestingly. Ryan is both a conservative and an atheist. Being a  conservative, he appreciates the importance of gratitude. Being an atheist, he sees no reason to take gratitude and its importance as  supportive of theistic belief. Herewith, some commentary on his post A New Error Theory for Theism.

1. Gratitude and human flourishing. Ryan rightly suspects a connection between gratitude and human flourishing: "The ordering of attitudes and dispositions in the soul is dysfunctional if at or near the center of these there is no deep gratitude, by which I mean gratitude that this world exists and that one lives in it." I believe this is a genuine insight.

2. The nature of gratitude. Let us first note that gratitude exhibits a triadic structure. To feel grateful is for someone X to feel grateful to someone Y for something or someone Z. If I receive a gift, I am grateful to the donor for the  gift. 'To whom?' and 'For what?' are both questions it is appropriate  to ask in ordinary cases of gratitude. And as the grammar of 'To  whom?' suggests, the donor must be a person. I cannot be grateful to a  vending machine for disgorging a can of Pepsi upon the insertion of a few coins. Here too we have a triadic relation: the machine gave me a can of soda. But I cannot be grateful to a machine, though I could perhaps be grateful to its installer or manufacturer or inventor. It would be a case of incorrect or inappropriate emotion were one to feel grateful to a vending machine. I hold, with Brentano, that one can distinguish between correct and incorrect emotion.

Note also that what one is grateful for, the gift, must be  gratuitously given. I can be appropriately grateful only for that  which is freely given, which implies that the donor is both a free  agent and an uncoerced free agent. If Robin Hood forces you to give me your money, I cannot be appropriately grateful to you, though I may be to Robin Hood. For there to be gratitude, there must be a donor, and it is necessary that the donor be a person; but it is not sufficient  that the donor be a person: the donor's donation must be a free act.

3. Can one be grateful to a not presently existing donor?   If I am grateful to a person P at time t does it follow that P exists  at t?  Or can one appropriately feel gratitude only to persons who presently exist?  Suppose someone likes what I write and mails me a check as a  gift for my blogging endeavours. Unbeknownst to me, the donor dies  before I receive the check. I am grateful to him for the check even though at the time of receiving the check and feeling the gratitude he  no longer exists. This suggests that gratitude to a person P does not  entail the present existence of P. And certainly it does seem that gratitude to past persons is appropriately felt. A child, student,  philosopher might appropriately feel gratitude in respect of his  deceased parents, teachers, predecessors.  If one feels grateful to a person surely the gratitude does not end when the person does.  My gratitude to you can survive your death though it cannot survive mine.  (I am assuming for the moment that we are not immortal souls.)

4. Gratitude to a never existing donor?  Can one appropriately feel grateful to a nonexistent person? A child, for example, feels grateful to Santa Claus for her Christmas presents.   This looks to be a genuine case of gratitude despite the nonexistence  of the person to whom the child feels grateful. But note that for the child the existence of Santa Claus is an epistemic possibility. If the child were convinced of the nonexistence of the fat guy, then she couldn't feel grateful to him.  Note also that the triadic structure is preserved.  The girl is grateful to Santa Claus for her presents despite his nonexistence.  If a theist is grateful to God for his existence, his gratitude is what it is whether or not God exists.  But a person who disbelieves in God cannot be grateful to God.

5.  Must the relata of a relation all of them exist?  #4 points up a fiendishly difficult philosophical question that turns up in many different contexts:  Can a relation obtain if one or more of its relata do not exist?  #3 points up the same problem on the assumption of presentism, the doctrine that (the contents of) the present alone exist, that past and furture items to do not exist.

6. Metaphysical gratitude. What Jim Ryan is talking about, however, is not ordinary gratitude -- gratitude to some intramundane person for some intramundane object -- but what we might call metaphysical gratitude or what he calls "deep gratitude": gratitude for the existence of the world and our lives within it. Now if this is a genuine case of gratitude, it seems appropriate to ask to whom we feel grateful. This person can only be God, as Ryan realizes, since only God could bestow the gift of the world's existence. So it would seem that a metaphysically grateful person is grateful to God. A theist might try to argue from gratitude to God as follows:

a. We are appropriately grateful for the existence of the world
b. To be grateful is to be grateful to someone
c. The only person to whom one can be appropriately grateful for the
    existence of the world is God
-----
d. God exists.

7. Ryan's rejection of this argument. Ryan will of course reject this argument by rejecting premise (b). He maintains:

P: There is no entailment from the proposition that one feels gratitude to the proposition that there is someone to whom one feels gratitude.

That could be read, not as a denial of the triadic structure of gratitude, but as saying that, from the mere fact that one feels grateful, it does not follow that the person to whom one feels grateful exists. (Compare the Santa Claus example above. The child is grateful to someone, namely, Santa Claus; but it does not follow that Santa Claus exists.  Or consider the situation in which presentism is true and one is grateful to a dead parent.  One would then be grateful to a nonexistent donor.)  So from the mere fact that one feels grateful for the existence of the world, it does not follow that God exists, even in the presence of the auxiliary premises that gratitude is by its very nature gratitude to a person, and the only possible donor of the world is God.

This seems right and refutes the (a)-(d) argument. But it raises an interesting question. Suppose the following: subject S is grateful for some object O; O can only be the gift of some person P and S knows
this to be the case; S either knows or else is subjectively certain that P does not exist. Are these suppositions consistent? Can I be grateful to a person I am subjectively certain does not exist? Ryan is subjectively certain that God does not exist. How then can he feel grateful for the existence of the world given that he knows that gratitude is by its very nature gratitude to a person and that in the
present case the person can only be God?

8. Gratitude and Gladness. I say that Ryan cannot be grateful that the world exists given his atheism.  For if he is grateful, he is grateful to someone, and this someone can only be God given that the object of the gratitude is the existence of the world. I grant that gratitude for the existence of the world does not prove the existence of God. But the gratitude to be gratitude must allow the existence of God: the existence of God must be epistemically possible for the subject of gratitude. But Ryan's 'gratitude' is blended with subjective certainty of God's nonexistence: the existence of God is not an epistemic possibility for Ryan. So I say that what Ryan feels is not gratitude. Ryan concludes,

Atheists can feel deep gratitude, as well, however. When we construe the emotion as deep gladness and modesty, the personal object (God) drops out. One is simply glad that this universe exists and that one lives in it. There need be no one to whom one is grateful. So, the error theory doesn't cast any aspersions on deep gratitude. It is perfectly consistent with holding, as I do, that deep gratitude is indeed part of proper functioning for human beings.

I deny that atheists can feel deep (metaphysical) gratitude, gratitude for the very existence of the world and our lives in it. An atheist is one who explicitly denies the existence of God. For such a person it is not epistemically possible that there be a person to whom to be grateful for the existence of the world. Since the existence of God is a priori ruled out, what the atheist feels cannot be gratitude. Gratitude by its very nature is gratitude to a person. Granted, the existence of the person is not guaranteed by the presence of the emotion; but it can't be excluded by it either. It is incoherent to feel gratitude to a person one believes did not ever exist. Ryan can no more feel gratitude for the existence of the world than I can feel gratitude for Christmas presents whose existence could only be explained by Santa's having dropped them down my chimney.

An atheist can be glad that the world exists, but gladness is not gratitude.

Save the Planet with George Carlin

I have never thought much of that overgrown adolescent, George Carlin.  But this is a brilliant and hilarious performance which serves as a useful corrective to environmental extremism and nature idolatry.  (Hat tip:  The blogging biker.)

The Question of the Reality of God: Wittgensteinian Fideism No Answer

Taking a Wittgensteinian line, D. Z. Phillips construes the question of the reality of God as like the question of the reality of physical objects in general, and unlike the question of the reality of any particular physical object such as a unicorn.   Phillips would therefore have a bone to pick with Edward 'Cactus Ed' Abbey who writes,

Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?

Abbey's meaning is clear: It is as idle to suppose that there is a God as to suppose that there is an irate unicorn on the far side of the moon. Of course, there could be such a unicorn. It is logically possible in that there is no contradiction in the idea. It is also epistemically possible in that the supposition is consistent with what we know. (Perhaps a clever extraterrestrial scientist synthesized a unicorn, put him in a space suit, and deposited the unfortunate critter on the moon.) But there is no positive reason to believe in something so outlandish. The same goes for God according to Abbey, Russell, and plenty of others.  Such theists think of God as just one more being among beings, as something in addition to all the other things that exist.

How might a theist respond to this puerile conception? (And to such cognate 'objections'  as Russell's Teapot?  ) One way to respond is that of the Wittgensteinian fideist. A fideist like Phillips would take Abbey to have misconstrued the very sense of the theist's affirmation. Abbey takes the theist to be adding a weird object to the ontological inventory: hence the comparison of God to an irate lunar unicorn. Phillips, however, clearly sees that this is a mistake.  His positive theory, however, is just as bad.   Phillips thinks that the claim that God exists is more like the claim that there are physical objects in general. That there are physical objects in general is presupposed by any inquiry into whether a particular physical object exists. It is a presupposition without which such an inquiry would make no sense. As Phillips puts it:

Similarly, the question of the reality of God is a question of the possibility of sense and nonsense, truth and falsity, in religion. When God's existence is construed as a matter of fact, it is taken for granted that the concept of God is at home within the conceptual framework of the reality of the physical world. . . . to ask a question about the reality of God is to ask a question about a kind of reality, not about the reality of this or that, in much the same way as asking a question about the reality of physical objects is not to ask about the reality of this or that physical object. ("Philosophy, Theology, and the Reality of God," Phil. Quart., 1963, reprinted in Rowe and Wainwright, p. 281)

Phillips blunders badly in this passage when he says that construing the divine existence as a matter of fact takes it for granted that the concept of God belongs within the conceptual framework of the reality of the physical world. For if anything is clear, it is that God for the theist is not a physical object. Surely, in claiming that God exists as a matter of fact, the theist who understands his doctrine is not claiming that God exists as a physical object. What Phillips should have said is that construing God's existence as a matter of fact presupposes, not that God is a physical object, but that God is a being or an  existent.

Phillips would want to deny that too. His view is that the reality of God is not the reality of a special being, but the reality of a presupposition that is not and cannot be questioned from within a religious language-game (or at least from within a theistic religious language-game). The reality of God has to do with what a religious believer is prepared to say: ". . . the religious believer is not prepared to say that God might not exist. It is not that as a matter of fact God will always exist, but that it makes no sense to say that God might not exist." (280)

Perhaps the following analogy will clarify what Phillips is driving at. Consider the reality of checkmate in chess. The existence of checkmate is not a matter of fact in the way that it is a matter of fact that Karpov opened a certain game with 1. d4. For within the game of chess it makes no sense to say that checkmate might not exist. Checkmate and the rules governing it are defining features of the game. They cannot be questioned from within the game, and to question them from without the game is simply to reject the game. For that reason, it makes no sense to demand proof of these rules, nor can one raise the question whether they are reasonable. Is it reasonable that one cannot castle out of check, into check, or though check? It is neither reasonable nor unreasonable. The question of reasonableness cannot arise. Similarly, for Phillips, it is neither reasonable nor unreasonable that God exists. To play a theistic language-game is to presupposes the meaningfulness of God-talk just as to play chess is to presuppose the meaningfulness of talk of checkmate. And just as God exists in theistic language-games, checkmate exists in chess. But also: just as checkmate does not exist outside chess, God does not exist outself theistic language-games. For if God does exist apart from theistic language-games, then there would be a fact of that matter as to the existence of God.

At this point one can see what is wrong with Phillips' view. Every sane person is an anti-realist about checkmate, but to be an anti-realist about God, as Phillips' view seems to require, is to make a joke of theistic belief. Phillips' claim that "theology is the grammar of discourse" (282) is therefore as preposterous as the claim that botany is the grammar of discourse about plants. There is of course a sense in which for the theist the existence of God is necessary, but this is not the sense in which a rule is necessary for a language-game. Chess is not chess without checkmate, so checkmate is necessary within chess. God, however, is not a rule, nor a linguistic presupposition, nor concept, nor anything dependent on human talking and acting. So the necessity of God is not the necessity of a rule. God is a necessary being, which implies that he is a being, which implies that he exsts independently of human talk and speech if he exists at all. God cannot be reduced to God-talk and God-ritual. Chess just is chess-talk and chess-ritual: chess has no reality outside chess conventions and the chessic form of life. Not so with God.

These points are frightfully obvious, but one can understand why Phillips was driven to contravene them. Surely God is not a physical object, and it is arguable that he is not a being among beings. What then is God, and how understand his reality? His is not the reality of any sort of abstract object, nor that of any sort of collection; thus he is not the world-whole. So Phillips is driven to say something equally untenable, namely, that God is immanent to certain language-games, as a sort of framework truth of those language-games.

The question of the reality of God is a hard nut to crack, but surely it won't do to say that the reality of God is a matter of talk and practice, as if God were merely a feature of certain language games and forms of life.  If God exists, then he is a reality transcendent of any Sprachspiel or Lebensform.

The Recluse Aphorizes, Laconically

By oneself one can be oneself.

Limits

The young should test their limits. The old, having tested them, should respect them. Two misfortunes: never to learn what one is capable of; to come to grief from attempting what one is incapable of.

From the Mail: John Bishop, Believing by Faith

Dr. Vallicella,

Another excellent post with which I whole-heartedly agree!  You asked if there were any other options besides:

A. Rationalism: Put your trust in reason to deliver truths about ultimates and ignore the considerations of Sextus Empiricus, Nagarjuna, Bayle, Kant, and a host of others that point to the infirmity of reason.

B. Fideism: Put your trust in blind faith. Submit, obey, enslave your reason to what purports to be revealed truth while ignoring the fact that what counts as revealed truth varies from religion to religion, and within a religion from sect to sect.

C. Skepticism: Suspend belief on all issues that transcend the mundane if not on all beliefs, period. Don't trouble your head over whether God is or is not tripersonal. Stick to what appears. And don't say, 'The tea is sweet'; say, 'The tea appears sweet.' (If you say that the tea is sweet, you invite contradiction by an irascible table-mate.)

D. Reasoned Faith: Avoiding each of the foregoing options, one formulates one's beliefs carefully and holds them tentatively. One does not abandon them lightly, but neither does one fail to revisit and revise them. Doxastic examination is ongoing at least for the length of one's tenure here below. One exploits the fruitful tension of Athens and Jerusalem, philosophy and religion, reason and faith, playing them off against each other and using each to chasten the other.

I recommend (D).  Or are there other options?

John Bishop (University of Auckland) has a book , Believing by Faith: An Essay in the Epistemology and Ethics of Religious Faith (OUP, 2007) which is perhaps the best book that I have read on  the subject.  He argues for what he calls a ‘supra-evidential fideism’ in which  one is ‘morally entitled’ to “take as true in one’s practical and theoretical deliberations” a claim that lacks  evidence sufficient for  epistemically-justified acceptance or rejection.

It is a developed Jamesian’ approach to the right to believe. He does not allow for beliefs that go contrary to the weight of evidence, thus he rejects Wittgensteinian fideism. One may believe beyond the evidence, but not against the evidence. He holds that one must always respect the canons of rational inquiry and not dismiss them, even in matters of faith. Yet, by the very nature of the faith-issue, they can be transcended with moral entitlement.

Nor does he allow for ‘induced willings-to believe.’  He holds that one who already has an inclination / disposition to believe is morally entitled to do so if the issue is important, forced, and by the nature of the issue cannot be decided upon the basis of ‘rationalist empiricist’ evidential practice.I came across  the book on a list of important books in philosophy of religion on Prosblogion.

I think that it is a type of fideism that combines your categories B and D – fideism and reasoned faith.

 With continuing appreciation,

Mark Weldon Whitten

They Refused to Look Through the Telescope

There were churchmen and other contemporaries of Galileo who, standing fast on  convictions swotted up from the lore of Aristotle and his commentators, refused to look through the Italian's telescope.  Similarly, there are atheists and mortalists today who, standing fast on convictions derived from less reputable sources, refuse to engage in the spiritual practices which could serve as their 'telescope.' 

Just as the scientific attitude demands of us an openness to one range of experience, the religious attitude demands of us an openness to another. 

Talk is Cheap?

Talk is cheap, they say, but the right word, at the right time, spoken from the heart with purity of intent to the right person can be priceless.

What Socializing and Whisky Have in Common

A little socializing, like a little whisky, is good. But more is not  better. The sobriety of solitary silence is superior to the sloughing off of self into the social, and the value of the latter is to enhance, by way of contrast, the delights of the former.  Thus spoke the introvert.

Edith Stein on Cognitio Fidei: Is Faith a Kind of Knowledge?

One finds the phrase cognitio fidei in Thomas Aquinas and in such Thomist writers as Josef Pieper. It translates as 'knowledge of faith.' The genitive is to be interpreted subjectively, not objectively: faith is not the object of knowledge; faith is a form or type of knowledge. But how can faith be a type of knowledge? One ought to find this puzzling.

On a standard analysis of 'knows,' where propositional knowledge is at issue, subject S knows that p just in case (i) S believes that p; (ii) S is justified in believing that p; and (iii) p is true. This piece of epistemological boilerplate is the starting-point for much of the arcana (Gettier counterexamples, etc.) of contemporary epistemology. But its pedigree is ancient, to be found in Plato's Theaetetus.

It is obvious that on the standard analysis mere belief is inferior to knowledge since if I believe what is false I don't have knowledge, and if I believe what is true without justification I don't have knowledge either. How then can mere belief be a form or type of knowledge? It is rather a necessary but not sufficient condition of knowledge. Or so it seems to the modern mind.

Another puzzle has to do with certainty. Whether or not knowledge entails certainty, it seems to the modern mind that belief definitely does not entail certainty: what I believe but do not know I cannot be certain about since if I believe but do not know, then either truth is lacking or justification is lacking or both. How then can mere belief be said to be certain? And yet we read in Aquinas that "It is part of the concept of belief itself that man is certain of that in which he believes." (Quoted from Pieper, Belief and Faith, p. 15).

Is easy to understand how one who believes but does not know that p can be subjectively certain that p; but it is difficult to understand how such a person can be objectively certain that p. Objective certainty, however, alone has epistemic value.

We now turn to the remarkable Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of the Roman Catholic church. In the 1920s Stein composed an imaginary dialogue between her two philosophical masters, Husserl and Aquinas. Part of what she has them discussing is the nature of faith.

One issue is whether faith gives us access to truth. Stein has Thomas say:

. . . faith is a way to truth. Indeed, in the first place it is a way to truths — plural — which would otherwise be closed to us, and in the second place it is the surest way to truth. For there is no greater certainty than that of faith . . . . (Edith Stein, Knowledge and Faith, tr. Redmond, ICS Publications 2000, pp. 16-17)

Now comes an important question. What is it that we as philosophers want? We want the ultimate truths about the ultimate matters. If so, it is arguable that we should take these truths from whatever source offers them to us even if the source is not narrowly philosophical. We should not say: I will accept only those truths that can be certified by (natural) reason, but rather all truths whether certified by reason or 'certified' by faith. Thus Stein has Aquinas say:

If faith makes accessible truths unattainable by any other means, philosophy, for one thing, cannot forego them without renouncing its universal claim to truth. [. . .] One consequence, then, is a material dependence of philosophy on faith.

Then too, if faith affords the highest certainty attainable by the human mind, and if philosophy claims to bestow the highest certainty, then philosophy must make the certainty of faith its own. It does so first by absorbing the truths of faith, and further by using them as the final criterion by which to gauge all other truths. Hence, a second consequence is a formal dependence of philosophy on faith. (17-18)

But of course this cannot go unchallenged by Husserl. So Stein has him say:

. . . if faith is the final criterion of all other truth, what is the criterion of faith itself? What guarantees that the certainty of my faith is genuine? (20)

Or in terms of of the distinction made above between subjective and objective certainty: what guarantees that the certainty of faith is objective and not merely subjective? The faiths of Jew, Christian, and Muslim are all different. How can the Christian be sure that the revelation he takes on faith has not been superseded by the revelation the Muslim takes on faith?

Stein's Thomas replies to Husserl as follows:

Probably my best answer is that faith is its own guarantee. I could also say that God, who has given us the revelation, vouches for its truth. But this would only be the other side of the same coin. For if we took the two as separate facts, we would fall into a circulus vitiosus [vicious circle], since God is after all what we become certain about in faith. [. . .]

All we can do is point out that for the believer such is the certainty of faith that it relativizes all other certainty, and that he can but give up any supposed knowledge which contradicts his faith. The unique certitude of faith is a gift of grace. It is up to the understanding and will to draw the practical consequences therefrom. Constructing a philosophy on faith belongs to the theoretical consequences. (20-22)

So there you have it. There are two opposing conceptions of philosophy, one based on the autonomy of reason, the other willing to sacrifice the autonomy of reason for the sake of truths which cannot be certified by reason but which are provided by faith in revelation. It looks as if one must simply decide which of these two conceptions to adopt, and that the decision cannot be justified by (natural) reason.

My task, in this and in related posts, is first and foremost to set forth the problems as clearly as I can. Anyone who thinks this problem has an easy solution does not understand it.  It is part of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem.

Primum Non Nocere

"First of all, do no harm."  Not just for medicos.  Also for the benighted politicos who would 'fix' health care.  Their approach is a bit like fixing a roof leak by tearing down the house and building a new one. 

And don't you just love the way these idiots use 'fix' and broken'?  Talk like a first-grader and you'll think like one too.  And these fools are our rulers? 

Not Uxorious, but Appreciative

Having paid tribute to WD-40, the least I can do is pay tribute, once again, to my wife. She may not be a solvent, but she contributes mightily to my being solvent.

As for marriage, it is a good thing if one enters into it for the right reasons, at the right time, and after due consideration. Bear in mind that every man has two heads. The big one is for thinking, the little one for linking. Understand their offices and respective spheres of operation. To cerebrate with the organ of copulation is Clintonian and not conducive unto happiness. Even in the question of marriage, the big head must be the ruling element.

Another Look at Anderson's Trinitarian Mysterianism (Peter Lupu)

(Hauled up from the vasty deeps of the ComBox into the light of day by BV who supplies minor edits and comments in blue.)

I strongly recommend to everyone interested in the subject to read Anderson’s “In defense of mystery: a reply to Dale Tuggy” (2005), Religious Studies, 41, 145-163 in which he replies to Dale Tuggy’s paper “The unfinished business of Trinitarian theorizing”, Religious Studies, 39(2003), 165-183.  I was unable to obtain Dale Tuggy’s original paper.

The Infirmity of Reason Versus the Certitude of Faith

Reason is infirm in that it cannot establish anything definitively. It cannot even prove that doubting is the way to truth, "that it is certain that we ought to be in doubt." (Pyrrho entry, Bayle's Dictionary, tr. Popkin, p. 205) But, pace Pierre Bayle, the merely subjective certitude of faith is no solution either! Recoiling from the labyrinth into which unaided human reason loses itself, Bayle writes:

It seems therefore that this unfortunate state [the one brought about by the infirmity of reason] is the most proper one of all for convincing us that our reason is a path that leads us astray since, when it displays itself with the greatest subtlety, it plunges us into such an abyss. The natural conclusion of this ought to be to renounce this guide and to implore the cause of all things to give us a better one. This is a great step toward the Christian religion; for it requires that we look to God for knowledge of what we ought to believe and what we ought to do, and that we enslave our understanding to the obeisance of faith. If a man is convinced that nothing good is to be expected from his philosophical inquiries, he will be more disposed to pray to God to persuade him of the truths that ought to be believed than if he flatters himself that he might succeed by reasoning and disputing. A man is therefore happily disposed toward faith when he knows how defective reason is. (206, emphasis added)

Now how is this a solution to the alleged infirmity of reason? A Christian fideist, acquiescing in pure blind (purblind?) faith, accepts the Trinity while a Muslim fideist, equally subjectively certain of his faith, rejects the Trinity while intoning that God is one. Blind conviction butts up against blind conviction of the opposite kind and all too often strife and bloodshed is the upshot.

Athens and Jerusalem at Loggerheads Over the One Thing Needful

The following is highly relevant to our Trinitarian/Christological discussions:

For Leo Strauss, ". . . Western civilization consists of two elements, or has two roots, which are in radical disagreement with each other." ("Progress or Return?" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, p. 245) These two elements are the Bible and Greek philosophy, Jerusalem and Athens. The "whole history of the West" is an attempt at harmonizing this radical disagreement. But the various attempts at harmonization were doomed to fail for the following reason:

. . . each of these two roots of the Western world sets forth one thing as the one thing needful, and the one thing needful as proclaimed by the Bible is incompatible, as it is understood by the Bible, with the one thing needful proclaimed by Greek philosophy, as it is understood by Greek philosophy. To put it very simply and therefore somewhat crudely, the one thing needful according to Greek philosophy is the life of autonomous understanding. The one thing needful as spoken by the Bible is the life of obedient love. The harmonizations and synthesizations are possible because Greek philosophy can use obedient love in a subservient function, and the Bible can use philosophy as a handmaid; but what is so used in each case rebels against such use, and therefore the conflict is really a radical one. (Ibid., p. 246, emphasis added.)

I should point out that Strauss goes on to speak of an underlying agreement between the Bible and Greek philosophy, but I'll leave that for a subsequent post. What he says above, though, strikes me as exactly right. First, Western civilization does have the two roots mentioned, a fact apparently missed by the Reverend Jesse Jackson when he sang at Stanford University, "Hey hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go." Did Brother Jesse realize that he was advocating the throwing out of his own bread and butter?

Second, the two roots or elements are in radical, albeit fruitful, tension. Indeed, the vitality of the West, as Strauss remarks elsewhere, derives in good measure from this tension, a tension which, absent in the Islamic world, may help explain the inanition in that world.

ADDENDUM

A reader suggests that Pope Benedict's Regensburg address can be read, in part, as an implicit response to the Straussian thesis of radical disagreement between the Bible and Greek philosophy. Compare this passage:

Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: "In the beginning was the λόγος". This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, σὺν λόγω, with logos. Logos means both reason and word - a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance. The vision of Saint Paul, who saw the roads to Asia barred and in a dream saw a Macedonian man plead with him: "Come over to Macedonia and help us!" (cf. Acts 16:6-10) - this vision can be interpreted as a "distillation" of the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry.

A Review of Jerrold J. Katz, Sense, Reference, and Philosophy

Here.  By Kelley L. Ross, whose site contains a great deal of interesting material.  But why anyone would use a black background escapes me. 

Another Example of a Necessary Being Depending for its Existence on a Necessary Being

The Father and the Son are both necessary beings.  And yet the Father 'begets' the Son.  Part, though not the whole, of the notion of begetting here must be this: if x begets y, then y depends for its existence on x.  If that were not part of the meaning of 'begets'' in this context, I would have no idea what it means.  But how can a necessary being depend for its existence on a necessary being?  I gave a non-Trinitarian example yesterday, but it was still a theological example. Now I present a non-theological example.

I assume that there are mathematical (as opposed to commonsense) sets.  And I assume that numbers are necessary beings.  (There are powerful arguments for both assumptions.) Now consider the set S = {1, 3, 5} or any set, finite or infinite, the members of which are all of them necessary beings, whether numbers, propositions, whatever.  Both S and its membership are necessary beings.  If you are worried about the difference between members and membership, we can avoid that wrinkle by considering the singleton set T = {1}.

T and its sole member are both necessary beings.  And yet it seems obvious to me that one depends on the other for its existence:  the set is existentially dependent on the member, and not vice versa.  The set exists because -- though this is not an empirically-causal use of 'because' -- the members exist, and not the other way around.   Existential dependence is an asymmetrical relation.  I suppose you either share this intuition or you don't.  In a more general form, the intuition is that collections depend for their existence on the things collected, and not vice versa.  This is particularly obvious if the items collected can also exist uncollected.  Think of Maynard's stamp collection.  The stamps in the collection will continue to exist if Maynard sells them, but then they will no longer form Maynard's collection. The point is less obvious if we consider the set of stamps in Maynard's collection.  That set cannot fail to exist as long as all the stamps exist.  Still, it seems to me that the set exists because the members exist and not vice versa.

And similarly in the case of T.  {1} depends existentially on 1 despite the fact that there is no possible world in which the one exists without the other.  If, per impossibile, 1 were not to exist, then {1} would not exist either. But it strikes me as false to say: If, per impossibile, {1} were not to exist, then 1 would not exist either.  These counterfactuals could be taken to unpack the sense in which the set depends on the member, but not vice versa.

It therefore is reasonable to hold that two necessary beings can be such that one depends for its existence on the other.  And so one cannot object to the notion of the Father 'begetting'  the Son by saying that no necessary being can be existentially dependent upon a necessary being.  Of course, this is not to say that other objections cannot be raised.

Can A Necessary Being Depend for its Existence on a Necessary Being?

According to the Athansian Creed, the Persons of the Trinity, though each of them uncreated and eternal and necessary are related as follows. The Father is unbegotten.  The Son is begotten by the Father, but not made by the Father.  The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.  Let us focus on the relation of the Father to the Son.  When I tried to explain this to Peter Lupu, he balked at the idea of one necessary being begetting another, claiming that the idea makes no sense.  One of his arguments was as follows.  If x begets y, then x causes y to begin to exist.  But no necessary being begins to exist.  So, no necessary being is begotten.  A second argument went like this.  Begetting is a causal notion.  But causes are temporally precedent to their effects.  No two necessary beings are related as before to after.  Therefore, no necessary being begets another.

I first pointed out in response to Peter that the begetting in question is not the begetting of one animal by another, but a begetting in a different sense, and that whatever else this idea involves, it involves the idea of one necessary being depending for its existence on another.  Peter balked at this idea as well.  "How can a necessary being depend for its existence on a necessary being?"  To soften him up, I looked for a non-Trinitarian case in which a necessary being stands in the asymmetrical relation of existential dependency to a necessary being. Note that I did not dismiss his problem the way a dogmatist might; I admitted that it is a genuine difficulty, one that needs to be solved.

So I said to Peter:  Look, you accept the existence of Fregean propositions, items which Frege viewed as the senses of sentences in the indicative mood from which indexical elements (including the tenses of verbs) have been removed and have been replaced with non-indexical elements.  You also accept that at least some of these Fregean propositions, if not all,  are necessary beings.  For example, you accept that the proposition expressed by '7 + 5 = 12' is necessarily true, and you see that this requires that the proposition be necessarily existent.  Peter agreed to that.

You also, I said to him, have no objection to the idea of the God of classical theism who exists necessarily if he is so much as possible.  He admitted that despite his being an atheist, he has no problem with the idea of a necessarily existent God.

So I said to Peter:  Think of the necessarily existent Fregean propositions as divine thoughts.  (I note en passant that Frege referred to his propositions as Gedanken, thoughts.)  More precisely, think of them as the accusatives or objects of divine acts of thinking, as the noemata of the divine noesis.  That is, think of the propositions as existing precisely as the  accusatives of divine thinking.  Thus, their esse is their concipi by God.  They don't exist a se the way God does; they exist in a mind-dependent manner without prejudice to their existing in all possible worlds.  To cop a phrase from the doctor angelicus, they have their necessity from another, unlike God, who has his necessity from himself.

So I said to Peter:  Well, is it not now clear that we  have a non-Trinitarian example in which a necessary being, the proposition expressed by '7 + 5 = 12,' depends for its existence on a necessary being, namely God, and not vice versa?  Is this not an example of a relation that is neither merely logical (like entailment) nor empirically-causal?  Does this not get you at least part of the way towards an understand of how the Father can be said to beget the Son?

To these three questions, Peter gave a resounding 'No!' looked at his watch and announced that he had to leave right away in order to be able to teach his 5:40 class at the other end of the Valle del Sol.

Dale Tuggy's Weblog

Thanks to Dale Tuggy for his linkage.  Dale is an expert on Trinitarian topics so get thee hence and feast at his table.

The Principle of Subsidiarity

David A. Bosnich, The Principle of Subsidiarity:

One of the key principles of Catholic social thought is known as the principle of subsidiarity. This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In other words, any activity which can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State.

Obama and Co. take note.  But of course they won't.  A CHANGE is coming, though, and this time it will be a change for the better.  The whole of Bosnich's essay is well worth reading.

 

Substance and Suppositum: Notes on Fernand Van Steenberghen

Here is another of the scholastic manuals I pulled off my shelf: Fernand van Steenberghen, Ontology (Nauwelaerts Publisher, Brussels, 1970, tr. Moonan).  A paragraph from p. 278 supports my thesis that the distinction between primary substance and suppositum is an ad hoc device invented for a theological purpose, a device for which there is no independent philosophical warrant:

4. The problem of subsistence or personality.  This problem was inserted into metaphysics for the benefit of theology, as is quite plain, in order to prepare the way for a satisfactory explanation of the theological  mystery of the incarnation, the question of knowing how and why the human nature of Jesus Christ does not constitute a human person.  But this problem is extraneous to philosophy and must remain so, for from the metaphysical point of view, there is no reason for distinguishing individual nature and individual.  It is therefore contrary to any sane method to ask in ontology on what conditions an individual nature might not be a suppositum (or person, where it is an intelligent nature that is in question.)

Why Run?

If the sky is the daily bread of the eyes (Emerson), then hiking, running, and cycling are the daily bread of the legs and lungs. And   what better way to appreciate the sky, and the lambent light of the desert Southwest, than by running over mountain trails at sunrise?   Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie.

From the Mail Bag: Occasionalism

Todd Wright e-mails:

Great blog, thanks for writing it!

[. . .]

2.  Are you familiar with the writings of the muslim philosopher Al-Ghazali and his idea now called "Occasionalism"?  It seems to me that the person of faith must give up his/her faith in cause and effect for the supernatural to make sense, and Al-Ghazali seems to be the only person to have ever understood this.

Thanks again for your blog!  It's fantastic!

Am I familiar with occasionalism?  Indeed I am and have given it quite a bit of thought.  I advocate a contemporary version of occasionalism in "Concurrentism or Occasionalism? American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, vol. LXX, no. 3, Summer 1996, pp 339-359. This post will give the reader some idea of what occasionalism is.

Does the believer have to give up his faith in cause and effect for the supernatural to make sense?  No, at the very most he would have to abandon certain views of causation.  That there is causation in the natural world is undeniable, a 'Moorean fact,' a datum.  Anyone who denies this is a lunatic who belongs in the same 'bin' with eliminativists in the philosophy of mind.    For if one were to deny causation, then one would in effect be denying that there is any difference between causal and noncausal event sequences.  But surely there is such a difference as all will admit including al-Ghazali and Malebranche.  I flip a switch (e1) and the light goes on (e2).  At the same time the phone rings (e3).   E1-e2 is a causal event sequence. E1-e3 is not.  Philosophers are not in the business of denying such data as these.  Philosophical questions first arise when we ask what it is for one event to cause another.  That there is causation is a pre-philosophical datum.  What causes what is a question for experience and science.  What causation is is a philosophical question.

Some theories of causation are inconsistent with theism, but not all are.  For example, if it is maintained that all causation is event-causation and that there cannot be be agent-causation, then classical theism is ruled out.  And I should also point out that one can be a theist without holding an occasionalist theory of causation.  For example, once could be a concurrentist.  But this is not the place to go into these details.

 

Oscar the Cat, Harbinger of Death

  If this dude jumps into your bed, you know you're a goner.  A strange but touching tail tale from The New England Journal of Medicine.

The 26.2 Club

I affixed my 26.2 decal to the rear window of my Jeep Liberty this morning.  I've earned and have the right to advertise my entry into an elite club.  Sunday's Lost Dutchman was my second attempt but my first success.  The first attempt was Boston 1979.  My training had been overzealous and my knees were giving me serious trouble; fearing permanent injury I dropped out at the top of Heartbreak Hill, 21.3 miles into it, with Boston a mere five miles downhill.  (It was my first road race, I confess to running as a tag-along or a 'bandit' in today's parlance, I was young, I didn't know any better. Mea maxima culpa.)

How elite a club?  Joe Henderson, who has been marathoning and writing about it since the late '60s, says it well:

If you really want to know where you stand, don't count how many runners finish ahead of you.  Instead, turn around and look behind you.  Look especially at the people you can't see: those who trained for a marathon and didn't reach the starting line . . . who race but not at this distance . . . who run but never race . . . who used to run but don't any more . . . who never ran and never will.  [. . .]  Being a marathoner make you one in a thousand Americans.  Pat yourself on the back for doing something that 99.9 per cent of your countrymen or women couldn't or wouldn't do.

Don't call yourself slow, because you are not. You are fast enough to beat everyone who isn't in the race.  (Marathon Training, 2nd ed. 2004, p. 10)

Substance and Suppositum: Notes on Klubertanz

This recent excursion into the philosophy of The School is proving to be quite fascinating, and I thank Dr. Novak et al. for their stimulation.  I should say that I have read thousands upon thousands of pages of scholastic material, from Aquinas to Zubiri,  from Maritain to Marechal, over the past 40 years, so it is not as if I am a complete stranger to it; I do confess, however, to finding some of it mumbo-jumbo and lacking in the sort of analytic rigor that we broadly analytic types prize. To get a better handle on the notion of suppositum ('supposit' in English), this morning I pulled down from the shelf a number of scholastic manuals.

Let us first  turn to George P. Klubertanz, S. J., Introduction to the Philosophy of Being, 2nd ed. (Meredith Publ., 1963).  Back in the day, when Catholic colleges were Catholic as opposed to catholic, this textbook was inflicted upon many a bored undergraduate in required courses. In those days, philosophy was taught systematically; this was before and during Vatican II, before and while  the rot set in (if rot it was) and before chaos descended, the kind of chaos that issued in the Vagina Monologues being presented at the University of Notre Dame.  (To cop a riff from Dennis Prager, there is no coward like an academic coward, and the abdication of authority on the part of university officials from the 60s on is something to marvel at.)

But I digress.  According to Klubertanz, "The first substance is the singular substance which exists.  When we want to designate the being precisely as an existing, substantial, complete individual, we call it a 'supposit.'" (251)  He goes on to say that a supposit is a "complete individual" and therefore not something common to many in the manner of a secondary substance.  Nor is a supposit an integral part, or an essential part, of a substance.  Klubertanz gives the example of the body of a living thing as an example of an essential part of it -- presumably because a living thing cannot exist without a body -- and the example of a hand as an example of an "integral part."  Klubertanz gives no rigorous definition of the latter phrase, but I surmise that an integral part is a part that is not essential to the whole of which it is a part.  Thus a primary substance such as a particular man can exist without a hand.

Progressives and the Growing Dependency Agenda

A must-read from the pen of George Will.  And here is a balanced discussion of the Tea Party movement by the blogging biker, Mike Valle.

Professor Anderson and the Hyper-Inscrutability of the Trinitarian Doctrine (Peter Lupu)

(This gem is pulled up from the vasty deeps of the ComBox to where it may shine in a more fitting setting.  Minor editing, bolding, and comments in blue by BV.)

1). Let us say that a *real* contradiction is a sentence which comes out false according to every possible model (M): i.e., M = language-plus-domain-plus-interpretation, where an ‘interpretation’ is a complete and systematic assignment of extensions to the non-logical terms of the language (L). We assume that L is a well developed natural language such as English and we have a sufficiently rich domain that includes whatever entities are required to implement an interpretation that will suffice for theological purposes.

1.1) Note: We are assuming throughout classical logic in two sense: (a) the logical constants are interpreted classically; (b) there are no *real* true contradictions.

1.2) Sentence S is a *real* contradiction just in case there is no *normal model* M in which it comes out true. A normal model in this context is one which features an interpretation that assigns extensions to the non-logical terms in the usual way prior to resolving any potential ambiguities. On a realist conception of truth, S [if contradictory] has no truth-maker (T-maker) in any normal model or possible world.

2) Let us now define at least one sense of an *apparent contradiction* in model theoretic terms. Let S be a sentence expressible in L and suppose S comes out false in every normal model M. S appears to be a contradiction. Is it really a contradiction? Prof. Anderson maintains that there are sentences which are contradictory in every normal model, but are non-contradictory in some other models of L. How can that be? [Shouldn't Peter have 'false' for contradictory and 'true' for non-contradictory in the preceding sentence?  After all, in (1) we are told in effect that contradictoriness is falsehood in every model, which implies that noncontradictoriness is truth in some model.  'Contradictory in every model' is a pleonastic expression.]

Was Descartes Poisoned by a Catholic Priest?

As we have been learning, the conceivability of such theological doctrines as Trinity, Incarnation, and Transubstantiation depends on one's background ontology.  Erlangen University's Theodor Ebert, according to this Guardian account, argues that the father of modern philosophy was poisoned with an arsenic-laced communion wafer by a Catholic priest because his metaphysical position is inconsistent with the Transubstantiation doctrine.

This raises an interesting question:  Isn't a Catholic priest's commission of murder by desecration of the host far worse than a philosopher's holding of heretical views? 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Running on St. Valentine's Day

My training over and my carbo-loading done, I am now in the psych-up phase for tomorrow's Lost Dutchman marathon.  Will I be able to go the distance?  At the outset, I'll Take It Easy but then Take It to the Limit.  I will have no trouble with the first 20 miles, but the last 10 K I will be Running on Empty.  Question is whether I will be Willin' to keep on movin'?

And while we're on the running them, let's not forget Del Shannon's Runaway, Roy Orbison's Running Scared, and Dion DiMucci's Runaround Sue.  And then there's that Crystals number the refrain of which sounds like 'They do run, run.'

And tomorrow  being St Valentine's Day, three for my wife.  An old Sam Cooke number, a lovely Shirelles tune, and my favorite from the Seekers.

A Platonist at Breakfast

I head out early one morning with wifey in tow. I’m going to take her to a really fancy joint this time, the 5 and Diner, a greasy spoon just dripping with 1950s Americana. We belly up to the counter --where I can keep an eye on the waitresses -- and order the $2. 98 special: two eggs any style, hashbrowns, toast and coffee. Meanwhile I punch the buttons of Floyd Cramer’s "Last Date" on the personal jukebox in front of me after feeding it with a quarter from wifey’s purse.

"How would you like your eggs, sir?"

"Over medium, please."

The eggs arrive undercooked. Do I complain? Rhinestone-studded Irene is working her tail off in the early morning rush. I’ve already bugged her for Tabasco sauce, extra butter, and more coffee. The service came with the sweetest of smiles. The place is jumping, the Mexican cooks are sweating, and the philosopher is philosophizing:

If it won’t matter by tomorrow morning that these eggs are undercooked, why does it matter now?

With that thought, I liberally douse the undercooked eggs with the fine Louisiana condiment, mix them up with the hashbrowns, and shovel the mess into my mouth with bread and fork, chasing it all with coffee and cream, no sugar.

Who says you can’t do anything with philosophy?

More Fun With Alienans Adjectives and an Application

My bathroom sinks are made of faux marble, which is to say that they are not made of marble: false marble is not marble.  So faux and 'false' function here as alienans adjectives. Similar cases: false gold, falsies, false friend.  But 'false' in 'false teeth' is not an alienans adjective: false teeth are teeth just as an artificial hand is a hand.  Artificial leather, however, is not leather.

What about 'epistemic' in 'epistemic possibility'?  I'd say it is alienans.  I ask the secretary whether Professor Windbag is in his office.  She says, "It's possible."  Unbeknownst to both of us, however, old Windbag was cremated the night before.  So one cannot validly infer 'It is possible that p'  from 'It is epistemically possible that p.'

I saw a liberal on John Stossel's show the other night.  She said more than once that obesity is contagious.  When called on the absurdity of her assertion, she retreated to the claim that it is socially contagious.  Socially contagious?  I pronounce my 'bullshit' upon that: 'socially' here functions as an alienans adjective.  What is socially contagious is not contagious strictly speaking.

Liberals want to make of obesity a public health problem.  We ought not let them get away with it.  I have explained before why it is not a public health problem, and I'm not in the mood to repeat myself.  I'll just remind you that if we let the proponents of socialized medicine get their way, our liberty is near an end.  Once the government controls every aspect of health care, they will be in a position to dictate your behavior in almost every particular: what you must eat, what you must not eat, whether and how much you should exercise, whether you will be allowed to engage in such risky activities as riding motorcycles and so on.  And if high risk activities are allowed, then you can expect special taxes and restrictions galore.

So when I go on about language, it is not all just pedantry and scholarly nicety.  Attention to language is a prerequisite for critical thinking.  There is no semantic vehicle that some leftist will not try to hijack and pilot to a Left Coast destination; so sharpen your wits and be on guard.

For more on alienans adjectives, see Adjectives.

Happiness and Outflow

Cogitative and seminal efflux are both in need of control, and it is reasonably surmised that control of either helps in the control of the other.  It is more than reasonably surmised that control of both is necessary for happiness.  But difficult it is to stem the tide of thought and seed. 

Purgatory is Other People

Other people are mirrors in which we perceive distorted images of ourselves.  But in these distortions truths lie hidden which we do well to discern.

This Life

Too dream-like to be real, this life is too real to be a dream.  We cannot literally be "such stuff as dreams are made on" (The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1), but the spiritually percipient will catch the Bard's drift.  "Our little life  rounded with a sleep" is not a candidate for plenary Reality.

Sans Souci

The renter builds no equity

In exchange his abode is sans souci.

Me I'd rather own something real

And leave it to my stoicism to adjust how I feel.

Memory and Happiness

It is we who supply the blood that enlivens the spectral vampires that haunt us from our past.  A part of mind control is purgation of memory, and without mind control happiness is achieved with difficulty, if at all. 

Liberal Condescension

Why are liberals so condescending?  Especially when they are so frightfully wrong about so frightfully much?  Gerard Alexander's WaPo article is an outstanding piece of analysis.  Liberal disdain is expressed "in the form of four major narratives about who conservatives are and how they think and function."

More Christology: Freddoso on Supposita

To better understand the doctrine of supposita and the role it plays in the doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation, we turn to Alfred J. Freddoso, Human Nature, Potency and the Incarnation (bolding added):

According to the Christian faith, as defined in this instance by the great Christological Councils and mirrored in centuries of liturgical practice and theological reflection, Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man. More precisely, he is a single divine person, the eternal Word, in whom are united, whole and unmixed, a divine nature and a human nature--so that he is, to quote Chalcedon, "one with the Father in his divinity and one with us in his humanity."

In expounding this doctrine medieval theologians fashioned the technical metaphysical notion of a suppositum (or hypostasis), i.e. an independently existing ultimate subject of characteristics.4 The philosophically astute will detect at once that, so understood, the concept of a suppositum is remarkably akin to that of an Aristotelian primary substance or individual(ized) nature. Indeed, had it not been for the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, medieval Christian thinkers would never have been led to assert that suppositum and substance (or: individual nature) are distinct concepts. To speak now only of the Incarnation, Christ's individual human nature, i.e. the individual composed of a body and an intellective soul and united to the Son of God, is a paradigmatic Aristotelian [primary] substance . . . .Yet, because of its metaphysical union with and dependence upon the eternal Word, this nature is not the ultimate metaphysical subject of Christ's characteristics--not even of his "purely human" characteristics. So in this one instance, known to us only by divine revelation, we have a substance which is not a suppositum, a substance which is metaphysically "sustained" by something distinct from it. To complete the picture, a person is just a suppositum with an intellectual nature, i.e. a suppositum essentially endowed with intellect and free will.

In technical medieval terminology, then, Jesus Christ is a divine suppositum or person, the Son of God, who has freely "assumed" and now "sustains" an individual human nature. What's more, this human nature is united to the divine person "hypostatically," i.e. in such a way that properties had immediately by the human nature have the Son of God as their ultimate metaphysical subject--in a manner analogous to that in which many properties had immediately by a proper part of a whole have the whole itself as their ultimate metaphysical subject.

Ernst Bloch on Law and the State

Ernst Bloch, like Theodor Adorno, is a leftie worth reading. But here are two passages replete with grotesque exaggeration and plain falsehood.  Later, perhaps, I will cite something from Bloch that I approve of. The offensive passages are from the essay, "Karl Marx, Death, and the Apocalypse" in Man on His Own: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (Herder and Herder, 1970, p. 32. The translation is by E. B Ashton):  

. . . the law as a whole, and the greater part of the criminal law as well, is simply an instrument by which the ruling classes maintain the legal standards that protect their interests . . . If there were no property, there would be no law and no need for its sharp-edged though hollow categories.

Does Inconceivability Entail Impossibility?

In an earlier thread James Anderson makes some observations that cast doubt on the standard entailment from inconceivability to impossibility.  (I had objected that his  theological mysterianism seems to break the inferential link connecting inconceivability and impossibility.) He writes,

But even though we have no direct epistemic access to any other inconceivability than our own, and despite the formidable historical pedigree of the idea, it still strikes me as implausible to maintain that inconceivability to us entails impossibility.  [. . .] For the principle in question is logically equivalent to the principle that possibility entails conceivability. But is it plausible to think that absolutely whatsoever happens to be possible in this mysterious universe and beyond must be conceivable to the human mind, at least in principle? Can this really be right?

I want to emphasize that I'm not advocating some form of modal skepticism, i.e., the view that our intuitions as to what is possible or impossible are generally unreliable. On the contrary, I think they're reliable. I just deny that they're infallible.

This does indeed give me pause.  Anderson is certainly right that if inconceivability entails impossibility, then, by contraposition, possibility entails conceivability.  These entailments stand or fall together.  But is it plausible to maintain that whatever is possible is conceivable?  Why couldn't there be possible states of affairs that are inconceivable to us?

But there may be an ambiguity here.  I grant that there are, or rather could be, possible states of affairs that we cannot bring before our minds.  These would be states of affairs that we cannot entertain due to our cognitive limitations.  But that is not to say that a state of affairs that I can bring before my mind and in which I find a logical contradiction is a possible state of affairs.  Thus we should distinguish two senses of inconceivable, where S is a state of affairs and A is any well-functioning finite cognitive agent:

S is inconceivable₁ to A =df A entertains S and finds a contradiction in S.

S is inconceivable₂ to A =df A is unable to entertain (bring before his mind) S.

Now it seems clear that inconceivability₂ does not entail impossibility.  But I should think that inconceivability₁ does entail impossibility.  For if S is contradictory, then that very state of affairs as the precise accusative of my thought that it is, cannot obtain.  Its possibility in reality is ruled out by the fact that it cannot be entertained without contradiction.

Now does possibility entail conceivability?  No, in that the possible need not be thinkable by us: there could be possibilities that lie beyond our mental horizon.  But possibility does entail conceivability if what we mean is that possible states of affairs that we can bring before our minds must be free of contradiction.

So, in apparent contradiction to what Anderson is claiming, I urge that we can be infallibly sure that a state of  affairs in which we detect a logical contradiction cannot obtain in reality.  There is more to reality, including the reality of the merely possible,  than what we can think of; but what we can think of must be free of contradiction if it is to be possible.

Conceivability without contradiction is no infallible guide to possibility.  But inconceivability₁ is an infallible guide to impossibility.  Where Anderson apparently sees symmetry, I uphold the traditional asymmetry.

Rand Resurgent

Cathy Young's A Rand Revival offers a balanced appraisal.  Excerpts:

Politically, Rand wanted to provide liberal capitalism with a moral foundation, challenging the notion that communism was a noble but unrealistic ideal while the free market was a necessary evil best suited to humanity's flawed nature.

[. . .]

But Rand's work also has a darker, more disturbing aspect--one that, unfortunately, is all too good a fit for this moment in America's political life. That is her intellectual intolerance and her tendency to demonize her opponents. Speaking through her hero John Galt, Rand declared, There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.

For more on Rand, seen my Ayn Rand category.

Materialist Mysterianism

I wonder whether mysterianism in defense of such theological doctrines as the Trinity does not in the end backfire by making possible the philosophical justification of philosophical theses incompatible with it.  To ease our way into this line of inquiry, let us consider materialist mysterianism. 

1.  If mysterianism is an acceptable approach in theology, why can't a materialist make use of it in the philosophy of mind?  The (positive) mysterian maintains that there are true propositions which appear (and presumably must appear given our 'present' cognitive make-up) contradictory.  This is not to be confused with dialetheism, the view that there are some true contradictions.  For the mysterian there are no true contradictions, but there are some truths that must appear to us as contradictory due to our cognitive limitations. 

Innumeracy at the Highest Levels?

Barack Obama claims to have visited 57 U. S. states.  He also claimed that he had one more to go and that he wasn't allowed by his staff to visit Hawaii or Alaska.  Does he really think there are 60 states?  Of course not.  Let's be charitable.  The man was very, very tired and he got confused.  He said '57' instead of '47.' 

But here's the thing.  Had George Bush or Ronald Reagan or any conservative made this mistake, liberals would have seized upon it as proof of stupidity.  This says something about liberals.  For a liberal, conservatives are stupid no matter how much intelligence they display, and liberals are the opposite no matter how much stupidity they manifest, for example, the stupidity of thinking that one can spend one's way out of debt.

So who is really stupid?