Maverick Philosopher

An Aphorism of Mine Translated into Slovak

Dear Mr. Vallicella,

My name is Cyril Šebo, I am an English teacher in Slovakia and also a blogger on our national Slovak blogspot

http://cyrilsebo.blog.sme.sk/clanok.asp?cl=309289

Today is The International Day of Translators and in my blog I dared to use one of your thougts from your blog, to show how difficult it can get to translate some thoughful ideas into another language.

Your statement I have borrowed was, "Silence is a grating clangor to the unwhole man."

I also suggested a translation and encouraged the readers to provide their critical analysis and possible (better) translation variants.

The blog post has received a very good following so far, people especially speculated about the poetic figure of "grating clangor" and the philosophical aspect of the "unwhole man."

Somebody also suggested a reversed translation of one of the Slovak versions into English: "Silence is a scratch and clangor in the ear of a man lacking inner integrity."

If your time allows, can you please let us know, whether this is close to your original idea, or is it absolutely ridiculous?

Thank you very much,

Cyril Šebo

Dear Mr. Šebo,

I am glad you enjoyed my aphorism and found it stimulating.  I wrote it on 3 January 1972 while a young man  living in a garret in Salzburg, Austria.  When I opened the skylight in the bathroom I got a view of the Salzburg Festung, 'fastness' being a nice  old poetic English word for Festung.

As for your reverse translation, I would say that it conveys the idea that I was trying to express, but does so in a way that violates one of the rules for a good aphorism.  The good aphorist aims at economy of expression. A good aphorism is terse.  "Scratch and" is superfluous, as is "to the ear."  Clangor is a loud ringing sound; sounds are perceived through the ears; so there is no need to add "to the ear."  'Clangor' has the added virtue of sounding like what it means.  The 'resonance' of the word is diminished by the addition of "scratch and."  "Unwhole man" is a more poetic and economical way of saying "man lacking inner integrity." But that is what I meant.

At the time I wrote the aphorism I may have been reading Max Picard who wrote a book entitled The World of Silence.  Here is something about Picard.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Youth, Fast Cars, and Death

Tomorrow is the 57th anniversary of the death of James Dean.  When the young  Dean crashed his low slung silver Porsche Spyder on a lonely California highway on September 30, 1955, he catapulted a couple of unknowns into the national spotlight.  One of them was Ernie Tripke, one of two California Highway Patrol officers who arrived at the scene.  He died  in 2010 at the age of 88.   But what ever happened to Donald Turnupseed, the driver who turned in front of the speeding Dean, having failed to see him coming?  His story is here. In exfoliation of the theme that "speed kills" I present the following for your listening pleasure:

Jan and Dean, Deadman's Curve (1964).  But it is not just boys who are drawn to speed, little old ladies have been known to put the pedal to the metal.  Case in point: The Little Old Lady From Pasadena.

Johnny Bond, Hot Rod Lincoln (1960)

James Dean, Public Service Announcement

James Dean, The 'Chicken' Scene

Beach Boys, Don't Worry Baby

Ike Turner/Jackie Brenston, Rocket 88 (1951).  The first R & R song?  With footage of Bettie Page.

Billy Joel, Only the Good Die Young

 

 

 

 

Amounting to Something

One only truly 'amounts to something' when one no longer holds this to be the goal.  (Written 24 June 1972)

The Pragmatic and the Evidential: Is It Ever Rational to Believe Beyond the Evidence?

Is it ever rational to believe something for which one has insufficient evidence? If it is never rational to believe something for which one has insufficient evidence, then presumably it is also never rational to act upon such a belief. For example, if it irrational to believe in God and post-mortem survival, then presumably it is also irrational to act upon those beliefs, by entering a monastery, say. Or is it?

 

W. K. Clifford is famous for his evidentialist thesis that "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything on insufficient evidence." On this way of thinking, someone who fails to apportion belief to evidence violates the ethics of belief, and thereby does something morally wrong. This has been called ethical evidentialism since that claim is that it is morally impermissible to believe on insufficient evidence.  Sufficient evidence is where there is preponderance of evidence.  On ethical evidentialism, then, it is morally permissible for a person to believe that p if and only p is more likely than not on the evidence the person has.

A cognitive evidentialist, by contrast, maintains that one is merely unreasonable to believe beyond a preponderance of evidence.  One then flouts a norm of rationality rather than a norm of morality.

Jeffrey Jordan, who has done good work on this topic, makes a further distinction between absolute and defeasible evidentialism.  The absolute evidentialist holds that the evidentialist imperative applies to every proposition, while the defeasible evidentialist allows exceptions.  Although Clifford had religious beliefs in his sights, his thesis, by its very wording, applies to every sort of belief, including political beliefs and the belief expressed in the Clifford sentence quoted above!  I take this as a refutation of Clifford's evidentialist stringency. For if one makes no exceptions concerning the application of the evidentialist imperative, then it applies also to "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything on insufficient evidence."  And then the embarrassing question arises as to what evidence once could have for the draconian Cliffordian stricture which is not only a morally normative claim but is also crammed with universal quantifiers.

If I took Clifford seriously I would have to give up most of my beliefs about politics, health, nutrition, economics, history and plenty of other things.  For example, I believe it is a wise course to restrict my eating of eggs to three per week due to their high cholesterol content.  And that's what I do.  Do I have sufficent evidence for this belief? Not at all.  I certainly don't have evidence that entails the belief in question.  What evidence I have makes it somewhat probable.  But more probable than not?  Not clear!  But to be on the safe side I restrict my intake of high-cholesterol foods.   What I give up, namely, the pleasures of bacon and eggs for breakfast every morning,  etc. is paltry in comparison to the possible pay-off, namely living  and blogging to a ripe old age.  Surely there is nothing immoral or irrational in my behavior even though I am flouting Clifford's rule.  And similarly in hundreds of cases.

The Desert Rat

Consider now the case of a man dying of thirst in a desert. He comes upon two water sources. He knows (never mind how) that one is potable while the other is poisonous. But he does not know which is which, and he has no way of finding out. Should the man suspend belief, even unto death, since he has insufficient evidence for deciding between the two water sources?  Let us suppose that our man is a philosopher and thus committed to a life of the highest rationality.

Absolute evidentialism implies that the desert wanderer should suspend judgment and withhold assent: he may neither believe nor disbelieve of either source that it is potable or poisonous on pain of either irrationality or an offence against the ethics of belief.

On one way of looking at the matter, suspension of belief  -- and doing nothing in consequence -- would clearly be the height of irrationality in a case like this.  The desert wanderer must simply drink from one of the sources and hope for the best. Clearly, by drinking from one (but not both) of the sources, his chances of survival are one half, while his chances of survival from drinking from neither are precisely zero. By simply opting for one, he maximizes his chances of reality-contact, and thereby his chances of survival. Surely a man who wants to live is irrational if he fails to perform a simple action that will give him a 50-50 chance of living when the alternative is certain death.

He may be epistemically irrational, but he is prudentially rational.  And in a case like this prudential rationality trumps the other kind.

Cases like this are clear counterexamples to evidentialist theories of rationality according to which rationality requires always apportioning belief to evidence and never believing on insufficient evidence.   In the above case the evidence is the same for either belief and yet it would be irrational to suspend belief. Therefore, rationality for an embodied  human agent (as opposed to rationality for a disembodied transcendental spectator) cannot require the apportioning of belief to evidence in all cases, as Clifford demands. There are situations in which one must decide what to believe on grounds other than the evidential.  Will I believe that source A is potable? Or will I believe that source B is potable? In Jamesian terms the option is live, forced, and momentous. (It is not like the question whether the number of ultimate particles in the universe is odd or even, which is neither live, forced, nor momentous.) An adequate theory of rationality, it would seem, must allow for believing beyond the evidence. It must return the verdict that in some cases, to refuse to believe beyond the evidence is positively irrational. 

But then absolute evidentialism is untenable and we must retreat to defeasible evidentialism.

The New Neighbors

Let us consider another such case. What evidence do I have that my new neighbors are decent people? Since they have just moved in, my evidence base is exiguous indeed and far from sufficient to establish that they are decent people. (Assume that some precisifying definition of 'decent' is on the table.) Should I suspend judgment and behave in a cold, skeptical, stand-offish way toward them? ("Prove that you are not a scumbag, and then I'll talk to you.") Should I demand of them 'credentials' and letters of recommendation before having anything to do with them? Either of these approaches would be irrational. A rational being wants good relations with those with whom he must live in close proximity. Wanting good relations, he must choose means that are conducive to that end. Knowing something about human nature, he knows that 'giving the benefit of the doubt' is the wise course when it comes to establishing relations with other people. If you begin by impugning the integrity of the other guy, he won't like you.  One must assume the best about others at the outset and adjust downwards only later and on the basis of evidence to the contrary. But note that my initial belief that my neighbors are decent people -- a belief that I must have if I am to act neighborly toward them -- is not warranted by anything that could be called sufficient evidence. Holding that belief, I believe way beyond the evidence. And yet that is the rational course.

So again we see that in some cases, to refuse to believe beyond the evidence is positively irrational. A theory of rationality adequate for the kind of beings we are cannot require that belief be always and everywhere apportioned to evidence.

In the cases just mentioned, one is waranted in believing beyond the evidence, but there are also cases in which one is warranted in believing against the evidence.  In most cases, if the available evidence supports that p, then one ought to believe that p.  But consider Jeff Jordan's case of 

The Alpine Hiker

An avalanche has him stranded on a mountainside facing a chasm.  He cannot return the way he came, but if he stays where he is he dies of exposure.  His only hope is to jump the chasm.  The preponderance of evidence is that this is impossible: he has no epistemic reason to think that he can make the jump.  But our hiker knows that what one can do is in part determined by what one believes one can do, that "exertion generally follows belief," as Jordan puts it.  If the hiker can bring himself to believe that he can make the jump, then he increases his chances of making it.  "The point of the Alpine hiker case is that pragmatic belief-formation is sometimes both morally and intellectually permissible."

We should therefore reject absolute evidentialism, both ethical and cognitive.  We should admit that there are cases in which epistemic considerations are reasonably defeated by prudential considerations.

And now we come to the Big Questions.  Should I believe that I am libertarianly free?  That it matters how I live?  That something is at stake in life?  That I will in some way or other be held accountable after death for what I do and leave undone here below?  That God exists?  That I am more than a transient bag of chemical reactions?  That a Higher Life is possible? 

Not only do I not have evidence that entails answers to any of these questions, I probably do not have evidence that makes a given answer more probable than not.  Let us assume that it is not more probable than not that God exists and that I (in consequence) have a higher destiny in communion with God.  

But here's the thing.  I have to believe that I have a higher destiny if I am to act so as to attain it.  It is like the situation with the new neighbors.  I have to believe that they are decent people if I am to act in such a way as to establish good relations with them.  Believing the best of them, even on little or no evidence, is pragmatically useful and prudentially rational. I have to believe beyond the evidence.  Similarly in the Alpine Hiker case.  He has to believe that he can make the jump if he is to have any chance of making it.  So even though it is epistemically irrational for him to believe he can make it on the basis of the available evidence, it is prudentially rational for him to bring himself to believe.  You could say that the leap of faith raises the probability of the leap of chasm.

And what if he is wrong?  Then he dies.  But if he sits down in the snow in despair he also dies, and more slowly.  By believing beyond the evidence he lives better his last moments than he would have by giving up.

Here we have a pragmatic argument that is not truth-sensitive: it doesn't matter whether he will fail or succeed in the jump.  Either way, he lives better here and now if he believes he can cross the chasm to safety.  And this, even though the belief is not supported by the evidence.

It is the same with God and the soul.  The pragmatic argument in favor of them is truth-insensitive: whether or not it is a good argument is independent of whether or not God and the soul are real.  For suppose I'm wrong.  I live my life under the aegis of God, freedom, and immortality, but then one day I die and become nothing.  I was just a bag of chemicals after all.  It was all just a big joke.  Electrochemistry played me for a fool.  So what?  What did I lose by being a believer? Nothing of any value.  Indeed, I have gained value since studies show that believers tend to be happier people.  But if I am right, then I have done what is necessary to enter into my higher destiny.  Either way I am better off than  without the belief in God and the soul.  If I am not better off in this life and the next, then I am better off in this life alone.

I am either right or wrong about God and the soul.  If I am right, and I live my beliefs, then then I have lived in a way that not only makes me happier here and now, but also fits me for my higher destiny.  If I am wrong, then I am simply happier here and now.

So how can I lose?  Even if they are illusions, believing in God and the soul incurs no costs and disbelieving brings no benefits. 

Hitchens: No Understanding of Religion

Reading Christopher Hitchens' Mortality I was struck once again by how people like him have no understanding of religion at all.   Lacking as they do any religious sense, they can only (mis)understand it from the outside as if it were just a set of strange doctrines. They don't seem to understand that the doctrines are "necessary makeshifts," to borrow a fine phrase from F. H. Bradley,  whereby we undertake to understand the Transcendent.  Failing to appreciate the provisional character of doctrines and dogmatic formulations, people like Hitchens seize upon them as if they were the reality represented and then look for contradictions and absurdities. And of course they find them.  For example, Hitchens sees an absurdity in prayer:

The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.  Half-buried in the contradiction is the distressing idea that nobody is in charge, or nobody with any moral authority. The call to prayer is self-cancelling. (Mortality, pp. 21-22)

The context makes this this little 'chemo-brain' outburst even less clear, if that is possible.  Prayer, we are told, is the attempt to instruct God on how to set right what he has has got "all wrong."  Now that has nothing to do with what anyone who actually prays means by 'prayer.' Take Plotinus (205-270):

The only way truly to pray is to approach alone the One who is Alone [All-One]. To contemplate that One, we must withdraw into the inner soul, as into a temple, and be still. (Enneads)

Did chatterbox Hitchens ever withdraw into his inner soul and be still?  No?  Then what right does he have to speak of these matters?  This from the Talmud:

He who rises from prayer a  better man, his prayer is answered.

The point here, I take it, is that we don't pray to change God so much as to change and improve ourselves. If we succeed in this, if we succeed in stilling our thoughts, mastering our desires, strengthening our resolutions, and re-directing our aspirations from the base to the noble, then we have succeeded in improving ourselves and our prayer has been answered.  Here, in a similar vein, is Ralph Waldo Emerson from his great essay "Self-Reliance":

Prayer that craves a particular commodity, — any thing less than all good, — is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.

Hitchens has no understanding of religion or of prayer.  The two are closely linked as William James observed:

Prayer is religion in act; that is, prayer is real religion. (Varieties of Religious Experience, 464)

In his profound incomprehension, Hitchens takes prayer in its crassest petitionary sense, oblivious of the iceberg submerged beneath that paltry tip.

Lacking as he does the religious sensibility, Hitchens is devoid of all sympathy for it, and can't see anything good in it.  His understanding of it is the misundertanding of the outsider.  To understand religion from the outside is  like trying to understand music from the outside as a peculiar sort of acoustic disturbance.  But religion, like music, chess, love, poetry, mathematics, running, science . . . can only be understood from the inside by those who engage in these activities and have the inner predisposition and talent to engage in them.

Permanence and Impermanence

Both worldling and philosopher distinguish between the permanent and the impermanent. How then do they differ?  For the philosopher what the worldling calls permanent is impermanent, while for the worldling what the philosopher calls permanent doesn't exist.

False Modesty

To appear modest, some of us preface our remarks with, "Correct me if I'm wrong."  But we say it only when we know we are not.

More on my Non-Identity With My Living Body

Maximilian J. Nightingale writes:

You laid out this syllogism in a recent post:

My living body will  become a dead body; 
I will never become a dead body;
therefore, I am  not identical to a living body.

It seems to me that if "becoming" means the same thing in both the first and the second premises, then one must say that both Bill and his living body will become a dead body, or that neither will.  It seems that where a living body used to be, a dead body will begin to be.  So also, it seems that where Bill used to be, a dead body will begin to be.

I don't see that the reader has refuted the argument.  Yes, 'becomes' means the same in both premises. 

Now the first premise is true:   It is clear that one day my living body will undergo a radical change and become a dead body: the same body that today is alive will on a future date no longer have the property of being alive but will instead have the property of being dead.  (I am assuming some 'normal' way of dying, as opposed to being instantaneously annihilated in a nuclear blast.  More on this in a moment.)  This is an alterational change: one and the same body will exist at different times in different states, first alive, then dead.  So it is not the case, as the reader claims, that "where a living body used to be, a dead body will begin to be."  That would be an existential change, not an alterational one.  It is not the case that a dead body will begin to be; one and the same body will go from being alive to being dead.

The second premise is also true.  When my body dies, I will cease to exist; but when my body dies it won't cease to exist: it will continue to exist for a while as a corpse.  This is an existential change in me, not an alterational change:  I will cease to exist.  It is not the case that I will change in respect of the property of being alive.

Therefore, I cannot be identical to my living body.  'Will no longer exist' is true of me, but not true of my body. 

"But what if you are annihilated in an explosion so that there is no corpse?"  At this point the argument takes a modal turn.  Even if my body does not continue to exist after I cease to exist, it could;  but it is not possible that I continue to exist after I cease to exist.  So again we have a difference in properties and non-identity.

I have been assuming mortalism, the doctrine that I cease to exist when my body dies.  If mortalism is false, and I exist even after the death of my body, then a fortiori I am not identical to my living body.

Human Perversity

People want sympathy and understanding.  But we must be careful how we show them. "I understand exactly how you feel" may earn the response, "You have no idea how I feel, how the hell could you?"

Obama: Fiscally Clueless

Here.

You say the Republicans are not much better?  I don't disagree.  But think of it this way. 

A jackass and an elephant are heading for a cliff, a fall from which will be fatal.  The jackass, being a jackass, is moving faster towards disaster.  The elephant is moving slower.  You must choose to ride on one or the other.  Upon which animal would you prefer to be mounted?

Obama is an utterly clueless jackass.  With a 'Ryanized' Romney there is some hope that we can avert disaster or at least postpone it.

Obama: Foreign Policy Disaster

Here.

Am I a Body or Do I Have a Body?

In his latest and last book, Mortality, Christopher Hitchens writes, "I don't have a body, I am a body." (86) He goes on to observe that he has "consciously and regularly acted as if this was [sic] not true."  It is a curious fact that mortalists are among the worst abusers of the fleshly vehicle.  But that is not my theme.

Is a person just his body?  The meditation is best conducted in the first person: Am I just my body?  Am I identical to my body?  Am I one and the same with my body, where body includes brain?  Am I such that, whatever is true of my body is true of me, and vice versa? Let's start with some 'Moorean facts,' some undeniable platitudes.

1. I am not now identical to a dead body, a corpse.  There is, no doubt, a dead body in my future, one with my name on it.  But that lifeless object won't be me.  I will never become a corpse.  I will never be buried or cremated.  I am not now and never will be identical to a dead body.  For when the corpse with my name on it  comes to exist, I will have ceased to exist; and when I cease to exist, it will still exist.  This property difference via the Indiscernibility of Identicals entails the non-identity of me and 'my' corpse. 

'My' corpse is the corpse that will come into existence when I cease to exist, or, if mortalism is false, when I am separated from my body.  Strictly speaking, no corpse is my corpse: hence the scare quotes around 'my.'  But I can speak strictly of my body: my body is the body that is either identical  to me, or is related to me in some 'looser' way. 

2.  I am obviously not identical to a dead body.  And I have just argued that I will never become identical to a dead body.  Am I  then identical to a  living body?  Not if the following syllogism is sound: My living body will become a dead body;  I will never become a dead body; therefore, I am not identical to a living body. 

This argument assumes that if x = y, then whatever is true of x is true of y, and vice versa.  Little is self-evident, but surely this principle is self-evident.  There is something true of my living body that is not true of me, namely 'will become a dead body.'  Therefore, I am not identical to a living body.  And since the only living body I could be identical to if I were identical to a living body would be my living body, I am not identical to my living body.  Of course, I have a living body in some to-be-explored sense of 'have'; the point is that I am not identical to it.

3. Consider now the following rather more plausible identity claim:  I am (identically) a self-conscious animal.  Let's unpack this.  I am a living human animal that says 'I' and means it; I am a thinker of I-thoughts, an example of which is the thought *I am just a self-conscious animal.*  I am self-aware: aware of myself as an object, both as a physical object, a body, through the five outer senses, and as psychological object, a mind, through inner sense or introspection.  Both my body and my mind are objects for me as subject.  As such a self-aware animal, I am aware of being different from my body.  In some sense I must be different from my body (and my mind) if  they are my objects.  'My objects' means 'objects for me as subject.'

Now if you were paying attention you noticed that I made an inferential move the validity of which demands scrutiny.  I moved from

a. I am aware of being different from my body

to

b. I am different from my body.

The materialist is bound to resist this inference.  He will ask how we know that the awareness mentioned in (a) is veridical.  Only if it is, is the inference valid.  He will suggest that it is possible that I have an non-veridical, an illusory, awareness of being different from my body.  I can't credit that suggestion, however.  It cannot be an illusion that I am different from anything I take as object of awareness including my brain or any part of my brain.  That is a primary and indubitable givenness. Awareness is by its very nature awareness of something: it implies a difference between that which is aware, the subject of awareness, and the object of awareness.  Without that difference there could be no awareness of anything.  If the self-aware subject were identical to that object which  is its animal body, then the subject would not be aware of the body. 

4.  Will you say that the body is aware of itself? Then I will ask you which part of the body is the subject of awareness.  Is it the brain, or a proper part of the brain?  When I am aware of my weight or the cut on my arm, is it the brain or some proper part of the brain that is aware of these things?  This makes no sense.  My brain is no more the subject of awareness than my glasses are.  My glasses don't see the wound; I see the wound by the instrumentality of the glasses.  Similarly, my brain doesn't see the wound; I see the wound by the instrumentality of the brain (and the visual cortex, and the optic nerves, and the glasses, etc.)  The fact that my visual awareness is causally dependent on my having a functioning brain does not show that my brain or any part of it is the subject of awareness.  I am not identical to my brain or to any bodily thing.

5.   Who or what asks the question:  Am I identical to this body here?  Does the body ask this question?  Some proper part of the body such as the brain?  Some proper part of this proper part?  How could anything physical ask a question?

"Look, there are are certain physical objects that ask themselves whether they are identical to the physical objects they are, and entertain the (illusory) thought that they might not be identical to the physical objects they are."

This little materialist speech is absurd by my lights since no physical object -- as we are given to understand 'physical object' by physics -- could do such a thing.   If you insist that some physical objects can, then you have inflated 'physical' so that it no longer contrasts with 'mental.' 

So with all due respect to the late Mr Hitchens, brilliant talker about ideas whose depth he never plumbed, I think there are very good reasons to deny that one is identically one's body.

Further questions:  If I am not identical to any physical thing, can it be inferred that I am identical to some spiritual thing?  If I am not identical to my body or any part thereof, do I then have a body, and what exactly does that mean? 

A Free Press?

Victor Davis Hanson:

There is not really any free press anymore, but instead a Ministry of Truth, in which PBS, NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, Newsweek, Time, AP, McClatchy, and Reuters are de facto extensions of the Obama campaign — far more highbrow and adept in disguising their partisanship than an overt Hannity or Limbaugh. Their “journalists” are fed favorable administration leaks when in the old days they had to sue to publish a hit piece. They care little whether ambassadors are left unguarded, or that the U.S. suffers the most costly attack on its air assets since Vietnam, or that administration officials offer lies about Libya that they know cannot be true.

"Ministry of Truth" is an allusion  to an eponymous agency in Orwell's 1984.   Hannity and Limbaugh announce their conservative tilt; the lamestream media shills mendaciously refuse to admit their bias.

Does God Give His Existence Meaning?

Chad McIntosh writes,

Your post We Cannot Be the Source of Our Own Existential Meaning touches on a puzzle that I’ve been wrestling with for several years now. I’d greatly appreciate your thoughts on the following.

Like you, I think meaning is bestowed, or endowed, by agents. However, I may hold a stronger view, which is captured by what I call the Endowment Thesis:

(ET) Any object x has meaning iff x has meaning by virtue of being endowed meaning by one or more agents.

BV:  In the post in question I did not endorse the thesis that meaning is bestowed by agents; I made the conditional claim that if existential meaning is bestowed by each upon himself, then the identification of existential meaning with subjectively bestowed meaning collapses into an elimination of existential meaning.  But your (ET) is plausible and its consequences are worth exploring.

(In fact, I normally state ET as true of value, not meaning. But I think ET holds for both value and meaning. But I’ll follow your post and state the puzzle with meaning instead of value). 

BV:  I think existential meaning has both a teleological and an axiological side.  Thus a meaningful life is a purpose-driven life, but not every purpose-driven life is meaningful: the purpose must have positive intrinsic value. If someone sets himself as the central  task of his life the  parsing of every sentence in Moby Dick, his life has purpose; but since the value of such an accomplishment is questionable, the same goes for the meaningfulness of a life consecrated to such a task.   See Teleological and Axiological Aspects of Existential Meaning.

The puzzle arises when we stipulate that x is God, God has meaning (or is a meaningful being, has a meaningful existence), and that God is the sole inhabitant of a world. So: God has meaning iff God has meaning by virtue of being endowed meaning by one or more agents.

There are two ways this could work: Either God, as a single agent, endows himself meaning, or God is in some way more than one agent (God is whole of which agents are parts—as agents, the parts can endow each other value, and God has meaning by virtue of each of the parts having meaning).

Now, both possibilities seem to require us to say that God does not have meaning logically prior to being endowed meaning (which leads me to think you may reject ET).

BV:  Yes.  Neither God nor Socrates can bootstrap himself into existence.  And it seems that the same goes for meaningfulness: neither can bootstrap his existence into meaningfulness.  So what I argued in my post with respect to finite agents like us holds also for God.  It cannot be the case that God gives his existence meaning. Not even God can be a subjectivist about existential meaning!

But the former possibility—where God has meaning by virtue of endowing himself meaning—requires making sense of endowing oneself meaning, which you—as well as I—find problematic. I have my own objections to this possibility, but I’m curious to what you think of it. Assuming (ET) is true, can God sans creation endow himself meaning (or value)? Would your arguments in the post apply to God with equal force here?

BV: Yes, it seems to me that the arguments apply to God with equal probative force.

Also, I hope we can bracket divine simplicity for the sake of the argument. Thoughts?

BV:  These considerations seem to add up to an argument against your (ET).  The universal quantifier 'any' causes trouble.  But surely some (many, most)  objects are such that their meaning, value, and purpose are not had by them intrinsically but are bestowed upon them by one or more agents acting individually or collectively.  I may assign a rock the purpose of being a paper weight, a purpose that it does not have intrinsically, and to a book that has collectively been assigned a purpose I can add an idiosyncratic purpose such as serving as a door stop or to fuel a fire.  I can use a topographical map to swat a fly, and a flyswatter to scratch my back or direct an orchestra.  Or consider the value of water.  That value, it seems, is not intrinsic to water, but it is also not assigned by me or you or all of us collectively.  But it is relative to our physical need for the stuff.  Water is not intrinsically valuable, else it would be good for electronic gear, paper, and fires.

So it seems safe to say that some purposes, values, and meanings are relative to agents even if those agents don't have the power to assign them arbitrarily.

As for God, he is a counterexample to (ET).  God does not have a purpose because he assigns himself one; he is intrinsically purposive, intrinsically good, intrinsically valuable, intrinsically meaningful.  This intrinsicality would be nicely underpinned by the divine simplicity, but it is not clear that one needs that doctrine to underpin it. 

Now suppose there is no God.  Then human existence is ultimately (as opposed to proximately) meaningless, purposeless, and valueless. But we have the sense that  it is none of these.  This sense gives us reason to seek God, even though it does not furnish materials for a compelling proof of the existence of God.

I have gone out on a limb here, which will afford you an opportunity to practice your sawing skills.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Forgotten Folkies

The Highwaymen were a 'collegiate folk ' outfit that had a big hit in 1961 with Michael Row the Boat Ashore.  Listening to it now after many years, I had forgotten how beautiful it is.  1962 brought them their second hit, Cotton Fields.  The tune is a Leadbelly cover and has been covered in its turn by the Springfields, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Beach Boys, and others.

The Springfields were how Dusty Springfield got her start.  Silver Threads and Golden Needles is another great tune they did.  It is a Wanda Jackson cover and was covered in its turn by Linda Ronstadt.

And while we're on the topic of implements of sewing, we can't go wrong with Jackie De Shannon's Needles and Pins (1963).

If you remember Joe and Eddie, There's a Meetin' Here Tonight, I'll buy you a bowl of menudo at Tres Banderas cantina, Apache Junction, Arizona. Meet me there in an hour. 

We Cannot Be the Source of Our Own Existential Meaning

Some say that life has no meaning except the meaning that we, individually, give it.  Thus the meaning of my life is the meaning I give my life, and the meaning of your life is the (perhaps different) meaning that you give your life, and that, apart from these individual projects of meaning-bestowal, one's life has no meaning.  Thus meaning does not come from God or der Fuehrer or il Duce or the government (as some contemporary liberals seem to think) or the state or society or other people, or anything exogenic, but comes, if it comes at all, from the wellsprings of one's own selfhood.

One could call this subjectivist theory  an identity theory of existential (as opposed to linguistic) meaning:  there is such a thing as the meaning of an individual human life, but what that meaning is is identical to the meaning the individual in question gives to its life.  By contrast, an eliminativist theory of existential meaning would have it that there is no such thing as existential meaning.

Now it seems to me that the subjectivist identity theory just sketched is untenable, precisely for the reason that it cannot be kept from collapsing into an eliminativist theory.  (This is a special case of how identity theories, which attempt to reduce A to B without denying the existence of A,  often collapse into eliminativist theories. See here and here for more on the general issue.) 

Note that if I must first give my life meaning, if it is to have some, then it has no meaning prior to and independent of my giving it meaning.  And yet I must exist prior (both logically and temporally) to the decisions, resolutions, declamations, and whatnot whereby I give my life meaning.  This implies that the acts of meaning-bestowal and the subject whose acts they are, exist meaninglessly.  These acts, however, are mine, and their subject is me.  It follows that my existence and my acts of meaning-bestowal are meaningless. 

The attempted identification of meaning with subjectively bestowed meaning collapses into an elimination of meaning.

What we have here is a 'bootstrap problem.'  Just as I cannot bootstrap myself into existence, i.e., cause my own existence (since that would require me to exist before I exist), I cannot bootstrap my existence into meaningfulness, i.e., bring it about that my existence has meaning.  Just as I cannot exist before I exist, I cannot have meaning before I have meaning.  I cannot be the source of my own meaning.

If the only meaning my existence has is the meaning I give it, then that I exist at all is meaningless.

Obama: A Prediction Come True

On 6 November 2008, I wrote into my journal:

The Irony of the Obama Victory.  The presidency was handed to him by the financial crisis.  But his policies will exacerbate it.

I was right.  I now predict that if he is re-elected, four more years of his policies will bring us to financial ruin.  Mark my words.

The man is not only incompetent and inexperienced but unserious.   Here he is on Letterman admitting that he doesn't know what the national debt is.  He obviously doesn't understand the gravity of the situation, or his own partial responsibility for it in irresponsibly pushing another entitlement, popularly known as ObamaCare, when the problem of the long-term solvency of the existing entitlements  has not been addressed.  Instead, he blames his predecessor while manically digging the hole deeper.

The Wit and Mortality of Christopher Hitchens

I just breezed through a quick first reading of Christopher Hitchens' Mortality (Twelve, 2012).  The slim volume ends with some fragmentary notes of characteristic wit scribbled near the end.  My favorites:

Amazing how heart and lungs have held up: would have been healthier if I'd been more sickly. (88)

I'm not fighting or battling cancer -- it's fighting me.  (89)

Brave? Hah! Save it for a fight you can't [can?] run away from. (89)

If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does. (91) 

Larkin good on fear in "Aubade," with implied reproof to Hume and Lucretius for their stoicism. Fair enough in one way: atheists ought not to be offering consolation either. (92)

I reproduce Philip Larkin's poem in my Philip Larkin on Death.

What is Left for Philosophy to Do?

Much of what was once in the province of philosophy now belongs to the sciences.  Might it be that eventually everything once claimed by philosophy will be taken over by special sciences?  I recently took Lawrence Krauss to task here and here for his latest scientistic outburst according to which philosophical problems, "when the grow up, leave home." He maintains that all answerable questions belong in the domain of empirical science.  Is that right?   Is it true that, eventually, there will nothing left for philosophy to do?  Or are there certain problems and questions that will remain specifically philosophical?  I suggest that in the following four areas philosophy has and will retain its proprietary rights in perpetuity.

A. Metaphilosophical Questions.  Let us first note that the questions raised in my introductory paragraph belong to philosophy.  They are questions about philosophy.  All such metaphilosophical questions belong to philosophy.  The philosophy of science (religion, law, etc.) is not part of science (religion, law, etc.), but the philosophy of philosophy is a branch of philosophy. There is simply no more encompassing rational discipline than philosophy.  So right here we have a number of questions that do not belong to any empirical science or to any formal science such as mathematics either. (Whether or not you want to call mathematics science, it is certainly not empirical science.)

Consider the question of scientism.  When properly employed, the term 'scientism'  means the following.

Scientism is a philosophical thesis that belongs to the sub-discipline of epistemology. It is not a thesis in science, but a thesis about science.  The thesis in its strongest form is that the only genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge, the knowledge generated by the (hard) sciences of physics, chemistry, biology and their offshoots. The thesis in a weaker form allows some cognitive value to the social sciences, the humanities, and other subjects, but insists that scientific knowledge is vastly superior and authoritative and is as it were the 'gold standard' when it comes to knowledge. On either strong or weak scientism, there is no room for first philosophy, according to which philosophy is an autonomous discipline, independent of natural science, and authoritative in respect to it. So on scientism, natural science sets the standard in matters epistemic, and philosophy’s role is at best ancillary.  Not a handmaiden to theology in this day and age; a handmaiden to science.

The question whether scientism is true is a philosophical question that cannot by its very nature be answered by any empirical science.  Not only is this question not discussed in any physics or chemistry or biology text, it is not a question to the answering of which observation and experiment are at all relevant.  The question whether the only genuine knowledge is scientific knowlerdge is not an empirical question.  It is not like the question whether high sodium intake is a contributing factor in hypertension or whether galactic recession is taking place.

Those who champion scientism are doing philosophy whether they know it or not, and presupposing that there are specifically philosophical theses. For scientism is a philosophical thesis.  Not only is scientism a philosophical thesis, it is an untenable philosophical thesis (as I argue here)  the critique of which belongs to philosophy.  Both the forwarding of the thesis and its evaluation as untenable are specifically philosophical activities.  One of the perennial tasks of philosophy is the debunking of bad philosophy or pseudo-philosophy of the sort produced by ignorant people like Krauss.

B. Normative Questions.  There are normative questions of various sorts in logic, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, and politology.  Empirical investigation cannot answer normative questions.  Consider the theory of the state.  A good chunk of it will be covered by political science which, perhaps, is independent of philosophy.  Political science studies the types, characteristics, institutions, and  genesis of states and other political entities as they actually exist.  It is a non-normative enterprise devoted to facts and their explanation.  It will of course treat of the norms embedded in laws and institutions but will study these norms as facts.  One can study the content of legal prescriptions and proscriptions under bracketing of their rightness or wrongness.  To do so is to study them as facts.  Thus one could study the content of the Nazi state's Nuremberg Laws without raising the question of their justice or injustice. Questions about the moral legitimacy of a given state or of any state are quite different from the factual questions treated in political science: they are normative questions belonging  to political philosophy.  If I study the structure of the Nazi state and its institutions and hierarchies I am doing political science.  But if I argue that the Nazi state was a criminal state or an unjust state then I have moved into the normative dimension and am doing political philosophy.

Or consider logic.  It does not reduce to the psychology of reasoning, let alone to the neurobiology underlying reasoning.  It is a normative discipline concerned, not with how we think as a matter of fact, but how we ought to think if we are to arrive at truth.  Similar considerations  hold for epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics.  Suppose you disagree with what I just said about logic. Then we have a dispute in the philosophy of logic, and once again philosophy is seen to be indispensable. 

3. Critical Questions.  One can raise critical questions about religion, mysticism, law, science and other sectors of culture.  A critique of religion, for example, aims to separate out the true from the false and the beneficial from the harmful in religion.  It aims to evaluate religion as a cultural form.  This is different from the descriptive study of extant religions.  A critique of Buddhism, for example, goes beyond a study of characteristic Buddhist beliefs and practices; it is concerned to evaluate these beliefs and practices in the light of such criteria as logical coherence, truth, and whether they help or hinder human flourishing.  Such an evaluation is obviously a specifically philosophical enterprise.  It cannot be supplanted by the sociology or psychology of Buddhism.  Suppose it is established that Buddhism appeals to people of a certain psychological make-up or social class. That is an interesting fact, but is irrelevant to the question whether Buddhism is wholly or in part logically coherent, true, or conducive to human flourishing.  The critique of Buddhism, and of any religion, belongs to philosophy.  And the same goes for the critique of mysticism, law, and the rest.

4.  Metaphysical Questions.  These are non-normative but also non-empirical questions.  They have no place within the province of any empirical science.

There are the questions of general metaphysics or ontology.  Among them: questions about existence, identity, properties, relations, modality.  Consider these two claims:

a. Principle of the Rejection of Nonexistent Objects:  Necessarily, for any x, if x has properties, then x exists.

b. Principle of the Rejection of Unpropertied Objects: Necessarily, for any x, if x exists, then x has properties.

I say both are true propositions of general metaphysics.  They are items of knowledge about the structure of any possible world, and therefore items of knowledge about the structure of the actual world.   But we do not know them by any empirical method: they do not belong in an empirical science.

The principles are not truths of pure logic either.  For their negations are not logical contradictions.  They are irreducibly ontological truths.  The belong to metaphysca generalis or ontology.

The Meinongians deny (a).  Where does the dispute about (a) belong?  In physics?  You would have to be as thoughtless as Krauss to maintain such a thing.  It belongs nowhere else but in philosophy.

There are also the questions of special metaphysics, among them, questions about God, the soul, the freedom of the will, and the relationof mind and body.

The Schizoid Left: OK to Bash Mormons and Christians but not Muslims?

Many liberals in the West have become, and many more are becoming, radical leftists out to subvert the very principles that they as leftists supposedly support. Thus arises the phenomenon of the schizoid Left. For example, from the time of the French Revolution on, the Left has been anti-clerical and ever more anti-religious. But now we witness the bizarre spectacle of leftists aligning themselves with, or at least not opposing, the most extreme type of religious fundamentalism on the face of the earth. They never miss an opportunity to bash Christians and Mormons, but are deeply offended by the amateurish Innocence of Muslims.  Bret Stephens:

The film, the [Obama] administration says, is "hateful and offensive" (Susan Rice), reprehensible and disgusting" (Jay Carney) and, in a twist, "disgusting and reprehensible" (Hillary Clinton). Mr. Carney, the White House spokesman, also lays sole blame on the film for inciting the riots that have swept the Muslim world and claimed the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his staff in Libya.

So let's get this straight: In the consensus view of modern American liberalism, it is hilarious to mock Mormons and Mormonism but outrageous to mock Muslims and Islam. Why? Maybe it's because nobody has ever been harmed, much less killed, making fun of Mormons.

For a second example of schizoid leftism, consider that lefties traditionally display a prominent libertine and bohemian wobble. Why then do they cozy up to, or at least not resolutely oppose, Islamic fanatics who murder homosexuals, stone adulterers, and circumcise females?

Third, the Left, as part of the Enlightenment project, supposedly champions science over superstition. Yet, in the last 400 years or so, scarcely anything of any scientific value has emanated from the Islamic world. (Bernard Lewis is the man to read on this. ) The same goes for philosophy. Tiny Israel in the mere 64 years of its existence has cranked out more genuine philosophy that the whole of the Islamic world has in 400 years. So what does the Left do? It waxes anti-Semitic and pro-Islamic.

The nihilism of the hard Left -- its denial of value and true being to anything that actually exists and provably works -- may be turning in upon itself. Unable to destroy Western civilization under its own steam, it aligns itself with Islamists, who, were they to attain power, would of course mercilessly
exterminate all leftists. A curious sort of Selbstaufhebung.

For a leftist, the end justifies any and all  means, including ignoring the very real threats of militant Islam while demonizing Christians who pose no threat to speak of.  For  full documentation, see David Horowitz, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, Regnery 2004. 

Why There Cannot Be a Decent Left

Ronald Radosh ends his piece as follows:

The truth is that the Left in the West, including our own Left, is largely anti-American, favorable to extremist radical social movements, and sees any one or group who is not on its side as not only incorrect, but morally evil. The answer to Michael Walzer’s own query is still the same: it would be nice if there was a decent Left, but its small and ineffectual numbers prove that its creation is something that will never take place.

Cf. Michael Walzer, Can There Be a Decent Left?

On 'Spirituality' and 'Religion'

Nathaniel Torrey writes to request a link to his post, The Dalai Lama and the Non-Religion of the Future.  I am pleased to do so.  His thoughts are in line with the ones I expressed in a 25 September 2010 entry,

On 'Spirituality'

The trendy embrace the term 'spirituality' but shun its close cousin, ‘religion.’ I had a politically correct Jewish professor in my kitchen a while back whose husband had converted from Roman Catholicism to Judaism. I asked her why he had changed his religion. She objected to the term ‘religion,’ explaining that his change was a ‘spiritual’ one.

How typical.  Being a good host, I didn't lay into her as I probably should have for her  'spiritual' good.

Etymologically, ‘religion’ suggests a binding, a God-man ligature, so to speak. But trendy New Age types don’t want to be bound by anything, or submit to anything. I suggest that this is part of the explanation of the favoring of the S word over the R word. Another part of the explanation is political. To those with a Leftward tilt, ‘religion’ reminds them of the Religious Right whose power strikes them as ominous while that of the Religious Left is no cause for concern.

A third part of the explanation may be that religion is closely allied with morality, while spirituality is often portrayed as beyond morality with its dualism of good and evil. One of the worst features of New Age types is their conceit that they are beyond duality when they are firmly enmired in it. Perhaps the truly enlightened are beyond moral dualism and can live free of moral injunctions. But what often happens in practice is that spiritual aspirants and gurus fall into ordinary immorality while pretending to have transcended it. One may recall the famous cases of Rajneesh and Chogyam Trungpa. According to one report, ". . . Trungpa slept with a different woman every night in order to transmit the teaching to them. L. intimated that it was really a hardship for Trungpa to do this, but it was his duty in order to spread the dharma."

With apologies to the shade of Jack Kerouac, you could say that that gives new meaning to 'dharma bum.'

The Fallacy of Redistribution

Thomas Sowell:

The history of the 20th century is full of examples of countries that set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty. The communist nations were a classic example, but by no means the only example.

In theory, confiscating the wealth of the more successful people ought to make the rest of the society more prosperous. But when the Soviet Union confiscated the wealth of successful farmers, food became scarce. As many people died of starvation under Stalin in the 1930s as died in Hitler's Holocaust in the 1940s. [Professor Sowell is referring to the forced collectivization of the Ukraine.  If you want to inform yourself of the horrors thereof, I recommend  Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, Oxford UP, 1986.]

How can that be? It is not complicated. You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth -- and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated. Farmers in the Soviet Union cut back on how much time and effort they invested in growing their crops, when they realized that the government was going to take a big part of the harvest. They slaughtered and ate young farm animals that they would normally keep tending and feeding while raising them to maturity.

Sowell is right of course.  People typically do not allow themselves to be jerked around.  If California is not business-friendly, business people will move to states like Texas, and the once 'Golden State' will sink deeper into the mire.  (Bill Bennett in a recent speech referred to California as the "The Lindsay Lohan of states.")  If you tax me at 100% for any amount earned above $100,000, I will arrange things so that my taxable income will be less than that amount.  It is just human nature to resist being screwed.

The current debate about redistribution on shows like the O'Reilly Factor is close to moronic.  O'Reilly talks as if Obama is for redistribution while Romney is not.  But redistribution has been with us for a long time in the form of a progressive income tax code, and that is not going away any time soon.  (And I am not even convinced that it should.)  So the issue is not redistribution versus no redistribution.  The issue is is whether we are going to have more of it, or less of it, or reduce the rate of its increase. 

Under Obama we will most assuredly have more of it, a lot more.    This will depress the economy, the national debt will increase even more, and we will be on the way to financial ruin.

Anyone who votes for the fiscally irresponsible Obama is a fool  who does not understand his own long-term best self-interest.  And anyone who thinks that it doesn't matter who is in the White House is also a fool, despite the fact that Romney is a milque-toast and a wimp.

Never forget: politics is always about the lesser of evils.  Better a milque-toast and wimpy businessman who understands how the economy works than a incompetent leftist who doesn't.

Escapism

Escapism is a form of reality-denial.   One seeks to escape from the only reality there is into a haven of illusion.  One who flees a burning building we do not call an escapist.  Why not?   Because his escape from the fire is not an escape into unreality, but into a different reality.  The prisoner in Plato's Cave who ascended to the outer world escaped, but was not an escapist. He was not escaping from, but to, reality.

Is religion escapist?  It is an escape from the 'reality' of time and change, sin and death.  But that does not suffice to make it escapist.  It is escapist only if this life of time and change, sin and death, is all there is.  And that is precisely the question, one not to be begged.

You tell me what reality is, and I'll tell you whether religion is an escape from it.

There is a nuance I ought to mention.  In both Platonism and Buddhism, one who has made "the ascent to what is" (Republic 521 b) and sees aright, is enjoined to  return so as to help those who remain below.  This is the return to the Cave mentioned at Republic 519 d.  In Buddhism, the boddhisattva ideal enjoins a return of the enlightened individual to the samsaric realm to assist in the enlightenment of the sentient beings remaining there.

To return to the image of the burning building.  He who flees a burning building is no escapist: he flees an unsatisfactory predicament (one dripping with dukkha as it were) to a more satisfactory condition.  Once there, he reconnoitres the situation, dons fire-protective gear, and returns to save his cats.  A little cute, a little crude, but it makes the point.

Both the Cave and the samsaric realm are not wholly unreal, else there would be no point to a return to them.  But they are, shall we say, ontologically and axiologically deficient.

Image credit. 

Shysters of the ACLU At It Again

"Following a complaint filed by the ACLU, school officials in Cranston, R.I. have ended gender specific activities like father-daughter dances and mother-son ballgames to comply with state gender discrimination laws."  Story here.

I've often wondered about the etymology of 'shyster.' From German scheissen, to shit? That would fit well with the old joke, "What is the difference between a lawyer and a bucket of shit?' "The bucket." I am also put in mind of scheusslich: hideous, atrocious, abominable. Turning to the 'shyster' entry in my Webster's, I read, "prob. fr. Scheuster fl. 1840 Am. attorney frequently rebuked in a New York court for pettifoggery."

According to Robert Hendrickson, Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, p. 659: 

 

Shyster, an American slang term for a shady disreputable lawyer, is first recorded in 1846. Various authorities list a real New York advocate as a possible source, but this theory has been disproved by Professor Gerald L. Cohen of the University of Missouri-Rolla, whose long paper on the etymology I had the pleasure of reading. Shakespeare's moneylender Shylock has also been suggested, as has a racetrack form of the word shy, i.e., to be shy money when betting. Some authorities trace shyster to the German Scheisse, "excrement," possibly through the word shicir, "a worthless person," but there is no absolute proof for any theory.

A little further research reveals that Professor Cohen's "long paper" is in fact a short book of 124 pages published in 1982 by Verlag Peter Lang. See here for a review. Cohen argues that the eponymous derivation from 'Scheuster' that I just cited from Webster's is a pseudo-etymology. 'Shyster' no more derives from 'Scheuster' than 'condom' from the fictious Dr. Condom. Nor does it come from 'Shylock.' It turns out my hunch was right. 'Shyster' is from the German Scheisser, one who defecates.

Companion posts: 

The ACLU and the Second Amendment

The ACLU and Mardi Gras

 

 

The Unholy Alliance With Islamism: Does the Left Have a Death Wish?

Mike Liccione's name came up over dinner with John Farrell, who has met Mike.  Small world.  (It also turns out that John now lives on the same street only a few doors down from where I lived for part of my time in Boston. Small world again.)  Mention of Mike put me in mind of an old post from 6 November 2009 in which I link to him, a post that is particularly relevant in the light of recent events.  The post follows.

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

Something that has long puzzled me also puzzles Michael Liccione. Mike puts it like this:

Shouldn't liberals be the most concerned about Islamic fundamentalism, given that the things they profess to value are the first things they would lose under Islamist pressure? It's hard to avoid the conclusion that this sort of liberal hates political conservatives and
orthodox Christians more than he loves his own liberty. And he wishes to cling desperately to his own self-image as a defender of the poor, oppressed minorities, even when some of those poor, oppressed minorities would just as soon see him and his kind swinging from the gallows.

Substantially correct. But if I may quibble, 'Islamic fundamentalism' may not be the right term. Better would be 'militant Islam' or 'radical Islam' or 'Islamism.' A fundamentalist, as I understand the word, is one who interprets the scriptures of his religion literally, as God's own inerrant word. Thus Islam, if I am not mistaken, holds that the Koran was literally dictated by God to Muhammad in Arabic. Whatever one
thinks of fundamentalists in this sense, it seems obvious that they should not be confused with militants or terrorists. Although fundamentalists and terrorists are sets with a non-null intersection, there are fundamentalists who are not terrorists and terrorists who are not fundamentalists.

It is important to try to think as clearly and precisely as one can about these issues, distinguishing the
different, and forging one's terminology in the the teeth of these differences.   And the more 'hot-button' the issue, the more necessary is clear and precise thinking.

Addendum 19 September 2012:  I have always been careful to speak of 'militant Islam' or 'radical Islam' or 'Islamism' as opposed to 'Islam.'  But now I am wondering whether this distinction is not perhaps a snare and a delusion.  The problem may well be with Islam itself and its basic values or lack of values.  See Diana West's post to which I linked yesterday.

It is becoming painfully obvious that the values of Muslims qua Muslims are simply incompatible with our Western values, and that to allow them to immigrate is a recipe for suicide.  Islamic culture is inferior to ours, the proof being the sad state of the countries Muslims come from -- which is of course why they don't stay in their own countries. 

Liberals of course support wide-open immigration, legal and illegal, along the lines of 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend.'  These liberal  fools hate Christians and conservatives more than they hate the enemies of their own liberal values.  I call that contemptible stupidity, stupidity  that is morally  censurable.

Bill K. comments:

I think it is far more pathological than simply the enemy of my enemy is my friend.  I believe the kind of liberal that wants the government to control everything (as opposed to the fuzzy-headed do-gooders that simply want problems to go away and people to be happy) actually admires and approves of Islam, because of its program of total control.   They also fail to understand that they will be the first to go when the Umma arrives.  They are so used to talking their way into what they want, that they won’t understand the use of force even when they face the beheading sword.  Look at our foreign policy.  BO actually thought he could talk the Muslims into world peace.

I suspect that our delusional leftist pals think that they can use Islamism to beat back conservatism and Christianity and then dismiss the Islamists once the job is done.  But they are pussies compared to the Islamists and they may be in for a big surprise.

Islam is a Radical Threat to Free Speech

Diana West:

It's important to realize sharia's prohibition of criticism of Islam is basic Islam: There is nothing "radical" about it. Indeed, it is this basic Islamic censorship that is at the crux of why Islam itself -- not "Islamism," not "radical Islam," not "Islamists," but Islam -- is an existential threat to the survival of any free society. It is why free societies, once penetrated by a Muslim demographic over 1 percent, begin to lose their liberties as a means of "accommodating" -- appeasing --  their new Islamic populations.

The Retreat Into the Private Life

When the world and its hopelessness are too much with us, one can and must beat a retreat into the private life.  Body culture, mind culture, hobbies, family life, the various escapes (which are not necessarily escapes from reality) into chess, fiction, religion, meditation, history, pure mathematics and science, one's own biography and the pleasant particulars of one's past, music, gardening, homemaking . . . .

I pity the poor activist for whom the real is exhausted by the political.  But I detest these totalitarians as well since they seek to elide the boundary between the private and the public.

So we need to battle the bastards in the very sphere they think exhausts the real.  But it is and must be a part-time fight, lest we become like them.  Most of life for us conservatives must be given over to the enjoyment and appreciation, in private, of the apolitical:  nature, for example, and nature's God.

Farrell in Flagstaff

 

It was my pleasure to meet science writer and long-time reader and friend of MavPhil, John Farrell, in Flagstaff Friday evening.  He was in town for a conference on the origins of the expanding universe, as he reports in Forbes here.  Flag is a lovely dorf sitting at 7,000 feet amongst the pines and home to the Lowell Observatory.  It is an excellent retreat from the heat  of the Valle del Sol where you would never catch me this time of year in long pants, jacket, and beret.

John and I are  standing in front of an excellent Mexican eatery on old Route 66.  I first heard about this joint  on Guy Fieri's Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.  As luck would have it, Farrell the Irishman is enthusiastic about Mexican chow.  Our tequila-fueled conversation was so good that I failed to clean my plate, a rare occurrence as my companions (literally those with whom one breaks bread, L. panis) know.

Perhaps the best thing about maintaining  a weblog is that it attracts like-minded, high-quality people some of whom one then goes on to meet in the flesh. 

The Atheist

Paul Brunton, Notebooks, Volume 12, Part I, p. 96, #14:

He alone can be an atheist who has never experienced a glimpse, or who has been caught and become embedded in a hard dry intellectualism, or in whom ethics and conscience have withered.

The point is quite defensible if put in less ringing terms.  Most atheists have either (1) never had a religious or mystical or paranormal experience, or (2) have succumbed to the hypertrophy of the critical faculty, or (3) are bereft of conscience or moral sense, or all three or any two of the above.

Ad (1).  A prosaic fellow, earth-bound, who believes only in the visible, the tangible, and the edible, who has never had an unusual experience of the the sort that intimates a reality beyond the sensible, or beyond the grossly sensible, will of course not be inclined to take seriously the claims of religion or the beliefs in God and the soul.  He believes in what the outer senses reveal to him and will be inclined to dismiss as incredible the belief that there exist  things external to his consciousness that are not certifiable by the five outer senses or by the instrumental extensions (telescopes, etc.) of the five external senses.  If he had had a mystical experience or a religious experience or a paranormal experience such as an out-of-body experience then he might have been budged from his narrow empiricism.  But lacking these sorts of experience, he sees no need to believe in anything but the objects of sense experience and such scientific posits  as may be necessary to explain their behavior.

Our prosaic worldling's attitude is not irrational.  He bases himself on what is given, but what is given to him are only the deliverances of the outer senses. He is aware of various a posteriori arguments for the existence of God but they find no purchase with him.   For the sheer obtrusiveness of the sense world makes it impossible for him to believe in anything beyond it.  And in a battle between the massive testimony, at every waking hour, of this gnarly world of time and change, and the output of abstract reasoning, the former is sure to win in the mind of our sense-bound worldling.  And so he uses his intellect to resist the arguments, making of each modus ponens a modus tollens.

And of course there is that not unimportant matter of our worldling's enslavement to the pleasures of the flesh.    As Plato observed, each pleasure and each pain does its bit to pin the soul to the body so securely and in such a manner that nothing can be real to such an enslaved soul except that which has a bodily nature. (Phaedo St. 83) Our man may even have had a mystical or religious or paranormal experience or two; but they will be no match for his ground-conviction of the ultimate reality of the material world, a conviction made impossible to break because of his attachment to sensuous pleasure.

Ad (2).  A dessicated intellect honed on the whetstone of analysis and powered by the will not to believe will have no trouble finding reasons for disbelief.  Anything can be argued, and any argument can be turned aside.  Reason in us is a frail reed  indeed, easily suborned by the passions and other irrational factors.

Ad (3).  Can an atheist be moral?  Well of course.  There are plenty of atheists who are more moral that some theists, e.g., Muslim terrorists. A different and much more interesting question is whether atheists are justified in being moral.  I pursue this question in Sam Harris on Whether Atheists are Evil.  And then there is the matter of conscience.  What exactly is it?  Atheists are typically naturalists.  Is there a decent naturalistic theory of conscience?  Could there be?  Or is the fact of conscience in us not an indicator of our higher origin?  And so while it is not true, pace Brunton, that atheists lack a conscience, I would argue that (i) their atheism prevents them from fully plumbling the depths of its deliverances, and (ii) they are in no position to provide an adequate theory of conscience and its normativity. 

Thomas Nagel Reviews Alvin Plantinga

Plantinga's latest is entitled, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism. Here is Nagel's review.  Like everything Nagel publishes, it is well worth careful reading.  The review ends as follows:

The interest of this book, especially for secular readers, is its presentation from the inside of the point of view of a philosophically subtle and scientifically informed theist—an outlook with which many of them will not be familiar. Plantinga writes clearly and accessibly, and sometimes acidly—in response to aggressive critics of religion like Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. His comprehensive stand is a valuable contribution to this debate.

I say this as someone who cannot imagine believing what he believes. But even those who cannot accept the theist alternative should admit that Plantinga’s criticisms of naturalism are directed at the deepest problem with that view—how it can account for the appearance, through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry, of conscious beings like ourselves, capable of discovering those laws and understanding the universe that they govern. Defenders of naturalism have not ignored this problem, but I believe that so far, even with the aid of evolutionary theory, they have not proposed a credible solution. Perhaps theism and materialist naturalism are not the only alternatives.

I didn't finish my series of detailed posts on Plantinga's Where the Conflict Lies, but here are  the ones I posted:

Notes on the Preface

Notes on Chapter One

Plantinga Versus Dawkins: Organized Complexity

Can God Break a Law of Nature?

Mary Travers

Mary Travers of PP & M fame died on this date in 2009.  Here is something from the archives about her.

Sweet Mystery of Life

Some of life is comprehensibility and some is mystery.  It is comprehensible that it is so; mysterious that it should be so.

Negativity Breeds Negativity

Negative people elicit negative responses from others.  So they suffer twice: from their own negativity and from the negativity they cause.

No Man is a Beast Merely

It is natural for a beast to be bestial, but not for a man.  He must degrade and denature himself, and that only a spiritual being can do.  Freely degrading himself, he becomes like a beast thereby proving that he is -- more than a beast.

Requite Good with Good

Requite good with good; evil with justice.

Obama the Feckless

The weak invite attack.  That is a law of nature.  Nations are in the state of nature with respect to each other.  Talk of international law is empty verbiage without an enforcement mechanism.  There is none.  Or at least there is none distinct from every extant state.  The same goes for diplomacy.  There needs be a hard fist behind the diplomat's smiling mask.  There had better be iron and the willingness to shed blood back of that persona.

Or as Herr Blut-und-Eisen himself is reported to have said, "Diplomacy unbacked by force is like music without instruments."

Having demonstrated his domestic incompetence, Obama is now showing us his fecklessness in matters foreign.  Is it 1979 all over again?  As a certain American philosopher of Spanish extraction is supposed to have said . . . .

One can hope that Romney will play Reagan to Obama's Carter.  For the good of all of us, those who understand these matters, and the liberal fools who don't.

 

More on the Kraussian 'Bait and Switch'

I wrote:

Here we observe once again the patented Kraussian 'bait and switch' dialectical ploy.  Note the scare quotes around 'wrong.'  Krauss  is switching from the relevant normative sense of the word to an irrelevant nonnormative sense.  That is the same type of trick  he pulled with respect to the Leibnizian question why there is something rather than nothing.  He baited us with a promise to answer the Leibnizian question but all he did was switch from the standard meaning of 'nothing' to a special meaning all his own according to which nothing is something.  So instead of answering the question he baited us with -- the old Leibniz question -- he substituted a different physically tractable question and then either stupidly or dishonestly passed off the answer to the physically tractable question as the answer to the philosophical question.

He is doing the same thing with the homosexuality question.  He is equivocating on 'right' and 'wrong' as between nonnormative and normative senses of the term.  Avoid that confusion and you will be able to see that a practice cannot be shown to be morally acceptable by showing that the practice is engaged in.  Slavery and ethnic cleansing are practices which have proven to be be very effective by nonnormative criteria.  World War II in the Pacific was ended by the nuclear slaughter of noncombatants.  Questions about moral acceptability and unacceptability cut perpendicular to questions about effectiveness, survival value and the like.

Joel Hunter responds:

. . . this causes me to wonder, in a charitable vein, whether Krauss is not, after all, performing an intentional bait-and-switch in his theorizing about "nothing," morality, and the will. Rather, because of his unassailable prior commitment to naturalize all phenomena, perhaps he's engaged in simply translating away genuine philosophical problems in much the same way that an emotivist translates away the propositional content of general moral principles. There's a logic to the naturalizing procedure whereby concepts of the nonphysical must be translated as something physical. That's the only way "nothing" is intelligible given his ground convictions. Of course, this doesn't excuse his equivocation on such matters. But if he had proposed something like the following, perhaps the bait-and-switch charge wouldn't stick: "The Leibniz question is a real puzzler. But in its classic form it is unanswerable because it is unintelligible using the explanatory tools we have at our disposal. The good news is that we can make it intelligible by translating physically nebulous terms into terms with definite physical meaning." As we both know, he is unlikely to speak this way because it is too intellectually humble, an indulgence of virtue he cannot afford since the more important aim of the translation project is to ghettoize the religious.

If I understand Professor Hunter, he is, with admirable exegetical charity, raising the question whether Krauss,  rather than engaging in an intellectually dishonest 'bait and switch' ploy, is instead proposing that intractable philosophical questions such as the one Leibniz famously  raised be replaced  by tractable scientific ones.  Accordingly, Krauss is not trying to the answer the questions of philosophy using empirical science, but is instead aiming to replace the philosophical questions with different ones, questions that are amenable to scientific solutions.  Clearly, the following strategies are different:

1. Answer the traditional questions of philosophy using scientific methods.

2. Replace the traditional questions with scientifically tractable ones since the former have proven intractable.

On (1), the traditional questions can be answered, but not by the 'arm chair' methods of philosophy, but empirically.  Science comes to occupy the domain of philosophy.  On (2), the traditional questions cannot be answered and so must be replaced by questions that can be scientifically  answered.   Science does not come to occupy the domain of philosophy; it establishes its own domain.  (Here is an example that would require a separate post to exfoliate.  When psychology first broke away from philosophy, it ceased to concern itself with the topics philosophers of mind treated: it changed the subject to observable behavior.  It is not just that psychology  abandoned the method of introspection; it also abandoned the subject matter that introspection was thought to reveal.)

Consider the Kraussian metaphor of "growing up and leaving home." When a young person does this he does so without prejudice to his diachronic identity: it is not as if the person-at-home perishes to be replaced by a numerically different person-away-from-home.  One and the same person is first at home and then away.  So the metaphor suggests that Krauss' strategy is (1).  That  is also the impression one gets from his awful book on something and nothing.  But there is also evidence that his strategy is (2).

I suggest that the man is just not clear as to what he is up to.  Hence the impression of 'bait and switch.'  He baits us with a traditional questions as if he is out to solve it scientifically; but then  he switches to a different question, replacing the philosophical question with a different one.

For example, instead of answering (or rejecting as senseless) the Leibniz question as to why  anything at all exists, he substitutes an entirely different question about how the physical universe has evolved from an initial material state (which is obviously not nothing).   Not that there is anything wrong with the second question; it is just not the question he baited us with.  Krauss' how-question and its answer are simply irrelevant to the why-question.  And yet our man thinks that somehow they are relevant.  Hence I say he is, if not intellectually dishonest, then badly confused. 

Is College a Lousy Investment?

This piece by Megan McArdle is required reading.

The role of government in causing the college bubble cannot be gainsaid.

On my view, government is practically necessary.  Anarchism is for adolescents.  Some of what government does is good, some bad.  Governments in the free world defeated the Nazis; communist governments murdered 100 million in the 20th century. (Source: Black Book of Communism.)  Some of what is bad are unintended consequences of programs that were set up with good intentions.  Federally-insured student loans made it possible (or at least easier) for many of us to finance our educations.  (It is of course a debatable point whether it is a legitimate function of government to insure student loans.)  But lack of oversight on the part of the Feds, and the greediness of university administrators coupled with the laziness and prodigality of too many students has led to the education bubble.

What has happened is truly disgusting.  The price of higher education has skyrocketed, increasing out of all proportion to general inflation, while the quality of the product delivered has plummeted in some fields and merely declined in others.   There are young people graduating from law schools today with $150 K in debt and little prospect of a job sufficiently remunerative to discharge the debt in a reasonable time.  For the painful details, see Paul Campos' law school scam blog.

Can we blame the federal government for the education bubble?  Of course, if there had been no federally-insured loan program the bubble would not have come about.  But there was no necessity that the program issue in a bubble.  So we are brought back to the real root of the problem, human beings, their ignorance, greed, prodigality, and general lack of moral and intellectual virtue.

Compare the housing bubble.  Government must bear some of the blame through its bad legislation.  But no bubble would have occurred if consumers weren't stupid and lazy and greedy.  What sort of
fool signs up for a negative amortization loan?  Am I blaming the victim?  Of course.  Blaming the victim is, within limits and in some cases, a perfectly reasonable and indeed morally necessary thing to do.  If you are complicit in your own being ripped-off through your own self-induced intellectual and moral defectiveness, then you must hold yourself and be held by others partially responsible.  And then there are the morally corrupt lenders themselves who exploited the stupidity, laziness, greediness and general lack of moral and intellectual virtue of the consumers.  A fourth factor is the
corruption of the rating agencies. 

The Constructive Curmudgeon

I don't know whether he is an antediluvian and a bibliomaniac, but Douglas Groothuis is a self-professed curmudgeon, albeit of a constructive stripe. I am not persuaded by his case for Biblical inerrancy, but I find his political observations astute, as in this list of reasons not to vote for Obama.  Read the list!

By the way, my opening sentence illustrates the principle that the antecedent of a pronoun need not come before  (in the order of reading) the pronoun of which it is the antecedent despite the following bit of schoolmarmishness from Grammar Girl:

Our second antecedent problem is what’s called “anticipatory reference,” which Bryan Garner calls “the vice of referring to something that is yet to be mentioned (5)," meaning that the writer puts the pronoun before the antecedent—a no no.

I say to hell with that.  I opened with a beautiful classy sentence.  Grammar Girl needs a good spanking not only for endorsing this stupid rule of the dumbed-down and inattentive but also for her use of 'no no' baby talk.

I should rant more fully on pronouns, their antecedents, with an application to Obama's "You didn't build that."

I do have a fine rant here on baby talk and first-grade English.

On a Saying Often Attributed to George Santayana

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. — George Santayana

Those who can remember the past and are able to learn its lessons are typically not those with the power to make a difference in the present so as to prevent the repetition of the past; and those with the power to make a difference typically either will not or do not remember.

Observations on the Joys of Teaching

Teaching is the feeding of people who aren't hungry.

Teaching philosophy is the feeding of people who are neither hungry nor know what food is.

Teaching is like agitating water in a glass with one's forefinger. As long as the finger is in motion, the water is agitated; but as soon as the finger is removed, the water returns to its quiescent state.

Philosophy, like a virgin, is wasted on the young.

The classroom is a scene of unreality. No one takes it quite seriously. Not the students, from whom little is expected and less demanded. Not the teachers, who waste their time in discipline and remediation.

According to an apocryphal story about George Santayana, one day, while lecturing at Harvard, he suddenly intuited the absurdity of teaching. Stopping in mid-sentence, he walked out of the classroom never to return. The truth is less dramatic: he dutifully finished the semester, turned in his grades, resigned his professorship, and embarked for Rome where he spent the rest of his life in cultured retirement.

"I would rather eat dry bread than teach." Franz Schubert, quoted in Maurice J.E. Brown, Schubert: A Critical Biography (New York: Da Capo, 1988), p. 233.

"I would rather sweep the streets than teach children!" Ralph E. Hone, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Literary Biography (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1979), p. 24.  Hone is quoting Sayers. 

The quotations borrowed from Dr. Gilleland, antediluvian, bibliomaniac, and curmudgeon.

When Philosophical Questions Grow Up Do They Leave Home? Some Bad Arguments of Lawrence Krauss Exposed

A tip of the hat to Professor Joel Hunter for referring me to a recent discussion between philosopher Julian Baggini and physicist Lawrence Krauss. We have come to expect shoddy scientistic reasoning from Professor Krauss (see here) and our expectation is duly fulfilled on this occasion as on the others.

The issue under debate is whether there are any answerable questions in which philosophy has proprietary rights.  Are there any questions that are specifically philosophical and thus beyond the purview of the sciences?  Or are all answerable questions scientific questions?  For Krauss, ". . . all the answerable ones  end up moving into the domain of empirical knowledge, aka science."  When philosophical questions "grow up, they leave home."

Moral (ethical) questions have traditionally belonged to philosophy.  If Krauss and his scientistic brethren are right, however, these questions, if answerable, will be answered empirically: "science provides the basis for moral decisions . . . ."  Baggini makes the expected response:

My contention is that the chief philosophical questions are those that grow up without leaving home, important questions that remain unanswered when all the facts are in. Moral questions are the prime example. No factual discovery could ever settle a question of right or wrong. But that does not mean that moral questions are empty questions or pseudo-questions.

Baggini's is a stock response but none the worse for that.  Krauss' rejoinder is entirely lame:

Take homosexuality, for example. Iron age scriptures might argue that homosexuality is "wrong", but scientific discoveries about the frequency of homosexual behaviour in a variety of species tell us that it is completely natural in a rather fixed fraction of populations and that it has no apparent negative evolutionary impacts. This surely tells us that it is biologically based, not harmful and not innately "wrong".

Here we observe once again the patented Kraussian 'bait and switch' dialectical ploy.  Note the scare quotes around 'wrong.'  Krauss  is switching from the relevant normative sense of the word to an irrelevant nonnormative sense.  That is the same type of trick  he pulled with respect to the Leibnizian question why there is something rather than nothing.  He baited us with a promise to answer the Leibnizian question but all he did was switch from the standard meaning of 'nothing' to a special meaning all his own according to which nothing is something.  So instead of answering the question he baited us with -- the old Leibniz question -- he substituted a different physically tractable question and then either stupidly or dishonestly passed off the answer to the physically tractable question as the answer to the philosophical question.

He is doing the same thing with the homosexuality question.  He is equivocating on 'right' and 'wrong' as between nonnormative and normative senses of the term.  Avoid that confusion and you will be able to see that a practice cannot be shown to be morally acceptable by showing that the practice is engaged in.  Slavery and ethnic cleansing are practices which have proven to be be very effective by nonnormative criteria.  World War II in the Pacific was ended by the nuclear slaughter of noncombatants.  Questions about moral acceptability and unacceptability cut perpendicular to questions about effectiveness, survival value and the like.

There is also this Kraussian gem:

. . . that many moral convictions vary from society to society means that they are learned and, therefore, the province of psychology. Others are more universal and are, therefore, hard-wired – a matter of neurobiology. A retreat to moral judgment too often assumes some sort of illusionary belief in free will which I think is naive.

Three non sequiturs in two sentences. That's quite a trick!

A. Yes, moral convictions vary from society to society, and yes, they are learned.  But Krauss confuses moral convictions as facts (which belong to psychology and sociology) with the content of moral convictions.  For example, I am convinced that rape is morally wrong.  My being so convinced is a psychological fact about me.  It is an empirical fact and can be studied like any empirical fact.  We can ask how I cam to hold the conviction.  But my being convinced is distinct from the content of the conviction which  is expressible in the sentence 'Rape is morally wrong.'  That sentence says nothing about me or about any agent or about the psychological state of any agent.   Confusing convictions and their contents, Krauss wrongly infers that moral questions are in the province of psychology as an empirical science when all he is entitled to conclude is that things like the incidence, distribution, and causes  of moral beliefs belong in the province of psychology, sociology and related disciplines.

B.  With respect to universal moral beliefs, Krauss falls into the same confusion.  He confuses the moral belief or conviction qua psychological fact about an agent with its content.  Even if my being convinced that X is morally wrong falls within neurobiology, because the being convinced is a state of brain, the content doesn't.  A further problem with what he is saying is that moral beliefs cannot be identical to neural states.  It is obvious that my moral convictions, as facts, belong to psychology; but it is the exact opposite of obvious that some of my moral convictions  -- the universal ones -- belong to neurobiology.  No doubt they have neurobiological correlates, but correlation is not identity.

C.   Krauss thinks that the belief in free will is "illusionary."  This is a nonsensical view shared by other scientistic types such as Jerry Coyne.  ( See here.) It is also difficult to square with Krauss' own apparent belief in free will: "We have an intellect and can therefore override various other biological tendencies in the name of social harmony."  So, holding social harmony to be a value we freely restrain ourselves and override out biological tendencies when we get the urge to commit rape.  The man cannot see that his theory is inconsistent with the course of action he is recommending.

There is a bit more to the Krauss-Baggini discussion, but the quality is so low that I won't waste any more time on it. 

"No Day Without Political Incorrectness" Department

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Too Many Lawyers in Government, Not Enough Doctors

Negatively, physicians are not lawyers.  Positively, they are scientifically trained without being mere theoreticians: they diagnose, they cut, they sew.  They are the plumbers and the auto mechanics of the mortal coil.  They grapple at close quarters with recalcitrant matter.  They do so fearlessly while lawyers watch, ready to pounce.    They don't just talk, write, and argue.  Not that the latter aren't important; they are.  But balance is also important.

We need more doctors, engineers, and businessmen in government -- and fewer lawyers.  And a few working stiffs, too.  There are truck drivers and pipe fitters who could do the job.  How can a government top-heavy with lawyers be representative of the folks?

Lawyers are especially overrepresented in the Democrat Party as Michael Medved observes:

By re-nominating Obama and Biden, the Democrats have selected only attorneys for all six of the most recent places on national tickets, cementing their status as the party of lawyers. Meanwhile, none of the last 8 Republicans nominated for president or vice president has been a practicing attorney.

Though Romney won a law degree in a joint program along with his Harvard MBA, he never joined the legal profession. All told, 14 of the last 18 places on Democratic national tickets since 1980 have gone to attorneys, and if Al Gore had finished law school at Vanderbilt before running for Congress, that would have been 17 of 18. The domination of the party by lawyers clearly connects to its propensity to address every problem with legal solutions—legislation, regulations, and law suits—rather than private sector, business initiatives.

None of the above is lawyer bashing.  We need lawyers if we are to have a legal system and the rule of law.  (And to defend ourselves against lawyers.) But lawyers, like liberals, have given themselves a bad name by their bad behavior.  They are too often the sophists of the modern world.  Remember the sophists of the ancient world? They knew how to make the weaker argument appear the stronger.

Martin Luther once vented his misology via "Reason is a whore."  But nowadays, when whores are sex workers, the Lutheran pronunciamento has lost its sting much as the oldest profession has lost its opprobrium. 

Perhaps in its stead we should put: "Reason is a lawyer."

More Fun With Existential Generalization

Intuitively, if something is identical to Venus, it follows that something is identical to something.  In the notation of MPL, the following is a correct application of the inference rule, Existential Generalization (EG):

1. (∃x)(x = Venus)
2. (∃y)(∃x)(x = y) 1, EG

(1) is contingently true: true, but possibly false.  (2), however, is necessarily true.  Ought we find this puzzling?  That is one question.  Now consider the negative existential, 'Vulcan does not exist.' 

3. ~(∃x)( x = Vulcan)
4. (∃y)~(∃x)(x = y) 3, EG

(3) is contingently true while (4) is a logical contradiction, hence necessarily false.  The inference is obviously invalid, having taken us from truth to falsehood.  What went wrong? 

Diagnosis A: "You can't existentially generalize on a vacuous term, and 'Vulcan' is a vacuous term."

The problem with this diagnosis is that whether a term is vacuous or not is an extralogical (extrasyntactic) question.  Let 'a' be an arbitrary constant, and thus neither a place-holder nor a variable.  Now if we substitute 'a' for 'Vulcan' we get:

3* ~(∃x)( x = a)
4. (∃y)~(∃x)(x = y) 3*, EG

The problem with this inference is with the conclusion: we don't know whether 'a' is vacuous or not.  So I suggest

Diagnosis B:  Singular existentials cannot be translated using the identity sign as in (1) and (3).  This fact, pace van Inwagen, forces us to beat a retreat to the second-level analysis.  We have to analyze 'Venus exists' in terms of

5. (∃x)(Vx)

where 'V' is a predicate constant standing for the haecceity property, Venusity.  Accordingly, what (5) says is that Venusity is instantiated.  Similarly, 'Vulcan does not exist' has to be interpreted as saying that Vulcanity is not instantiated. Thus

6. ~(∃x)(Wx)

where 'W' is a predicate constant denoting Vulcanity.

It is worth noting that we can existentially generalize (6) without reaching the absurdity of (4) by shifting to second-order logic and quantifying over properties:

7. (∃P)~(∃x)Px.

That says that some property is such that it is not instantiated.  There is nothing self-contradictory about (7).

But of course beating a retreat to the second-level analysis  brings back the old problem of haecceities.  Not to mention the circularity problem. 

The thin theory is 'cooked' no matter how you twist and turn.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Torch Songs

"A torch song is a sentimental love song, typically one in which the singer laments an unrequited or lost love, where one party is either oblivious to the existence of the other, or where one party has moved on." (Wikipedia)

Sarah Vaughn, Broken-Hearted Melody.  I loved this song when I was nine and I love it today.  The guitar fills are just right: simple, tasteful and unobtrusive.

Ketty Lester, Love Letters

Roy Orbison, In Dreams

Lenny Welch, Since I Fell for You

Timi Yuro, Hurt

Billie Holliday, The Very Thought of You

Etta James, At Last

Gogi Grant, The Wayward Wind (1956).  Made the #1 Billboard position.  The tune has haunted me since I was six years old. 

Toni Fisher, The Big Hurt (1959).  Made the Billboard #3 slot.  The first verse hints at the origin of 'torch song':

Now it begins,
now that you've gone
Needles and pins, twilight till dawn
Watching that
clock till you return
Lighting that torch and watching it burn.

Is this the first recording to use a phase shifter?  Pretty far-out for the 'fifties.  While we're on the topic
of special effects, the first fuzz tone occurs as far as I know in Marty Robbins' Don't Worry About Me (1961).

"Possible Tornado Touches Down in Brooklyn and Queens"

Story here.  "Only a possible tornado?  It is the actual ones that worry me." 

"Did you hear about Jack? He died of an apparent heart attack."  "Wow, hs heart must have been in terrible condition if all it took was an apparent heart attack to do him in."

Bad jokes, no doubt, but they do get us thinking about the various senses of 'possible' and 'apparent.'  How many of each are there?

 

Eastwood on His 'Empty Chair' Performance at the Republican National Convention

Here is my take on Eastwood's unscripted talk.  Here is Eastwood's. 

“President Obama is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” Eastwood told The Pine Cone this week. “Romney and Ryan would do a much better job running the country, and that’s what everybody needs to know. I may have irritated a lot of the lefties, but I was aiming for people in the middle.”

Empty Chair, Empty Suit, Empty Speech

And the speech was indeed empty.  But that is par for the course for Dems.  Bare of content, full of bromides, vacuity piled upon vacuity. Gaseous, nebulous, nugatory.

But the mendacity of it all is that behind the flatulent phrases is a hard Left agenda that they will not avow but that comes out  when their guard is down.

"You didn't build that!"

"Government is the only thing we all belong to."

If that isn't a totalitarian formula completely at odds with traditional American values, what would be?

And there you have the modern Democrat Party: totalitarianism wrapped in bullshit.