I started to take the quiz but then quit in disgust after the first two questions.
Here is the first question:
Which of the following statements comes closest to your view?
.
.
I would say that both statements are true. That some government regulation is necessary is obviously true. But that many types of regulation makes things worse is also the case, though it is not as obvious. What does it even mean to ask which of these comes closest to my view? The rational thing to do is reject the question as poorly defined.
Here is the second question:
Which of the following statements comes closest to your view?
Hard work and determination are no guarantee of success for most.
Again, both of these statements are true, at least in the USA at the present time. The second statement is obviously true. Success is not guaranteed for anyone. You could be doing everything right and be killed by a drunk driver. In every success there is some element of luck. The first statement is not as clearly true, but it too is true. Again, there is the problem of what 'comes closest' even means. I am a conservative and so you will expect me to plump for the first statement. But the second is one that every sane person must accept. So in one sense of 'closest' the second is closest to my view. In another sense, the first is closest, because it is more characteristic of my view. A near-certainty that everyone must accept on pain of being irrational is not characteristic of any political view. Capiche?
Not all of the question pairs display the faults of the first two. They display others such as false alternative. And a few, I grant, are well-formulated. #20 for example:
Which of the following statements comes closest to your view?
.
These statements cannot both be true, and there is no false alternative: it must be that one of them is true.
Then stop trying to 'help' them. Excellent advice for liberals from a black man, Jason Riley. The Left will of course denounce him as an Uncle Tom, an 'oreo,' a traitor to his race, among other things. But that is all the more reason to read him with close attention. Leftists cannot abide anyone who talks sense. Here is Riley on the Zimmerman case.
But first one who didn't. An early manager suggested to Frank Sinatra that he adopt the stage name 'Frankie Satin.' Sinatra would have none of that bullshit. He did things his way. You got a problem with that? That's Life.
Joseph Di Nicola (Joey Dee and the Starlighters), Peppermint Twist, with an intro by Dwight D. Eisenhower! This video shows what the dude looked like. Resembles a super short Joe Pesci. What Kind of Love is This?
Margaret Battavio (Little Peggy March), I Will Follow Him. This one goes out to the sycophants of the Ladderman.
Frank Castelluccio (Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons), Can't Take My Eyes Off of You. Dawn.Walk Like a Man. Wifey and I saw Jersey Boys, the movie, and enjoyed it immensely. Here's the trailer. Directed by Clint Eastwood. Gets a lot of the period details right, like women's slacks with the zipper up the back. See how many period references you can identify. Topo Gigio. The Blob. Etc.
One of the purposes of this site is to combat the stupidity of Political Correctness, a stupidity that in many contemporary liberals, i.e., leftists, is willful and therefore morally censurable. The euphemism 'undocumented worker' is a good example of a PC expression. It does not require great logical acumen to see that 'undocumented worker' and 'illegal alien' are not coextensive expressions. The extension of a term is the class of things to which it applies. In the diagram below, let A be the class of illegal aliens, B the class of undocumented workers, and A^B the intersection of these two classes. All three regions in the diagram are non-empty, which shows that A and B are not coextensive, and so are not the same class. Since A and B are not the same class, 'undocumented worker' and 'illegal alien' do not have the same intension or meaning. Differing in both extension and intension, these expressions are not intersubstitutable.
To see why, note first that there are illegal aliens who are not workers since they are either petty criminals, or members of organizedcriminal gangs e.g., MS-13, some of whose members are illegal aliens, or terrorists, or too young to work, or unable to work. Note second that there are illegal aliens who have documents all right -- forged documents. Note third that there are undocumented workers who are not aliens: there are American citizens who work but without the legally requisite licenses and permits.
So the correct term is 'illegal alien.' It is descriptive and accurate and there is no reason why it should not be used.
Now will this little logical exercise convince a leftist to use language responsibly and stop obfuscating the issue? Of course not. Leftism in some of its forms is willfully embraced reality denial, and in other of its forms is a cognitive aberration, something like a mental illness, in need of therapy rather than refutation. In a longer post I would finesse the point by discussing the cognitive therapy of Stoic and neo-Stoic schools, which does include some logical refutation of unhealthy views and attitudes, but my rough-and-ready point stands: one cannot refute the sick. They need treatment and quarantine and those who go near them should employ appropriate prophylactics.
So why did I bother writing the above? Because there are people who have not yet succumbed to the PC malady and might benefit from a bit of logical prophylaxis. One can hope.
Too many of the academic philosophers of consciousness are overly concerned with the paltriest aspects of consciousness, so-called qualia, and work their tails off trying to convince themselves and others that they are no threat to physicalism.
While man's nobility lies in the power of thought whereby he traverses all of time and existence, our materialists labor mightily to make physicalism safe for the smell of cooked onions.
Although the world runs on appearances, a fact well to be heeded by anyone who plans to hang out long in these sublunary precincts, the task of the philosopher is to penetrate seemings, whence we may conclude that it is unseemly for a philosopher to be much concerned with the seemly and the unseemly.
What follows is an old post from about ten years ago worth dusting off in the light of current events. If 'true' admits of degrees, what I say below is truer now than it was then. Just two of several current examples. Barack Obama, the most Left-leaning president in U. S. history, traded Bowe Bergdahl for five of the worst Gitmo terrorists. Was that a prudent thing to do? Only someone who is blind to a clear and present danger could do something so utterly irresponsible. The second example is the Iraq pullout, the effect of which, whether intended or not, is to make the whole region safe for ISIS. Anyone with his head screwed on right would have seen that coming. But not a leftist insensitive to danger. I could go on, the Southern border . . . .
..............
Conservatives take a sober view of human nature. They admit and celebrate the human capacity for good, but cannot bring themselves to ignore the practically limitless human capacity for evil. They cannot dismiss the lessons of history, especially the awful lessons of the 20th century, the lessons of Gulag and Vernichtungslager. They know that evil is not a contingent blemish that can be isolated and removed, but has ineradicable roots reaching deep into human nature. The fantasies of Rousseau and Marx get no grip on them. Conservatives know that it is not the state, or society, or institutions that corrupt human beings, but that it is the logically antecedent corruption of human nature that makes necessary state, social, and institutional controls. The timber of humanity is inherently and irremediably crooked; it was not first warped by state, social, or institutional forces, and cannot be straightened by any modification or elimination of these forces.
I used the word 'know' a couple of times, which may sound tendentious. How do conservatives know that evil is not a contingent blemish, or that human beings are so fundamentally flawed that no human effort can usher in utopia?
They know this from experience. But although experience teaches us what is the case, and what has been the case, does it teach what must be the case? Here the lefties may have wiggle room. They can argue that failure to achieve a perfect society does not conclusively show that a perfect society cannot be achieved. This is true. But repeated failures add up to a strong inductive case. And these failures have been costly indeed. The Communists murdered an estimated 100 million in their social experiments. They did not hesitate to break eggs on a massive scale in quest of an omelet that never materialized. They threw out 'bourgeois' morality, but this did not lead to some higher morality but to utter barbarity.
I would also argue that experience can sometimes teach us what must be the case. We have a posteriori knowledge of the essential (as opposed to accidental) properties of some things. These are tough epistemological questions that I mention here only to set aside.
The main point I want to make is that the Left is insensitive to danger because of its Pollyannish view of human beings as intrinsically good. Leftists tend to downplay serious threats. They are blind to the radical evil in human nature. This attitude is betrayed by their obfuscatory use of the phrase 'Red Scare'to the very real menace the USSR posed to the USA in the 1950's and beyond. It wasn't that conservatives were scared, but that the Soviets were making threats. This is now particularly clear from the Venona decrypts, the Mitrokhin archives, and other sources. I especially recommend reading Ronald Radosh on the Rosenberg case.
The Left's insensitivity to danger is also betrayed by their attitude toward the present Islamo-terrorist threat. They just can't seem to take it seriously, as witness their incessant complaining about the dangers to civil liberties after the 9/11/01 attacks. There is something deeply perverse about their attitude. They must realize that a liberty worth wanting requires security as a precondition. See my Liberty and Security for an exfoliation of this idea. But if they grasp this, why the unreasonable and excessive harping on individual liberties in a time of national peril? Don't they understand that theliberties we all cherish are worthless to one who is being crushed beneath a pile of burning rubble? How could Katrina van den Heuvel on C-Span the other day refer to Bush's playing of the 'terror card'? Such talk is border-line delusional.
It is as if they think that conservatives want to curtail civil liberties, and have seized upon the 9/11 attacks to have an excuse to do so. In the lunatic world of the leftist a conservative is a 'fascist' -- to use their favorite term of abuse. This is absurd: it is precisely conservatives who aim to conserve civil liberties, including the politically incorrect ones such as gun rights.
Terrorists and the rogue states that sponsor them pose a very real threat to our security, and this threat must be faced and countered even if it requires a temporary abridgement of certain liberties. Thatis what happens in war time. Leftists ought to admit that it is precisely their insensitivity to the threat posed by such Islamo-terrorists as Osama bin Laden that led to the 9/11 attacks in the first place. If a proper response had been made to the 1993 World Trade Tower attack, the 2001 attack might never have occurred. We were attacked because we were perceived as weak and decadent, and we were perceived as weak and decadent because leftists in the government failed to take seriously the terrorist threat.
It must be realized that liberty without security is worthless. Genuine liberty is liberty within a stable social and political order. I may have the liberty to leave my house any time of the day or night, but such a liberty is meaningless if I get mugged the minute I step out my door. So if the Left were really serious about liberty, it would demand adequate security measures.
But, while David has never aspired to put the world right by philosophy, the world for its part has not been equally willing to let him and philosophy alone in return. Quite the reverse. His tenure of the Chair turned out to coincide with an enormous attack on philosophy, and on humanistic learning in general: an attack which has proved to be almost as successful as it was unprecedented.
This attack was begun, as everyone knows, by Marxists, in support of North Vietnam’s attempt to extend the blessings of communism to the south. The resulting Marxisation of the Faculty of Arts was by no means as complete as the resulting Marxisation of South Vietnam. But the wound inflicted on humanistic learning was a very severe one all the same. You could properly compare it to a person’s suffering third-degree burns to 35 per cent of his body.
After the defeat of America in Vietnam, the attack was renewed, amplified, and intensified, by feminists. Their attack has proved far more devastating than that of the Marxists. Lenin once said, “If we go, we shall slam the door on an empty house”; and how well this pleasant promise has been kept by the Russian Marxists, all the world now knows. It is in exactly the same spirit of insane malignancy that feminists have waged their war on humanistic learning; and their degree of success has fallen not much short of Lenin’s. Of the many hundreds of courses offered to Arts undergraduates in this university, what proportion, I wonder, are now not made culturally-destructive, as well as intellectually null, by feminist malignancy and madness? One-third? I would love to believe that the figure is so high. But I cannot believe it.
David did all that he could have done, given the limits set by his position and his personality, to repel this attack. Of course he failed; but then, no one could have succeeded. What he did achieve was a certain amount of damage-limitation. Even this was confined to the philosophy-section of the front. On the Faculty of Arts as a whole, David has had no influence at all—to put it mildly. In fact, when he spoke at a meeting of the Faculty, even on subjects unrelated to the attack, you could always have cut the atmosphere with a knife. It is a curious matter, this: the various ways inferior people have, of indirectly acknowledging the superiority of others, even where no such acknowledgment is at all intended by the inferior, or expected by the superior.
By the end of 1972, the situation in the philosophy department had become so bad that the splitting of the department into two was the only way in which philosophy at this university could be kept alive at all. In this development, David was the leading spirit, as his position and personality made it natural he should be. Of course he did not do it on his own. Pat Trifonoff’s intelligence and character made her an important agent in it. Keith Campbell’s adhesion to our side, after some hesitation, was a critical moment. But while I and certain others were only casting about for some avenue of escape, David never gave up. He battled on, and battled on again, and always exacted the best terms, however bad, that could be got from the enemies of philosophy.
The result of the split was far more happy than could have been rationally predicted at the time. In fact it was a fitting reward for David’s courage and tenacity. For the first twenty years of the new Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy have been fertile in good philosophy, to a degree unparalleled in any similar period in this or any other Australian university. The department has also enjoyed a rare freedom from internal disharmony. As I have often said, it is the best club in the world, and to be or have been a member of it is a pleasure as well as a privilege.
There will certainly be no adequate official acknowledgment, from anyone inside the university, of what is owed to David. What could someone like the present Vice-Chancellor possibly care about the survival of humanistic learning, or even know about philosophy, or history, or literature? Anyone who did would never have got a Vice-Chancellor’s job in the first place. If there is any acknowledgment forthcoming from the Faculty of Arts, David will be able to estimate the sincerity of it well enough. It will be a case of people, who smiled as they watched him nearly drowning in the boiling surf of 1967–72, telling him how glad they were when, against all probability, he managed to make it to the beach.
But anyone who does know and care about philosophy, or does care about the survival of humanistic learning, will feel towards him something like the degree of gratitude which they ought to feel.
Imagine a German restaurant so named. Blood and Soil. My astute readers needn't be reminded of the provenience of this phrase. "Best blood sausage in the East Valley!" Or MOM's Diner of Mesa. "Fine Aryan cuisine served up right by members of the militia of Montana." Would you be offended? I just made up those examples.
But this is a real example: La Raza Steak and Ribs, a Mexican joint in Apache Junction, Arizona. When I mentioned this to a friend, he replied, "That would be like naming a German restaurant Die Rasse, The Race."
Once again, the double standard. And once again I ask: what would be left of the Left were they disembarrassed of every single one of their double standards?
I have read your latest post on truthmakers. Among other things, you mention [David] Armstrong's view on abstract objects. As I read elsewhere (not in Armstrong own works, I have not read anything by him yet) he was realist about universals and gives a very voluminous defense of his view. Does this view entail realism about abstract objects?
I think that Quine was realist about abstract objects and at the same time naturalist and also holds that his Platonism was consequence of his naturalized ontology. Moreover, I have the impression that several preeminent analytic philosophers hold realist views on abstract objects, mostly under influences from Quine and in a smaller degree from Putnam.
Do Armstrong's views about universals entail realism about abstract objects?
No, they do not. Rejecting extreme nominalism, Armstrong maintains that there are properties. (I find it obvious that there properties, a Moorean fact, though I grant that it is not entirely obvious what is obvious.) Armstrong further maintains that properties are universals (repeatables), not particulars (unrepeatables) as they would be if properties were tropes. But his is a theory of immanent universals. This means two things. First, it means that there are no unexemplified universals. Second, it means that universals are constituents of the individuals (thick particulars) that 'have' them. In Wolterstorff's terminology, Armstrong is a constituent ontologist as opposed to a relation ontologist. His universals are ontological parts of the things that 'have' them; they are not denizens of a realm apart only related by an asymmetrical exemplification tie to the things that have them.
So for Armstrong universals are immanent in two senses: (a) they cannot exist unexemplified, and (b) they enter into the structure of ordinary (thick) particulars. It follows that his universals are not abstract objects on the Quinean understanding of abstract objects as neither spatial nor temporal nor causally active/passive. For given (b), universals are where and when the things that have them are, and induce causal powers in these things. And yet they are universals, immanent universals: ones-in-many, not ones-over-many. Some philosophers, including Armstrong, who are not much concerned with historical accuracy, call them 'Aristotelian' universals.
Does Armstrong reject all abstract objects?
Yes he does. Armstrong is a thorough-going naturalist. Reality is exhausted by space-time and the matter that fills it. Hence there is nothing outside of space-time, whether abstract (causally inert) or concrete (causally active/passive). No God, no soul capable of disembodied existence, or embodied existence for that matter, no unexemplified universals, not even exemplified nonconstituent universals, no Fregean propositions, no numbers, no mathematical sets, and of course no Meinongian nonenties.
How do Armstrong and Quine differ on sets or classes?
For Quine, sets are abstract entities outside space and time. They are an addition to being, even in those cases in which the members of a set are concreta. Thus for Quine, Socrates' singleton is an abstract object in addition to the concrete Socrates. For Armstrong, sets supervene upon their members. They are not additions to being. Given the members, the class or set adds nothing ontologically. Sets are no threat to a space-time ontology. (See D. M. Armstrong, Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics, Oxford UP, 2010, p. 8.)
What about the null set or empty class?
For Armstrong, there is no such entity. "It would be a strange addition to space-time!" he blusters. (Sketch, p. 8, n. 1). Armstrong makes a bad mistake in that footnote. He writes, "Wade Martin has reminded me about the empty class which logicians make a member of every class." Explain the mistake in the ComBox. Explain it correctly and I'll buy you dinner at Tres Banderas.
Are both Quine and Armstrong naturalists?
Yes. The Australian is a thorough-going naturalist: there is nothing that is not a denizen of space-time. The American, for reasons I can't go into, countenances some abstract objects, sets. It is a nice question, which is more the lover of desert landscapes.
Much of religion is overbelief, but much of science is underbelief. One sees less than is there; one sees only what one's restricted method allows one to see. Examples are legion. Find them.
For more on overbelief and underbelief, see the first two articles below.
You are sliding down a mountain towards certain death. Your only hope is to grab the rope that is thrown to you. Will you refuse to do so because the rope might break? Will you first inquire into the reliability of the rope or the credibility of the assurances of the one who would be your savior?
If you accept truthmakers, and two further principles, then you can maintain that a deductive argument is valid just in case the truthmakers of its premises suffice to make true its conclusion. Or as David Armstrong puts it in Sketch of a Systematic Metaphysics (Oxford UP, 2010), p. 66,
In a valid argument the truthmaker for the conclusion is contained in the truthmaker for the premises. The conclusion needs no extra truthmakers.
For this account of validity to work, two further principles are needed, Truthmaker Maximalism and the Entailment Principle.Truthmaker Maximalism is the thesis that every truth has a truthmaker. Although I find the basic truthmaker intuition well-nigh irresistible, I have difficulty with the notion that every truth has a truthmaker. Thus I question Truthmaker Maximalism. (The hyperlinked entry sports a fine photo of Peter L.)
Armstrong, on the other hand, thinks that "Maximalism flows from the idea of correspondence and I am not willing to give up on the idea that correspondence with reality is necessary for any truth." (63) Well, every cygnet is a swan. Must there be something extramental and extralinguistic to make this analytic truth true? And let's not forget that Armstrong has no truck with so-called abstract objects. His brand of naturalism excludes them. So he can't say that there are the quasi-Platonic properties being a cygnet and being a swan with the first entailing the second, and that this entailment relation is the truthmaker of 'Every cygnet is a swan.'
The Entailment Principle runs as follows:
Suppose that a true proposition p entails a proposition q. By truthmaker Maximalism p has a truthmaker. According to the Entailment Principle, it follows that this truthmaker for p is also a truthmaker for q. [. . .] Note that this must be an entailment. If all that is true is that p --> q, the so-called material conditional, then this result does not follow.
I would accept a restricted Entailment Prinicple that does not presuppose Maximalism. To wit, if a proposition p has a truthmaker T, and p entails a proposition q, then T is also a truthmaker for q. For example, if Achilles' running is the truthmaker of 'Achilles is running,' then, given that the proposition expressed by this sentence entails the proposition expressed by 'Achilles is on his feet,' Achilles' running is also the truthmaker of the proposition expressed by 'Achilles is on his feet.'
Cognitive Dissonance Theory, developed by Leon Festinger (1957), is concerned with the relationships among cognitions. A cognition, for the purpose of this theory, may be thought of as a ³piece of knowledge.² The knowledge may be about an attitude, an emotion, a behavior, a value, and so on. For example, the knowledge that you like the color red is a cognition; the knowledge that you caught a touchdown pass is a cognition; the knowledge that the Supreme Court outlawed school segregation is a cognition. People hold a multitude of cognitions simultaneously, and these cognitions form irrelevant, consonant or dissonant relationships with one another.
[. . .]
Two cognitions are said to be dissonant if one cognition follows from the opposite of another. What happens to people when they discover dissonant cognitions? The answer to this question forms the basic postulate of Festinger¹s theory. A person who has dissonant or discrepant cognitions is said to be in a state of psychological dissonance, which is experienced as unpleasant psychological tension. This tension state has drivelike properties that are much like those of hunger and thirst. When a person has been deprived of food for several hours, he/she experiences unpleasant tension and is driven to reduce the unpleasant tension state that results. Reducing the psychological sate of dissonance is not as simple as eating or drinking however.
The above, taken strictly and literally, is incoherent. We are first told that a cognition is a bit of knowledge, and then in the second quoted paragraph that (in effect) some cognitions are dissonant, and that if one cognition follows from the opposite of another, then the two are dissonant. But surely it is logically impossible that any two bits of knowledge, K1 and K2, be such that K1 entails the negation of K2, or vice versa. Why? Because every cognition is true -- there cannot be false knowledge -- and no two truths are such that one follows from the opposite of the other.
The author is embracing an inconsistent pentad:
1. Every cognition is a bit of knowledge.
2. Every bit of knowledge is true.
3. Some, at least two, cognitions are dissonant.
4. If one cognition follows from the opposite (the negation) of another, then the two are dissonant.
5. It is logically impossible that two truths be such that one follows from the negation of the other: if a cognition is true, then its negation is false, and no falsehood follows from a truth.
The point, obviously, is that while beliefs can be dissonant, cognitions cannot be. There simply is no such thing as cognitive dissonance. What there is is doxastic dissonance.
"What a pedant you are! Surely what the psychologists mean is what you call doxastic dissonance."
Then they should say what they mean. Language matters. Confusing belief and knowledge and truth and related notions can lead to serious and indeed pernicious errors. A good deal of contemporary relativism is sired by a failure to make such distinctions.
If I understand Duns Scotus on the divine simplicity, his view in one sentence is that the divine attributes are really identical in God but formally distinct. (Cf. Richard Cross, Duns Scotus on God, Ashgate 2005, p. 111) I can understand this if I can understand the formal distinction (distinctio formalis) and how it differs from the real distinction (distinctio realis). This will be the cynosure of my interest in this post.
There appear to be two ways of construing 'real distinction.' On the first construal, the real distinction is plainly different from the formal distinction. On a second construal, it is not so clear what the difference is. I have no worked-out view. In this entry I am merely trying to understand the difference between these two sorts of distinction and how they bear upon the divine simplicity, though I will not say anything more about the latter in this installment.
First Construal of 'Real Distinction'
On the first construal, the real distinction is to be understood in terms of separability. But 'separable' has several senses. Here are my definitions of the relevant senses. I am not trying to exposit Thomas or any scholastic. I am merely trying to get to the truth of the matter.
D1. Individuals x, y are mutually separable =df it is broadly logically possible that x exist without y, and y exist without x.
Example. The separability of my eyeglasses and my head is mutual: each can (in a number of different senses of 'can' including the broadly logical sense) exist without the other. This distinction is called real because it has a basis in extramental and extralinguistic reality. It is not a merely verbal distinction like that between 'eyeglasses' and 'spectacles.'
D2. Properties F, G are mutually separable =df it is broadly logically possible that F be instantiated by x without G being instantiated by x, and vice versa.
Example. Socrates is both seated and speaking. But he is possibly such as to be the one without the other, and the other without the one. He can sit without speaking, and speak without sitting. The properties of being seated and speaking, though co-instantiated by Socrates, are mutually separable. Of course, this does not imply that these properties can exist uninstantiated.
D3. Individuals x, y are unilaterally separable =df it is broadly logically possible that one of the pair x, y exist without the other, but not the other without the one.
Example. A (primary) substance S and one of its accidents A. Both are individuals, unrepeatables. But while A cannot exist without S, S can exist without A. Second example. Consider a fetus prior to viability. It is not an accident of the mother, but a substance in its own right. Yet it cannot exist apart from the mother, while the mother can exist apart from it. So what we seem to have here are two individuals that are unilaterally separable.
D4. Properties F, G are unilaterally separable =df it is broadly logically possible that one of the pair F, G be instantiated by x without the other being instantiated, but not the other without the one.
Example. Suppose Socrates is on his feet, running. His being on his feet and his running are unilaterally separable in that he can be on his feet wthout running, but he cannot be running without being on his feet.
D5. Items (whether individuals or properties) I, J are weakly separable =df I, J are either mutually separable or unilaterally separable.
On the first construal of 'real distinction,' it comes to this:
D6. Items (whether individuals or properties), I, J are really distinct =df I, J are weakly separable.
My impression is that when Scotists speak of the real distinction they mean something identical to or very close to my (D6). Real distinctness is weak separability. Two items, whether individuals or properties, are really distinct if and only if they are either mutually separable or unilaterally separable. According to Alan B. Wolter ("The Formal Distinction" in John Duns Scotus, 1265-1965, eds. Ryan and Bonansea, CUA Press, 1965, pp. 45-60),
In the works of Aquinas, for example, the term ['real distinction'] seems to have two basically different meanings, only one of which corresponds to the usage of Scotus, Ockham, or Suarez. For the latter, the real distinction is that which exists between individuals, be they substances or some individual accident or property. It invariably implies the possibility of separating one really distinct thing from another to the extent that one of the two at least may exist apart from the other. (p. 46)
Second Construal of 'Real Distinction'
On a Thomist view, my essence and my existence are not really distinct on the first construal of 'real distinction' because they are mutually inseparable: neither can be without the other. This strikes me as entirely reasonable. My individual essence is nothing without existence, and there are no cases of pure existence. I am not now and never have been an existence-less essence, nor a bit of essence-less existence. And yet Thomists refer to the distinction between (indvidual) essence and existence in finite concrete individuals as a real distinction. So 'real distinction' must have a second basic meaning, one that does not require that really distinct items be either mutually or unilaterally separable. What is this second basic meaning? And how does it differ from the Scotistic formal distinction?
Seeking an answer to the first question, I turn to Feser's manual where, on p. 74, we read:
But separability is not the only mark of a real distinction. Another is contrariety of the concepts under which things fall . . . . For example, being material and being immaterial obviously exclude one another, so that there must be a real distinction between a material thing and an immaterial thing. A third mark sometimes suggested is efficient causality . . . .
In this passage, Feser seems to be saying that there is one disinction called the real distinction, but that it has more than one mark. He does not appear to be maintaining that 'real distinction' has two different meanings, one that requires separability and another that does not. On the next page, however, Feser makes a distinction between a "real physical distinction" and a "real metaphysical distinction" where the former requires separability but the latter does not. He goes on to say that for Scotus and Suarez a necessary condition of any real distinction in created things is that the items distinguished be separable: "a distinction is real only when it entails separability." (75)
The Formal Distinction
I asked: "What is the second basic meaning of 'real distinction'?" The answer I glean from Feser is that the second meaning is real metaphysical distinction, a distinction that does not require separability. Now for my second question: How does this real metaphysical distinction differ from the formal distinction? According to Cross, "the formal distinction is the kind of distinction that obtains between (inseparable) properties on the assumption that nominalism about properties is false." (108) Feser describes it as a third and intermediate kind of disinction that is neither logical nor real. (75) Both what Cross and Feser say comport well with my understanding of the formal distinction.
Consider the distinction between a man's animality and his rationality. They are clearly distinct because there are animals that are not rational, and there are rational beings that are not animals. It is also clear that the distinction is not purely logical: the distinction is not generated by our thinking or speaking, but has a basis in extramental and extralinguistic reality. Is it then a real distinction? Not if such a distinction entails separability. For it is not broadly logically possible that the rationality of Socrates exist without his animality, or his animality without his rationality. Anything that is both animal and rational is essentially both animal and rational. (Whereas it is not the case that anything that is both sitting and speaking is essentially both sitting and speaking.) So the Scotist, for whom the reality of a real distinction entails separability, says that what we have here is a formal distinction, a distinction between two 'formalities,' animality and rationality, that are really inseparable but formally distinct.
My second question, again, is this: How does the real metaphysical distinction differ from the formal distinction? In both cases, the distinction is not purely logical, i.e., a mere distinctio rationis. So in both cases the distinction has a basis in reality. Further, in both cases there is no separability of the terms of the distinction. Socrates cannot be rational without being an animal, and he cannot be an animal without being rational. Similarly, he cannot exist without having an essence, and he cannot have an essence without existing.
So what is the difference between the real metaphysical distinction (that Feser distinguishes from the real physical distinction) and the formal distinction? If I understand Feser, his view is that the formal distinction collapses into the virtual distinction, which is a logical distinction, hence not a real distinction, whereas the real metaphysical distinction is a real distinction despite its not requiring separability. But what is the virtual distinction?
The Virtual Distinction
Feser tells us that a logical distinction is virtual "when it has some foundation in reality." (73) A virtual distinction is a logical distinction that is more than a merely verbal distinction. He gives the example of a man's nature which, despite its being one thing, can be viewed under two aspects, the aspect of rationality and the aspect of animality. The distinction between the two aspects is not real but virtual. The virtual distinction thus appears to be identical to the formal distinction.
Accordingly, the difference between the real metaphysical distinction and the formal distinction is that the first is real despite its not entailing separability while the second is logical despite having a foundation in reality. I hope I will be forgiven for not discerning a genuine difference between these two kinds of distinction. Feser suggests that the difference may only be a matter of emphasis, with the Thomist emphasizing the logical side of the virtual/formal distinction and the Scotist emphasizing the real side. (76)
Should we then irenically conclude that the metaphysical real distinction of the Thomists (or, to be cautious, of Feser the Thomist) is the same as the formal distinction of (some of) the Scotists?
Essence and Existence Again
I am afraid that matters are much messier. Suppose you agree that essence and existence in Socrates are neither mutually nor unilaterally separable. Suppose you also agree that Socrates is a contingent being: he exists (speaking tenselessly) but there is no broadly logical necessity that he exist. The second supposition implies that Socates does not exist just by virtue of his essence: his existence does not follow from his nature. Nor is his existence identical to his essence or nature, as it is in the ontologically simple God. So they must be distinct in reality. But -- and here comes trouble -- this real distinction in Socrates as between his essence and his existence cannot be a distinction between inseparable aspects. Animality and rationality are inseparable aspects of Socrates' nature; but essence and existence cannot be inseparable aspects of him. If they were inseparable, then Socrates would exist by his every nature or essence. This seems to imply that the metaphysical real distinction is not the same as the formal distinction. For the metaphysical real distinction between essence and existence requires separability of essence and existence in creatures.
Aporetic Conclusion
It looks like we are in a pickle. We got to the conclusion that the real metaphysical distinction is the same as the formal distinction. But now we see that they cannot be the same. Some may not 'relish' it, but the 'pickle' can be savored as an aporetic polyad:
1. Socrates is a metaphysically contingent being.
2. Metaphysical contingency entails weak separability (as defined above) of essence and existence.
3. Nothing is such that its essence and existence are weakly separable.
The triad is logically inconsistent.
Solution by (1)-denial. One cannot of course maintain that Socrates is metaphysically necessary. But one could deny the presupposition upon which (1) rests, namely, the constituent-ontological assumption that Socrates is compounded of essence and existence. On a relation ontology, essence-existence composition makes no sense.
Solution by (2)-denial. One could try to show that contingency has an explanation that does not require weak separability of essence and existence.
Solution by (3)-denial. One could argue that the individual essence of Socrates can be wthout being exemplified along the lines of Plantinga's haecceity properties.
Each of these putative solutions brings trouble of its own.
People can and ought to be judged by the company they keep, the company they keep away from, and those who attack them.
Addendum (6/23):
S. N. counters thusly:
For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.' (Luke 7.33-4)
God incarnate can safely consort with gluttons and drunkards and the lying agents of the Infernal Revenue Service, but mortal man cannot. So one who does so consort ought to be judged by the company he keeps. The judgment might be along the following lines, "You are morally weak, and you know you are; and yet you enter the near occasion of sin?"
This leads to a question about "Judge not lest ye be judged." How is this NT verse at Matthew 7, 1-5 to be interpreted? Is it to be read as implying the categorical imperative, "Thou shalt not judge others morally"? Or is it to be interpreted as a merely hypothetical imperative, "You may judge others morally, but only if you are prepared to be judged morally in turn and either condemned or exonerated as the case may be"?
The first reading is not plausible. For one thing, one cannot detach the antecedent or the consequent of a conditional in the way one can detach the conjunct of a conjunction. Compare 'If you don't want to be judged by others, don't judge them' with 'You don't want to be judged by others and you don't want others to judge you.' The categorical imperative 'Don't judge them' does not follow from the first. The declarative ' You don't want others to judge you' does follow from the second.
But now a third reading suggests itself to me, one that in a sense combines the categorical and the hypothetical, to wit, "You may judge others morally, but only if you are prepared to be judged morally and condemned by God, since no man is justified before God." This is tantamount to a categorical prohibition on judging.
I suspect the third reading is the correct one in the context of Christian teaching as a whole. But I'm no theologian.
Two pop music notables died this last week, lyricist Gerry Goffin and disc jockey Casey Kasem. Both played key roles in delivering the Boomer 'soundtrack.' Goffin, ex-husband of Carole King, died in Los Angeles on Wednesday at age 75. Here are some of the tunes he co-wrote with King.
In one portion of Grace Boey's interview of Peter Unger, Unger discusses what Russell had to say about the value of philosophy, and I was a bit taken aback because that particular quotation by Russell resonates with me a lot, and Unger's swift dismissal of it as garbage left me almost wounded.
What Unger appears to be saying is that claims about the value of philosophy are either quasi-mystical nonsense, or these are claims which can be empirically tested, and therefore should not be assumed a priori. We can only say philosophy has value if we take a bunch of philosophy students, measure parameters such as their dogmatism, creativity, rationality etc at the start and then at the end when they graduate, see if learning philosophy has improved these parameters, and whether this improvement is more than the graduates of other subjects like psychology and literature. Only then we can say that there is value in studying philosophy.
Your thoughts appreciated.
This is what Unger says:
This quote is from a small book that Bertrand Russell wrote, from 1912, which is still used as a textbook today: a little book called The Problems of Philosophy. He talks here about the value of philosophy:
Thus, to sum up our discussion of the value of philosophy; Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves. Because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all that because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.
The second part, after the ‘above all’ seems like complete nonsense. What the heck does all that mean? It’s mystical nonsense, no? This from one of the two founders of modern logic, second only to Gottlob Frege in laying down the foundations of symbolic and mathematical logic.
Let’s go to the first part, before the ‘above all’. He says that these questions, and not questions about, say, chemistry, or ornothology, enlarge your conception of what is possible. I hardly even know what that means. But he goes on and says things which are less hard to understand, like, it enriches your intellectual imagination. And a second thing it does, which I take to be distinct, is it diminishes your dogmatic assurance.
These are things that can be tested for, as I said before! Whether it’s a treatment effect, or a selection effect. There are tests for how creative people are, or how dogmatic they are. You test them, at the end, the day after they graduate. And you see whether this is true.
Bertrand Russell never even bothers to think about whether, or what, these things might have to do with any test you can give to human people, or what’s going on. It’s so full of nonsense, the guy was always full of nonsense. He read up on relativity theory, but you would think he would think of some psychological testing that had some bearing on the smoke he was blowing. He never gave it a thought.
BV: In dismissing mysticism as nonsense, Unger merely advertises his own ignorance and spiritual vacancy and falls to the tabloid level of an Ayn Rand who displays no more understanding of mysticism than he does. Mysticism is a vast field of ancient yet ongoing human experience and endeavor and one that earlier American philosophers such as Josiah Royce, William James, and William Ernest Hocking, to mention just three philosophers of high distinction, took very seriously indeed. See, respectively, The World and the Individual, First Series, 1899, lectures II, IV, and V; The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902, lectures XVI and XVII; Types of Philosophy, 1929, chapters 30, 31, 32, 33. It is worth noting that all three luminaries were professors at Harvard University.
In those days Harvard was still far from the over-specialization and hyper-professionalization of philosophy that breeds people like Peter Unger, who though "terribly" clever -- to use one of his favorite adjectives --appear to view philosophy as a highly rarefied academic game without roots in, or anything to say about, one's life as an "existing individual" (phrase from Kierkegaard, but I am thinking of all the existentialists, as well as Augustine, Pascal, the Stoics, the ancient Skeptics, and indeed all philosophers from Plato to Aquinas to Kant and beyond for whom philosophy has something to do with the search for wisdom).
The institutionalization of philosophy in the 20th century, though not without some benefits, has led to the following. Empty gamesmanship without existential anchorage. Hypertrophy of the critical and analytic faculty with concomitant atrophy of the intuitive faculty. Philistinic dismissal of whole realms of human experience and endeavor. Technicality and specialization taken to absurd lengths not justified by any actual results. (If extreme specialization and narrowing of focus led to consensus among competent practioners, then that might count as a justification for the specialization. But it hasn't and it doesn't. See here.)
Bertrand Russell, you will recall, published a collection of essays in October 1910 that in the second edition of December 1917 were given the title Mysticism and Logic. The lead essay, "Mysticism and Logic," which originally appeared in the Hibbert Journal of July 1914, displays a serious engagement with what Unger the philistine dismisses as "complete nonsense." What Russell writes about mysticism is penetrating enough to suggest that he may have had some mystical experiences of his own. In the end Russell rejects the four main tenets that he takes as definitive of mysticism, but his rejection is reasoned and respectful. He grants that "there is an element of wisdom to be learned from the mystical way of feeling, which does not seem to be attainable in any other way." (p. 11)
But of course that essay dates from the days of our grandfathers and great grandfathers. Times have changed, and in philosophy not for the better. The analytic philosophy that Russell did so much to promote has become sterile and ingrown and largely irrelevant to the wider culture. There are of course exceptions, Thomas Nagel being one of them.
There is a lot more to be said. But for now I will simply oppose to Unger's nauseating view the following quotations:
The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man. (William James, Pragmatism, Harvard UP, 1975, p. 56)
Maximae res, cum parvis quaeruntur, magnos eos solent efficere.
Matters of the greatest importance, when they are investigated by little men, tend to make those men great. (Augustine, Contra Academicos 1. 2. 6.)
See here for a different critical response to Unger.
As the West slides into the dustbin of history, the philosopher's pleasures are of the owlish sort. The owl of Minerva spreads her wings at dusk, to survey the scene of strife, with an equanimity born of distance, as befits a spectator of all time and existence.
Walter Williams against Slavery Reparations. But is Williams really black? Or is he a traitor to his race? Could anyone be a traitor to his race? Is there any idea so preternaturally dumbassed that leftists won't promulgate it? If I argue against reparations, leftists call me a racist. If a seriously black man like Williams does, he is called an Uncle Tom. That's the Left for you.
The Redskin Non-Issue. The Left fiddles with PeeCee nonsense while Rome burns. Have you ever heard 'redskin' used in the way 'kike,' 'greaseball,' and 'nigger' are used?
I have often pointed out that there is nothing liberal about contemporary 'liberals.' Kim R. Holmes' Intolerance as Illiberalism is well worth your time. Excerpt:
Hard illiberalism, however, is not the only variant. There are “soft” versions too. They often appear “liberal” and even operate inside democratic systems otherwise committed to the rule of law. But their core idea is that liberal democracy and the constitutional rule of law are insufficient to bring about absolute equality.
It is this form of illiberalism that is gaining traction in America today. It comes in many guises and varying degrees of intensity. It is a campus official countenancing “trigger warnings” and speech codes that censor free speech and suppress debate. It is a radio host shouting that he hopes employees of the National Security Agency get cancer and die. It is politicians and government officials who bend the rules, launch investigations, overturn laws, criminalize so-called “hate” speech, and stretch the meaning of the Constitution to impose their views on Americans. It is the mindset of “us versus them” that leads government officials such as New York’s governor to say that there is “no place in the state of New York” for “extreme conservatives”— by which he meant not fringe or violent groups but anyone who opposes abortion or the redefinition of marriage. And it is the idea that constitutional limits, individual rights, and even due process can be ignored in the “greater” cause of creating income equality.
These people have become not merely intolerant but fundamentally illiberal.
Illiberalism is not just about government denying people the right of free expression and equality before the law. It is also about controlling how people think and behave. It is a threat both to our democratic system of government and to the “liberal” political culture.
Let me start off by recommending Jim Ryan's infrequently updated but very old (since 2002!) Philosoblog, the archives of which contain excellent material worthy of the coveted MavPhilSTOA (stamp of approval). The following entry (originally posted February 2005 at my first blog) is in response to my query as to why Ryan left university teaching.
JR: Well, here's my story, thanks for asking: I've always taken learning to be almost sacred, scholarship to be transcendent, books sublime. Given this disposition, I was unable to stomach teaching that 20% of my students who were there to get by by hook or by crook (avoid class, avoid the book, succumb to cheating, etc.). I realized at 37 that I would become a bitter old man if I taught for another 30 years. I liked the other 80% of my students, and I liked my research, but these weren't enough to get me through the bitter part. So, having a reasonable math and science background I boned up on chemistry during my last year of teaching and hustled a job in the Chem department at U. of Virginia. That was two years ago, almost. It's been fun, but now I'm thinking of moving into the business world, so that I can make more money and have more time with my kids.
What about your story, Bill? How'd you come to quit?
BV: Learning sacred, scholarship transcendent, books sublime. I can see we have something in common, a commonality that is also part of the reason why I gave up teaching. The average run of students would dismiss your sentiments and mine as bullshit, as some kind of empty self-serving rhetoric that could only be spouted by some weirdo who fills his belly by spouting it. Most people have no intellectual eros, could not care less about scholarship, and place no value whatsoever on good books.
Proof of the latter point can be found by scouring the used bookstores in a locale like Boston-Cambridge. Take a book off the shelf that was assigned in a course, note the underlining or 'magic marker mark-up' and how it extends maybe three or four pages and then stops -- great for me, of course, who gets a relatively pristine copy for pennies, but indicative of the pointlessness of reading assignments.
Most teaching is like trying to feed people who aren't hungry. Pointless. Of course, I had some great students and some great classes. But not enough of either to justify the enterprise.
Then there is the problem of stimulating colleagues. It is easy to end up in a department without any, in which case you are on your own, and you may as well be an independent scholar. Isolation? Not any more. Not with the WWW and the blogosphere in particular.
But the main reason I quit was to be able to do philosophy full time and live a more focused existence. It had been something I had been thinking about for a long time. I see philosophy as a spiritual quest, not an academic game. I had tenure, and I had enjoyed it for seven years. I had enjoyed a two-year visiting associate professorship, and I could have returned to my tenured position, but I was ready to take the next step in my life. The catalyst was my wife's being offered a great job in a beautiful place. Being a Westerner, I had served enough time in the effete and epicene East and was ready to get back to where mountains are mountains and hikers and climbers are damn glad of it.
Editorial commentary at the Gray Lady nowadays resembles micturition more than intelligent cogitation, but there are a couple of notable counter-instances, one being the writings of Ross Douthat. Herewith, three quotations from his recent Prisoners of Sex:
The culture’s attitude is Hefnerism, basically, if less baldly chauvinistic than the original Playboy philosophy. Sexual fulfillment is treated as the source and summit of a life well lived, the thing without which nobody (from a carefree college student to a Cialis-taking senior) can be truly happy, enviable or free.
In his second sentence above, Douthat puts his finger on another indicator of our junk culture's having gone off the rails. Must I explain why?
Meanwhile, social alternatives to sexual partnerships are disfavored or in decline: Virginity is for weirdos and losers, celibate life is either a form of unhealthy repression or a smoke screen for deviancy, the kind of intense friendships celebrated by past civilizations are associated with closeted homosexuality, and the steady shrinking of extended families has reduced many people’s access to the familial forms of platonic intimacy.
Contemporary feminism is very good — better than my fellow conservatives often acknowledge — at critiquing these pathologies. But feminism, too, is often a prisoner of Hefnerism, in the sense that it tends to prescribe more and more “sex positivity,” insisting that the only problem with contemporary sexual culture is that it’s imperfectly egalitarian, insufficiently celebratory of female agency and desire.
Like many American boys, I read plenty of Jack London: The Call of the Wild, White Fang, The Sea Wolf, Martin Eden, not to mention numerous short stories, some of them unforgettable to this day: "Love of Life," "Moonface," and "To Build a Fire." But I never got around to John Barleycorn until years later after I had read a lit-crit study of the American booze novel, and had decided to read every booze novel I could get my hands on. You could say I went on a booze novel binge. So I read Charles Jackson's Lost Weekend, things like that, until I was ready for the grandpappy of them all, John Barleycorn.
Here are some notes from a journal entry of 7 March 1998.
Finished John Barleycorn in bed last night. One of London's best books. What's the gist of it?
One cannot live and be happy unless one suppresses the final truth which is that life is a senseless play of forces, a brutal and bloody war of all against all with no redeeming point or purpose. Man is a brother to the dust, "a cosmic joke, a sport of chemistry." (319).
Only by telling himself "vital lies" can a man live "muttering and mumbling them like charms and incantations against the powers of Night." (329) All metaphysics, religion, and spirtuality are half-believed-in attempts to "outwit the Noseless One [the skull behind the face] and the Night." (329) "Life is oppositional and passes. You are an apparition." (317) "All an appearance can know is mirage." (316)
Ah, but here is a weak point in the London position. An appearance can't know anything, can't even dream or doubt anything. If I am dreaming, then I am, beyiond all seeming, and I cannot be a mere dream object. Here the "White Logic" shows itself to be illogic. Let your experience be as deceptive, delusive, mirage-like as you want, the experiencer stands above it, apart from it, behind it -- at least in his inner essence. Thus there is the hope that he may unfold his inner essence, disentangling himself from the play of specters. But this is exactly what London, worldling and sensualist, did not do. And what he presumably could not do.
There is the 'truth' we need to live and flourish -- which is a bunch of "vital lies" -- and there is the real truth, which is that our life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Religion and metaphysics are further life-enhancing illusions. Alcohol revealed all this "White Logic" to London. What is his solution? Stay sober and dream on, apparently. Close the books of despair (Spencer, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche) and lose yourself in the daily round, the social whirl, the delights of the foreground. Distract yourself and keep your self distracted.
What is noteworthy here is that booze for London is not anodyne and escape but truth serum. Beyond noteworthy it is very strange: the boozed-up, barely-corned, brain is in the proper condition to grasp reality as she is.
Three paths are suggested:
A. The Superficial Man. Lives in immediacy and illusion, oblivious to sickness, old age, and death. Doesn't see that there is a problem of life to be solved. Or rather he doesn't want to see that life is a predicament. He prefers self-deception on this point. He takes short views and avoids the long ones. Keeps himself busy and distracted.
B. The 'London Man.' Sees through the average schlep's illusions. He experiences the nullity, the vanity of success, recognition, love of woman, money and the rest. (See p. 254) But beyond this there is only the horror of the senseless and brutal struggle for existence. So he turns against the "ancient mistake of pursuing Truth too relentlessly." (254) He returns to the Cave, believing that ultimately there is No Exit.
C. The Quester. For whatever reason, he has been so placed in life that he has a glimpse of the possibility of salvation from meaninglessness. He sees deeper than the 'London Man.' He has been granted a fleeting vision of the Light behind and beyond the Noseless One and Night. He works to attain that vision in fullness.
Congressional investigators are fuming over revelations that the Internal Revenue Service has lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency's tea party controversy.
The IRS said Lois Lerner's computer crashed in 2011, wiping out an untold number of emails that were being sought by congressional investigators. The investigators want to see all of Lerner's emails from 2009 to 2013 as part of their probe into the way agents handled applications for tax-exempt status by tea party and other conservative groups.
Lerner headed the IRS division that processes applications for tax-exempt status. The IRS acknowledged last year that agents had improperly scrutinized applications by some conservative groups.
Her computer crashed and she lost the e-mail? Mendacity on stilts. Typical Obama administration bullshit. A computer crash does not cause the loss of e-mail: the stuff is stored on the e-mail provider's server. We all know that. One is struck by the chutzpah of these IRS liars. What contempt they have for the people who pay their salaries! See fourth article below.
Grace Boey interviews Peter Unger about his new book Empty Ideas: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy. Excerpt:
In a way, all I’m doing is detailing things that were already said aphoristically by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations. I read it twice over in the sixties, pretty soon after it came out, when I was an undergraduate. I believed it all — well, sort of. I knew, but I didn’t want to know, and so it just went on. And basically what Philosophical Investigations says is that when you’re doing philosophy, you’re not going to find out anything. You find out some trivial things, you’ll be under the delusion that you’re doing a great deal, but what you should do is stop and do something more productive.
But you didn’t stop.
Neither did Wittgenstein. He kept scribbling away! What stopped him from doing that was terminal cancer. Only cancer had that desired effect. But it also had some other undesired effects — namely, ending his life. (Laughter)
There's something paradoxical about Wittgenstein's behavior and Unger's too.
Ludwig Wittgenstein had no respect for academic philosophy and he steered his students away from academic careers. For example, he advised Norman Malcolm to become a rancher, a piece of advice Malcolm wisely ignored. And yet it stung his vanity to find his ideas recycled and discussed in the philosophy journals. Wittgenstein felt that when the academic hacks weren't plagiarizing his ideas they were misrepresenting them.
The paradox is that his writing can speak only to professional philosophers, the very people he despised. Ordinary folk, even educated ordinary folk, find the stuff he wrote gibberish. When people ask me what of Wittgenstein they should read, I tell them to read first a good biography like that of Ray Monk, and then, if they are still interested, read the aphorisms and observations contained in Culture and Value (Vermischte Bemerkungen).
Only professional philosophers take seriously the puzzles that Wittgenstein was concerned to dissolve in his later work. And only a professional philosopher will be exercised by the meta-problem of the origin and status of philosophical problems. So we have the paradox of a man who wrote for an audience he despised.
"There is less of a paradox that you think. Wittgenstein was writing mainly for himself; his was a therapeutic conception of philosophy. His writing was a form of self-therapy. He was tormented by the problems. His writing was mainly in exorcism of his demons."
This connects with the fly and fly bottle remark in the Philosophical Investigations and a second paradox.
Why does the bug need to be shown the way out? Pop the cork and he's gone.
Why did Wittgenstein feel the need to philosophize his way out of philosophy? He should have known that metaphilosophy and anti-philosophy are just more philosophy with all that that entails: inconclusiveness, endlessness, a labyrinth of distinctions and epicycles, objections and replies . . . . He should have just walked away from it.
If the room is too smoky, there is no necessity that you remain within it. You are free to go, the door is unlocked. This figure's from Epictetus and he had the quitting of life in view. But the same holds for the quitting of philosophy. Just do it, if that's what you want. It can be done.
What cannot be done, however, is to justify one's exit. (That would be like copulating your way to chastity.) For any justification proffered, perforce and willy-nilly, will be just more philosophy. You cannot have it both ways. You either walk away or stay.
Peter Unger, too, seems to want to copulate his way to chastity. Early on, as an undergraduate under the spell of Wittgenstein, he sensed that philosophy leads nowhere. But that didn't stop him from scribbling book after book. (His second-to-the-last, All the Power in the World, is a stomping tome fat enough to kill a cat.) Now Unger is an old man and he still cannot stop. For his latest -- which I just today ordered via Amazon Prime -- is just more of the same, just more philosophy. You cannot elude the seductive grasp of fair Philosophia by writing metaphilosophy or anti-philosophy. That will just entangle you in her outer garments when you ought to be penetrating toward her unmentionables. For again, the meta- and anti-stuff is just more of the same. Why does Unger suppose that his empty ideas are worthier than anyone else's?
I am quite sure that Unger will end up just another illustration of the first of Etienne Gilson's "laws of philosophical experience," namely, "Philosophy always buries its undertakers." (The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Scribners, 1937, p. 306)
After I read Unger's book, I will probably have more to say. I suspect much of his and others' disenchantment with analytic philosophy is due to the hyperprofessionalization, over-specialization, and science-aping that took off like a rocket, for a number of different reasons, in the 20th century. That, together with the decoupling of philosophy from any sort of spiritual quest or search for wisdom. What good is philosophy so decoupled? What good is it if it does not conduce to living well or wisely, or does not point beyond itself to revelation or enlightenment or at least ataraxia? Philosophy is not itself a science, as should be abundantly clear by now, and it cannot aspire ever to tread the "sure path of science" (Kant). If it pulls in its horns and tries to play handmaiden to the sciences, it consigns itself to irrelevance. How many working scientists read philosophy of science?
Update (6/17): Unger's new book arrived today, just one day after I ordered it via Amazon Prime. That's what I call service! Of course, if the federal government controlled book distribution, I would have received it in half a day and at half the price.
Today's mail also brought me Peter van Inwagen's latest, Existence, a collection of recent essays. I will be reviewing it for Studia Neoaristotelica.
In a way, all I’m doing is detailing things that were already said aphoristically by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations. I read it twice over in the sixties, pretty soon after it came out, when I was an undergraduate. I believed it all — well, sort of. I knew, but I didn’t want to know, and so it just went on. And basically what Philosophical Investigations says is that when you’re doing philosophy, you’re not going to find out anything. You find out some trivial things, you’ll be under the delusion that you’re doing a great deal, but what you should do is stop and do something more productive.
But you didn’t stop.
Neither did Wittgenstein. He kept scribbling away! What stopped him from doing that was terminal cancer. Only cancer had that desired effect. But it also had some other undesired effects — namely, ending his life. (Laughter)
- See more at: http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/06/philosophy-is-a-bunch-of-empty-ideas-interview-with-peter-unger.html#sthash.TKAGeGmN.dpuf
In a way, all I’m doing is detailing things that were already said aphoristically by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations. I read it twice over in the sixties, pretty soon after it came out, when I was an undergraduate. I believed it all — well, sort of. I knew, but I didn’t want to know, and so it just went on. And basically what Philosophical Investigations says is that when you’re doing philosophy, you’re not going to find out anything. You find out some trivial things, you’ll be under the delusion that you’re doing a great deal, but what you should do is stop and do something more productive.
But you didn’t stop.
Neither did Wittgenstein. He kept scribbling away! What stopped him from doing that was terminal cancer. Only cancer had that desired effect. But it also had some other undesired effects — namely, ending his life. (Laughter)
- See more at: http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/06/philosophy-is-a-bunch-of-empty-ideas-interview-with-peter-unger.html#sthash.TKAGeGmN.dpuf
In a way, all I’m doing is detailing things that were already said aphoristically by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations. I read it twice over in the sixties, pretty soon after it came out, when I was an undergraduate. I believed it all — well, sort of. I knew, but I didn’t want to know, and so it just went on. And basically what Philosophical Investigations says is that when you’re doing philosophy, you’re not going to find out anything. You find out some trivial things, you’ll be under the delusion that you’re doing a great deal, but what you should do is stop and do something more productive.
But you didn’t stop.
Neither did Wittgenstein. He kept scribbling away! What stopped him from doing that was terminal cancer. Only cancer had that desired effect. But it also had some other undesired effects — namely, ending his life. (Laughter)
- See more at: http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/06/philosophy-is-a-bunch-of-empty-ideas-interview-with-peter-unger.html#sthash.TKAGeGmN.dpuf
In your Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy divine simplicity article you draw a helpful comparison toward the end between trope theory and divine simplicity. However it left me wondering in what way the claim that 1) God is simple differs from the claim that 2) God is just a trope of divinity?
Excellent question. But can I answer it? Here is what I said in the SEP entry:
Tropes are ontologically simple entities. On trope theory, properties are assayed not as universals but as particulars: the redness of a tomato is as particular, as unrepeatable, as the tomato. Thus a tomato is red, not in virtue of exemplifying a universal, but by having a redness trope as one of its constituents (on one version of trope theory) or by being a substratum in which a redness trope inheres (on a second theory). A trope is a simple entity in that there is no distinction between it and the property it ‘has.’ Thus a redness trope is red, but it is not red by instantiating redness, or by having redness as a constituent, but by being (a bit of) redness. So a trope is what it has. It has redness by being identical to (a bit of) redness. In this respect it is like God who is what he has. God has omniscience by being (identical to) omniscience. Just as there is no distinction between God and his omniscience, there is no distinction in a redness trope between the trope and its redness. And just as the simple God is not a particular exemplifying universals, a trope is not a particular exemplifying a universal. In both cases we have a particular that is also a property, a subject of predication that is also a predicable entity, where the predicable entity is predicated of itself. Given that God is omniscience, he is predicable of himself. Given that a redness trope is a redness, it is predicable of itself. An important difference, of course, is that whereas God is unique, tropes are not: there is and can be only one God, but there are many redness tropes.
Not only is each trope identical to the property it has, in each trope there is an identity of essence and existence. A trope is neither a bare particular nor an uninstantiated property. It is a property-instance, an indissoluble unity of a property and itself as instance of itself. As property, it is an essence, as instance, it is the existence of that essence. Because it is simple, essence and existence are identical in it. Tropes are thus necessary beings (beings whose very possibility entails their actuality) as they must be if they are to serve as the ontological building blocks of everything else (on the dominant one-category version of trope theory). In the necessity of their existence, tropes resemble God.
If one can bring oneself to countenance tropes, then one cannot object to the simple God on the ground that (i) nothing can be identical to its properties, or (ii) in nothing are essence and existence identical. For tropes are counterexamples to (i) and (ii).
In the SEP article I was merely trying to "to soften up the contemporary reader for the possible coherence of DDS . . . by adducing some garden variety examples of contemporary philosophical posits that are ontologically simple in one or more of the ways in which God is said to be simple." I was not suggesting that God is a divinity trope.
But perhaps this suggestion can be developed. Perhaps God can be usefully viewed as analogous to a trope, as a divinity trope. One thing is clear and must be borne in mind. God is a stupendously rich reality, the ne plus ultra of absoluteness, transcendence, and alterity. He cannot easily be brought within the human conceptual horizon. If you are not thinking of God in these terms, you are probably thinking like an atheist, as if God is just one more being among beings. God, however, is nothing like that famous piece of (hypothetical) space junk, Russell's teapot.
Given the divine transcendence and absoluteness, one cannot expect God to fit easily into any presupposed ontological framework developed for the purpose of understanding 'sublunary' items. God is not a trope among tropes any more than he is a substance among substances or a concrete particular among concrete particulars. Two points. First, there are indefinitely many redness tropes, but there cannot be indefinitely many divinity tropes. If God is a trope, then he is an absolutely unique trope. Second, no concrete 'sublunary' item is identical to a single trope. (I trust my astute readers understand my use of 'sublunary' here.) Many tropes enter into the constitution of any ordinary particular. But if God is a trope he must be absolutely unitary, enfolding all of his reality in his radical unity. So 'trope' needs some analogical stretching to fit the divine reality.
To answer the reader's question, God cannot be a trope among tropes. But an analogical extension of the trope conception in the direction of deity may be worth pursuing.
The view for which McGinn is known is a jejune prediction, namely that science cannot ever solve the problem of how the brain produces consciousness. On what does he base his prediction? Flimsy stuff. First, he is pretty sure our brain is not up to the job. Why not? Try this: a blind man does not experience color, and he will not do so even when we explain the brain mechanisms of experiencing color. Added to which, McGinn says that he cannot begin to imagine what it is like to be a bat, or how conscious experience might be scientifically explained (his brain not being up to the job, as he insists). This cognitive inadequacy he deems to have universal epistemological significance.
Alongside the arrogance, here is one whopping flaw: no causal explanation for a phenomenon, such as color vision, should be expected to actually produce that phenomenon. Here is why: the neural pathways involved in visually experiencing color are not the same pathways as those involved in intellectually understanding the mechanisms for experiencing color. Roughly speaking, experiencing color depends on areas in the back of the brain (visual areas) and intellectual understanding of an explanation depends on areas in the front of the brain.
Now what does this snark and misdirection have to do with anything McGinn actually maintains? Nothing that I can see. Here's McGinn:
Churchland’s account of my arguments for our cognitive limitations with respect to explaining consciousness bears little relation to what I have written in several books, as anyone who has dipped into those books will appreciate. What she refers to as a “whopping flaw” in my position (and that of many others) is simply a complete misreading of what has been argued: the point is not that having a causal explanation for a phenomenon should produce that phenomenon, so that a blind man will be made to see by having a good theory of vision. The point is rather that a blind man will not understand what color vision is merely by finding out about the brain mechanisms that underlie it, since he needs acquaintance with the color experiences themselves.
Churchland 0 - McGinn 1.
The articles below should help you understand some of the issues.
A Sketch of the Difference between Two Ontological Styles
What it is for a thing to have a property? Ostrich nominalism aside, it is a Moorean fact that things have properties, but the nature of the having is a philosophical problem. The ordinary language 'have' does not wear it correct ontological analysis on its sleeve. My cup is blue. Does the cup have the property of being blue by standing in a relation to it -- the relation of exemplification -- or by containing it as an ontological or metaphysical part or constituent? The root issue that divides constituent ontologists (C-ontologists) and those that N. Wolterstorff calls, rather infelicitously, "relation ontologists" (R-ontologists) is whether or not ordinary particulars have ontological or metaphysical parts.
C-ontologists maintain that (i) ordinary particulars have such parts in addition to their commonsense parts; (ii) that among these ontological parts are (some of) the properties of the ordinary particular; and (iii) that the particular has (some of) its properties by having them as proper parts. R-ontologists deny that ordinary particulars have ontological parts, and consequently deny that ordinary particulars have any of their properties by having them as parts. Of course, R-ontologists do not deny that (most) ordinary particulars have commonsense parts.
Drawing on some graphic images from D. M. Armstrong, we can say that for C-ontologists ordinary particulars are "layer cakes" while for R-ontologists they are "blobs." 'Blob' conveys the idea that ordinary particulars lack ontological structure in addition to such commonsense structure as spatial structure.
The distinction between these two styles of ontology or two approaches to ontology is not entirely clear, but, I think, clear enough. To take an example, is the blueness of my blue coffee cup an abstract object off in a platonic or quasi-platonic realm apart and only related to the cup I drink from by the external asymmetrical relation of exemplification? That, I take it, is van Inwagen's view. I find it hard to swallow. After all, I see (with the eyes of the head, not the eye of the mind) the blueness at the cup, where the cup is. Phenomenologically, I see (some) properties. So some properties are literally visible. No abstract objects (as PvI and others influenced by Quine use 'abstract objects') are literally visible. Ergo, some properties are not abstract objects.
Here is a second argument. Some properties are either wholly or partially located at the places where the things that have the properties are located. No abstract objects are either wholly or partially located at the places where the things that have the properties are located. Therefore, some properties are not abstract objects. So I am inclined to say that the blueness of my cup is in some unmereological and hard-to-explain sense an ontological proper part or constituent of the cup. It is obviously not the whole of the cup since the cup has other properties. Ordinary particulars are not ontologically structureless 'blobs.'
Needless to say, these two quick little arguments do not decide the matter in favor of C-ontology. And the other arguments I could add won't decide the matter either. But taken cumulatively these arguments give one good reason to reject R-ontology.
It is also worth observing that an ontological constituent needn't be a property. Gustav Bergmann's bare particulars and Armstrong's thin particulars are ontological constituents of ordinary or 'thick' particulars but they are not properties of those particulars. The materia signata of the Thomists is a constituent of material particulars, but not a property of such particulars. So, C-ontology is not just a thesis about properties and how they are had by the things that have them.
So much for ontological background. For more on the two ontological approaches, see my article, "Constituent versus Relational Ontology," Studia Neoaristotelica: A Journal of Analytical Scholasticism, vol. 10, no, 1, 2013, pp. 99-115. Now what relevance does this have for the classically theist doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS)? But first: What is DDS?
The Doctrine of Divine Simplicity
To put it as 'simply' as possible, DDS is the thesis that God is without (proper) parts. (If you want to say that God is an improper part of himself, I'll let that slide.) Being without parts, God is without composition of any sort. It is obvious that God is not a region of space, nor does he occupy a region of space. So he cannot have spatial or material parts. If God is eternal, then he cannot have temporal parts. (And if there are no temporal parts, then God cannot have them even if he is everlasting or omnitemporal.) But he also lacks ontological parts. So the divine attributes cannot be different parts of him in the way that my attributes can be different parts of me on a C-ontology. We can put this by saying that in God there is no real distinction between him and his omni-attributes. He is each attribute, which implies that each attribute is every other attribute. Indeed, there is no distinction in God between God and any of his intrinsic properties. (Each omni-attribute is an intrinsic property, but not conversely.) What's more, there can be no distinction in God between essence and existence, form and matter, act and potency. Since God is in no way composite, he is simple.
And why must God be simple? Because he is absolute, and nothing absolute can be depend for its existence or nature on anything distinct from it. An absolute is what it has. It cannot be compounded of anything that is not absolute or dependent on anything that is not absolute. Why must God be absolute? Because anything less would not be God, a worship-worthy being. These answers are quick and catechetical, but I must invoke my blogospheric privilege and move one.
Plantinga's Critique Misses the Mark
Perhaps the best-known attack on the coherence of DDS is that of A. Plantinga in his Does God Have a Nature? The attack fails because Plantinga foists on the DDS an R-ontology that is foreign to the thought of DDS defenders. If properties are abstract objects, and God is a concrete particular, then of course it would be incoherent to maintain that God and omnsicience are one and the same. For if omniscience is a property, and properties are abstract objects, and abstract objects are causally inert, then the identification of God and omniscience would either render God causally inert -- which would contradict his being concrete -- or it would render omniscience causally active -- in contradiction to its being abstract. More simply, if you think of concreta and abstracta as denizens of radically disjoint realms, as R-ontologists do, then it would be something like a Rylean category mistake to maintain that God is identical to his properties.
More simply still, if God is causally active and no property is causally active (or passive for that matter), would it not be supremely stupid to assert that there is no distinction in reality between God and his properties? Could Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Avicenna, et al. have been that stupid? I don't think so. Aquinas was as little Quinean in his understanding of abstracta as Quine was Aquinian. Philosophical theologians under the spell of Quine such as Plantinga and van Inwagen are not well situated to understand such tenets of classical theism as DDS.
It is obvious, then, that DDS is incoherent when read in the light of R-ontology. It is also uncharitable in excelsis to read Aquinas et al. in that light because so reading them makes nonsense of what they say.
Does C-ontology Help with Coherence?
One of the entailments of DDS is that God does not exemplify his nature; he just is his nature. We have seen that this makes no coherent sense on (any version of) R-ontology. But it does make coherent sense on (some versions of) C-ontology. For if God is purely actual with no admixture of potency, wholly immaterial, and free of accidents, then what is left for God to be but his nature? To understand this, one must bear in mind that the divine nature is absolutely unique. As such it is not repeatable: it is not a universal. It is therefore unrepeatable, a particular. What is to prevent it from being identical to God and from being causally active?
If you say that God is an instance of a multiply exemplifiable divine nature, they you are simply reverting to R-ontology and failing to take in the point I just made. God cannot be an instance of a kind, else he would depend on that kind to be what he is. God transcends the distinction between instance and kind. And if you persist in thinking that natures are causally inert abstract objects, then you are simply refusing to think in C-ontological terms.
If you say that I beg the question against the denier of DDS when I say that God transcends the instance-kind distinction, then you miss the point. The concern here is not whether DDS is true or whether there are non-question-begging arguments for it; the concern is whether it makes coherent sense as opposed to being quickly dismissable as guilty of a category mistake.
Another objection one might make is that the divine nature is not simple but complex, and that if God is his nature, then God is complex too. For Plantinga, the nature of a thing is a conjunctive property the conjuncts of which are those properties the thing exemplifies in every possible world in which it exists. On this approach, the divine nature is 'cobbled together' or constructed out of God's essential properties. But then the divine nature is logically and ontologically posterior to those properties. Clearly, no defender of DDS will think of natures in the Plantingian way. He will think of the divine nature as logically and ontologically prior to the properties, and of the properties as manifestations of that unitary nature, a nature the radical unity of which cannot be made sense of on Plantinga's approach.
There are other problematic entailments of DDS. One is that in God, nature and existence are one and the same. On an R-ontology, this makes no coherent sense. But it can be made sense on a C-ontological approach. A fit topic for a separate post.
My referrers' list points me to this post whence I snagged these two delightful quotations:
The pipe draws wisdom from the lips of the philosopher, and shuts up the mouth of the foolish; it generates a style of conversation, contemplative, thoughtful, benevolent, and unaffected.
William Makepeace Thackeray
A pipe is the fountain of contemplation, the source of pleasure, the companion of the wise; and the man who smokes, thinks like a philosopher and acts like a Samaritan.”
Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
The name 'Bulwer-Lytton' rings a bell doesn't it? You guessed right: it's the same Bulwer-Lytton who penned, in prose of purple, the opening sentence,
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
Jean-Paul Sartre put the following into the mouth of a character in the play, No Exit: "Hell is other people." What then would hell be for philosophers? To be locked in a room forever with a philosopher with whom one has little or no common ground. David Stove and Theodor Adorno, for example. Or Sartre and Etienne Gilson.
Leftists are not concerned with the truth, but with the 'narrative.' The latter concern is animated by the will to power, not the will to truth, a fact that explains what otherwise would be hard to explain, namely, why certain leftists are enamoured of Nietzsche. Here are the liberal narratives with respect to Bergdahl, Benghazi, IRS, Obamacare, VA, and illegal immigration. Excerpt:
For the Obama administration narrative to be accurate about the swap of five Taliban/al-Qaeda-related kingpins for Sgt. Bergdahl, we are asked to believe the following:
1. Sgt. Bergdahl was in ill health; thus the need for alacrity. Surely we will expect to see him in an enfeebled state on his return to the U.S.
2. Sgt. Bergdahl was in grave and sudden danger from his captors; thus the need for alacrity. We expect to see proof of that on his return to the U.S.
3. The five Taliban detainees will be under guard in Qatar for a year. We expect in June 2015 to know that they are still there in Qatar.
5. Sgt. Bergdahl served with “honor and distinction.” We expect to have confirmation of that fact[4] once his intelligence file is released and more evidence is adduced that all of his platoon-mates were wrong (or perhaps vindictive and partisan[5]) in stating that he voluntarily left their unit — deserted — to meet up with the Taliban.
6. Sgt. Bergdahl was captured on the “field of battle”; we expect to have confirmation that he was taken unwillingly by the enemy amid a clash of arms.
7. Sgt. Bergdahl was not a collaborator. We expect to learn confirmation of the fact that he did not disclose information to his captors.
8. Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers in his platoon are either partisan operatives or sorely misinformed, and we will shortly learn that their accounts of Bergdahl’s disappearance were erroneous.
9. The U.S. has traditionally negotiated to bring home even deserters, and did so frequently, for example, both during and after the Korean War when GIs crossed into North Korea.
11. There is no law stopping the president from releasing terrorists from Guantanamo, only legal fictions[7] promulgated by right-wing critics of the president.
12. The five Taliban terrorists are now old outliers[8], rusty, and mostly irrelevant to the war in Afghanistan.
Hilary Putnam took up blogging on 29 May of this year. Well, better late than never. He has entitled his weblog Sardonic Comment. He might also have considered It Ain't Obvious What's Obvious, which is a line he uses somewhere.
In 1976, when I delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford, I often spent time with Peter Strawson, and one day at lunch he made a remark I have never been able to forget. He said, "Surely half the pleasure of life is sardonic comment on the passing show". This blog is devoted to comments, not all of them sardonic, on the passing philosophical show.
Here: "THE YOUNG man accused of stabbing Esa Saarinen, a professor of applied philosophy at Aalto University, has revealed that his objective was to whip up media attention."
Ken Hochstetter of the College of Southern Nevada kindly sent me some comments on my SEP Divine Simplicity entry. They are thoughtful and challenging and deserve a careful reply. My remarks are in blue. I have added some subheadings.
The editors of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy want me to revise my Divine Simplicity entry by July 2nd. Written in 2006, it has been revised once, in 2010. This will be the third revision. If anyone who knows this subject has any constructive comments on the style, content, coverage, or organization of the present entry, I'd like to hear them. In particular, references to recent literature not included in the present bibliography would be helpful.
I have already reported on Brian Leiter's initial unprovoked attack on me. After that 2004 attack, which I chose to ignore, he got in a jab or two which I also ignored, until just the other day when he let loose again with an unprovoked attack. Then I realized that for my own peace of mind, and to teach him a lesson, and to defend all the others, including graduate students, the untenured, and those who are tenured but do not relish the prospect of being slimed by him, that I must mount a defense.
I conclude my self-defense today.
It must be borne in mind that I never launched an unprovoked attack upon him. I am defending myself and others against his attacks. I am giving him a taste of his own medicine, or rather, poison, so that maybe some day he will see that there is no percentage in his brand of scumbaggery. Of course, one cannot appeal morally to a morally obtuse leftist for whom the end justifies the means and bourgeois morality is buncombe, a person who demonizes his opponents and whose modus operandi is the ad hominem.
It would do no good to write to him and say, "Sir, you have attacked me personally and viciously, out of the blue, even though you don't know me at all, when I have done nothing to you, and only because I hold ideas with which you disagree. Doesn't that seem morally wrong to you? Don't you believe in free speech?"
That won't work with someone bereft of moral sense. One has to make a prudential appeal to his self-interest along the lines of: keep this up, buddy, and you will diminish your own status, which is apparently the main thing that concerns you. As a status-obsessed careerist, Leiter is enslaved to the opinions of others. So he must take care that he remains well thought of, at least by those who still think well of him.
This post will respond to Leiter's latest outburst. I will try to keep this brief.
What got Leiter's goat was the following sentence from my masthead:
Selected for The Times of London's 100 Best Blogs List (15 February 2009)
You see, for Leiter I am neither "competent" nor "successful" and so do not deserve any such minor honor as the one bestowed by The Times, even if I were in 100th place. A glance at my PhilPapers page, which lists 50 or so publications in Analysis, Nous, The Monist, etc. should put the question of competence to rest. If I am incompetent, then all those referees and editors must be mighty incompetent to have given me their positive evaluations. Am I successful? Well, I got a tenure-track job right out of graduate school, was awarded tenure, and was invited to teach at Case Western Reserve University for two years as a full-time Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy. I have been awarded four National Endowment for the Humanities grants. And so on. Is that success or failure? After my stint at Case Western Reserve I decided to live the life of an independent philosopher.
It is at this point, presumably, that I went from success to failure in the eyes of the illustrious Leiter. You see, someone as spiritually vacant and given to psychological projection as Leiter cannot comprehend how anyone could not value the trappings and bagatelles, the privileges and perquisites, that he values. If one is not a professor of philosophy, he thinks, one is not a real philosopher. I wonder what Leiter would say about Spinoza and plenty of others, not to mention his hero, Nietzsche. The point is obvious. I needn't go on. Leiter is a shallow and vain man, a grasping and ambitious man, and is widely regarded with disdain in philosophical and legal circles.
At the end of his post, he relates something he got from one of his sycophants:
. . . after teaching at the University of Dayton from 1978-1991, he took a leave of absence because his wife, who teaches art education, got a job at Arizona State University. Unsurprisingly, he could not get another job, and so he simply left academia to follow his wife. The only amusing irony here is that our raving right-wing, racist lunatic appears to be basically a "house husband"!
Here is the truth. I taught at the University of Dayton from 1978 to 1989. Then I took a leave from U. D. and, having been invited, I taught as a Visiting Associate Professor Philosophy at Case Western Reserve University. Now for a long time I had dreamed of becoming an independent philosopher who could devote all his time to his philosophical and spiritual pursuits. Of course, I cannot expect a superficial climber like the Ladderman, who cannot imagine anything higher than being an academic functionary, to understand any of this.
My wife and I both had tenured positions in Ohio, in Cleveland and Dayton, respectively, the distance between the two being roughly 220 miles. So we had a long-distance marriage going for quite a number of years. The solution came when she was offered a great position at ASU. She had me make the decision, and I decided that we should move to the beautiful state of Arizona. Being a very frugal man who had saved and invested a lot of money, I decided to retire from teaching at age 41 and realize my dream. It was one of the best decisions I ever made and my life has been wonderful ever since.
Am I a racist? Of course not. The allegations of Leiter and his sycophant are pure slander. The playing of the race card is the last refuge of a scoundrel. It is a matter of public record that I owned and lived in a house in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, from 1986-1991, a city that is approximately 40% black. Interested in what someone really thinks? Look to their behavior, especially their monetary behavior.
Leiter says I called him an idiot and philosophically incompetent. Another lie on his part. My objection is a moral one: he launches vicious personal attacks on people because he disagrees wth their ideas. He does not respect the principle of toleration.
I do not consider him stupid, nor do I say that he is philosophically incompetent. I assume he is competent. My main objection to him is the he is a leftist thug who smears people because of their views. He has a right to his leftism, but not to his thuggishness.
A secondary objection, one which I would never have made had he not attacked me, is that Leiter is a status-obsessed careerist devoid of spiritual depth. Just as there is no wisdom and decency on the Left, there is no wisdom and decency in Brian Leiter. If there is, it is deeply buried. He should let it shine forth if it exists.
Addendum (9 June)
Frank Wilson at Books, Inq. writes (emphasis added):
Considering that Leiter's characteristic mode of operation is personal attack, it is rather amusing that he doesn't like such when it is directed at himself. In his latest on Bill Vallicella, he has this to say: "an obscure (and right-wing) British journalist with no knowledge of philosophy was asked to recommend 100 blogs in different areas, two of which he identified as philosophy blogs."
Well, this blog is also one of the hundred chosen, and the British journalist referred to is Bryan Appleyard, who is neither obscure nor particularly right-wing. Bryan in fact, didn't choose the 100 blogs himself. I sent Bryan an email when this blog was chosen to thank him and he wrote back that he had nothing to with the final pick. He just submitted a long list of various blogs to his editors. They looked at blogs on the list and made their choices.
So Leiter doesn't know what he's talking about. (I should have added that, from what I have observed, Bryan is quite philosophically fluent.)
For the first time since the end of World War II, classic anti-Semitic tropes—“the Jews” control the world and are to blame for everything that goes wrong, including the financial crisis; The Jews killed Christian children in order to use the blood to bake Matzo; the Holocaust never happened—are becoming acceptable and legitimate subjects for academic and political discussion. To understand why these absurd and reprehensible views, once reserved for the racist fringes of academia and politics, are now moving closer to the mainstream, consider the attitudes of two men, one an academic, the other a politician, toward those who express or endorse such bigotry. The academic is Professor Brian Leiter. The politician is Ron Paul.
You’ve probably never heard of Leiter. He’s a relatively obscure professor of jurisprudence, who is trying to elevate his profile by publishing a gossipy blog about law school professors. He is a colleague of John Mearsheimer, a prominent and world famous professor at the University of Chicago.
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