Maverick Philosopher

Proof That No One is Wise

Correct a wise man and he will (sincerely) thank you.

Saul Alinksy Lives in Ferguson

A lIttle collateral reading to help along the wonderful 'conversation about race' we've been having.

John Lennon 34 Years Later

John Lennon was gunned down this night in 1980 by Mark David Chapman. I remember that night well: a student of mine called me in the middle of it to report the slaying.  Lennon was my least favorite Beatle due to his silly utopianism, as expressed in the lyrically inane 'Imagine,'  but this tune of his from the 1965 Rubber Soul album is a gem, and more than fit to remember him by.

And I believe he penned Tomorrow Never Knows from the Revolver album, the best song I know of about meditation.  It gives me goose bumps still, almost 50 years later.

Physicist George Ellis on Physicist and Pseudo-Philosopher Lawrence Krauss

From Scientific American, 22 July 2014 (HT: Karl White), emphasis added:

Horgan: Lawrence Krauss, in A Universe from Nothing, claims that physics has basically solved the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing. Do you agree?

Ellis: Certainly not.  He is presenting untested speculative theories of how things came into existence out of a pre-existing complex of entities, including variational principles, quantum field theory, specific symmetry groups, a bubbling vacuum, all the components of the standard model of particle physics, and so on. He does not explain in what way these entities could have pre-existed the coming into being of the universe, why they should have existed at all, or why they should have had the form they did.  And he gives no experimental or observational process whereby we could test these vivid speculations of the supposed universe-generation mechanism. How indeed can you test what existed before the universe existed? You can’t.

Thus what he is presenting is not tested science. It’s a philosophical speculation, which he apparently believes is so compelling he does not have to give any specification of evidence that would confirm it is true. Well, you can’t get any evidence about what existed before space and time came into being.  Above all he believes that these mathematically based speculations solve thousand year old philosophical conundrums, without seriously engaging those philosophical issues. The belief that all of reality can be fully comprehended in terms of physics and the equations of physics is a fantasy. As pointed out so well by Eddington in his Gifford lectures, they are partial and incomplete representations of physical, biological, psychological, and social reality.

And above all Krauss does not address why the laws of physics exist, why they have the form they have, or in what kind of manifestation they existed before the universe existed  (which he must believe if he believes they brought the universe into existence). Who or what dreamt up symmetry principles, Lagrangians, specific symmetry groups, gauge theories, and so on? He does not begin to answer these questions.

It’s very ironic when he says philosophy is bunk and then himself engages in this kind of attempt at philosophy. It seems that science education should include some basic modules on Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hume, and the other great philosophers, as well as writings of more recent philosophers such as Tim Maudlin and David Albert.

That's exactly right.  As I said in an earlier post,

I fear that a lot of our contemporary scientists are hopelessly bereft of general culture.  They are brilliant in their specialties but otherwise uneducated.  But that does not stop the likes of Dawkins and Krauss and Coyne and Hawking and Mlodinow from spouting off about God and time and the meaning of life . . . .  They want to play the philosopher without doing any 'homework.'  They think it's easy: you just shoot your mouth off.

My Scientism category contains detailed critiques of Krauss and other 'scientisticists' to give an ugly name to an ugly bunch of 'philosophistines.'  I coined 'philosophistine' years ago to refer to philistines when it comes to philosophy.

Where in Logical Space is God?

Milos the Serbian sends us to this sampling of correspondence by and to David Lewis assembled by his widow, Stephanie Lewis.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Cat Songs

Harry Chapin, Cat's in the Cradle.  A great song with an important message by a songwriter (1942-1981) who died too young. 

Bob Dylan, Cat's in the Well

Bent Fabric, Alley Cat

Tokens, The Lion Sleeps Tonight

Rooftop Singers, Tom Cat.  From those far-off and fabulous hootenanny days.

Norma Tanega, Walkin' My Cat Named 'Dog.'  Tanega was a mid-'60s one-hit wonder.  What became of her?  Story here.

Kinks, Phenomenal Cat

Lovin' Spoonful, Nashville Cats

Buck Owens, I Got a Tiger By the Tail

Al Stewart, Year of the Cat.  HT to Jeff Hodges for reminding me of this one.

Friday Cat Blogging! Neoreactionary Cat

More such kitties here.

All Sins of the Spirit

All sins are of the spirit even those that are of the flesh.

Dubious Compensation

In compensation for hearing loss nature gives the old man bigger ears.

Is There Such a Thing as Racial Profiling?

One of the tactics of leftists is to manipulate and misuse language for their own purposes.  Thus they make up words and phrases and hijack existing ones. 'Islamophobe' is an example of the former, 'disenfranchise' an example of the latter.    'Racial profiling' is a second example of the former.  It is a meaningless phrase apart from its use as a semantic bludgeon.  Race is an element in a profile; it cannot be a profile.  A profile cannot consist of just one characteristic.  I can profile you, but it makes no sense racially to profile you.  Apparel is an element in a profile; it cannot be a profile.  I can profile you, but it makes no sense sartorially to profile you.

Let's think about this.

I profile you if I subsume you under a profile.  A profile is a list of several descriptors.  You fit the profile if you satisfy all or most of the descriptors.  Here is an example of a profile:

1. Race:  black
2. Age: 16-21 years
3. Sex: male
4. Apparel: wearing a hoodie, with the hood pulled up over the head
5. Demeanor: sullen, alienated
6. Behavior: walking aimlessly, trespassing, cutting across yards, looking into windows and garages, hostile and disrespectful when questioned; uses racial epithets such as 'creepy-assed cracker.'
7. Physical condition: robust, muscular
8. Location:  place where numerous burglaries and home invasions had occurred, the perpetrators being black
9. Resident status: not a resident.

Now suppose I spot someone who fits the above profile.  Would I have reason to be suspicious of him?  Of course.  As suspicious as if the fellow were of Italian extraction but fit the profile mutatis mutandis.  But that's not my point.  My point is that I have not racially profiled the individual; I have profiled him, with race being one element in the profile.

Blacks are more criminally prone than whites.*  But that fact means little by itself.  It becomes important only in conjunction with the other characteristics.  An 80-year-old black female is no threat to anyone.  But someone who fits all or most of the above descriptors is someone I am justified in being suspicious of.

There is no such thing as racial profiling.  The phrase is pure obfuscation manufactured by liberals to  forward their destructive agenda.  The leftist script requires that race be injected into everything.  Hence 'profiling' becomes 'racial profiling.'  If you are a conservative and you use the phrase, you are foolish, as foolish as if you were to use the phrase 'social justice.'  Social justice is not justice.  But that's a separate post. 

I wrote and posted the above in July of last year.  This morning I find in The New Yorker a piece entitled  No Such Thing as Racial Profiling.  It is just awful and shows the level to which our elite publications are sinking.  It is not worth my time to rebut, but I will direct my readers to the author's comments on the R. Giuliani quotation. Get out your logical scalpels. 

Addendum.  There is also the liberal-left tendency to drop qualifiers.  Thus 'male' in 'male chauvinism' is dropped, and 'chauvinism' comes to mean male chauvinism, which is precisely what it doesn't mean.    So one can expect the following to happen.  'Racial' in 'racial profiling' will be dropped, and 'profiling' will come to mean racial profiling, which, in reality, means nothing. 

___________________

* See here:

Any candid debate on race and criminality in this country would have to start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes. African-Americans constitute about 13% of the population, yet between 1976 and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the U.S. The black arrest rate for most offenses—including robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes—is typically two to three times their representation in the population. [. . .]

"High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination," wrote the late Harvard Law professor William Stuntz in "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice." "The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans—and of African American control of city governments."

Related articles

'Spengler' on the Criminal Rights Movement

Safe Speech

"No man speaketh safely but he that is glad to hold his peace. " (Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Chapter XX.)

Excellent advice for Christian and non-Christian alike.  Much misery and misfortune can be avoided by simply keeping one's  mouth shut.  That playful banter with your female student that you could not resist indulging in  -- she construed it as sexual harrassment.  You were sitting on top of the world, but now you are in a world of trouble.  In this Age of Political Correctness examples are legion.  To be on the safe side, a good rule of thumb is: If your speech can be misconstrued, it will be.  Did you really need to make that comment, or fire off that e-mail, or send that picture of your marvellous nether endowment to a woman not your wife?

Part of the problem is Political Correctness, but another part is that people are not brought up to exercise self-control in thought, word, and deed.  Both problems can be plausibly blamed on liberals.  Paradoxically enough, the contemporary liberal promotes speech codes and taboos while at the same time promoting an absurd tolerance of every sort of bad behavior.  The liberal 'educator' dare not tell the black kid to pull his pants up lest he be accused of a racist 'dissing' of the punk's 'culture.'

You need to give your children moral lessons and send them to schools where they will receive them.  My mind drifts back to the fourth or fifth grade and the time a nun planted an image in my mind that remains.  She likened the tongue to a sword capable of great damage, positioned behind two 'gates,' the teeth and the lips.  Those gates are there for a reason, she explained, and the sword should come out only when it can be well deployed.

The good nun did not extend the image to the sword of flesh hanging between a man's legs.  But I will.  Keep your 'sword' behind the 'gates' of your pants and your undershorts until such time as it can be brought out for a good purpose. 

Companion post: Idle Talk

Imagine No 'Imagine'

Imagine no 'Imagine'
It's easy if you try
No more lefty lyrics
Above us more than sky.

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And Lennon's song'll go unsung.

No Truth, No Justice!

Rioters, looters, and their enablers on the Left love to chant, "No justice, no peace!"  In one sense of these words, I completely agree. There can be no durable and genuine peace without justice.  But there can be no administration of justice without respect for  truth.  In the Ferguson affair, did justice demand the indictment of Officer Darren Wilson?  No, because the evidence presented to the grand jury, which is as close as we are likely to come to the truth of what happened in the altercation between Wilson and Michael Brown, did not warrant Wilson's indictment.

But leftists, true to form, have chosen to ignore the truth.  They value truth only if it fits their 'narrative.'  According to the 'narrative,' white cops driven by racial animus routinely gun down unarmed blacks.  That's a lie and a slander, and leftists  know it.  But playing the race card works for them politically which is why they play it.  So their calls for justice are hollow and indeed absurd.  There can be no justice without truth.

No truth, no justice!

Related articles

Why Are So Many on the Left Moral Scum?

The Deep Meaning of Ferguson: The End of the Rule of Law

Sick of Political Acrimony, Reader Goes on 'News Fast'

Are There Possible Worlds in which the Human Nature of Christ Exists Unassumed?

This entry continues the conversation with Tim Pawl about Chalcedonian Christology.

I set forth the following antilogism:

3. The individual human nature of the Logos is a substance.
4. Every substance is metaphysically  capable of independent existence.
5. The individual human nature of the Logos is not metaphysically capable of independent existence.

I expected Tim to question (4), but he instead questioned (5).  That turned the dialectic away from the general-ontological Aristotelian framework, which I was claiming does not allow the coherent conceivability of the Chalcedonian formulation, toward the exact sense of the Chalcedonian theological doctrine of the Incarnation. 

As I see it, we are now discussing the following question.  Is it metaphysically possible that the individual human being who is the Son of God -- and is thus identical to the Second Person of the Trinity -- exist as an individual human being but without being the Son of God?   I thought I was being orthodox in returning a negative answer.  As I understand it, the individual human being who is the Son of God  in the actual world, our world, is the Son of God in every possible world in which he exists.  This is equivalent to saying that Jesus of Nazareth is essentially (as opposed to accidentally) the Son of God.  (X is essentially F =df x is F in every possible world in which x exists.) 

If I understand what Tim Pawl is saying, his view is that there are possible worlds in which Jesus of Nazareth exists but is not the Son of God.  So the issue between us is as follows:

BV: Every metaphysically possible world in which Jesus exists is a world in which he is identical to the Son (the Logos, the Word, the Second Person).

TP: Some metaphysically possible worlds in which Jesus exists are worlds in which he is not identical to the Son (the Logos, the Word, the Second Person).

In his latest comment, Tim writes,

I do think that there is a merely possible world in which CHN [Christ's human nature] exists as unassumed. In such a world, it fulfills the conditions for being a supposit. And so it fulfills the conditions for being a supposit with a rational nature. So it is a person in that world, [call it W] even though it is not a person in this world [call it A].

I am afraid I find this incoherent. If Jesus is (identical to) the Son of God, then Jesus is (identically) the Son of God in every world in which he exists.  To spell out the argument:

1. 'Jesus' and 'Son' are Kripkean rigid designators: they designate the same item in every possible world in which that item exists.

2. Necessity of Identity.  For any x, y, if x = y, then necessarily x = y.

3. Jesus = Son.

Therefore,

4. Necessarily, Jesus = Son. (from 2, 3 by Universal Instantiation and Modus Ponens)

Therefore,

5. It is not possible that Jesus not be identical to the Son. (from 4 by the standard modal principle that Nec p is logically equivalent to ~Poss~p.)

Related articles

Substance, Supposit, Incarnation, Trinity, and the Heresy of Nestorius

More on One Person-Two Natures: Response to Timothy Pawl

Is it Coherently Conceivable that One Person Have Two Natures?

The Deep Meaning of Ferguson: The End of the Rule of Law

Ferguson is of course just one instance.  But it is emblematic.  As usual, Victor Davis Hanson gets it right:

In the Ferguson disaster, the law was the greatest casualty. Civilization cannot long work if youths strong-arm shop owners and take what they want. Or walk down the middle of highways high on illicit drugs. Or attack police officers and seek to grab their weapons. Or fail to obey an officer’s command to halt. Or deliberately give false testimonies to authorities. Or riot, burn, and loot. Or, in the more abstract sense, simply ignore the legal findings of a grand jury; or, in critical legal theory fashion, seek to dismiss the authority of the law because it is not deemed useful to some preconceived theory of social justice. Do that and society crumbles.

In our cynicism we accept, to avoid further unrest, that no government agency will in six months prosecute the looters and burners, or charge with perjury those who brazenly lied in their depositions to authorities, or charge the companion of Michael Brown with an accessory role in strong-arm robbery, or charge the stepfather of Michael Brown for using a bullhorn to incite a crowd to riot and loot and burn. We accept that because legality is becoming an abstraction, as it is in most parts of the world outside the U.S. where politics makes the law fluid and transient.

Nor can a government maintain legitimacy when it presides over lawlessness. The president of the United States on over 20 occasions insisted that it would be illegal, dictatorial, and unconstitutional to contravene federal immigration law — at least when to do so was politically inexpedient. When it was not, he did just that. Now we enter the Orwellian world of a videotaped president repeatedly warning that what he would soon do would be in fact illegal. Has a U.S. president ever so frequently and fervently warned the country about the likes of himself?

Read it all.

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How to Tell the Truth without being Truthful

Sick of Political Acrimony, Reader Goes on 'News Fast'

Ad Ignorantiam and the Law

The Retreat into the Private Life

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

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

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

Sick of Political Acrimony, Reader Goes on 'News Fast'

This from reader K. W. with my comments in blue:

I am taking a break from all news and social media. I will be keeping up with your blog, however, as your most recent treatment on the Incarnation is intriguing. I'm taking a break because I'm tired of all of the vehemence being spewed out there. It's not all from the liberals; conservatives have a role to play too. However, much of it is from the liberals.

 

I agree that conservatives are a part of the problem, but most of the trouble is from the Left.  No surprise here.  Civility is a conservative virtue.  Why should a leftist be civil?  He is out to oppose, disrupt, subvert, and bring about radical change. Radical change: not improvement of a system that works well by comparison with other systems elsewhere and elsewhen.  The leftist is a nowhere man, a u-topian.  He does not stand, like the conservative, upon the the terra firma of a reality antecedent to his wishes, desires, and impossible dreams.

 

This puts conservatives in a tough spot. For the Left, politics is war.  And war cannot be conducted in a civil manner.  One has to employ the same tactics as the aggressor or else lose. 

 

The temptation to retreat into one's private life is very strong.  But if you give in and let the Left have free reign you may wake up one day with no private life left.  Not that 'news fasts' from time to time are not a good idea.  We should all consume less media dreck.  But there is no final retreat from totalitarians.  They won't allow it.  At some point one has to stand and fight in defense, not only of the individual, but also of the mediating structures of civil society.

 

The hypocrisy is just too much. They decry potential violence in the form of the Second Amendment, but think that the rioting is justified and acceptable. They rightly cry out that "Black Lives Matter!" and yet only do so when a white officer shoots an unarmed black man. Where were they when black men are attacking one another? Black lives matter . . . of course they do. So then why raze businesses in their communities, businesses that provide paying jobs which would help those black lives make ends meet? Even if Officer Wilson was guilty, why repay injustice by perpetuating injustice? What did those businesses have to do with any of it? Why burn down police cruisers and confirm in the minds of those white police officers what you think they think of you all. I just don't understand this madness and it depresses me that the majority opinion (or at least the most vocal opinion) is that this is all appropriate and good. 

 

You are talking sense, of course. But there is no common sense on the Left, no wisdom, and worst of all, no concern for truth.

 

What matters to a leftist is not truth, but the 'narrative.'  A narrative is a story, and stories needn't be true to be useful in promoting an 'agenda.'

 

Officer Darren Wilson was not indicted for a very good reason: there was simply no case again him.  He was assaulted by the thuggish Michael Brown who had just robbed a convenience store and roughed up its proprietor. Brown then proceeded to walk in the middle of the road, which of course is illegal.  Wilson, doing his job, ordered him out of the road and then Brown went on the attack, initiating a physical altercation with the cop and trying to wrest  his  weapon from him.  Outside the car, a bit later, Brown rushed the cop and the cop had no choice but to shoot him dead.  The cop did it by the book.  Everything he did was legal.  And morally permissible. 

 

But leftists do not care what the actual facts are, because, again, they do not care about truth.  What actually happened in Ferguson is ignored because it does not comport with the 'narrative' according to which racist white cops shoot down "unarmed black teenagers." 

 

For a leftist, the narrative is everything and truth be damned.  Leftists claim to want justice, but without truth there can be no justice.

 

Was Brown unarmed?  Yes, but by the same token Rodney King was a motorist and Trayvon Martin was a child.  There is a form of mendacity whereby one deceives by telling truths.

 

Note the linguistic mischief liberals make.  If you say that a person is unarmed, you imply that he is harmless.  But an unarmed man who attacks a cop and tries to arm himself with the cop's weapon is not harmless, although, technically, he is unarmed until the moment he succeeds in arming himself.

 

And of course race doesn't come into this at all except insofar as blacks are more criminally prone than whites.

 

Nor should this be a liberal-conservative issue, unless liberals are opposed to the rule of law.  I fear that here in fact  is the salient point: contemporary liberals have no respect for the rule of law, from Obama and Holder on down.  (Turkish saying: Balık baştan kokar: "The fish stinks from the head.")  Examples are legion: Obamacare, illegal immigration, et cetera ad nauseam.

 

The truth is that Michael Brown by his preternaturally imprudent, immoral, and illegal behavior brought about his own demise.  Had he been brought up properly to respect the law and its legitimate enforcers, he would be alive today. All he had to do was get out of the street!  But no! He started a fight with a cop, taunted him, called him 'a pussy,' threw the cigarillos he had stolen at him, as if to say, "What are you going to do about it, pig?"   (Was Brown suicidal?)

 

You could say that I am blaming the victim.  But unless one is profoundly stupid one must agree with me that this is a clear case in which blaming the victim is perfectly justified. 

 

It's crunch time with term papers and grading and guest lectures for my supervisor, so I have to retain an aggressive posture from this point until December 15th. Hence my fast from media. And I need time to emotionally process all of this. I have appreciated your blog and the perspective you offer. It is a voice crying out in the wilderness. 

 

Vox clamantis in deserto!

 

Related articles

How to Tell the Truth without being Truthful

'Spengler' on the Criminal Rights Movement

The Deep Meaning of Ferguson: The End of the Rule of Law