Maverick Philosopher

Third Anniversary of the TypePad Incarnation of Maverick Philosopher

This weblog commenced  on 4 May 2004 and has been in operation for seven and a half years.  This, the latest incarnation, the Typepad version, began on Halloween 2008.  Here are the posts from three years ago. Typepad is not the perfect platform; I doubt if there is one.  But it is superior for my purposes to the crappy Blogger, the defunct Powerblogs, and the adequate WordPress.

Readership is trending upwards.  I now routinely receive 1,000 to 1,700 pageviews per day.  The total pageview count for the last three years is now over one million: 1,029,176 as of a few moments ago. That averages to 939.89 pageviews/day with 2,828 total posts and 4,971 comments.

Can you say cacoethes scribendi?

I've missed only a few days in these seven and a half  years so it's a good bet I'll be blogging 'for the duration.'  It's like reading and thinking and meditating and running and hiking and playing chess and breathing and eating and drinking coffee. It is not something one gives up until forced to.  Some of us are just natural-born scribblers.  We were always scribbling, on looseleaf, in notebooks, on the back of envelopes, in journals daily maintained.  This is just an electronic extension of all of that. 

Except now I conduct my education in public.  This has some disadvantages, but  they are vastly outweighed by the advantages.  I have met a lot of interesting and stimulating characters via this blog, many in the flesh.  You bait your hook and cast it into the vasty deeps of cyberspace and damned if you don't snag some interesting fish.  The occasional scumsucker and bottomfeeder is no counterargument.

I thank you for your patronage, and I hope my writings are of use not just to me. 

Last Words

Why do we consider last words significant? Is it because we suppose that the moment of death is or can be a moment of heightened existential lucidity?  Here are Steve Jobs' last words as reported by his sister.  Brace yourself.

Zombies and Other Minds

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Zombies and Other Minds are both well-known philosophical topics, though Zombies are 'hotter': the heyday of Other Minds debates was back in the '50s and '60s. How are they related? Not by identity, though some do confuse the two topics. They are distinct in that Other Minds belongs to epistemology whereas Zombies belongs to ontology. Let me see if I can work this out in detail.

 1. What is a zombie? 

You will have gathered that a zombie is a creature of philosophical fiction conjured up to render graphic a philosophical issue and to throw certain questions in the philosophy of mind into relief.    A zombie is a living being that is physically and behaviorally exactly like a living human being except that it lacks (phenomenal) consciousness.  Cut a zombie open, and you find exactly what you would find were you to cut a human being open. And in terms of linguistic and nonlinguistic behavior, there is no way to tell a human being from a zombie. (So don't think of something sleepy, or drugged, or comatose or Halloweenish as in the picture above.)  When a zombie sees a tree, what is going on in the zombie's brain is a 'visual' computational process, but the zombie lacks what a French philosopher would call interiority. There is no irreducible subjectivity, no irreducible intentionality, no qualitative feel to the 'visual' processing; there is nothing it is like for a zombie to see a female zombie or to desire her. (What's it like to be a zombie? There is nothing it is like to be a zombie.)  I suspect that Daniel Dennett is a zombie.  But I have and can have no evidence for this suspicion.  His denial of qualia is not evidence.  It might just be evidence of his being a sophist.  More to the point, his linguistic behavior and facial expressions could be just the same as those of a non-zombie qualia-denier. 

2. Where do zombies come from?  

Zombies surface within the context of discussions of physicalism. Physicalism is an ontological doctrine, a doctrine about what ultimately exists,  what exists in the most fundamental sense of 'exists.'  The physicalist is committed to the proposition that everything, or at least everything concrete, is either physical or determined by the physical. To be a bit more precise, physicalism is usefully viewed as the conjunction of an 'inventory thesis' which specifies physicalistically admissible individuals and a 'determination thesis' which specifies physicalistically admissible properties. What the inventory thesis says, at a first approximation, is that every concretum is either a physical item or composed of physical items. As for the determination thesis, what it says is that physical property-instantiations determine all other property-instantiations; equivalently, every nonphysical property-instantiation supervenes on physical property-instantiations. This implies that all mental facts supervene upon physical facts.  So if a being is conscious, then this fact about it supervenes upon, is determined by, its physical properties.  This implies that there cannot be two beings, indiscernible with respect to all physical properties, such that the one is conscious while the other is not.  This in turn rules out the possibility of zombies.  For, if physicalism is true, once the physical properties are fixed, the mental properties are also automatically fixed.

3. What useful work do zombies do? 

If zombies are metaphysically (broadly logically) possible, then physicalism is false.  That's their job: to serve as counterexamples to physicalism.  For if zombies are possible, then it is not the case that every nonphysical property-instantiation supervenes upon a physical property-instantiation: a zombie has all the same physical properties as its indiscernible non-zombie twin, but is not conscious.  The possibility of zombies implies that consciousness is non-supervenient, something in addition to a being's physical makeup.  So one anti-physicalist argument goes like this:

1. If physicalism is true, then every nonphysical property-instantiation supervenes upon a physical property-instantiation. 
2. If zombies are possible, then it is not the case that every nonphysical property-instantiation supervenes upon a physical property-instantiation.
3. Zombies are possible.
Therefore
4. Physicalism is not true.

This is a valid argument the soundness of which rides on premise (3).  Here is where the fight will come.  Without questioning the validity of the argument -- physicalists after all are benighted but not stupid -- the physicalist will run the argument in reverse.  He will deny the conclusion and then deny (3).  In effect, he will argue from (1) & (2) & (~4)  to (~3).  He will deny the very possibility of zombies.  He will insist that anything that behaves just like a conscious person and has the 'innards' of a conscious person JUST IS a conscious person.

Now I find that absurd: it is a denial of that subjectivity which is properly accessed only via the irreducible first-person singular point of view.  Nevertheless, I will have a devil of a time budging my materialist-functionalist interlocutor.  Materialists are bloody objectivists: they think that anythng that is not objectively accessible in the third-person way just isn't there at all, or it if is 'there,' is not to be taken seriously.

Can one support (3) in a manner so compelling as to convince the recalcitrant materialist?  After all, (3) is not self-evident.  If it were self-evident, then we would have a 'knock-down' argument against physicalism.  But there are few if any  'knock-down' (absolutely compelling)  arguments in philosophy. 

Now zombies are certainly conceivable.  But it is not clear whether conceivability entails metaphysical (broadly logical) possibility, which is in play in (3).    So it is not clear whether the conceivability of zombies is a compelling  reason to reject physicalism.  The question of the relation between conceivability and possibility is a difficult one.  There is some discussion of this in the conceivability category.

The truth of physicalism is not my main concern this Halloween.  My main concern is merely to explain the role of the zombie Gedankenexperiment.  The point is that zombies figure in discussions of the ontological thesis of physicalism.  If zombies are possible, then physicalism is false.

4.  Zombies and Other Minds

So what is the difference between the Zombie question and the Other Minds question?  I'll have to think about this in greater depth, but here are some 'shoot-from-the hip' remarks of the sort one can get away with on a weblog.

Suppose Dennett is a zombie as I suspect.  The poor creature has no inner life, no interiority. Since he has no mind in the sense of 'mind' in which I know that I have a mind, he cannot be an other mind to me or to any other minded individual.  If an organism has no mind, then no question can arise as to how one knows or rationally believes that it has a mind, nor any question as to how one knows nor rationally believes that it is in one state of mind rather than another.  It is these epistemological questions that arise within the context of discussions of Other Minds.

As I see it, if physicalism is true, then we are all zombies.  We are all stumbling around 'in the dark.'  But if so,  then the epistemological problems associated with the Other Minds debate should have fairly easy solutions.  If verbal and non-verbal behavior is constitutive of mentality, then I should be able to know that you are skeptical or angry or bored or fearful just by looking at your face, observing your 'body language,' and listening to your words.  External criteria would suffice.  But if we are not zombies, and physicalism is false, then the epistemological questions regain their urgency. 

Whatever the exact details, the Zombie and Other Minds questions are not to be conflated.

Drinking and Dancing

If you want to spend your mornings thinking and trancing, then you cannot spend your nights drinking and dancing.

Al-Ghazzali on Choosing a Wife

Here are the attributes al-Ghazzali recommends seeking in a prospective wife. (Alchemy of Happiness, p. 96 ff.)

1. Chastity
2. Good disposition
3. Beauty ("See a woman before marrying her.")
4. The sum paid by the husband should be moderate
5. She should not be barren
6. Of good stock
7. Not previously married
8. Not too nearly related to her husband.

The importance of #3 is contested, however, by Jimmy Soul inter alia.   Otherwise, it is pretty good advice.

Al-Ghazzali on Worldly Trifles

From The Alchemy of Happiness, p. 48:

Another dangerous property of worldly things is that they appear at first as mere trifles, but each of these so-called 'trifles' branches out into countless ramifications until they swallow up the whole of a man's time and energy.

Monasticism and the Monks of Mount Athos

Back in April, 60 Minutes had a segment on the monks of Mt. Athos.  It was surprisingly sympathetic for such a left-leaning program. What one expects and usually gets from libs and lefties and the lamestream media is religion-bashing -- unless of course the religion is Islam, the religion of peace -- but the segment in question was refreshingly objective.  It was actually too sympathetic for my taste and not critical enough.  It didn't raise the underlying questions.  Which is why you need my blog.

 

We know that this world is no dream and is to that extent real.  For all we know it may be as real as it gets, though  philosophers and sages over the centuries, East and West, have assembled plenty of considerations that speak against its plenary reality.  We don't know that there is any world other than this one.  We also don't know that there isn't.  Now here is an existential question for you:  Will you sacrifice life in this world, with its manifold pleasures and satisfactions, for the chance of transcendent happiness in a merely believed-in hinterworld?  The Here is clear; the Hereafter is not.  It is not clear that is is, or that it isn't, or what it is if it is.  When I say that the world beyond is merely believed-in, I mean that it is merely believed-in from the point of view of the here and now where knowledge is impossible; I am not saying that there is no world beyond. 

Let us be clear what the existential option is.  It is not between being a dissolute hedonist or an ascetic, a Bukowski or a Simon of Sylites.  It is between being one who lives in an upright and productive way but in such a way as to assign plenary reality and importance to this world, this life, VERSUS one who sees this world as a vanishing quantity that cannot be taken with full seriousness but who takes it as preparatory for what comes after death.  (Of course, most adherents of a religion live like ordinary worldlings for the most part but hedge their bets by tacking on some religious observances on the weekend.  I am not concerned with these wishy-washy types here.)

The monks of Mount Athos spend their lives preparing for death, writing their ticket to the Beyond, engaging in unseen warfare against Satan and his legions.  They pray the Jesus Prayer ceaselessly; they do not surf the Web or engage in competitive eating contests or consort with females -- there are no distaff elements on the Holy Mountain.

Is theirs the highest life possible for a human being?  Or is the quest to determine what is the highest life the highest life?  The monks think they have the truth, the final truth, the essential and saving truth.  Thinking they possess it, their task is not to seek it but to implement it in their lives, to 'existentially appropriate it' as Kierkegaard might say, to knit it into the fabric of their Existenz.  There is a definite logic to their position.  If you have the truth, then there is no point in wasting time seeking it, or talking about it, or debating scoffers and doubters.  The point is to do what is necessary to achieve the transcendent Good the existence of which one does not question. 

This logic is of course common to other 'true believers.'  Karl Marx in the 11th of his Theses on Feuerbach wrote that "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world, but the point is to change it."  Marx and the Commies he spawned thought they had the truth, and so the only thing left was to implement it at whatever cost, the glorious end justifying the bloody means.   Buddha was famously opposed to speculation.  If you have been shot with a poisoned arrow, there is no point in speculating as to the trajectory of the arrow, the social class of the archer, or the chemical composition of the poison; the one thing necessary is to extract the arrow.  The logic is the same, though the point is different.  The point for Buddha was not theosis (deification) as in Eastern Orthodoxy, or the classless society as in Marxism, but Nirvana, extinguishment of the ego-illusion and final release from the wheel of Samsara. 

If you have the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, then  by all means live in accordance with it.  Put it into practice.  But do you in fact have the truth?  For the philosopher this is the question that comes first and cannot be evaded.  If the monks of Mt Athos are right about God and the soul and that the ultimate human goal is theosis, then they are absolutely right to renounce this world of shadows and seemings and ignorance and evil for the sake of true reality and true happiness.

But do they have the truth or does one throw one's life away when one flees to a monastery? Does one toss aside the only reality there is for a bunch of illusions?  There is of course a secular analog.  I would say that all the earnest and idealistic and highly talented individuals who served the cause of Communism in the 20th century sacrificed their lives on the altar of illusions.  They threw their lives away pursuing the impossible.  Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, for example.  Such true believers wasted their lives and ended up  enablers of  great evil.  In the end they were played for fools by an evil ideology.

So isn't the philosopher's life the highest possible life for a human being?  For only the philosopher pursues the ultimate questions without dogmatism, without blind belief, in freedom, critically, autonomously.  I am not saying that the ultimate good for a human being is endless inquiry.  The highest goal cannot be endless inquiry into truth, but a resting in it.   But that can't come this side of the Great Divide.  Here and now is not the place or time to dogmatize.  We can rest in dogma on the far side.

My Athenian thesis -- that the life of thephilosopher is the highest life possible for a human being -- won't play very well in Jerusalem. And I myself have doubts about it.  But all such doubts are themselves part and parcel of the philosophical enterprise.  For if nothing is immune from being hauled before the bench of Reason, there to be rudely interrogated, then fair Philosophia herself must also answer to that tribunal.

 

Another Side of the Education Bubble: The Law School Bubble

Who hasn't thought of attending law school?  Before doing anything rash, you may want to peruse the posts of law professor Paul Campos at Inside the Law School Scam.  He began the blog in August so you could easily take it da capo.

And then there is the student loan crisis and the moral and economic absurdity of Obama's 'forgive and forget' policy.  Just as government interference in the mortgage industry bears a large part (not all) of the responsibility for the housing bubble, it bears a large part of the responsibility for the education bubble.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Duane Allman

Duane Allman died 40 years ago today when he crashed his Harley Sportster.  Here he is playing slide guitar with Delaney and Bonnie. And here he is in One Way Out a couple of months before his death.

Another Round with Hennessey on Accidental Predication

Having had my say about what is known in the trade as Occam's Razor, and having secured some welcome agreement with the proprietor of Beyond Necessity in the combox of the aforelinked post, I am now ready to address the meat of Richard Hennessey's response to my three-post critique of what I took to be his theory of accidental predication.

There is no need to stray from our hoary example of accidental predication: 'Socrates is seated.'  I took Hennessey to be saying that in a true accidental predication of this simple form subject and predicate refer to exactly the same thing.  If they didn't, the sentence could not be true.  Here is how Hennessey puts it:

Let us take the proposition “Socrates is sitting” or the strictly equivalent “Socrates is a sitting being.” The referent of the subject term here is the sitting Socrates and that of the predicate term is one and the same sitting Socrates. . . . only if the referent of the “Socrates” and that of the “sitting” of “Socrates is sitting” are identical can it be true that Socrates is actually the one sitting.

Since Hennessey uses the word 'identity' we can call this an identity theory of accidental predication: in true predications of this sort, the referent of the subject term and the referent of the predicate term are identical, and this identty is what insures that the predication is true.  If so, then the same goes for all other true predications which are about Socrates.  So consider 'Socrates is standing' which is the logical contrary (not contradictory) of 'Socrates is sitting.'  These sentences cannot both be true at the same time, but they can be true at different times.  Suppose we ask what the truth-maker is in each case.  Given that subject and predicate terms refer to exactly the same thing, namely, Socrates, it follows that in each case it is Socrates and Socrates alone that is the truth-maker of both sentences.  When he is sitting, Socrates makes-true 'Socrates is sitting' and when he is standing Socrates makes-true 'Socrates is standing.' 

What I do not understand, however, is how these obviously different sentences, which differ in their truth-conditions, can have one and the same entity as truth-maker.  The same problem does not seem to arise for such essential predications as 'Socrates is human.'  For there is no time when he is not human, and (this is a distinct modal point), at every time at which he is human he is not possibly such as to be nonhuman.  In the case of essential predications an identity theory may be workable.  Perhaps we can say that Socrates himself is the truth-maker of 'Socrates is human,' 'Socrates is rational,' and Socrates is animal.'

In the case of accidental predications, however, it seems definitely unworkable. This is because different accidental predications about Socrates need different truth-makers. It is not Socrates, but Socrates'  being seated that is the truth-maker of 'Socrates is seated' and it is not Socrates, but Socrates' standing that is the truth-maker of 'Socrates is standing.'

Without worrying about what exactly the italicized phrases pick out (facts? states of affairs? tropes?), one thing seems crystal clear: there cannot be a strict identity of, e.g., the referent of 'Socrates' and the referent of 'seated.'  And since there cannot be a strict identity, there must be some difference between the referents of the subject and predicate terms.  Hennessey seems to show an appreciation of this in his response (second hyperlink above):

If we tweak the [B.V.] passage a bit, we can, it strikes me, improve the thesis about the referencing at work in the sentence “Socrates is sitting” so that it offers a more satisfactory support of the neo-Aristotelian thesis of anti-realism in the theory of universals, one indeed getting along “without invoking universals.” First, let us speak of “particular property” instead of “particularized property,” for the latter expression suggests, at least to me, that the property would be, prior to some act of particularization, a universal and not a particular. Let us then accept, but with a precision, Bill’s statement that “‘sitting’ refers to a particularized property (a trope),” saying instead that while the “Socrates” in our statement refers to Socrates, the person at present sitting, the “sitting” primarily refers to Socrates, the person at present sitting, and also co-refers to the particular property of sitting that inheres in Socrates. (An alternative terminology might have it that the “Socrates” in our statement denotes Socrates and the “sitting” primarily denotes Socrates, still the person sitting, and also connotesthe property of sitting that inheres in Socrates; come to think of it, I believe I recall having read, long ago, a similar distinction in the Petite logique of Jacques Maritain, a book which I no longer have, thanks to a flooded basement.)

This is definitely an improvement.  It is an improvement because it tries to accommodate the perfectly obvious point that there must be some difference or other between the worldly referents of the subject and predicate terms in accidental predications.  Hennessey is now telling us that 'Socrates' in our example refers to exactly one item, Socrates, while 'sitting' refers to two items, Socrates and the particular property (trope, accident) seatedness which inheres in Socrates.

But Hennessey is not yet in the clear.  For I will now ask him what the copula 'is' expresses.  It seems he must say that it expresses inherence.  He must say that it is because seatedness inheres in Socrates that 'Socrates is seated' is true.  Now inherence is an asymmetrical relation: if x inheres in y, then it is not the case that y inheres in x.  But there is no sameness relation (whether strict identity, contingent identity, accidental sameness, Castaneda's consubstantiaton, etc) that is not symmetrical.  Thus if x is in any sense the same as y, then y is (in the same sense) the same as x.  Therefore, Hennessey's bringing of inherence into the picture is at odds with his claims of identity.  Inherence, being asymmetrical,  is not a type of identity or sameness.  So why the talk of identity in the first passage quoted above?

Why does Hennessey say that 'seated' refers primarily to Socrates but also to the particular property seatedness?   Why not just say this: 'Socrates' refers to the primary substance (prote ousia) Socrates and nothing else; 'is' refers to the inherence relation or nexus and nothing else; 'seated/sitting' refers to the particular property (trope, accident) seatedness and nothing else.  This would give him what he wants, a theory of predication free of universals.

But this is not what Hennessey says.  He is putting forth some sort of identity theory of predication.  He thinks that in some sense the subject and predicate terms refer to the very same thing.  He tells us that 'seated' refers both to a substance and to an accident.  The upshot is that Hennessey has given birth to a hybrid theory which I for one do not find  intelligible. 

Here is the question he needs to confront directly: what, in the world, makes it true that 'Socrates is seated' (assuming of course that the sentence is true)?  Here is a clear answer: the sentence is true because seatedness inheres in Socrates.  But then of course there can be no talk of the identity of Socrates and seatedness.  They are obviously not identical: one is a substance and the other an accident.  The relation between them, being asymmetrical, cannot be any sort of sameness relation.

The other clear answer which, though clear, is absurd is this:  the sentence is true because 'Socrates' and 'seated' refer to the very same thing with the result that the copula expresses identity.  Now this is absurd for the reasons given over several posts. This was his original theory which he has wisely moved away from.

Instead of plumping for one of these clear theories, Hennessey gives us an unintelligible hybrid, a monster if you will, as we approach Halloween.

The Rise of Anti-Western Christianity

An important article.

On Corporate Prayer and Institutionalized Religion

Paul Brunton, The Notebooks of P. B., vol. 12, part 2, p. 34, #68:

A public place is an unnatural environment in which to place oneself mentally or physically in the attitude of true prayer.  It is far too intimate, emotional, and personal to be satisfactorily tried anywhere except in solitude.  What passes for prayer in temples, churches, and synagogues is therefore a compromise dictated by the physical necessity of an institution.  It may be quite good but too often alas! it is only the dressed-up double of true prayer.

Where would we be without institutions?  We need them, but only up to a point.  We are what we are because of the institutions in which we grew up, and natural piety dictates that we be appropriately grateful.  But their negative aspects cannot be ignored and all further personal development requires those who can, to go it alone.

We need society and its institutions to socialize us, to raise us from the level of the animal to that of the human.  But this human is all-too-human, and to take the next step we must tread the solitary path.  Better to be a social animal than a mere animal, but better than both is to become an individual, as I am sure Kierkegaard would agree.  To achieve true individuality  is one of the main tasks of human life.  In pursuit of this task institutions are more hindrance than help.

For some, churches and related institutions will always be necessary to provide guidance, discipline, and community.  But for others they will prove stifling and second-best, a transitional phase in their development.

For any church to claim that outside it there is no salvation -- extra ecclesiam salus non est -- is intolerable dogmatism, and indeed a form of idolatry in which something finite, a human institution contingent both in its existence and configuration, is elevated to the status of the Absolute.

For my take on idolatry see the Idolatry category.

What Brought Beckwith Back

Reasons for reversion to Rome. 

Nihil philosophicum a nobis alienum putamus

"We consider nothing philosophical to be foreign to us."  This is the motto Hector-Neri Castañeda chose to place on the masthead of the philosophical journal he founded in 1966, Noûs. When Hector died too young a death at age 66  in the fall of '91, the editorship passed to others who removed the Latin phrase. There are people who find classical allusions  pretentious. I understand, but do not share, their sentiment.

Perhaps I should import Hector's motto into my own masthead. For it   certainly expresses my attitude and would be a nice, if inadequate, way of honoring the man.

Hector's motto is modelled on Terentius: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. "I am a human being; I consider nothing human to be  foreign to me." One also sees the thought expressed in this form:  Nihil humanum a me alienum puto. Hector's motto is modeled on this variant.

Peter Hitchens on an Evening Without Richard Dawkins

Excerpt (emphasis added)

The most moving – and most enjoyable – contribution of the evening came from the marvellous Dr Stephen Priest, simultaneously diffident and extremely powerful. I won’t try to summarise it because I’m sure I’d fail. I hope it will eventually make it on to the web. It reminded me of why I had once wanted to study philosophy, a desire which faded rapidly when I was exposed to English Linguistic Philosophy and various other strands of that discipline which made me wonder if I had wandered into a convention of crossword-compilers, when what I wanted was to seek the origins of the universe.

Many of you will know that in his failure to face William Lane Craig, Professor Dawkins was not alone. Several other members of Britain’s Atheist Premier League found themselves unable or unwilling (or both) to take him on.

The important thing about this is that what Craig does is simple. He uses philosophical logic, and a considerable knowledge of physics, to expose the shallowness of Dawkins’s arguments. I would imagine that an equally serious Atheist philosopher would be able to give him a run for his money, but Dawkins isn’t that. He would have been embarrassingly out of his depth.

It would be interesting to compile a list of those who were dissuaded, or almost dissuaded, from pursuing philosophy by their encounter with the Ordinary Language movement.  Hector-Neri Castañeda  once told me that the dominance of the latter in the '50s and '60s almost convinced  him to drop philosophy as a profession abd go to law school.  Not being a native English speaker, he could not hope to contribute to discussions in which the subtleties of ordinary English usage are put under the microsope.  But then things changed in that wild decade of the '60s in which so many things changed, the epigoni of Wittgenstein went into eclipse, and systematic philosophy was back on track and attractive of the better heads.

My posts on OLP are collected in the Ordinary Language Philosophy category.

A Response to Levi Asher on Abortion

In a very brief post I posed a question for those pacifists who are pro-choice: "If you are a pacifist, why aren't you also pro-life? If you oppose the killing of human beings, how can you not oppose the killing of defenceless human beings, innocent human beings?"

Levi Asher answers at his blog, Literary Kicks. 

Asher begins with a point with which I agree: " being pro-choice and being pro-abortion are completely different things." I have made this point myself in disagreement with some conservative friends.  One can support the legal right to abortion without advocating abortion, just as one can support the right to keep and bear arms without advocating that people do so.  It is also worth pointing out that in a civil discussion we ought to respect the labels our opponents choose for themselves.  So if Ron Paul calls himself a non-interventionist in foreign policy, it is somewhat churlish to insist on calling him an isolationist as John McCain did in their 2008 debates.  It is the same with those who label themselves 'pro-choice.' 

But although one can be pro-choice without advocating abortion, one who is pro-choice tolerates abortion.  Tolerating abortion, the pro-choicer tolerates the killing of innocent human beings, innocent biologically human individuals.  The fundamental question is how such killing can be justified -- whether or not one is a pacifist.  But if one is  pacifist then the burden of justification will be all the more onerous.  Of course, much depends on how one defines 'pacifist.' Asher does not provide a definition, and without a precise definition a discussion like this won't get very far.

Suppose you hold that in no possible circumstances is the killing of a human being justified.  If so, you must oppose capital punishment, just war doctrine, killing in self-defense, and indeed suicide since suicide is the killing of a human being.  The point of my question above was that if you are pacifist in this, or some closely related sense, then how would it be logically consistent of you to countenance the moral acceptability of abortion given that abortion is the killing of innocent and defenceless human beings?  Simply put, if you hold that in no possible circumstances is the killing of a human being justified, then you must also hold that the killing of unborn (not-yet-born) human beings is unjustified.

Notice that you can't reasonably deny that the unborn are human.  What are they then, bovine?  Lupine?  It is a plain biological fact that human parents have human offpsring.  Even more absurd would be to deny, as Ayn Rand does, that human fetuses are typically alive.  What are they then, dead?

One should also avoid making the silly but oft-heard assertion that a fetus is just a bit of tissue.  That's false.  The fetus, at least in its later phases of development, is a biological individual, a separate human living organism distinct from its mother.

The difference between being not-yet-born and being born is a difference, but not one that makes a moral difference.  A mere 'change of address,' a mere spatial translation from womb to crib cannot transform a morally acceptable killing to a morally unacceptable one.  Or to put it the other way around: if infanticide is morally wrong, then why isn't late-term abortion?  Analogy: if shooting me down in the street is morally wrong, then doing the deed in my house is no less morally wrong.  "Your honor, I shot him all right, but he was in his house with the door closed!"

Or is it the time difference that is supposed to make the moral difference?  Compare a fetus a few days before birth to a neonate  right after birth.  There is a temporal difference, and a very slight developmental difference, but not a difference that makes a moral difference, i.e., a difference that justifies a difference in treatment.

So I am not sure Asher got the point of my question.  If one respects all life, including the life of unborn humans, and this is not an empty avowal, then one must be prepared to defend life especially in cases where the living beings are innocent and defenceless.  The pro-choicer, however, by tolerating abortion shows that he is not willing to defend the life of the innocent and defenceless unborn.

Asher puts the following question to me: "how can you claim to be a libertarian, and yet want the government to outlaw abortion?"

First of all I have never claimed to be a libertarian.  I thought it was obvious that I am a conservative.  Although many liberals confuse libertarians and conservatives there are important differences which it would require a separate post to detail.  Moreover, it is a bad mistake to suppose that all libertarians are pro-choice.  Ron Paul is a nationally prominent libertarian who is pro-life.  He had the good sense to quit the Losertarian Libertarian Party and join the Republicans, but that does not make him any less of a libertarian.  His pro-life position is very clearly defined in the first chapter of his 2011 book, Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom (Grand Central Publishing, pp. 1-9)  I understand that there are even some Objectivists who take a pro-life position, though their hero was pro-choice, employing arguments as awful as many of her arguments are.  See Ayn Rand on Abortion.

Asher continues:

If you don't believe it the government's place to manage anyone's economy, health care or education, how can it be the government's place to intrude on one of the most deeply personal and difficult decisions a woman or a woman's family has to make? If you're a libertarian, don't you want to reduce the government's power to intrude into private life? You can't be a libertarian and not be pro-choice -- the combination of the two would be an oxymoron.

Again, I am not a libertarian.  How could anyone think that I was?  Support for limited government does not distinguish between libertarians and conservatives since both support limited government.  Asher says that a libertarian cannot fail to be pro-choice.  That is plainly false, as witness the case of Ron Paul.  (I'll have to write a separate post to summarize Paul's arguments.)  Both libertarians and conservatives champion the rights of individuals.  Among these rights are the right to life.  It is perfectly consistent for a libertarian to extend these rights to the unborn. 

Asher thinks that laws against abortion "intrude into private life."  He doesn't seem to understand that some such intrusions are legitimate.  If he abuses or kills his own children he will have to answer to the state, and rightly so.  That is a legitimate intrusion into his private family life.  Conservatives, and some libertarians, maintain that there is no difference that makes a moral difference between killing born and unborn children.  If one of the legitimate functions of the state is to protect life, and it is, then that includes all human life. 

I notice that Asher doesn't given any arguments in favor of his position.  One of the arguments he could give is the Woman's Body Argument which I present and refute here.  The gist of the argument is that a woman has a right to do anything she wants with any part of her body.  But unless it can be shown that the biologically human individual growing within her is a mere part of her body, the argument will not establish its conclusion.

The Dog Delusion

Image swiped from Reppert's site.  But the following is mine:

 

 

Wherein Kitty learns that there's probably no Dog and that she should stop worrying and enjoy her life.

Suggestions on How Best to Study

Just over the transom:

Noting your desire to correct spelling, here are two that I spotted: "...gave an argment [sic] a while back (1 August 2010 to be precise) to the conclusion that there cannot, as a matter of metaphyscal necessity [sic]..."

Holy moly!  Thanks.  I just corrected them, and then found three more.

My current frustrations stem from mental mistakes, not typos.  Thinking clearly about philosophy is more difficult for me than writing about my thoughts, which makes me suspect that I should write more (summary papers, counterarguments) while I'm working through the material instead of just taking notes along the way.

Right.  Reading by itself is too passive to be very profitable even if done while alert in a quiet environment in an upright position.  So one ought to take notes and mark passages (assuming you own the book).  But even this is not enough.  The only way  properly to assimilate a philosophical text is by writing a summary and a critique of it.  The summary is an attempt to understand exactly what the author's thesis or theses are, and (just as important) what his arguments are.  Having done that, one advances to critical evaluation, the attempt to sort out  which theses and arguments you consider true/valid and which false/invalid.  Blogging can be very useful for this purpose and can lead to worthwhile exchanges and the refinement and testing of one's ideas.

As I see it, there is no point in seriously studying anything without a decision as to whether or not one should take on board the author's theses and arguments and incorporate them into one's own thinking.  The point of study and inquiry is to get at the truth, not to know what someone else  has maintained that the truth is.

I have just completed a semester of Searle's intro to the philosophy of mind via podcast. I worked through the primary readings and also studied his textbook.  It was very difficult and rewarding.  Now it is time to tackle his semester on language.

Searle is good.  You will learn a lot from him.  My posts on Searle are collected in the aptly-named Searle category.

Always enjoy your posts.  Occam's Razor is sorely abused by apologists from all corners of the debate.

Glad we agree, and thanks for the kind words.

The Use and Abuse of Occam's Razor: On Multiplying Entities Beyond Necessity

Self-styled neo-Aristotelian Richard Hennessey's response to my three posts concerning his theory of accidental predication is now online. 

He graciously declines my suggestion that he make use of accidental compounds or accidental unities in his theory despite the excellent Aristotelian pedigree of these items, a pedigree amply documented in the writings of Frank Lewis and Gareth Mathews.  Following Mathews, I characterized accidental compounds as 'kooky' objects with as little pejorative intent as I found in Mathews who defends these items. Hennessey, however, apparently takes the label pejoratively:

I cannot help but agree that the seated-Socrates in question, as a being other than Socrates, is a “‘kooky’ or ‘queer’ object.” And I cannot help but wonder how anyone who rejects universals could be tempted to multiply entities and accept such a “‘kooky’ or ‘queer’ object.”

So before examing the meat of Hennessey's response to me, in a later post, we must first tackle some preliminary matters including the nature of Occam's Razor, its use and abuse, and the role of explanation and explanatory posits in philosophy.

On Brandishing the Razor

I am not historian enough to pronounce upon the relation of what is standardly called Occam's Razor to the writings of the 14th century William of Ockham. The different spellings of his name will serve as a reminder to be careful about reading contemporary concerns into the works of philosophers long dead. Setting aside historical concerns, Occam's Razor is standardly taken to be a principle of theoretical economy or  parsimony that states:

   OR. Do not multiply entities beyond necessity.

It is sometimes formulated in Latin: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. The principle is presumably to be interpreted qualitatively rather than quantitatively, thus:

   OR*. Do not multiply TYPES of entity beyond necessity.

Thus it is not individual entities that are not to be multiplied, but types or kinds or categories of entity.  To illustrate.  Some criticized David Lewis' extreme modal realism on the ground that it proliferates concreta: there are not only all the actual  concreta , there are all those merely possible ones as well.  He responded quite plausibly to the proliferation charge by pointing out that the Razor applies to categories of entity, not individual entities, and that category-wise his ontology is sparse indeed.

'Multiply' is a picturesque way of saying posit. (Obviously, there are as many categories of entity as there are, and one cannot cause them to 'multiply.')  And let's not forget the crucial qualification: beyond necessity.  That means: beyond what is needed for purposes of adequate explanation of the data that are to be explained.  Hence:

OR**  Do not posit types of entity in excess of what is needed for purposes of explanation.

So the principle enjoins us to refrain from positing more types of entity than we need to explain the phenomena that need to be explained. It is obvious that (OR**) does not tell us to prefer theory T1 over theory T2 if T1 posits fewer types of entity than T2. What it tells us is to prefer T1 over T2 if T1 posits fewer types of entity AND accounts adequately for all  the data. So there is a trade-off between positing and accounting.

Our old pal Ed over at Beyond Necessity often seems to be unaware of this.  He seems to think that simply brandishing the Razor suffices to refute a theory.  Together with this he sometimes displays a tendency to think that whole categories of entity can be as it were  shamed out of existence by labeling them 'queer.'  I picked up that word from him.  A nice, arch, donnish epithet.  But that is just name-calling, a shabby tactic best left to the ideologues. 

Hennessey is perhaps not guilty of any name-calling or entity-shaming but I note that he too seems to think that merely waving the Razor about suffices as a technique of refutation. One piece of evidence is the quotation above where he states in effect that to posit accidental compounds such as seated-Socrates is to multiply entities.  But this is to ignore the crucial question whether there is any need for the positing. 

What is offensive about Razor brandishing is the apparent ignorance on the part of some brandishers of the fact that we all agree that one ought not posit types of entity in excess of the needs of explanation. What we don't agree on, however, is whether or not a given class of entities is needed for explanatory purposes.  That is where the interesting questions and the real disagreements lie. 

Hennessey eschews universals in the theory of predication, and elsewhere.  Fine.  But he cannot justify that eschewal solely on the basis of Occam's Razor which is a purely methodological principle.  In other words, the Razor does not dictate any particular ontology.  Taken as such, and apart from its association with the nominalist Ockham, it does not favor nominalism (the view that everything is a particular) over realism (the view that there are both particulars and universals).  It does not favor any ontology over any other. 

Nor does it rule out so-called 'abstract objects' such as Fregean propositions.  I gave an argument a while back (1 August 2010 to be precise) to the conclusion that there cannot, as a matter of metaphysical necessity, be nothing at all, that there must be at least one abstract object, a proposition.  Hennessey commented on that post, Thinking about Nothing, and made the objection that I was multipying entities.  But again, the salient question is whether the entity-positing is necessary for explanatory purposes.  If my argument was a good one, then it was.  One cannot refute such an argument simply by claiming that it introduces a type of entity that is less familiar than one's favorite types.

To sum up.  Philosophy is in large part, though not entirely, an explanatory enterprise.  As such it ought to proceed according to the methodological principle formulated above as (OR**).  This principle is not controversial.  Hence it should not be presented to one's opponents as if it were controversial and denied by them.  Nor is it a principle that takes sides on the substantive questions of ontology.  Thus the following argument which is suggested by Hennessey's remarks is invalid:

1. OR**
2. Accidental compounds are a category of particular distinct from both substances and accidents.
Ergo
3. There are no accidental compounds. 

Non sequitur!  He needs a premise to the effect that the positing of accidental compounds is otiose since the explanatory job can be adequately done without them.  He needs such a premise, and of course he needs to defend it.

What I am objecting to is the idea is that by earnest asseverations of a wholly uncontroversial methodological principle one actually  advances the substantive debate.  

Why Science Will Never Put Religion Out of Business

If science can eventually provide what religion promises, then science will eventually put religion out of business.  But can science provide what religion promises?  I will argue that it cannot.  My argument will  not assume that any religion, or any combination of religions, is true, wholly or in part.  Perhaps no actual or possible religion makes contact with reality at any point.  Perhaps every actual or possible religion is nothing but an elaborate expression of human neediness, of human wishes, dreams, hopes, and fears. Still, there remains the fact of these fears and hopes, and the question whether anything can assuage the former and fulfill the latter.  I will begin by listing the main types of problem that religion addresses, and then ask whether current or future science, or rather, a technology that implements current or future science, can supply the needs that religions cater to.

The Problems Religion Addresses

1. The first category of problems includes the facts that shook young prince Siddartha to his core, moved him to forsake the royal compound with its impressive perquisites and blandishments and set him on the austere path to becoming Buddha, the supremely enlightened one who saw to the bottom of our predicament and saw the way out (as his followers believe), and went on to found Buddhism.  What shook Siddartha and shocked him deeply were sickness, old age, death, and everything connected with them, everything that causes them and everything they bring in their train. We can lump all this under the rubric of natural evil: suffering and misery in all its forms that arises from natural causes.  For Buddha the fundamental fact and the fundamental problem was that of suffering, which is why the First Noble Truth, which is not only first in the order of presentation but also first in the order of importance, is "All is suffering," sarvam dukkham.

2. The second category is that of moral evil.  These are the problems that come into the world via the exercise of free will, from the merest unkindness on up to the horrors of rape, torture, slavery, mass murder, abuse of power by governments and their agents, as well as by private individuals, and all the crimes that fill the history books and the pages of every newspaper in every corner of the globe every day.  Here belong all the ills that derive not just from weakness of will, but even more from perversity of will. 

3. The third category is that of moral and intellectual blindness, ignorance, and delusion, for example, the delusional thinking of someone who believes that happiness will be his if he succeeds in murdering his wife, collecting on a life insurance policy, and getting away with the crime.

4. Under the fourth rubric I collect all the problems associated with the ontological deficiency of the world of our ordinary experience.  All of the deeper heads in the East, the Near East and the West from Buddha and Ecclesiastes to Plato and Plotinus to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche have been struck and shocked by the vanity of existence and the transitoriness of life.  "I am aggrieved by the transitoriness of things," wrote Nietzsche to his friend Overbeck.  A homo religiosus with the bladed intellect of a skeptic, Nietzsche couldn't bring himself to accept any traditional religion.  And yet the religious need was alive in him, and it was that need that gave rise to his peculiar scheme of Redemption in the form of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same. 

Connected with the vanity of existence and the transience of life is the apparent meaninglessness of our lives.  Albert Camus famously argued in the The Myth of Sisyphus that the one and only serious philosophical problem is that of suicide.  Does the Absurd demand suicide as the only appropriate response?  That was his question.  He characterized the Absurd as the disproportion between the human craving for meaning and the universe's apparent meaninglessness.  What we want it cannot provide.  It is not that the universe is indifferent to us -- indifference, after all, is a human attitude which presupposes concern and is a privation thereof -- but beyond indifference and interestedness. The silence of ther universe is not a privation of speech, but something deeper -- and worse.

We suffer from a lack of existential meaning, a meaning that we cannot supply from our own resources since any subjective acts of meaning-positing are themselves (objectively) meaningless. Connected with this is our deep existential insecurity which erupts into consciousness from time to time in the form of the anxiety, anguish, dread, Angst that Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre described.  This is not an anxiety about this or that; its intentional object is global, our very Being-in-the-world in Heideggerian jargon.  This is experienced as unheimlich.  Anxiety reveals that we are not at home in the world.   We feel desolation.  I feel fear for an intramundane being, ein innerweltliches Seiende; I feel Angst for my very In-der-Welt-sein, which is precarious desolate and lived in the face of das Nichts. (The connection between original sin and dread/anxiety is explored by Kierkegaard in The Concept of Dread.)

I don't claim that the above catalog is complete or even very well constructed: #4 bleeds back into #1 especially if suffering is taken in the radical Buddhist sense in which all-pervasive dukkha (suffering, ill, unsatisfactoriness) is undepinned by anatta (selflessness, insubstantiality) and anicca (radical, Heraclitean impermanence).  For the Buddhist, suffering goes deep, rooted as it is in the very ontological structure of the world of our ordinary experience. 

But I have said enough to make clear what sorts of problems religion addresses.  It follows that the salvation religion promises is not to be understood in some crass physical sense the way the typical superficial and benighted atheist-materialist would take it but as salvation from meaninglessness, anomie, spiritual desolation, Unheimlichkeit, existential insecurity, Angst, ignorance and delusion, false value-prioritizations, moral corruption irremediable by any human effort, failure to live up to ideals, the vanity and transience of our lives, meaningless sufferings and cravings and attachments, the ultimate pointlessness of all efforts at moral and intellectual improvement in the face of death . . . .

I should add that anyone who doesn't feel these problems to be genuine problems will have no understanding of religion at all.  And I remind the reader that I do not assume that any religion can deliver on its promises of salvation from the above litany of problems. My point is that natural science and its resulting technologies are powerless to solve these problems.

This ought to be self-evident to anyone who appreciates the problems.  Consider #1.  If suffering is rooted as deeply as the Buddhists think, in the very ontological structure of this changeful world, then obviously no mere manipulation of matter will solve the problem of suffering.  You can drug people into a stupor, but being rendered insensate is no solution to the problems of sentient suffering.  Suppose you don't think suffering is as deeply rooted as the Buddhists think.  Sickness, old age, and death remain inevitable despite the welcome alleviations and life-extensions that modern science makes possible.

As for the rest of my categories, it is self-evident that there are no technological solutions to moral evil, moral ignorance, and the apparent absurdity of life.  Is a longer life a morally better life?  Can mere longevity confer meaning?

The notion that present or future science can solve the problems that religion addresses is utterly chimerical.

So if you reject religion, then you ought to honestly face the problems without evasion and without cultivating 'pie-in-the-future' illusions.  Companion post:  Can Belief in Man Substitute for Belief in God?

The Stove 'Dilemma' and the Lewis 'Trilemma'

This from D. J. Stove, the son of atheist and neo-positivist David Stove:

When the possibility of converting to Catholicism became a real one, it was the immensity of the whole package that daunted me, rather than specific teachings. I therefore spent little time agonizing over the Assumption of Mary, justification by works as well as faith, the reverencing of statues, and other such concepts that traditionally irk the non-Catholic mind.

Rather, such anguish as I felt came from entirely the other direction. However dimly and inadequately, I had learnt enough Catholic history and Catholic dogma to know that either Catholicism was the greatest racket in human history, or it was what it said itself that it was. Such studying burned the phrase "By what authority?" into my  mind like acid. If the papacy was just an imposture, or an exercise in power mania, then how was doctrine to be transmitted from generation to generation? If the whole Catholic enchilada was a swindle, then why should its enemies have bestirred themselves to hate it so much? Why do they do so still?

This reminds me of the famous 'trilemma' popularized by C. S. Lewis:  Jesus is either the Son of God, or he is a lunatic, or he is the devil. This trilemma is also sometimes put as a three-way choice among lord, lunatic, or liar.  I quote Lewis and offer my critical remarks here.

Just as I cannot accept the Lewis 'trilemma' -- which is not strictly a trilemma inasmuch as not all three prongs are unacceptable -- I cannot accept the Stovian 'dilemma' which strikes me as a text-book case of the informal fallacy of False Alternative.  ". . . either Catholicism was the greatest racket in human history, or it was what it said itself that it was."  Why are these the only two alternatives?  The Roman Catholic church claims to be the one, true, holy, catholic (universal), and apostolic church.  One possibility is that the Roman church was all of these things before various linguistic, political, and theological tensions eventuated in the Great Schism of 1054 such that after that date the one, true, etc. church was the Orthodox church of the East.  After all, both can and do trace their lineage back to Peter, the 'rock' upon whom Christ founded his church.  That is at least a possibility.  If it is actual, then the present Roman church would be neither a racket nor what it claims to be.  It would be a church with many excellences that unfortunately diverged from the authentic Christian tradition.

Or it could be that that true church is not the Roman church but some Protestant denomination, or maybe no church is the true church: some are better than others, but none of the extant churches has 'cornered the market' on all religiously relevant  truth. 

I get the impression that Stove has a burning desire to belong to a community of Christian believers, is attracted to the Roman church for a variety of reasons, some of them good, and then concocts an obviously  worthless argument to lend a veneer of rationality to his choice.

My point is a purely logical one.  I am not taking sides in any theological controversy.

Young Man's Bible, Old Man's Bible

When he was a young man he travelled around the country with On the Road, the 'Bible of the Beat Generation,' in his rucksack, just as Kerouac had with Dwight Goddard's Buddhist Bible in his.   Now he is an old man.  When he travels now he carries a different light paperback, the plain old Bible.

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 tears & mist, a pilgrim on the via dolorosa of this dolorous life, 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.

Another 'river' song in the same plaintive vein is Pat Boone's Moody River from 1961. 

Here's to You, Jack

Jack Kerouac was a big ball of affects ever threatening to dissolve in that sovereign soul-solvent, alcohol. One day he did, and died. The date was 21 October 1969. Today is the 42nd anniversary of his release from the wheel of the quivering meat conception and the granting of his wish:

The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . .
. . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel
and safe in heaven dead. (Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus)

Apparently, he took his last drink  at the Flamingo Sports Bar in St. Petersburg.

The bar has become the area's de facto gathering spot for Kerouac aficionados to swap stories. Sitting on the patio, Alan Sansotta, who shot pool with Kerouac every week in the late 1960s, said he understands why the connection still matters.

"The first time you read On The Road, you think, 'What the hell am I doing with my life? I need to open my head up and see what's going on in the world,' " said Sansotta. "His literature really did change my life. It changed my life. And I thank God for that, because no doubt, geez, I'd have led a pretty boring life without Jack."

Yep, it would have been a lot less interesting without Jack.

The picture below is of Neal Cassady.  The inscription on the gravestone reads: "He honored life."

Accidental Sameness and its Logical Properties

I should thank Richard Hennessey for motivating me to address a topic I haven't until these last few days discussed in these pages, namely, that of accidental sameness.  Let us adopt for the time being a broadly Aristotelian ontology with its standard nomenclature of substance and accident, act and potency, form and matter, etc.  Within such a framework, how can we account for an accidental predication such as 'Socrates is seated'? 

In particular, what is expressed by 'is' in a sentence like this?  Hennessey seems to maintain that it expresses an identity which holds, if the sentence is true, between the referent of the subject term 'Socrates' and the referent of the predicate term  'seated.'  Here is what Hennessey says:

Let us take the proposition “Socrates is sitting” or the strictly equivalent “Socrates is a sitting being.” The referent of the subject term here is the sitting Socrates and that of the predicate term is one and the same sitting Socrates. Similarly, the referent of the subject term of “Plato is sitting” is the sitting Plato and that of its predicate term is one and the same sitting Plato. Here, once again, only if the referent of the “Socrates” and that of the “sitting” of “Socrates is sitting” are identical can it be true that Socrates is actually the one sitting. And, only if the referent of the “Plato” and that of the “sitting” of “Plato is sitting” are identical can it be true that Plato is actually the one sitting.

Hennessey is making two moves in this passage.  The first is the replacement of 'Socrates is seated' with 'Socrates is a seated being.' (I am using 'seated' instead of 'sitting' for idiosyncratic stylistic reasons;  the logic and ontology of the situation should not be affected.) I grant that the original sentence and its replacement are logically equivalent.  Hence I have no objection to the first move.

The second move is to construe the 'is' of the replacement sentence as expressing identity.  Together with this move goes Hennessey's  claim that ONLY in this way can the truth of the sentence be insured.  This claim is false for reasons given earlier, but this is not my present concern.  My concern at present is the second move by itself.  Can the 'is' of the replacement sentence be construed as expressing identity?

The answer to this is in the negative if by 'identity' is meant strict identity.  Strict identity, symbolized by '=,'  is an equivalence relation: it is reflexive, symmetrical, and transitive.  It is furthermore governed by the Indiscernibility of Identicals (If a = b, then everything true of a is true of b and vice versa) and the Necessity of Identity (If a = b, then necessarily a = b).  Now if the referent of 'Socrates' and the referent of 'seated' are strictly identical, then this is necessarily so, true in every possible world in which Socrates exists, in which case our sentence cannot be contingently true as it obviously is.  Socrates is seated only at some of the times at which he exists, not at all such times.  And at any time at which he is seated he is possibly such as not to be seated at that time.  (The modality in question is broadly logical.)

So if Hennessey wants to construe the 'is' as expressing a type of sameness, it cannot be that sameness which is strict identity.  An option which is clearly open to him as an Aristotelian is to construe the 'is' as expressing accidental sameness.  But what is that?

It is a dyadic relation that connects one substance and one accidental compound.  (Thus by definition it never connects two substances or two compounds.)  An accidental compound is a particular, not a universal.  It is a hylomorphic compound the matter of which is a substance and the form of which an accident inhering in that substance.  It is admittedly a somewhat 'kooky' object, to borrow an epithet from Gareth Mathews.  An example is seated-Socrates.  Socrates is a substance.  His seatedness is an accident inhering in him.  The two together form an accidental compound which can be denoted by 'seated-Socrates' or by 'Socrates + seatedness.'  Seated-Socrates is neither a substance nor an accident, but a transcategorial hybrid composed of one substance and one accident, but only if the accident inheres in the substance. (An accidental compund is therefore not a mereological sum of a substance and any old accident.)

The compound is not a substance because it cannot exist on its own, but it is parasitic upon its parent substance, in our example, Socrates. It is also not a substance because it is not subject to alterational change.  Change for an accidental compound is existential change, either coming into being or passing out of being.  When Socrates sits down, seated-Socrates comes into being, and when he stands up it passes out of being.  An accidental compound is not an accident because it is not related to its parent substance by inherence, but by accidental sameness.  A key difference is that inherence is an asymmetrical relation, while accidental sameness is symmetrical.

Hennessey can say the following: 'Socrates is seated' expresses the accidental sameness of Socrates with the accidental compound, seated-Socrates.  He needs to posit two objects, not one: a substance and an accidental compound.  If he holds that the referent of 'Socrates' and the referent of 'seated' are strictly identical, then the accidentality of the predication cannot be accommodated, and all predications become essential. That was my initial objection to Hennessey's view before I figured out a way to salvage it. 

What are the logical properties of the accidental sameness relation?  Like strict identity, it is symmetrical.  This should be obvious.  If Socrates is accidentally the same as seated-Socrates, then the latter is accidentally the same as the former.  The inherence relation, by contrast, is asymmetrical: if A inheres in S, then S does not inhere in A. This is one of the differences between the accidental sameness relation and the inherence relation. 

Accidental sameness is irreflexive.  This can be proven as follows:

1. No substance is an accidental compound.
2. If a is accidentally the same as b, then either a is a subtance and b a compound, or vice versa.
Therefore
3. No object, whether substance or compound, is accidentally the same as itself.

It can also be proven that accidental sameness is intransitive.  Thus, if a is accidentally the same as b, and b accidentally the same as c, it follows that a is not accidentally the same as c.  Suppose a is a substance.  Then b is a compound.  But if b is a compound, then c is a substance, with the result that a substance is accidentally the same as a substance, which violates the definition of accidental sameness.  On the other hand, if a is a compound, then b is a substance, which makes c a compound, with the result that a  compound is accidentally the same as a compound, which also violates the definition.  So accidental sameness is intransitive.

Clearly, there is accidental sameness only if there are accidental compounds.  But are there any of the latter?  Consider a fist.  A fist is not strictly identical to the hand whose fist it is. (They have different persistence conditions.) But a fist is not strictly different from the hand whose fist it is.  But surely there are fists, and surely what we have in a situation like this is not two individuals in the same place.  So it is reasonable to maintain that a fist is an accidental compound which is accidentally the same as the hand whose fist it is.

Still, there is something 'kooky' about accidental compounds.  So I'll end with a challenge to Hennessey, enemy of universals.  Why are accidental compounds less 'kooky' than universals, whether immanent or transcendent? 

Why Richard Dawkins Refuses to Debate William Lane Craig

Dawkins explains.

The Case for American Optimism

Brad Lips at American Thinker makes the case. 

Son of Atheist Neo-Positivist David Stove Converts to Catholicism

A very interesting counterexample (or exception?) to "Like father, like son." (Memo to self: Write a post on the difference between exceptions and counterexamples.)  Via Feser.

I feel moved to comment on parts of R. J. Stove's statement.  Maybe later.  But at the moment I am more strongly drawn to the pleasures of the mountain bike.  There is nothing quite like cranking  a mountain bike through the foothills of a beautiful mountain range at sunrise.  And the high I get after 1-2 hours of this is qualitatively different from the types of euphoria induced by hiking and running, though these are exquisite as well.

The strenuous life is best by test.

Heart Attack Hill and Heart Attack Grill

I'd rather toil up Heart Attack Hill than put away one of these bad boys.  It would take about 80 miles of hiking to burn off the calories from just one of these burgers if you have the fries and milkshake as well.  Up for an 80-miler?

Nanny-state liberals would use the power of the state to shut down restaurants like this.  That is the trouble with contemporary liberals: they do not understand or value the liberty of the individual , a liberty which includes the liberty to behave in ways that many of us consider foolish.  If you grant the state the power to order your life there will be no end to it.  Right now, in Germany it is illegal to homeschool one's own children!  Every day brings a new example of governmental overreach.  We do not exist for the state; the state exists for us.  Our wealth is ours, not the state's.  We don't have to justify our keeping; they have to justify their taking.

Please no liberal nonsense about an 'epidemic' of obesity or obesity as a public health problem.  True, we Americans are a gluttonous people as witness competitive eating contests, the numerous food shows, and the complete lack of any sense among most that there is anything morally wrong with gluttony.  The moralists of old understood something when they classified gluttony as one of the seven deadly sins.

Obesity is not a disease; so, speaking strictly, there cannot be an epidemic of it.  I know that 'epidemic' is used more broadly than this, even by epidemiologists; but this is arguably the result of an intrusion of liberal ideology into what is supposedly science.   Do you really think that 'epidemic' is being used in the same way in 'flu epidemic' and 'obesity epidemic'?  Is obesity contagious?  If fat Al sneezes in my face, should I worry about contracting the obesity virus? There is no such virus.  Obesity is not contagious and not a disease.   I know what some will say: obesity is socially contagious.  But now you've shifted the sense of 'contagious.'    You've engaged in a bit of semantic mischief.  It is not as if there are two kinds of contagion, natural and social.  Social contagion is not contagion any more than negative growth is growth or a decoy duck is a duck. 'Social' in 'socially contagious' is an alienans adjective.

Why then are you fat?  You are fat because you eat too much of the wrong sorts of food and refuse to exercise.  For most people that's all there is to it.  It's your fault.  It is not the result of being attacked from without by a virus.  It is within your power to be fat or not.  It is a matter of your FREE WILL.  You have decided to become fat or to remain fat.  When words such as 'epidemic' and 'disease' are used in connection with obesity, that is an ideological denial of free will, an attempt to shift responsibility from the agent to factors external to the agent such as the 'evil' corporations that produce so-called 'junk' food. 

There are public health problems, but obesity is not one of them.  It is private problem resident at the level of the individual and the family. 

Death Penalty, Abortion, and Certainty

Some opponents of the death penalty oppose it on the ground that one can never be certain whether the accused is guilty as charged.  Some of these people are pro-choice.  To them I say: Are you certain that the killing of the unborn is morally permissible?  How can you be sure?  How can you be sure that the right to life kicks in only at birth and not one  minute before?  What makes you think that a mere 'change of address,' a mere spatial translation from womb to crib, confers normative personhood and with it the right to life?  Or is it being one minute older that confers normative personhood?  What is the difference that makes a moral difference -- thereby justifying a difference in treatment -- between unborn human individuals and infant human individuals?

Suppose you accept the general moral prohibition against homicide.  And suppose that you grant that there are legitimate exceptions to the general prohibition including one or more of the following: self-defense, just war, suicide, capital punishment.  Are you certain that abortion is a legitimate exception?  And if you allow abortion as a legitimate exception, why not also capital punishment?

After all, most of those found guilty of capital crimes actually are guilty and deserving of execution; but none of the unborn are guilty of anything.

My point,then, is that if you demand certainty of guilt before you will allow capital punishment, then you should demand certainty of the moral permissibility of abortion before you allow it.  I should add that in many capital cases there is objective certainty of guilt (the miscreant confesses, the evidence is overwhelming, etc.); but no one can legitimately claim to be objectively certain that abortion is morally permissible. 

Pacifism and Abortion

If you are a pacifist, why aren't you also pro-life?  If you oppose the killing of human beings, how can you not oppose the killing of defenceless human beings, innocent human beings? 

You call yourself a liberal.  You pride yourself on 'speaking truth to power' and for defending the weak and disadvantaged.  Well, how much power do the unborn wield?

Accidental Sameness: Defending Hennessey Against My Objection

Yesterday I made an objection to Richard Hennessey's neo-Aristotelian theory of accidental predication.  But this morning I realized that he has one or more plausible responses.  By the way, this post has, besides its philosophical purpose, a metaphilosophical one.  I will be adding support to my claim lately bruited that philosophy -- the genuine article -- is not a matter of debate, as I define both 'philosophy' and 'debate.'  For have you ever been to a debate in which debater A, having made an objection to something debater B has said, says, "Wait a minute!  I just realized that you have one or more plausible ways of turning aside my objection.  The first is . . . ."?

1. 'Socrates is seated' is an example of an accidental predication.  For surely it is no part of Socrates' essence or nature that he be seated.  There is no broadly logical necessity that  he be seated at any time at which he is seated, and there are plenty of times at which he is not seated.  'Socrates is seated' contrasts with the essential predication 'Socrates is human.'  Socrates is human at every time at which he exists and at every world at which he exists.

2. Hennessey's theory is that ". . . only if the referent of the 'Socrates' and that of the 'sitting' of 'Socrates is sitting' are identical can it be true that Socrates is actually the one sitting."  The idea seems to be that accidental predications can be understood as identity statements.  Thus 'Socrates is seated' goes over into (what is claimed to be) the logically equivalent  'Socrates is (identical to) seated-Socrates.'  Accordingly, our sample sentence is construed, not as predicating a property of Socrates, a property he instantiates, but as affiming the identity of Socrates with the referent of 'seated-Socrates.'

3.  But what is the referent of 'seated-Socrates'?  If the referent is identical to the referent of 'Socrates,' namely Socrates, then my objection kicks in:  how can the predication be contingently true, as it obviously is, given that it affirms the identity of Socrates with himself?  Socrates is essentially Socrates but only accidentally seated.

4. Perhaps Hennessey could respond to this objection by saying that 'Socrates' and 'Socrates-seated' do not refer to the same item: they refer to different items which are, nonetheless, contingently identical.  This would involve distinguishing between necessary identity and contingent identity where both are equivalence relations (reflexive, symmetrical, transitive) but only the former satisfies in addition the Indiscernibility of Identicals (InId) and the Necessity of Identity (NI).  It is obvious that if a and b are contingently identical, but distinct, then these items must be discernible in which case InId fails.  It is also obvious that NI must fail for contingent identity.

5. Closer to Aristotle is a view described by Michael C. Rea in "Sameness Without Identity: An Aristotelian Solution to the Problem of Material Constitution" in Form and Matter, ed. Oderberg, Blackwell 1999, pp. 103-115.  I will now paraphrase and interpret from Rea's text, pp. 105-107.  And I won't worry about how the view I am about to sketch differs -- if it does differ -- from the view sketched in #4.

When Socrates sits down, seated-Socrates comes into existence. When he stands up or adopts some other nonseated posture, seated-Socrates passes out of existence.  This 'kooky' or 'queer' object is presumably a particular, not a universal, though it is not a substance.  It is an accidental unity whose existence is parasitic upon the existence of its parent substance, Socrates.   It cannot exist without the parent substance, but the latter can exist without it.  The relation is like that of a fist to a hand made into a fist.  The fist cannot exist without the hand, but the hand can exist without being made into a fist.Though seated-Socrates is not a substance it is like a substance in that it is a hylomorphic compound: it has Socrates as its matter and seatedness as its form.  As long as Socrates and seated-Socrates exist, the relation between them is accidental sameness, a relation weaker than strict identity. 

Accidental sameness is not strict identity presumably because  the former is not governed by the Indiscernibility of Identicals.  Clearly, Socrates and seated-Socrates do not share all properties despite their sameness.  They differ temporally and modally. Socrates exists at times at which seated-Socrates does not exist (though not conversely).  And it is possible that Socrates exist without seated-Socrates existing (though not conversely). 

Are Socrates and seated-Socrates numerically the same?  They count as one and so they are one in number though not one in being.   So says Aristotle according to Rea.  After all, if Socrates and Alcibiades are seated at table we count two philosophers not four.  We don't count: Socrates, seated-Socrates, Alcibiades, seated-Alcibiades.

But I will leave it to Hennessey to develop this further.  It looks as if this is the direction in which he must move if his theory is to meet my objection.

What about essential predication?  Is there a distinction between Socrates and human-Socrates?  These two cannot be accidentally the same.  They must be strictly identical. If 'Socrates is human' is parsed as 'Socrates is identical to human-Socrates' then how does the latter differ from 'Socrates is Socrates'?  The sense of 'Socrates is human' differs from the sense of 'Socrates is Socrates.'  How account for that?  'Socrates is Socrates' is a formal-logical truth, trivial and uninformative.  'Socrates is human' is not a formal-logical truth; it is informative. 

"Europe is the Faith and the Faith is Europe"

This infamous phrase of Hillaire Belloc is here explained by James V. Schall.  Excerpt:

Modern science itself has medieval Christian origins. Without the notion of a real world, itself not God, worth investigating together with the notion of real secondary causes, no science would be possible. Those societies that embraced a voluntarist origin of things never developed science because one cannot investigate what can constantly be otherwise.

Schall goes on to mention the Pope's Regensburg speech.  My comments thereon are in Pope Benedict's  Regensburg Speech and Muslim Oversensitivity.

Comments on Richard Hennessey's Neo-Aristotelian Theory of Predication

Richard Hennessey of Gnosis and Noesis sketches a neo-Aristotelian theory of predication in Another Aristotelian Basis for a Neo-Aristotelian Anti-Realism in the Theory of Universals.  Drawing as he does upon my discussion in Scholastic Realism and Predication, he has asked me to comment on his post.  I will do so with pleasure.

I first want to agree partially with something he says at the close of his post: 

. . . we have in the so-called problem of universals not a genuine problem, but merely a pseudo-problem. That is, we have a problem of universals only if we posit their existence. If we do not posit them, there is no genuine problem.

I would put the point somewhat differently.  The phrase 'problem of universals' is a misnomer. For what is in dispute in the so-called problem of universals is the nature of properties.  Not their existence, but their nature.  That there are properties is a given, a datum.  What alone can be reasonably questioned is their nature.  If you deny that sugar is sweet, then I show you the door.  But if you deny that sweetness is a universal, then I listen to your arguments.  For it is not at all obvious that the sweetness of a sugar cube is a universal. (Nor is it obvious that it isn't) That it is a universal is a theoretical claim that goes beyond the data.  It is consistent with the data that the sweetness be a particular, an unrepeatable item, such as a trope (as in the theories of D. C. Williams and Keith Campbell, et al.) or some other sort of particular. 

The correct phrase, then, is 'problem of properties,' not 'problem of universals.'  But that is not to say that there is no legitimate use for 'problem of universals.'  If one posits universals, then one will face various problems such as the problem of how they connect to particulars.  Those problems are genuine, not pseudo, given that there are universals.

In any case, Richard sees no need to posit universals, whether Platonic or Aristotelian, to explain either essential or accidental predication.  Here is the gist of Richard's theory:

Let us take the proposition “Socrates is sitting” or the strictly equivalent “Socrates is a sitting being.” The referent of the subject term here is the sitting Socrates and that of the predicate term is one and the same sitting Socrates. Similarly, the referent of the subject term of “Plato is sitting” is the sitting Plato and that of its predicate term is one and the same sitting Plato. Here, once again, only if the referent of the “Socrates” and that of the “sitting” of “Socrates is sitting” are identical can it be true that Socrates is actually the one sitting. And, only if the referent of the “Plato” and that of the “sitting” of “Plato is sitting” are identical can it be true that Plato is actually the one sitting.

What we have here could be called an identity theory of predication: if 'Socrates is a sitting being' is true, then the referent of the subject term 'Socrates' and the referent of the predicate term 'sitting being' are numerically identical.  Accordingly, the 'is' is the 'is' of identity.  ONLY on this analysis, says Richard, can the sentence be true. I rather doubt that, but first we need to consider whether Richard's theory is not open to serious objection.

If x and y are identical, then this is necessarily so. Call this the Necessity of Identity.  More precisely: for any x, y, if x = y, then necessarily, x = y.   Equivalent contrapositive: if possibly ~(x = y), then ~(x = y).  It follows that if Socrates is identical to some sitting being, then necessarily he is identical to that sitting being.  But in that case it would not be possible for Socrates not to be a sitting being.  This, however, is possible.  Sometimes he is on his feet walking around, other times he is flat on his back, and he has even been observed standing on his head.  And please note that even if, contrary to fact, Socrates was always seated, it would still be possible for him not to be seated.  The mere possibility of his not being seated shows that he cannot be identical to some sitting being.

This is an objection that Richard needs to address if his theory is to be tenable.  Note that my objection can be met without invoking universals.  One could say that 'Socrates' in our sample sentence refers to Socrates, that 'sitting' refers to a particularized property (a trope), and that the 'is' is the 'is' of predication, not identity.  Accordingly, there is not an identity between Socrates and a sitting being; the particularized property being-seated inheres in Socrates, where inherence, unlike identity, is asymmetrical.

The other claim that Richard makes is that ONLY on his theory can the truth of 'Socrates is sitting' be accommodated.  That strikes me as false.  I just gave an analysis on which the truth of the predication is preserved.  And of course there are others. 

 

Is Philosophy the Most Practical Major?

Here.  Via the indefatigable Dave Lull.  Here is my little tribute to Lull from earlier this year:

If you are a blogger, then perhaps you too have been the recipient of his terse emails informing one of this or that blogworthy tidbit. Who is this Dave Lull guy anyway? Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence provides an answer:

As Pascal said of God (no blasphemy intended) Dave is the circle whose center is everywhere in the blogosphere and whose circumference is nowhere. He is a blogless unmoved mover. He is the lubricant that greases the machinery of half the online universe worth reading. He is copy editor, auxiliary conscience and friend. He is, in short, the OWL – Omnipresent Wisconsin Librarian.

For other tributes to the ever-helpful Lull see here. Live long, Dave, and grease on!

Addendum (20 October, 5:20 AM):  I just corrected a typo.  I had 'indefagitable' instead of indefatigable.'  Perhaps I was subsconsciously thinking that that one who is indefatigable cannot be fagged out.  Hence: indeFAGitable.

PhilPapers and PhilJobs

PhilPapers is a nifty little utility.  They have recently added PhilJobs for those of you in quixotic quest of an academic appointment.  Here  is my PhilPapers page.  It captures only some of my publications even with 'online only' turned off.

Death Row and the Livin's Easy

In California, death row's the place to be -- for all the amen-i-ties. And little chance of being executed.  So if you're thinking of messin' with Texas, better head west.  Just don't stop in Arizona.  We carry open and concealed in these parts, and we don't need no stinkin' permit either way.

Will Science Put Religion out of Business? A Preliminary Tilt at Transhumanism

A correspondent writes:

Here's how I think science will eventually put religion out of business. Soon medical science is going to be able to offer serious life extension, not pie-in-the-sky soul survival or re-incarnation, but real life extension with possible rejuvenation. When science can offer and DELIVER what religion can only promise, religion is done.

1.  Religion is in the transcendence business.  The type of transcendence offered depends on the particular religion.  The highly sophisticated form of Christianity expounded by Thomas Aquinas offers the visio beata, the Beatific Vision.  In the BV -- you will forgive the abbreviation -- the soul does not lose its identity.  It maintains its identity, though in a transformed mode, while participating in the divine life.  Hinduism and Buddhism offer even more rarefied forms of transcendence in which the individual self is either absorbed into the eternal Atman, thereby losing its individual identity, or extinguished altogether  by entry into Nirvana.  And there are cruder forms of transcendence, in popular forms of Christianity, in Islam, and in other faiths, in which the individual continues to exist after death  but with little or no transformation to enjoy delights that are commensurable with the ones enjoyed here below.  The crudest form, no doubt, is the popular Islamic notion of paradise as an endless sporting with 72 black-eyed virgins.  So on the one end of the spectrum: transcendence as something difficult to distinguish from utter extinction; on the other end, immortality mit Haut und Haar (to borrow a delightful phrase from Schopenhauer), "with skin and hair" in a realm of sensuous delights but without the usual negatives such as heart burn and erectile dysfunction. 

I think we can safely say that a religion that offers no form of transcendence, whether Here or Hereafter, is no religion at all.  Religion, then, is in the business of offering transcendence.

2.  I agree with my correspondent that if science can provide what religion promises, then science will put religion out  of business.  But as my crude little sketch above shows, different religions promise different things.  Now the crudest form of transcendence is physical immortality, immortality "with skin and hair."  Is it reasonable to hope that future science will give rise to a technology that will make us, or some of us, physically immortal?  I don't think so.  That would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics according to which the entropy of an irreversible process in an isolated system increases leading in the case of the universe (which is both isolated and irreversible) to the heat death of the universe and the end of all life.  Granted, that is way off in the future.  But that is irrelevant if the claim is that physical immortality is possible by purely physical means.  And if that is not the claim, then the use of the phrase 'physical immortality' is out of place.  In a serious discussion like this word games are strictly verboten.

3.  Physical immortality is nomologically impossible, impossible given the laws of nature.  Of course, a certain amount of life extension has been achieved and it is reasonable to expect that more will be achieved. So suppose the average life expectancy of people like us gets cranked up to 130 years.  To underscore the obvious, to live to 130 is not to live forever. Suppose you have made it to 130 and are now on your death bed.  If you have any spiritual depth at all, your lament is likely to be similar to that of Jacob's: "The length of my pilgrimage  has been one hundred and thirty years; short and wretched has been my life, nor does it compare with the years my fathers lived during their pilgrimage." (Genesis 47:9) 

The important point here is that once a period of time is over, it makes no difference how long it has lasted.  It is over and done with and accessible only in the flickering and dim light of intermittent and fallible memory.  The past 'telescopes' and 'scrunches up,' the years melt into one another; the past cannot be relived.  What was distinctly lived is now all a blur.  And now death looms before you.  What does it matter that you lived 130 or 260 years? You are going to die all the same, and be forgotten, and all your works with you. After a while it will be as if you never existed.

The problem is not that our lives are short; the problem is that we are in time at all.  No matter how long a life extends it is still a life in time, a life in which the past is no longer, the future not yet, and  the present a passing away.  This problem, the problem of the transitoriness of life, cannot be solved by life extension even if, per impossibile, physical immortality were possible.  This problem of the transitoriness and vanity of life is one that religion addresses.

So my first conclusion is this.  Even if we take religion in its crudest form, as promising physical immortality, "with skin and hair," science cannot put such a crude religion out of business.  For, first of all, physical immortality is physically impossible, and second, mere life extension, even unto the age of a Methuselah, does not solve the problem of the transitoriness of life.

4.  But I have just begun to scratch the surface of the absurdities of transhumanism. No higher religion is about providing natural goodies  by supernatural means, goodies  that cannot be had by natural means.   Talk of pie-in-the-sky is but a cartoonish misrepresentation by those materialists who can only think in material terms and only believe in what they can hold in their hands. A religion such as Christianity promises a way out of the unsatisfactory predicament we find ourselves in in this life.  What makes our situation unsatisfactory is not merely our physical and mental weakness and the shortness of our lives.  It is primarily our moral defects that make our lives in this world miserable.  We lie and slander, steal and cheat, rape and murder.  We are ungrateful for what we have and filled with inordinate desire for what we don't have and wouldn't satisfy us even if we had it.  We are avaricious, gluttonous, proud, boastful and self-deceived.  It is not just that our wills are weak; our wills are perverse.  It is not just that are hearts are cold; our hearts are foul.  You say none of this applies to you?  Very well, you will end up the victim of those to whom these predicates do apply. And then your misery will be, not the misery of the evil-doer, but the misery of the victim and the slave.  You may find yourself forlorn and forsaken in a concentration camp. Suffering you can bear, but not meaningless suffering, not injustice and absurdity.

Whether or not the higher religions can deliver what they promise, what they promise first and foremost is deliverance from ignorance and delusion, salvation from meaninglessness and moral evil.  So my correspondent couldn't be more wrong.  No physical technology can do what religion tries to do.  Suppose a technology is developed that actually reverses the processes of aging and keeps us all alive indefinitely.  This is pure fantasy, of course, given the manifold contingencies of the world (nuclear and biological warfare, terrorism, natural disasters, etc.); but just suppose.  Our spiritual and moral predicament would remain as deeply fouled-up as it has always been and religion would remain in business.

5.  If, like my correspondent, you accept naturalism and scientism, then you ought to face what you take to be reality, namely, that we are all just clever animals slated to perish utterly in a few years, and not seek transcendence where it cannot be found.  Accept no substitutes!  Transhumanism is an ersatz religion.

It could be like this.  All religions are false; none can deliver what they promise.  Naturalism is true: reality is exhausted by the space-time system.  You are not unreasonable if you believe this.  But I say you are unreasonable if you think that technologies derived from the sciences of nature can deliver what religions have promised.

As long as there are human beings there will be religion.  The only way I can imagine religion withering away is if humanity allows itself to be gradually replaced by soulless robots.  But in that case it will not be that the promises of religion are fulfilled by science; it would be that no one would be around having religious needs.

 

All's Well That Ends Well

Yesterday's hike was almost over.  The light was failing as we gingerly negotiated the last steps of the treacherous downgrade of Heart Attack Hill.  Suddenly my hiking partner let out a yell and jumped back at the unmistakable sound of a diamond back rattlesnake (crotalus atrox).  It was a perfect hike: physically demanding in excellent company with a dash of danger at the end. 

There is Already Europe

Why should the USA become like Europe?  There is already Europe, and look at what it has become.

Typos!

Despite my 'due diligence,' typographical errors, though I strive to ferret them out, often go undetected on the day of publication.  All of yesterday's posts contain them.  So I will correct them now.  No, I don't use any SpellCheck utility.  That's like having a jackass of an editor looking over my shoulder, a miserable Besserwisser who thinks he knows what I am 'trying' to say and how I want to say it.  I'll say it my own way, damn you, and without your political correctness and school-marmish rules.

'Inappropriate'

Calling something 'inappropriate' is the ne plus ultra of liberal disapprobation.  They just can't bring themselves to use such words as 'wrong' or 'immoral' or evil.'

Unburdened by Yesterday's Baggage

In human relationships it is often the absence of a past that makes possible the having of a future.

Philosophy, Debate, and Dialog

The proprietor of Beyond Necessity tells us that he is thinking of attending the London debate between William Lane Craig and atheist philosopher Stephen Law on 17 October.  I hope he attends and files his report.

But can philosophy be debated?  In a loose sense, yes, but not in a strict sense.  I say that if debate is occurring in a certain place, then no philosophy is occurring in that place.  Philosophy is not a matter of debate.  That is a nonnegotiable point with me.  So I won't debate it, nor can I consistently with what I have just said.   It is after all a (meta)philosophical point: if philosophy cannot be debated then the same goes for this particular philosopheme.  But though I won't debate the point, I must in my capacity as philosopher give some reasons for my view.  My view is a logical consequence of my view of debate in conjunction with my view of philosophy.

Debate is a game in which the interlocutors attempt to defeat each other, typically before an audience whose approbation they strive to secure.  Hence the query 'Who won the debate?' which implies that the transaction is about attacking and defending, winning and losing.  I don't deny that debates can be worthwhile in politics and in other areas.  And even in philosophy they may have some use.  Someone who attends the Craig-Law debate will come away with some idea of what sorts of issues philosophers of religion discuss.  What he won't come away with is any understanding of the  essence of philosophy.

Why is philosophy -- the genuine article -- not something that can be debated? 

Philosophy is inquiry.  It is inquiry by those who don't know (and know that they don't know) with the sincere intention of increasing their insight and understanding.  Philosophy is motivated by the love of truth, not the love of verbal battle or the need to defeat an opponent or shore up and promote a preconceived opinion about which one has no real doubt.  When philosophy is done with others it takes the form of dialog, not debate. It is conversation between friends, not opponents, who are friends of the truth before they are friends of each other.  Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas.

There is nothing adversarial  in a genuine philosophical conversation.  The person I am addressing and responding to is not my adversary but a co-inquirer.  In the ideal case there is between us a bond of friendship, a philiatic bond.  But this philia subserves the eros of inquiry.  The philosopher's love of truth is erotic, the love of one who lacks for that which he lacks.  It is not the agapic love of one who knows and bestows his pearls of wisdom.

There is nothing like this in a debate.  The aim in a debate is not to work with the other towards a truth that neither claims to possess.  On the contrary, each already 'knows' what the truth is and is merely trying to attack the other's counter-position while defending his own.  Thus the whole transation is ideological the two sides of which are polemics and apologetics.  Debate is verbal warfare.  This is why debaters never show doubt or admit they are wrong.  To show doubt is to show weakness.  To prevail against an enemy you must not appear weak but intimidating.

There is no place for polemics in philosophy.  To the extent that polemics creeps in, philosophy becomes ideology.  This is not to say that there is no place for polemics or apologetics.  It is to say that that place is not philosophy.

Discussions with ideologues, whether religious or anti-religious, tend to be unpleasant and unproductive.  They see everything in terms of attack and defense.  If you merely question their views they are liable to become angry or flustered.  I once questioned a Buddhist on his 'no self' doctrine.  He became hostile.  His hostility at my questioning of one of the beliefs with which he identifies proved that his 'self' was alive and kicking despite doctrinal asseverations to the contrary.

Athens, Jerusalem, and Karl Jaspers

I stand astride both cities, with a foot in each.  But I favor one leg . . . .

Or to change the metaphor:  I do not look down upon the cities from above as from an Olympian standpoint but sight from the perspective of one of the cities, Athens, towards the other, Jerusalem.

So while I attempt a syn-optic view, my syn-optics cannot quite shake off the perspectivism of all finite optics.  My intellectual honesty demands recognition of this fact. 

In the last paragraph of the preface to the book that bears the slightly inaccurate English title Philosophical Faith and Revelation, Karl Jaspers explains why he entitled his book Der Philosophische Glaube Angesichts der Offenbarung and not Der Philosophische Glaube und Offenbarung.  Jaspers remarks that und (and) would be inappropriate because it would suggest that he was laying claim to a superior standpoint outside both philosophy and revelation, a standpoint that Jaspers does not claim to occupy.  He speaks from the side of philosophy while being touched, struck, affected (betroffen) by  the claims of revelation.  Thus his philosophical faith is in the face of (angesichts) revelation, elaborated in confrontation with it.  And so his philosophical optics are situated and perspectival, not synoptic or panoptic.

 

It seems we have only four options assuming that an Hegelian panoptical God's eye view is unavailable to us, a view which would somehow synthesize philosophy and religion:

1. Deny the tension by eliminating Athens in favor of Jersualem in the manner of an irrationalist like Lev Shestov.
2. Deny the tension by eliminating Jerusalem in favor Athens.
3. Live the tension as a philosopher who takes seriously the claims and demands of revelation.
4. Live the tension as a religionist who take seriously the claims and demands of philosophy.

(1) and (2) are nonstarters.  So we are left with the difficult choice between (3) and (4).

A Test for the Religious Sensibility

Some have the religious sensibility (inclination, predisposition, call it what you will) and some don't.  Here is one of several possible tests to see if you have it.  Get hold of Augustine's Confessions and Pascal's Pensées. If you read these books and they do not speak to you at all, if they do not move you, if they leave you cold, if they do not in any measure inspire you to reform your life, then it is a good bet that you don't have a religious bone in your body. It is not matter of intelligence but of sensibility.

"He didn't have a religious bone in his body." I recall that line from Stephanie Lewis' obituary for her husband David, one of the most brilliant American philosophers of the postwar period. He was highly intelligent and irreligious. Others are highly intelligent and religious. Among contemporary philosophers one could mention Alvin Plantinga, Peter van Inwagen, and Richard Swinburne.

The belief that being intelligent rules out being religious casts doubt on the intelligence of those who hold it.

Literary Kicks

Levi Asher kindly linked to my Flannery O'Connor on the Beats and I return the compliment by pointing you to his Dirty Hippie Lit which will inform you of some recent developments in the world of Beat arcana.

The Moral Dimensions of Illegal Immigration

Another outstanding piece by Victor Davis Hanson, one of the best things I have read on the topic. 

Bierce, Blondel, and Nirvana

This from The Devil's Dictionary:

     Nirvana, n. In the Buddhist religion, a state of pleasurable
     annihilation awarded to the wise, particularly to those wise enough
     to understand it. (Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Although intended sardonically, there is a serious point here to which Maurice Blondel alludes in the following quotation:

     . . . if there is a salvation it cannot be tied to the learned
     solution of an obscure problem. . . It can only be offered clearly
     to all. (Action, p. 14)

It might be fruitful for someone to develop a comparison of Buddhism and Christianity on this point. Buddhism is a religion of self-help: "Be ye lamps unto yourselves, etc." Trouble is, how many attain the Goal? And if only a few renunciates ever attain it, how does that help the rest of us poor schleps? By contrast, in Christianity, God, in the person of the Word (Logos) made flesh, does the work for us. Unable ultimately to help ourselves, we are helped by Another. And the help is available to all despite their skills in metaphysics and meditation. (By "do the work for us," I of course do not mean to suggest the sola fide extremism of some Protestants.)

Obviously, what I have just written is but a crude gesture in the direction of a whole constellation of problem-clusters. For example, a thorough comparison would have to go into the role of the Bodhisattva as a sort of helper of samsarically-bound 'schleps.'

George Will on the Liberal-Collectivist Agenda

Excerpt:

The collectivist agenda is antithetical to America’s premise, which is: Government — including such public goods as roads, schools and police — is instituted to facilitate individual striving, a.k.a. the pursuit of happiness. The fact that collective choices facilitate this striving does not compel the conclusion that the collectivity (Warren’s “the rest of us”) is entitled to take as much as it pleases of the results of the striving.

Warren’s statement is a footnote to modern liberalism’s more comprehensive disparagement of individualism and the reality of individual autonomy. A particular liberalism, partly incubated at Harvard, intimates the impossibility, for most people, of self-government — of the ability to govern one’s self. This liberalism postulates that, in the modern social context, only a special few people can literally make up their own minds.