Maverick Philosopher

Roberto Rosselini's Socrates

It was my good fortune to happen across  Rosselini's Socrates the night before last, Good Friday night, on Turner Classic Movies.  From 1971, in Italian with English subtitles.  I tuned in about 15 minutes late, but it riveted my attention until the end.  It is full of excellent, accurate dialog based on the texts of Plato that record Socrates' last sayings and doings.  I was easily able to recognize material from the Platonic dialogues Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and the immortal Phaedo.  The dialog moves fast, especially in Italian, and near the end it was difficult to read the fast moving subtitles through  eyes filled with tears.

One ought to meditate on the fact that the two greatest teachers of the West, and two great teachers of humanity, Socrates and Jesus, were unjustly executed by the State.  This is something contemporary  liberals, uncritical in their belief in the benevolence of government, ought especially to consider. 

 

My eyes glued to the TV, I was struck by how Socratic my own attitude toward life and death is.  Death is not to be feared, but is to be prepared for and embraced as a portal to knowledge.  It is the ultimate adventure for the truth seeker. It is not unreasonable to suppose that it is such a portal even though we cannot know it to be so in this life.  There is no dogmatism in the Socratic wisdom: its incarnation does not claim to know here what can only be known, if it will be known, there.  He is an inquirer, not an ideologue defending an institutional status quo. The point of the arguments recorded in the Phaedo, and partially rehearsed in the movie, is to persuade sincere truth seekers of the reasonableness of the philosopher's faith, not to prove what cannot be proven, and especially not to benighted worldlings who care little about truth, smug worldlings whose hearts and minds have been suborned by their love of power and money and the pleasures of the flesh.

His friends want the seventy-year-old philosopher to escape and have made preparations. But what could be the point of prolonging one's bodily life after  one has done one's best and one's duty in a world of shadows and ignorance that can offer us really nothing in the end but more of the same?  This vale of soul-making is for making souls: it cannot possibly be our permanent home.  (Hence the moral absurdity of transhumanism which is absurd technologically as well.) Once the soul has exhausted the possibilties of life behind the veil of ignorance and has reached the end of the via dolorosa through this vale of tears then it is time to move on, to nothingness or to something better.

Or perchance to something worse?  Here is where the care of the soul here and now comes in.  Since the soul may live on, one must care for it: one must live justly and strive for the good.  One must seek the knowledge of true being while there is still time lest death catch us unworthy, or worthy only of annihilation or worse.

Socrates' life was his best argument: he taught from his Existenz.  He taught best while the hemlock was being poured and his back was to the wall.  His dialectic was rooted in his life.  His dialectic was not cleverness for the classroom but wisdom for the death chamber.

Whether his life speaks to you or not depends on the kind of person you are,  in keeping with Fichte's famous remark to the effect that the philosophy one chooses depends on the sort of person one is.

Does it matter whether Socrates existed and did the things attributed to him in the Platonic writings?  I don't see that it does.  What alone matters is whether a person here and now can watch a movie like Rossellini's and be moved by it sufficiently to change his own life.  What matters is the Idea and the Ideal.

What matters is whether one can appropriate the Socratic message for oneself as Johann Gottlieb Fichte did in this very Socratic passage from The Vocation of Man (LLA, 150):

Should I be visited by corporeal suffering, pain, or disease, I cannot avoid feeling them, for they are accidents of my nature ; and as long as I remain here below, I am a part of Nature. But they shall not grieve me. They can only touch the nature with which, in a wonderful manner, I am united, not my self, the being exalted above all Nature. The sure end of all pain, and of all sensibility to pain, is death; and of all things which the mere natural man is wont to regard as evils, this is to me the least. I shall not die to myself, but only to others ; to those who remain behind, from whose fellowship I am torn: for myself the hour of Death is the hour of Birth to a new, more excellent life.

 

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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Death and Resurrection

Bob Dylan, See That My Grave is Kept Clean

Bob Dylan, In My Time of Dyin' 

Bob Dylan, Gospel Plow

Bob Dylan, Fixin' to Die

Johnny Cash, Ain't No Grave

Johnny Cash, Redemption

Johnny Cash, Personal Jesus

Johnny Cash, Hurt

Mississippi John Hurt, You Got to Walk That Lonesome Valley

Johnny Cash, Final Interview.  He speaks of his faith starting at 5:15.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 45e: "Go on, believe! It does no harm."

Good Friday: At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 75:

The infinite which is in man is at the mercy of a little piece of  iron; such is the human condition; space and time are the cause of  it. It is impossible to handle this piece of iron without suddenly reducing the infinite which is in man to a point on the pointed  part, a point on the handle, at the cost of a harrowing pain. The  whole being is stricken in the instant; there is no place left for God, even in the case of Christ, where the thought of God is not  more at least [at last?] than that of privation. This stage has to  be reached if there is to be incarnation. The whole being becomes privation of God: how can we go beyond? After that there is only the resurrection. To reach this stage the cold touch of naked iron  is necessary.

'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' There we have the real   proof that Christianity is something divine. (p. 79)

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So Long, Lawrence Auster (1949-2013)

Lawrence Auster died early this Good Friday morning.  May he rest in peace and come to know what here below one can only believe.  Here is Laura Wood's obituary.  Auster's site will remain online and is well-worth reading.  I must say, however, that I consider him an extremist and share  Steve Burton's misgivings about his work.  Auster's attacks on distinguished fellow conservatives are often wrongheaded and always tactically foolish, demonstrating as they do a failure to realize that politics is a practical business and that the best and the better are often the enemy of the good.  We need a broad coalition to defeat leftists and Islamists.  A certain amount of intramural squabbling  is to be expected and may even be healthy, but not if it ramps up to internecine warfare.  Dennis Prager is not the enemy because he is optimistic about e pluribus unum while you are not.  Know who the enemy is. 

With Auster and other ultra conservatives, however, it seems one can never be too far Right, and that one who grants the least scintilla of validity to any liberal notion is just as much an enemy as the hardest hard-core left-winger.  From a practical point of view, such extremism  is profoundly stupid.  The ultras will end up talking to themselves in their narrow enclaves and have no effect on the wider culture all the while feeding their false sense of their own significance. 

Ideological extremism is a fascinating topic.  There are leftists for whom one cannot be too far Left, rightists for whom one cannot be too far Right, and, as we have recently observed in the case of Thomas Nagel and his latest book,  atheistic naturalists for whom one cannot be too much of an atheist and too much of a naturalist.

Poor Nagel: atheist, naturalist, liberal.  But still too reasonable and balanced and philosophical for the fanatics and hard-liners of scientistic ideology.  Shunned by his own kind, Nagel must turn to theists, anti-naturalists, and conservatives for appreciation and serious discussion. 

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Here.  There is also the issue of what I call 'misplaced moral enthusiasm.'  Libruls get worked up over Pee-Cee non-issues while turning a blind eye to grave evils such as partial-birth abortions.

Related: Mel Gibson, Misplaced Moral Enthusiasm, and Real Threats

Kimball on the Philistinism of the Nagel Bashers

A good article, except for Roger Kimball's excessive admiration for the positivist David Stove who is himself a philistine, or to employ a neologism of mine, a 'philosophistine.'

See here which concludes:

4. The trouble with Stove is that he is a positivist, an anti-philosopher, someone with no inkling of what philosophy is about. He is very intelligent in a superficial sort of way, witty, erudite, a pleasure to read, and I am sure it would have been great fun to have a beer with him. But he is what I call a philosophistine. A philistine is someone with no appreciation of the fine arts; a philosophistine is one with no appreciation of philosophy. People like Stove and Paul Edwards and Rudolf Carnap just lack the faculty for philosophy, a faculty that is distinct from logical acumen.

5. My tone is harsh.  What justifies it?  The even harsher tone this two-bit positivist assumes in discussing great philosophers who will be read long after he is forgotten, great philosophers he must misunderstand because he cannot attain their level.

My harshness further justified here.

The notion that Stove was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century is risible.

It puzzles me why conservatives as opposed to libertarians should so admire this anti-metaphysical religion-basher.  You don't have to be a theist to be a conservative, but a conservative who doesn't respect religion is no conservative at all.  Here is what R. J. Stove says about his father:

Diagnosed with esophageal cancer, and convinced beyond all reason that his announcement of this diagnosis to Mum had brought about her stroke, Dad simply unraveled. So, to a lesser extent, did those watching him.

All Dad's elaborate atheist religion, with its sacred texts, its martyrs, its church militant; all his ostentatious tough- mindedness; all his intellectual machinery; all these things turned to dust. Convinced for decades of his stoicism, he now unwittingly demonstrated the truth of Clive James's cruel remark: "we would like to think we are stoic...but would prefer a version that didn't hurt."

Already an alcoholic, he now made a regular practice of threatening violence to himself and others. In hospital he wept like a child (I had never before seen him weep). He denounced the nurses for their insufficient knowledge of Socrates and Descartes. From time to time he wandered around the ward naked, in the pit of confused despair. The last time I visited him I found him, to my complete amazement, reading a small bedside Gideon Bible. I voiced surprise at this. He fixed on me the largest, most protuberant, most frightened, and most frightening pair of eyes I have ever seen: "I'll try anything now."

(Years later, I discovered—and was absolutely pole-axed by —the following passage in Bernard Shaw's Too True To Be Good, in which an old pagan, very obviously speaking for Shaw himself, sums up what I am convinced was Dad's attitude near the end. The passage runs: "The science to which I pinned my faith is bankrupt. Its counsels, which should have established the millennium, led, instead, directly to the suicide of Europe. I believed them once. In their name I helped to destroy the faith of millions of worshipers in the temples of a thousand creeds. And now look at me and witness the great tragedy of an atheist who has lost his faith.")

Eventually, through that gift for eloquence which seldom entirely deserted him, Dad convinced a psychiatrist that he should be released from the enforced hospital confinement which he had needed to endure ever since his threats had caused him to be scheduled. The psychiatrist defied the relevant magistrate's orders, and released my father.

Within twenty-four hours Dad had hanged himself in his own garden.

This was in June 1994. I cannot hope to convey the horror of this event. It dealt a mortal blow to the whole atheistic house of cards which constituted my own outlook. 

Times as Maximal Propositions

1. Here are three temporal platitudes: The wholly past is no longer present; the wholly future is not yet present; the present alone is present.  Here are three closely related controversial metaphysical theses: the wholly past, being no longer is not; the wholly future, being not yet,  is not; the present alone is.  The second trio is one version of presentism.  I grant that presentism is appealing, though it would be a mistake to take it to be common sense or immediate fallout from common sense.  The platitudes are Moorean; deny them on pain of being an idiot.  Not so with the heavy-duty metaphysical theses about time and existence advanced by the presentist.  We can reasonably ask what they mean and whether they are true.

2. Now even presentists will admit that the past is not a mere nothing.  Last Sunday's hike has some sort of reality that cries out for accommodation.  After all it is now true that I hiked eight hours on Sunday. Even if there are no truth-makers, there still must be something that the true past-tensed sentence is about.  Here I distinguish between two principles, Truth-Maker and Veritas Sequitur Esse.

3. We should also keep in mind that past times and events do not have the status of the merely possible. When Sunday's hike was over it did not change its modal status from actual to merely possible.  It remained an actual event, albeit a past actual event.  Soren Kierkegaard WAS  engaged to Regine Olsen, but he was never married to her.  Intuitively, the engagement belongs to the sphere of the actual whereas the marriage belongs to the sphere of the merely possible, not that it is possible now.  Neither event is a mere nothing.  Furthermore, the engagement has, intuitively,  'more reality' than the marriage.  What was is more real than what might have been.  Historians attempt to determine what the actual facts were.  They are constrained by the reality of the past, whence it follows that past has some sort of reality.  Historians are neither fiction writers nor students of mere possibilia.

4. I take it to be a Moorean datum that past events and times are not nothing and also not merely possible. Hence a theory of time that cannot accommodate these data is worthless.  How can the presentist accommodate them?  He has to do it in a manner consistent with his claim that past and future  items do not exist at all, that only temporally present items exist. 

5.  One approach is the 'ersatzer' approach: one looks for substitutes for nonpresent times.  Let's consider the view that times are maximal propositions.  A proposition is maximal just in case it entails every proposition with which it is broadly logically consistent.  Accordingly, past and future times are contingently false maximal propositions.   But then the present time is the sole true maximal proposition, and temporal presentness is identical to truth.

This scheme seems to allow us to uphold the Moorean data mentioned in #s 2-4 while holding a version of presentism.  If each time is a proposition, and propositions exist omnitemporally, then all times are always available to be referred to.  Sunday's hike is a wholly past event.  Hence, on presentism, it does not exist at all.  But the maximal propositions that were true during the hike all exist and exist now.  It is just that they are now false.  Sunday's hike is not nothing because those maximal propositions are not nothing and each entails *BV hikes,* a proposition that is not nothing.  Sunday's hike is not merely possible because those maximal propositions, though now false, were true.

What we have done is to substitute for nonexistent past events and times, existent and present but false propositions.

6.  One problem I have with this approach is as follows.  If nonpresent times are false maximal propositions, then the present time is the sole true maximal proposition.  If the present time is the sole true  maximal proposition, then presentness is truth.  The concrete universe cannot, however, be said to be true.  It follows that the concrete universe  cannot be said to be temporally present.  But surely this is false: it anythiingis temporally present the concrete universe is.  For the presentist, whatever exists, exists at present.  The concrete universe exists, ergo, it is present.

Here is a second argument.  If a contingent, singular, affirmative proposition is true, then it is made true by an existing non-proposition.  If the present time is the sole maximal true proposition, then it has a truth-maker.  That truth-maker is the concrete universe in its present state.  So the concrete universe must have the property of being temporally present to serve as the truth-maker of the present time.  For only the present universe could make true the  maximal proposition  that alone is presently true.

The ersatzer approach puts Descartes before the whores the cart before the horse:  it is the presentness of the concrete universe that explains the present truth of the maximal proposition with which the present time has been identified, and not the other way around.  Temporal presentness cannot be truth.  It cannot be 'kicked upstairs' to the level of abstracta.

7.  In sum, the presentist must somehow account for the reality of the past since the past is not nothing and not something merely possible.  But the above ersatzer approach fails.  So what makes it true now that I hiked eight hours on Sunday?  If I understood Rhoda's suggestion it is that God's veridical memory of my hiking on Sunday is the truth-maker of 'I hiked last Sunday.'  We will have to consider Rhoda's suggestion in a separate post.  Deus ex machina? 

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Can a Thing Exist Without Existing Now?

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Thinking Meat?

Argument A.  Meat can't think.  My brain is meat.  Therefore, what thinks in me when I think is not my brain.

A in Reverse: What thinks in me when I think is my brain.  My brain is meat. Therefore, meat can think.

The proponent of A needn't deny that we are meatheads.  Of course we are.  We are literally meat (and bone) all the way through. His point is that the res cogitans cannot be a hunk of meat. 

Both arguments are valid, but only one is sound.  The decision comes down to the initial premises of the two arguments. Is there a rational way of deciding between these premises? 

A materialist might argue as follows.  Although we cannot at present understand how a hunk of meat could feel and think, what is actual is possible regardless of our ability or inability to explain how it is possible.  The powers of certain configurations of matter could remain hidden for a long time from our best science, or even remain hidden forever.  What else would be doing the thinking and feeling in us if not our brains?  What else could the mind be but the functioning brain?  The fact that we cannot understand how the brain could be a semantic engine is not a conclusive reason for thinking that it is not a semantic engine.

It is worth noting that the reverent gushing of the neuro-scientistic types over the incredible complexity of the brain does absolutely nothing to reduce the unintelligibility of the notion that it is brains or parts of brains that are the subjects of intentional and qualitative mental states.  For it is unintelligible how ramping up complexity can trigger a metabasis eis allo genos.  Are you telling me that meat that means is just meat that is more complex than ordinary meat?  You might as well say that the leap from unmeaning meat to meaning meat is a miracle.  Some speak of 'emergence.'  But that word merely papers over the difficulty, labelling the problem without solving it.  You may as well say, as in the cartoon, "And then a miracle occurs."  But then it's Game Over for the materialist.

Our materialist would do better to insist that unintelligibility to us does not entail impossibility.  Our inability to explain how X is possible does not entail that X is not possible.

My response would be that while unintelligibility does not entail impossibility, it is excellent evidence of it.  If you tell me that a certain configuration of neurons is intrinsically object-directed, directed to an object that may or may not exist without prejudice to the object-directedness, then you are saying something unintelligible.  It is as if you said that.5 volts intrinsically represents 1 and .7 volts intrinsically represents 0.  That's nonsense.  Or it as if you said that a pile of rocks intrinsically indicates the direction of the trial.  (See The Philosophizing Hiker: The Derivative Intentionality of Trail Markers.)

No rock pile has intrinsic meaning or intrinsic representational power.   And the same goes for any material item or configuration of material items no matter how complex. No such system has intrinsic meaning; any meaning it has is derived. The meaning is derived either from an intelligent being who ascribes meaning to the material system, or from an intelligent being whose purposes are embodied in the material system, or both.

Thus I am rejecting the view that meaning could inhere in material systems apart from relations to minds that are intrinsically intentional, minds who are original Sinn-ers, if you will, original mean-ers. We are all of us Sinn-ers, every man Jack of us, original Sinn-ers,  but our Sinn-ing is not mortal or venial but vital.  Intrinsic, underived intentionality is our very lifeblood as spiritual beings.

So if the materialist says that the brain means, intends, represents, thinks, etc., then I say that makes no sense given what we understand the brain to be.  The brain is a material system and the physical, chemical, electrical, and biological properties it and its parts have  cannot be meaningfully predicated of mental states.  One cannot speak intelligibly  of a voltage drop across a mental state any more than can one speak intelligibly of the intentionality of synapses or of their point of view or of what it is like to be one.

Of course, the materialist can pin his hope on a future science that understands the brain in different terms, terms that could be sensibly attached to mental phenomena.  But this is nothing more than an empty gesturing towards a 'possibility' that cannot be described except in the vaguest terms.  It is nothing but faith, hope, and hand-waving.

There is also the dogmatism of the materialist who insists that the subject of thinking must be the functioning brain.  How does he know that?  He doesn't.  He believes it strongly is all. 

So I give the palm to Argument A: Meat can't think.  My brain is meat.  Therefore, what thinks in me when I think is not my brain.

I do not absolutely foreclose on the abstract possibility that there be thinking meat.  For I grant that unintelligibility to us is not invincible proof of impossibility.  But when I compare that vaguely described abstract possibility with the present certainty that matter as we know it cannot think due to the very unintelligibility of the idea, then the present certainty wins over the abstract possibility and over the faith and hope of the materialist. 

Cf. They're Made Out of Meat 

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Relations With Relatives

Our relations with our relatives are too often like the relations of Arabs and Israelis: too much past, no future.  But with the Arabs and Israelis it is even worse: too much history, not enough geography.

Conservatives and Prudence

The fourth of Russell Kirk's Ten Conservative Principles reads:

Fourth, conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence. Burke agrees with Plato that in the statesman, prudence is chief among virtues. Any public measure ought to be judged by its probable long-run consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity. Liberals and radicals, the conservative says, are imprudent: for they dash at their objectives without giving much heed to the risk of new abuses worse than the evils they hope to sweep away. As John Randolph of Roanoke put it, Providence moves slowly, but the devil always hurries. Human society being complex, remedies cannot be simple if they are to be efficacious. The conservative declares that he acts only after sufficient reflection, having weighed the consequences. Sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery.

How does Barack Obama stack up against this fourth principle?  Permit me a slight exaggeration: Obama is the apotheosis of imprudence.  Like Randolph's "devil who always hurries,"  he is in a big rush to "fundamentally transform America" (his words), as witness Obamacare and Obama's stunning fiscal irresponsibility.  The national debt approaches 17 trillion (by a very conservative measure) and the man thinks that not a problem.  Well, as Krazy Krugman says, the government is not like a household: the government can print money!  Yes it can.  And will.

At once a devil and a deification.  We are in for it.

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Good analysis by Jonathan Tobin from the pages of Commentary.

No one is more illiberal than a contemporary liberal.  They don't deserve the appellation. 'Leftist' is better.

On Philosophical Denials of the Obvious

In philosophy, appeals to the obvious don't cut much ice because, as Hilary Putnam says somewhere, "It ain't obvious what's obvious."  And as Spencer Case, MavPhil Cairo correspondent,  points out, ". . . in contemporary academic philosophy there is a perverse incentive to deny the obvious."  One who denies what counts as obvious to the vulgar comes off as a learned sophisticate while the one who invokes the obvious is cast in the role of rube or bigot or intransigent fool.

This raises the question whether there are obvious truths the denial of which would be perverse and sophistical.  The answer is obviously in the affirmative.  For example, it is obvious that normal post-natal  human beings have two legs, that if they live long enough they learn to walk upright upon them, etc. Examples are easily multiplied ad libitum in the Moorean manner. More interesting is the question whether there are obvious truths that competent, academically accredited philosophers have denied either directly or by implication.  I asked Spencer for examples.  Here is part of that he said:

As far as more serious philosophers go, certain pro-choice hardliners at the University of Colorado deny that it is wrong to kill small children in fairly mundane circumstances. In addition, I believe every emotivist and expressivist theory of semantic content of moral statements denies the obvious. It's obvious that when I say "eating meat is morally wrong" I do not mean "eating meat (Boo!)" or anything of the sort. I am the one formulating the statement, and I know damn well what I intend to say. Extreme materialism in philosophy of mind, and David Lewis' ideas about modality also seem like good examples to me. Then there's Graham Priest who denies the law of non-contradiction. (But you might have already noticed the hedging in "I believe" or "seem like.") 

Let's consider three examples.  I expect Case to agree with me about the first two and disagree about the third.

1. Infanticide.  I argue this way: "Infanticide is morally wrong; there is no morally relevant difference  between late-term abortion and infanticide; ergo, late-term abortion is morally wrong."  But of course the argument can be run in reverse with no breach of logical propriety: "Late-term abortion is not morally wrong; there is no morally relevant difference between late-term abortion and infanticide; ergo, Infanticide is not morally wrong."  For details, see here.

Both arguments are valid, but only one can be sound.  Which one?  The first, say I.  I am tempted to say that is just obvious that killing infant humans is morally wrong in the vast majority of circumstances, and that if you say the opposite, then you are denyng the obvious.  I think Spencer will agree with me on this.  So here is a case where it is obvious what's obvious.  Even if it is not blindingly self-evident that killing infant humans, for convenience say, is morally wrong, it is more obvious than the opposite.

Of course, much more can be said in elaboration of the basic point, and to soften up my opponent.  But if he remains intransigent, then I am well within my epistemic rights in writing him off as morally blind and showing him the door.  What is both subjectively and objectively self-evident to me is not subjectively self-evident to him -- but that is due to a defect in his cognitive apparatus: he is just morally obtuse.

2. Extreme Materialism.  One form of extreme materialism about the mind, the most extreme, is eliminative materialism.  I trust Spencer will agree with me if I simply dismiss it as a lunatic philosophy of mind despite its having been espoused by some brilliant people.  For argument, see my Eliminative Materialism category.  Brilliance is no guarantee of truth.  (David Lewis goes wrong brilliantly and most creatively.)  My dismissal of eliminative material is a dismissal of its claim to be credible.  It is incredible.  (By its own lights there are no beliefs, which also supplies a reason for its being unbelievable). But I am not saying that one shouldn't  study it.  After all, pathology can be very instructive, whether one studies diseased tissue or diseased thinking.

Less extreme is identity materialism which I argue collapses into eliminativism.  I am within my epistemic rights in simply stating that it is obvious that my present thinking about the Boston Common is not identical to a complex state of my brain.  Of course, I am not saying that one should not be prepared to give detailed arguments and to answer objections.  But all that is merely in the service of what really ought to be obvious.  The arguments merely articulate the position one finds obvious, situating it within the space of reasons.

3. Berkeleyan Idealism.  Can it be dismissed in the same way, as involving a denial of the obvious?  As I said in an earlier post (December 2009) responding to Case:

I think it is clear that someone who identifies God with an anthropomorphic projection simply denies the existence of God.  This putative identification collapses into an elimination.  You are not telling me what God is when you tell me he is an anthropomorphic projection, you are telling me that there is no such being.  Same with felt pains. A putative identification of a felt pain with a brain state collapses into an elimination of felt pains.    For a felt pain simply cannot be identical to a brain state: it has properties no brain state could possibly  have.  But an  identification of a physical object with a cluster of items such as Berkeleyan ideas or Husserlian noemata, items that exist only mind-dependently, does not  collapse into an elimination, the reason being that there is nothing in the nature of physical objects as we experience them that requires that such objects exist in splendid independence of any mind.  I just located my coffee mug on my desk, and now I am drinking from it.  There is nothing in my experiential encounter with this physical thing that requires me to think of it as something that exists whether or not any mind exists.  And so I am not barred from the idealist interpretation of the ontological status of stones and coffee cups and their parts (and their parts . . .).  Nor does the meaning of 'coffee cup' or 'physical object' constrain me to think of such things as existing in complete independence of any mind.  Neither phenomenology nor semantics forces realism upon me.  There is nothing commonsensical about either realism or idealism; both are theories.

Neither a realist nor an idealist interpretation of the ontological status of  physical objects  can be 'read off' from the phenomenology of our experiential encounter with such things or from the semantics of the words we use in referring to them and describing them.  Only if realism were built into the phenomenology or the semantics would an identification of a physical thing with a cluster of mind-dependent items collapse into an elimination of the physical thing. For in that case it would be the very nature of a physical thing to exist mind-independently so that any claim to the contrary would be tantamount to a denial of the existence of the physical thing.  The situation would then be exactly parallel to the one in which someone claims that God is an anthropomorphic projection.  Since nothing could possibly count as God that is an anthropomorphic projection, any claim that God is such a projection amounts to a denial of the existence of God.  But the cases are not parallel since there is nothing in the nature of a physical thing as this nature is revealed by the phenomenology of our encouter with them to require that physical things exist in sublime independence of any and all minds.

Of course, one could just stipulate that physical objects are all of them mind-independent.  But what could justify such a stipulation?  That would be no better than Ayn Rand's axiomatic declaration, Existence exists!  What Rand means by that is that whatever exists exists in such a way as to require no mind for its existence.  But although that may be true, it is far from self-evident and so has no claim to being an axiom.

In sum, token-token-identity theory in the philosophy of mind collapses into eliminativism about mental items.  As so collapsing, it is refutable by Moorean means.  The identitarian claims of idealists, however, do not collapse into eliminativist claims, and so are not refutable by Moorean means.

My claim, then, is that Berkeleyan idealism does not deny the obvious in the way that the eliminative materialist does.  Indeed, it shows a lack of philosophical intelligence if one thinks that Berkeleyan idealism or its opposite is  obvious.  St. Paul displays the same lack of philosophical intelligence when he claims, at Romans 1:18-20 that the existence and nature of God are obvious from nature. See Is Atheism Intellectually Respectable? On Roman 1:18-20.

Nature can be reasonably interpreted both as divine handiwork and as the opposite in the same way that the tree in the quad can be interpreted Berkeley-wise or the opposite.  But my current headache or my present thoughts about Bostion cannot be reasonably interpreted as identical to material states.  It is obvious that they are not material states given the understanding of 'material 'supplied by current physics.

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On the Obvious

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Forgotten Folkies

Paul Clayton, Wild Mountain Thyme.

Who's Gonna Buy You Ribbons (When I'm Gone).  Dylan borrowed a bit of the melody and some of the lyrics for his Don't Think Twice.  This is a proto-version prior to the Freewheelin' album.

Dylan talks about Clayton in the former's Chronicles, Volume One, Simon and Shuster, 2004, pp. 260-261.

Mark Spoelstra is also discussed by Dylan somewhere in Chronicles.  While I flip through the pages, you enjoy Sugar Babe, It's All Over Now.  The title puts me in mind of Dylan's wonderful It's All Over Now, Baby Blue.  Comparing these two songs one sees why Spoelstra, competent as he is, is a forgotten folkie while Dylan is the "bard of our generation" to quote the ultra conservative Lawrence Auster.

Ah yes, Spoelstra is mentioned on pp. 74-75.

About Karen Dalton, Dylan has this to say (Chronicles, p. 12):

My favorite singer in the place [Cafe Wha?, Greenwich Village] was Karen Dalton. She was a tall white blues singer and guitar player, funky, lanky and sultry.  I'd actually met her before, run across her the previous summer outside of Denver in a mountain pass town in a folk club.  Karen had a voice like Billie Holliday's and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed and went all the way with it.  I sang with her a couple of times.

It Hurts Me Too

In My Own Dream.

Same Old Man

Presentism and Existence Simpliciter: Questions for Rhoda

For Alan Rhoda, "Presentism is the metaphysical thesis that whatever exists, exists now, in the present. The past is no more.  The future is not yet.  Either something exists now, or it does not exist, period." Rhoda goes on to claim that presentism is "arguably the common sense position."  I will first comment on whether presentism is commonsensical and then advance to the weightier question of what it could mean for something to exist period, or exist simpliciter.

Common Sense?

It is certainly common sense that the past is no more and the future is not yet.  These are analytic truths understood by anyone who understands English.  They are beyond the reach of reasonable controversy, stating as they do that the past and the future are not present.  But presentism is a substantive metaphysical thesis well within the realm of reasonable controversy.  It is a platitude that what no longer exists, does not now exist.  But there is nothing platitudinous about 'What no longer exists, does not exist at all, or does not exist period, or does not exist simpliciter.'  That is a theoretical  claim of metaphysics about time and existence that is neither supported nor disqualified by common sense and the Moorean data comprising it.

In the four sentences that begin his article, Rhoda has two platitudes sandwiched between two metaphysical claims.  This gives the impression that the metaphysical claims are supported by the platitudes.  My point is that the platitudes, though consistent with the metaphysical theory, give it no aid and comfort.

Compare the problem of universals:  It is a Moorean fact that my cup is blue and that I see the blueness at the cup.  But this datum neither supports nor disqualifies the metaphysical theory that blueness is a universal, nor does it either support or disqualify the competing metaphysical theory that the blueness is a particular, a trope.  Neither common sense, nor ordinary language analysis, nor phenomenology can resolve the dispute.  Dialectical considerations must be brought to bear. 

Existence Simpliciter

Be that as it may.  If we pursue the above line we will be led into metaphilosophy.  On to the central topic.  'Whatever exists, exists now' is open to the Triviality Objection:  of course, what exists (present-tense) exists now!  Enter existence simpliciter.  The following is not a tautology: 'Whatever exists simpliciter, exists now.'

The problem  is to understand exactly what existence simpliciter is.  Let's  recall that in this series of posts it is not the truth-value of presentism that concerns me, but something logically prior to that, namely, the very sense of the thesis.  Only after a thesis is identified can it be evaluated.  I am not being coy.  I really don't understand what precisely the presentist thesis is.  What's more, I have no convictions in the philosophy of time the way I do in the philosophy of existence.  No convictions, and no axes to grind.  For example, I am convinced that the Fregean doctrine of existence is mistaken, pace such luminaries as Frege, Russell, Quine and their latter-day torch-bearers such as van Inwagen.  I am not at all convinced that presentism is wrong.  Like I said, I am not clear as to what it states.

Alan can correct me if I am wrong, but I think what he means by 'existence simpliciter' is something like this:

ES.  X exists simpliciter =_df (Ey)(x = y).

In plain English, an item exists simpliciter if it is identical to something. 'Identical to something' is elliptical for 'identical to something or other.'  I ascribe (ES) to Alan on the basis of a comment of his to the effect that existence simpliciter is the unrestricted quantifier sense of 'exists.'   I take it that unrestricted quantifiers range over unrestricted domains, and that an absolutely unrestricted domain contains everything: past items, present items, future items, atemporal items, merely possible items . . . . Presentism could then be put as follows:

P. (x)[(Ey)(x = y) =_df x exists now].

That is,

P*. Everything is such that it is identical to something iff it exists now.

Now if the quantifiers in (P) and (P*) range over everything, including past and future items, then the theses are trivially false.  But if they range only over present items, then they are trivially true.  To avoid this difficulty, we might formulate Rhoda's presentism thusly:

P**. All and only present items instantiate the concept  being identical to something.

The idea, then, is that  we have the concept existence simpliciter and this concept is the concept being identical to something.  Accordingly the presentist is saying something nontrivial about this concept, namely, that all and only its instances are temporally present items.

Unfortunately, I am still puzzled.  Is the verb instantiate' in (P**) present-tensed?  No, that way lies Triviality.  Is it timeless?  No, there is nothing timeless on Rhoda's scheme.  Is it disjunctive: 'did instantiate or do instantiate or will instantiate'?  No, for that too is false:  it is false that all items that did or do or will instantiate the concept identical to something  are temporally present.  Socrates did instantiate the concept but he is not temporally present.   And obviously 'instantiate' in (P**) cannot be replaced by 'omnitemporally instantiate.'  That leaves a tense-neutral reading of 'instantiate' which somehow abstracts from the timeless, the present-tensed, the omnitemporal and the disjunctive use of a verb. 

I am having trouble understanding what what this tense-neutral use of 'instantiate' amounts to.  But this may only be a problem for me and not for Rhoda's theory.

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Could the Meaning of Life be the Quest for the Meaning of LIfe?

I  have toyed with the notion that the meaning of life just is the search for its meaning.  But this is really no better than saying that the meaning of life is subjective: posited and maintained by the agent of the life, and potentially different for different agents.  If the meaning of human life is subjective, however, then it has no meaning. Similarly, if the meaning of life is exhausted in the search for life's meaning, then there is no meaning apart from the search, which is to say that life has no meaning, strictly speaking.  The following, then, is a nonstarter:

1. The meaning of human life consists in the quest for its meaning.

But (1) is to be distinguished from

2. No human life can count as truly meaningful unless some portion of it is devoted to raising, investigating, and answering for oneself the question as to the meaning of human life.

(2) I heartily endorse.  The difference between (1) and (2) is that (1) identifies the quest for meaning with meaning whereas (2) does not.

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Tweet This

He who tweets is a  twit whose brain will soon be fit only to flit.

Philosopher Lectures on the Cogito at Bordello in Pahrump, Nevada

My sources tell me that he had one hell of a time putting Descartes before the whores.  Well, as Dorothy Parker once observed, "You can lead a whore to culture but you can't make her think."

Should Nagel's Book Be on the Philosophical Index Librorum Prohibitorum?

Via Reppert's blog I came to an article by Simon Blackburn about Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos. The article ends as follows:

There is charm to reading a philosopher who confesses to finding things bewildering. But I regret the appearance of this book. It will only bring comfort to creationists and fans of “intelligent design”, who will not be too bothered about the difference between their divine architect and Nagel’s natural providence. It will give ammunition to those triumphalist scientists who pronounce that philosophy is best pensioned off. If there were a philosophical Vatican, the book would be a good candidate for going on to the Index [of prohibited books].

The problem with the book,  Blackburn states at the beginning of his piece, is that

. . . only a tiny proportion of its informed readers will find it anything other than profoundly wrong-headed. For, as the title suggests, Nagel’s central idea is that there are things that science, as it is presently conceived, cannot possibly explain.

Blackburn doesn't explicitly say that there ought to be a "philosophical Vatican," and an index of prohibited books but he seems to be open to the deeply unphilosophical idea of censoring views that are "profoundly wrong-headed."  And why should such views be kept from impressionable minds?  Because they might lead them astray into doctrinal error.  For even though Nagel explicitly rejects God and divine providence, untutored intellects might confuse Nagel's teleological suggestion with divine providence.

Nagel's great sin, you see, is to point out the rather obvious problems with reductive materialism as he calls it.  This is intolerable to the scientistic  ideologues since any criticism of the reigning orthodoxy, no matter how well-founded, gives aid and comfort to the enemy, theism -- and this despite the fact that Nagel's approach is naturalistic and rejective of theism!

So what Nagel explicitly says doesn't matter.  His failing to toe the party line makes him an enemy  as bad as theists such as Alvin Plantinga.  (If Nagel's book is to be kept under lock and key, one can only wonder at the prophylactic measures necessary to keep infection from leaking out of Plantinga's tomes.)

Blackburn betrays himself as nothing but an ideologue in the above article.  For this is the way ideologues operate.  Never criticize your own, your fellow naturalists in this case.  Never concede anything to your opponents.  Never hesitate, admit doubt or puzzlement.  Keep your eyes on the prize.  Winning alone is what counts.  Never follow an argument where it leads if it leads away from the party line.

Treat the opponent's ideas with ridicule and contumely.  For example, Blackburn refers to consciousness as a purple haze to be dispelled.  ('Purple haze' a double allusion, to the Hendrix number and to a book by Joe Levine on the explanatory gap.) 

What is next Professor Blackburn? A Naturalist Syllabus of Errors?

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Still Puzzling Over Presentism

The presentist aims to restrict what exists in time to what exists in time now.  Call this the presentist restriction.  But if the presentist says that only what exists now, exists, he cannot possibly mean that only what exists at the time of his utterance or thought of the presentist thesis  exists.  If it is now 5:05 AM GMT on 20 March 2013 anno domini, the presentist thesis is not that only what exists at 5:05 AM GMT on 20 March 2013 anno domini exists.  The presentist is not a solipsist of the present moment.  He is a metaphysician, not a lunatic. Nor is presentism an infinite family of time-indexed theses, but one thesis about time and existence.

The presentist restriction is not to the time that happens to be present, but to each time:  Each time t is such that whatever exists in time exists at t. Formulated so as to avoid the solipsism of the present moment, the formulation must quantify over times.  But whatever we quantify over must exist: it must be there to be quantified over.  So nonpresent times must exist.  But nonpresent times cannot exist if presentism is true and only what is present exists.

Therefore, when formulated so as to evade SPM, presentism entails its own falsity.  If true, then false.  If false, then False.  Ergo, necessarily false.

But 'surely' it cannot be that easy to refute presentism!  So I must have gone wrong somewhere.  Where exactly?

Over Sunday breakfast, Peter L. suggested that the presentist can make an exception in the case of (nonpresent) times.  But then the presentist thesis is drastically weakened.  Moreover, no presentist that I know of makes such an exception.

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Lent for Atheists?

Apparently, there are some atheists who are adopting Lenten-type practices without abandoning their atheist beliefs.  This ought to be cautiously applauded: we all can profit morally from a bit of voluntary abstinence.  One cannot live well without (moderate) asceticism.  (See William James on Self-Denial.) Better self-controlled atheists than atheists 'gone wild.'

But I would urge these atheists to go further and practice doxastic abstinence.  Without rejecting your atheist beliefs, put them within brackets for the Lenten period.  Practice epoché with respect to them, that is, withhold intellectual assent.  That is not to doubt them or disbelieve them, but simply to make no use of them.  Leave them alone for a time.  In the strict sense epoché goes beyond even suspension of judgment.  If I suspend judgment with respect to a propositional content, I neither affirm it, deny it, doubt it, nor even just entertain it.  For if I do any of those things I admit that it has a coherent sense.  In epoché, however, I leave it open whether the content has a coherent sense.  Epoché is the ultimate in doxastic disengagement.  Practicing total doxastic abstinence, I totally disengage from those propositions that ignite often acrimonious disagreement. 

You can always go back to your atheist beliefs.  Another excellent form of self-denial for atheists and religionists alike is to abstain from all theological controversies and polemics from time to time.   One could call it a 'belief fast.'  I hope we can all agree that being just is better than developing a theory of justice.  And if discussing the Trinity only makes you angry and combative, then it might be best to drop theology and cultivate piety.

But while atheists can profit from voluntary self-denial, bringing such practices under the Lent umbrella makes little sense.  Will the period of self-denial go from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday?  Why tie it to these dates freighted as they are with Christian metaphysics?  When a Christian reminds himself on Ash Wednesday that he is dust and shall return to dust, the whole point of that memento mori is situated within the context of the hope for and promise of eternal life.  Christian mortalism is toto caelo different from atheist mortalism.  And what the Christian celebrates on Easter Sunday is precisely the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ by the power of God  and the hope that death will be conquered eventually for all. No atheist believes that.

In the final analysis, Lent secularized is no longer Lent.  Atheists ought to exercise their imaginations and come up with a secular analog free of Chistian trappings.

Atheists ought also to worry that if they take up Christian practices, the beliefs may follow . . . . 

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Can One Forgive Oneself? An Aporetic Triad

I pointed out earlier that forgiving is triadic: x forgives y for z.  There is the forgiver, the one to whom forgiveness is proffered, and that which is forgiven.   Nominative, dative, accusative.   It is of course correct English to say 'I forgive you,' but this fact about usage cuts no ice since 'I forgive you'  is elliptical for 'I forgive you for what you did or what you failed to do.'  'I forgive you' is not evidence that forgiving is in some cases dyadic any more than 'Tom is married' is evidence that marriage is monadic. Forgiving is then at least triadic: it is a three-place relation.  'X forgives y for z' has three argument-places.  But it doesn't follow that forgiving is in every case a three-term or three-relata relation.    For if one one can forgive oneself, then  x and y are the same person.  Compare identity, which is a two-place, but one-term relation.

Why did I write "at least triadic"?  Because we need to think about such examples as 'I forgive you both for conspiring against me.'   That appears to involve three persons and one action.  I set this issue aside for later discussion.

At the moment, the following aporetic triad is at the cynosure of my interest:

1. There are cases of self-forgiveness and they are instances of genuine forgiveness.

2. If a person forgives himself at time t for doing or failing to do z , then he cannot help but be aware of and admit his own guilt at t for doing or failing to do z.

3. Genuine forgiveness is unconditional: it is consistent with a non-admission of guilt on the part of the one who is forgiven.

Each limb of the triad is plausible.  But the limbs cannot all be true: the conjunction of ( 1) and (2) entails the negation of (3).  Indeed, the conjunction of any two limbs entails the negation of the remaining limb.

To solve the problem, we must reject one of the limbs. 

(1)-Rejection.  One might maintain that cases of self-forgiveness are not instances of genuine forgiveness.  One might hold that 'forgiveness' in 'self-forgiveness' and 'other-forgiveness'  is being used in different ways, and that the difference between the two phenomena is papered over by the sameness of word.

(2)-Rejection.  I would say that (2) is self-evident and cannot be reasonably rejected.

(3)-Rejection.  One might maintain that genuine forgiveness need not be unconditional, that there are cases when it depends on the satisfaction of the condition that the one forgiven admit his guilt.

I would solve the problem by rejecting both (1) and (3).  As I see it at the moment, genuine forgiveness is an interpersonal transaction: it involves at least two distinct persons.  Self-forgiveness, however, remains intra-personal. What is called self-forgiveness is therefore a distinct, albeit related, phenomenon.  It is not genuine forgiveness the paradigm case of which is one person forgiving another for an action or omission that is in some sense wrong, that injures the first person,  and that the second person admits is wrong.

I also maintain that forgveness cannot be unconditional. For forgiveness to transpire as between A and B, B must accept the forgiveness that A offers.  But B cannot do this unless he admits that he has done something (or left something undone) that is morally or legally or in some other way (e.g., etiquette-wise) censurable.  Thus B must admit  guilt.  That is a condition that must be met if forgiveness is to occur.

One who accepts both (1) and (3) will, via (2), land himself in a contradiction.

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Here.

Thomas Nagel, Heretic

Andrew Ferguson writes on the the explosion of hostility toward Thomas Nagel after the publication of his 2012 book, Mind and Cosmos.  Here is my overview of the book.  More detailed posts on the same book are collected under the Nagel rubric.

For a non-philosopher, Ferguson's treatment is accurate.  Here are a couple of  interesting excerpts in which he relates the thoughts of Daniel Dennett:

Daniel Dennett took a different view. While it is true that materialism tells us a human being is nothing more than a “moist robot”—a phrase Dennett took from a Dilbert comic—we run a risk when we let this cat, or robot, out of the bag. If we repeatedly tell folks that their sense of free will or belief in objective morality is essentially an illusion, such knowledge has the potential to undermine civilization itself, Dennett believes. Civil order requires the general acceptance of personal responsibility, which is closely linked to the notion of free will. Better, said Dennett, if the public were told that “for general purposes” the self and free will and objective morality do indeed exist—that colors and sounds exist, too—“just not in the way they think.” They “exist in a special way,” which is to say, ultimately, not at all.

What amazes me is that people like Dennett fail to appreciate the utter absurdity of what they are maintaining.  He obviously believes that civilization and civil order both exist and are worth preserving.  This is why he thinks the sober materialist truth ought not be broadcast to hoi polloi.  And yet the preservation of civilization and its order require the widespread acceptance of such illusory notions as that of moral responsibility and freedom of the will.  But if these notions are illusory, then so are Dennett's value judgment that civilization is worth preserving and his factual judgment that civilization exists.

It is absurd (self-contradictory) to maintain both that civilization is valuable and that every value-judgment is illusory.

It is also absurd to urge that the truth ought to be withheld from the ignorant masses.   There is no room for 'ought' in Dennett's eliminativist  scheme.  Nor is there any room for rational persuasion.  Rational persuasion requires that there be reasons, and that people are sensitive to them.  But in Dennett's world reasons must be as ultimately illusory as consciousness and free will and all the rest of Wilfrid Sellars' Manifest Image.

It is absurd to attempt to  persuade rationally if reasons are illusory.

It is also absurd to put forth 'truths' on a scheme that allows no place for truth. 

When all of the following are consigned to the junk heap, then the very eliminativist project consigns itself to the junk heap: consciousness, intentionality, purposiveness, qualia, truth, meaning, , moral responsibility, personhood, free will, normativity in all its varieties . . . .

It's nonsense and the various emperors of this Nonsense are naked.   And yet Dennett and Co. can't see it:

“I am just appalled to see how, in spite of what I think is the progress we’ve made in the last 25 years, there’s this sort of retrograde gang,” he said, dropping his hands on the table. “They’re going back to old-fashioned armchair philosophy with relish and eagerness. It’s sickening. And they lure in other people. And their work isn’t worth anything—it’s cute and it’s clever and it’s not worth a damn.”

There was an air of amused exasperation. “Will you name names?” one of the participants prodded, joking.

“No names!” Dennett said.

The philosopher Alex Rosenberg, author of The Atheist’s Guide, leaned forward, unamused.

“And then there’s some work that is neither cute nor clever,” he said. “And it’s by Tom Nagel.”

There it was! Tom Nagel, whose Mind and Cosmos was already causing a derangement among philosophers in England and America.

Dennett sighed at the mention of the name, more in sorrow than in anger. His disgust seemed to drain from him, replaced by resignation. He looked at the table.

“Yes,” said Dennett, “there is that.”

Around the table, with the PowerPoint humming, they all seemed to heave a sad sigh—a deep, workshop sigh.

Tom, oh Tom .  .  . How did we lose Tom .  .  .

Thomas Nagel may be the most famous philosopher in the United States—a bit like being the best power forward in the Lullaby League, but still. His paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” was recognized as a classic when it was published in 1974. Today it is a staple of undergraduate philosophy classes. His books range with a light touch over ethics and politics and the philosophy of mind. His papers are admired not only for their philosophical provocations but also for their rare (among modern philosophers) simplicity and stylistic clarity, bordering sometimes on literary grace.  

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Bipolar Bears

These dual-residence antipodeans are an exceedingly rare subspecies of ursus maritimus. While they can be quite tame under medication, off their meds they go to extremes.

What It's All About

I knew a guy who maintained that getting married and having kids was "what it's all about."  I incline to the view that figuring out what it's all about is what it's all about.  And depending on how seriously one takes that task, one might decide that having children is contraindicated.  When Prince Siddartha got word that his wife had bore him a son, he name him 'Rahula,' meaning fetter.  Or so the story goes.

Anecdotage

The last stop for the old raconteur.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan

This, Dylan's second album, and one of my favorites, was released in May of 1963 by Columbia Records. Here are my favorites from the album. 

Blowin' in the Wind, with its understated topicality, enjoys an assured place in the Great American Songbook.  London Ed uploaded this Alanis Morissette version which is one of the better covers.  Thanks, Ed!

Girl from the North Country Ah! it's even better than I remember it as being.

Understated topicality also characterizes A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, written during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, lending it a timeless quality absent in a blatant 'finger-pointing' song such as Masters of War.  The Baez version is probably the best of the covers.

Don't Think Twice, It's All Right in the outstanding PP & M version.  Another permanent addition to musical Americana.  Said to be inspired by Suze Rotolo, the girl on the album cover.

Bob Dylan's Dream in the PP & M rendition.

Oxford Town.  About James Meredith's battle for admission to the University of Mississippi.

In her memoir, A Frewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties (Broadway Books, 2008, p. 277-8), Suze Rotolo says this about her mother Mary Rotolo:

I remember her informing me that the career army man an older cousin was married to had lost out on a promotion that involved security clearance because of my appearance on the cover of Bob's album.  I was astounded.

True, the times they were troubled.  Protest against the escalating war in Vietnam was on the rise, draft cards were being burned, and colleges were erupting with discontent.  Blues, bluegrass, and ballads no longer defined folk music, since so many folksingers were now writing songs that spoke to current events.  Bob Dylan was labeled a "protest singer."  But the absurdity of my mother, Marxist Mary, trying to make me feel responsible for a military man's losing a security clearance because I am on an album cover with Bob Dylan, a rebel with a cause, left me speechless.  And that was all she said to me about the cover or the album in general. 

Capital Punishment: From One Extreme to Another

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Seven Saudi men convicted of theft, looting and armed robbery were executed on Wednesday, according to the country's official news agency, more than a week after their families and a rights group appealed to the king for clemency.

The executions took place in Abha, a city in the southern region of Asir, the Saudi Press Agency said. A resident who witnessed the execution said the seven were shot dead by a firing squad, a first in the kingdom, which traditionally has beheaded convicts sentenced to death.

[. . .]

The original sentences called for death by firing squad and crucifixion.

That's the one extreme, justice Sharia-style.  Here is the other, justice liberal-style, if you want to call it 'justice':

Amnesty International called the executions an "act of sheer brutality."

"We are outraged by the execution of seven men in Saudi Arabia this morning. We oppose the death penalty in all circumstances, but this case has been particularly shocking," said Philip Luther, Amnesty's Middle East and North Africa director. (emphasis added)

I say that what we have here are equal but opposite forms of moral insanity.  That Sharia is morally insane needs no argument.  But anyone who opposes the death penalty in all circumstances is equally morally obtuse and has no conception of justice at all.  I argue this in detail in my Crime and Punishment category and I won't repeat myself here.  In any case, argument with the morally obtuse is pointless since their lack of sound moral sense prevents them from accepting the premises from which alone one can fruitfully argue.

Arguing with the morally obtuse about moral matters is like arguing with the empirically uninformed about empirical matters

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An Analysis of the Concept of Forgiveness

In my last post on this topic I advanced a double-barreled thesis to the effect that (i) unconditional forgiveness is in most cases morally objectionable, and (ii) in most cases conditional forgiveness is genuine forgiveness.  But now we need to back up and focus on the very concept of forgiveness since deciding whether (i) and (ii) are correct depends on what exactly we take forgiveness to be.  So here is my preliminary stab at an analysis.  After this task is completed, it may be necessary to back up once more and ask how I arrived at my analysis.  Ain't philosophy fun?

1. Forgiveness has a triadic structure: to forgive is for someone to forgive someone for something.  X forgives y for z, where x and y are persons (usually but not necessarily human) and z is typically an action or an action-omission.  We typically forgive deeds and misdeeds, but perhaps states can be forgiven, for example, the state of being insufferably arrogant.  An interesting side-question is whether x and y could be the same person.  Is it possible to forgive oneself for something?  I mention this question only to set it aside.

2. Only those we perceive to be guilty can be forgiven.  Necessarily, if x forgives y for z, then x perceive, whether rightly or wrongly, y to be guilty of doing or having done z, or guilty of failing or having failed to do z.  The necessity of this necessary truth is grounded in the very concept of forgiveness.

3. It follows from (2) that only what one rightly or wrongly takes to be a moral agent can be forgiven or not forgiven.  For anything one takes to be morally guilty one must take to be a moral agent.  I can neither forgive nor not forgive my cat for sampling my lasagne.  Not being a moral agent, my cat cannot incur guilt.

4. It also follows from (2) that what I forgive a person for must be a wrongful act or act-omission.  Tom, unlike my cat, is a moral agent; but it is not possible to forgive Tom for feeding his kids.

5. Forgiving works a salutary change in the forgiver: it alters his mental attitude toward the one forgiven.  True forgiveness is not merely verbal but involves a genuine change of heart/mind (a metanoia if you will) that is good for the forgiver. 

6. Forgiving cannot remove the guilt of the one forgiven if he is indeed guilty.  Suppose you steal my money.  You don't admit guilt or make restitution.  But I forgive you anyway.  Clearly, my forgiving you does not remove your moral guilt.  You remain objectively guilty of theft.  The demands of justice have not been satisfied. 

7. Forgiving cannot retroactively make a person innocent of a crime he has committed.  Suppose again that you steal my money.  You admit guilt and you make restitution.  My forgiving you does not and cannot change the fact that you wrongfully took my money.  Forgiveness does not retroactively confer innocence.  It follows that you remain guilty of having committed the crime even if you do admit guilt and satisfy the objectve demands of justice by making restitution, etc.

Assuming that the above analysis is correct, albeit not complete, does it allow for the possibility of unconditional forgiveness?  It does.  Suppose again that you steal my money, but don't admit guilt let alone make restitution.  If I forgive you nonetheless, then I do so unconditionally, as opposed to on condition that you admit guilt, make restitution, etc.

Note that unconditional forgiveness is not an inter-personal transaction between the forgiver and the person forgiven, but something that transpires intrapsychically in the forgiver.  This is because unconditional forgiveness doesn't require the one forgiven to acknowledge anything or even to be aware that he is the recipient of forgiveness.   One can unconditionally forgive dead persons and persons with whom one has no contact.  Since unconditional forgiveness is merely intra-personal as opposed to inter-personal, one may question whether it is forgiveness in the strict sense at all. Accordingly, one might add to the list of the concept's features:

8.  Necessarily, if x forgives y, then y perceives himself as having done something wrong and admits his wrongdoing to x.

Now I don't think that features 1-7 are controversial, but #8 is.  For it rules out unconditional forgiveness.  The underlying issue is whether forgiveness is an inter-personal transaction or merely an attitude change within the mind/heart of the forgiver.  If forgiveness is inter-personal, the one forgiven must accept forgiveness.  But he can do that only if he acknowledges guilt.

But if unconditional forgiveness is possible, and not ruled out by the very concept of forgiveness, it doesn't follow that it is morally acceptable.  I say it is not.  To forgive unconditionally is to refuse to take a stand against it.  But I will leave the elaboration of this point for later.

The other main question is whether conditional forgiveness is genuine forgiveness.  I say it is.

One might think that there is nothing left to forgive after the offender has admitted guilt, made reparations, etc.  But there is something left to forgive, namely, his having committed the offense in the first place.

A second consideration.  If unconditional forgiveness is possible, then what makes forgiveness forgiveness has nothing to do with the the one forgiven:  it does not require his admission of guilt, his doing penance, or even his being guilty.  If I forgive a person, I must take him to be guilty, but he needn't be in fact.  Unconditional forgiveness is merely an alteration of the forgiver's mental state.  Now if forgiveness is what it is whether or not there is any non-relational change in the one forgiven, then it doesn't matter whether or not the conditions are satisfied.  So conditional forgiveness will be just as much forgiveness as unconditional forgiveness is.

So for these two reasons conditional forgiveness counts as genuine forgiveness.

 

Related articles

The Putative Paradox of Forgiveness

More on the Putative Paradox of Forgiveness

A Prudent Assumption

It is prudent to assume that what can be taken the wrong way will be.

Popes and Dopes

I was planning on writing something along these lines, but James Taranto has done the job and done it well.

Atheist Malcolm Pollack gets it right too and refers us to a fine piece by Pat Buchanan.

And then there is this by Michael Brendan Dougherty on the ascendancy of Jorge Bergoglio:

But the other way to look at the dawn of this papacy is that it is one more in the pile of recent Catholic novelties and mediocrities. He is the first Latin American pope, the first Jesuit to be pope, and the first to take the name Francis. And so he falls in line with the larger era of the church in the past 50 years which has been defined by ill-considered experimentation: a “pastoral” ecumenical council at Vatican II, a new synthetic vernacular liturgy, the hasty revision of the rules for almost all religious orders within the church, the dramatic gestures and “saint factory” of Pope John Paul II’s papacy, along with the surprise resignation of Benedict XVI. In this vision, Benedict’s papacy, which focused on “continuity,” seems like the exception to an epoch of stunning and unsettling change, which—as we know—usually heralds collapse.

"Ill-considered experimentation" is right.  I would go further and call it profoundly stupid.  People who are drawn to religion tend to be of a conservative bent.  Conservatives don't like change, tolerating it only when necessary.  For a conservative, there is a defeasible presumption in favor of keeping things as they are, a  defeasible presumption in favor of traditional formulations and usages, beliefs and practices.  Now the world outside the Church is rife with  change, not all of it bad, of course, but much of it unsettling.  The Church ought to be a place of stability and order, an oasis of calm, a venue where the ancient is preserved as a temporal reminder of the eternal.

So  you drive people away from the Church by instituting 'reforms' that accommodate the Church to the crap culture outside it.  This is a large topic and a fit one for a large-scale rant, but it is time to punch the clock.  I will just mention three stupidities: getting rid of the Latin mass; abolishing the no-meat-on-Friday rule, and the asinine PC re-labelling of confession as 'reconciliation.'  Pee-Cee crapola and just the tip of the iceberg.

Even if Catholicism is pure buncombe with no transcendent warrant, if it wants to survive immanently speaking, then it must not allow itself to be watered down into some form of  namby-pamby secular humanist bullshit.

Have I succeeded in expressing my disapprobation of recent developments?

The dopes inside the Church are worse than those outside it.

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Benedict XVI: "A Conservative Not in Favor of Reforms"

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More on the Putative Paradox of Forgiveness

This just over the transom: 

Finally, a post on forgiveness. :-) But my spirit within me won't permit me to forgo responding to what you've written. You characterize the paradox this way: It is morally objectionable to forgive those who will not admit wrongdoing, show no remorse, make no amends, do not pay restitution, etc.  But if forgiveness is made conditional upon the doing of these things, then what is to forgive?  Conditional forgiveness is not forgiveness.  That is the gist of the putative paradox, assuming I have understood it.

 

That is not quite right.

The problem is this. Forgiving unconditionally -- forgiving someone without their apology, repentance, penance, etc. -- seems to amount to little more than condoning what they've done; it's hardly forgiveness but more of an acceptance of the wrong. On the other hand, forgiving on the condition that the wrong has been atoned -- the wrongdoer has apologized, repented, made reparations, performed penances, etc -- seems to be superfluous, insofar as after atonement has been made, the wrongdoer is not guilty of anything any longer and thus there is nothing to forgive, nor would continued resentment be appropriate. 

BV:  That's exactly what I said, though in a lapidary manner.  So I think we agree as to what the putative paradox is.  I call it 'putative' because I don't see it as a genuine paradox.

 

You write that, The first limb strikes me as self-evident: it is indeed morally objectionable to forgive those who will not admit wrongdoing, etc. But this is contentious; not everyone sees this the way you do. For instance, Jesus seems to forgive wrongdoers unconditionally on two occasions, once in the pericope adulterae (at John 7.53-8.11) and again at Luke 23.34 when he is being crucified. A significant number of contemporary philosophers (e.g., David Garrard, Eve McNaughton, Leo Zaibert, Christopher McCowley, Cheshire Calhoun, Glen Pettigrove) defend the practice of unconditional forgiveness, as well. So it's unacceptable simply to accept the first horn of the paradox as is; there is the argumentation of all these philosophers to deal with!

 

 

BV: Yes, my assertion is debatable, but then so is almost everything in philosophy and plenty of what is outside of philosophy.  I don't think bringing Jesus in advances your argument.  Either Jesus is God or he is not.  If he is not, then he lacks the authority to contravene the existing law and forgive the adulteress.  If he is God, then two problems.  First, your argument then rests on a highly contentious theological presupposition.  (I will remind you that in conversation you said that you were not trying to work out the Christian concept of forgiveness, but the concept of forgiveness in general.) Second, granting that God has the authority to forgive and forgive unconditionally, that has no relevance to the human condition, to forgiveness as it plays out among mere mortals such as us. For one thing, God can afford to forgive unconditionally; nothing can touch him.  But for us to adopt a policy of forgiving unconditionally would be disastrous.

At Luke 23:34, Jesus is reported to have said, "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do."  Note that Jesus is not forgiving his tormenters; he is asking God the Father to forgive them.  So this passage is not relevant to our discussion.  Besides, there is nothing here about unconditional forgiveness.  Jesus could have been requesting his Father to forgive the killers after punishing them appropriately.

Your mention of contemporary philosophers who support your position is just name-dropping.  To drop a name is not to give an argument.  I would have to see their arguments.  Is it unacceptable for me to hold to my understanding of forgiveness according to which it is morally objectionable to forgive the unrepentant in advance of studying the arguments of those you mention?  No more unacceptable than holding to the view that motion is possible in advance of studying the arguments of Zeno and his school, or holding to the reality of time despite my inability decisively to refute McTaggart.  I might just stand my Moorean ground: "Look, I just ate lunch; therefore time is real!"  Similarly with forgiveness: "Look, it is a wonderful thing to forgive, but only on condition that the offender own up to his wrongdoing, make amends, etc."

You also write, I admit that once the miscreant has paid his debt, he is morally in the clear.  His guilt has been removed.  But I can still forgive him because forgiveness does not take away guilt, it merely alters the attitude of the one violated to the one who violated him. You are forgetting another important aspect of forgiveness beyond the change in attitude, however, namely that it is a way of responding to wrongdoers as wrongdoers. Another way of putting this is that forgiveness is only possible when someone stands before us as guilty for some wrong done and is thus an appropriate candidate for resentment, anger, etc. If someone has atoned for their wrong and is no longer guilty, then there's no ground for resentment and thus there's nothing more to forgive! So the change in attitude after atonement has been made may resemble forgiveness, but it's hardly genuine forgiveness since there's no wrong to forgive any longer.

BV:  This is an interesting and weighty point, but I disagree nonetheless.  You may be conflating two separate claims.  I would say that it is a conceptual truth that if X forgives Y, then X perceives Y as having done wrong, whether or not Y has in fact done wrong.  This truth is analytic in that it merely unpacks our ordinary understanding of 'forgiveness.'  But it doesn't follow from this conceptual truth that there is nothing left to forgive with respect to a person who has atoned for his misdeed.   I say there is:  the mere fact that he has done me wrong in the first place.  Suppose he stole my money, but then apologized and made restitution.  In that case the demands of justice have been met.  But there is still something left to forgive, namely, his having stolen my money in the first place.  The apology and restitution do not eliminate the whole of the guilt, for the offender remains guilty of the misdeed.  After all, his apology and restitution do not retroactively make him innocent.  He remains guilty as charged.  The fact of his having committed the misdeed  can in no way be altered.  Though contingent at the time, it now has the modal status of necessitas per accidens.

There is obviously a difference between one who is guilty of an offence and one who is innocent of it.  That distinction remains in place even after the guilty party pays for his crime.  Your position seems to imply that punishment retroactively renders the criminal innocent -- which is absurd.

Consider this. Forgiveness is commonly thought of as gracious; it is a generous way of responding to wrongdoers that goes beyond strictly what they deserve. How is it at all generous to change one's attitude towards a wrongdoer only once atonement has been made and she is effectively no longer a wrongdoer?

BV:  I agree that forgiveness is gracious and not strictly a matter of desert.  It is nevertheless generous to forgive even after atonement has been made.  For one is forgiving the offender of having committed the misdeed in he first place.  I deny that the offender is no longer a wrongdoer after the penalty has been paid.  Again, your position seems to imply that punishment retroactively renders the criminal innocent.

Remember the Derrida quote I cited:

Imagine, then, that I forgive on the condition that the guilty one repents, mends his ways, asks forgiveness, and thus would be changed by a new obligation, and that from then on he would no longer be exactly the same as the one who was found to be culpable. In this case, can one still speak of forgiveness? This would be too simple on both sides: one forgives someone other than the guilty one. In order for there to be forgiveness, must one not on the contrary forgive both the fault and the guilty as such, where the one and the other remain as irreversible as the evil, as evil itself, and being capable of repeating itself, unforgivably, without transformation, without amelioration, without repentance or promise? Must one not maintain that an act of forgiveness worthy of its name, if there ever is such a thing, must forgive the unforgivable, and without condition? (On cosmopolitanism and forgiveness, pp. 38-9)

BV:  John Searle once said of Derrida that he gives bullshit a bad name.  So an appeal to the authority of Derrida will have as little effect on me as an appeal the supposed authority of Paul Krugman in an economic connection.  The Derrida passage smacks of sophistry what with the rhetorical questions and the typically French amorphousness.  He seems to be advancing the following sophism.  If one forgives the one who has atoned, then "one forgives someone other than the guilty one."  But that is to confuse numerical identity with qualitative identity.

 

Thus I have to hold, pace tua, that genuine forgiveness must be unconditional, and conditionalized forgiveness is less than true.

BV: And I continue to maintain, pace tua, that only conditional forgiveness is morally unobjectionable and that conditional forgiveness counts as genuine forgiveness. 

 

 

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The Putative Paradox of Forgiveness

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You are free to psychologize your opponent when his position is demonstrably false or incoherent.  If his reasons are worthless, then you are justified in exposing the motives that drive his commitments. 

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Common Ground Between Presentist and Anti-Presentist?

What the presentist affirms, roughly, is that only (temporally) present items exist: there are no nonpresent existents.  The anti-presentist denies this, maintaining that there are nonpresent existents.  Now there is no genuine dispute here unless the identity of the presentist thesis is perfectly clear and the anti-present is denying that very thesis.

Following some earlier suggestions of Peter Lupu, I will now try to formulate this dispute using the concept nonpresent existent.  I will use 'NPE' to refer to this concept, a concept we may assume both the presentist and his opponents understand.  A nonpresent existent, by stipulative definition, is one that exists in time, but is either merely past or merely future.  Using NPE, presentism and anti-presentism may be defined as follows:

P. NPE is not instantiated

AP. NPE is instantiated.

The dispute, then, is about whether NPE is instantiated.  NPE is a concept both parties understand.  So it is common ground.  The dispute is not about this concept, but about whether it is instantiated.

But note that 'is' occurs in both formulations.  Does it have exactly the same sense in both (P) and (AP)?  If not, then the common ground afforded us by NPE avails us nothing.

Yesterday (see link below) I distinguished five time-related senses of 'is.'  Starting with (P), which sense of 'is' is operative in it?  We can right away exclude the 'is' of atemporality since presentism is a thesis about temporal items.  We can also exclude the 'is' of temporal presentness.  The presentist cannot be charitably construed as saying that NPE is not now instantiated, for that is trivially true. 

The 'is' of omnitemporality is not a suitable candidate either.  For if NPE is not instantiated at every time, then we have quantification over times.  But one cannot quantify over what does not exist.  So nonpresent times exist.  But if so, then NPE is instantiated, contrary to what the presentist intends.

On the disjunctively detensed reading of 'is', the presentist is saying that NPE was not instantiated or is not instantiated or will be not instantiated, and the anti-presentist is saying that the NPE was instantiated or is instantiated or will be instantiated.

Does this do the trick? At the moment I cannot see that it doesn't.  But time is the hardest of nuts to crack and my 'nutcracker' may not be up to the job . . . .

 

Related articles

Five Time-Related Senses of 'Is'

The Putative Paradox of Forgiveness

I understand Aurel Kolnai has a paper on this topic.  I haven't read it.  But the paradox has been put to me as follows in conversation.

It is morally objectionable to forgive those who will not admit wrongdoing, show no remorse, make no amends, do not pay restitution, etc.  But if forgiveness is made conditional upon the doing of these things, then what is to forgive?  Conditional forgiveness is not forgiveness.  That is the gist of the putative paradox, assuming I have understood it.

This is something I need to explore, but off the top of my head I fail to see a problem.  The first limb strikes me as self-evident: it is indeed morally objectionable to forgive those who will not admit wrongdoing, etc.  But I reject the second limb. I admit that once the miscreant has paid his debt, he is morally in the clear.  His guilt has been removed.  But I can still forgive him because forgiveness does not take away guilt, it merely alters the attitude of the one violated to the one who violated him.

Suppose you take money from my wallet without my permission.  I catch you at it and express my moral objection.  You give me back my money and apologize for having taken it.  I  forgive you.  My forgiving you makes perfect sense even though you have made restitution and have apologized.  For I might not have forgiven you: I might have told you go to hell and get out of my life for good.

By forgiving you, I freely abandon the justified negative attitude toward you that resulted from your bad behavior.  This works a salutary change in me, but it also does you good, for now you are restored to my good graces and our mutual relations become once again amicable.

So I see no paradox.  The first limb is self-evidently true while the second is false.  Only conditional forgiveness is genuine forgiveness. 

It is of course possible that I am not thinking deeply enough!

Five Time-Related Senses of 'Is'

I dedicate this post to that loveable rascal Bill Clinton who taught us just how much can ride on what the meaning of 'is' is.

Credit where credit is due: Some of the inspiration for this post comes from a conversation with Peter Lupu and from an article he recommended, S. Savitt, Presentism and Eternalism in Perspective.

1.  There is first of all the 'is' of atemporality.  Assuming that there are timeless entities such as God (concrete) and the number 13 (abstract), any sentences we use to talk about them must feature tenseless verbs and copulae.  Consider the proposition expressed by the sentence, '13 is prime.'  13 is prime, but not now and not always.  If the truth were always true, it would be in time.  The truth is timeless and so is the object 13 and the property of being prime.  The same goes for '13 exists.'  It is not true now nor at every time.  It is true timelessly.  It is worth noting that the timeless is' and 'exists' do not abstract from the temporal determinations of pastness, presentness, and futurity for the simple reason that numbers and such are not in time in the first place.  So the 'is' of atemporality is not the result of a de-tensing operation whereby we abtract from the temporal determinations to lay bare the pure copula, the copula that merely 'copulates.'  The 'is' in question is tenseless from the 'git-go.'

Perhaps we should distinguish between grammatical tense and logical tense.  Every verb has a grammatical tense.  Thus the verb in 'God exists' is in the present tense. But God exists timelessly, and so 'exists' in this instance is logically without a tense.

Consider John 8:58: "Before Abraham was, I am."  Is that ungrammatical?  Yes, but logically it makes sense.

2. At the opposite end of the spectrum we find the 'is' of temporal presentness.  Examples: 'Peter is smoking' and 'There are 13 donuts in the box.'  There are now 13 donuts in the box.

3. The 'is' of omnitemporality.  Savitt gives the example of 'Copper is a conductor of electricity.'  The sentence is true at every time, not just at present.  But it is not timelessly true since it is about something in time, copper.  I think the example shows that the tenseless is not the same as the timeless.  What is timelessly true is tenselessly true, but not conversely.

4. The Disjunctively Detensed 'Is.'  We can de-tense 'is' as follows: x is detensedly F just in case x was F or is  F or will be F.  We can do the same with 'exists.'  Thus, Socrates is detensedly wise iff Socrates was wise or is wise or will be wise.  De-tensing involves abstracting from temporal determinations.  A detensed copula is a pure copula: all it does is 'copulate' or link. 

The 'am' in 'I am dead' is a pure copula, and the sentence is tenselessly true, but not presently true or timelessly true or omnitemporally true.  Gott sei dank!

5. The Hypertenseless 'Is.'  God exists atemporally and thus tenselessly while Socrates exists temporally but not presently or omnitemporally and thus he too exists tenselessly.  If there is a hypertenseless sense of 'exist' it applies to both God and Socrates and abstracts from the way each exists, atemporally in the case of God, temporally in the case of Socrates.

In 'God and Socrates both exist,' the 'exist' is hypertenseless in that it is abstractly common to both the tenselessness of the 'exists' in 'God exists' and the tenselessness of the 'exists' in 'Socrates exists.' 

Now what is this hypertenseless univocal sense of 'exists' that applies to both God and Socrates?  Persumably it is the quantifier sense according to which x exists iff (Ey) x = y.  Existence in this sense is identity-with-something-or-other. Absolutely everything, whatever its mode of existence, exists in this hypertenseless sense.

Now the presentist wants to say that, necessarily, it is always the case that only present items exist.  But in what sense of 'exist'?  It cannot be the first four, for reasons given in previous posts.  So let's try the fifth sense.  Accordingly, only present items are identical-with-something-or-other. 

Does this work? 

Related articles

Abstracta: Omnitemporal or Timeless? An Argument from McCann

Time and Tense: Remarks on the B-Theory

Defining Presentism

Presentism and Actualism, Tenseless Existence and Amodal Existence

Can a Thing Exist Without Existing Now?

A Slap Down for the Food Fascists

That nanny-state nincompoop, Mayor Bloomberg, had his preternaturally risible limit anent large sodas struck down by a NY judge. 

I have more to say in Feel-Good Liberalism, High Capacity Magazines and High Capacity Soft Drink Containers.

What fools these liberals be!

 

Marriage and Admiration

What makes for a good marriage?  It is not enough to like your spouse.  It is not enough to love her.  The partners must also admire one another.  There has to be some attribute  in your spouse that you don't find in yourself (or not in the same measure) and that you aspire to possess or possess more fully.  Must I add that we are not talking mainly about physical attributes?

What is admiration?

To love is not to admire.  If God exists, he loves us.  But he certainly doesn't admire us.  For what does he lack?  He doesn't aspire to possess any attribute that we have and that he lacks.  Closer to the ground, one can easily love a sentient being, whether animal or human, without admiration. 

To value is not to admire.  Prudence is a valuable attribute; so if you are prudent, I will value you in respect of your prudence; but if I am as prudent as you, then I don't admire you in respect of your prudence.  Admiration is for attributes the admirer does not possess, or does not possess in the measure the admired possesses them.

To respect is not to admire.  I can and ethically must respect the rights of those who are inferior to me in respect of admirable attributes.

My suggestion, then, is that a necessary though not sufficient condition of a good marriage is that it be a two-membered mutual admiration society.

'Transpicuous'

When I encountered 'transpicuous' for the first time today, I thought the writer was either neologizing  by combining 'transparent' and 'conspicuous,' or else just confused.  But the word, though rare, has been in the English language since the 17th century.

Use it or lose it!

Companion post: What is Language? Tool, Enabler, Dominatrix?

The Rand Paul Filibuster

In Paul's own words:

I wanted to sound an alarm bell from coast to coast. I wanted everybody to know that our Constitution is precious and that no American should be killed by a drone without first being charged with a crime. As Americans, we have fought long and hard for the Bill of Rights. The idea that no person shall be held without due process, and that no person shall be held for a capital offense without being indicted, is a founding American principle and a basic right.

If the Obama Administration whose Attorney General is Eric Holder can get away with killing by drone an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, without owning up to it, what is to stop such a mendacious and power-hungry administration  from killing U.S. citizens in the homeland without due process?

Even the shysters of the ACLU and the  bunch at The Nation are on the right side of this issue. It would be nice if we could convince the aforementioned crapweasels that it is the Second Amendment that backs up the others, including the Fifth, but they are too morally corrupt and intellectually obtuse for that. 

David Theroux of the Independent Institute asked me to post a link to ta short video, Anthony Gregory on Rand Paul's Senate Filibuster.  I am happy to do so.

Companion post: Welcome to Fascist Amerika 

Conor Friedersdorf on Holder's Evasive Letter

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Rand Paul filibusters.

Subsidiarity and the Left's Assault on Civil Society

Abstracta: Omnitemporal or Timeless? An Argument from McCann

Is everything in time? Or are there timeless entities?  So-called abstracta are held by many to be timeless.  Among abstracta we find numbers, (abstract as opposed to concrete) states of affairs, mathematical (as opposed to commonsense) sets, and Fregean (as opposed to Russellian) propositions, where a Fregean proposition is the sense of an indexical-free sentence in the indicative mood.  The following items are neither in space, nor causally active/passive, but some say that they exist in time at every time: 7, 7's being prime, {7}, 7 is prime.  If an item exists in time at every time, then it is omnitemporal.  If an item is 'outside' time, then it is timeless or eternal or, to be helpfully pleonastic in the manner of McCann, timelessly eternal.

Let us agree that a temporalist is one for whom everything is in time, while an eternalist is one for whom some things are not in time. 

On p. 55 of his Creation and the Sovereignty of God (Indiana University Press 2012), Hugh McCann argues that the temporalist cannot formulate his thesis without presupposing that there are timeless states of affairs, at least of the negative sort.  Here is how I see the argument. 

Part of what the temporalist says is that

1. There are no timeless states of affairs.

How is 'there are no' in (1) to be understood?  The temporalist must intend it to be taken in a way consistent with temporalism, thus:

2. There never have been, are not now, and never will be any timeless states of affairs.

Unfortunately, the eternalist will agree with the temporalist on the truth of (2).  Consider 7's being prime.  Both agree that at no time does this state of affairs exist.  The agreement is unfortunate because it shows that the bone of contention cannot be formulated in terms of (2).  The bone of contention must be formulated in terms of (1) taken tenselessly.  But then the temporalist ends up presupposing that there are timeless states of affairs.  For he presupposes that there is the timeless state of affairs, There being no timeless states of affairs.

Temporalism, when properly formulated, i.e., when formulated in a way that permits disagreement between temporalist and eternalist, refutes itself by implying its own negation.

Is this 'Mavericked-up' McCann argument a good argument or not?  Have at it, boys.

A Parallel with the Problem of Formulating Presentism

We have seen in previous posts that to avoid tautology the presentist must reach for a tenseless sense of 'exists.'  He cannot say, tautologically, that whatever exists (present-tense) exists now.  For that is not metaphysical 'news.'  It is nothing to fight over, and fight we must.  He has to say: Whatever tenselessly exists, exists now.  But then he seems to presuppose that there are times, as real as the present time, at which temporal individuals such as Socrates tenselessly exist.  The upshot is that when presentism is given a nontautological formulation, a formulation that permits disagreement beween presentist and anti-presentist, it refutes itself.  For if there are non-present times as real as the present time, then it is not the case that only present items exist. 

Addendum (10 March):  Hugh McCann Responds

On the argument from my ch. 3 about timeless states of affairs, I of course stand by it (as of this moment, at least).  But I don’t think this argument alone would suffice to show that there is a B-series.  It might be, for example, that the only timeless states of affairs that there are pertain to abstracta; things like Seven’s being prime, and so forth.  If that were so we would get no B-series, because abstracta exhibit no temporal features at all, whereas entities in a B-series share before and after relations.

BV replies:  Well, I didn't claim that McCann's argument suffices to show that there is a B-series, a series of events related by the so-called B-relations: earlier than, later than, and simultaneous with.  Perhaps my use of 'eternalist' misled him.  All I meant by it above, as I stated,  is someone who holds that some entities are timeless.  I wasn't using it in the more commonly accepted sense in which it implies a commitment to the B-series. So we agree that the above argues does not suffice to show that there is a B-series.  It could be that there are timeless entities, and entities in time, but no B-series.

As for the analogous anti-presentist argument you go on to give, I subscribe to it.  But all it shows, as far as I can see, is that we have to consider talk of tenseless states of affairs legitimate.  But to show that isn’t to show very much.  It doesn’t yet follow, for example, that we have to speak of Socrates as existing tenselessly.  Socrates is not a state of affairs, and there is nothing paradoxical about saying there neither is, was, nor will be a tenseless Socrates.  The question is just whether it is true, and there I am unsure of the answer.  Furthermore, I can imagine someone claiming that when it comes to the concrete world, tenseless states of affairs—the B-series, in effect—is just a necessary fiction, something we need in order to be able to keep proper track of our memories.  I have no knockdown argument for or against this position.  I am inclined to think, however, that it is a vast oversimplification, just as I think presentism is.

BV replies: I think what McCann is getting at here is that an adequate formulation of presentism must presuppose the meaningfulness of  talk of tenseless states of affairs, but needn't presuppose that there are tenseless states of affairs involving entities in time.  If that is what he means, then my quick little argument seems unsound, and McCann shouldn't have subscribed to it.  I'll have to think about it some more.  What a miserably difficult topic this is!

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Defining Presentism

McCann, God, and the Platonic Menagerie

Can a Thing Exist Without Existing Now?

Time and Tense: Remarks on the B-Theory

Presentism and Actualism, Tenseless Existence and Amodal Existence

The Pop-Tart Terrorist

More proof, as if we needed it, of the stupidity of liberals.  Should we respond respectfully and rationally to fools?  Mockery and ridicule are often more effective.  Many of the members of Generation Screwed  voted for Obama because they perceived him as 'cool.'  Rational persuasion is not likely to work on such people.  Their perceptions need to be changed from 'cool' to 'uncool' by the ridicule dished out by the likes of Dennis Miller and Adam Carolla. 

If you want to win, make the fools look uncool to those who think coolness the criterion, but have solid arguments at the ready for those who can think.

Gail Collins' NYT op-ed gun outburst is another example of liberal stupidity.  I won't sully these pages by quoting any of it.  Here is an adequate response.

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Medieval California

Victor Davis Hanson on the once Golden State.  Beautifully Medieval California. California at Twilight. The California Mordida.

Worldly Success: How Much is Enough?

You have enough world success if it enables you to advance the project of self-realization on the important fronts including the moral, the intellectual, and the spiritual.  The vita contemplativa cannot be well lived by the grindingly poor, the sick, the politically and socially oppressed, the sorely afflicted and tormented.  Boethius wrote his Consolations of Philosophy in prison, but you are not Boethius.

You have too much worldly success when it becomes a snare and a burden and a distraction. 

We need some social acceptance and human contact, but fame is worse than obscurity.  Reflect for a moment on the character of those who enjoy fame and the character of those whose fickle regard confers it.

We need a modicum of worldly wherewithal to live well, but more is not better. Only the terminally deluded could believe, as the saying goes, that "You can't be too thin or too rich."  You could be anorexic or like unto the New Testament camel who couldn't pass through the eye of a needle.

We need health but not hypertrophy.

We need power, but not the power over others that corrupts but the power over oneself that does not.

Presentism and Actualism, Tenseless Existence and Amodal Existence

John of the MavPhil commentariat drew our attention to the analogy between presentism and actualism.  An exfoliation of the analogy may prove fruitful.  Rough formulations of the two doctrines are as follows:

P. Only the (temporally) present exists.

A. Only the actual exists.

Now one of the problems that has been worrying us is how to avoid triviality and tautology.  After all, (P) is a miserable tautology if 'exists' is present-tensed.  It is clear that no presentist thinks his thesis is a tautology. It is also clear that there is a difference, albeit one hard to articulate, between presentism and the the various types of anti-presentism.  There is a substantive metaphysical dispute here, and our task is to formulate the dispute in precise terms.  This will involve clarifying the exact force of 'exists' in (P).  If not present-tensed, then what?

A similar problem arises for the actualist.  One is very strongly tempted to say that to exist is to be actual.  If 'exists' in (A) means 'is actual,' however, then (A) is a tautology.  But if 'exists' in (A) does not mean 'is actual,' what does it mean? 

We seem to have agreed that Disjunctive Presentism is a nonstarter:

DP.  Only the present existed or exists now or will exist.

That is equivalent to saying that if x existed or exists or will exists, then x presently exists.  And that is plainly false. Now corresponding to the temporal modi past, present, and future, we have the modal modi necessary, actual, and merely possible.  This suggests Disjunctive Actualism:

DA.  Only the actual necessarily exists or actually exists or merely-possibly exists.

This too is false since the merely possible is not actual.  It is no more actual than the wholly future is present.

We must also bear in the mind that neither the presentist nor the actualist intends to say something either temporally or modally 'solipsistic.'  Thus the presentist is not making the crazy claim that all that every happened or will happen is happening right now.  He is not saying that all past-tensed and future-tensed propositions are either false or meaningless and that the only true propositions are present-tensed and true right now.  The presentist, in other words, is not a solipsist of the present moment. 

Similarly wth the actualist. He is not a solipsist of this world.  He is not saying that everything possible is actual and everything actual necessary.  The actualist is not a modal monist or a modal Spinozist who maintains that there is exactly one possible world, the actual world which, in virtue of being actual and the only one possible, is necessary.  The actualist is not a necessitarian.

There is no person like me, but I am not the only person.  There is no place like here, but here is not the only place.  There is no time like now, but now is not the only time.

In sum, for both presentism and actualism, tautologism, disjunctivism, and solipsism are out! What's left?

To formulate presentism it seems we need a notion of tenseless existence, and to formulate actualism we need a notion of amodal existence (my coinage).   

We can't say that only the present presently exists, and of course we cannot say that only the present pastly or futurally exists.  So the presentist has to say that only the present tenselessly exists.  I will say more about tenseless existence in a later post. 

What do I mean by amodal existence?  Consider the following 'possible worlds' definitions of modal terms:

Necessary being: one that exists in all possible worlds
Impossible being: one that exists in no possible world
Possible being: one that exists in some and perhaps all possible worlds
Contingent being: one that exists in some but not all possible worlds
Merely possible being: one that exists in some possible worlds but not in the actual world
Actual being: one that exists in the actual world
Unactual being: one that exists either in no possible world or not in the actual world.

In each of these definitions, the occurrence of 'exists' is modally neutral analogously as 'exists' is temporally neutral in the following sentences:

It was the case that Tom exists
It is now the case that Tom exists
It will be the case that Tom exists. 

My point, then, is that the proper formulation of actualism (as opposed to possibilism) requires an amodal notion of existence just as the proper formulation of presentism requires an atemporal (tenseless) notion of existence.

But are the atemporal and amodal notions of existence free of difficulty?  This is what we need to examine.  Can the requisite logical wedges be driven between existence and the temporal determinations and between existence and the modal determinations? If not then presentism and actualism cannot even be formulated and the respective problems threaten to be pseudoproblems.

Related articles

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Defining Presentism

Can a Thing Exist Without Existing Now?

Presentism Between Scylla and Charybdis

Time and Tense: Remarks on the B-Theory

Scollay Square No Longer Exists

Caesar, the Rubicon, Tenseless Truth, Determinism, and Fatalism

Twitter

A weapon of mass distraction.

On the Left's Toleration of Muslim Fanatics

Here is an important interview with Lars Hedegaard, Denmark's Salman Rushdie, whose life is in danger because he speaks the truth as he sees it.  Hedegaard is a man of the Left, but do they come to his defense?  Excerpt:

DP: Where are the attacks on you being racist coming from? What part of the ideological spectrum?

LH: I would say almost exclusively from the left. (Of course, also from Muslims. Not all Muslims, but some.) I seem to be very unpopular with my old friends. I think the problem is that I know what it's all about to be left-wing; I used to be a leading Marxist in this country. But I've held to the opinion that we first of all have to fight for free speech and freedom and equality between the sexes and the rule of law; and also, that we should not bow before religious fanatics of any type, regardless of where they come from. This seems to me what was the essence of being left-wing back in the days. No longer.

The left now seems to have reverence for fanatics -- as long as they are Muslim. Of course, they can criticize Christianity all they want. But when somebody threatens with violence -- if you criticize me, I'll come and kill you -- then all of a sudden they become soft. They become understanding. They talk about tolerance; we have to show respect. I don't want to show respect for people who say that men are worth more than women, that women can be killed if they are adulterers; that apostates from Islam should be killed; that people should be stoned, etc. I mean, I don't like that. I want to fight that. I want to describe it. And I don't think the left does.

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Defining Presentism

I concede to London Ed that it is not clear what exactly the thesis of presentism is.  There is no point in considering objections to it until we are sure what the thesis comes to.  The rough idea is of course easy to convey: only temporally present items exist.  This is more plausible under restriction to items 'in time' where the eternal God and abstracta such as Fregean propositions are not 'in time.'  The rough idea, then, is that only present contingent concreta exist.  This implies that a wholly past contingent concretum such as Socrates does not exist.

But how are we to take 'exist' in the last two sentences?  As present-tensed? Then both sentences are trivially true.  Surely no philosopher who calls himself a presentist intends

Tautological Presentism:  Only present contingent concreta exist at present.

And of course he doesn't intend

Timeless Presentism:  Only present contingent concreta exist timelessly.

For that implies that if x is a timeless contingent concretum, then x is temporally present.

But the clear-headed presentist must also, in his formulation of his thesis, avoid giving aid and
comfort to the absurdity that could be called 'solipsism of the present moment.'  (I borrow the phrase from Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, Simon and Schuster 1948, p. 181.) To wit,

SPM Presentism:  Only what exists (present tense) exists simpliciter; nothing existed and nothing will exist.

The idea behind (SPM) is decidedly counterintuitive if not insane.  To illustrate, consider James Dean who died on September 30th, 1955.  It is a Moorean fact that Dean existed but no longer exists.  (Alter the example to Dean's car if you hold to the immortality of the soul.)  It is a Moorean fact that there actually was this actor, that he was not a mere possibility or a fictional being or nothing at all. But this plain fact is incompatible with SPM-Presentism. 

Another possibility is

Disjunctive Presentism:  Only present contingent concreta existed or exist or will exist.

Disjunctive Presentism seems objectionable because, e.g., Scollay Square existed, but does not now.

What about

Tenseless Presentism:  Only present contingent concreta tenselessly exist.

Now the problem is to explain that 'tenselessly exist' means if it does not mean 'timelessly exist' or 'did exist, does exist, or will exist.'

Ned Markosian defines presentism as the view that, "necessarily, it is always true that only present objects exist." (here, fn 1)  This is not helpful since we are not told how to read 'exist.'  The Triviality Objection threatens to kick in.  And how are we to understand, "it is always true"?  If this involves quantifying over times, then anti-presentism is let in through the back door.  If there is a manifold of equally real/existent times, then presentism cannot be true of these times. 

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The Criminology of Firearms

An important article. 

Many liberals feel that civilian gun ownership is unnecessary because adequate protection against the criminal element is afforded by the police.  I advise them to think through the following considerations:

Misinformed people oppose self-defense objections to gun ban laws, urging victims to instead rely on police. This misunderstands what policing is and does. Accordingly, when criminals rob or injure them, misinformed victims try to sue the police for not protecting them. Whereupon the police send forth lawyers invoking the universal US rule that the police duty is to discourage crime only indirectly by patrolling the streets and by apprehending criminals after their crimes.

While police should stop crimes they observe, criminals take care to strike when police are not present. In fact, police almost never (less than 3 percent of cases) arrive in time to help victims. For that reason, the statutory or common law of every state exonerates police from suit for non-protection, e.g. California Government Code §§ 821, 845 and 846: “[A police department and its officers are] not liable for an injury caused by ... failure to enforce an enactment [nor for] failure to provide police protection service or ... provide sufficient police protection service [nor for] the failure to make an arrest or [the] failure to retain an arrested person in custody.”

Misinformed persons also urge victims to depend on restraining orders instead of self-defense. But restraining orders are just pieces of paper. A five-year study [PDF] in Massachusetts found that almost 25 percent of domestic murderers were under a restraining order when they killed.

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Making Sure That It Never Happens Again

From The Hill:

President Obama on Sunday said he would make gun control a priority in his new term, pledging to put his “full weight” behind passing new restrictions on firearms in 2013.

“I'm going to be putting forward a package and I'm going to be putting my full weight behind it,” Obama said in an interview aired on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I'm going to be making an argument to the American people about why this is important and why we have to do everything we can to make sure that something like what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary does not happen again.”

Question: Does any clear-thinking person  seriously believe that steps can be taken to prevent such events from ever happening again? Of course not.  Then why the empty utopian rhetoric? The "everything we can" is equally silly.  There is a way to severely reduce the likelihood of another Sandy Hook type shooting.  And that is to to secure every school like a prison.  That would be much more effective that any tightening of gun laws.  So if we must do "everything we can," then we ought to secure every school, every church, every college campus, etc. like a prison or a military installation.

What comes out of Obama's mouth is just feel-good liberal-left blather, thoughtless verbiage, without contact with facts or evidence, and without consequence for the solution of any real problem.  The only real consequence is a further erosion of liberty and an expansion of the state. 

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