Maverick Philosopher

Living to Eat

One who lives to eat is almost as ridiculous as one who drives a car to pump gas into its tank.  In both cases a vehicle; in both cases fuel; in both cases means-end confusion.

The Voter ID Controversy Continues

It amazes me that new articles and columns in high-class venues appear almost daily concerning what really ought to be a non-issue.  Of course, I blame the Left for this.  By maintaining preternaturally absurd positions, they force sensible writers to waste time and energy opposing their nonsense.  Here is how a 15 August NY Times editorial begins:

Judge Robert Simpson of the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania seems to assume that legislators have a high-minded public purpose for the laws they pass. That’s why, on Wednesday morning, he refused to grant an injunction to halt a Republican-backed voter ID law that could disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of poor and minority state residents in November.       

One thing you have to understand about leftists is that they regularly engage in semantic distortion: they will take a word that has an established meaning and misuse it for their ideological ends.  'Disenfranchise' is a case in point.

To disenfranchise is to deprive of a right, in particular, the right to vote.  But only some people in a given geographical area  have the right to vote.  Felons and children do not have the right to vote, nor do non-citizens.  You do not have the right to vote in a certain geographical area simply because you are a sentient being residing in that area.  Otherwise, cats and dogs and children and felons and illegal aliens would have the right to vote. Now a requirement that one prove that one has the right to vote is not to be confused with a denial of the right to vote.

My right to vote is one thing, my ability to prove that I have the right another.  If I cannot prove that I am who I claim to be on a given occasion, then I won't be able to exercise my right to vote on that occasion; but that is not to say that I have been disenfranchised.  For I haven't be deprived of my right to vote; I have merely been prevented from exercising my right due to my inability to prove
my identity.

That's one point.  The author of the NYT editorial begins by egregiously misusing 'disenfranchise.'  But note also the cynicism betrayed in the opening sentence.  Third, we are asked to believe the unbelievable, that "hundreds of thousands of poor and minority state residents" will be 'disenfranchised' come November.  Hundreds of thousands? Prove it!  In Pennsylvania, photo ID is free.  So even the 'poor' can afford it.  Our editorial writer continues:

He wrote in his ruling that requiring a government-issued photo ID card to vote “is a reasonable, nondiscriminatory, nonsevere burden when viewed in the broader context of the widespread use of photo ID in daily life,” as if voting were equivalent to buying a six-pack of beer or driving a car.       

At this point I stopped reading.  The writer is committing a grotesque straw man fallacy.  No one claims that voting is "equivalent" -- whatever that is supposed to mean -- " to buying a six-pack of beer or driving a car."  The point is that the photo ID requirement is a minimal one in that photo ID is necessary for all sorts of transactions in everyday life that ordinary people engage in.  And again, in PA you can acquire this ID for free. Our idiot editorialist also seems not to realize this issue has nothing to do with driving a car.  A photo ID is not the same as a driver's license.  The latter is a species of the former as genus.  You don't need to own a car, and you don't even need to have a driver's license.

Now if you want to read something intelligent on this issue, besides what I have written, I recommend this WSJ piece, and this article from Commentary.

Generation Screwed May Support Ryan

Gen-Xers (those born between 1965 and 1980) are the cohort sandwiched between the Boomers  and the Millennials.  Now they have one of their own in contention for high office.  And Paul Ryan, 42, is no slacker.  Romney's pick of the man for VP was a brilliant stroke and may gin up support for the Republican ticket as Kirsten Powers argues.

She quoted a word I had never seen before, 'athazagoraphobia':

Generation X chronicler Jeff Gordiner, has written that Gen-Xers suffer from “athazagoraphobia”—“an abnormal and persistent fear of being forgotten or ignored.” Except it’s not really a phobia; it’s been reality for a long time. Maybe that is about to change.

If the Dead and the Undocumented Voted Conservative . . .

. . . liberals would be screaming for voter ID.

My Existence and My Possible Nonexistence

Leo Mollica made a good objection to my earlier argument, an objection I  need to sort out.  I exist, but I might not have existed.  How might a thin theorist translate this truth?

On the thin theory, my existence is my identity-with-something.  It follows that my nonexistence is my diversity-from-everything, and my merely possible nonexistence is my diversity from everything in one or more merely possible worlds.  But -- and this I take it is Leo's point -- I needn't exist in merely possible world w for it to be true in w that I am diverse from everything in w.  So w is not a world in which I am self-diverse, but simply a world in which I am diverse from everything in w.  Had w been actual, I would not have been self-diverse; I would not have existed at all, i.e., I would not have been identical to any of the things that would have existed had w been actual.

To put it another way, on the thin theory, my actual existence is my self-identity, my identity with me.  Opposing this reduction of singular existence to self-identity, I argued that if my existence is my self-identity, then the possibility of my nonexistence is the possibility of my being self-diverse -- which is absurd.  Mollica's rejoinder in effect was that my possible nonexistence is not my possible self-diversity, but my possible diversity from everything distinct from me.

I could respond  by saying that this objection begs the question by assuming the thin theory.  But then Mollica could say that I am begging the question against him.  Let me try a different tack.

If I am diverse from everything in w, but I don't exist in w, then something must represent me there.  For part of what makes w w is that it lacks me.  It is essential to w that it not contain me. But how express this fact if there is no representative of me in w?  Now the only possible candifdate for a representative of me in possible worlds in which I do notr exist  is my haecceity-property: identity-with-BV.  If there is such a property, then it can go proxy for me in every possible world in which I do not exist, worlds which  in part are  defined by my nonexistence.

So it seems that Mollica's objection requires that there be haecceities such as identity-with-BV, and that these be properties that can exist unexemplified.  But now two points.

First, there are no such haecceity properties for reasons given elsewhere, for example, here.

Second,  if haecceities are brought into the picture, then we are back to the Fregean version of the thin theory according to which 'exists(s)' is a second-level property.  But what I have been pounding on is the latest and most sophisticated version of the thin theory, that of van Inwagen.  And we have seen that he rejects the view that 'exist(s)' is second-level.

Engagement with Equanimity

Can you engage with the political while retaining peace of mind?  If not, avoid politics.

The monkish virtues are easy to cultivate and practice in the monastery.  The trick, however, is to practice them in the world -- where they are needed.

Apology to a Fly

I regret having to kill you, but one of my thoughts is worth more than your entire life.

"But if the fly could speak, he would most assuredly disagree with your value assessment."

If the fly could speak, then I would consider him a spiritual being and accord him the respect I accord myself.

The Four G's

Conservative: God, guns, grub, gold.

Liberal: government, government, government, government.

'Something is Self-Identical' Cannot Translate 'There are Objects': Another Argument Against the Thin Theory

At Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 4.1271 we read: "So one cannot say, for example, 'There are objects', as one might say, 'There are books'."

In endnote 9, p. 194,  of "The Number of Things," Peter van Inwagen (Phil. Issues 12, 2002) writes:

Wittgenstein says that one cannot say " 'There are objects', as one might say, 'There are books'."  I have no idea what the words 'as one might say' ['wie man etwa sagt'] could mean so I will ignore them.

Is van Inwagen simply feigning incomprehension here?  How could he fail to understand what those words mean?  Wittgenstein's point is that object is a formal concept, unlike book.  One can say, meaningfully, that there are books.  One cannot say, meaningfully, that there are objects.  Whether Wittgenstein is right is a further question.  But what he is saying strikes me as clear enough, clear enough so that one ought to  have some idea of what he is saying rather than no idea.  By the way, van Inwagen is here engaging in a ploy of too many analytic philosophers.  In a situation in which it is tolerably, but not totally, clear what is being said, they say, 'I have no idea what you mean' when, to avoid churlishness, they ought to say, 'Would you please clarify exactly what you mean?'

Be this as it may.  Philosophers are a strange, in-bred breed of cat, and they acquire some strange tics.  My present topic is not the tics of philosophers, nor formal concepts either.

According to Wittgenstein, one cannot say (meaningfully) that there are objects.  Van Inwagen responds:

Why can one not say that there are objects?  Why not say it this way: '(Ex)(x = x)'? (p. 180)

Without endorsing Wittgenstein's claim, or trying to determine what exactly it means, my thesis is that van Inwagen's translation of 'There are objects' as 'Something is self-identical' is hopeless.

I do not deny the logical equivalence of the two sentences.   I do not claim that there are self-identical items that do not exist.  Everything exists.  My claim is that to exist is not to be self-identical.  They are not the very same 'property.'    If they were, then van Inwagen's translation would be unexceptionable.  But they are not.  Here is a reductio ad absurdum argument to show that existence and self-identity are distinct, that existence cannot be reduced to self-identity.

0. Existence and self-identity are the very same property. (Assumption for reductio)

1. If existence and self-identity are the very same property, then nonexistence and self-diversity are the very same property, and conversely. (Self-evident logical equivalence.)

2. Possibly, I do not exist.  (Self-evident premise: I am a contingent being.)

3. Possibly, I am not self-identical. (From 1, 2)

4. What is not self-identical is self-diverse.  (True by definition)

5. Possibly, I am self-diverse. (From 3, 4)

6. (5) is necessarily false.

7. (0) is false. Q.E.D.

The thin theory of existence is the theory that existence is exhaustively explicable in terms of the purely logical concepts of standard first-order predicate logic with identity.  Identity and quantification are such concepts.  Now the only way within this logic to translate 'There are objects' or 'Something exists' is the way van Inwagen suggests.  But what I have just shown is that 'Something is self-identical' does not say what 'Something exists' says.

If things exist, then of course they are self-identical.  What else would they be? Self-diverse?  But their existence is not their self-identity.  Their existence is their being there, their not being nothing, their  reality -- however you want to put it.  If something is self-identical, it cannot be such unless it first exists.  It astonishes me that there are people, very intelligent people, who cannot see that.  What should we call this fallacy?  The essentialist fallacy?  The fallacy of thinking that being = what-being?  Or maybe it is not a fallacy of thinking, but a kind of blindness.  Some people are color-blind, some morally blind, some modally blind.  And others existence-blind. 

Obama's Assault on the Institutions of Civil Society

Obama showed his true colors quite unmistakably in his 'You didn't build that" speech.  Yuval Steinitz has his number:

The president simply equates doing things together with doing things through government. He sees the citizen and the state, and nothing in between — and thus sees every political question as a choice between radical individualism and a federal program.

As I said before, it is a classic false alternative fallacy: either you pull yourself up by your own bootstraps or government helps you.  This goes together with a straw man fallacy: Obama imputes to his opponents an absurd 'rugged individualism' that they do not espouse.

But most of life is lived somewhere between those two extremes, and American life in particular has given rise to unprecedented human flourishing because we have allowed the institutions that occupy the middle ground — the family, civil society, and the private economy — to thrive in relative freedom. Obama’s remarks in Virginia shed a bright light on his attitude toward that middle ground, and in that light a great deal of what his administration has done in this three and a half years suddenly grows clearer and more coherent, and even more disconcerting.

Disconcerting is right.  It's an all-out, totalitarian assault on the institutions of civil society.  The Left is totalitarian by its very nature and it can brook no competitors: not religion, not the family, not private charities and associations.

This intolerance of nonconformity is even more powerfully evident in the administration’s attitude toward the institutions of civil society, especially religious institutions involved in the crucial work of helping the needy and vulnerable. In a number of instances, but most notably in the controversy surrounding the Department of Health and Human Services rule requiring religious employers to provide free abortive and contraceptive drugs to their employees under Obamacare, the administration has shown an appalling contempt for the basic right of religious institutions to pursue their ends in accordance with their convictions.

It is important to recall just what the administration did in that instance. The HHS rule did not assert that people should have the freedom to use contraceptive or abortive drugs — which of course they do have in our country. It did not even say that the government facilitate people’s access to these drugs — which it does today and has done for decades. Rather, the rule required that the Catholic Church and other religious entities should facilitate people’s access to contraceptive and abortive drugs. It aimed to turn the institutions of civil society into active agents of the government’s ends, even in violation of their fundamental religious convictions.

The idea is to hollow out the space  between the individual and the State, to clear it of the institutions of civil society that mediate between individual and state:

Indeed, the president and his administration don’t seem to have much use for that space at all. Even the family, which naturally stands between the individual and the community, is not essential. In May, the Obama campaign produced a Web slideshow called “The Life of Julia,” which follows a woman through the different stages of life and shows the many ways in which she benefits from public policies that the president advocates. It was an extraordinarily revealing work of propaganda, and what it revealed was just what the president showed us in Roanoke: a vision of society consisting entirely of the individual and the state. Julia’s life is the product of her individual choices enabled by public policies. She has an exceptional amount of direct contact with the federal government, yet we never meet her family. At the age of 31, we are told, “Julia decides to have a child” and “benefits from maternal checkups, prenatal care, and free screenings under health care reform.” She later benefits from all manner of educational, economic, and social programs, and seems to require and depend upon no one but the president.

[. . .]

The Left’s disdain for civil society is thus driven above all not by a desire to empower the state without limit, but by a deeply held concern that the mediating institutions in society — emphatically including the family, the church, and private enterprise — are instruments of prejudice, selfishness, backwardness, and resistance to change, and that in order to establish our national life on more rational grounds, the government needs to weaken and counteract them.

The Right’s high regard for civil society, meanwhile, is driven above all not by a disdain for government but by a deeply held belief in the importance of our diverse and evolved societal forms, without which we could not hope to secure our liberty. Conservatives seek mechanisms and institutions to bring implicit social knowledge to bear on our troubles, while progressives seek the authority and power to bring explicit technical knowledge to bear on them.

[. . .]

To ignore what stands between the state and the citizen is to disregard the essence of American life. To clear away what stands between the state and the citizen is to extinguish the sources of American freedom. The president is right to insist that America works best when Americans work together, but government is just one of the many things we do together, and it is only rarely the most important of them.

One of the problems with Romney is that he has no clue as to what the battle is really about.  He thinks solely in economic terms.  Paul Ryan or somebody should force the affable milque-toast to study Steinitz's piece and then give him a test on it.

ButI'll give Mitt this: his pick of Ryan as running mate was courageous and intelligent.

A Hitchcock-Serling Coincidence

I've been watching old Alfred Hitchcock re-runs from '63 and '64.  I must have seen some of these as a kid, but I've forgotten them all.  On the night of 10 August I saw "The Magic Shop."  What struck me was how similar in theme this is to the Twilight Zone episode, "It's a Good Life." 

The very next morning  I checked to see if a Twilight Zone episode was airing on the Sci Fi channel.  There was, and it happened to be "It's a Good Life."  So that is the coincidence, and you can make of it what you will.

Hitchcock is good, but he can't hold a candle to Serling. Rod Serling's 1959-1964 series was  and is  TV at its very best.  The best of the episodes are inexhaustibly rich especially 50 years later.  They provide an insight into the speech patterns, the mores, the sartorial habits, the politics, and the cinematography of the day. More importantly, many of them are morality tales that convey important moral truths and life lessons.  Serling was above all a moral teacher.  We have nothing like this on TV today.  What we have are endless quantities of degrading garbage.

On Living Too Long

Old age for some is a sort of afterlife in a foreign country.  One has lived beyond one's own time and now finds oneself among strangers.

Differences Between Wishing and Hoping

I wish, I wish, I wish in vain
That we could sit simply in that room again
Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat
I'd give it all gladly
If our lives could be like that.

Bob Dylan's Dream

Wishing and hoping are both intentional attitudes: they take an object.  One cannot just wish, or just hope, in the way one can just feel miserable or elated.  If I wish, I wish for something.  The same holds for hoping. How then do the two attitudes differ?  They differ in terms of time, modality, and justification.

1.  The object of hope lies in the future, of necessity.  One cannot hope for what was or what is.  In his dream, Dylan wished to be together again with his long lost friends.  But he didn't hope to be together with them again.  Coherent: 'I wish I had never been born.'  Incoherent: 'I hope I had never been born.'  Coherent: 'I wish I was with her right now.'  Incoherent: 'I hope I was with her right now.'

Although hope is always and of necessity future-directed, wishing is not temporally restricted.  'I wish I were 30 again.' 'I wish I were in Hawaii now.'  'I wish to live to be a hundred.'   I cannot hope to be 30 again or hope to be in Hawaii now.  But I can both wish and hope to live to be a hundred.

Can I hope to be young again?  That's ambiguous.  I could hope for a medical breakthrough that would rejuvenate  a person in the sense of making him physiologically young  and I could hope to undergo such a rejuvenation.  But I cannot hope to be calendrically young again.

2. One can hope only for what one considers to be possible.  (What one considers to be possible may or may be possible.)  But one can wish for both what one considers to be the possible and what one consider to be  impossible.  I can hope for a stay of execution, but not that I should continue to exist as a live animal after being hanged.  ('Hanged' not 'hung'!)  I can hope to survive my bodily death, but only if I consider it possible that I survive my bodily death. But I can wish for what I know to be impossible such as being young again, being able to run a 2:30 marathon, visiting  Mars next year.

3. There is no sense in demanding of one who wishes to be cured of cancer that he supply his grounds or justification for so wishing.  "Are you justified in wishing to be cancer-free?"  But if he hopes to beat his cancer, then one can appropriately request the grounds of the hope.

If I both wish and hope for something I consider possible that lies in the future, then the difference between wishing and hoping rests on the fact that one can appropriately request grounds for hoping but not grounds for wishing.

I'll end with my favorite counterfactual conditional:  'If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.' 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Time Signatures

4/4 is the most common time signature, and 3/4 is fairly common.  James Ray's If You Gotta Make a Fool Of Somebody (1961) is a good example of 3/4 time.  Another beautiful example is Dylan's "Farewell Angelina," here sung by Joan Baez.

Dylan's Mr Tambourine Man is in 2/4 time  -- 1-2, 1-2, 1-2 -- but the Byrds cast it into a danceable 4/4.

The Beatles' A Little Help From My Friends is in 4/4 time, but Joe Cocker covered it in 3/4.

Probably the most popular tune in 5/4 time is Dave Bruebeck's aptronymic Take Five from 1959.  Jethro Tull's Living in the Past (1969) is also in 5/4 time.

You can guess the time signature of Cannonball Adderley's 74 Miles Away. I like McCoy Tyner's version of this even better, but couldn't find it.

Peter Gabriel's Solsbury Hill is also mainly in 7/4 time.

A Quick Proof that 'Exist(s)' is not Univocal

Suppose we acquiesce for the space of this post in QuineSpeak. 

Then 'Horses exist' says no more and no less than that 'Something is a horse.'  And 'Harry exists' says no more and no less than that 'Something is Harry.'  But the 'is' does not have the same sense in both translations.  The first is the 'is' of predication while the second is the 'is' of identity.  The difference  is reflected in the standard notation.  The propositional function in the first case is Hx.  The propositional function in the second case is x = h.  Immediate juxtaposition of predicate constant and free variable is the sign for predication.  '=' is the sign for identity.  Different signs for different concepts.  Identity is irreducible to predication which is presumably why first-order predicate logic with identity is so-called.

Those heir to the Fressellian position, such as Quine and his epigoni, dare not fudge the distinction between the two senses of 'is' lately noted. That, surely, is a cardinal tenet of their brand of analysis.

So even along Quinean lines, the strict univocity of 'exist(s)' across all its uses cannot be upheld.  It cannot be upheld across the divide that separates general from singular existentials.

Or have I gone wrong somewhere?

Fruits of Civilization

One of the fruits of civilization  is that it allows some of us to reflect upon civilization and its fruits -- and its discontents.

Did the State Make You Great?

Krauthammer 'nails it' brilliantly (emphasis added):

To say that all individuals are embedded in and the product of society is banal. Obama rises above banality by means of fallacy: equating society with government, the collectivity with the state. Of course we are shaped by our milieu. But the most formative, most important influence on the individual is not government. It is civil society, those elements of the collectivity that lie outside government: family, neighborhood, church, Rotary club, PTA, the voluntary associations that Tocqueville understood to be the genius of America and source of its energy and freedom.

Moreover, the greatest threat to a robust, autonomous civil society is the ever-growing Leviathan state and those like Obama who see it as the ultimate expression of the collective.

(One quibble: Krauthammer's "product of society" is too strong. But even the great stumble on occasion.)

How can Obama be so stupid that he doesn't understand the above?  And how could we be so(collectively) stupid as to have elected  the incompetent?  (Don't blame me: I held my nose and voted for the effete and superannuated McCain.)

Obama commits a grotesque straw man fallacy when he imputes to conservatives and libertarians the view that each of us pulled himself up by his own bootstraps ex nihilo.  That goes hand-in-glove with a fallacy of false alternative: either you did it all on your own, or government did it for you.  As Krauthammer in effect points out, the institutions of civil society are neither the creation of the individual nor government agencies. 

Obama Backs Race-Based Disciplinary Policies

Should we be surprised? 

President Barack Obama is backing a controversial campaign by progressives to regulate  schools’ disciplinary actions so that members of major racial and ethnic groups  are penalized at equal rates, regardless of individuals’ behavior.

"Regardless of individuals' behavior."  Think about that.

Yes, Vote Fraud's Real

There is no need to play the 'numbers game.'  The photo ID requirement is a matter of principle. 

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.

But if you want to play the 'numbers game' voter fraud  does occur often enough to be a serious problem.

Et in Arcadia Ego

Death says, "I too am in Arcadia."

The contemplation of death, one's own in particular, cures one of the conceit that this life has a meaning absolute and self-contained.  Only those who live naively in this world, hiding from themselves the fact of death, flirting with transhumanist arcadian and other utopian fantasies, can accord to this life the ultimate in reality and importance.

If you deny a life beyond the grave, I won't consider you foolish or even unreasonable.  But if you anticipate a paradise on earth, I will consider you both.  And if you work to attain such a state in defiance of morality, then I will consider you evil, as evil as the Communists of the 20th century who murdered 100 million to realize their impossible fantasies. 

Guercino – Et in Arcadia Ego – 1618-22 – Roma, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica di Palazzo Barberini

Voter ID Laws are Not Like a Poll Tax

Here we go again:

First, a voter restriction is like a poll tax when its authors use voting  fraud as a pretext for legislation that has little to do with voting fraud.

Second, it is like a poll tax when it creates only a small nuisance to some  voters, but for other groups it erects serious barriers to the ballot.

Third, it is like a poll tax when it has crude partisan advantage as its most  immediate aim.

1.  Presumably the issue concerns the requirement that voters produce government-issued photo ID at polling places.  Voting fraud is obviously not a 'pretext' for such a requirement but a good reason to put such a requirement in place.  The claim that photo ID legislation has little to do with voting fraud is ludicrous.  The whole point of it is to prevent fraud.

2.  It is just silly to claim that phtoto ID "erects a serious barrier to the ballot."  If you don't have a driver's license, you can easily acquire photo ID from a DMV office for a nominal sum.  You are going to need it anyway for all sorts of other purposes such as cashing checks.  In the state  of Arizona, the ID is free for those 65 and older and for those on Social Security disability.  For others the fee is nominal: $12 for an ID valid for 12 years. 

3.  Those who support photo ID are aiming at "crude partisan advantage?"  How is that supposed to work?  Do non-Democrats get such an advantage when they stop  voter fraud?  Is the idea that it it par for the course that Dems should cheat, and so, when they are prevented from cheating, their opponents secure a"crude partisan advantage?"

What we have is crude psychological projection.  Unable to own up to their own unsavory win-at-all-costs motivations, liberals impute to conservatives unsavory motives.  "You want to disenfranchise blaxcks and Hispanics!"  As if these minorities are so bereft of life skills that they lack, or cannot acquire, a simple photo ID.  Note also the trademark liberal misuse of language. 

To disenfranchise is to deprive of a right, in particular, the right to vote.  But only some people have the right to vote.  Felons and children do not have the right to vote, nor do non-citizens.  You do not have the right to vote in a certain geographical area simply because you are a sentient being residing in that area.  Otrherwise, my cats would have the right to vote. Now a requirement that one prove that one has the right to vote is not to be confused with a denial of the right to vote.

My right to vote is one thing, my ability to prove I have the right another.  If I cannot prove that I am who I claim to be on a given occasion, then I won't be able to exercise my right to vote on that occasion; but that is not to say that I have been 'disefranchised.'  For I haven't be deprived of my right to vote; I have merely been prevented from exercising my right due to my inability do prove my identity.

I am still looking for a decent argument against photo ID. 

The Space of Scholars

The space of scholars is made safe by the blood of warriors.

The Double 'L'

Marvellous, travelling, tranquillity.  Not that the single 'l' is wrong.  It could be argued that the extra 'l' does no work and just takes up space.  What's my rule?  Being a conservative across the board, I am a linguistic conservative, though  flexibly such and not hide-bound like some people I could mention.  So I may well split an infinitive if the forward momentum of the sentence demands it.  And the muscular elegance to which my prose style aspires often requires the use of contractions, as above, fourth sentence.  The  schoolmarms be damned.  And great writers too, such as George Orwell, when they presume to dictate iron-clad rules of good writing.  Here I show that Orwell falls into traps of his own setting.

The Latin tranquillitas sports two 'l's.  So to honor that fact I write 'tranquillity.'  You are free to drop the second 'l' -- or the first. 

My rule, I suppose, is to favor the old way as long as the archaicism does not mount to the point of distraction.

One of the fruits of civilization is that it allows some of us to occupy ourselves with bagatelles such as this.

But don't forget that civilization is thin ice and that we must be prepared to defend it with blood and iron.  (A sentence slouching toward mixed metaphor?)

Cats Crepuscular

My wife observed last night that our young cats are very active at twilight.  No surprise there, said I.  Neither diurnal nor nocturnal in their hunting habits, housecats are a crepuscular species of critter.  The word derives from the Latin crepuscula, twilight.  But there is morning twilight and evening twilight.  And so critters crepuscular are either matinal or vespertine or both.  Matins are prayers said in the morning while vespers are prayers said in the evening.  Cats, however, prey rather than pray.  When not on the prowl or in play they sleep, having been made in the image and likeness of Sloth.

There is also an interesting etymological connection between Hesperus (Hesperos), the Evening Star, and vespers.  Hesperos/Hesperus became the Latin Vesperus.  Eosphoros/Phosphoros became the Latin Luciferus, Lucifer, light-bearer, from L. lux, lucis, light.  Interesting that the Bearer of Light in his later career became the Prince of Darkness.

Eosphoros and Hesperos in their later careers went from being gods to being mere Fregean senses, mere modes of representation, Darstellungsweisen,  and conduits of reference. 

Here a cool cat name of Thelonious Sphere Monk bangs out "Crepuscule with Nellie."  Was he on the prowl with her, or just hanging out in the gloaming?

A Test for Marital Compatibility: Travelling Together

I just heard Dennis Prager say on his nationally syndicated radio show that travelling  together is a good test for marital compatibility. Sage advice.

Long before I had heard of Prager I subjected my bride-to-be to such a test.  I got the idea from the delightful 1982 movie The Diner.  One of the guys who hung out at the diner tested for marital suitability by administering a football quiz to his fiance.  That gave me the idea of taking my future wife on a cross-country trip from Cleveland, Ohio to Los Angeles, California in my Volkswagen bus.  This was not a camper bus, but a stripped-down model, so the amenities were meager-to-nonexistent.  I threw a mattress in the back, made some curtains, and hit the road.  That was in the summer of '82. The soundtrack from The Diner was one of the tapes we listened to on the way. I recall reading the Stephen King novel Cujo about the dog from hell when my inamorata drove.

We slept mainly at rest stops.  I had an old .38 Special with me for protection, which fortunately proved unnecessary.  What did we do for showers?  I don't think we took any.  We cleaned up at the rest stop facilities like true vagabundos and moved on.

One dark and starry night I pulled off Interstate 10 in  some desolate stretch of the Mojave desert. Wifey-to-be was scared but it was a memorable moonless star-studded night.  We made it to L. A., saw family and friends, then headed up old U. S. 395 along the eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada to Bishop, Cal,  where we visited some more of my people, then north to Reno, Nevada where we hooked up with I-80 and  pointed the old bus East.

Dear one took the rigors of that  trip 30 years ago like a trouper, and passed the test with flying colors.  We got married the following summer and remain happily married 29 summers later.

When I told the story to a feminazi some years back she gave me a hard and disapproving look.  She didn't like that I imposed a marital compatibility test upon my lady love.  Bitch!  So here's another bit of free and friendly advice. Marry an angel, never a bitch.  Life's enough of a bitch. You don't need to marry one.  Does your belllicosity need an outlet?  Fight outside the home.  Home should be an oasis of peace and tranquillity.

So once again I agree with Prager.  Check her or him out on the road before heading for the altar. 

From the Inside of a Fortune Cookie

It being so cold in these parts this time of year, I had a big bowl of hot and sour soup for lunch at a local Chinese joint.  The message inside the fortune cookie read:

Luck favors prepared mind.

In the literary vicinity of that conservative favorite:

The harder I work, the luckier I get.

Existence and Plural Predication: Could 'Exist(s)' be a First-Level Non-Distributive Predicate?

'Horses exist' is an example of an affirmative general existential sentence. What is the status of the predicate '___ exist' in such a sentence? One might maintain that 'exist(s)' is a second-level predicate; one might maintain that it is a first-level distributive predicate; one might maintain that it is a first-level non-distributive (collective) predicate. 

1. Frege famously maintained that 'exist(s)' is a second-level predicate, a predicate of concepts only, and never a first-level predicate, a predicate of objects.  Russell followed him in this.  A consequence of this view is that 'Horses exist' is not about what it seems to be about, and does not say what it seems to say.  It seems to be about horses, and seems to say of them that they exist.  But on Frege's analysis the sentence is about the concept horse and says of it, not that it exists, but that it has one or more instances.

Paradoxically, the sentence ''Horses exist'  on  Frege's  analysis says about a non-horse something that cannot be true of a horse or of any concrete thing!

For an interesting comparison, consider 'Horses surround my house.'  Since no horse could surround my house, it is clear that the sentence is not about each of the horses that surround my house.  What then is it about?  One will be tempted to reach for some such singularist analysis as: 'A set of horses surrounds my house.'  But this won't do since no such abstract object as a set could surround anything.  So if the sentence is really about a set of horses then it cannot say what it appears to say.  It must be taken to say something different from what it appears to say.  So what does 'Horses surround my house' say about a set if it is about a set? 

One might be tempted to offer this translation: 'A set of horses is such that its members are surrounding my house.' But this moves us in a circle, presupposing as it does that we already understand the irreducibly plural predication 'Horses surround my house.'  After all, if the members of a set of horses surround my house that is no different from horses surrounding my house.

The circularity here is structurally similar to that of the Fregean analysis.  If 'Horses exist' is about a concept, and says of that concept that it has instances, then of course those instances are horses that exist.  So the attempt to remove existence from individuals and make of it a property of concepts ends up reinstating  existence as a 'property' of individuals.

Pursuing the analogy a bit further, the refusal to grant that there are irreducibly plural predications such as 'Horses surround my house' is like the refusal to grant that there are irreducibly first-level existence sentences.

2.  Pursuing the analogy still further, is it possible to construe the predicate in 'Horses exist' as a non-distributive first-level predicate like the predicate in 'Horses surround my house'?  First some definitions.

A predicate F is distributive just in case it is analytic that whenever some things are F, then each is F.  Thus a distributive predicate is one the very meaning of which dictates that if it applies to some things, then it applies to each of them.  'Blue' is an example.  If some things are blue, then each of them is blue.

If a predicate is not distributive, then it is non-distributive (collective).  If some Occupy-X nimrods have the building surrounded, it does not follow that each such nimrod has the building surrounded.  If some students moved a grand piano into my living room, it does not follow that each student did.  If bald eagles are becoming extinct, it does not follow that each bald eagle is becoming extinct.  Individual animals die, but no individual animal ever becomes extinct. If the students come from many different countries, it does not follow that each comes from many different countries.  If horses have an interesting evolutionary history, it does not follow that each horse has an interesting evolutionary history.

I will assume for the purposes of this post that 'Horses surround my house' and 'Horses have an interesting evolutionary history' are irreducibly plural predications.  (That they are plural is obvious; that they are irreducibly plural is not.  For arguments see Thomas McKay, Plural Predication.)   And of course they are first-level as well: they are about horses, not about concepts or properties or propositional functions.  Now is 'Horses exist' assimilable to 'Horses surround my house' or is it assimilable to 'Horses are four-legged'? The predicate in the later is a distributive first-level predicate, whereas the predicate in 'Horses surround my house' is a non-distributive first-level predicate.

I am assuming that the 'Fressellian' second-level analysis is out, but I won't repeat the arguments I have given ad nauseam elsewhere.

I do not understand how 'exist(s)' could be construed as a non-distributive  predicate.  For if it is non-distributive, then it is possible that some things exist without it being the case that each of them exists.  And that I do not understand.  If horses exist, then each horse exsts.

Peter van Inwagen seems (though it not clear to me) to be saying that 'exists(s)' is a non-distributive first-level predicate. He compares 'Horses exist' to 'Horses have an interesting evolutionary history.'   'Horses exist,' he tells us, is equivalent to 'The number of horses is not zero.'  ("Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment," p. 483)  But he denies that 'exists(s)' is second-level.  To say that the number of horses is not zero is to predicate of horses that they number more than zero. (483)  It is not to predicate of the concept horse that the cardinality of its extension is more than zero.

Now we cannot say of a horse that it surrounds a house or has an interesting evolutionary history.  We can say that of horses, but not of a horse.  Can we say of a horse that it numbers more than zero?  We can of course say of horses that they number more than zero. But I don't see how we can sensibly say of an individual horse that it numbers more than zero.  Perhaps Frege was wrong to think that number words can only be predicates of concepts which are ones-over-many.  Perhaps all one needs is the many, the plurality.  But it seems one needs at least that to swerve as logical subject.  If this is right, and to exist is to number more than zero, then we cannot sensibly say of an individual that it exists.  We can say this of individuals but not of an individual.  But surely we can say of an individual horse that it exists.  So I conclude that 'exist(s)' cannot be a first-level non-distributive predicate.

3.  And so one is driven  to the conclusion that 'exist(s)' is a first-level distributive predicate.  'Horses exist' says of each individual horse that it exists.  But isn't this equally objectionable?   The vast majority of horses are such that I have no acquaintance with them at all.  So how can my use of 'Horses exist' be about each horse? 

It is at this juncture that Frege gets his revenge:

We must not think that I mean to assert something of an African chieftain from darkest Africa who is wholly unknown to me, when I say 'All men are mortal.'  I am not saying anything about either this man or that man, but I am subordinating the concept man to the concept of what is mortal.  In the sentence 'Plato is mortal' we have an instance of subsumption, in the sentence 'All men are mortal' one of subordination.  What is being spoken about here is a concept, not an individual thing. (Posthumous Writings, p. 213)

Plato falls under the concept man; he does not fall within it.  The concept mortal does not fall under the concept man -- no concept is a man -- but falls within it.  When I say that all men are mortal I am not talking about individual men, but about the concept man, and I am saying that this concept has as part of its content the subconcept mortal. 

Similarly, my utterance of 'Horses exist' cannot be about each horse; it is about the concept horse, and says that it has instances -- which is the view I began by rejecting and for god reason.

We seem to have painted ourselves into an aporetic corner.  No exit. Kein Ausgang. A-poria. 

Conservatives, Liberals, and Happiness

It turns out that conservatives are happier than liberals.  But why?

Conservative explanation.  Marriage and religious faith are conducive to happiness.  More conservatives are married than liberals, and more practice a religion. Ergo, conservatives as a group are happier than liberals as a group.

Liberal explanation.  Conservatives are happier because they turn a blind eye to the injustices of the world.  They are oblivious to inequality.  And when they do see it,they rationalize it. Ignorance is bliss.  Conservatives naively believe that people can better themselves by the practice of the old virtues of frugality, perseverance, hard work, self-control, deferral of gratification, and the like, when the truth is that people are products of their environment and need government help to do well.

As a conservative, I of course consider the liberal explanation to be bogus.

Do we conservatives, ostrich-like, ignore injustice?  The answer depends on what one takes justice to be.  The liberal tendency is to see justice as fairness, and to understand fairness in terms of material equality, equality of wealth and equality of power.  A just society for a liberal, then, is one in which material inequality is either eliminated or severely mitigated.  Along these lines the prominent political philosopher John Rawls puts forth his famous Difference Principle the gist of which is that social and economic inequalities in a society are justified only if they benefit the worst off, i.e., only if the worst off are better of than they would have been without the inequality.

But why should my having more than you be considered unjust unless it benefits you?  Of course, my having more than you will typically benefit you. "A rising tide lifts all boats."   My roof was leaking  in two places. Now I could have done an amateur patch job myself: roofing ain't rocket science.  But I decided to have the entire house professionally re-roofed with all that that entails in terms of new flashing, etc.  My ability to afford such an expensive job gave support to a local company and all its jobbers, not to mention the crew of workers who had employment for a week.  And having extra dough, I laid $60 in tips on the workers.  I could give a hundred examples of how my having more than certain others benefits those others.  When's the last time a poor man made a loan to a friend, or a contribution to a charity?  How many poor people give people jobs?  And of course people like me who are modestly well-off have been benefited in innumerable ways by people who are wealthy.  Think of those who have endowed art museums and university chairs. 

But suppose, contrary to fact, that my having more did not benefit others. Why should that affect the justice of my having more?  If I work harder, longer, and smarter than you, and practice the old-fashioned virtues that liberals mock even when they themselves owe their success to them, then it is a good bet that I will end up with more than you.  Unless I engage in force or fraud I am entitled to what I earn or what I inherit or what falls out of the sky into my lap.  Take my intelligence and my good genes.  Do I deserve them?  No, but I have a right to them. I have a right to them and right to what I acquire by their use. 

I grant that a certain amount of luck is ingredient in every success.  But I have a right to my good luck even though I don't deserve it.  Of course, liberals often 'see' luck where there is no luck at all but  hard work and the exercise of conservative virtues.  Hence the conservative saying, "The harder I work the luckier I become."   The point is that what the liberal misconstrues as luck is really not luck at all but effort.  Should we help life's unlucky?  I should think so.  But not if the helping is really a harming, a making of the recipients of charity weaker and more dependent.  

Liberals consider it legitimate for the state to use its coercive powers to promote material equality by taking from the highly productive and giving to the unproductive and less productive.  This cannot work in the long run.  The well-off will resist being ripped off by government functionaries who line their own pockets and feather their nests with perquisites purchased at taxpayer expense.  Many will expatriate.  Government, it is clear, is too often a hustle like any hustle rigged by those who benefit from it for their own benefit.  Government needn't be a hustle, but too often it is, which is why vigilance on the part of the citizenry is necessary to keep it in check.

The value of liberty trumps that of material equality.  This is a key difference between conservative and libertarian on the one side and leftist on the other.  Naturally I believe in formal equality, equality of treatment, treating like cases in a like manner, not discriminating on the basis of irrelevant criteria such as race, sex, or creed.

Of course, it depends on the creed. If you are a radical Muslim out to impose sharia and subvert our way of life, and act upon your beliefs, then you ought to be deported, or jailed, or executed, depending on the nature of your actions.  You should never have been let in in the first place.  After all, toleration, though a good thing, has limits, and if he do not see that it has limits then you are hopelessly foolish.  In a word, you are a liberal.

For more on toleration and its limits see my aptly titled Toleration category.

Victor Davis Hanson on Gore Vidal

Here.  Excerpt:

For all his claims of erudition, Vidal suffered the wages of the public autodidact. I noticed he quoted Latin ad nauseam — and nearly always with his nouns and adjectives not just in the wrong cases (especially the confusion of the accusative and ablative in preposition phrases), but predictably in the fashion of those who like to copy down Latin phrases but cannot read a complete Latin sentence. By his sixties, Vidal had degenerated into a conspiracy theorist, and his embarrassing late-life infatuation with Timothy McVeigh caught the eye of the goddess Nemesis.

Systematic Deracination

To deracinate is to uproot.  W. K.  sends this:

That article about political correctness in the universities you linked to reminded me of David Conway's comments in A Defence of the Realm about the 'systematic deracination' of the citizens of western liberal democracies since World War Two:

Through changes in educational curricula, plus other cultural changes, most notably in public broadcasting, the cultural majorities in these societies have been made increasingly unfamiliar with their national histories and traditions. Without adequate historical knowledge of their national histories and without encouragement and opportunity to participate in national traditions, the members of a society cannot be expected to have much understanding of or affection for them.

Solzhenitsyn put this chillingly: 'to destroy a people, you must first sever their roots'. Nothing is more important to remedying this than reclaiming education. Blogs like yours help. I teach English, and I try to do my bit by enunciating the following politically incorrect truths to all my classes. Like the author of the article you linked to, I'm frustrated by 'engagement with political presuppositions often quite peripheral at best — and more often directly opposed — to one’s own scholarly purposes', but the fact that it is necessary is a reminder that the spiritual reality that the scholar defends is vaster, richer and more profound than the narrow intellectual lists where he fights. The advantage of this list is that it frees one up to get on with the more important matter of showing why, for example, Shakespearean tragedy is worth reading. And it prevents one from assenting to falsehoods - to do which is to be complicit in evil.

I doubt you'll learn anything from it, but you might find it interesting anyway; the ones in red are, I think, the most politically incorrect.

  

The slave trade

 

The British weren’t the first to practise slavery, but they were the first to abolish it, first at home, then in the colonies, then throughout the world. Be proud of that.

 

More than three quarters of the captives sold to Europeans were provided by the Africans themselves from raids and war. The African powers remained in control of the slaves as long as the slave trade lasted. They entered into the slave trade entirely of their own accord. There was no opposition to slavery even in principle in black Africa. Western-style abolitionism had no impact: African chiefs sent delegations to the West to protest the abolition of the slave trade because they found it so profitable.

 

Muslims were the greatest slave traders, enslaving seventeen-million people. There was never a Muslim abolitionist movement. The Koran assumes and accepts slavery.

 

Marxism

 

Communists murdered over one-hundred million people in the twentieth century.

 

Note how the Western intellectuals who criticise capitalist democracies vote with their feet by living in them, tellingly opting not to emigrate to North Korea or a Cuban prison state.

 

Sexism

Historically, nowhere in the world have women been better treated than in Christian nations. In his Confessions, St. Augustine wrote the first tribute in history to an ordinary woman, his mother, Monica.  The Divine Comedy is highest praise of a woman ever. According to Christianity, the Virgin Mary is the greatest human being ever to have lived. Be proud of that.

The accusers during the witch hunts were overwhelmingly women.

One-hundred and fifty years ago, ninety-five percent of men didn't have the vote.

In nineteenth-century England, more novels were published by women than by men. And they wrote under their own names, contrary to the feminist myth that women were obliged to take male names.

Western literature starts with an account of men fighting over a woman. Listen to Achilles: ‘Why must we battle Trojans, men of Argos? Why, why in the world if not for Helen with her loose and lustrous hair?’And Odysseus endures all perils and resists all temptations – even immortality – to get back home to his wife. Medieval chivalric literature also testifies to the fact that women were highly esteemed.

Homosexuality

Plato made sodomy illegal in his Laws.

Poets and orators did not express longings to return to their catamites.

Adult Athenians who acted as catamites were excluded from all offices in public life, not even being permitted to address the assembly.

Dead White Males

Most great literature is written by dead white males. Postmodernists think that’s explained by ‘oppression’ and ‘privilege’, but there are good reasons for it:

Whites have the highest IQ of any race (see the cold-climate theory of IQ).

Men are disproportionately represented at the extremes of intelligence (morons and geniuses): above the IQ level of 170, the genius level, there are thirty timesas many men as women. (Again, there are evolutionary reasons for this.)

Before writers are acknowledged to be great, their work must be subjected to the test of time, which outlasts any individual's lifespan.

Christianity

William E. Lecky, an atheist, makes the following point in his History of European Morals: ‘The vast change in the status of women must be manifest to all after Christianity had superseded the unlimited license of the pagan Empire.’ He mentions:

Christianity's absolute prohibition of sexual indulgence outside marriage

The security of wives by the prohibition of divorce

The legal rights of guardianship of children hitherto reserved to men

The inheritance of widows

"There can be little doubt that reverence for the Virgin Mary has done much to elevate and purify the ideal of woman and soften the manners of men."

The "redeeming and ennobling features of the age of chivalry which no succeeding change of habit or belief has wholly destroyed."

Also:

Christians preached that there was no separate baptism for men and women. All were one in Christ.

Christians did not expose baby girls at birth.

Christians honoured women who defied emperors, centurions and soldiers to witness to the Faith.

Christians were the first to educate women.

Christians were the first to have separate prison cells for men and women.

Merton, Marilyn, and David Carradine

Today, August 5th, is the 50th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe's death.  What follows is a post from 13 June 2009.

....................

Thomas Merton, Journal (IV, 240), writing about Marilyn Monroe around the time of her death in 1962:

. . .the death was as much a symbol as the bomb – symbol of uselessness and of tragedy, of misused humanity.

He’s right of course: Monroe’s was a life wasted on glamour, sexiness, and frivolity. She serves as a lovely
warning: Make good use of your human incarnation! Be in the flesh, but not of the flesh.

The fascination with empty celebrity, a fascination as inane as its object, says something about what we have become in the West. We in some measure merit the revulsion of the Islamic world. We value liberty, and rightly, but we fail to make good use of it as Marilyn and Anna Nicole Smith failed to make good use of their time in the body. Curiously enough, a failure to make good use of one's time in the body often leads to its early destruction, and with it, perhaps, the possibility of spiritual improvement.

Curiously, Merton and Carradine both died in Bangkok, the first of accidental electrocution on 10 December 1968, the second a few days ago apparently of autoerotic asphyxiation.  The extremity and perversity of the latter practice is a clear proof of the tremendous power of the sex drive to corrupt and derange the human spirit if it is allowed unfettered expression.  One with any spiritual sensitivity and depth ought to shudder at the thought of ending his life in the manner of Carradine, in the heteronomy and diremption of the flesh, utterly enslaved to one's lusts, one's soul emptied out into the dust.  To risk one's very life in pursuit of intensity of orgasm  shows a mind unhinged.  Thinking of Carradine's frightful example, one ought to pray, as Merton did thousands of times: Ora pro nobis peccatoribus.  Nunc et in hora mortis.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: James Burton, Master of the Telecaster

James Burton is the legendary sideman responsible for those deceptively simple but perfect guitar solos on such early  Rick Nelson recordings as Hello Mary Lou and Travelin' Man and It's Up to You.

Here Burton trades licks with Bruce Springsteen under the watchful eye of Roy Orbison.  By the way, "Pretty Woman," blending as it does the Dionysian with the tender is a candidate for the office of perfect R & R song.

Playing "Johnny B. Goode" with E. P.

Working Man's Blues

Invective, Philosophy, and Politics

A new reader (who may not remain a reader for long) wrote in to say that he enjoyed my philosophical entries but was "saddened" by the invective I employed in one of my political posts.

I would say that the use of invective is justifiable in polemical writing.  Of course, it is out of place in strictly philosophical writing and discussion, but that is because philosophy is inquiry into the truth, not defense of what one antecedently takes to be the truth.  When philosophy becomes polemical, it ceases to be philosophy.  Philosophy as it is actually practiced, however, is often degenerate and falls short of this ideal.  But the ideal is a genuine and realizable one.  We know that it is realizable because we know of cases when it has been realized.  By contrast, political  discourse either cannot fail to be polemical or is normally polemical. 

Let me then hazard the following stark formulation, one that admittedly requires more thought and may need qualification.  When philosophy becomes polemical, it ceases to be philosophy.  But when political discourse ceases to be polemical, it ceases to be political discourse.

A bold pronunciamento, not in its first limb, but in its second.  The second limb is true if the Converse Clausewitz Principle is true: Politics is war conducted by other means.  Whether the CCP is true is a tough nut that I won't bite into just yet.  But it certainly seems to be true as a matter of fact.  Whether it must be true is a further question.

Another possible support for the second limb  is the thought that man, contrary to what Aristotle famously said, is not by nature  zoon politikon, a political animal.  No doubt man is by nature a social animal.  But there is no necessity in rerum natura that there be a polis, a state.  It is arguably not natural there be a state.  The state is a necessary evil given our highly imperfect condition.  We need it, but we would be better off without it, given its coercive nature, if we could get on without it.  But we can't get on without it given our fallen nature.  So it is a necessary evil: it's bad that we need it, but (instrumentally) good that we have it given that we need it.

Of course my bold (and bolded) statement needs qualification.  Here is a counterexample to the second limb.  Two people are discussing a political question.  They agree with each other in the main and are merely reinforicing each other and refining the formulation of their common position.  That is political discourse, but it is not polemical.  So I need to make a distinction between 'wide' and 'narrow' political discourse.  Work for later.

Now for a concrete example of an issue in which polemic and the use of invective is justified.

Can one reasonably maintain that the photo ID requirement at polling places 'disenfrachises' blacks and other minorities as hordes of liberals maintain?  No, one cannot.  To maintain such a thing is to remove oneself from the company of the reasonable.  It is not enough to calmly present one's argument on a question like this.  One must give them, but one must do more since it is not merely a theoretical question.  It is a crucially important practical question and it is important that the correct view prevail. If our benighted opponents cannot see that they are wrong, if they are not persuaded by our careful arguments, then they must be countered in other ways.  Mockery, derision, and the impugning of motives become appropriate weapons.  If you don't have a logical leg to stand on, then it becomes legitimate for me to call into question your motives and to ascribe unsavory ones to you. For, though you lack reasons for your views, you have plenty of motives; and because the position you maintain is deleterious, your motives must be unsavory or outright evil, assuming you are not just plain stupid.

Companion post: The Enmity Potential of Thought and Philosophy as Blood Sport

Coitus Reservatus and Beyond

It is a decidedly unpopular thing to say these days, but I'll say it anyway, echoing a conviction of William James: Much profit comes from avoiding sensory indulgence.

A much more difficult practice is to enter into it with cool detachment. Coitus reservatus, for example. But it is no more difficult than playing blindfold chess, which is not that difficult. One experiences the sensations attendant upon sexual intercourse while remaining indifferent to them: one regards them as mere sensations. (In my lexicon, coitus reservatus requires non-ejaculation, whereas coitus interruptus allows it, but outside the partner.)

Could one take it one step further and ejaculate with detachment? This is hard to imagine, but conceivable. After all, Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita was enjoined by Lord Krishna to kill with detachment. Try to imagine looking a man in the eyes and then running him through with a sword, all the while preserving one's equanimity. If it is possible to kill with detachment, then it is possible to ejaculate with detachment.

What could it mean to ejaculate with detachment? One would experience the sensations attendant upon the outflow of seminal fluid while viewing them as mere sensations. One would not lose oneself in them as is normally the case, but hold them at mental arm's length, or, to change metaphor, peer at them from within the fastness of the inner citadel. One would remain unattached. Like the chess master who keeps the draw in hand, one would keep one's ataraxia in hand.

Am I talking nonsense?

Companion post:  William James on Self-Denial

God, Socrates, and the Thin Theory

I maintain that there are modes of being.  To be precise, I maintain that it is intelligible that there be modes of being.  This puts me at odds with those, like van Inwagen, who consider the idea unintelligible and rooted in an elementary mistake:

. . . the thick conception of being is founded on the mistake of transferring what properly belongs to the nature of a chair -- or of a human being or of a universal or of God -- to the being of the chair. (Ontology, Identity, and Modality, Cambridge 2001, p. 4)

To clarify the issue let's consider God and creatures.  God exists.  Socrates exists.  God and Socrates differ in their natures.  For example, Socrates is ignorant of many things, and he knows it; God is ignorant of nothing.  God is unlimited in power; Socrates is not.  And so on.  So far van Inwagen will agree.  But I take a further step: God and Socrates differ in the way they exist: they differ in their mode of being.  So I make a three-fold distinction among the being (existence) of x, the nature (quiddity, whatness) of x, and the mode of being of x.  At most, van Inwagen makes a two-fold distinction between the being of x and the nature of x.  For me, God and Socrates differ quidditatively and existentially whereas for van Inwagen they differ only quidditatively (in respect of their natures).

One difference between God and Socrates is that God does not depend on anything for his existence  while Socrates and indeed everything other than God depends on God for his/its existence, and indeed, at every time at which he/it exists.  I claim that  that this is a difference in mode of existence: God exists-independently while creatures exist-dependently. There would be an adequate rebuttal of my claim if thin translations could be provided of the two independent clauses of the initial sentence of this paragraph.   By a thin translation of a sentence  I mean a sentence that is logically equivalent to the target sentence but does not contain 'exist(s) or cognates or 'is' used existentially.  Translations are easy to provide, but I will question whether they are adequate.   Let 'D' be a predicate constant standing for the dyadic predicate ' --- depends for its existence on ___.'  And let 'g' be an individual constant denoting God.

1. God does not depend on anything for his existence

1-t. (x)~Dgx. 

2. Everything other than God depends on God for its existence

2-t. (x)[(~(x = g) --> Dxg].

I will now argue that these thin translations are not adequate. 

I begin with the obvious point that the domain of the bound variable 'x' is a domain of existent objects, not of Meinongian nonexistent objects.    It is also obvious that the thin translations presuppose that each of these existents exists in the same sense of 'exists' and that no one of them differs from any other of them in respect of mode of existence.  Call this the three-fold presupposition.

Now consider the second translation, (2-t) above.   It rests on the three-fold presupposition, and it states that each of these existents, except God, stands in the relation D to God.  But this is incoherent since there cannot be a plurality of existents -- 'existent' applying univocally to all of them -- if each existent except God depends on God for its existence.  It ought to be obvious that if Socrates depends on God for his very existence at every moment, then he cannot exist in the same way that God exists.

I don't deny that there is a sense of 'exists' that applies univocally to God and Socrates.  This is the sense captured by the particular quantifier.  Something is (identically) God, and something else is (identically) Socrates.  'Is identical to something' applies univocally to God and Socrates.  My point, however, is that the x to which God is identical exists in a different way than the y to which Socrates is identical.  That 'is identical to something' applies univocally to both God and Socrates is obviously consistent with God and Socrates existing in different ways.

Here is another way to see the point.  To translate the target sentences into QuineSpeak one has to treat the presumably sui generis relation of existential dependence of creatures on God as if it were an ordinary external relation.  But such ordinary relations presuppose for their obtaining the existence of their relata. But surely, if Socrates is dependent on God for his very existence, then his existence cannot be a presupposition of his standing in the sui generis relation to God of existential dependence. He cannot already (logically speaking) exist if his very existence derives from God.

The point could be put as follows.  The Quinean logic presupposes ontological pluralism which consists of the following theses: everything exists; there is a plurality of existents; each existent exists in the same sense of 'exists.'  Ontological pluralism, however, is incompatible with classical theism according to which each thing distinct from God derives its existence from God.  On classical theism, everything other than God exists-derivatively and only God exists-underivatively.

On the Quinean scheme of ontological pluralism, the only way to connect existents is via relations that presuppose the existence of their relata.  So the relation of existential dependence that is part and parcel of the notion of divine creation must be misconstrued by the Quinean ontological pluralist as a relation that presupposes the logically antecedent existence of both God and creatures. 

The ontology presupposed by Quine's logic is incompatible with the theism van Inwagen espouses.  One cannot make sense of classical theism without a doctrine of modes of being.  One cannot be a classical theist and a thin theorist.

First They Came for My Chicken Sandwich . . .

Here. 

I have honestly never eaten a Chick-Fil-A sandwich.  So tomorrow I am going to try one.  This is in keeping with my maxim, 'No day without political incorrectness.'  Each day you must engage in one or more politically incorrect acts.  Some suggestions:

• Smoke a cigar
• Use standard English
• Practice with a firearm
• Read the Bible
• Enunciate uncomfortable truths inconsistent with the liberal Weltanschauung
• Read Maverick Philosopher
• Think for yourself
• Patronize Chick-Fil-A
• Give your baby baby formula
• Read the Constitution
• Cancel your subscription to The New York Times
• Find more examples of politically incorrect things to do

Obama's False Alternative

Obama apparently thinks that the only alternative to omni-intrusive, ever-expanding government is some sort of 'rugged individualism' according to which each individual pulls himself up by his own pony-tail in the manner of the celebrated Baron von Muenchhausen.  Bullshit. False alternative.  That he would push this false alternative is a good illustration of Obama's mendacity.  There is a way to avoid the extremes:  subsidiarity.

Political Correctness and Left-Wing Bias in the Universities

Liberal profs admit they would discriminate.

Captive Minds: Conformity and Campus Intellectuals  Excerpt (emphasis added):

Working for four years at this prairie college, I had many opportunities to see political correctness in action: in our so-called “equity” hiring practices, in changes to our course offerings to highlight racial and sexual diversity, and in the unfailing faux-reverence with which all aspects of Aboriginal literature and culture were treated, even down to a discussion about whether, in a job advertisement, we should refer to Canada by its indigenous name of Turtle Island.

But this was not a matter of political correctness alone: it was collective thinking in its most blatant form. There were striking parallels to what Czeslaw Milosz in The Captive Mind analyzes as the intellectual’s not-unwilling accommodations to Party orthodoxy. Milosz was interested not only in the compulsions of totalitarianism but in the significant emotional and psychological attractions of the Communist system: the reassurances and rewards of ceding responsibility for judgment, and the manifold reasons why an intellectual could find himself at home in conformity. Can it be that, even free of threat or compulsion, many intellectuals will choose to surrender their independence of thought? C.S. Lewis wrote about the seductive pleasures of belonging in “The Inner Ring,” brilliantly highlighting the desire planted deep in the heart of every human being to be approved, acknowledged as “one of us” by people we admire. To get into that charmed circle, Lewis warned, many of us will assent to nearly anything.

No matter the reigning orthodoxy — in our department it was, as in the vast majority of English departments across North America, Leftist, anti-Western, feminist, and multiculturalist — the desire to fall in line, and to compel or outlaw those who do not, seems to be an enduring fact of human nature.

Milosz's Captive Mind is essential reading.  Your humble correspondent has of course read it, but he has yet to blog it.  He really ought to. 

Friday Cat Blogging: Schroedinger's Cat

Photo ID: The 'It Would Disproportionately Affect Hispanic Voters' Argument

 Here (emphasis added) we find:

In March, the Justice Department denied the Lone Star State the necessary clearance for this new law, arguing that it would disproportionately affect Hispanic voters. Texas officials appealed.  To preserve the access of all citizens to the right to vote . . . the District Court should follow the Justice Department’s lead and strike down this highly suspect and unnecessary law.

What is interesting here is the role disproportionality plays in these leftist attempts at argument.  Let's see if we can uncover the 'logic' of these arguments.

Suppose people of Italian  extraction are disproportionately affected by anti-racketeering statutes.  Would this be a good reason to oppose such laws? Obviously not.  Why not? The reason is that the law targets the criminal behavior, not the ethnicity of the criminal. If it just so happens that people of Italian extraction are 'overrepresented' in the memberships of organized crime syndicates, then of course they will be 'disproportionately affected' by anti-racketeering laws.  So what?

It is very easy to multiply examples.  Who commits more rapes, men or women?  You know the answer.  Among men, in which age group will we find more rapists?  Will there be more rapists in the 15-45 age group or in the 45-75 age group?  You know the answer. Laws against rape will therefore disproportinately affect males aged 15-45.  Would this be a good reason to oppose such laws? Obviously not.  Why not? The reason is that the law targets the criminal behavior, not the age or sex of the criminal. 

Suppose that drunk drivers are predominantly Irish.  (Just suppose; I'm not saying it is true.)  Then laws against drunk driving would disproportionatey affect them.  Of course.  But that would be no reason to oppose such laws.  Is a law just only if it affects all groups equally or proportionately?  Of course not. 

Who is more likely to be a terrorist, a twenty-something  male Egyptian Muslim or a sixty-something Mormon matron?  Do you hesitate over this question?    The answer is clear, and you know what it is.  Are anti-terrorism laws therefore to be opposed on the ground that they disproportionately affect young Muslim males from middle eastern countries?

Should there be a quota system when it comes to rounding up terrorists?  "You can apprehend only as many Muslim terrorists as Buddhist terrorists."

Suppose child molesters are 'overrepresented' among Catholic priests.  Then laws against such molestation will disproportionarely affect them.  But so what?  It would be morally absurd to argue that such laws 'discriminate' against Catholic priests and should be struck down on the ground that Catholic priests  are disproportionately inclined to engage in child molestation.

Now we know that illegal aliens in Southwest states such as Texas  are predominantly, indeed overwhelmingly,  of Hispanic extraction.  So such aliens would be disproportionately affected by photo ID requirements.  But this is surely no argument against photo ID.  After all, they are not citizens and have no right to vote in the first place.

Now consider the Hispanic citizens of Texas. They have the right to vote.  And no decent person wants either to prevent them from exercising their right or to make it more difficult for them to vote than for other groups to vote.  Why would they be 'disproportionately affected' by a photo ID requirement?

Is it because Hispanics are less likely to have ID than members of other groups?  Or less likely to have the minimal skills necessary to acquire such ID?  It does, after all, take a tiny bit of effort.  You have to get yourself down to the DMV and fork over a nominal sum. 

I myself do not believe that Hispanics as a group are so bereft of life skills that they are incapable of acquiring photo ID.  But that apparently is what Dems believe when they think that a perfectly reasonable requirement would 'disproportinately affect' them.  What an insult to Hispanics!

So I ask once again: is there even one decent reason to oppose photo ID? 

Lesser Lights

The following aphorism floated before my mind as I was reading Paul Roubiczek, Across the Abyss:

Lesser lights, too, provide illumination.  And they, rather than the fixed stars in our cultural firmament, are perhaps better exemplars for us -- who are lesser lights.

A Theism-Materialism Combo?

If the reality of spirit and the reality of free will cannot be encountered in ourselves, in the depths of our subjectivity, why should we think that they  can be encountered outside ourselves -- in God, for example?

I don't understand those who attempt to combine theism with materialism about the human mind.  I don't deny that it is a logically possible combination.  But mere absence of formal-logical contradiction is no guarantee of metaphysical coherence.  (I develop the thought in "Could a Classical Theist be a Physicalist?" Faith and Philosophy, vol. 15, no. 2, April 1998, pp. 160-180.)

If reality has a spiritual core we will be able to learn about it only by studying ourselves, by plumbing our subjective depths, not by reducing self to not-self, not by trying to understand spirit and consciousness in material terms.  They cannot be understood in those terms, and attempts to do so end up eliminating the very means of access -- mind and language -- to the material world.

Holes and Their Mode of Being

Consider a particular hole H in a piece of swiss cheese.  H is not nothing.  It has properties.  It has, for example, a shape: it is circular.  The circular hole has a definite radius, diameter, and circumference.  It has a definite area equal to pi times the radius squared.  If the piece of cheese is 1/16th of an inch thick, then the hole is a disk having a definite volume.  H has a definite location relative to the edges of the piece of cheese and relative to the other holes.  H has causal properties: it affects the texture and flexibility of the cheese and its resistance to the tooth.  H is perceivable by the senses: you can see it and touch it.  You touch a hole by putting a finger or other appendage into it and experiencing no resistance.

Now if anything has properties, then it exists.  H has properties; so H exists. 

H exists and the piece of cheese exists.  Do they exist in the same way?  Not by my lights.  The hole depends for its existence on the piece of cheese; the latter does not depend for its existence on the former.  H is a particular, well-defined, indeed wholly determninate, absence of cheese.  It is a particular, existing absence.  As an absence of cheese it depends for its existence on the cheese of which it is the hole.

So I say the hole exists in a different way than the piece of cheese.  It has a dependent mode of existence whereas the piece of cheese has a relatively independent mode of existence.

On the basis of this and other examples I maintain that there are modes of being.  To be precise, I maintain that it is intelligible that there be modes of being.  This puts me at odds with those, like van Inwagen, who consider the idea unintelligible and rooted in an elementary mistake:

. . . the thick conception of being is founded on the mistake of transferring what properly belongs to the nature of a chair -- or of a human being or of a universal or of God -- to the being of the chair. (Ontology, Identity, and Modality, Cambridge 2001, p. 4)

Did I make a mistake above, the mistake van Inwagen imputes to thick theorists?  Did I mistakenly transfer what properly belongs to the nature of the hole -- its dependence on the piece of cheese -- to the being (existence) of the hole?

I plead innocent.  Perhaps it is true that it is the nature of holes in general that they depend for their existence on the things in which they are holes.  But H is a particular, spatiotemporally localizable, hole in a particular piece of cheese.  Since H is a particular existing hole, it cannot be part of H's multiply exemplifiable nature that it depend for its existence on the particular piece of cheese it is a hole in.  The dependence of H on its host is due to H's mode of existence, not to its nature.

Suppose there are ten quidditatively indiscernible holes in the piece of cheese: H1, H2, . . . H10.  Each exists.  Each has its own existence.  But each has the very same nature.  How then can this common nature be the factor responsible for making H1 or H2 or H3, etc.,  dependent on the particular piece of cheese?  The dependence of each hole on its host is assignable not to the nature common to all ten holes but to each hole's existence as a mode of its existence.

Now of course this will not convince any thin theorist.  But then that is not my goal.  My goal is to show that the thick theory is rationally defensible and not sired by any obvious 'mistake.'  If any 'mistakes' are assignable then I 'd say they are assignable with greater justice to the partisans of the thin theory.

Talk of 'mistakes,' though, is out of place in serious philosophy.  For apart from clear-cut logical blunders such as affirming the consequent, quantifier shift fallacies, etc. any alleged 'mistakes' will rest on debatable substantive commitments.