Maverick Philosopher

Susan Sontag on the Art of the Aphorism

At any given time I am  reading twenty or so books.  One of them at the moment is Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2012.  In the midst of a lot of stuff, there are some gems.  Here is one:

Aphorism is aristocratic thinking: this is all the aristocrat is willing to tell you; he thinks you should get it fast, without spelling out all the details.  Aphoristic thinking constructs thinking as an obstacle race: the reader is expected to get it fast and move on.  An aphorism is not an argument; it is too well-bred for that. (512)

The last line is the best.  There is something plebeian about argument.  The thought is pure Nietzsche.  See "The Problem of Socrates" in Twilight of the Idols (tr. Kaufmann):

Section 4: Socrates' decadence is suggested not only by the admitted wantonness and anarchy of his instincts, but also by the hypertrophy of the logical faculty . . . .

Section 5: With Socrates, Greek taste changes in favor of dalectics. [. . .]  What must first be proved is worth little.  Wherever authority still forms part of good bearing, where one does not give reasons but commands, the dialectician is a kind of buffoon . . . . Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously . . . .

Whether or not argument is plebeian, it has no place in an aphorism.  As I put it:

An aphorism that states its reasons is no aphorism at all. But the reasons are there, though submerged, like the iceberg whose tip alone is visible. An aphorism, then, is the tip of an iceberg of thought.

and

Aphorisms and poems have this in common: neither can justify what they say while remaining what they are.

The Sontag-Nietzsche view seems to be that one needn't have reasons for what one aphoristically asserts;  mine is that one should have them but not state them, leastways, not in the aphorisms themselves.

Addendum, 4:30 PM:  That indefatigable argonaut of cyberspace, the ever-helpful Dave Lull, librarian non pareil, friend of bloggers and the just recipient of their heart-felt encomia, sent me a link to a post by James Geary entitled  Susan Sontag on Aphorisms. 

Geary rightly demolishes the silly conceit of another blogger who, commenting on Sontag, characterizes aphorisms as "the ultimate soundbitification of thinking."  That is truly awful and deserves to be buried in the deepest and most mephitic nether regions of the blogosphere.

But Geary says something that contradicts my claim above that argument has no place in an aphorism:

And aphorisms are arguments. That’s why they are so often written in declarative or imperative form. An aphorism is only one side of the argument, though.

It appears that Geary is confusing a statement with an argument.  Consider Nietzsche's "Some men are born posthumously."  This is a declarative sentence but certainly no argument.  An argument requires at least one premise and a conclusion.  To argue is to support a claim with reasons.   Nothing like this is going on in the one-sentence aphorism just quoted.

A Letter to Young Voters

I would quibble with parts of this piece  by Dennis Prager, but it is worth reading.   Excerpt:

Young people believe that when the government gives more money and benefits to more people it helps them. This is naïve. As you get older and wiser you realize that when people are given anything without having to earn it (unless they are physically or mentally utterly incapable of earning anything), they become ungrateful and lazy. They also become less happy. Every study shows that people who earn money are far happier than people who win many millions of dollars in a lottery. Happiness is earned, not given.

Here’s another: Young people are far more likely to believe that world peace is achieved when nations lay down their arms and talk through their differences. But this has never been the case. Of course, good nations stay peaceful when they talk to other good nations. Bad nations — that is, nations ruled by evil men — are never dissuaded from making war by talk. They are dissuaded only by good nations having more arms than they do. That is why the Marine Corps has done so much more for world peace than the Peace Corps.

If you want to vote Democrat, don’t do so because that is the party that cares more for the poor and the hungry. We older conservatives (and young ones, too) care just as much for the poor. But after living a life of seeing the naïve only make things worse for the poor, we are no longer seduced by caring rhetoric. We are seduced by policies based on the awesome American value of individual initiative combined with liberty to create and retain wealth. It’s now called “conservatism.”

And, finally, you should know this: The “idealists” that many of you find appealing are the ones leaving you with a national debt that will render it very difficult for you to attain the material quality of life that these people have had.

Will millenials be persuaded?  Not likely.

Still Irish After All These Years

I met a man on Sunday who, after introducing himself, remarked that he was Irish-Catholic.  "And I'm still Irish," he continued.

Whether Being is an Activity on the Thick Theory: Van Inwagen's Straw Man Argument

(Note to Alfredo and Peter L:  I need your help in understanding this particularly opaque portion of PvI's paper.)

Here are some notes on section 2 of Peter van Inwagen's "Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment" (pp. 476-479 of the Metametaphysics volume).

The first of the Quinean theses that van Inwagen maintains is that "Being is not an activity."  Here is the opening sentence of the section:

Many philosophers distinguish between a thing's being and its nature.  These philosophers seem to think of, e.g., Socrates' being as the most general activity Socrates engages in.

These two sentences have me flummoxed.  Let me explain why.

First, the two sentences taken together imply that philosophers who distinguish between a thing's being (existence) and its nature think of a thing's being as the most general activity it engages in.  That's just false.  There are philosophers who distinguish between being and nature (Aquinas for example) without holding that a thing's being is the most general activity it engages in.  Since I hesitate  to impute something plainly false to the dean of the thin theorists, I must question what he's driving at.

My suspicion is that van Inwagen (447) gets the notion that being is an activity entirely from J. L. Austin's jocose footnote to p. 68 of Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford, 1962):  "The word ['exist'] is a verb, but it does not describe something that things do all the time, like breathing, only quieter -- ticking over, as it were, in a metaphysical sort of way."  That's clever all right, but too frail a reed to support a global imputation to all thick theorists of the view that being is a peculiarly quiet activity.

Second, since van Inwagen goes on to deny that being is an activity, are we to conclude that he rejects the distinction between being and nature?  Is PvI denying that there is a distinction between Socrates' nature and his existence?  Is he suggesting the following argument:

a. If there is a distinction between a thing's being and its nature, then being is the most general activity the thing engages in.

b. Being is not the most general activity a thing engages in.

Therefore

c. There is no distinction between a thing's being and its nature.

I hope van Inwagen is not suggesting any such argument.  For that would not cohere with his commitment to a Quinean translation of 'Socrates exists' into 'It is not the case that everything is identical to Socrates.'  This implies that the existence of Socrates is his identity-to-something -- in which case there is a distinction between Socrates' nature and his existence.  After all, Socrates' nature and the property of being identical to something are distinct.

Third,  PvI speaks of "many philosophers' but gives no examples.  He needs a footnote right at the end of the second sentence above.  He needs to quote philosophers who explicitly say that being is a most general activity.  Farther down the page he mentions Heidegger and Sartre, but no page references are given and no quotations.  So my third point is that PvI seems to be committing a Straw Man fallacy.  Which philosopher ever said that being is the most general activity a thing engages in?

The view van Inwagen ascribes to thick theorists such as Heidegger and Sartre  involves the following propositions:

1. Being is an activity.

2. Being is the most general activity that a thing engages in, one that is implied by every other activity the thing in question engages in.  Thus if Socrates is running, then he is moving on his feet, and if so, then he is moving through space, etc.  until we come to some one terminal activity that is implied by all the other activities  the thing is engaged in at the time.

3.  This most general terminal activity -- being -- is the same activity at every time the thing in question is engaging in any activity.

4.  This most general activity is the same for each member of a given category, Thus it is the same for Socrates and Plato, but presumably not the same for a bridge or an ass.

5.  This most general terminal activity of being (existing) is different (or can be different) for different categories of entity. Thus the most general activity of a table is not the same as the most activity of a human being.  And so there are different kinds of being, different kinds of this most general terminal activity. 

Van Inwagen imputes the above five theses to Heidegger and Sartre and, it appears, to all thick theorists.

There are  several topics to discuss.  One, which I will leave until later, is whether Heidegger and Sartre are committed to the five theses listed.  A second is whether thick theorists in general are committed to them.

Well, I'm a thick theorist and I don't see that I am committed to them.  As a thick theorist I am committed to the intelligibility of the idea that there are modes of existence (ways or modes of being).  The thin theory, however, entails the unintelligibility of this idea.  For van Inwagen, the idea springs from a clear-cut mistake, namely, the mistake of transforming a difference in nature into a difference in mode of existence.  For van Inwagen, the vast difference between a human being and a rock is simply a vast difference in their natures, and does not imply any difference in the mode of being of that which has these natures.  The idea is not that a rock and a human being have the same mode of being, but that one cannot intelligibly speak of one or more modes of being at all.  The rock exists, the man exists, and to say that is just to say that each is identical to something or other.

I will now given an example which to my mind shows that it is intelligible that there be modes of existence.  We will have to see if I am committing the mistake of transforming a difference in nature into a difference in mode of existence.

Pains and Brains

Phenomenal pains exist and brain states exist.  More generally, there are non-intentional mental states and there are physical states.  But felt pains and felt pleasures and such have a “first-person ontology” as John Searle puts it.  The being of a pain is (identically) its being perceived.  But nothing physical is such that its being is (identically) its being perceived.  This certainly looks like a difference in mode of existence.  Pains exist in a first-person way while brains exist in a third-person way.  

What can the thin theorist  say in rebuttal?  The thins think that we thick-heads illicitly transfer what belongs to the nature of an item to its existence.  So a thin theorist must say that it belongs to the nature of a particular pain that it belong to some particular person.  But this cannot be right.  It cannot belong to the nature of this pain I am now enduring that it be felt by me.  For natures are multiply realizable.  We can of course say that it is the nature of pains in general to be perceived by someone or other. If a pain exists, however, it is a particular pain and it cannot be part of the nature of that particular pain to be perceived by some particular person sich as me.  The dependence of a particular pain on its being perceived is therefore due to its dependent mode of existence and not due to its nature.

Note also that nothing I said implies that the being of the particular pain I am in is a most general activity the pain is engaging in.  My pain is not an agent engaged in an exceedingly quiet activity; it is not an agent at all but a subjective state.

We must also note that the being of my felt pain and the being of your felt pain are numerically different contra van Inwagen's #4 above.

As far as I can see, little or nothing van Inwagen says in  section 2 of his paper  touches the thick theory.  What he has given us is a straw man argument.

California: Road Warrior is Here

Another great column by Victor Davis Hanson.

Meanwhile San Berdoo bites the dust.  Excerpt:

Intellectually bankrupt, morally bankrupt — the city is under criminal investigation for sundry financial shenanigans — San Bernardino is above all old-fashioned bankrupt bankrupt, a pitiful penniless pauper that cannot even afford a cup of coffee: Seriously — the coffee guy wants cash up front now and has stopped serving the municipal office building until the city makes good on its latte liabilities. This is a paddle-free scato-riparian fiscal expedition of the first order.

In plain English: up shit 'crick' (creek) without a paddle.

Ross Douthat on the Free Exercise of Religion

An excellent column with discussion of the Chick-Fil-A 'flap.'

Theodor Haecker

I've been re-reading Haecker's penetrating and prescient  Journal in the Night.  Here is a recent article on the man and his work.  My Haecker posts are here.

In the Face of Totalitarians

In the face of totalitarians one cannot retreat into one's private life for they, being totalitarians, won't allow any private life.  So the conservative is forced willy-nilly to become an activist against his natural tendency.  He must draw a line in the sand and say "This far but no farther."

A minor example.  My friends Peter and Mike who teach at community colleges in Maricopa County, Arizona, were on the rant once again yesterday morning over the smoking ban that went into effect on 1 July.  This draconian ruling forbids smoking anywhere on campus, including parking lots and closed cars in such lots.  Bear in mind that reasonable smoking restrictions were already in effect and that my friends, only one of whom smokes, had no objection to them.

Now what is behind the new ruling?  Nothing but lust for power and a desire on the part of its promoters to outdo themselves in pursuit of PC thereby earning 'brownie-points' with the higher-ups.  (I intend 'brownie-points' as a double-entendre with an allusion to brown-nosing.)

And so the breakfast conversation turned to means of combating the insanity: massive disobedience, smoke-ins, and libertarian 'flash mobs':  the tweets go out, the students and faculty assemble quickly to blow some smoke and then just as quickly disperse.  Imagine several such mobs assembling and dispersing at different open-air campus locations on a single day.

The people charged with enforcement would be overwhelmed, the ruling would be flouted into risibility, and then ignored.

Mockery and derision are powerful weapons and perfectly legitimate when one is dealing with willfully stupid and morally stunted Pee-Cee power-heads.

Companion post:  The Conservative Disadvantage

Epicurus in One Sentence and the Comforts of Materialism

When we are, death is not; when death is, we are not.

Some say people hold to religion because of its comforts.  A superficial way of thinking  given religion's moral demands and  the fears it inspires.  It was precisely such fears for which Epicurean materialism  was prescribed as anodyne.

Materialism has its comforts too.  Will you then say that people believe it because it is comforting?

Materialism has its comforts but it also renders human life meaningless. That goes on the debit side of the balance sheet.

A Reason Why Germany Had to Lose the War

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night, tr. A. Dru, Pantheon, 1950, p. 172, entry #579 of 10 September 1941:

A year ago today the official propagandist, Fritsche, talking on the wireless, said of the bombing of London: 'Once upon a time fire rained down upon Sodom and Gomorrha, and there only remained seventy-seven just men; it is very doubtful whether there are seventy-seven just people in London today.'  I already know many reasons why Germany will not win the war.  Fritsche's speech is one.

See the eponymous category for more from his pen.

Concluding punctilious postscript:  I added a hyperlink to (Dru's translation of) Haecker's text.  That bit of contextualization enriches and thus modifies the sense of his text.  Worth noting if not worth worrying about.

All Roads Lead to Rome

Under protracted consideration every philosophical question inevitably raises questions about the nature, methods, and goals of philosophy.  All philosophical  roads lead to metaphilosophical Rome. Not that we will find in Rome what we could not find on the way there.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia

Chips, Rubber Biscuit

Ray Barretto, El Watusi

Rivingtons, Papa Oom Mow Mow

Shirley Ellis, The Name Game

Lee Dorsey, Ya Ya 

Is Meinong's Theory of Objects "Obviously Self-Contradictory?" Van Inwagen Says 'Yes'

A good post from November aught-nine.  Highly relevant to current discussions.

Photo ID: Eric Holder's Assault on Common Sense

I was shocked (shocked!) to hear over breakfast a while back that my friend Peter L. will vote for neither Obama nor Romney.  All my posts about how politics is a practical business, how it's always about the lesser of evils,and about how foolish it is to let the best become the enemy of the good have fallen on deaf ears.  But I won't give up on old Peter: he's worth saving from the remnant of his liberal folly.

When you vote for a president, you are not voting for just that one person.  You are voting for his entourage as well.  And for Obama that entourage is a sorry  lot including as it does Eric Holder who became Attorney General.  Remember the outrageous suit his Justice Department brought against Arizona re: S. B. 1070? (See my Arizona category for 1070 posts.)  Now the issues raised by S. B. 1070 are complex.  But the issue raised by photo ID laws is not.  It's a very simple issue and there ought not be any dispute about it whatsoever.  And yet our esteemed Atty Gen'l is going after states with photo ID laws making irresponsible accusations of 'disenfranchisement' and comparing the requirements to poll taxes.

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

Suppose you don't have a driver's license.  How hard is it to get a photo ID?  Not very hard.  In Arizona it costs only $12 and is available at any DMV office.  And it's good for 12 years.  That comes to a dollar a year.  That's a hell of a deal, especially when you consider all the other things you can do with that nifty photo ID such as open a bank account, cash checks, use credit cards, buy alcohol and tobacco products, apply for store credit, secure a library card, etc.  You can now start doing all the things that normal citizens do.  Ain't that grand? You can stop being a nonentity.  Remember what your Uncle Quine taught you, "No entity without identity." If you tell me you don't do any of those things, and don't have any desire to do them, then why are you so interested in voting?  You don't have a bank account, or cash checks, etc., but you have a burning desire to vote?

If you are 65 or older or a recipient of Social Security disability benefits you can get the ID for free.   So what's your excuse for not securing a photo ID?  If you  are that lazy, how informed will you be about the issues on which you have such a burning desire to vote?

Liberals feel that the photo ID requirement will 'disenfranchise' many blacks and other minorities.  This shows that we conservatives have a higher view of you minorities than do your 'keepers,' the Dems. 

Some people want to play the 'numbers game.' They claim that there have only been a few cases of voter fraud.  If you think that, then I refer you to the work of John Fund and Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia.  And please note that the number of convictions in courts of law for voter fraud is bound to be much much lower than the actual cases of voter fraud.  And if there are. contrary to fact, very few cases of voter fraud, then, by the same token, there are very few people who lack photo ID. 

But there is no need to play the numbers game at all.  It's matter of principle. Will we have a election system that is credible and worthy of respect or not? 

Those who oppose photo ID have no good reasons, but they have plenty of motives, and I fear that they are of the unsavory kind. 

An Open Question

G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica was very influential.  But is it good?

Existence and an 'Open Question' Consideration

G. E. Moore famously responded to the hedonist's claim that the only goods are pleasures by asking, in effect: But is pleasure good?  The point, I take it, is that the sense of 'good' allows us reasonably to resist the identification of goodness and pleasure.  For it remains an open question whether pleasure really is good.  To appreciate the contrast between open and closed questions, consider Tom the bachelor.  Given that Tom is  a bachelor, it is not an open question whether Tom is an unmarried adult male.  This is because the sense of 'bachelor' does not allow us reasonably to resist the identification of bachelors with adult unmarried males.    It is built into the very sense of 'bachelor' that a bachelor is an adult unmarried male.  But it is not built into the very sense of 'good' that the good is pleasure.

It occurred to me while cavorting in the swimming pool the other  morning that a similar Open Question gambit can be deployed against the thin theorist.

Suppose a thin theorist maintains  the following.  To say that Quine exists is to say that Quine is identical to something.  No doubt, but does the something exist?  The question remains open.  Just as 'good' does not mean 'pleasurable,' 'something' does not mean 'something that exists.'  Otherwise,  'Something that does not exist'  would be a contradiction in terms.  But it is not.  Consider

1. A matter transmitter is something that does not exist.

It follows from (1) that

2. Something does not exist.

I am not claiming that (2) is true.  I hold that everything exists!  My claim is that (2) is neither a formal-logical contradiction, nor is it semantically contradictory, i.e., contradictory in virtue of the senses of the constituent terms.  Here is an example of a formal-logical contradiction:

3. Something  that does not exist exists.

Here is an example of a sentence that, while not self-contradictory by the lights of formal logic, is semantically contradictory:

4. There are bachelors that are not unmarried adult males.

'Some cat is fat' and 'A fat cat exists' are logically equivalent.  But do they have exactly the same meaning (sense)?  This is an open question.  And precisely because it is an open question, the two sentencces do not have the same meaning, pace London Ed, van Inwagen and the rest of the thin boys.  For there is nothing in the very sense of 'Some cat is fat' to require that a fact cat exist.  Compare 'Some unicorn is angry.'  Does that require by its very sense that an angry unicorn exists?

Am I getting close to the point where I can justifiably diagnose van Inwagen and the boys with that dreaded cognitive aberration, existence-blindness? Or is it rather the case that I suffer from double-vision? 

Mayor Bloombrain

Lawrence Auster on the good mayor's latest outburst.  Auster is much more of paleocon than I am.  I'm still a bit of a liberal in a good sense of the term.  Or is there no good sense of the term?  I hope to post later on Auster's hostility to such conservatives as Dennis Prager.

Death, Where is Thy Sting?

We are concerned that life is short and that its end approaches.  But there is consolation in the contrary thought that we are getting through this life, that a time will come when we can lay down its burdens of pain, disappointment, ignorance, and moral failure.  The end is the end of the goods of this life but also the end of its evils.  And this whether the end is final or a new beginning.

So death, where is thy sting?  If this world is but a shadow-play of phenomena, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing; if all the world's a stage in the theater of the absurd, then to be quit of it is no great loss.  But if it  is prelude, then new adventures await and you can look forward to them. To live well one must hope, both in this life and beyond it.

But suppose you believe that this world is ultimately real, and that life in it is unqualifiedly good.  Then you have a problem.  For then death is a great calamity: it deprives you irrevocably of the ultimate in reality and value.

The solution to the problem is to abandon the twin presupposition that this world is the ne plus ultra of being and value and that life in it is unqualifiedly good.  There are fairly weighty reasons for both abandonments.

What I don't understand is the attitude of Philip Larkin on Death.  He seems in the grip of the twin presupposition.

Friday Cat Blogging: Montaigne and His Cat

Government Did Not Build Your Business

A very good Reason magazine article.  The author, Ronald Bailey, explains a distinction between tangible and intangible wealth.  Human, social, and institutional capital are forms of intangible wealth. 

And while you are at Reason.com, read Sheldon Richman's article on the right to self-defense.  It makes a number of obvious points that liberals seem incapable of understanding.  Part of the problem, of course, is that liberals live in enclaves in which the truths Richman enunciates are simply not heard.  Liberals hang too much with their own ilk.  They need to get out more and 'expand their horizons.'

Conservatives are not 'sheltered' in the same way.  There is no way a conservative or a libertarian can avoid liberals.  Liberals dominate the mainstream media, the universities, the courts, the other branches of government,  the entertainment industry, and many mainstream churches.  Conservatives and libertarians cannot help but confront liberal ideas.

But what happens when conservative and libertarian ideas are presented to the public via an outlet such as Fox News Network? Liberals  scream their pointy heads off in protest.  That is clear proof that they are not 'liberal' in any classical  sense.  They would be better described as left-wing fascists.

How can anybody object to a John Stossel simply presenting his ideas and his arguments?  Most of what he says makes good sense.  I disagree with his open borders policy and his ideas about drug legalization.  He and libertarians generally are dead wrong on those two points.  But I don't want to shut him down -- or up.  I want to hear his point of view.

One night Stossel hosted a discussion between Pat Buchanan and Reason magazine's Nick Gillespie. Paleo-conservatism met  libertarianism. Great discussion.  Are you going to find something like that on MSNBC?  They dumped Buchanan.  Leftist scumbaggery!

A Second Van Inwagen Argument for the Univocity of 'Exists'

I discussed one of the Peter van Inwagen's arguments here and found it wanting.  He has a second argument:  ". . . 'exists' is univocal owing to the interdefinability of 'there exists'  and the obviously univocal 'all.'  But this is a powerful argument, for, surely, 'all' means the same in 'All natural numbers have a successor' and 'All Greeks are mortal'?" (484).  The argument could be put as follows:

'Every' is univocal.

'Exist(s)' and 'every' are interdefinable:  'Fs exist' is equivalent to 'It is not the case that everything is not an F.'

Therefore

'Exist(s)' is univocal.

I accept this crisp little argument -- but with a restriction: 'exist(s)' is univocal across all affirmative and negative general existential sentences.  But what about a singular existential such as 'Peter exists'?  Does 'exist' in the latter have the same sense that it has in 'Rabbits exist'?  I say it doesn't:  'exist(s)' is not univocal across all existence sentences, general and singular.

To warm up, what are we saying when we say that rabbits exist? On Frege's approach, we are saying that the concept rabbit is instantiated.  So 'exist(s)' in general existentials means 'is instantiated.'  But 'Peter exists' does not say that Peter is instantiated.  So is it not spectacularly obvious that 'exist(s)' is not univocal across singular and general existentials? 

But we needn't follow Frege is holding that 'exist(s)' is a second-level predicate.  And van Inwagen does not follow him in this.  Perhaps it would not be unfair to characterize van Inwagen as a half-way Fregean: he likes the notion that "existence is allied to number" but he does not take that characteristic Fregean thesis to entail that 'exist(s)' is a second-level predicate, i.e., a predicate of concepts, not objects.  Van Inwagen could and would say something along these lines:

1. Rabbits exist:  It is not the case that everything is not a rabbit.  ~(x)~Rx.

2. Peter exists:  It is not the case that everything is not identical to Peter.  ~(x)~(x = Peter)

I will now try to show that, even on van Inwagen's preferred translations, there is still equivocity as between general and singular existentials. (1) and (2) are equivalent to

1*. Rabbits exist: Something is a rabbit. (Ex)Rx.

and

2*. Peter exists:  Something is (identically) Peter. (Ex)(x = Peter).

Now it seems to me that we are still stuck with equivocation.  The predicate in (1*) is 'something is (predicatively) ___.'   The predicate in (2*) is 'something is (identically) ___.'  Now the 'is' of predication is not the 'is' of identity.  So the equivocation on 'exist(s)' remains in the form of an equivocation on 'is' as between the 'is' of predication and the 'is' of identity.

The equivocation ought to be obvious from the notation alone.  The immediate juxtaposition of 'R' and 'x' in '(Ex)Rx' signifies that x is (predicatively) R.  But in '(Ex)(x = Peter)' we find no such juxtaposition but a new sign, '=.'  

My thesis, then, is that while 'exist(s)' is univocal across all general existentials, it is not univocal across all existentials.  This reflects that fact that -- to switch over to material mode -- existence cannot be reduced to or eliminated in favor of any thin logical notion or combination of such notions.

Gun Laws and the Supposed 'Politicization' of the Aurora Massacre

Last year, when Republicans were being accused of 'politicizing' the national debt crisis I made the point that one cannot politicize that which is inherently political:

The Republicans were accused of 'politicizing' the debt crisis.  But how can you politicize what is  inherently political?  The debt in question is the debt of the federal government.  Since a government is a political entity, questions concerning federal debts are political questions.  As inherently political, such questions cannot be politicized.

If to hypostatize is to illicitly treat as a substance that which is not a substance, to politicize is to illictly treat as political what is not political.  Since governmental debt questions are 'already' political, they cannot be politicized.

Then I was criticizing Democrats and liberals.  But now I find that some Republicans and conservatives are making the same mistake.  They are accusing liberals of politicizing the Aurora massacre.  Example here.

But as I said, you cannot politicize what is already political.  Now guns are not political entities, but gun laws are, whether federal, state, or local.  Whether there should be gun laws at all, and what their content should be are political questions.

Now we all agree that we have to have laws regulating the manufacture, sale,  transporting, and use of firearms.  So we all agree that we have to have 'gun control.'  Gun control is not what I display or fail to display at the shooting range, but is a phrase that refers to gun control laws.  Since we all want gun control, we all want (enforceable and enforced)  gun control laws, even the dreaded NRA.

It is a liberal lie to say that conservatives are against gun control.  It is similar to the liberal lie that conservatives are anti-government.  If I am for limited government, then I am for government, whence it follows that I am not against government.    (Anarchists are anti-government, but no conservative, and few libertarians, are against government.)  Likewise, if I am for laws that prevent the sale of guns to felons, and for other such laws, then I am not against gun control. 

By the way, the preternaturally obtuse Bill Moyers got a nice and well-deserved slap-down from Bill O'Reilly the other night for his idiotic remarks about the NRA.  Bill Moyers is a one-man argument for the federal defunding of PBS and its affiliates such as NPR. (See National Public Radio Needs Your Support!)  Listen to the whole of O'Reilly's speech.  He is a moderate on gun control, too moderate perhaps.  He is moderate on many issues.   Is that why the Left can't stand him?

But I digress.  We  all agree that we need enforceable and enforced gun control laws.  But we don't all agree about the content of these laws.  Now that is a political question the answering of which presupposes a political theory, a theory of man in his relation to the state. The gun debate is political from the ground up.  It is silly so speak of 'politicizing' it.

Here is what I say.  I have a right to life, a right to defend my life, and a right to appropriate means of self-defense.  No government has the right to interfere with these rights.  This is nonnegotiable.  If you disagree, I have to put you down as morally and intellecually obtuse, as beyond the pale of rational debate.  I will do my best to make sure that you and your ilk are defeated politically.

What's an appropriate means of self-defense?  The tactical shotgun is the most effective  tool of home defense.  Holmes, the Aurora shooter, had one of those.  It looked like a Remington 1070.  He misused it for evil ends.  That is chargeable to his moral and legal account, not to the gun's.  Guns lack such 'accounts.'  No gun is a free agent.  No gun ever lilled anybody.  Killing is an action (action-type); actions are actions of agents.  Pay attention, liberals.

There will always be massacres and murders regardless of the stringency of gun laws.  Norway.

Can anything be done?  Yes.  Enforce existing gun laws.  Execute miscreants such as Holmes, after a fair trial, in a speedy manner.  There could a be a judicial fast-track to expedite the execution of such people within a year, at most.  Put limits on the quantities and types of vile and soul-destroying rubbish that HollyWeird liberals dish out.  Stop attacking religion, that most excellent vehicle for the delivery of moral teachings.  If Holmes had internalized the Ten Commandments as a boy, could he have done what he did?  Do you think he would have been less likely to do what he did?

But liberals are morally and intellectually obtuse.  So they will fight against all reasonable proposals.  A liberal would far rather violate the rights of decent citizens than mete out justice to vicious criminals. 

Socrates, Plato, and an Ass

Schopenhauer somewhere jokes that the medievals employed only three examples: Socrates, Plato, and an ass [Esel, nicht Arsch]. 

The Noble and the Base

If a noble man becomes aware of my moral defects, he is saddened, disappointed, disillusioned perhaps.  But the base man reacts differently: he is gleeful, pleased, reassured. "So he isn't better than me after all! Good!"

The noble seek those who are above them so that they can become like them.  The base deny that anyone could be above them.

Sexual Indulgence

"Sexual indulgence de-realizes the Transcendent for us."  My first thought upon awakening from a strange sexual dream.  "First thought, best thought," Kerouac used to say.

Nausea at Existence: A Continental Thick Theory

A reader wants me to comment on the analytic-Continental split.  Perhaps I will do so in general terms later, but in this post I will consider one particular aspect of the divide that shows up in different approaches to existence.  Roughly, Continental philosophers espouse the thick theory, while analytic philosophers advocate the thin theory.  Of course there are exceptions to this rule: Your humble correspondent is an analytic thick theorist and so is Barry Miller.  Whether there are any Continental thin theorists I don't know.

Why should analytic philosophers prefer the thin theory?  Part of the reason, some will say, is that analysts tend to be superficial people: they are logically very sharp but woefully lacking in spiritual depth.   They are superficial specimens of what Heidegger calls das Man, the 'they': lacking authenticity, they float along on the superficies of things.  Bereft of  a depth-dimension in themselves, they are blind to the world's depth-dimension.  Blind to the world's depth-dimension, they are blind to existence.  A Heideggerian might say that they are not so much blind as forgetful: they have succumbed to die Vergessenheit des Seins.  The analysts, of course, will not  admit to any such deficiencies of sight or memory.  They will turn the tables and accuse Continentals such as Heidegger and Sartre of being muddle-headed mystics and obscurantists who commit school-boy blunders in logic.  (Carnap's famous/notorious attack on Heidegger is a text-book case.)

So we have a nice little fight going, complete with name-calling.  Perhaps a little exegesis of a passage from Sartre will help clarify the issue.  I have no illusions about converting any thin theorist.  I aim at clarity, not agreement.  I will be happy if I can achieve  an exact understanding of what we are disagreeing about and why we are disagreeing.  When that goal is attained we can cheerfully agree to disagree.

So let's consider the famous 'chestnut tree' passage in Jean-Paul Sartre's novel, Nausea.  The novel's protagonist, Roquentin, is in a park when he has a bout of temporary aphasia while contemplating the roots of a chestnut true. Words and their meanings vanish. He finds himself confronting a black knotty mass that frightens him. Then he has a vision:

It left me breathless. Never, until these last days, had I understood the meaning of 'existence.' I was like all the others, like the ones walking along the seashore, all dressed in their spring finery. I said, like them, 'The ocean is green; that white speck up there is a seagull,' but I didn't feel that it existed or that the seagull was an 'existing seagull'; usually existence hides itself. It is there, around us, in us, it is us, you can't say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it. When I believed I was thinking about it, I must
[have] believe[d] that I was thinking nothing, my head was empty, or there was just one word in my head, the word 'to be.' Or else I was thinking . . . how can I explain it? I was thinking of belonging, I was telling myself that the sea belonged to the class of green objects, or that that green was a part of the quality of the sea. Even when I looked at things I was miles from dreaming that they existed; they looked like scenery to me. I picked them up in my hands, they served me as tools, I foresaw their resistance. But that all happened on the surface.

If anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered, in good faith, that it was nothing, simply an empty form that was added to external things without changing anything in their nature. And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence
had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder — naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness. (p. 127 tr. Lloyd Alexander, ellipsis in original.)

This marvellous passage records Roquentin's intuition (direct nonsensory perception) of Being or existence. (It would be interesting to compare in a subsequent post Jacques Maritain's Thomist intuition of Being with Sartre's existentialist intuition of Being.) Viewed through the lenses of logic, 'The green sea exists' is equivalent to 'The sea is green' and 'The sea belongs to the class of green objects.' For the (standard)  logician, then, 'exists' and cognates is dispensable and the concept of existence is fully expressible in terms of standard logical machinery.  Anything we say using 'exists(s)' we can also say without using 'exist(s).  To give another example, 'Dragons do not exist' is logically equivalent to 'Everything is not a dragon.'  If we want, we can avoid the word 'exist(s)' and substitute for it some logical machinery: the universal quantifier and the tilde (the sign for negation) as in our last example.

But why would a man like Peter van Inwagen -- the head honcho of the thin theorists -- want to avoid 'exist(s)'?  Because he wants to show that existence is a thin notion: there is nothing more to it than can be captured using the thin notions of logic: quantification, negation, copulation, and identity.  He wants to show that there is no reason to think that there is any metaphysical depth lurking behind 'exist(s)' and cognates, that there is no room for a metaphysics of existence as opposed to a logic of 'exist(s)'; nor room for any such project as Heidegger's fundamental ontology (Being and Time) or Sartre's phenomenological ontology (Being and Nothingness).

And why does the thin theorist go to all this deflationary trouble?  Because he lacks this sense or intuition of existence that philosophers as diverse as Wittgenstein, Maritain, and Sartre share, a sense or intution he feels must be bogus and must rest on some mistake.  He fancies himself the clear-headed foe of obfuscation and he sees nothing but obfuscation in talk of Being and existence.

But as I have been arguing ad nauseam (so to speak) over many a blog post, published article and book, sentences like 'The sea is green' presuppose for their truth that the sea is an existing sea. Compare the reference above to an existing seagull. And, as Sartre has Roquentin says, "usually existence hides itself." It hides itself from all of us most of the time when we are immersed in what Heidegger calls average everydayness (alltaegliche Durchschnittlichkeit, vide Sein und Zeit), and existence hides itself from the logician qua logician all the time. For all of us most of the time, and for logicians all of the time, existence is "nothing, simply an empty form."

In fact, that is a good statement of the thin theory:  existence is nothing at all, apart from an empty logical form.  Sea, seagull, bench, tree, root  -- but no existence of the sea, of the seagull, of the bench, etc.  Sea, seagull, bench, tree, root, and some logical concepts.  That's it.

"Usually existence hides itself."  This invites mockery from the thin theorists.  What?  Existence plays hide-and-seek with us?!  [Loud guffaws from the analytic shallow-pates.]  To the existence-blind it must appear a dark and indeed incomprehensible saying.  But  of course to the blind that which is luminous must appear dark.  Perhaps we can recast Sartre's loose and literary formulation in aseptic terms by saying that existence is a hidden and taken-for-granted presupposition of our discourse that for the most part remains hidden and taken-for-granted. Let me explain.

'The sea is green' and 'The green sea exists' are logically equivalent.  But this equivalence rests on a tacit presupposition, namely, that the sentences are to be evaluated relative to a domain of existing items.  The reason we can make the deflationary move of replacing the latter sentence with the former is because existence is already present, though hidden,  in 'The sea is green.'   'The sea is green' can be parsed as follows: The sea is (exists) & the sea (is) green, where the parentheses around 'is' indicate that it functions as a pure copula, a pure predicative link and nothing more.  The parsing makes it clear that the 'is' in 'The sea is green' exercises a dual function: it is not merely an 'is' of predication: it is also an 'is' of existence.  Therefore, translation of 'The green sea exist' as 'The sea is green' does not eliminate existence as the thin theorist falsely assumes.

In material mode, the point is that nothing can have a property unless it exists.   The sea cannot be green or slimy or stinky unless it exists.  This existence of the sea, seagull, etc., however, is a presupposition that remains hidden as long as we comport ourselves in Heidegger's "average everydayness" manipulating things for our purposes but not wondering at their very existence.  We have to shift out of our ordinary everyday attitude in order to be struck by the sheer existence of things.  Perhaps the thin theorist is incapable of making that shift.  But he really doesn't need to if he has followed my reasoning.

What the thin theorist  does is to substitute logical Being for real Being. Note that I am not endorsing Sartre's theory of real Being: that it is an absurd excrescence, de trop (superfluous), unintelligible, etc. What I am endorsing is his insight that real Being is extralogical, that it is not a thin notion exhausted by the machinery of logic.  Thus I am endorsing what is common to Sartre, Maritain, Wittgenstein, and others, namely, that existence is real not merely logical.

But what if you are one of those sober types who has never experienced anything like Heideggerian Angst or Sartrean nausea or Wittgenstein's wonder at the existence of the world? Well, I think you could still be brought by purely discursive methods to understand how existence cannot reduce to a purely logical notion. We shall see.  

Who Built the Internet? Obama's Straw Man Fallacy

This just over the transom:

With respect to your post about how "you didn't build this blog" -- really bad example. You built the blog, but Big Government built the internet that allows you to transmit it it to potentially billions of people. So, it's exactly an illustration of what Obama was talking about -- you and businesses and everyone are dependent on public infrastructure for rich and fruitful lives.

It's an excellent example.  You must be a liberal.  Here is what Obama said:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.

Let's go through this sentence by sentence.

1. It is true that we have all been helped by others and that no one's success is wholly a matter of his own effort.  "No man is an island."  No one pulls himself  up by his own bootstraps.    But of course no conservative denies this.  Not even libertarians deny it.  What Obama is doing is setting up a straw man that he can easily knock down.  He imputes a ridiculous view to the conservative/libertarian and then makes the obvious point that the ridiculous view is ridiculous.

2. Not everyone is lucky enough to have great teachers, but most of us have had some good teachers along the way. Sure.  But there is no necessary connection to Big Government.  I went to private schools: elementary, high school, college, and graduate school.  And my teaching jobs were all at private schools.  Obama falsely assumes that only government can provide education.  That is not only a false assumption but a mendacious one as well.  Obama is certainly aware that there are alternatives to public education such as home-schooling and private schools.  There is also autodidacticism: Eric Hoffer, the 'longshoreman philosopher,' didn't even go to elementary school.  A relative taught him to read when he was very young but beyond that he is totally self-taught. Of course, he is a rare exception.

There is also the question whether the federal government has any legitimate role to play in education even if one  grants (as I do) that state and local governments have a role to play.  It is simply nonsense, though in keeping with his Big Government agenda, for Obama to suggest that we need the federal government to provide education.  It is also important to  point out that the federal Department of Education, first set up in the '60s, has presided over a dramatic decline in the quality of education in the U. S.  But that is a huge separate topic.

3. With respect to roads and bridges and infrastructure generally, it is ridiculous to suggest that these products of collective effort are all due to the federal government or even to state and local government.  Obama is confusing the products of collective effort wth the products of government effort.  It is a silly non sequitur to think that because I cannot do something by myself that I need government to help me do it.    One can work with others without the intrusion of government.  He is also confusing infrastructure with public infrastructure.  The first is a genus, the second a species thereof. 

4. How did the Internet begin?  This from a libertarian site:  "The internet indeed began as a typical government program, the ARPANET, designed to share mainframe computing power and to establish a secure military communications network."  So the role of the federal government in the genesis of the Internet cannot be denied.

But what do we mean by 'Internet'?  Those huge interconnected mainframes?  That is the main chunk of Internet infrastructure.  But don't forget the peripherals.  For the blogger to use that infrastructure he first of all needs a personal computer (PC).  Did Big Government provides us with PCs?  No.  It was guys like Jobs and Wozniak tinkering in the garage.  It was private companies like IBM.  And let's not forget that it was in the USA and not in Red China or the Soviet Union or North Korea that PCs were developed.  Would Jobs and Wozniak and Gates have been motivated to do their hard creative work in a state without a free economy?  Did any commie state provide its citizens with PCs?  No, but it did provide them with crappy cars like the Trabant and the Yugo.  Germans are great engineers.  But Communism so hobbled East Germany that the Trabant was the result.

How do you hook up the PC to the Internet?  Via the phone line.  (Telephony, by the way, was not developed by the government.  Remember Alexander Graham Bell and his associates?)  To convert digital information into analog information  transmissible via phone lines and back again you need a modulator-demodulator, a modem.  Who gave us the modem?  Government functionaries?  Al Gore?  Was Obama the mama of the modem?  Nope.  Dennis C. Hayes invented the PC modem in 1977.  In the private sector.

Back in the day we operated from the  C prompt using DOS commands.  That was before the GUI: graphical user interface.  Who invented that?  Credit goes to a number of people working for Xerox, Apple, and Microsoft.  All in the private sector.

And then there is Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML).  Who invented that and with it the World Wide Web (WWW)?  Tim Berners-Lee in the private sector.    The WWW is not the same as the Internet.  The WWW is a huge collection of interconnected hypertext documents accessible via the Internet.   The government did not give us the WWW.

Returning now to the blog that I built.  I built the blog, but I didn't build the Typepad platform that hosts the blog. Did Al Bore or any other government functionary give us Typepad or Blogger? No.  That too is in the private sector.

And then there are the search engines.  Did the government give us Google?

Obama is a mendacious no-nothing, a disaster for the country, and the emptiest of empty suits.  Just read his awful speech.  You liberals need to wise up. If you vote for him, you will seal your own doom and get what you deserve for being stupid. 

There is Beauty in the World

I look out my study window, over the Superstition ridgeline, and marvel at the beauty of the roseate stratonimbus of sunrise.  There is beauty in the world and we do well to appreciate it.  There is also beauty and nobility in human nature.  It peeps out now and again.  A young man took a bullet during the Aurora massacre to shield his girlfriend.

It can be a moral challenge to avoid misanthropy.  But avoid it we must.  The timber of humanity, though crooked, is nonetheless mostly sturdy and termite-free.  Or is the rosiness of this Arizona sunrise biasing me toward too optimistic a view?

The hardest task in the world is to achieve a just view of things and people and their good and evil.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Youth and Old Age

Let's get off to a rousing start with The Who's famous generational anthem, aptly entitled My Generation.  "Things they say seem so cold, I hope I die before I get old."  Rather on the sweeter side, Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys wonder what it'll be like when I Grow Up to be a Man.  The same wonderful harmonies are also in evidence in this great Beach Boys cover of  I'm So Young. 

Ricky Nelson, Young World.  Sonny James, Young Love.  Lovin Spoonful, Younger Girl.  Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, Young Girl.  Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, Little Children.  Janis Ian, Society's Child.  Social commentary from a precocious 16 year old in '67.  Joan Baez sings Bob Dylan's, Forever Young.

But the young become old . . .

Bob Seger, Old Time Rock and Roll. "Call me a relic, call me what you will/Say I'm old-fashioned, say I'm over the hill/Today's music ain't got the same soul/ I like that that old time Rock and Roll." Neil Young, Old Man.  Howlin' Wolf, Goin' Down Slow.  "I've had my fun, if I don't get well no more."  Bob Dylan, Not Dark Yet (but it's gettin' there). George Harrison, All Things Must Pass.  Bob Dylan, See that My Grave is Kept Clean.

R.I.P. Kitty Wells (1919-2012), Making Believe (1955). Heartaches by the Number.

The Three Greatest Scams of Our Time

Here.  Excerpt:

These three chimeras [the Palestinian faux “narrative,” the environmental craze, and the Obama myth] generally manifest the morbid sense of victimhood and hatred of the modern West that is the most contemptible and dangerous feature of our contemporary world. Israel is a tiny outpost of enlightened modernity that the world wants to see snuffed out and replaced by medieval barbarism and tribal fanaticism; the global warming hoaxers want to roll back technological progress to a condition like that well before the industrial revolution, even before the rise of agrarian societies; and Barack Obama is the first president of the United States who actually despises—and has stated overtly his desire to “fundamentally transform”—the founding principles and way of life of the freest and most dynamic society ever known.

What sustains these programs of dissolution is not truth but a semblance of truth rooted in fantasy, misrepresentation, invention, and dinning repetition. Serious critique and sincere skepticism are dismissed as mere conspiracy, as disrupting the recitals we have come dotingly to believe in. Myth is received as reality and “narrative” euchres objective analysis and the pursuit of fact. In our fable-ready time, the real story is the story itself. This is where we are today. Where we will be tomorrow does not inspire confidence.

Barack the Magic Suit: A Political Fairy Tale

A short video by Andrew Klavan.  Here is an essay by him which ends like this:

He has no clue how things actually work. Even if socialism did work, it would be wrong because it would strip people of the fruits of their labor and the property rights on which liberty depends. Thankfully, it doesn’t work, which makes the moral issue moot. But Obama has no clue of what’s been tried and found wanting. He surrounds himself with ideologues and tunes out anyone who’s ever made an honest dime in the real world. Thus every single idea the “progressive” president puts forward is a regressive throwback to notions that have been failing miserably for more than seventy years. The stuff he believes is just plain dopey. He thinks technology is the cause of unemployment. He does not understand that only private jobs create the wealth that makes public jobs possible. He thinks that wind and solar energy should be subsidized and fossil fuel production suppressed. He insists on bringing the European social model to the U.S. even as the model implodes in front of our eyes.

So go ahead, tell me that Mitt Romney is rich and I should hate him for it. Tell me that he’s white and I should hate him for that. Tell me that his wife rides horses or that he said something nasty when he was fifteen or that — omigod! — he’s a Mormon. Whatever his foibles and flaws, it seems pretty clear that Romney has the character to be president. Barack Obama has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he does not. 

Some Man is White Because a White Man Exists

(Theme music: Ballad of a Thin Man)

Phoenicians and Londoners agree that 'Some F is a G' and 'An FG exists' are logically equivalent.  Thus, 'Some man is white' is logically equivalent to 'A white man exists.'  But I take a further step: some man is white because a white man exists, where 'because' expresses the asymmetrical relation of metaphysical grounding.   London Ed refuses to take this step and finds my position unintelligible.  He objects:

Now I agree that if 'a white man exists' has a different meaning from 'some man is white', then the question of whether some F is a G because some FG exists, is an intelligible one. But it is not intelligible if they have the same meaning, as London 'thin' theorists claim. After all, the statement

(1) Some man is white because some man is white

is not intelligible. Nor is

(2) Some man is white because the sentence 'quidam homo est albus' is true

For the Latin sentence 'quidam homo est albus' means the same as 'some man is white'. The one sentence translates into the other. So there is no meaningful 'because' here. So why does Maverick think that

(3) Some man is white because some white man exists.

is intelligible? He says as much in his comment #6. So does he think that 'some man is white' has the same meaning as 'a white man exists'? Surely not, for the reasons stated here. But if the meaning is different, what is that difference?

I agree with Ed that if 'Some man is white' and 'A white man exists' have exactly the same meaning, then 'Some man is white because a white man exists' is unintelligible.  That's entirely clear.  So I have to show that the two sentences -- call them the some-sentence and the existence-sentence -- do not have the same meaning.

We agree that the two sentences have the same truth-conditions.  But sameness of truth-conditions does not entail sameness of meaning.  'X is triangular' and 'x is trilateral' have the same truth-conditions but not the same meaning.  So I hope that Ed is not inferring sameness of meaning from sameness of truth-conditions.

Or maybe Ed thinks that the thin theorist stipulatively defines 'exist(s)' in terms of the particular quantifier.  If that is what the thin theorist is doing, then I grant that the existence-sentence and the some-sentence have the same meaning.  For then they are arbitrarily stipulated to have the same meaning. But then the thin theory is wholly without interest.  Substantive philosophical questions cannot be answered by framing stipulative definitions.  The substantive question is: What is the nature of existence?  If the thin theory is worth discussing it is the theory that "existence is what existential quantification expresses" (Quine), that existence is wholly understandable in  terms of such purely logical notions as the particular quantifier and identity.  Thus Quine explicates 'a exists' in terms of '(Ex)(x = a).'  That existence is a purely logical notion is what I most strenuously deny.

What positive reason is there for thinking that the two sentences have different meanings? Well, 'A white man exists' says all that 'Some man is white' says, but it says more: it makes explicit that there are one or more existing items that are such that they are both human and white.  The existence-sentence is richer in meaning than the some-sentence.  It makes explicit that the item that is both human and white exists, is not nothing, is mind-independently real -- however you want to put it.

Or perhaps we could put it this way.  The some-sentence abstracts from the existential aspect of the existence-sentence and so does not capture the whole of its meaning.

Do the gods love the pious because it is pious, or is the pious pious because the gods love it?   That, Ed agrees, is an intelligible question.  And so I take it he agrees that there is a relation we can call metaphysical grounding which is neither logical not causaI.   I say it's the same with the existence problem.  One can intelligibly ask whether some F is G because an FG exists, or vice versa. 

My answer is that existence is metaphysically prior to somemess, and metaphysically grounds it. 

Philosophy is a Useless Major; All Praise to Philosophy

Here is a list of the most useful and useless college majors:

The top 10 most useful college majors:
1. Nursing
2. Mechanical engineering
3. Electrical engineering
4. Civil engineering
5. Computer science
6. Finance
7. Marketing and marketing research
8. Mathematics
9. Accounting
10. French, German, Latin and other common foreign languages.

The top 10 most useless college majors:
1. Fine Arts
2. Drama and theater arts
3. Film, video and photographic arts
4. Commercial art and graphic design
5. Architecture
6. Philosophy and religious studies
7. English literature and language
8. Journalism
9. Anthropology and archeology
10. Hospitality management

Philosophy comes in at #6 of the useless.  Those who fill their belly from teaching philosophy (or rather from conducting philosophy classes, which is not the same) will be strongly tempted to defend philosophy by arguing that it really is useful after all.

I say that's a mistake.  I take the classical line.  Of course philosophy is useless, and therein lies its nobility and dignity.  The merely utile is ancillary to the non-utile.  Failure to appreciate this shows a lack of nobility of soul.  What follows is the meat of my Should One Stoop to a Defense of Philosophy?

What I object to . . . is the notion that philosophy needs to justify itself in terms of an end external to it, and that its main justification is in terms of an end outside of it. The main reason to study philosophy is not to become a more critical reasoner or a better evaluator of evidence, but to grapple with the ultimate questions of human existence and to arrive at as much insight into them as is possible. What drives philosophy is the desire to know the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. Let's not confuse a useful byproduct of philosophical study (development of critical thinking skills) with the goal of philosophical study. The reason to study English literature is not to improve one's vocabulary or to prepare for a career as a journalist.   Similarly, the reason to study philosophy is not to improve one's ability to think clearly about extraphilosophical matters or to acquire skills that may prove handy in law school.

Philosophy is an end in itself. This is why it is foolish to try to convince philistines that it is good for
something. It is not primarily good for something. It is a good in itself. Otherwise you are acquiescing in the philistinism you ought to be combating. Is listening to the sublime adagio movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony good for something? And what would that be, to impress people with how cultured you are?

To the philistine's "Philosophy bakes no bread" you should not respond "Yes it does," for such responses are patently lame. You should say, "Man does not live by bread alone," or "Not everything is pursued as a means to something else," or "A university is not a trade school."  You should not acquiesce in the philistine's values and assumptions, but go on the attack and question his values and assumptions.  Put him on the spot.  Play the Socratic gadfly.  If a philistine wants to know how much you got paid for writing an article for a professional journal, say, "Do you really think that only what one is paid to do is worth doing?" 

Admittedly, this is a lofty conception of philosophy and I would hate to have to defend it before the uncomprehending philistines one would expect to find on the typical Board of Regents. But philosophy is what it is, lofty by nature, and if we are to defend it we must do so in a way that does not betray it.

It might be better, though, not to stoop to defend it at all, at least not before the uncomprehending.  It might be better to show contempt and supercilious disdain. Not everyone can be reasoned with, and part of being reasonable is understanding this fact.

Friday Cat Blogging: 'Cat' with Cat

I Didn't Build This Blog

Big Government did. (Big Government must have a death wish.)

For more on this theme, surf on over to http://didntbuildthat.com/.

Profiling, Prejudice, and Discrimination

Everybody profiles.  Liberals are no exception.  Liberals reveal their prejudices by where they live, shop, send their kids to school and with whom they associate.  

The word 'prejudice' needs analysis.  It could refer to blind prejudice: unreasoning, reflexive (as opposed to reflective) aversion to what is other just because it is other, or an unreasoning pro-attitude toward the familiar just because it is familiar.  We should all condemn blind prejudice.  It is execrable to hate a person just because he is of a different color, for example. No doubt, but how many people do that?  How many people who are averse to blacks are averse because of their skin color as opposed to their behavior patterns? Racial prejudice is not, in the main, prejudice based on skin color, but on behavior. 

'Prejudice' could also mean 'prejudgment.'   Although blind prejudice is bad, prejudgment is generally good.  We cannot begin our cognitive lives anew at every instant.  We rely upon the 'sedimentation' of past exerience.  Changing the metaphor, we can think of prejudgments as distillations from experience.  The first time I 'serve' my cats whisky they are curious.  After that, they cannot be tempted to come near a shot glass of Jim Beam.  My prejudgments about rattle snakes are in place and have been for a long time.  I don't need to learn about them afresh at each new encounter with one. Prejudgments are not blind, but experience-based, and they are mostly true. The adult mind is not a tabula rasa.  What experience has written, she retains, and that's all to the good.

So there is good prejudice and there is bad prejudice.  The teenager thinks his father prejudiced in the bad sense when he warns the son not to go into certain parts of town after dark.  Later the son learns that the old man was not such a bigot after all: the father's prejudice was not blind but had a fundamentum in re.

But if you stay away from certain parts of town are you not 'discriminating' against them?  Well of course, but not all discrimination is bad. Everybody discriminates.  Liberals are especially discriminating.  The typical Scottsdale liberal would not be caught dead supping in some of the Apache Junction dives I have been found in.  Liberals discriminate in all sorts of ways.  That's why Scottsdale is Scottsdale and not Apache Junction. 

'Profiling,' like 'prejudice' and 'discrimination,' has come to acquire a wholly negative connotation.  Unjustly.  What's wrong with profiling?  We all do it, and we are justified in doing it.  Consider criminal profiling.

It is obvious that only certain kinds of people commit certain kinds of crimes. Suppose a rape has occurred at the corner of Fifth and Vermouth. Two males are moving away from the crime scene. One, the slower moving of the two, is a Jewish gentleman, 80 years of age, with a chess set under one arm and a copy of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed under the other. The other fellow, a vigorous twenty-year-old, is running from the scene.

Who is more likely to have committed the rape? If you can't answer this question, then you lack common sense.  But just to spell it out for you liberals: octogenarians are not known for their sexual prowess: the geezer is lucky if he can get it up for a five-minute romp.  Add chess playing and an interest in Maimonides and you have one harmless dude.

Or let's say you are walking down a street in Mesa, Arizona.  On one side of the street you spy some fresh-faced Mormon youths, dressed in their 1950s attire, looking like little Romneys, exiting a Bible studies class.  On the other side of the street, Hells Angels are coming out of their club house.  Which side of the street would you feel safer on?   On which side will your  concealed semi-auto .45 be more likely to see some use?

The problem is not so much that liberals are stupid, as that they have allowed themselves to be stupefied by that cognitive aberration known as political correctness.

Their brains are addled by the equality fetish:  everybody is equal, they think, in every way.  So the vigorous 20 year old is not more likely than the old man to have committed the rape.  The Mormon and the Hells Angel are equally law-abiding.  And the twenty-something Egyptian Muslim is no more likely to be a terrorist than the Mormon matron from Salt Lake City. 

Are the Pyramids of Egypt Slated for Destruction?

This is one of the statues of Buddha that the Taliban dynamited in 2001:

Will the Pyramids of Egypt meet the same fate at the hands of similar miscreants?  See Victor Davis Hanson, Blowing Up History.

Of the world religions, "the religion of peace" is uniquely violent. 

Having said that, I must be an 'Islamophobe' right?

Wrong.  My fear of radical Islam is entirely rational.

A phobia is by definition an irrational fear.  Leftists introduced 'Islamophobia' as a semantic bludgeon to silence their opponents and prevent honest debate.  That is why it is utterly stupid for any conservative to use this word.  If you are a conservative, don't talk like a liberal!  Language matters.

No Resting Place in Any Earthly Desire

Paul Brunton, Notebooks, Vol. 15, Part 2, p. 58, entry #179:

In the end man has to arrive at this conclusion: that there is no resting place for him in any earthly desire, and that the satisfying and enduring peace of desirelessness is immensely superior to the always partial and transient fulfullment of such desire.

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.

The same goes for the Brunton passage.  If you can 'relate' to it, then you are probably religiously inclined; if not, you probably aren't.

Moral Responsibility in Dreams

I had a lucid dream the other night in which I lost my cool to an extent I would consider morally reprehensible in waking life.  But was there any moral failure in the dream?  And then there are the dreams in which I am having sexual intercourse with a woman not my wife.  I'm aware I am dreaming and I think to myself: "Well, this is just a dream; I may as well enjoy it."  So on occasion I grant nocturnal permission to a nocturnal emission. 

Was there real, not merely dreamt, moral failure in the dream?      (Augustine discusses this or a cognate question somewhere in his pelagic pennings, but I have forgotten where.)

Lucid dreaming while asleep is not the same as fantasizing while awake.  But they are similar.  Suppose I am entertaining (with hospitality) thoughts about having sex with my neighbor's wife.  That sort of thing, I have argued, is morally objectionable.  I mean the thinking, whether or not it results in any doing.  Jesus just says it (MT 5:28).  I argue it here and here.  (Of course if he is God, he doesn't need to argue it, and because I am not God, I do.)  Does the similarity support the claim that the nocturnal permission is as morally impermissible as the diurnal permission?

True Detachment

True detachment requires a certain indifference to, and thus a certain detachment from, one's success or failure at achieving detachment.  There is a  paradox here inasmuch as one cannot be detached entirely from the project of attaining detachment.  Otherwise there would be no difference between the seeker of wisdom and the worldling who is quite satisfied with his current moral condition and does not seek to better himself.   The trick is to pursue detachment detachedly.  I try to succeed, but if I fail it's no big deal and if I succeed it's also no big deal and certainly nothing to crow about or feed my ego on. One has to be aware of one's various moral failings and work to overcome them, all the while not worrying too much about the outcome.  One has to avoid the mistake of thinking that one can rely entirely upon oneself while also avoiding the equal but opposite mistake of just letting oneself go.

Photo ID: Voter Suppression or Liberal Projection?

If it is racist to demand photo ID at polling places, what does that say about how liberals view black people? They must view you black folk as utterly incompetent nonentities incapable of taking part in modern life, as pimps, whores, drug addicts, carjackers, hoodie-wearing thugs, smash & grab artists, troglodytes, total losers  . . . .  Time to rise up and move off the liberal plantation.

The Left-leaning Los Angeles Times ran a  piece the other day with the risible subheading: "The evidence is overwhelming that recent photo ID laws are politically motivated."  This is a perfect example of the pot calling the kettle black.  It is also a good example of psychological projection.  After all, it is liberals and leftists whose motivations are purely political.  Their sole motivation for opposing photo ID laws is to win at all costs and by any means including voter fraud.  I say this because they do not have one single cogent argument against such laws. Liberals project  unsavory motivations into their opponents.  This defense mechanism keeps them from having to acknowledge that is they who have unsavory motivations.

Anyone with common sense ought to be able to appreciate that voting must be conducted in an orderly manner, a manner to inspire confidence in the citizenry, and that only citizens who have registered to vote and have satisfied the minimal requirements of age, etc., are to be allowed into the voting booth. Given the possibility of fraud, it is therefore necessary to verify the identities of those who present themselves at the polling place. To do this, voters must be required to present a government-issued photo ID card, a driver's license being only one example of such. It is a reasonable requirement and any reasonable person should be able to see it as one.  Is this why our liberal pals oppose it?  Liberals are not famous for their common sense.

Too many liberals, however, see these common-sense requirements as acts of voter suppression, as witness this astonishing outburst from Jennifer Granholm, former governor of Michigan:

In November, five million eligible voters will find it harder to exercise their
rights in America -- 150 voter suppression laws have been introduced in 30 state
legislatures across the country.

The most common tactics: requiring photo ID, restricting registration drives,
limiting early voting and imposing onerous residency requirements. Who do these
laws most directly affect? The poor, the elderly, minorities and the young. And
how do those groups typically vote? Democratic.

Let's consider photo ID.  For Granholm, requiring such ID is a form of voter suppression.  How's that for hyperbole?  Does she call it bank withdrawal suppression when check cashers are required to produce ID?  The other day I withdrew a sum of money from a checking account in excess of what is obtainable from an ATM machine.  I was asked to show my driver's license.  Was that an infringement of my right to access my own funds?  Of course not.  The demand was eminently reasonable even though I am known at the bank in question.  Similarly with the photo ID requirement at the polling place.  Examples like this can be multiplied indefinitely. 

Some liberals say that voter fraud is rare.  Maybe, maybe not.  In any case, irrelevant.  There is a principle at stake.  Besides, how many people lack ID?  Without ID one simply cannot function in society.  To exploit and adapt a slogan of the Harvard logician, Willard Quine, "No [social] entity without [social] identity."  You're a nonentity without  ID.  So when a liberal says that voter fraud is rare, reply, "So is lack of ID.  Since almost everyone has it, almost no one is excluded from voting by the ID requirement."

Since liberals don't have even one cogent argument against photo ID, we are justified in psychologizing their opposition to common-sense requirements.  Their opposition is rooted in a desire to win by any means, including fraud.  As lefties, they believe the end justifies the means.  They see themselves as the noble standard-bearers of equality against their disgusting, evil, SIXHRB opponents.  (SIXHRB: sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, racist, bigoted. HT: Dennis Prager.)

By the way, Governor Granholm is now on the faculty at University of California, Berkeley.  Surprise!

Metaphysical Grounding and the Euthyphro Dilemma

The locus classicus of the Euthyphro Dilemma (if you want to call it that) is Stephanus 9-10 in the early Platonic dialog, Euthyphro. This aporetic dialog is about the nature of piety, and Socrates, as usual, is in quest of a definition. Euthyphro proposes three definitions, with each of which Socrates has no trouble finding fault. According to the second, "piety is what all the gods love, and impiety is what all the gods hate." To this Socrates famously responds, "Do the gods love piety because it is pious, or is it pious because they love it?" In clearer terms, do the gods love pious acts because they are pious, or are pious acts pious because the gods love them?

 

What interests me at the moment is the notion of metaphysical grounding which I want to defend against London Ed and other anti-metaphysical types.  (For it is his failure to understand metaphysical grounding that accounts for Ed's failure to appreciate the force of my circularity objection to the thin theory of existence.)  Thus I will not try to answer a question beyond my pay grade, namely:

 

Q. Does God command X because it is morally obligatory, or is X morally obligatory because God commands it?

 

My concern is with the preliminary question whether (Q) is so much as intelligible.  It is intelligible only if we can make sense of the 'because' in it.   Let' s start with something that we should all be able to agree on (if we assume the existence of God and the existence of objective moral obligations), namely:

 

1.  Necessarily, God commands X iff X is morally obligatory.

(1) expresses a broadly logical equivalence and equivalence is symmetrical: if p is equivalent to q, then q is equivalent to p.  But metaphysical grounding  is asymmetrical: if M metaphysically grounds N, then it is not the case that N metaphysically  grounds M.  For example, if fact F is the truth-maker of sentence s, then it is not the case that s is the truth-maker of F.  Truth-making is a type of metaphysical grounding: it is not a causal relation and its is not a logical relation (where a logical relation is one that relates propositions, examples of logical relations being consistency, inconsistency, entailment, and logical independence.)

(1) leaves wide open whether God is the source of the obligatoriness of moral obligations, or whether such obligations are obligatory independently of divine commands.  Thus the truth of (1) does not entail an answer to (Q).

The 'because' in (Q) cannot be taken in a causal sense if causation is understood as a relation that connects physical events, states, or changes with other physical events, states, or changes.  Nor can the 'because' be taken in a logical sense.  Logical relations connect propositions, and a divine command is not a proposition.  Nor is the obligatoriness of the content of a command a proposition.

So I say this:  if the content of a command is morally obligatory because God issued the command, then the issuing of the command is the metaphysical ground of the the moral obligatoriness of the content of the command.  If, on the other hand, the content of the command is morally obligatory independently of the issuing of the divine command, then the moral obligatoriness of the command is the metaphysical ground of the correctness of the divine command.

Either way, there is a relation of metaphysical grounding.

My argument in summary:

1. (Q) is an intelligible question.

2. (Q) is not a question about a causal relation.

3. (Q) is not a question about a logical relation.

4. There is no other ordinary (nonmetaphysical) candidate relation such as a temporal relation or an epistemic relation for (Q) to be about.

5. (Q) is an intelligible question if and only if 'because' in (Q) expresses metaphysical grounding.

Therefore

6. 'Because' in (Q) expresses metaphysical grounding.

Therefore

7. There is a relation of metaphysical grounding.

OK, London Ed, which premise will you reject and why? 

The Story of Oh: the Terrible Price of a Korean Defection

By Richard Fernandez (HT: Bill Keezer):

The BBC tells the melancholy story of Oh Kil-nam, a South Korean man who, convinced by his Marxist education that North Korea was a worker’s paradise, decided to defect there with his wife and two children in 1986. Oh, who had just completed his PhD in Germany in Marxist economics and who “had been active in left-wing groups” had no reason to doubt the beckoning invitation of North Korean officials who promised him free health care and a government job, like certain other people you may know.

He chose poorly.

Aged and broken, Oh now concludes that his “life was ruined by his decision to defect to North Korea. Seventy years old, he still does not know the fate of his wife and daughters – either dead or imprisoned in a labour camp.” His wife, who lacked the benefit of a European education, suspected something was amiss from the first. She was aghast when he told her of his plan to defect.

What is Man?

Peter Geach quotes Tennyson: "Man is an immortal spirit charged with the control and taming of a beast." (Truth and Hope, p. 18)

Double Contractions

Scowled upon by schoolmarms for generations, contractions are now seen in formal writing.  But formal writing, or what passes for such, has not yet sunk to the use of what I will call double contractions such as 'shouldn't've' and 'couldn't've.'

But the  times they are a changin' and with them the language.

In Loco Parentis

When parents, teachers, clergy and others in the private sector abdicate authority, the authority of the state takes their place.  Time was when universities were in loco parentis.  No longer.  Now it is the nanny state that is in loco parentis.

The Euphemism of Obituary

How wonderful people are made to appear in death and how different from how they appeared in life.

Can a Thin Theorist Experience Wonder at Existence?

Existence elicited nausea from Sartre's Roquentin, but wonder from Bryan Magee:

 . . . no matter what it was that existed, it seemed to me extraordinary beyond all wonderment that it should. It was astounding that anything existed at all. Why wasn't there nothing? By all the normal rules of expectation — the least unlikely state of affairs, the most economical solution to all possible problems, the simplest explanation — nothing is what you would have expected there to be. But such was not the case, self-evidently. (Confessions of a Philosopher, p. 13)

We find something similar in Wittgenstein:  Wie erstaunlich, dass ueberhaupt etwas existiert.  "How astonishing that anything at all exists." (Geheime Tagebuecher 1914-1916, p. 82.)

What elicited Magee's and Wittgenstein's wonderment was the self-evident sheer existence of things in general: their being as opposed to their nonbeing. How strange that anything at all exists! Now what could a partisan of the thin conception of Being or existence make of  this wonderment at existence? Or at Sartre's/Roquentin's nausea at existence?  I will try to show that no thin theorist qua thin theorist can accommodate  wonderment/nausea at existence, and that this fact tells against the thin theory.

 

I have already exposited the thin theory ad nauseam, if you will forgive the pun.  So let's simply consider what the head honcho of the thin theorists, Peter van Inwagen, has to say about wonder at existence in "Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment" (in Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, eds. Chalmers et al., Oxford 2009, pp. 472-506) He begins by pointing out (478) that everything we say using 'exists' and its cognates can be said without using 'exists'and its cognates.  'Dragons do not exist' can be put by saying 'Nothing is a dragon,' or 'Everything is not a dragon.'  'God exists' can be put in terms of the equivalent 'It is not the case that everything is not (a) God.' 'I think, therefore I am' is equivalent to 'I think, therefore not everything is not I.'  Here are some further examples of my own.  'An honest politican does not exist' is equivalent to 'No politician is honest.'  'A  sober Irishman does  exist'  is equivalent to 'Some Irishman is sober.'  'An impolite New Yorker does not exist' is equivalent to 'Every New Yorker is polite.'

From examples like these it appears that every sentence containing 'exists' or 'is' (used existentially) or cognates, can be be replaced by an equivalent sentence in which 'exists' or  'is' (used existentially), or cognates does not appear.

Now let's see how this works when it comes to the sentences we use to express our wonder at our own existence or at the existence of things in general.

Suppose I am struck by a sudden sense of my contingency.  I exclaim, 'I might never have existed.'  That is equivalent to 'I might never have been identical to anything' or, as van Inwagen has it, 'it might have been the case that everything was always not I.' (479)

To wonder why there is anything at all is to wonder "why it is not the case that everything is not (identical with) anything." (479)

Now I could mock these amazing contortions whereby van Inwagen tries to hold onto his thin theory, but I won't.  Mockery and derision have a place in polemical writing, as when I am battling the lunkheads of the Left, but they have no place in philosophy proper.  But really, has anyone  ever expressed his wonder at the sheer existence of the world using the sentence I just quoted from PvI?  But of course I need a more substantial objection that this, and I have one.

When I wonder at the sheer existence of things I am not wondering at the fact that everything is identical to something, or  wondering  at its not being the case that everything is not identical with anything.

Why not? Well, the truth of 'Everything is identical to something' presupposes a domain of quantification the members of which are existing items.  Surely what I find wonder-inducing is not the fact that every item x in that presupposed domain is identical to some item y in that very same presupposed domain! That miserable triviality is not what I am wondering at.   I am wondering at the  existence of anything at all including the domain and everything in it.

What I am wondering at is that there is something and not nothing.  How can a Quinean such as PvI express that something exists?  Is 'Something exists' equivalent to 'For some x, x = x'?  No.  Existence is not self-identity.  For x to exist is not for x to be self-identical.  Otherwise, for x not to exist would be for x to be self-diverse -- which is absurd.  My possible nonexistence is not my possible self-diversity.

Suppose there is only only one  thing, a, and that I am wondering at the existence of a.  Why is there a and not rather nothing?  Am I wondering at a's self-identity?  Obviously not.  I am wondering at a's sheer existence, that it is 'there,' that it is not nothing, that is it, that it has Being. 

And so I conclude that a thin theorist qua thin theorist cannot experience wonder at the sheer existence of things.  All he can experience wonder at -- if you want to call it wonder -- is that things presupposed as existing are self-identical -- which is surely not all that marvellous.  Of course they are self-identical!  Necessarily if a thing exists, it is self-identical. But existence is not self-identity. If existence were self-identity, then nonexistence would be self-diversity and possble existence would be possible self-diversity. 

Some of us experience wonder at the sheer existence of things.  As old Ludwig puts it, Ich staune dass die Welt existiert!  When I experience this wonder I am not experiencing wonder at the trivial fact that each of the things presupposed as existing is identical to something or  other.  I am wondering at the existence of everything including the presupposed domain of existents.  This then is yet another argument against the thin theory.  The thin theory cannot accommodate wonder at existence, or Sartrean nausea at existence either. 

This Land is Your Land?

A conservative response to the Woody Guthrie centennial and a supplement to Saturday night's oldies show.

Existence, Circularity, and Metaphysical Grounding

London Ed must have known by some paranormal means  that I was talking about him over Sunday breakfast with Peter Lupu.  For his post upon return from sunny Greece is about the alleged circularity of the thin conception of existence.  Peter and I were discussing Peter van Inwagen's  "Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment" (in Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, eds. Chalmers et al., Oxford 2009, pp. 472-506.)  Van Inwagen is a Quinean about existence and perhaps the most prominent and formidable of the contemporary thin theorists.  Me, I'm a thick-head: existence is not (identical to) what so-called 'existential' quantification  expresses, and existence comes in modes.  The negations of these convictions I reject as two dogmas of analysis (from the title of a forthcoming paper).

I was lamenting to Peter that I couldn't get London Ed to see my point about circularity.  I now think I understand why Ed doesn't accept it.  It has to do with his not accepting a different notion, that of metaphysical grounding.

Let's start with a Quinean explication of a sentence such as 'Peter exists.'  It goes like this:

1. Peter exists =_df for some x, x = Peter.

What does (1) accomplish?  Well, it shows how one can get rid of 'exists' as a first-level predicate, and with it a reason for thinking that existence is a property of individuals.  For it is clear (assuming that there are no nonexistent objects) that the sentences flanking '=df' are equivalent, indeed logically equivalent: there is no possible situation in which  one is true (false) and the other false (true).

Now in one sense of 'circular' I want to concede to Ed that (1) is not circular:  the definiens -- the RHS of (1) -- does not contain 'exists.'  In other words, (1) is not circular in the way the following are circular:

X is a human being =_df x has human parents.
Knowledge is the state one is in when one knows something.
Knowledge is cognition.
A book of pornography is one that contains pornographic material.

The following, whether correct or incorrect,  are not circular definitions in the above sense:

Knowledge is justified true belief.
Justice is whatever is advantageous to the stronger.
A circle is a locus a points in the same plane equidistant to some common point.

(1) is clearly not circular in the manner of the above examples: the definiendum is not repeated in the definiens.  So in what sense is (1) circular? (1) is true iff the following is true

1a. Peter exists =_df for some existing x, x = Peter.

(1a), however, is plainly circular.  After all, (1) is  not equivalent to

1b. Peter exists =_df for some x, whether existent or nonexistent, x = Peter.

For if (1) were equivalent to (1b), then (1) would be false.

One response I anticipate Ed making is to say that there is no difference between 'x' and 'existing x': whatever is a value of the one is a value of the other, and vice versa.  If so, then perhaps (1a) collapses into (1) and there is no circularity in the sense in which the examples above are circular.

I would insist, however, that (1) is circular in a different and deeper  sense.  A presupposition of (1)'s truth is that the domain of quantification -- the domain over which the variable 'x' ranges -- is a domain of existents.  Therefore, if I want  to know what it is for x to exist, you have not given me any insight by telling me that for x to exist is for x to be identical to something that exists.  For of course x is identical to something that exists, namely x!

Suppose we distinguish between semantic and metaphysical circularity.  I am willing to concede that (1) is not semantically circular.  But I do maintain that (1) is metaphysically circular: its truth presupposes that the domain of quantification is a domain of existing items.  To put it another way, the truth of (1) has an ontological or metaphysical ground, namely the existence of the items over which we quantify.

Consider a domain consisting of just three items: Peter, Paul, and Mary. Peter exists iff one of these items is identical to Peter.  Paul exists iff one of these items is identical to Paul.  Mary exists iff one of these items is identical to Mary.  Perfectly true and perfectly trivial.  Although we learn something necessarily true about Peter, about Paul, and about Mary, we do not learn what it is for Peter or Paul or Mary to exist in the first place. 

I want to know that is is for Peter (who stands in here for any individual) to exist. You tell me that for Peter to exist is for Peter to be identical to something.  But in giving this true but trivial answer you have helped yourself to the existence of the thing to which Peter is identical.  You have evaded my question by assuming that we are just given existing individuals.

What form could an answer take?  One answer is that the existence of the items in the domain of quantification is a brute fact and thus inexplicable.  To exist is just to be there inexplicably.  That would at least be an honest answer as opposed to the silly triviality that to exist is to be identical to something.  A radically different answer is to say that for a concrete contingent ndividual to exist is for it to be a divine creation.  Both the brute fact answer and the theistic answer are consistent with Quine's triviality.

Getting back to London Ed, why doesn't he accept my circularity objection to the thin theory?  He doesn't accept it because he is operating with an exclusively semantic notion of circularity which remains at the level of sentences and does not descend to the level of the truth-makers (ontological grounds) of sentences.  (In earlier discussions it became clear that Ed has no clue as to what a truth-maker is supposed to be.) The thin theory, as expressed in (1), however, is not obviously semantically circular: 'exists' is not found on the RHS. All one finds there is a quantifier, a variable bound by the quantifier, the identity sign, and a name that functions in this context as an arbitrary constant.  My claim, however, is that (1) is metaphysically or ontologically circular.  This notion is one that Ed does not understand.

Metaphysical grounding, one of whose forms is truth-making, is for Ed a wholly unintelligible notion.  For Peter and me, however, it is an intelligible notion .  Here I think we can locate the ultimate root of our disagreement.

What say you, gentlemen?