Maverick Philosopher

Germany's Angela Merkel: Multiculturalism has "Utterly Failed"

Read it. 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Kerouac's Favorite Song

Ellis Amburn, Subterranean Kerouac (St. Martin's 1998), p. 324:

One night he [Kerouac, during a 1962 visit to Lowell, Mass.] left a bar called Chuck's with Huck Finneral, a reedy, behatted eccentric who carried a business card that read: "Professional killer . . . virgins fixed . . . orgies organized, dinosaurs neutered, contracts & leases broken."  Huck's philosophy of life was: "Better a wise madness than a foolish sanity."  They drove to a friend's house in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and on the way, Jack sang "Moon River," calling it his favorite song.  Composed by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, "Moon River" was the theme song of the popular Audrey Hepburn movie Breakfast at Tiffany's.  Sobbed by a harmonic, later swelling with strings and chorus, the plaintive tune's gentle but epic-like lyrics describe a dreamer and roamer not unlike Kerouac.

Indeed they do.  A restless dreamer, a lonesome traveler, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of mist, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore.  Here is another version of the tune with some beautiful images.

 

 

Kerouac October Quotation #16: No More Booze, Publishing, or Seminal Emission

Some of the Dharma, p. 240:

Sunday Jan 30 [1955] . . This is it . . . the day I decide to go forward instead of backward . . . will stop drinking, cold turkey (if I can do it) . . . Drink is the curse of the Holy Life -- alcohol is the curse of Tao -- I'll be like Reverend Henry Armstrong now -- I put on the cloth this morning in the yard -- (damn the cloth) -- I felt its dignified hugeness on me -- This, coupled with No Publishing and No Loosing of Sexual Vitality, would return me to the original pristine state of the child . . . 6 year old Ti Jean seeing the red sun in the snow windows of Lowell wondering "Qui c'est ca, moi?" (O what difference does it make?) -- Now I'll go to Nin's and help with the new house and prepare for Summer & Fall in Mexico in a grass hut -- now I'll imitate the action of the child and like water rule the low valleys of the world -- Adoration to the Child.

[. . .]

Armed with continence, and with sublime childlike solitariness, and with unwasted vitality, 33 years old, I go reveal the holy life to men who perish for lack of knowledge.

Nirvana as Asphyxiation

E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered, tr. R. Howard (New York: Seaver Books, 1983), p. 118:

In the Benares sermon, Buddha cites, among the causes of pain, the thirst to become and the thirst not to become. The first thirst we understand, but why the second? To long for nonbecoming -- is that not to be released? What is meant here is not the goal but the way as such, the pursuit and the attachment to the pursuit. -- Unfortunately, on the way to deliverance only the way is interesting. Deliverance? One does not attain it, one is engulfed in it, smothered in it. Nirvana itself -- an asphyxia! Though the gentlest of all.

 

I am reminded of Ramanuja's rejoinder to Shankara: "I want to taste sugar, not become sugar." If salvation is destructive of all individuality, what could it be worth? If, on the other hand, salvation is merely entry into a Hinterwelt that reproduces in improved form features of the hic et nunc -- as on the puerile Islamic conception of paradise as endless disporting with black-eyed virgins -- then (i) what rational person could believe in it, and (ii) how could it solve the fundamental problems that plague us here below? They would simply be reproduced in the hinterworld.

I'll give this problem a name. It is the problem of elaborating a conception of salvation that avoids both annihilationism and reduplicationism. 

Gray Flannel and the Matter of Money

Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit  appeared in 1955 two years before Jack Kerouac's  On the Road. I never finished Gray Flannel, getting only 80 or so pages into it.  It's a book as staid as the '50s, a tad boring, conventional, and forgettable in comparison to the hyperromantic and heart-felt rush of the unforgettable On the Road. Since how 'beat' one is in part has to do with one's attitude towards money, which is not the same as one's possession or nonpossession of it, I'll for now just pull some quotations from Horace and Sloan Wilson.  The Horace quotations seem not to comport well with each other, but we can worry that bone on another occasion.

Quaerenda pecunia primum est; virtus post nummos. (Horace, Epistles I, 1, 53) Money is to be sought first of all; virtue after wealth. Or, loosely translated, cash before conscience.

Vilius argentum est auro virtutibus aurum. (Horace, Epistles I, 1, 52). Silver is less valuable than gold, gold less valuable than virtue.

The next morning, Tom put on his best suit, a freshly cleaned and pressed gray flannel. On his way to work he stopped in Grand Central Station to buy a clean white handkerchief and to have his shoes shined. During his luncheon hour he set out to visit the United Broadcasting Corporation. As he walked across Rockefeller Plaza, he thought wryly of the days when he and Betsy had assured each other that money didn't matter. They had told each other that when they were married, before the war, and during the war they had repeated it in long letters. "The important thing is to find a kind of work you really like, and something that is useful," Betsy had written him. "The money doesn't matter."

The hell with that, he thought. The real trouble is that up to now we've been kidding ourselves. We might as well admit that what we want is a big house and a new car and trips to Florida in the winter, and plenty of life insurance. When you come right down to it, a man with three children has no damn right to say that money doesn't matter. (The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Simon and Shuster, 1955, pp. 9-10)

The Kerouac-Francis Sweeney, S. J. Correspondence

Mention is made of it in Ellis Amburn, The Subterranean Kerouac  (St. Martin's, 1998), pp. 328-331.  A bit of it is online here.  You will need to scroll down to find it.

Why Liberals Don't Get the Tea Party

Good analysis by Peter Berkowitz. Excerpt:

Born in response to President Obama's self-declared desire to fundamentally change America, the tea party movement has made its central goals abundantly clear. Activists and the sizeable swath of voters who sympathize with them want to reduce the massively ballooning national debt, cut runaway federal spending, keep taxes in check, reinvigorate the economy, and block the expansion of the state into citizens' lives.

In other words, the tea party movement is inspired above all by a commitment to limited government. And that does distinguish it from the competition.

 

 

Kerouac October Quotation #15 Mexico City Blues 16th Chorus

Here.

Kerouac October Quotation #14 and Quiz

Describing the famous Gallery Six poetry reading in The Dharma Bums, Kerouac writes,

The other poets were either hornrimmed intellectual hepcats with wild black hair like Alvah Goldbrook, or delicate pale handsome poets like Ike O'Shay (in a suit), or out-of-this-world genteel looking Renaissance Italians like Francis DaPavia (who looks like a young priest), or bow-tied wild-haired old anarchist fuds like Reinhold Cacoethes, or big fat bespectacled quiet booboos like Warren Coughlin.

Who are or were these five poets in real life?

Islam and the West

It is certainly time that the West considered systematically whether it has irreconcilable differences with Islam. The belligerence of many Islamic spokesmen and the unassimilable quality of many Muslim immigrants in the West, as well as the spectacular terrorist provocations of extreme Islamic groups, make this a very legitimate question.

Read the rest.

Neal Cassady Estate

The writing is poor, but this site will be of interest to Beat Generation aficionados.

The Bundle Theory and the Identity of Indiscernibles

I have been defending the bundle-of-universals theory of concrete particulars (BT) against various weak objections over a series of posts, here,  here, here, and here. Now I consider a very powerful objection, one that many will consider decisive.  The objection can be cast in the mold of modus tollendo tollens:  If BT is true, then the Identity of Indiscernibles is a necessary truth.  But the Identity of Indiscernibles is not a necessary truth. Ergo, BT is not true.

1. The Identity of Indiscernibles (IdIn) is the converse of the Indiscernibility of Identicals (InId) and not to be confused with it.  InId is well-nigh self-evident, while IdInis not.  Roughly, the latter is the principle that if x and y share all properties, then x = y.  It is a strictly ontological principle despite the epistemological flavor of 'indiscernible.' As just stated, it is more of a principle-schema than a principle.  We will get different principles depending on what we count as a property.  To arrive at a plausible nontrivial principle we must first rule out haecceity properties.  If, for any x,there is a property of identity-with-x, then no two things could share all properties, and the principle would be trivially true due to the falsehood of the antecedent.  Haecceity properties are creatures of darkness in any case as I argue elsewhere.

A plausible, nontrivial, principle results if we allow as properties all and only relational and  nonrelational pure properties.  A pure property is one that makes no reference to any specific individual.   Being married would then be an example of a pure relational property: to be married is to be married to someone, but not to any specified individual.  Being married to Xanthippe, however, is an impure relational property.  Being obese would be an example of a nonrelational property.  Here then is a plausible version of the Identity of Indiscernibles:

Necessarily, for any x, for any y, and for any relational or nonrelational pure property P, if (x has P iff y has P) then x = y.

2.  It is obvious, I think, that BT entails IdIn in the above form.  Consider a concrete particular, an iron sphere say, at a time.  On BT it is nothing but a bundle of universals. This implies that it is not possible that there be a second iron sphere that shares with the first  all relational and nonrelational pure properties.  This is not possible on BT because on BT a concrete particular is nothing more than a bundle of universals.  Thus there is no ontological ingredient in a concrete particular that could serve to differentiate it from another particular having all the same relational and nonrelational pure properties.  And if it is not possible that there be two things that differ numerically without differing property-wise, then the Identity of Indiscernibles as above formulated is necessarily true.

I am assuming that BT, if true, is necessarily true.  This is a special case of the assumption that the propositions of metaphysics, if true, are necessarily true.  If this assumption is granted, then BT entails IdIn.

3.  But is IdIn true?  Since it is necessarily true if true, all it takes to refute it is a possible counterexample.  Imagine a world consisting of two iron spheres and nothing else.  (The thought experiment was proposed in a 1952 Mind article by Max Black.) They are the same size, shape, volume, chemical composition and so on.  They agree in every nonrelational respect.  But they also agree in every relational respect.  Thus, each has the property of being ten meters from an iron sphere.   What Black's example seems to show is that there can be numerical difference without property-difference.  But then IdIn is false, whence it follows that BT is false.

4.  This is a powerful objection, but is it fatal?  Here are three ways to resist the argument, fit topics for further posts.  He who has the will to blog will never be bereft of topics.

a. Maintain that BT is a contingent truth.  If so, then BT does not entail IdIn as formulated above.

b. Grant that BT entails IdIn, but deny that scenarios such as Black's are really possible.  Admit that they are conceivable, but deny that conceivability entails possibility.

c.  An immanent universal can be wholly present at different places at once.  So why can't a bundle of universals be wholly present in different places at once?  Argue that Black's world can be interpreted, not as two particulars sharing all universals, but as one particular existing in two places at the same time.  From that infer that Black's Gedankenexperiment does show that IdIn is false.

Any other paths of resistance?

Kerouac October Quotation #13: Buddhist Life Denial

From Some of the Dharma, Viking 1997, p. 175, emphasis added:

No hangup on nature is going to solve anything -- nature is bestial -- desire for Eternal Life of the individual is bestial, is the final creature-longing -- I say, Let us cease bestiality & go into the bright room of the mind realizing emptiness, and sit with the truth. And let no man be guilty, after this, Dec. 9 1954, of causing birth. -- Let there be an end to birth, an end to life, and therefore an end to death.  Let there be no more fairy tales and ghost stories around and about this.  I don't advocate that everybody die, I only say everybody finish your lives in purity and solitude and gentleness and realization of the truth and be not the cause of any further birth and turning of the black wheel of death.  Let then the animals take the hint, and then the insects, and all sentient beings in all one hundred directions of the One Hundred Thousand Chilicosms of Universes. Period.

Nature is the cause of all our suffering; joy is the reverse side of suffering.  Instead of seducing women, control yourself and treat them like sisters; instead of seducing men, control yourself and treat them like brothers.  For life is pitiful.

Stop.

Coulter on Sobran

Not Your Average Joe.

The Philosopher as Rhinoceros

George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States (New York: Norton, 1967), p. 35:

So long as philosophy is the free pursuit of wisdom, it arises wherever men of character and penetration, each with his special experience or hobby, looks about them in this world. That philosophers should be professors is an accident, and almost an anomaly. Free reflection about everything is a habit to be imitated, but not a subject to expound; and an original system, if the philosopher has one, is something dark, perilous, untested, and not ripe to be taught, nor is there much danger that anyone will learn it. The genuine philosopher -- as Royce liked to say, quoting the Upanishads -- wanders alone like the rhinoceros.

Is it any wonder that Santayana quit his teaching job at Harvard and spent the rest of his life in retirement in Rome?

The difference between a philosopher and a professor of philosophy is the former lives for what the latter lives from.

Quo Vadis?

The universe is in no big rush to get somewhere.  So why are you?  Whither goest thou? 

Self-Censorship Among the Politically Correct

There is no chicken like a liberal chicken.  Here.  Prager's comment: "Secular + Liberal = Wimp."

UPDATE 10/14.  Reason magazine weighs in.  Just Admit it, Newspapers: You're Scared of Muslims.

Of course.  The self-censorship is motivated by fear.  And it is a rational fear, which is why 'Islamophobia' and cognates are idiotic constructions that ought to be shunned by the intelligent.  Must I point out once again that a phobia is an irrational fear? So why do our leftist pals sling this word?

Some leftists sincerely believe that the concern over radical Islam is alarmist.  But most leftists know that it is not alarmist.  It is just that they hate conservatives more than they hate the threat to their own values.  They hate conservatives so much that they cannot or will not admit that they have more in common with contemporary American conservatives than they do with radical Muslims.  Astonishing, but true.  Apparently, they think they can use the Islamists, as a species of 'useful idiot,' to help destroy capitalism and usher in the socialist worker's paradise, dismissing or converting the Islamists when their services are no longer needed.  It's a bad bet.  It is more likely that they will lose their heads before any dismissal or conversion or mollification or other normalization of Islamists occurs.

Kerouac October Quotation #12: Our Boy Gives the Hinayana the Nod

From Some of the Dharma, pp. 174-175:

Hit the makeless null. Whether or not individuality is destroyed now, it will be complelely destroyed in death.  For all things that are made fade back to the unmade.   What's all the return-vow hassle, but a final metaphysical clinging to eternal ego-life by Mahayana Thinkers.  An intellectualized ego-attachment to taskhood.  Hinayana, nay Ecclesiastes, is best.

Companion posts:  A Philosopher's Notes on Ecclesiastes, Chapters 1-2.  A Philosopher's Notes on Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3. 

Bundling is Symmetrical But not Transitive

Over the phone the other day, Peter L. suggested the following objection to the bundle-of-universals theory of ordinary particulars, 'BT' hereafter.  (I leave out of consideration for the nonce bundle-of-tropes bundle theories.)  I am not sure I understood what Peter was driving at.  But here is the gist of what I thought he was saying. 

1. Suppose x is a proper (spatial) part of y, y being a physical thing.  On BT, both y and x are bundles of universals.  Now it often happens that a whole has a property that is not had by all its parts.  Think of a rubber ball.  The ball is spherical (or spheroid, if you  insist).  But it has proper parts that are not spherical.  For example, its hemispheres are not spherical.  Nor are the cubes of rubber internal to it spherical.  (They too are proper parts of it on classical mereology. These cubes could be 'liberated' by appropriate cutting of the ball.) The ball is red, let us say, but beneath the surface it is black.  And so on.  in sum, wholes often have properties that their parts do not have.

2.  On BT, property-possession is understood, not in terms of the asymmetrical relation of exemplification, but in terms of the symmetrical relation of bundling.  Accordingly, for a property to be possessed by something is not for it to be exemplified by this thing, but for it to be bundled with other logically and nomologically compossible properties.  Exemplification, the asymmetrical relation that connects a substratum to a first-level property is replaced by bundling  which is a symmetrical relation that connects sufficiently many properties (which we are assuming to be universals) so as to form a particular.  When the universals are bundled, the result is a whole of which the universals are ontological constituents, with the bundling relation taking over the unifying job of the substratum.  While bundling is symmetrical -- if U1 is bundled with U2, then U2 is bundled with U1-- ontological constituency is asymmetrical:  if U is an ontological constituent of B, then B is not an ontological constituent of U.

3.  Given that the  ball is a bundle of universals, and that the ball is spherical, it follows that the ball has as one of its ontological 'parts' the universal, sphericality.  Now sphericality and cubicality are not broadly-logically compossible.  Hence they cannot be bundled together to form an individual.  But our ball has a proper part internal to it which is a cube.  That proper part has cubicality as a constituent universal.  So it seems a broadly-logical contradiction ensues:  the ball has as constituents both sphericality and cubicality, universals that are not compossible.

4. An interesting objection!  But note that it assumes Transitivity of Bundling:  it assumes that if sphericality is bundled  with sufficiently many other Us to form a complete individual, and cubicality is bundled with one of these Us -- say being made of rubber -- then sphericality is bundled with cubicality. But it is well-known that bundling is not transitive.  Suppose roundness and redness are bundled in our ball, and redness and stickiness are bundled in a numerically distinct disk, but there is nothing that is both round and sticky. That's a possible scenario which shows that Transitivity of Bundling fails. From the fact that U1 is bundled with U2, and U2 with U3, one cannot infer that U1 is bundled with U3.  So from the fact that sphericality is bundled with rubberness, and rubberness with cubicality, it does not follow that sphericality is bundled with cubicality.

The  bundle theory can accommodate the fact that a property of a whole needn't be a property of all its proper parts.  Or am I missing something?

 

Krauthammer on Obama's Policies

Read it.  Excerpt:

For the first time since modern budgeting was introduced with the Budget Act of 1974, the House failed to even write a budget. This in a year of extraordinary deficits, rising uncertainty and jittery financial markets. Gold is going through the roof. Confidence in the dollar and the American economy is falling – largely because of massive overhanging debt. Yet no budget emerged from Congress to give guidance, let alone reassurance, about future U.S. revenues and spending.

The day of reckoning approacheth. 

Brevity

Brevity is the soul of blog.

Can a Bundle Theory Accommodate Change?

0.  Peter L. has been peppering me with objections to bundle theories.  This post considers the objection from change.

1. Distinguish existential change (coming into being and passing out of being) from alterational change, or alteration.  Let us think about ordinary meso-particulars such as avocados and coffee cups.  If an avocado is unripe on Monday but ripe on Friday, it has undergone alterational change: it has changed in respect of the property of being ripe.  One and the same thing has become different in respect of one or more properties. (An avocado cannot ripen without becoming softer, tastier, etc.)  Can a bundle theory make sense of an obvious instance of change such as this?  It depends on what the bundle theory (BT) amounts to.

2. At a first approximation, a bundle theorist maintains that a thing is nothing more than a complex of properties contingently related by  a bundling relation, Russellian compresence say.    'Nothing more' signals that on BT there is nothing in the thing that exemplifies the properties: there is no substratum (bare particular, thin particular) that supports and unifies them. This is not to say that on BT a thing is just its properties: it is obviously more, namely, these properties contingently bundled.  A bundle is not a mathematical set, a mereological sum, or a conjunction of its properties.  These entities exist 'automatically' given the existence of the properties.  A bundle does not. 

3.  Properties are either universals or property-instance (tropes).  For present purposes, BT is a bundle-of-universals theory.  Accordingly, my avocado is a bundle of universals.  Although a bundle is not a whole in the strict sense of classical mereology, it is a whole in an analogous sense, a sense sufficiently robust to be governed by a principle of extensionality: two bundles are the same iff they have all the same property-constituents.  It follows that the unripe avocado on Monday cannot be numerically the same as the ripe avocado on Friday.  And therein lies the rub.  For they must be the same if it is the case that an alteration in the avocado has occurred. 

So far, then, it appears that the bundle theory cannot accommodate alterational change.  Such change, however, is a plain fact of experience.  Ergo, the bundle theory in its first approximation is untenable.

4.  This, objection, however, can be easily met by sophisticating the bundle theory and adopting a bundle-bundle theory.  Call this BBT.  Accordingly, a thing that persists over time such as an avocado is a diachronic bundle of synchronic or momentary bundles.  The theory then has two stages.  First, there is the construction of momentary bundles from universals.  Then there is the construction of a diachronic bundle from these bundles. The momentary bundles have properties as constituents while the diachronic bundles do not have properties as constituents, but individuals.  At both stages the bundling is contingent: the properties are contingently bundled to form momentary bundles and these resulting bundles are contingently bundled to form the persisting thing.

Accordingly, the unripe avocado is numerically the same as the ripe avocado in virtue of the fact that the earlier momentary bundles which have unripeness as a constituent  are ontological parts of the same diachronic whole as the later momentary bundles which have ripeness as a constituent.

5. A sophisticated bundle theory does not, therefore, claim that a persisting thing is a bundle of properties; the claim is that a persisting thing is a bundle of individuals which are themselves bundles of properties.  This disposes of the objection from change at least as formulated in #3 above.

6. BBT also allows us to accommodate the intuition  that things have accidental properties.  On the proto-theory BT according to which a persisting thing is a bundle of properties, it would seem that all properties must be essential, where an essential property is one a thing has in every possible world in which it exists.    For if wholes have their parts essentially, and if bundles are wholes in this sense, and things are bundles of properties, then things have their properties essentially.  But surely our avocado is not essentially ripe or unripe but accidentally one or the other.  On BBT, however, it is a contingent fact that a momentary bundle MB1 having ripeness as a constituent is bundled with other momentary bundles.  This implies that the diachronic bundle of bundles could have existed without MB1 and without other momentary bundles having ripeness as a constituent.  It therefore seems to follow that BBT can accommodate accidental properties.

7. That is, BBT can accommodate the modal intuition that our avocado might never have been ripe.  But what about the modal intuition that, given that the avocado is ripe at t, it might not have been ripe at t?  This is a thornier question and the basis of a different objection that is is not defused by what I have said above.  And so we reserve this objection for a separate post.

The History of Philosophy as Akin to an Intellectual Arms Race

Nicholas Rescher, The Strife of Systems: An Essay on the Grounds and Implications of Philosophical Diversity (University of Pittsburg Press, 1985), pp. 205-206:

The history of philosophy is akin to an intellectual arms race where all sides escalate the technical bases for their positions.  As realists sophisticate their side of the argument, idealists sophisticate their counterarguments; as materialists become more subtle, so do phenomenalists, and so on.  At the level of basics, the same old positions continue to contest the field -- albeit that ever more powerful weapons are used to defend increasingly sophisticated positions.

The context is an argument for the thesis that philosophy is susceptible of technical but not doctrinal progress.  The nature of philosophy precludes consensus.  Resolution of "the substantive issues in such as way as to secure general approbation and assent" (206) is out of the question. Such consensus is impossible and therefore not even an ideal.

Strife of Systems is essential reading for anyone interested in metaphilosophy.

How Radical Islam Seduced the Academics

Read it.

Too Many Laws

You've heard me say it before.  Laws should be few in number, rational in content, enforceable, and enforced.  As it is, we have too many laws, indeed, too many 'Ls':  too many laws, lawyers, legislators (most of whom are lawyers), and liberals.  How can a government claim to be representative of the people when it is top-heavy with lawyers?  That is a question that ought to be asked.  While you're at it, ask whether it might not be a good idea to have some de-legislators in among the legislators.

America is Drowning in Law.

Kerouac October Quotation #11: For the Sake of Absolute Freedom

It's October 11th today, Columbus Day.  This is a month to be savored day by day, hour by hour.  To aid in the savoring, here is today's Kerouac quotation, from "The Vanishing American Hobo" in Lonesome Traveler, p. 173 of the 1970 Black Cat edition.  (Purchased my copy in a shop on Bourbon Street in New Orleans on 12 April 1973, while on the road, enroute to Boston from Los Angeles.  From that point of the trip on I had two Kerouac books in my rucksack, the just mentioned and, you guessed it, On the Road.)

There is nothing nobler than to put up with a few incoveniences like snakes and dust for the sake of absolute freedom.

Kerouac October Quotation #10 October in the Railroad Earth

Kerouac reads a few pages from "The Railroad Earth" in Lonesome Traveler, a collection of short pieces first published in 1960.

Krauthammer as Chess Player

Here.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Two Sorts of One-Hit Wonders

There are one-hit wonders whose hits have endured and one hit wonders whose hits have pretty much sunk into oblivion, which is why you need me to prowl the musty mausoleum of moldy oldies for these moth-eaten memories.   Norma Tanega and her  Walkin' My Cat Named Dog belong to the latter category.  If you remember this curious tune from 1966  I'll buy you a beer.  An example of a one-hit wonder whose hit gets plenty of play is Curtis Lee's Pretty Little Angel Eyes.

Land of a Thousand Dances was Cannibal and the Head Hunters' one hit.  Its obscurity lies perhaps midway between the Tanega and Lee efforts.  This one goes out to my old friend Tom Coleman whose hometown is Whittier, California.  He most likely listened to this song some Saturday night while cruising Whittier Blvd, or else while enroute to a dance at the El Monte Stadium.  "Be there or be square."

Kerouac October Quotation #9: Mexico City Blues 228th Chorus

Kerouac reads.

Notes on Chapter One of Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design

Many thanks to reader David Parker for sending me a copy of Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (Bantam, 2010).  Not a book worth buying, but graciously accepted gratis! When physicists need money, they scribble books for popular consumption.  But who can blame them: doing physics is hard while writing bad philosophy is easy.

 Numbers in parentheses are page references.

The first chapter, "The Mystery of Being," gets off to a rocky start with a curious bit of anthropomorphism: the universe is described as "by turns kind and cruel," (5) when it is obviously neither.  Imputing human attitudes to nature is unscientific last time I checked.  And then there is the chapter's title.  I would have thought that the purpose of science is to dispel mystery.  But let that pass.  The authors remind us that we humans ask Big Questions about the nature of reality and the origin of the universe, e.g., "Did the universe need a creator?" (5)  True, but the past tense of that question betrays a curious bias, as if a creator is a mere cosmic starter-upper as opposed to a being ongoingly involved in the existence of the world at each instant.  It is the latter that sophisticated theists maintain.

The Big Questions traditionally belong to philosophy, but we are told that  "philosophy is dead." (5)  Unfortunately for the authors, "Philosophy always buries its undertakers," as Etienne Gilson famously observed in The Unity of Philosophical Experience (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937, p. 306) He calls this the first law of philosophical experience.  Memorize it, and have it at the ready the next time someone says something silly like "philosophy is dead." As a codicil to the Gilsonian dictum, I suggest "and presides over their oblivion."

Philosophy is dead, the authors opine, because she "has not kept up with modern developments in the sciences, particularly physics." (5) To get answers to such questions as Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? and Why this particular set of laws and not some other?  we must turn to physics. (These three questions are listed on p. 10)  It will be very surprising if physics -- physics alone without any smuggled-in philosophical additions -- can answer the first and third questions.  But it will never answer the second question.  For we are conscious and self-conscious moral agents, and no purely physical explanation of consciousness, self-consciousness and all it entails can be derived from physics alone.

What I expect the authors to do is to smuggle in various philosophical theses along with their physics.  But if they do so -- if they stray the least bit from pure physics -- then they prove that philosophy is alive after all, in their musings.  What they will then be doing is not opposing philosophy as such, but urging their philosophy on us, all the while hiding from us the fact that it is indeed philosophy.

That's a pretty shabby tactic, if you want my opinion. (And there you have it, even if you don't want it.)  You posture as if you are opposing all philosophy which you claim is "dead," which presumably means 'cognitively worthless,' and then you go on to make blatantly philosophical assertions which are neither properly clarified as to their sense, nor supported by anything that could count as rigorous argumentation. For example, in Chapter 2, the authors opine that "free will is just an illusion."  (32)  The sloppy  'reasoning'  laden with rhetorical questions that leads up to this obviously philosophical assertion is nothing that could be justified by pure physics.  I will come back to this when I discuss Chapter 2.

Quantum theory is brought up and the suggestion is floated that "the universe itself has no single history, nor even an independent existence." (6) It has "every possible history."  A little later we are introduced to M-theory:

. . . M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing.  Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god.  Rather,these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law. (8-9)

The writing here is quite inept.  If the authors want to say that these universes came into being out of nothing, they should say that, and not say that they were created out of nothing.  Creation, whether out of nothing or out of something,  implies a creator.  It is also inept to speak of 'intervention.'  If God creates a universe, he does not intervene in it; he causes it to exist in the first place.  One can intervene only in what already exists.  Such sloppy writing does not inspire confidence, and suggests that the thinking behind the writing is equally sloppy.  But even ignoring these infelicities of expression, it is a plain contradiciton to say that these universes comes into being out of nothing and that they arise naturally from physical law.  Whatever physical law is, it is not nothing!  That's clear, I hope.  So why don't our physicists say what they mean, namely that these multiple universes came into being , not from nothing, but from physical law.  That would be noncontradictory although it would prompt the question as to the nature and existence of physical law or laws. 

Another apparent contradiction worth noting: After mentioning quantum theory in the Chapter 1, the authjors assure us in Chpater 2  that "scientific determinism" is "the basis of all modern science." (30) How this is supposed to jive, I have no idea.  But hey, when the idea is to make a fast buck, who cares about such niceties as logical consistency?

Not only did many universes come into existence out of physical law (or is it out of nothing?), but "Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states at later times, that is at times like the present . . . ." (9)  Most of these states are unsuitable for the existence of any form of life.  It is our presence that "selects out from this vast array only those universes that are compatible with our existence." (9)  That's a neat trick given that universes "have no independent existence." (6)  If so, then we have no independent existence and cannot function as the "lords of creation" (9) who select among the vast array of universes.

But I want to be fair.  Perhaps later chapters will remove some of the murk.  There is also this consideration:  Even bad books are good if they stimulate thought. But don't buy it.  Borrow it from a library.

As I always say, "Never buy a book you haven't read."

 

Two Questions About the Bundle Theory Answered

On the bundle-of-universals theory of ordinary concrete particulars, such a particular is a bundle of its properties and its properties are universals.  This theory will appeal to those who, for various ontological and epistemological reasons, resist substratum theories and think of properties as universals.  Empiricists like Bertrand Russell, for example.  Powerful objections can be brought against the theory, but the following two questions suggested by  some comments of Peter Lupu  in an earlier thread are, I think, easily answered.

Q1.  How may universals does it take to constitute a particular?  Could there be a particular composed of only one or only two universals?

Q2.  We speak of particulars exemplifying properties.  But if a particular is a bundle of its properties, what could it mean to say of a particular that it exemplifies a property?

A1.  The answer is that it takes a complete set.  I take it to be a datum that the ordinary meso-particulars of Sellars' Manifest Image -- let's stick with these -- are completely determinate or complete in the following sense:

D₁. X is complete =_df for any predicate P, either x satisfies P or  x satisfies the complement of  P.

If predicates express properties, and properties are universals, and ordinary particulars are bundles of properties, then for each such particular there must be a complete set of universals.  For example, there cannot be a red rubber ball that has as constituents exactly three universals: being red, being made of rubber, being round.  For it must also have a determinate size, a determinate spatiotemporal location, and so on.  It has to be such that it is either covered with Fido's saliva or not so distinguished.  If it is red, then it must have a color; if it is round, it must have a shape, and so on.  This brings in further universals.  Whatever is, is complete.  That is a law of metaphysics, I should think.  Or perhaps it is only a law of phenomenological ontology, a law of the denizens of the Manifest Image.  (Let's not get into quantum mechanics.) 

A2.  If a particular is a bundle of universals, then it is a whole of parts, the universals being the (proper) parts, though not quite in the sense of classical mereology.  Why do I say that? Well, suppose you have a complete set of universals, and suppose further that they are logically and nomologically compossible.  It doesn't follow that they form a bundle.  But it does follow, by Unrestricted Summation, that there is a classical mereological sum of the universals.  So the bundle is not a sum.  Something more is required, namely, the contingent bundling to make of the universals a bundle, and thus a particular.

Now on a scheme like this there is no exemplification (EX) strictly speaking.  EX is an asymmetrical relation -- or relational tie:  If x exemplifies P-ness, then it is not the case that P-ness exemplifies x.  Bundling is not exemplification because bundling is symmetrical: if U1 is bundled with U2, then U2 is bundled with U1.  So what do we mean when we say of a particular construed as a bundle that is has -- or 'exemplifies' or 'instantiates' using these terms loosely -- a property?  We mean that it has the property as a 'part.'   Not as a spatial or temporal part, but as an ontological part.  Thus:

D₂. Bundle B has the property P-ness =_df P=ness is an ontological 'part' of B.

Does this scheme bring problems in its train?  Of course!  They are for me to know and for you to figure out.

 

The Beat Generation, the Tea Party and the Meaning of 'Beat'

Many thanks to that indefatigable argonaut of the cybersphere, Dave Lull, for bringing Lee Siegel's The Beat Generation and the Tea Party to my attention.  An auspicious find in this fine October, Kerouac month hereabouts.  If I wanted to be unkind I would say that the article proves that anything can be compared to anything.  But he does make some good points.  Excerpt:

Still, American dissent turns on a tradition of troublemaking, suspicion of elites and feelings of powerlessness, no matter where on the political spectrum dissent takes place. Surely just about every Tea Partier agrees with Ginsberg on the enervating effect of the liberal media: “Are you going to let our emotional life,” he once wrote, “be run by Time magazine?”

More seriously, the origin of the word “beat” has a connection to the Tea Partiers’ sense that they are being marginalized as the country is taken away from them. According to Ginsberg, to be “beat” most basically signified “exhausted, at the bottom of the world, looking up or out . . . rejected by society.” Barack Obama meant much the same thing when, during the presidential primaries, he notoriously said that “in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, and they feel so betrayed by government.” That he went on to characterize such people as “bitter” souls who “cling to their guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” only strengthened the anxiety among proto-Tea Partiers that they were about to be “rejected by society.”

Here some serious qualifications are in order.  Although 'beat' does have the connotation of 'beaten down' and 'exhausted,' this meaning is strictly secondary when compared to the term's fundamental meaning which is in the semantic vicinity of 'beatific,' 'beatitude,' The Eight Beatitudes, and the Beatific Vision (visio beata) in the theology of Thomas Aquinas.  Kerouac cannot be understood apart from his Catholic upbringing.  If we take Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) and Sal Paradise (Jack Kerouac) of On the Road as the main exemplars of beatness, there is nothing of the cool, jaded beatnik about them (the latter term an invention of the liberal media modeled on 'sputnik.')  They are not cool, but hot, 'mad,' joyously affirmative.  Every Kerouac aficionado thrills to the passage near the beginning of On the Road where Sal confesses: ". . . the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved . . . ." (p. 9)

The very name 'Sal Paradise' is a tip-off.  Salvatore, Salvator: savior.  Paradise: the prelapsarian state, the state before the lapsus or Fall, or else heaven.  Is there any book of his where our bourbon-besotted boy does not talk of heaven? It's all about salvation, happiness, heaven.  In part this is why he distances himself from Buddhism whose solution to suffering is merely negative: 

Myself, the dharma is slipping away from my consciousness and I cant think of anything to say about it anymore. I still read the diamond sutra but as in a dream now.  Don't know what to do.  Cant see the purpose of human or terrestrial or any kinda life without heaven to reward the poor suffering fucks. The Buddhist notion that Ignorance caused the world leaves me cold now, because I feel the presence of angels. (Some of the Dharma, Viking 1997, editor's introduction.)

And then there is the later OTR passage in which the 'beat' is explained:

. . . his [Dean's] bony mad face covered with sweat and throbbing veins saying, "Yes, yes, yes, " as though tremendous revelations were pouring into him all the time now . . . . He was BEAT -- the root, the soul of Beatific. (OTR, 161)

See also this Kerouac  interview for confirmation.  This was two years before his death.

Siegel's piece, then, is quite a stretch, but very interesting nonetheless.  But it is annoying when he quotes Ginsberg but provides no reference.  

Kerouac October Quotation #8 The Detritus of Literary Production

Satori in Paris (Grove Press, 1966), p. 35:

The whole library groaned with the accumulated debris of centures of recorded folly, as tho you had to record folly in the Old or the New World anyhow, like my closet with its incredible debris of cluttered old letters by the thousands, books, dust, magazines, childhood boxscores, the likes of which when I woke up the other night from a pure sleep, made me groan to think this is what I was doing with my waking hours: burdening myself with junk neither I nor anybody else should really want or will ever remember in Heaven.

Hits a nerve.  I also note the incongruity of a book ostensibly about satori mentioning heaven.  My longstanding sentimental attachment to the old dharma lush makes me overlook his silly misuse of 'satori' to refer to his inebriated Parisian experiences.

Happiness

"You can't make the unhappy happy."  I just heard Dennis Prager say this during his Happiness Hour.  An important truth.  There are people who are bent on being miserable, no matter what their circumstances or endowments.  As a general rule, they are best avoided if you want to be happy yourself.

Companion post:  People Are What They Are.

Supererogation and Suberogation

It would be neat if all actions could be sorted into three jointly exhaustive classes: the permissible, the impermissible, and the obligatory. These deontic modes would then be analogous to the alethic modes of possibility, impossibility, and necessity. Intuitively, the permissible is the morally possible, that which we may do; the impermissible is the morally impossible, that which we may not do; and the obligatory is the morally necessary, that which we must do.

Pursuing the analogy, we note that the following two alethic modal principles each has a deontic analog, where 'p' ranges over propositions and 'A' over actions:

1A. If p is necessary, then p is possible, but not conversely.
1D. If A is obligatory, then A is permissible, though not conversely.

2A. P is impossible iff ~p is necessary.
2D. A is impermissible iff ~A is obligatory. (e.g. Sexually molesting children is impermissible iff not sexually molesting children is obligatory.)

But of course the following ab esse ad posse principle has no deontic analog:

3A. If p is true, then it is possible that p is true.
3D. If A is done, then A is permissible.

This is not surprising since the deontic is a species of the normative.

Now let's try to characterize (not define) the deontic concepts of the permissible, the impermissible, and the obligatory in terms of the axiological concepts of good and bad:

4. If A is impermissible, then A is bad to do and good to leave undone.
5. If A is obligatory, then A is good to do and bad to leave undone.
6. If A is permissible then A is axiologically indifferent: neither bad to do and good to leave undone, nor good to do and bad to leave undone.

These characterizations seems to leave conceptual room for two other sorts of actions, actions that are good to do but NOT bad to leave undone, and actions that are bad to do but NOT good to leave undone. The former are supererogatory in a wide sense of the term, and the latter are suberogatory.

For example, paying one's bill in a restaurant is (legally and morally) obligatory: it is good to pay the bill and bad to leave without paying. But tipping is (legally, though perhaps not morally) supererogatory: it is good to tip but not legally required, and in this sense not bad to leave no tip. If this is unclear, consider tipping in excess of 20%. Surely this would be supererogatory: good to do (ceteris paribus) but not bad to leave undone. One could plausibly argue that restaurant patrons are morally obligated to tip in the amount of 15-20% of the tab given that waiters and waitresses work for minimum wage and rely on tips for a livable wage; but surely no one is obligated to leave a 50% tip, say. And yet it would be a very nice thing to do for that pretty waitress working her way through school. It would be good to do but not bad to leave undone.

Do you balk at calling such trifling actions supererogatory because they are not grand or heroic like throwing oneself on a grenade to save one's buddies? Well then, I will accommodate your point by distinguishing between wide and narrow senses of 'supererogation.' Or I might just give you the word as long as you grant me a category of actions an example of which I have just provided.

Now for some examples of suberogation. A supererogatory act is a good act that is in excess of what is morally or legally required. A suberogatory act is then one that is bad but not so bad as to be impermissible. The following might be examples: talking too much, public displays of affection, breaking wind in public, picking one's nose in front of others. The practitioner of public rhinotillexis does nothing legally or morally impermissible, but it is something bad, and not just aesthetically. I want to say that it is a morally bad action that not impermissible. So I say it is suberogatory.

More needs to be said. I am not sure that in the end the sub- and supererogatory don't collapse into the permissible thus obviating the need for two further categories of actions. Further reading: the SEP article, Supererogation.

The Conservative Philosopher

As a philosopher, he loves reason.  As a conservative, he is properly skeptical of it.

Kerouac October Quotation #7: Born to Die

Visions of Cody, p. 12:

All you do is head straight for the grave, a face just covers a skull awhile. Stretch that skull-cover and smile.

Joseph Sobran

Joseph Sobran is dead at the age of 64.  Beginning as a paleocon, he ended up an anarchist, and apparently something of an anti-Semite.    His 1985 Pensees: Notes for the Reactionary of Tomorrow, however, contains a wealth of important ideas worth ruminating on.  A couple of excerpts, not necessarily the best:

"The poor" are to liberalism roughly what "the proletariat" is to Communism--a formalistic device for legitimating the assumption of power. What matters, for practical liberals, is not that (for example) the black illegitimacy rate has nearly tripled since the dawn of the Great Society; it is that a huge new class of beneficiaries has been engendered--beneficiaries who vote, and who feel entitled to money that must be taken from others. It is too seldom pointed out that a voter is a public official, and that the use of proffered entitlements to win votes amounts to bribery. For this reason John Stuart Mill pronounced it axiomatic that those who get relief from the state should be disfranchised. But such a proposal would now be called inhuman, which helps account for the gargantuan increase in the size and scope of federal spending. Corrupt politicians make headlines; but no honest politician dares to refer to the problem of corrupt voters, who use the state as an instrument of gain.

[. . .]

The enemy, for socialism, is any permanent authority, whether it is a long-standing church or a holy scripture, whose tendency is to put a brake on political power. In fact power and authority are often confused nowadays: the thoroughly politicized man who seeks power can only experience and interpret authority as a rival form of power, because it impedes his ambition for a thoroughly politicized society. But authority is more nearly the opposite of power. It offers a standard of truth or morality that is indifferent and therefore often opposed to current desires and forces, standing in judgment over them. If God has revealed Himself to man, the progressive agenda may find itself seriously inconvenienced.

For this reason, religion is a source of deep anxiety to the liberal. He harps on its historical sins: Crusades, Inquisitions, witch burnings, wars. He never notices that the crimes of atheist regimes, in less than a century, have dwarfed those of all organized religions in recorded history. He sees Christianity's sporadic persecutions as being of its essence; he regards Communism's unbroken persecution as incidental to its potential for good. He warns of the "danger" posed by American fundamentalists (one of the most gentle and law-abiding segments of the population) and is unchastened by the results of "peace" in Vietnam and Cambodia.

A Letter from a Republican to Hispanics

Here.

Kerouac October Quotation #6: Slim Gaillard, the Man Who Knew Time

This post is for my old college buddy Tom Coleman, fellow Kerouac aficionado, who played Dean to my Sal back in the day. 

From On the Road:

 ... one night we suddenly went mad together again; we went to see Slim Gaillard in a little Frisco nightclub. Slim Gaillard is a tall, thin Negro with big sad eyes who's always saying 'Right-orooni' and 'How 'bout a little bourbon-arooni.' In Frisco great eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals sat at his feet and listened to him on the piano, guitar and bongo drums. When he gets warmed up he takes off his undershirt and really goes. He does and says anything that comes into his head. He'll sing 'Cement Mixer, Put-ti Put-ti' and suddenly slow down the beat and brood over his bongos with fingertips barely tapping the skin as everybody leans forward breathlessly to hear; you think he'll do this for a minute or so, but he goes right on, for as long as an hour, making an imperceptible little noise with the tips of his fingernails, smaller and smaller all the time till you can't hear it any more and sounds of traffic come in the open door. Then he slowly gets up and takes the mike and says, very slowly, 'Great-orooni ... fine-ovauti ... hello-orooni ... bourbon-orooni ... all-orooni ... how are the boys in the front row making out with their girls-orooni ... orooni ... vauti ... oroonirooni ..." He keeps this up for fifteen minutes, his voice getting softer and softer till you can't hear. His great sad eyes scan the audience. Dean stands in the back, saying, 'God! Yes!' -- and clasping his hands in prayer and sweating. 'Sal, Slim knows time, he knows time.'

Light up a cigarodi, mix yourself a wine spodiodi and then dig Slim Gaillard's Cement Mixer mentioned above.  While you're at it, check out the cat on bass in this clip.  Go, man, go!  (Never did get around to reading John Clellon Holmes' Go.)

 

Sinatra on Rock and Roll

Frank Sinatra died on 14 May 1998. Here we read:

 . . . as Sinatra began to recover from Gardner, he became more outspoken. In 1957, he denounced rock 'n' roll as "the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear. ... It manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the Earth."

That is about as fair as my judgment, back in the '60s, of the music of Sinatra and his fellow Rat Pack crooners: "lounge lizard music." Enamored as I was of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, Sinatra's music struck me as so much booze-drenched escapist rubbish, devoid of reality content. Empty glamor and glitz, at home in the plastic fantastic fool's paradise called Las Vegas.

But escapism is what Sinatra and his generational cohort needed, as mine needed a music of engagement. Different generations with different needs and sensibilities. In the meantime, I've come to appreciate his artistry.

Angel Eyes.  Only the Lonely. 

Metaphysics at Cindy's: The Ontological Stucture of Contingent Conreta

Over Sunday breakfast at Cindy's, a hardscrabble Mesa, Arizona eatery not unwelcoming to metaphysicians and motorcyclists alike, Peter  Lupu fired a double-barreled objection at my solution to Deck's Paradox.  The target, however, was not hit.  My solution requires that (a) concrete particulars can be coherently 'assayed' (to use a favorite word of Gustav Bergmann), or given an ontological analysis in terms of constituents some or all of which are universals, and (b) modally contingent concrete particulars can be coherently assayed as composed of necessary beings.

Peter denies both of (a) and (b), without good reason as it seems to me.  Let's begin with some definitions pithily presented.

Definitions

Abstract =df causally inert.

Concrete =df not abstract.

Universal =df repeatable (multiply exemplifiable).

Particular =df unrepeatable.

Modally contingent=df existent in some but not all broadly-logically possible worlds.

Modally necessary =df not modally contingent and not modally impossible.

Ad (a).  One form of the question is:  Could a concrete particular be coherently construed as a bundle universals?  Peter thinks not: "But the unification of two universals U and V is another universal W, not a particular." (From a two page handout he brought to breakfast.  How many people that you know bring handouts to breakfast?!)  Now bundle-of-universals theories of particulars face various standard objections, but as far as I know no one in the literature has made Peter's objection.  Presumably for good reason: it is a bad objection that confuses conjunction with the bundling relation.

We understand conjunction as a propositional connective.  Given the propositions a is red and b is round we understand that the conjunction a is red & b is round is true iff both conjuncts are true.  It is clear that a conjunction of propositions is itself a proposition.  By a slight extension we can speak meaningfully of a conjunction of propositional functions, and from there we can move to talk of conjunctions of properties.  Assuming that properties are universals, we can speak of conjunctions of universals.  It is clear that a conjunction of universals is itself a universal.  Thus the conjunction of Redness and Roundness is itself a universal, a multiply exemplifiable entity.  I will use 'Konjunction'  to single out conjunction of universals.

Now it should be obvious that a bundle of universals is not a conjunction of universals.  Let K be the Konjunction operator: it operates upon  universals to form universals.  Let B be the bundling operator: it operates upon universals to form particulars.  Bundling is not Konjunction.  So far, then, Peter seems to have failed to make an elementary distinction.

Now suppose Peter objects that nothing could operate upon universals to form a particular.  Universals in, universals out.  Then I say that he is just wrong: the set-theoretical braces -- { } -- denote an operator that operates upon items of any category to form sets of those items.  Now it should be obvious that a set of universals is not itself a universal, but a particular.  A Konjunction of universals is a universal, but a set of universals is not a universal, but a particular.  The Konjunction of Redness and Roundness is exemplifiable; but no set is exemplifiable.

Am I saying that a bundle of universals is a set of universals?  No.  I am saying that it is false to assume that any operation upon universals will result in a universal.  What I have said so far suffices to refute Peter's first objection, which was that the unification of two universals yields a third universal. You can see that to be false by noting that the unification into a set of two or more universals does not yield a universal but a particular.

Ad (b).  Our second question is whether a contingent particular could have as ontological constituents necessary beings.  Peter thinks not.  He thinks that anything composed of necessary beings will itself be a necessary being.  And so, given that universals are necessary beings, and that concrete particulars are composed of universals, no concrete particular can be modally contingent.

This objection fares no better than the first.  Suppose Redness and Roundness are compresent.  (You will recall that Russell took the bundling relation to be the compresence relation.  See An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, 1940, Chapter 6.)  Each of these universals, we are assuming, is a necessary being.  But it doesn't follow that their compresence is necessary; it could easily be contingent.  Here and now I see a complete complex of compresence two of whose constituent universals are Redness and Roundness.  But surely there is no necessity that these two universals co-occur or be com-present.  After all, Redness is often encountered compresent with shapes that are logically incompatible with Roundness.  Compresence, then, is a contingent relation.  It follows that complexes of compresence are contingent.  Necessarily, Rednessexists.  Necessarily, Roundness exists.  But it does not follow that, necessarily, Redness and Roundness are compresent: surely there are possible worlds in which they are not.

Peter's argument for his conclusion commits the fallacy of composition:

1. Every universal necessarily exists.

2. Every concrete particular is composed of universals. Therefore,

3. Every concrete particular is composed of things that necessarily exist. Therefore,

4. Every concrete particular necessarily exists.

The move from (3) to(4) is the fallacy of composition.  One cannot assume that if the parts of a whole have a certain property, then the whole has those properties.

 

Kerouac October Quotation #5

"Time is the purest and cheapest form of doom." (Visions of Cody, McGraw-Hill, 1972, p. 374)

Literary Kicks

Levi Asher of Literary Kicks e-mailed me to say that he has a response to a recent Buddhism post of mine. Please do check it out, and if you are a Beat Generation aficionado, you will find plenty of material on the Beats at Asher's place. 

In his response to me, Asher points out something I wouldn't dream of denying, namely, that Siddartha Gautama recommended a middle path between extreme asceticism and indulgence.  That's true, but pertains only to the means whereby desire as such is to be conquered.  The fact remains that for Buddhism desire as such is the problem, as opposed to misdirected desire, desire for unworthy of objects.

Hegel on Wall Street

Here.

Report from Afghanistan and More on Religious Zealotry

Spencer Case reports from Afghanistan, and I comment in blue (older comments of mine in dark orange):

Greetings again from Afghanistan. I've been reading your blog regularly although I haven't written in a while, so I hope you'll forgive a few preliminaries. Things are winding down in my tour, despite an attack on my base by a few Taliban last week (of which my report can be found here: http://www.cjtf101.com/en/regional-command-east-news-mainmenu-401/3362-us-afghan-servicemembers-respond-during-attack.html).

Also, I became interested in Robert Reilly's book The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis because of your pointer. I reviewed it in the Idaho State Journal and on my Dateline Afghanistan blog. Imagine my delight when none other than Reilly himself posted
a comment to my review! (online at: http://www.pocatelloshops.com/new_blogs/afghanistan/?p=99)

By the time this month expires I will be drinking my much awaited first post-deployment beer. Speaking of worldly pleasures, I'd like to make a second stab at an unresolved argument we had a couple of months ago. I am still convinced  that sincere conviction in a religious afterlife commits one to zealotry. After all, given a sincere conviction in Christian  salvation, how could the pursuit of any finite good be justified? And who could be more of a paradigm case of zealotry than the person who thinks all worldly goods are completely overridden by some one eternal Good?

In your response to my argument, you write:

Kerouac October Quotation #4: Resolutions Made and Broken

Sweet gone Jack made such an effort to be a good boy, but failed so utterly as to break one's heart.  Here is a Some of the Dharma entry (p. 127) written sometime between July and October 1954, before success and fame and alcohol undid him:

RESOLVED

One meal a day

No drinking of intoxicants

No maintaining of friendships

That, if I break any of these elementary rules of Buddhism, which have been my biggest obstacles, hindrances t othe attainment of contemplative happiness and joy of will, I will give up Buddhism forever. [He did break them and did give up Buddhism.]

Agreed, that I may finish the literary work I began, by the age of 40, after which my only work is to be in the Dharma Teaching, to be followed  by all cessation of work, striving or mental effort when Nirvana is nigh and signs indicate there is no more to write and teach.

One meal a day means, the mind not to be taunted and tempted by the senses. (Sensation of taste left uncultivated.) No intoxicants means, the heart not to be deranged, beaten in, (as in excessive drinking), nor the brain hystericalized and over-filled with anxious drug-thoughts and irrelevant images.  No maintaining of friendships means, no relations whatever to contaminate the good of contemplation, no pleasure-seeking, no ego-personality activity, no Co-Ignorance.

Quand tu t'ennui souffre . . .

Not drinking  preserves contemplative strength

Eating once a day, contemplative sensitivity

No friends or lusts, contemplative serenity

Strength, Sensitivity, Serenity = Joy

Kerouac October Quotation #3: This World, the Palpable Thought of God

Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels (G. P. Putnam 1965), p. 48:

Outside it's October night in Manhattan and on the waterfront wholesale markets there are barrels with fires left burning in them by the longshoremen where I stop and warm my hands and take a nip two nips from the bottle and hear the bvoom of ships in the channel and I look up and there, the same stars as over Lowell, October, old melancholy October, tender and loving and sad, and it will all tie up eventually into a perfect posy of love I think and I shall present it to Tathagata, my Lord, to God, saying "Lord Thou didst exult -- and praise be You for showing me how You did it -- Lord now I'm ready for more -- And this time I won't whine -- This time I'll keep my mind clear on the fact that it is Thy Empty Forms."

. . . This world, the palpable thought of God . . . [ellipsis in original]

 

Saturday NIght at the Oldies: Obscure '60s Psychedelia: Fever Tree

A good band with a highly distinctive sound, Fever Tree had a minor hit with  San Francisco Girls (1968).  But my favorite is The Sun Also Rises, a song I never forgot even though I hadn't heard it   in over 40 years until just recently and had forgotten the name of the band.