Maverick Philosopher

Of Hurt and Humor

Don't tell a hurtful joke and expect the victim to appreciate the humor while abstracting from the hurtfulness.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: More Performers Who Ditched Their Italian Surnames

But before getting on to the greaseball crooners, a bit of R & R history.  London Ed reminds me that today, the 5th of July, 2014, is the 60th anniversary of the recording of Elvis Presley's That's Alright, Mama, his first commercial record.  It was written and first recorded by Arthur 'Big Boy' Crudup in 1946.  Some say that Presley's recording is the first rock and roll record.  Others give the palm to the 1951 Rocket 88 by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Kings.  The associated video features footage (and 'leggage') of Bettie Page, that innocent  and unwitting sex kitten of the '50s. She got religion big time later on, as did Dion Dimucci, but that's another and another Saturday Night at the Oldies . . . .

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

Before Bobby Darin became Bobby Darin he rejoiced under the name, Walden Robert Cassotto.  Dream Lover.  18 Yellow Roses. You're the Reason I'm Living.

Bobby Rydell started out Robert Ridarelli.  Forget him.  Volare. "Letsa fly . . . ." Wild One. We Got Love.

No, his name wasn't Dino Martino, it was Dino Paul Crocetti.  Schmaltzy as it is, That's Amore captures the Nagelian what-it's-like of being in love.  Houston.

Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero, better known as Connie Francis. My Darling Clementine. Never on Sunday.  I prefer the understated Melina Mercouri version.

Timoteo Aurro = Timi Yuro.  When I first heard her back in the day, I thought she was black.  What a voice!  What's the Matter, Baby?  Her signature number: Hurt.

Laura traded in 'Nigro' for 'Nyro.'  Wedding Bell Blues.   And When I Die.  These go out to Monterey Tom, big L.N. fan.  Nyro died young in 1997 of ovarian cancer, 49 years of age.

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Saturday Night at the Oldies: 1956

The Gender Academy

In his latest NRO column, Spencer Case argues that "The feminist left is politicizing philosophy."  I would add that this is but a special case of the general truth that the Left politicizes everything. 

Some related posts of mine:

The Politicization of the American Philosophical Association

The Recent Dennett-Plantinga A. P. A. Debate and the Question of Tone in Philosophy Excellent comment thread.  A. C. Grayling makes an appearance and is pummelled by Ed Feser and others.

Still More on the Colorado Situation

Lukas Novak on Reference to What is Not

Our Czech friend Lukas Novak sent me a paper in which, drawing upon John Duns Scotus, he rejects the following principle of reference:

(PR) It is impossible to refer to that which is not.

In this entry I will first pull some quotations from Novak's paper and then raise some questions about the view he seems to be endorsing.

I. Novak's Scotistic View

Novak writes,

Scotus’ position can be simply characterized as a consistent rejection of the PR . . . . According to Scotus, the objects of any intentional relations . . . simply are not required to have any ontological status whatsoever, or, as Scotus puts it, any esse verum. The “being” expressed by the predicates exploited by Francis, like “to be known” (esse cognitum), “to be intelligible” (esse intelligibile), “to be an image of a paradigm” (esse exemplatum), “to be represented” (esse repraesentatum) and the like, is not real or true in any way, irrespectively of whether the relation involved concerns God or man.

[. . .]

 

It is not necessary to assume any esse essentiae in objects of knowledge: instead, Scotus speaks of “esse deminutum” here, but he points out emphatically that this “diminished being” is being only “secundum quid”, i.e., in an improper, qualified sense – this is the point of Scotus’ famous criticism of Henry of Ghent laid out in the unique question of dist. 36 of the first book of his Ordinatio. If you look for some real being in the object of intellection that it should have precisely in virtue of being such an object, there is none to be found. The only real being to be found here is the real being of the intellection, to which the esse deminutum of the intellected object is reduced:

[. . .]

In other words: if we were to make something like an inventory of reality, we should not list any objects having mere esse deminutum. By speaking about objects in intelligible being we do not take on any ontological commitment (to use the Quinean language) over and above the commitment to the existence of the intellections directed to these objects.

[. . .]

And now the crucial point: it is precisely this intelligibility, imparted to the objects by the divine intellect, what [that] makes human conceiving of the same objects possible, irrespectively of whether they have any real being or not:

[. . .]

In other words: the most fundamental reason why the PR is false is, according to Scotus, the fact that a sufficient condition of the human capacity to refer to something is the intelligibility of that something. This intelligibility, however, is bestowed on things in virtue of their being conceived, prior to creation, by the absolute divine intellect. This divine conceiving, however, neither produces nor presupposes any genuine being in the objects; for it is a universal truth that cognition is an immanent operation, one whose effect remains wholly in its subject (and so does not really affect its object) – in this elementary point divine cognition is not different. Accordingly, objects need not have any being whatsoever in order to be capable of being referred to. (emphasis added)

II. Some Questions and Comments

As a matter of fact we do at least seem to refer to nonexistent objects and say things about them, true and false.   Alexius von Meinong's celebrated goldner Berg, golden mountain, may serve as an example.  The golden mountain is made of gold; it is a mountain; it does not exist; it is an object of my present thinking; it is indeterminate with respect to height; it is 'celebrated' as it were among connoisseurs of this arcana; it is Meinong's favorite example of a merely possible individual; it -- the very same one I am talking about now -- was discussed by Kasimir Twardowski, etc.

Now if this seeming to refer is an actual referring, if we do refer to the nonexistent in thought and overt speech, then it is possible that we do so.  Esse ad posse valet illatio.  But how the devil is it possible that we do so?  (PR) is extremely plausible: it is difficult to understand how there could be reference to that which has no being, no esse, whatsoever.

If I understand Novak, he wants a theory that satisfies the following desiderata or criteria of adequacy

D1. Possibilism is to be avoided.  We cannot maintain that the merely possible has any sort of being.

D2. Actualist ersatzism is to be avoided.  We cannot maintain that there are actual items such as Plantingian haecceities that stand in for mere possibilia.

D3. The phenomenological fact that intentionality is relational or at least quasi-relational is to be respected and somehow accommodated.  No adverbial theories!

D4. Eliminativism about intentionality/reference is to be avoided.  Intentionality is real!

D5. Nominalist reductionism according to which reference is a merely intralinguistic phenomenon is to be avoided.  When I refer to something, whether existent or nonexistent, I am getting outside of language!  

Novak does not list these desiderata; I am imputing them to him.  He can tell me if my imputation is unjust.  In any case, I accept (D1)-(D5): an adequate theory must satisfy these demands.  Now how does Novak's theory satisfy them?

Well, he brings God into the picture. Some will immediately cry deus ex machina! But I think Novak can plausibly rebut this charge.  If God is brought on the stage in an ad hoc manner to get us out of a jam, then a deus ex machina objection has bite.  But Novak and his master Scotus have independent reasons for positing God.  See my substantial post on DEM objections in philosophy, here.

Suppose we have already proven, or at least given good reasons for, the existence of God.  Then he can be put to work.  Or, as my esteemed teacher J. N. Findlay once said, "God has his uses."

So how does it work?  It is sufficient for x to be an object of thought or reference by us that it be intelligible. This intelligibility derives from the divine intellect who, prior to creation, conceives of such items as the golden mountain.  But this conceiving does not impart to them any real being.  Nor does it presuppose that they have any real being.  In themselves, they have no being at all.  God's conceiving of nonexistent objects is a wholly immanent operation the effect of which remains wholly within the subject of the operation, namely, the divine mind.    And yet the nonexistent objects acquire intelligibility.  It is this intelligibility that makes it possible for us finite minds to think the nonexistent without it being the case that nonexistent objects have any being at all.

That is the theory, assuming I have understood it.  And it does seem to satisfy the desiderata with the possible exception of (D3).  But here is one concern.  The theory implies that when I think about the golden mountain I am thinking about an operation wholly immanent to the divine intellect.  But that is not what I seem to be thinking about.  What I seem to be thinking about has  very few properties (being golden, being a mountain) and perhaps their analytic entailments, and no hidden properties such as the property of being identical to an operation wholly immanent to the divine intellect.  An intentional object has precisely, all and only, the properties it is intended as having.

Connected with this concern is the suspicion that on Novak's theory the act-object distinction is eliminated, a distinction that is otherwise essential to his approach.  He wants to deny that merely intentional objects have any being of their own.  So he identifies them with divine conceivings.  But this falls afoul of a point insisted on by Twardowski.  (See  article below.)

My merely imagined table does not exist in reality, 'outside' my mind.  But it also does not exist 'in' my mind as identical to the act of imagining it or as a proper part of the act of imagining it, or as any sort of mental content, as Twardowski clearly saw.  Otherwise, (i) the merely imagined table would have the nature of an experience, which it does not have, and (ii) it would exist in reality, when it doesn't, and (iii) it would have properties that cannot be properties of mental acts or contents such as the property of being spatially extended.

My point could be put like this.  The typical merely intentional, hence nonexistent, object such as the golden mountain does not have the nature of an experience or mental act; it is an object of such an act.  But if merely intentional objects are divine conceivings, then they have the nature of an experience. Ergo, etc.  Novak's theory appears to fall into psychologism.   

Related articles

Do Merely Intentional Objects Have Being of Their Own? With a Little Help from Ingarden

More Pictures from Prague

Bare Particulars and Lukáš Novák's Argument Against Them

Lukáš Novák on Common Natures

Prague Conference on Analytic Theology, September 2013

Arguments Don't Have Testicles

The Supreme Court justices in the majority in the 5-4 Hobby Lobby decision are all male: Alito, Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Kennedy.  If someone seeks to discredit their decision on that ground, say this:

Arguments don't have testicles!

If the person persists, then point out that females dominated the minority in that decision.

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Semi-Annual Twilight Zone Marathon Starts Tomorrow!

Schedule here.

The hard-driving Serling lived a short but intense life. Born in 1924, he was dead at age 50 in 1975. His four pack a day cigarette habit destroyed his heart. Imagine smoking 80 Lucky Strikes a day! Assuming 16 hours of smoking time per day, that averages to one cigarette every twelve minutes.  He died on the operating table during an attempted bypass procedure.

But who is to say that a long, healthy life is better than a short, intense one fueled by the stimulants one enjoys? That is a question for the individual, not Hillary, to decide.

 

It is appropriate that on Independence Day one should celebrate with Serling, WWII paratrooper, anti-statist, defender of the individual.

Serling knew how to entertain while also stimulating thought and teaching moral lessons. Our contemporary dreckmeisters apparently think that the purpose of art is to degrade sensibility, impede critical thinking, glorify scumbags, and rub our noses ever deeper into sex and violence. It seems obvious that the liberal fetishization of freedom of expression without constraint or sense of responsibility is part of the problem. But I can't let a certain sort of libertarian or economic conservative off the hook. Their lust for profit is also involved.

What is is that characterizes contemporary media dreck? Among other things, the incessant presentation of defective human beings as if there are more of them than there are, and as if there is nothing at all wrong with their way of life. Deviant behavior is presented as if it is mainstream and acceptable, if not desirable. And then lame justifications are provided for the presentation: 'this is what life is like now; we are simply telling it like it is.' It doesn't occur to the dreckmeisters that art might have an ennobling function.

The tendency of liberals and leftists is to think that any presentation of choice-worthy goals or admirable styles of life could only be hypocritical preaching.  And to libs and lefties, nothing is worse than hypocrisy.  Indeed, a good indicator of whether someone belongs to this class of the terminally benighted is whether the person obsesses over hypocrisy and thinks it the very worst thing in the world.  See my category Hypocrisy for elaboration of this theme.

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Anti-Left Links

The Left's Central Delusion

How Obama Lost the Middle East

Our man Spencer Case's latest:  How Obama Sided with the Muslim Brotherhood

Sobby Lobby.  More quotations that show that all-too-many high-placed liberals are morally obtuse, intellectually deficient liars. 

Robert Paul Wolff's Misunderstanding of the Hobby Lobby Decision

Professor Wolff of The Philosopher's Stone writes,

When we got back to our apartment, I turned on my computer to check the news, and learned of the pair of decisions handed down by the Supreme Court.  That both decisions are disastrous goes without saying, but I think they have quite different significances.

The Hobby Lobby decision granting to certain businesses the legal right to claim protection of their "religious beliefs" against The Affordable Care Act is by any measure the more grotesque of the two, and Justice Ginsburg is clearly correct in warning that the majority has opened the door to an endless series of meretricious claims of conscience by those fictional persons we call corporations.  Only someone with Marx's mordant satirical bent could fully appreciate the decision to confer personhood on corporations while robbing actual persons of the elementary right to medical protection.

I beg to differ.  First of all, the SCOTUS decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby was not that personhood is to be conferred on corporations.  That had already been settled by the Dictionary Act enacted in 1871.  Here we read:

The Dictionary Act states that “the words ‘person’ and ‘whoever’ include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals.”12

The question the court had to decide was whether closely held, for-profit corporations are persons under the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act . "RFRA states that “[the] Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion.”3 (Ibid.)

If Hobby Lobby is forced by the government to provide abortifacients to its employees, and Hobby Lobby is a person in the eyes of the law, then the government's Affordable Care Act mandate is in violation of the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act.  For it would substantially burden Hobby Lobby's proprietors' exercise of religion if they were forced to violate their own consciences by providing the means of what they believe to be murder to their employees.  So the precise question that had to be decided was whether Hobby Lobby is a person in the eyes of the law.  The question was NOT whether corporations are persons in the eyes of the law.  Wolff is wrong if he thinks otherwise.

Note that the issue here is not constitutional but statutory: the issue has solely to do with the interpretation and application of a law, RFRA.  As Alan Dershowitz explains (starting at 7:52), it has to do merely with the "construction of a statute."

Not only was the SCOTUS decision not a decision to confer personhood on corporations, it also does not entail "robbing actual persons of the elementary right to medical protection."  And this, even if (i) there is a positive right to be given medical treatments, drugs, appliances, and whatnot, and (ii) abortion is a purely medical procedure that affects no person other than a pregnant woman.  See Dershowitz. 

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The Case for Nicotine

Nicotine is the main psychoactive ingredient in tobacco, and a most delightful and useful ingredient it is, especially for us Luftmenschen.  I am thinking of the chess players who make Luft, not war, and of the philosophers whose thoughts are characteristically lofty and luftig even if at times nebelig.  Nicotine is good for cognitive functioning, increasing both memory and attention.  Studies on humans and lab animals show this to be the case.  But we connoisseurs of the noble weed know this to be so without the help of studies. Experientia docet. 

The drawback, of course, is that nicotine may be the most highly addictive substance on earth–more addictive than crack cocaine or heroin, and a more difficult addiction to shake, Rezvani said.

Why is that? First, it binds with the receptors in the brain for acetylcholine, one of our most important neurotransmitters and the first ever discovered. Second, because nicotine is usually inhaled, via cigarettes and now e-cigarettes, it hits the brain almost immediately.

“One reason for it being so addictive is that as soon as you smoke, you see the reward,” Rezvani said. The same is true of crack cocaine, he said.

The quotation 'smacks' of wild liberal exaggeration.  It reeks of the Big Lie.  People have been parroting that Everett Koop line for years.  Remember that bow-tied sawbones who occupied the most useless office in the land, that of Surgeon General, from 1981 to 1989?  Surely it is nonsense to say that nicotine is more addictive than heroin or crack cocaine.  In fact, I will go one better:  It is not addictive in any serious sense at all. But of course it all depends on what exactly is meant by 'addiction,' a word I have yet to see any anti-tobacco ideologue explain.  It is a word that is used and overused and abused in all sorts of promiscuous connections.

You say you're addicted to nicotine?  Well, if I paid you a million dollars to go one month without smoking, would you be able to do it? Of course you would.  But if you had been shooting heroin daily for years and were addicted, and I made the same offer, would you be able to collect?  No way!  This is of course an empirical question, but some empirical questions can be answered from the armchair.  This assumes that you have experience of life and some common sense, a commodity in short supply among liberals.  It would be very interesting to set up an experiment, but you would need some moneybags to bankroll it.  Anybody out there want to pony up 200 million USD?  Do the experiment using 100 two-pack per day cigarette smokers and 100 heroin addicts who shoot up daily.  You get a million bucks if you go a month without indulging.  You will of course be under close surveillance.  I predict the following outcome.  90 - 100% of the smokers but only 0-10% of the 'smackers' would collect.

And now for some anecdotal evidence, which is, after all, evidence: 'anecdotal' is not here functioning as an alienans adjective.

I have been smoking cigars and pipes for 45 years or so.  Time was when I smoked two loads of pipe tobacco per diem, all the way down, and it was strong stuff.  In Turkey where I lived for a year in the '90s I bought a Meerschaum pipe and I smoked an unconscionable quantity of the meanest shit there is, straight Turkish.  Stateside the stuff is used sparingly as a seasoning in blends.  I don't recommend it straight.  Might blow your head clean off.  Mine is still intact, thank you very much.

Now here's my point:  if nicotine is addictive, then surely I ought to be addicted.  But I'm not.  I smoke only when I decide to, nowadays, less than one cigar per week.  But I smoke the sucker down to the bitter end, reducing the whole of it to smoke and ashes.  "But doesn't it burn your fingertips?"  Not if I tamp it down into a smoking pipe.  The finale is mighty rasty and loaded with nicotine.  And I am still not addicted.

I am not an isolated exception.  There are all the two-pack-a day cigarette smokers who just up and quit of their free will without a federal program or a 'patch' or somebody holding their hand.  I'm thinking of my father, and aunts and uncles, and brother-in-law, and hundreds of others.  And they smoked unfiltered Camels and Lucky Strikes, not the pussy brands abroad in the land today. 

Now suppose I was smoking crack cocaine or mainlining heroin for the last 45 years.  I'd mostly like be dead, but if I weren't I would be addicted in a serious sense of that word. So there is just no comparison.  It's a bullshit comparison that only a willfully nescient liberal could love.

Can you call a substance 'addictive' if only some people become 'addicted' to it?  I say No.  In the case of nicotine, it is not the substance that is addictive but the user who allows himself of his own free will to become 'addicted.'  (Those are 'sneer' quotes by the way.)  You say you have an 'addictive personality'?  I'm going to question that too.  You are most likely just looking for an excuse.  Why not say you lack self-discipline and that you refuse to take yourself in hand; that instead of doing those things, you blame your problems on something outside of yourself, whether tobacco or tobacco companies, or 'society'?

The case for nicotine, then, is that it is a sovereign enhancer of cognitive functioning.  And you can get it without smoking cigarettes or using snuff.  I recommend that you stay away from cigarettes and snuff.

There is a lot to say on this topic and lot of liberal nonsense to dispose of.  But I'll end today with this aphorism:

The church of liberalism must have its demon and his name is 'tobacco.'

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Peter Unger Introduces a Central Thesis of his New Book, Empty Ideas: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy

Here, via Dave Lull.  The comments, as one ought to expect, are not very good.  Here as elsewhere, and to exaggerate a bit, the best arguments against an open combox are the contents of one.

I have read large chunks of Unger's new book and I hope to provide a critical response to some of it before too long.  For now I refer the interested reader to a couple of recent Unger-related entries.

Peter Unger on Betrand Russell on the Value of Philosophy

Can one Copulate one's Way to Chastity?  Notes on Wittgenstein and Unger

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Unger on "Empty Ideas"...and M.B. Willard's awesomeness