Maverick Philosopher

Flash Mobs

Another indicator of the decline of the West.  And another argument for concealed carry.

And of course there is a Pee Cee taboo on mentioning any of this:

The hateful murders of Matthew Shephard, who was gay, and James Byrd, Jr., who was black, were memorialized with national legislation. When similar crimes are committed by blacks against whites, they are greeted with ignominious silence. Just ask your friends how many of them are familiar with the murder of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsome, or David Graham. How many are familiar with Hoang Nguyen, who was killed in a senseless "game" called the knock-out game, in which mostly black attackers attack mostly non-black victims?

Butchvarov: Objects, Entities, and Transcendental Idealism

This entry extends and clarifies my post, Blackman Versus Butchvarov: Objects, Entities, and Modes of Existence. 

Preliminaries

For Butchvarov, all consciousness is intentional. (There are no non-intentional consciousnesses.)  And all intentionality is conscious intentionality. (There is no "physical intentionality" to use George Molnar's term.)  So, for Butchvarov, 'consciousness' and 'intentionality' are equivalent terms.  Consciousness, by its very nature, is consciousness of something, where the 'of' is an objective genitive.

Is Obama Smart?

George W. Bush couldn't rub a subject and a verb together and come up with a clean sentence in his mother tongue.  The man lacked verbal facility.  Among many, myself included, verbal facility is a touchstone of intelligence, or rather of one sort of intelligence, verbal intelligence.  Barack Obama has it.  But there is more to intelligence than the ability to sling words while avoiding syntactic howlers.  And when it comes to this 'more,' Obama is sadly lacking.  Obama is an uncommonly good bullshitter and blather-mouth, but the content is sorely lacking.  Does he have even one concrete idea that he is willing to express publicly?  Like Bret Stephens, I don't understand why so many consider him highly intelligent:

I don't buy it. I just think the president isn't very bright.

Socrates taught that wisdom begins in the recognition of how little we know. Mr. Obama is perpetually intent on telling us how much he knows. Aristotle wrote that the type of intelligence most needed in politics is prudence, which in turn requires experience. Mr. Obama came to office with no experience. Plutarch warned that flattery "makes itself an obstacle and pestilence to great houses and great affairs." Today's White House, more so than any in memory, is stuffed with flatterers.

Much is made of the president's rhetorical gifts. This is the sort of thing that can be credited only by people who think that a command of English syntax is a mark of great intellectual distinction. Can anyone recall a memorable phrase from one of Mr. Obama's big speeches that didn't amount to cliché? As for the small speeches, such as the one we were kept waiting 50 minutes for yesterday, we get Triple-A bromides about America remaining a "Triple-A country." Which, when it comes to long-term sovereign debt, is precisely what we no longer are under Mr. Obama.

Read it all.

Adolescentia, Iuventus, Senectus

Brandon at Siris turns 33 and considers it the perfect age.

Attacking the Messenger

Standard and Poor's downgrading of the credit worthiness of the U. S. government from AAA to AA+ should come as no surprise to anyone.  We all knew that current levels of debt are unsustainable.  So what do Obama and Geithner and their shills in the liberal media do?  They blame the messenger for the ill tidings he delivers.

They do the same with the Tea Partiers.  The central concern of the Tea Partiers is fiscal responsibility:  "There is one common thread that is uniting the one million plus people who protested on April 15th, 2009 at over 850 Tea Parties across this great country. That common thread is that we all want fiscal responsibility with our tax dollars."

So what does the Left do?  Instead of facing reality, it launches scurrilous attacks on the messengers.  They are racists, terrorists, hostage-takers, astro-turfers. 

But what is to be done?  This from the WSJ:

Despite S&P's opinion, there is no chance that America will default on its debts. The real importance of the downgrade will depend on the political reaction it inspires.

If the response is denial and blaming the credit raters, then the U.S. will continue on its current road to more downgrades and eventually to Greece. What has already become a half-decade of lost growth will turn into a lost decade or more.

If the response is to escape the debt trap by the stealth route of inflation—a path now advocated by many of the same economists who promoted the failed spending stimulus of 2009—then the U.S. could spur a dollar crisis and jeopardize its reserve currency status.

The better answer—the only road back to fiscal sanity and AAA status—is to reverse the economic policies of the late Bush and Obama years. The financial crisis followed by the Keynesian and statist revival of the last four years have brought the U.S. to this downgrade and will lead to inevitable decline. The only solution is to return to the classical, pro-growth economic ideas that have revived America at other moments of crisis.

Lynne Ballew

At the time I knew her, in the mid-'70s, I had no idea what a remarkable person she is.  I was a graduate student and she was a young professor.  We spoke a few times in the hallway.  A while back I was re-reading some Plato and I came upon a marginalium of mine: "Ask Lynne about this."  That put me in mind of her and I wondered what had become of her.  I had heard that she had left academe but knew nothing more.  A few key strokes  and her inspiring story unfolded before me.

The Peculiar Madness of Paul Krugman

Excellent analysis by Robert Tracinski.

Why We Can't Ignore Politics

Thomas Mann, Diaries 1918-1939, entry of August 5, 1934:

     A cynical egotism, a selfish limitation of concern to one's
     personal welfare and one's reasonable survival in the face of the
     headstrong and voluptuous madness of 'history' is amply justified.
     One is a fool to take politics seriously, to care about it, to
     sacrifice one's moral and intellectual strength to it. All one can
     do is survive, and preserve one's personal freedom and dignity.
  
I don't endorse Mann's sentiment but I sympathize with it. Hitler came to power in 1933. Imagine the effect that must have had on a man of Mann's sensitivity and spiritual depth. You witness your country, the land of Kant and Schiller, of Dichter und Denker, poets and thinkers, in Heinrich Heine's fine phrase, transformed into a land of Richter und Henker, judges and hangmen.

My response to Mann would be along these lines: It precisely because men of the spirit must survive and survive to create that they must be concerned with politics and with those who can kill and suppress them. You escaped to the USA, but what if there were no such country to which to escape because all of the people of high quality practised your cynical egotism, your selfish limitation to the personal?

One can take politics seriously and do one's bit without sacrificing one's moral and intellectual strength to it.  The latter, I agree, would be folly.

We Need to Face the Truth as the Catastrophe Looms

A Pond away, Janet Daley of The Telegraph sees things with exceptional  clarity.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Hard Times

I got me a bad case of the Standard and Poor's AA+ downgrade blues. 

B. B. King, Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out

Ray Charles, Busted

Eric Clapton, Goin' Down Slow

Woody Guthrie, Hard Travelin'

Bob Dylan, Song to Woody

Bob Dylan, In My Time of Dyin'

Honoring Barry Miller

I honor him in the best way a philosopher can be honored -- by carefully studying his works,  thinking his thoughts, and building upon them.

Political Parsimony

The politically parsimonious do not multiply agencies beyond necessity.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Here.  I have the book in my library (but of course!) but this site offers among other things information about the people and places mentioned by the good Pepys as he records the quotidiana of an existence unremarkable  except for the insight it affords into those far-off times.  

How can one not love the 'Net and the love labors of those who toil in its vasty deeps? A peep into the deeps of Pepys.

Academic Rot Exposed

I plugged this site a few days ago.  By now I've read most of the posts, and they are good.    #65 of 100 reasons not to go to graduate school is up.  Title is Teaching is Less and Less Rewarding.

The abdication of authority by professors and administrators that set in in the '60s  is a good part of the problem.  Indeed, much of our national decline is traceable to abdication of authority on the part of parents, teachers, and clergy.  Not to mention go-along-to-get-along politicians.  But that's another post.

Are There Logically Simple Propositions?

Leo Carton Mollica e-mails:

 

Your most recent post (for which many thanks) inspired the below-expressed argument, and I was curious as to your opinion of it . . . . I think it has something behind it, but right now I feel uncertain about my examples in (2).

 

0. There is something curious about the relation between a proposition or declarative sentence and the terms or words that compose it: the list L ("Christ," "Judas," "betrays") clearly differs, at the very least in not having a truth value, from the sentence "Judas betrays Christ," yet nothing immediately presents itself as the ground G of this difference. One plausible candidate for G is some kind of union or togetherness amongst the members of L present in "Judas betrays Christ" and not in L itself, but this proposal is open to a serious challenge.

 

1. Suppose we accept Barry Miller's thesis, from "Logically Simple Propositions," that some declarative sentences have only one semantic element. His favorite such sentence is the Romanian "Fulgura," whose only constituent word translates (if I remember aright) the English "brightens," and which is interesting in requiring no actual or implied subject to form a complete sentence (like "It's raining" in English, but without the dummy subject).

 

2. Now, the lone word in "Fulgura" seemingly can occur outside any proposition. If, for example, someone were to ask me to recite my favorite Romanian word, or to translate "brightens" into Romanian, it would be strange to take me as telling them something false, or to have them respond "No, it isn't," upon my replying with "fulgura." There would, however, be nothing strange about the sentence "Fulgura" being false and someone telling me as much. [. . .]

 

3. Even in such simple sentences, therefore, there is a distinction between the sentence and the words contained therein, for one can be had without the other. But the ground of this distinction cannot be any union or togetherness among the words that enter into the sentence for the simple reason that no union or togetherness amongst items can be had without distinct items to unify or bind together. It can, therefore, be at least plausibly argued that the general ground of the difference between a sentence and its constituent words is no kind of union or togetherness.

 

I take Mr Mollica's basic argument to be this:

 

a. If there are logically simple sentences/propositions, then the problem of the unity of the sentence/proposition is not one that arises for every sentence/proposition.
b. There are logically simple sentences/propositions.
Therefore

c. The problem of the unity of the proposition is not one that arises for every sentence/proposition.

 

My response is to reject (b) while granting (a).  I discussed the question of logically simple sentences/propositions with Barry Miller back in the '90s in the pages of Faith and Philosophy.  My "Divine Simplicity: A New Defense (Faith and Philosophy, vol. 9, no. 4, October 1992, pp. 508-525) has an appendix entitled "Divine Simplicity and Logically Simple Propositions."  Miller responded and I counter-responded in the July 1994 issue, pp. 474-481.  It is with pleasure that I take another look at this issue. I will borrow freely from what I have published.  (Whether this counts as plagairism, depends, I suppose, on one's views on diachronic personal identity.)

 

A.  A logically simple proposition (LSP) is one that lacks not only propositional components, but also sub-propositional components.Thus atomic propositions are not logically simple in Miller's sense, since they contain sub-propositional parts.  A proposition of the form a is F, though atomic, exhibits subject-predicate complexity.

 

B. Miller's examples of LSPs are inconclusive.  Consider the German Es regnet ('It is raining').  As Miller correctly notes, the es is grammatical filler, and so the sentence can be pared down to Regnet, which is no doubt grammatically simple.  He then argues:

 

Now there is no question of Regnet being a predicate; for as a proposition it has a complete sense, whereas as a predicate it could have only incomplete sense. Hence, Regnet and propositions like it seem logically simple. (Barry Miller, "Logically Simple Propositions," Analysis, vol. 34, no. 4, March 1974, p. 125.)

 

I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that Miller is confusing propositions with the sentences used to express them.  Regnet and fulgura are grammatically simple.  But it scarcely follows that the propositions they express are logically simple.  What makes them one-word sentences is the fact that they express propositions; otherwise, they would be mere words.  So we need a sentence-proposition distinction.  But once that distinction is in place then it becomes clear that grammatical simplicity of sentence does not entail logical simplicity of the corresponding proposition.

 

C.  It is also unclear how any intellect like ours could grasp a proposition devoid of logical parts, let alone believe or know such a proposition.  To believe that it is snowing, for example, is to believe something logically complex, albeit unified, something formulatable by some such sentence as 'Snow is falling.'  So even if there were logically simple propositions, they could not be accusatives of minds like ours.  And if propositions are defined as the possible accusatives of propositional attitudes such as belief and knowledge, then the point is stronger still: there cannot be any logically sinple propositions.

 

D.  So it seems to me that 'the problem of the list' or the problem of the unity of the sentence/proposition is one that pertains to every sentence/proposition.  It is a problem as ancient as it is  tough, and, I suspect, absolutely intractable.  For a glimpse into the state of the art, I shamelessly recommend my June 2010 Dialectica article, "Gaskin on the Unity of the Proposition."

In Praise of Blogosophy

Philosophy is primarily an activity, not a body of doctrine. If you were to think of it as a body of doctrine, then you would have to say there is no philosophy, but only philosophies. For there is no one universally recognized body of doctrine called philosophy. The truth of course is one not many. And that is what the philosopher aims at: the one ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, including the ultimate truth about how we ought to live. But aiming at a target and hitting it are two different things. The target is one, but our many arrows have fallen short and in different places. And if you think that your favorite philosopher has hit the target of truth, why can't you convince the rest of us of that? 

Disagreement does not of course prove the nonexistence of truth, but it does cast reasonable doubt on all claims to its possession. Philosophy aspires to sound, indeed incontrovertible, doctrine. But the quest for it has proven tough indeed. For all we know it may lie beyond our powers. Not that this gives us reason to abandon the quest. But it does give us reason to be modest and undogmatic.

Philosophy, then, is primarily an activity, a search, a quest. Somewhere deep in the bowels of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Kant remarks that "Philosophy cannot be taught, we can at most learn to philosophize." I agree. It cannot be taught because it does not exist as teachable doctrine. Philosophy is not something we profess, except perhaps secondarily; it is something we do. The best professors of philosophy are doers of philosophy.  A professor, obviously, need not be a paid professor, an academic functionary.

How then should we do philosophy? Conversation face-to-face with the like-minded, intelligent, and sincere is useful but ephemeral and hard to arrange. Jetting off to conferences can be fun especially if the venue is exotic and the tab is picked up your department. But reading and listening to papers at conferences is pretty much a waste of time when it comes to actually doing productive philosophy. Can you follow a technical paper simply by listening to it? If you can you're smarter than me.

So we ought to consider the idea that philosophy in its purest form, its most productive form, is 'blogosophy,' philosophy pursued by weblog. And there is this in favor of it: blogging takes pressure off the journals. Working out my half-baked ideas here, I am less likely to submit material that is not yet ready for embalming in printer's ink.

The Left's Double Standard on Civility . . .

. . . is well exposed by James Taranto.

For more on this topic, see my On Civility and Recent Civility Initiatives.

Are Your Political Opponents Crazy?

Gary Gutting maintains a thesis similar to the one I put forth in The Debt Debate.  Where he speaks of competing pictures, I speak of competing visions. 

Atomic Sentences and Syncategorematic Elements

According to Fred Sommers (The Logic of Natural Language, p. 166), ". . . one way of saying what an atomic sentence is is to say that it is the kind of sentence that contains only categorematic expressions." Earlier in the same book, Sommers says this:

In Frege, the distinction between subjects and predicates is not due to any difference of syncategorematic elements since the basic subject-predicate propositions are devoid of such elements.  In Frege, the difference between subject and predicate is a primitive difference between two kinds of categorematic expressions. (p. 17)

Examples of categorematic (non-logical) expressions are 'Socrates' and 'mammal.'  Examples of syncategorematic (logical) expressions are 'not,' 'every,' and  'and.'  As 'syn' suggests, the latter expressions are not semantic stand-alones, but have their meaning only together with categorematic expressions.  Sommers puts it this way: "Categorematic expressions apply to things and states of affairs; syncategorematic expressions do not." (164) 

At first I found it perfectly obvious that atomic sentences have only categorematic elements, but now I have doubts.  Consider the atomic sentence  'Al is fat.' It is symbolized thusly: Fa.  'F' is a predicate expression the reference (Bedeutung) of which is a Fregean concept (Begriff) while 'a' is a subject-expression or name the reference of which is a Fregean object (Gegenstand).  Both expressions are categorematic or 'non-logical.'  Neither is syncategorematic.  And there are supposed to be no syncategorematic elements in the sentence:  there is just 'F' and 'a.'

But wait a minute!  What about the immediate juxtaposition of 'F' and 'a' in that order? That juxtaposition is not nothing.  It conveys something.  It conveys that the referent of 'a' falls under the referent of 'F'.  It conveys that the object a instantiates the concept F. I suggest that the juxtaposition of the two signs is a syncategorematic element.  If this is right, then it is false that atomic sentence lack all syncategorematic elements.

Of course, there is no special sign for the immediate juxtaposition of 'F' and 'a' in 'Fa.'  So I grant that there is no syncategorematic element if such an element must have its own separate and isolable sign. But there is no need for a separate sign; the immediate juxtaposition does the trick.  The syncategorematic element is precisely the juxtaposition.

Please note that if there were no syncategorematic element in 'Fa' there would not be any sentence at all.  A sentence is not a list.  The sentence 'Fa' is not the list 'F, a.'  A (declarative) sentence expresses a thought (Gedanke) which is its sense (Sinn).  And its has a reference (Bedeutung), namely a truth value (Wahrheitswert).  No list of words (or of anything else) expresses a thought or has a truth value.  So a sentence is not a list of its constituent words.  A sentence depends on its constituent words, but it is more than them.  It is their unity. 

So I say there must be a syncategorematic element in 'Fa' if it is to be a sentence.  There is need of a copulative element to tie together subject and predicate.  It follows that, pace Sommers, it is false that atomic sentences are devoid of syntagorematic elements.

Note what I am NOT saying.  I am not saying that the copulative element in a sentence must be a separate sign such as 'is.'  There is no need for the copulative  'is.'  In standard English we say 'The sea is blue' not 'The sea blue.' But in Turkish one can say Deniz mavi and it is correct and intelligible.  My point is not that we need the copulative 'is' as a separate sign but that we need a copulative element which, though it does not refer to anything, yet ties together subject and predicate.  There must be some feature of the atomic sentence that functions as the copulative element, if not immediate juxtaposition then something else such as a font difference or color difference.

At his point I will be reminded that Frege's concepts (Begriffe) are unsaturated (ungesaettigt).  They are 'gappy' or incomplete unlike objects.  The incompleteness of concepts is reflected in the incompleteness of predicate expressions.  Thus '. . . is fat' has a gap in it, a gap fit to accept a name such as 'Al' which has no gap.  We can thus say that for Frege the copula is imported into the predicate.  It might be thought that the gappiness of concepts and predicate expressions obviates the need for a copulative element in the sentence and in the corresponding Thought (Gedanke) or proposition.

But this would be a mistake.  For even if predicate expressions and concepts are unsaturated, there is still a difference between a list and a sentence.  The unsaturatedness of a concept merely means that it combines with an object without the need of a tertium quid.  (If there were a third thing, then Bradley's regress would be up and running.)  But to express that a concept is in fact instantiated by an object requires more than a listing of a concept-word (Begriffswort) and a name.  There is need of a syncategorical element in the sentence.

So I conclude that if there are any atomic sentences, then they cannot contain only categorematic expressions.

Bill Clinton, the Race Card, and Voter ID

Say it ain't so, Bill.  This from the The Wall Street Journal:

The last time Bill Clinton tried to play the race card, it blew up his wife's primary campaign in South Carolina. Well, the Voice is back, this time portraying the nationwide movement to pass voter ID laws as the return of Jim Crow.

"There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the other Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today," the former President warned a student group last month.

I find this simply astonishing.  How can any reasonable person find the Voter ID question worthy of debate? 

Anyone with common sense must be able to appreciate that voting must be conducted in an orderly manner, and that only citizens who have registered to vote and have satisfied the minimal requirements of age, etc. are to be allowed into the voting booth. Given the propensity to fraud, it is therefore necessary to verify the identities of those who present themselves at the polling place. To do this, voters must be required to present a government-issued photo ID card, a driver's license being only one example of such. It is a reasonable requirement and any reasonable person should be able to see it as such.

Why are liberals so stupid?  The darker surmise, of course, is that they are not stupid but cunning and unprincipled: they want voter fraud.  They want to win at all costs, fraud or no fraud.

And please notice how leftists like Clinton will not hesitate to commit a tort on the English language  if it serves their purpose.  Clinton implies that an identity check would limit the franchise of blacks.  Preposterous. There is also the slam against blacks.  Those of my acquaintance don't live under bridges and they do manage to do things like cash checks.

Clinton famously stumbled over the meaning of 'is.'  Apparently he is equally challenged by the meaning of  'franchise.'

Liberal Cry Babies and Tea Party 'Terrorists'

 The scurrilous hyperventilation and name-calling of the scumbaggers of the Left continues apace.  Here's an example:  President Obama Bends to Blackmail. More choice items in this despicable genre, together with rebuttals, can be found over at Real Clear Politics.

Ernest Gellner on Ordinary Language Philosophy: Moore as Wittgensteinian Man

The following quotations from Ernest Gellner's Words and Things  are borrowed from Kieran Setiya's site.

Academic environments are generally characterised by the presence of people who claim to understand more than in fact they do. Linguistic Philosophy has produced a great revolution, generating people who claim not to understand what in fact they do. Some achieve great virtuosity at it. Any beginner in philosophy can manage not to understand, say, Hegel, but I have heard people who were so advanced that they knew how not to understand writers of such limpid clarity as Bertrand Russell or A. J. Ayer.

It is not clear whether Moore should be called a philosopher or a pedant of such outstanding ability as to push pedantry and literal-mindedness to a point where it became a philosophy. [. . .] One might say that Moore is the one and only known example of Wittgensteinian man: unpuzzled by the world or science, puzzled only by the oddity of the sayings of philosophers, and sensibly reacting to that alleged oddity by very carefully, painstakingly and interminably examining their use of words. . . .

Absolutely brilliant!  When I first read Moore and his remark to the effect that he would never have done philosophy if it hadn't been for the puzzling things he found in books by men like Bradley, I took that as almost the definition of an inauthentic philosopher: one who gets his problems, not from life, but from books.  I should say, though, that over the years I have come to appreciate Moore as a master of analysis.  But I can't shake the thought that there is something deeply perverse about finding the impetus to philosophizing in philosophical claims and theories rather than in the realities attendance to which gave rise to the claims and theories in the first place.  Imagine a scientist or an historian or even a theologian  who proceeded in that way.

In this passage Gellner explains the appeal of the later Wittgenstein:

The linguistic naturalism, the reduction of the basis of our  thought to linguistic etiquette, ensures that there is no appeal  whatever to Extraneous Authority for the manner in which we speak and think. Naturalism, this-worldliness, is thus pushed to its final limit. But at the very same time, and for that very reason (language and custom being their own masters, beholden and accountable to no Outside norm), the diversified content of language and custom is indiscriminately endorsed. Thus the     transcendent, if and when required, slips back ambiguously, in virtue of being the object of natural practices, customs, modes of speech.

I take the Gellnerian ball and run with it in What is the Appeal of Ordinary Language Philosophy?  and How Ordinary Language Philosophy Rests on Logical Positivism.
  

A Problem for the Hylomorphic Dualist

A position in the philosophy of mind that is currently under-represented and under-discussed is Thomistic or hylomorphic dualism.  Whereas the tendency of the substance dualist is to identify the person with his soul or mind, the hylomorphic approach identifies the person with a soul-body composite in which soul stands to body as form (morphe) stands to matter (hyle). In a slogan: anima forma corporis: the soul is the form of the body. To be a bit more precise, the soul is the substantial form of the body, a form that makes of the matter it informs a human substance. 

This is not a version of substance dualism since soul and body on the hylomorphic scheme are not (primary) substances in their own right. We  define a (primary) substance as anything logically (as opposed to causally) capable of independent existence. Fido is then a substance but his soul is not inasmuch as his soul cannot exist on its own. And the same goes for Fido's body: it cannot exist on its own. Fido's corpse can exist on its own, but it is not his body. A dead dog is not a dog: 'dead' in 'dead dog' is an alienans adjective. It functions like 'decoy' in 'decoy duck.' Strictly speaking, a body is a body only when animated by a soul, and a soul is a soul only when animating a body. The composite is what lives and dies, death being the separation of soul and body.

So far, so good.

Now comes the tricky part. For Thomas, the soul of a human being — or the intellective part of the soul of a human being — is not merely a substantial form, but also a subsistent form, a form that can exist on its own. This is the element of Platonism that remains in Thomas's Aristotelianism. This subsistent form can survive separation from the body. The theological motivation for this is perhaps clear: there must be something that bridges the temporal gap between death (separation of soul from body) and resurrection of the body and concomitant reunification of body with soul. That which grounds personal identity over the temporal gap is the soul as subsistent substantial form. Whether there is a need for such a ground is a question that cannot be discussed at the moment.

So although Thomist dualism is distinct from Platonic or Cartesian dualism, it is still a rather robust form of dualism, more robust than the dualism of the epiphenomenalist, say. As long as we don't confuse dualism with substance dualism, there is no reason that I can see for not describing Thomas's hylomorphic theory of mind as dualistic.

So much for a brief sketch of the hylomorphic position.  I wish I could report that I find it unproblematic. But I don't. I'll mention one problem now, others later.

 How can a substantial form exist apart from that of which it is the form? Is it not necessarily tied to that of which it is the form? After all, it is so tied in the case of non-humans like Fido. Fido is a composite the components of which cannot exist on their own. Why should it be any different in the case of the human soul if the human soul is indeed the form of the human body?

The problem here, in short, is that there is a tension between soul as substantial form and soul as substantial subsistent form. Ontologically, one wants to protest, a form is not the sort of entity that could be subsistent. Necessarily, a form  is a form of that of which it is the form.  But a subsistent form is possibly such as to exist apart from that of which it is the form.  These propositions cannot both be true.

I find it hard to resist the suspicion that what Aquinas has done is implanted Christian elements into the foreign soil of Aristotelianism.  Christianity requires that the soul be capable of independent existence.  But no form, by its very nature as form, is capable of independent existence.  Simply to make an exception in the case of the human soul is wholly unmotivated and ad hoc and inconsistent with hylomorphic ontology.

(Further tantalizing wrinkle: Aquinas describes God as forma formarum, form of all forms, but also as ipsum esse subsistens, self-subsistent existence. So God is a self-subsistent form. He is a form that does not inform anything. More grist for the mill.)

 

Fiscal Responsibility

What is the debt debate about?  Senator Marco Rubio in this video does an excellent job of explaining the issue. You decide whether he deserves the 'terrorist' label proffered by Vice President Joe Biden.  By the way, didn't Biden's boss give us a lecture recently about civility?

Conservatives in the Lead

According to a Gallup Poll dated 1 August, 41% of Americans self-identify as conservatives, 36% as moderate, and 21% as liberal.

Liberals have only themselves to blame for their poor showing.  Their extremism and reckless deviation from common sense condemn them in the eyes of most of us.  The op-ed columnists of the once-great New York Times, for example, are an extremist lot.  Have you ever read a Krugman column?  Or this morning's bit of hyperventilation from Joe Nocera in which he likens Tea Partiers to terrorists? 

Pee Cee Christians

Do some Christians have a death wish?  Campus Crusade for Christ has changed its name, dropping 'crusade' and 'Christ.' 

And then they have the chutzpah to say they are not bowing to political correctness.

There is nothing wrong with unintentionally causing offense to people who take offense inappropriately.  If 'crusade' and 'Christ' are offensive to you, then that is your problem.  This thought is developed in Of Black Holes and Political Correctness.

And besides, Christianity is offensive to the natural man.  It is supposed to be.

The Aporetics of Singular Sentences

I should issue a partial retraction.  I wrote earlier,"The TFL representation of singular sentences as quantified sentences does not capture their logical form, and this is an inadequacy of TFL, and a point in favor of MPL."  ('TFL' is short for 'traditional formal logic'; 'MPL' for 'modern predicate logic with identity.' )

The animadversions of Edward the Nominalist have made me see that my assertion is by no means obvious, and may in the end be just a dogma of analytic philosophy which has prevailed because endlessly repeated and rarely questioned.  Consider again this obviously valid argument:

1. Pittacus is a good man
2. Pittacus is a wise man
-----
3. Some wise man is a good man.

The traditional syllogistic renders the argument as follows: 

Every Pittacus is a wise man
Some Pittacus is a good man
-----
Some wise man is a good man.

This has the form:

Every P is a W
Some P is a G
-----
Some W is a G.

This form is easily shown to be valid by the application of the syllogistic rules. 

In my earlier post I then repeated a stock objection which I got from Peter Geach:

But is it logically acceptable to attach a quantifier to a singular term? How could a proper name have a sign of logical quantity prefixed to it? 'Pittacus' denotes or names exactly one individual. 'Every Pittacus' denotes the very same individual. So we should expect 'Every Pittacus is wise' and 'Pittacus is wise' to exhibit the same logical behavior. But they behave differently under negation.

The negation of 'Pittacus is wise' is 'Pittacus is not wise.' So, given that 'Pittacus' and 'every Pittacus' denote the same individual, we should expect that the negation of 'Every Pittacus is wise' will be 'Every Pittacus is not wise.' But that is not the negation (contradictory) of 'Every Pittacus is wise'; it is its contrary. So 'Pittacus is wise' and 'Every Pittacus is wise' behave differently under negation, which shows that their logical form is different.

My objection, in nuce, was that 'Pittacus is wise' and 'Pittacus is not wise' are contradictories, not contraries, while 'Every Pittacus is wise' and 'Every Pittacus is not wise' ('No Pittacus is wise') are contraries.  Therefore, TFL does not capture or render perspicuous the logical form of 'Pittacus is wise.'

To this, Edward plausibly objected:

As I have argued here before, ‘Pittacus is wise’ and ‘Pittacus is not wise’ are in fact contraries. For the first implies that someone (Pittacus) is wise. The second implies that someone (Pittacus again) is not wise. Both imply the existence of Pittacus (or at least – to silence impudent quibblers - that someone is Pittacus). Thus they are contraries. Both are false when no one is Pittacus.

I now concede that this is a very good point.  A little later Edward writes,

The thing is, you really have a problem otherwise. If 'Socrates is wise' and 'Socrates is not wise' are contradictories, and if 'Socrates is not wise' implies 'someone (Socrates) is not wise', as standard MPC holds, you are committed to the thesis that the sentence is not meaningful when Socrates ceases to exist (or if he never existed because Plato made him up). Which (on my definition) is Direct Reference.

So you have this horrible choice:  Direct reference or Traditional Logic.

But must we choose?  Consider 'Vulcan is uninhabited.'  Why can't I, without jettisoning any of the characteristic tenets of MPL, just say that this sentence, though it appears singular is really general because 'Vulcan' is not a logically proper name but a definite description in disguise?  Accordingly, what the sentence says is that a certain concept -- the concept planet between Mercury and the Sun -- has as a Fregean mark (Merkmal) the concept uninhabited.

Now consider the pair 'Socrates is dead' - 'Socrates is not dead.'  Are these contraries or contradictories?  If contraries, then they can both be false.  Arguably, they are both false since Socrates does not exist, given that presentism is true. Since both are false, both are meaningful.  But then 'Socrates ' has meaning despite its not referring to anything.  So 'Socrates' has something like a Fregean sense.  But what on earth could this be, given that 'Socrates' unlike 'Vulcan'  names an individual that existed, and so has a nonqualitative thisnsess incommunicable to any other individual?

If, on the other hand, the meaning of 'Socrates' is its referent, then, given that presentism is  true and Socrates does not exist, there is no referent in which case both sentences are meaningless.

So once again we are in deep aporetic trouble.  The proper name of a past individual cannot have a reference-determining sense.  This is because any such sense would have to be a Plantingian haecceity-property, and I have already shown that these cannot exist.  But if we say that 'Socrates' does not have a reference-determining sense but refers directly in such a way as to require Socrates to exist if 'Socrates' is to have meaning, then, given presentism,  'Socrates' and the sentence of which it is a part is meaningless. 

A Big Victory for the Tea Party

Call it Schadenfreude, but it was certainly a pleasure to wake up this morning to the gnashing of leftist teeth over last night's Tea Party triumph.  The howling of the lefties is as music to my ears.  In his latest outburst, Paul Krugman speaks of "extortion."  Others speak of 'hostage-taking,' 'terrorism,' 'Taliban tactics,' 'arson.'  One commentator likened the Tea Partiers to Hezbollah.

This absurdly extremist rhetoric lets us know that for the Left this is a war.  But then how can we treat it as a civil debate?  They are lying about us blatantly and brazenly.  (Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist said on C-Span the other night that Republicans want to destroy Social Security.)  So we must tell the truth about them and gird our loins for the next round.  Meanwhile a bit of celebration is in order.

Moral Corruption

The corruption in institutions is first in the human heart.  But we are able to recognize it in both places. And that provides a slim basis for hope.  A totally corrupt being would presumably be blind to his own corruption.  The benighted who know they are in the dark are not completely lost.

Pious Language

Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being, p. 227:  "I doubtless hate pious language worse than you because I believe the realities it hides."