Maverick Philosopher

Why No Women in the National Football League?

Because we take football seriously.

David Gelernter:

Since when did we decide that men and women are interchangeable in hand-to-hand combat on the front lines? Why do we insist on women in combat but not in the NFL? Because we take football seriously. That’s no joke; it’s the sad truth.

We take panem et circenses seriously, but not the defense of the Republic.

Friday Cat Blogging a Day Late! Trump Grabs Pussy

I asked a reader whether the graphic to the left was too tasteless to post to my blog, adding,  "But then these are times in which considerations of good taste and civility are easily 'trumped.'"  My reader responded with a fine statement:

Of course it’s tasteless, but it’s funny.  We should go to battle with a song in our heart.  Never had patience for the hand-wringing by the beskirted Republicans and professional “conservatives”.  How could anyone be surprised by the locker room braggadocio of a man who appeared on the Howard Stern show 600 times?  Trump is a deeply flawed messenger of the right message, but politics is a practical affair.  He’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard in this go-around.  After all it’s only the very foundation of the republic at stake.  So let’s have some fun while beating the drum for him.

My reader is right.  Trump is all we've got.  He has a rotten character, but then so does Hillary.  This may not be obvious because, while Trump broadcasts his faults, she hides hers.  This is part of her being a slimy, mendacious stealth ideologue.

Given that both are sorry specimens on the character front, it comes down to policy.  

Another thing you must bear in mind is that a vote for Hillary is a vote for her entire ilk and entourage.  Do you want Huma Abedin in the White House?

Related articles

Hillary the Fabulist

On 'Disenfranchise' and Hillary's Will to Power

Desideratum

It may not be possible except for some of us some of the time: to be in the world, but not of it.  Engaged, yet detached.  To battle our enemies without becoming embittered or like them.  To retain the equanimity of the monk in the midst of the world.  To float like a lotus blossom without getting wet.

Or to paraphrase the Bhagavad  Gita: to enter and  partake of the fray but with detachment from the fruits of action.

Conservatism, Inc. Wants Trump to Lose

The latest from Publius Decius Mus.

Meditation Themes

There is no end to the number of meditation themes; one must choose one that is appealing to oneself. One might start discursively, by running through a mantram, but the idea is to achieve a nondiscursive one-pointedness of attention. Here are some suggestions.

1. A Christian of a bhaktic disposition might start with the Jesus Prayer which is used by the mystics of Eastern Orthodoxy: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner." One tethers one's mind to the mantram to the exclusion of all other thoughts, repeating it (in thought) over and over. One then gradually whittles it down to one  word, 'Lord,' for example, by progressively dropping 'a sinner,' 'on me a sinner,' 'have mercy on me a sinner,' and so on. One then repeats 'Lord,' 'Lord, 'Lord,' . . . in an attempt to sink into mental quiet.  

Mental quiet is the first phase of meditation proper.  Achieving it is difficult and rare, and what one does to achieve it is merely preliminary to meditation proper.  A resolute, daily meditator may reasonably hope touch upon mental quiet once a month. 

If one feels oneself slipping into mental quiet, then one must let go of the mantram and simply abide passively in the state of quietude, without reflecting on it, analyzing it, or recalling how one got to it. Philosopher types who 'suffer' from hypertrophy of the discursive faculty may find this well-nigh impossible.  The approach to mental quiet is a phase of active working; this is difficult enough. Even more difficult is the phase in which one lets  go of this work and simply rests in it. There will be a very strong temptation to analyze it. If at all possible, resist this temptation.

2. A more metaphysically inclined Christian who is fond of St. Augustine might experiment with his phrase, 'Lord, eternal Truth, unchanging Light,' reducing it to one word, whether 'Lord' or 'Truth' or 'Light.'

3. I have had good results with a line from Plotinus' Enneads, "It is by the One that all beings are beings." This is a very rich saying that can be mulled over from several directions. Everything that is, IS. What is it for a thing TO BE? And what is the source of the being of that-which-is? It is by the One that all beings are. What does 'by'  mean? And what is the One? Although one starts discursively, the idea is to penetrate this ONE, to become at-one with it, to achive at-one-ment. As Plotinus would say, it is a flight of the alone to the all-One. Of course, it cannot  be grasped: any grasping is discursive.

One is digging for the  nondiscursive root of the discursive mind, a root that is itself rooted in the ONE which is the source of all phenomenal entities and unities.

4. A classical theme of meditation is the Self, or, if you insist, the absence of a Self. Here is one of the ways I approach this theme. I start by closely attending to my breath. I think of it objectively as air entering though my nostrils and travelling to my lungs. And then I think about my body and its parts. Here on this mat is this animated body; but am I this animated body? How could I be identical to this animated body? I have properties it doesn't have, and vice versa.  Am I this breath, these lungs, this cardiovascular system, this animated body? Or am I the awareness of all of this? How could I be any object? Am I not rather the subject for whom all  objects are objects? Am I not other than every object? But what is this subject if it is not itself an object? How could there be a subject that was not an object or a potential object? Is it nothing at all? But there is awareness, and awareness is not any object. There is patently a difference between the awareness of O and O, for any O. To be for a human being is to be in this transcendental difference. Is this difference nothing? If it is not nothing, what differs in this difference? 

One can pursue this meditation in two ways. One can reduce it to a koan: I am awareness and I am not nothing, but I am not something either. Not nothing and not something. How? I am something, I am nothing, I can't be both, I can't be neither. What then is this I that is nothing and something and not nothing and something? One can take this as a koan, an intellectual knot that has no discursive solution but is not a mere nugatory puzzle of linguistic origin, to be relieved by some Wittgensteinian pseudo-therapy, but a pointer to a dimension  beyong the discursive mind. The active phase of the meditation then  consists in energetically trying to penetrate this riddle.

Note that one needn't dogmatically assume or affirm that there is a dimension beyond the discursive mind.  This is open inquiry, exploration without anticipation of result.  One 'senses' that there is a transdiscursive dimension.  This is connected to the famous sensus divinitatis.  If there were no intimation of the Transdiscursive, one would have no motive to take up the arduous task of meditation.  I am referring to the genuine article, not some New Age relaxation technique.

Or, instead of bashing one's head against this brick wall of a koan, one can just repeat 'I,' 'I', 'I' in an attempt at peacefully bringing the discursive intellect to subsidence.  But in a genuine spirit of inquiry and wonder.  No 'vain repetitions.'

Related articles

Is He Your Prophet?

Moral Phenomena in the Vicinity of Hypocrisy

When is one a hypocrite?  Let's consider some cases.

C1. A man sincerely advocates a high standard of moral behavior, and in the main he practices what he preaches.  But on occasion he succumbs to temptation, repents, and resolves to do better next time.  Is such a person a hypocrite?  Clearly not.  If he were, then we would all be hypocrites, and the term 'hypocrite,' failing of contrast, would become useless.  A hypocrite cannot be defined as one who fails to practice what he preaches since we all, at some time or other, fail to practice what we preach.  An adequate definition must allow for moral failure.

C2. A man sincerely advocates a high standard of behavior, but, for whatever reason, he makes no attempt to live in accordance with his advocacy.  Here we have a clear case of a hypocrite.

C3. Let the high standard be sexual purity in thought, word, and deed.  Consider now the case of a person, call him Lenny, who does not accept this standard.  He has no objection to impure thoughts or pornography or to the sort of locker-room braggadocio in which men like Donald Trump boast of their sexual escapades.  But Lenny  knows that his neighbor, a Trump supporter, does advocate the high standard that he, Lenny, does not acknowledge.  

In an attempt to persuade his neighbor to withdraw his support from Trump, Lenny says to the neighbor, "Look, man, you are appalled by Trump's sexual morality, or lack thereof; how then can you vote for him?"  This is an example of a non-fallacious ad hominem argument.  The argument is 'to the man,' in this case the neighbor.  It starts with a premise that the neighbor accepts but Lenny does not; the argumentative aim is to expose an inconsistency among the neighbor's beliefs.  

Is Lenny a hypocrite?  No.  He does not accept the neighbor's stringent sexual morality.  He thinks it is 'puritanical.'  He may even think that it sets the bar so high that no one can attain it, the end result being that people who try to live by the standard are driven to hypocrisy.  But Lenny himself is not a hypocrite.  For it is not the case that he makes no attempt to live by a moral standard that he sincerely advocates. He does not accept the standard. 

C4. Now we come to the most interesting case, that of 'Saul.'   Lenny made it clear that he does not accept as objectively morally binding the demand to be pure in thought, word, and deed.  Like Lenny, Saul does not accept the moral standard in question. Unlike Lenny, Saul feigns a commitment to it in his interactions with conservatives. Suppose Saul tries to convince Lenny's neighbor to withdraw his support from Trump. Saul uses the same argument that Lenny used.

Is Saul a hypocrite or not?  Not by one definition that suggests itself.  On this definition there are two conditions one must satisfy to be a hypocrite: (i) one sincerely advocates a moral standard he believes to be morally obligatory; (ii) one makes little or no attempt to live by the standard.  In other words, a hypocrite is a person who makes no attempt to practice what he sincerely preaches and believes to be morally obligatory.  Saul does not satisfy condition (i); so, on this definition, Saul is not a hypocrite.

Or is he?

It depends on whether (i) is a necessary condition of being a hypocrite.  Suppose we say that a hypocrite is one who makes little or no attempt at practicing what he preaches, whether what he preaches is sincerely or insincerely advocated as morally obligatory. Then Saul would count as a hypocrite along with all the other Alinskyite leftists who condemn Trump for his sexual excesses.

Whether or not we call these leftist scum hypocrites, they use our morality against us when they themselves have nothing but contempt for it.

Related articles

Hypocrites in Reverse: Those Who Do Not Preach What They Practice

Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, and Hypocrisy

Leftists and Civility

A Vote for Hillary is a Vote for Tax-Payer Funded Abortion on Demand

Including partial-birth abortion.

You say your conscience won't allow you to vote for a vulgarian who thinks, or used to think, that his celebrity entitles him to grab at the female anatomy?  But your conscience is not troubled by Hllary's support for abortion?  Then I humbly suggest that you are morally obtuse.

You tell me you won't vote for either Trump or Hillary?  Then you support Hillary by your inaction.  Is your conscience 'down' with that?

The Dems are the abortion party.  (Is that why so many 'Catholics' are Dems?)  Hadley Arkes, Pro-Lifers Settle for Dhimmitude:

The readers of this site have heard often of that bill passed by the House over a year ago to punish surgeons killing those babies who survive abortions. The vote was 248-177, and all votes in opposition came from the Democrats. That, not merely partial-birth abortion, is the issue on the table right now.

For the official position now of the Democrats is that the right to abortion is not confined to pregnancy. It entails nothing less than the right to kill a child born alive, who survives the abortion. That is the position that Hillary should be made to defend.

And yet even more so Tim Kaine. He professes to be an earnest Catholic, that he had reservations about “partial-birth” abortion. And so: will he vote now in the Senate to bring to the floor for a vote that bill that passed the House a year ago? Will he break now from the pro-choice orthodoxy of his party, his president, and his presidential candidate? [emphasis added]

 

Related articles

Abortion and Infanticide: What's the Difference?

Death Penalty, Abortion, and Certainty

Further Questions About Meditation

 This continues the thread begun in Questions About Meditation. Vlastimil writes,

I want to ask, which meditation techniques do you practice? Or rather, do they include some specifically Buddhist ones? Even vipassana/insight practice?

Some Buddhists told me that doing vipassana seriously always tends one towards Buddhist beliefs. I wonder if you agree. Or if you think that vipassana practice as such is not exerting that tendency and that the tendency is rather exerted by the combination of the practice with certain doctrines brought into the practice.

E.g., yesterday I read (in a Buddhist manual by Daniel Ingram) that when practising vipassana -- in a way that increases the speed, precision, consistency and inclusiveness of our experience of all the quick little sensations that make up our sensory experience -- "it just happens to be much more useful to assume that things are only there when you experience them and not there when you don’t. Thus, the gold standard for reality when doing insight practices is the sensations that make up your reality in that instant. ... Knowing this directly leads to freedom."

Will the vipassana practice tend me to believe that "useful" assumption, so useful for becoming to believe the Buddhist doctrines? Also, can I make any serious progress in that practice without making that assumption?

A. One Way to Meditate

Let me tell you about a fairly typical recent morning's meditation.  It lasted from about 3:10 to 4 AM.  

After settling onto the meditation cushions, I turned my attention to my deep, relaxed, and rhythmic breathing, focusing on the sensation of air passing in and out through the nostrils.  If distracting thoughts or images arose I would expel them on the 'out' breath so that the expulsion of air coincided with the 'expulsion' of extraneous thoughts.  If you have already learned how to control your mind, this is not that difficult and can be very pleasant and worth doing for its own sake even if you don't go any deeper.  

(If you find this elementary thought control  difficult or impossible, then you ought to be alarmed, just as you ought to be alarmed if you find your arms and legs flying off in different directions on their own.  It means  that you have no control over your own mind. Then who or what is controlling it?)

I then visualized my lungs' filling and emptying.  I visualized my body as from outside perched on the cushions.  And then I posed a question about the awareness of breathing.

There is this present breathing, and there is this present awareness of breathing.  Even if the breathing could be identified with, or reduced to, an objective, merely physical process in nature, this won't work for the awareness of breathing.

What then is this awareness?  It is not nothing.  If it were nothing, then nothing would appear, contrary to fact.  Fact is, the breathing appears; it is an object of awareness.  So the awareness is not nothing.  But the awareness is not something either:  it it not some item that can be singled out.  There is at least an apparent contradiction here: the awareness-of is both something and nothing.  A Zen meditator could take this as a koan and work on it as such.

Or, in an attempt at avoiding logical contradiction, one might propose that the awareness-of is something that cannot be objectified.   It is, but it cannot be objectified.

I am aware of my breathing, but also of my breathing's being an object of awareness, which implies that in some way I am aware of my awareness, though not as a separable object.

Who is aware of these things?  I am aware of them.    But who am I?  And who is asking this question?  I am asking it.  But who am I who is asking this question and asking who is asking it?

At this point I am beyond simple mind control to what could be self-inquiry. (Cf. Ramana Maharshi)  The idea is to penetrate into the source of this awareness.  One circles around it discursively with the idea of collapsing the circle into a non-discursive point, as it were. (I just now came up with this comparison.) 

B.  Does doing vipassana seriously always tends one towards Buddhist beliefs?

I don't think so.  The Vipassana meditator's experiences are interpreted in the light of the characteristic Buddhist beliefs (anicca, anatta, dukkha).  They are read in to the experiences rather than read off from them.  A Christian meditator could easily do the same thing.  I reported an unforgettable experience deep in meditation in which I felt myself to be the object of a powerful, unearthly love.  If I take myself to have experienced the love of Christ, then clearly I go beyond the phenomenology of the experience.  Still, the experience fits with Christian beliefs and could be taken in some loose sense to corroborate it.  The same goes for the Vipassana meditator.

C. Impermanence

For example, does one learn from meditation that all is impermanent?

First of all, that

T. All is impermanent

Can be argued to be self-refuting.

Here goes.  (T) applies to itself: if all is impermanent, then (T), or rather the propositional content thereof, is impermanent. That could mean one of two things. Either the truth-value of the proposition expressed by (T) is subject to change, or the proposition itself is subject to change, perhaps by becoming a different proposition with a different sense, or by passing out of existence altogether.  (There is also a stronger reading of 'impermanent' according to which the impermanent is not merely subject to change, but changing, and indeed continuously changing.)

Note also that if (T) is true, then every part of (T)'s propositional content is impermanent. Thus the property (concept) of impermanence is impermanent, and so is the copulative tie and the universal quantifier. If the property of impermanence is impermanent, then so is the property of permanence along with the distinction between permanence and impermanence.

In short, (T), if true, undermines the very contrast that gives it a determinate sense. If true, (T) undermines the permanence/impermanence  contrast. For if all is impermanent, then so is this contrast and this distinction. This leaves us wondering what sense (T) might have and whether in the end it is not nonsense.

What I am arguing is not just that (2) refutes itself in the sense that it proves itself false, but refutes itself in the much stronger  sense of proving itself meaningless or else proving itself on the brink of collapsing into meaninglessness.

No doubt (2) is meaningful  'at first blush.' But all it takes is a few preliminary pokes and its starts collapsing in upon itself.

Now perhaps the Vippassana meditator gets himself into a state in which he is aware of only momentary, impermanent dharmas. How can he take that to show that ALL is impermanent?

There is also a question about what a belief would be for a Buddhist.  On my understanding, beliefs are "necessary makeshifts" (a phrase from F. H. Bradley) useful in the samsaric realm, but not of ultimate validity.  They are like the raft that gets one across the river but is then abandoned on the far shore.  The Dharma (teaching) is the raft that transports us across the river of Samsara to the land of Nirvana where there is no need for any rafts -- or for the distinction between Samsara and Nirvana.

D. How Much Metaphysics Does One Need to Meditate?

Assuming that meditation is pursued as a spiritual practice and not merely as a relaxation technique, I would say that the serious meditator must assume that there is a 'depth dimension' of spiritual/religious significance at the base of ordinary awareness and that our ultimate felicity demands that we get in touch with this depth dimension.

"Man is a stream whose source is hidden." (Emerson) I would add that meditation is the difficult task of swimming upstream to the Source of one's out-bound consciousness where one will draw close to the Divine Principle.

As St. Augustine says, Noli foras ire, in te ipsum reddi; in interiore homine habitat veritas.  The truth dwells in the inner man; don't go outside yourself: return within. 

Related articles

Infinite Desire and God as Being Itself

The Competency of Desire

Breathe Deeply and Slow Down

Jack Kerouac: A Buddhist Wanderer Comes Home

Nothing is Written in Stone

Just Say 'No' to 'No Self'

Buber Contra Buddhism

Speaker Ryan Needs to Resign

Here

The Pussy Cat Bows of the Yap-and-Scribble Bow Tie Milquetoasts

Pussy Bow is elliptical for 'Pussy Cat Bow,' the latter a well-established term in the world of women's fashion.  Melania Trump sported one at the second debate. Was she out to implant some sly suggestion?  I have no idea.  But it occurred to me this morning that boy tie boys such as George Will also sport pussy cat bows.  (As you know, pussy cats are both male and female.)  And given the currency of 'pussy' in the politics of the day, it seems entirely appropriate to refer to the signature sartorial affectation of effete yap-and-scribble do-nothing quislings like Will as a pussy bow.

George Will is a good example of how Trump Derangement Syndrome can lead to cognitive meltdown.

I used to respect Will. No more.

Trump's Comments: The Latest Left-Wing Hysteria

Dennis Prager:

We are regularly forced to endure a new left-wing manufactured, media-supercharged hysteria.

The latest is the tsunami of horror in reaction to Donald Trump's gross and juvenile comments made in private 11 years ago.

The tsunami of condemnation of his remarks is quintessential left-wing hysteria. That more than a few Republicans and conservatives have joined in is a testament to the power of mass media and hysteria to influence normally sensible people.

This is hysteria first and foremost because the comments were made in private. I would say the same thing if crass comments made by Hillary Clinton in private conversation had been recorded. In fact, I did. In 2000, in a Wall Street Journal column, I defended Hillary Clinton against charges that she was an anti-Semite. That year it was reported that Clinton had called Paul Fray, the manager of her husband's failed 1974 congressional campaign, a "f---ing Jew bastard."

Even the left-wing newspaper, the Guardian, reported that three people -- two witnesses and Fray -- confirmed the report.

Nevertheless, I wrote in the Journal, "I wish to defend Mrs. Clinton. I do so as a practicing Jew and a Republican. ... We must cease this moral idiocy of judging people by stray private comments."

(Emphasis added.)

Related articles

On 'Disenfranchise' and Hillary's Will to Power

America, Love It or Weave It

Defunding the Left

You know things have come to a sorry pass when defunding the Left might have to include withdrawal of financial support from The Society of Christian Philosophers.

What we really need is an Association of Conservative Philosophers.  (The resonance of the initials ACP will not be lost on my astute readers.)  The contributors to Rightly Considered may want to take this ball and run with it.

Related articles

Richard Swinburne's Paper Now Online

Why No Calls For Hillary to Withdraw?

Talk about a double standard!  

We've known all along that Trump is crude and Clintonian in his sexual appetite, although  not as bad as Bill in terms of deeds; but the Wikileaks data dump brought something new and objectively far more important to our attention.  It is another revelation of Hillary's greed, mendacity, secretiveness, and lust for power.  We get a whiff of her doctrine of 'two truths' one for the insiders, the other for public consumption.  There is her assault on national sovereignty with her call for a borderless world.  This supercilious stealth ideologue who has enriched herself in government 'service' absolutely must be stopped, and there is only one man who can do it.  Jeb! never was up to the job.

What's worse, a P-grabber or a gun grabber?  The former operates on occasion and in private in the 'noble' tradition of Jack Kennedy, Ted Kennedy,  and Bill Clinton.   The latter would violate sacred American rights for all and forever.  Don't believe Hillary's lies about supporting the Second Amendment.  She lies whenever it is useful for advancing herself and her destructive agenda.  In that order.

And then there is the utter hypocrisy of liberals who, having presided over when not promoting the injection of  moral toxins into our culture, moralize about Trump's admittedly disgusting and puerile locker-room talk.  Heather MacDonald gets it right in Trumped-Up Outrage.  As does Margot Anderson who points out that Dems have no problem with the objectification of females if they are small enough.  Rebecca Tetti offers this important insight:

These people who celebrate porn and abortion and make heroic figures out of small-souled, sex-deluded creatures such as Bill Maher and Lena Dunham and Sandra Fluke and lionize sick predator men like the Kennedys and Bill Clinton are not merely being hypocrites or playing politics when they denounce Trump. They are deliberately engaging in The Lie: the corruption of meaning itself. They aren’t outraged because they’re decent. They’re using our decency as a pawn in their quest for political power.

The insight is that the Left uses our decency, which they don't believe in, against us, mendaciously feigning moral outrage at what doesn't outrage them at all.  (Cf. Saul Alinsky's RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”)

And then there are the milquetoast pseudo-conservatives who have withdrawn their support from Trump out of fear of losing their position, power, perquisites, and pelf.  That other  'P-word,' to use Megyn Kelly's demure expression, seems rightly applicable to them. The motivations of Senator McCain and the boys are transparent enough.  

But enough of this.  For now.

Related articles

Hillary's Presidential Bid as an Exercise in and Referendum on Cynicism

Hillary the Fabulist

Truth Decay

Bachmann Urges Evangelicals To Rally Around Trump: 'We Don't Get A Do-Over'

Robert De Niro . . .

. . . must be getting some 'Mean Tweets' along about now over his attack on Donald Trump.

I've admired De Niro as an actor ever since Martin Scorsese's 1973 Mean Streets.  

Now actors and actresses have a right to their political opinions, but I can't see that most of them have a right to their high opinion of their political opinions.  I wrote the following in June of 2013:

The encomia continue to pour in on the occasion of the passing of James Gandolfini.  'Tony Soprano' died young at 51, apparently of a heart attack, while vacationing in Italy.  Given the subtlety of The Sopranos it would be unfair to say that Gandolfini wasted his talent portraying  a scumbag  and glorifying criminality, and leave it at that.    But I wonder if people like him and De Niro and so many others give any thought to the proper use of their brief time on earth. 

It's at least a question: if you have the talents of an actor or a novelist or a screen writer or a musician, should you have any moral scruples about playing to the basest sides of human nature?  Are we so corrupted now that this is the only way to turn a buck in the arts?

Related:  

Advice for Hollywood Liberals

Why are Actors and Actresses Held in Such Low Esteem?

Robert De Niro Calls Jon Voight 'Delusional' Over Support for Trump

Has political disagreement ever been worse in these United States?  Well, yes, during the Civil War.  So it could be worse.  But keep your powder dry.

Political Legitimacy and Rent Seeking

David P. Goldman:

This is not an election fought over competing policies but a struggle for legitimacy. A very large portion of the electorate (how large a portion we will discover next month) believes that its government is no longer legitimate, and that it has become the instrument of an entrenched rent-seeking oligarchy.

By and large, I agree with this reading. "America's economy is corrupt, cartelized and anti-competitive," I wrote in August. It is typical of rent-seeking that Lockheed Martin's stock price has tripled during the past three years, and payment to its top management team has risen from $12 million a year to over $60 million a year, while Lockheed Martin's F-35 languishes in cost overruns and deployment delays. Produce a lemon and get rich: that's Washington. It is not a trivial matter, or unrepresentative of our national condition, that the FBI director who declined to prosecute Mrs. Clinton for mishandling of classified material just returned to government from a stint at Lockheed Martin, where he was paid $6 million for a single year's service. I don't know whether FBI Director Comey is corrupt. But it looks and smells terrible.

That's why it was so important for Trump to talk about jail time for his opponent. If things had not gotten to the point where former top officials well might belong in jail, Trump wouldn't be there in the first place. The Republican voters chose a reckless, independently wealthy, vulgar, rough-edged outsider precisely because they believe that the system is corrupt. They are right to so believe; if the voters knew a tenth of what I know about it, they would march on Washington with pitchforks.

What is rent seeking? Here:

"Rent seeking” is one of the most important insights in the last fifty years of economics and, unfortunately, one of the most inappropriately labeled. Gordon Tullock originated the idea in 1967, and Anne Krueger introduced the label in 1974. The idea is simple but powerful. People are said to seek rents when they try to obtain benefits for themselves through the political arena. They typically do so by getting a subsidy for a good they produce or for being in a particular class of people, by getting a tariff on a good they produce, or by getting a special regulation that hampers their competitors. Elderly people, for example, often seek higher Social Security payments; steel producers often seek restrictions on imports of steel; and licensed electricians and doctors often lobby to keep regulations in place that restrict competition from unlicensed electricians or doctors.

Hillary's Nonsense About "No Religious Test"

Hillary got clobbered in last night's debate, but Trump missed an opportunity to refute her nonsensical claim that vetting Muslim immigrants involves the application of a "religious test."

In Article VI of the U. S. Constitution we read:

. . . no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Two questions.  One concerns Muslim citizens of the U.S.  The other concerns Muslims who are attempting to immigrate.  The first question first.

Does it follow from the passage quoted that the U. S. Constitution allows a Muslim citizen who supports Sharia (Islamic law) to run for public office?  No!  For the same Constitution, in its First Amendment, enjoins a salutary separation of church/synagogue/mosque and state, though not in those words.  Sharia and the values and principles enshrined in the founding documents are incompatible.  On no sane interpretation is our great Constitution a suicide pact.

It is important to realize that Islam is as much  an anti-Enlightenment political ideology as it is a religion.  It is an unholy hybrid of the political and the religious.  Our Enlightenment founders must be rolling around in their graves at the very suggestion that Sharia-subscribing Muslims are eligible for the presidency and other public offices. 

A religion that requires the subverting of the U. S. Constitution is not an admissible religion when it comes to applying the "no religious Test" provision. On a sane interpretation of the Constitution, Islam, though a religion, is not an admissible religion where an admissible religion is one that does not contain core doctrines which, if implemented, would subvert the Constitution.

Or one might argue that Islam is not a religion at all.  Damn near anything can and will be called a religion by somebody.  Some say with a straight face that leftism is a religion, others that Communism is a religion.  Neither is a religion on any adequate definition of 'religion.'  I have heard it said that atheism is a religion.  Surely it isn't.  Is a heresy of a genuine religion itself a religion?  Arguably not.  Hillaire Belloc and others have maintained that Islam is a Christian heresy.  Or one could argue that Islam, or perhaps radical Islam, is not a religion but a totalitarian political ideology masquerading as a religion.  How to define religion is a hotly contested issue in the philosophy of religion. 

The point here is that "religious" in ". . . no religious Test shall ever be required" is subject to interpretation.  We are under no obligation to give it a latitudinarian reading that allows in a destructive ideology incompatible with our values and principles.

As for immigration, would-be immigrants have no rights under our Constitution.  So Article VI doesn't apply to them at all.

As for gaseous talk of blocking Sharia-supporting Muslims as being "not who we are," it suffices to say that 'liberals' who gas off like this ought simply to be ignored.

There is no right to immigrate, and a nation is under no obligation to allow in subversive elements.  But it does have every right to protect its culture and values.  Here alone is a decisive reason to vote for Trump and block Hillary.  Trump punched hard last night, but not hard enough.  He should have pointed out that Hillary is a destructive leftist globalist who aims at the same "fundamental transformation" that Obama called for.  He should have pointed out that no patriot calls for the fundamental transformation of his country.  For what that implies in our case is the destruction of the U.S. as it was founded to be.

Related articles

The Danger of Appeasing the Intolerant

What Explains the Left's Toleration of Militant Islam?

Observations on Free Speech

There is No Provision in Islam for Mosque-State Separation

"I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it."

The Anthropomorphism of Perfect-Being (Anselmian)Theology

One approach to God and his attributes is Anselmian: God is "that that which no greater can be conceived."  God is the greatest conceivable being, the most perfect of all beings, the being possessing all perfections.  But what is a perfection?  A perfection is not just any old (positive, non-Cambridge) property, but a great-making property.  Some of these properties admit of degrees while some do not. To say of God that he is the ens perfectissimum, the most perfect of all beings, is to say that he possesses all great- making properties, and of those that admit of degrees, he possesses them to the highest degree.

For example, power admits of degrees; so while Socrates and God are both powerful, only God is maximally powerful.  Wisdom too admits of degrees; so while both Socrates and God are both wise, only God is maximally wise.  And the same holds for love and mercy and moral goodness.  Many of the divine attributes, then, are maxima of attributes possessed by humans.

Are Socrates and God wise in the same sense of 'wise'?  This follows if wisdom in God is just the highest degree of the same attribute that is found in some humans.  Accordingly, the predicate 'wise' is being used univocally in 'Socrates is wise' and 'God is wise' despite the fact that God but not Socrates is all-wise.

Thus a commitment to univocity appears to be entailed by the Anselmian or perfect-being approach.

The polar opposite of univocity is equivocity.  The phenomenon of equivocity is illustrated by this pair of sentences: 'Socrates is wise,' 'Hillary is in no wise fit to be president.'  The meaning of 'wise' is totally different across the two sentences.  Midway between univocity and equivocity there is analogicity.  Perhaps an example of an analogical use of 'wise' would be in application to Guido the mafioso.  He's a wise guy; he knows the score; but he is not a wise man like Socrates, though he is like the latter in being knowledgeable about some things.   But I mention analogy only to set it aside.

My thesis: an Anselmian approach to God and his attributes such as we find in Alvin Plantinga and T. V. Morris is anthropomorphic. One takes God to have the very same great-making properties that (some) humans have, but to the maximal degree.  Socrates is benevolent and merciful; God is omnibenevolent and all-merciful.  And so on.  In so doing, one approaches God from the side of man, assimilating God to man.  God is 'made' in the image and likeness of man, as a sort of superman, but with defects removed and attributes maximized.

Well, what is wrong with anthropomorphism?  The problem with it is that it fails to do justice to God's absolute transcendence and ineffability.  If the difference between creatures and God is only a matter of degree, then God would not be worthy of worship. He would be "the greatest thing around" and no doubt an object of wonder and admiration, but not an appropriate object of worship. (See Barry Miller, A Most Unlikely God, U. of  Notre Dame Press, 1996, p. 3)

God is the Absolute.  As such, he is radically other than creatures.  His attributes cannot be 'in series' with human degreed attributes even if at the limits of these series.  God in not just another thing that exists  and possesses properties in the way creatures possess properties.  

A subsequent entry will examine the view opposite to that of perfect-being theology, that of negative theology. 

Related articles

Is God Beyond All Being?

Realism, Idealism, and Classical Theism

Potentiality and the Substance View of Persons

Review of Barry Miller, A Most Unlikely God

Atheism and Ontological Simplicity: A Retraction and a Repair

Is the Real a Tricycle? Plantinga versus Hick, Round One

Thinking and Speaking about the Absolute: Three Views

Gratitude is the Memory of the Heart

A masterpiece of the aphorist's art.  Attributed to Jean Massieu (1772-1846).

Related articles

Robert Nisbet's Conservatism

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ships and Trains and Boats and Planes

Doors, Crystal Ship

Clancy Bros., When the Ship Comes In.  Peter, Paul, and Mary also do a fine job with the great Dylan anthem.

Brewer and Shipley, One Toke Over the Line.  What you'll be when the shit comes in.  Matters feculent bring Brian Leiter to mind. Speculation is running high according to a New York Times piece that he mailed feces to four philosophers.  

Dionne Warwick, Trains and Boats and Planes

Peter, Paul, and Mary, Leaving on a Jet Plane

Arlo Guthrie, City of New Orleans.  Classic Americana.

Jimmy Dean, PT 109

Frankie Ford, Sea Cruise

Phil Ochs, Pleasures of the Harbor

Credence Clearwater Revival, Proud Mary

Gordon Lightfoot, Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Powerful song, great lyrics.  "Does anyone know where the love of God goes/When the waves turn the minutes to hours?"

Beach Boys, Sloop John B.

The Discursive Framework, Logic, and Whether the Via Negativa is the Path to Nowhere

The Historian of Logic comments:

It seems to me that what you call the ‘Discursive Framework’ is what I and others call ‘logic’, and that it reflects a Kantian view of logic that prevailed before Russell and Frege, namely that logic reflects the ‘laws of thought’ only. Are you mooting the possibility of beings which defy conception under these laws, or realms where the laws do not apply?

I was re-reading Kant’s Logic last week and it is full of this stuff.

Logic.  I would define logic as the normative science of inference. Science: scientia, study of.  Inference:  the mental process of deriving a proposition (the conclusion) from one or more  propositions (the premises).  Normative: logic is not concerned with how people think as a matter of fact, which is a concern of psychology, but with how they ought to think if they are to arrive at truth and move from known truths to further truths.   The task of logic is to set forth the criteria whereby correct inferences may be distinguished from incorrect inferences. 

The above definition is neutral with respect to any number of ontological questions.  Thus I used 'proposition' above innocuously without presupposing any theory as to what propositions are.  I spoke of inference as a mental process, but this too is innocuous inasmuch as one could be a mind-brain identity theorist and agree with me about logic.  (But if you are an eliminativist about the mental, then you 'get the boot':  it is a Moorean fact that there are inferences.)

Discursive Framework.  This is not the same as logic, pace the Historian, even though it does contain such logical principles as LNC and LEM, and indeed the whole of standard logic.  (We can argue about 'standard' in the ComBox.)  The DF also contains principles that are not strictly logical -- they are not logical truths -- but are better classifiable as metaphysical, as propositions of metaphysica generalis.  Examples:

a. Everything exists: There are no nonexistent items.  Pace van Inwagen, the negation of this is not a logical contradiction.

b. Everything has properties.  (Partisans of bare or thin particulars do not deny this.)

c. Nothing has a property P by being identical to P.   (The 'is' of predication is not assimilable to the 'is' if formal identity.)

d. Principles of logic, such as For any x, x = x, are not just true of objects of thought qua objects of thought, but are also true  of mind-independentally real items.   Thus the principles of logic are not merely principles of thought but principles of reality as well. Not merely logical, they are also ontological.  There is a jump here, from the logical to the ontological, that Aristotle was aware of.  With that jump comes the problem of justifying it.

e. The thinking of ectypal intellects such as ourselves is necessarily such as to involve a distinction between subject and predicate. There are no simple thoughts/propositions if by that we mean thoughts/proposition lacking sub-propositional structure.  Every proposition is internally structured, e.g. Fa, Rab, (x)Fx, etc.  

Laws of Thought but No Psychologism.  Kant, Husserl, and Frege all rejected psychologism in logic.  Are the laws of logic laws of thought?  Yes, of course.  What else would they be?  But this is not to say that they are laws of human psychology.  They are laws that govern the thinking of any actual or possible ectypal intellect.  They might also be laws of reality, all reality, with no exceptions. But surely it would be uncritical simply to assume this.  It wants proof, or at least argument.  As I said, Aristotle had already seen the problem.

Are you mooting the possibility of beings which defy conception under these laws, or realms where the laws do not apply?

Yes, that is what I am doing, although I wouldn't speak of beings.  That's plural, and the singular-plural distinction is part and parcel of the Discursive Framework.  My aim is to make philosophy safe for mysticism.    My aim is to show that while remaining in philosophy, in the DF, one can come to descry the 'possibility' of a, or rather, THE transdiscursive realm.  I deny that the via negativa is the road to nowheresville or u-topia.

I am not attempting anything new; the novelty is merely in the way I go about it.  And there is nothing illogical about it.  Or can you find non sequiturs or other strictly logical mistakes in the above or in recent cognate posts?  If there is a suprarational realm would it not be sloppy thinking, and thus 'illogical,' to assume that it must be infrarational?

Nothing new:  we have seen this sort of thing in the Far East in Buddhist schools like that of Nagarjuna and in Taoism; in the ancient and medieval Western world, e.g., Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite, and in the modern period with Kant and then again in the early Wittgenstein.

The Doctrine of Divine Simplicity (DDS) Helps Focus The Issue.  Duality is unavoidable on the discursive plane.  To think is to judge, and to judge at the most basic level  is to judge of a that it is or is not F.  At a bare minimum, then, there is the duality of subject and property.  (Brentano transformations of  predications into existential sentences avail nothing: the duality of existence-nonexistence remains.) As I said above, no thought/proposition, no content of an act of thinking, is simple.  But God is simple according to DDS.  He is identical to his attributes, which implies that each attribute is identical to every other one.  If he weren't then he would be dependent on his attributes for his nature, and he would not be the absolute reality.  He could not possess aseity. He could not be uniquely unique. If God were unique only in the sense that he is necessarily one of a kind, then he would one of a class of such beings, and a greater could be conceived, namely, a being uniquely unique, i.e., unique in the sense of transcending the very distinction between instance and kind.

Now if God is simple, then how can our talk and thought, which is necessarily discursive, be literally true of him?  One response is that God talk is literal but analogical.  This needs exploring in a separate post.  But if we cannot accept the doctrine of analogy, then the simple God lies entirely beyond the DF. 

Related articles

a

Arguing with Kripke over Existence

Georg Lichtenberg, Aphoristically, on the Freedom of the Will, with Pedantic Commentary

Truth and God: How are they Related?

Bertrand Russell: Empiricism is Self-Refuting. Is He Right?

Language and Reality

"I Swear, If You Existed, I'd Divorce You."

If the recipient of this insult had been a philosophy professor instead of a mere history  professor, he might have responded as follows.  "Darling, by the Existence Symmetry of Relations, if a relation R holds, then either all of its relata exist or none of them do. Now one cannot divorce a person to whom one is not married.  So you and I stand in the marital relation.  It follows that if I don't exist, then you don't either."

The 'Liberal' Speaks

If it ain't totalitarian, then it ain't government!

Thinker, Thought, Sentence

If thought is to sentence as soul to body, then thinker is to thought as God to soul.

George Orwell on the Renegade 'Liberal'

The more things change, the more they remain the same.  Here is the great Orwell from 1945 in The Freedom of the Press:

One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought. This argument was used, for instance, to justify the Russian purges. The most ardent Russophile hardly believed that all of the victims were guilty of all the things they were accused of: but by holding heretical opinions they ‘objectively’ harmed the régime, and therefore it was quite right not only to massacre them but to discredit them by false accusations. The same argument was used to justify the quite conscious lying that went on in the leftwing press about the Trotskyists and other Republican minorities in the Spanish civil war. And it was used again as a reason for yelping against habeas corpus when Mosley was released in 1943.

This is quite applicable to the liberal-left termites of the present day who are undermining our institutions, so much so that not even an outfit such as the Society of Christian Philosophers is free of their infestation.

Related articles

Barry Goldwater on Conservatism

The Academic Curtain

Thomas Sowell on the sad state of our elite universities.  Excerpt:

There is no barbed wire around our campuses, nor armed guards keeping unwelcome ideas out. So there is no "iron curtain." But there is a curtain, and it has its effect.

One effect is that many of the rising generation can go from elementary school through postgraduate education at our leading colleges and universities without ever hearing a coherent presentation of a vision of the world that is fundamentally different from that of the political left.

There are world class scholars who are unlikely to become professors at either elite or non-elite academic institutions because they do not march in the lockstep of the left. Some have been shouted down or even physically assaulted when they tried to give a speech that challenged the prevailing political correctness.

Harvard is just one of the prestigious institutions where such things have happened -- and where preemptive surrender to mob rule has been justified by a dean saying that it was too costly to provide security for many outside speakers who would set off campus turmoil.

Despite the fervor with which demographic "diversity" is proclaimed as a prime virtue -- without a speck of evidence as to its supposed benefits -- diversity of ideas gets no such respect.

Related articles

Micro-Totalitarianism

The Left's Central Delusion

The Wages of Political Correctness: A Climate of Fear

Thinking and Speaking about the Absolute: Three Views

Univocity.  There is an absolute reality.  We can speak of it literally and sometimes truly using predicates of ordinary language that retain in their metaphysical use the very same sense they have in their mundane use.  For example, we can say of Socrates that he exists, and using 'exists' in the very same sense we can say of God that he exists.  Accordingly, 'exists' is univocal in application to creature and creator.  Corresponding to this sameness of sense there is a sameness in mode of Being: God and Socrates exist in the very same way.  No doubt God exists necessarily whereas Socrates exist contingently; but this is a mere different in modal status, not a difference in mode of Being.  It is the difference between existing in all possible worlds and existing in some, but not all, possible worlds.

And the same holds for non-existential predicates such as 'wise.' We can say of Socrates that he is wise, and using 'wise' in the very same sense we can say of God that he is wise.  Accordingly, 'wise' is univocal in application to creature and creator.  Corresponding to this sameness of sense there is sameness in mode of property-possession: God and Socrates both have wisdom by instantiating it.

Analogicity.  Theological language is literal, but analogical.  I won't discuss this view now.

Negative Theology.  The absolute reality is beyond all our concepts. God is utterly transcendent, radically other. Nothing can be truly predicated of God as he is in himself, not even that he exists, or does not.  The problem with this approach is that it threatens to render theological language unintelligible.

So why not adopt the Univocity View?  Is there any good reason not to adopt it?

I think there is a good reason, namely, that the UV implies that God is a being among beings; that God as absolute reality cannot be a being among beings;  ergo, etc.  

But what does it mean to say that God is a being among beings?  As I see it, to say that God is a being among beings is to say that God is no exception to the logical and ontological principles (pertaining to properties, property-possession, existence, modality, etc.) that govern anything that can be said to exist.  It is to say that God fits the ontological or general-metaphysical schema that everything else fits. It is to say that God is ontologically on a par with other beings despite the attributes (omniscience, etc.) that set him apart from other beings and indeed render him unique among beings. To spell it out.  If God is a being among beings, then:

a.  Properties. Some properties are such that God and creatures share them.  Consider the property of being a self.  For present purposes we may accept Dale's definition: "a being capable of consciousness, with intelligence, will, and the ability to intentionally act."  God is a self, but so is Socrates.  Both are selves in the very same sense of 'self.'  'Self' is being used univocally (not equivocally and not analogically) in 'God is a self' and 'Socrates is a self' just as 'wise' is being used univocally in 'God is wise' and 'Socrates is wise,' and so on.

Some are  uncomfortable with talk of properties and seem to prefer talk of concepts.  Well then, I can put my present point by saying that some concepts are such as to be common to both God and creatures, the concept self being one example.

b. Property-possession. God has properties in the same way that creatures do.  My first point was that there are some properties that both God and creatures share; my present point is a different one about property-possession: the having of these shared properties is the same in the divine and creaturely cases.  Both God and Socrates instantiate the property of being a self, where first-level instantiation is an asymmetrical relation or non-relational tie that connects individuals and properties construed as mind-independent universals.

The point could be put conceptualistically as follows.  Both God and Socrates fall under the concept self, where falling under is an asymmetrical relation that connects individuals and concepts construed as mind-dependent universals. 

c. Existence. God is in the same way that creatures are.  Given that God exists and that Socrates exists, it does not follow that they exist in the same way.  Or so I maintain.  But part of what it means to say that God is a being among beings is to say that God and Socrates do exist in the very same way.  Whatever it is for an item to exist, there is only one way for an item to exist, and God and Socrates exist in that very same way. For example, if what it is for x to exist is for x to be identical to some y, then this holds both for God and Socrates.

d. It follows from (a) and (b) taken together that God is really distinct from his properties, and that his properties are really distinct from one another.  God is in this respect no different from Socrates. Really distinct: distinct in reality, apart from our mental operations.  (What is really distinct need not be capable of separate existence.)  And both items have their properties by instantiating them.

e. It follows from (c) that God is really distinct from his existence (just as Socrates is really distinct from his existence) and that God is really distinct from existence (just as Socrates is distinct from existence). 

f. It follows from (d) and (e) taken together that God is not ontologically simple.  Contrapositively, if God is ontologically simple, then God is not a being among beings as I am using this phrase.  It is therefore no surprise that Dale Tuggy ansd other evangelical Christians reject divine simplicity whereas I am inclined to accept it.  See my SEP entry for more on this.

To conclude, my argument against the Univocity View is as follows: 

A. If the UV is true, then God is a being among beings in the sense explained.
B. If God is a being among beings, then God is not ontologically simple.
C. An absolute being must be ontologically simple.
D. God is the absolute being.
Ergo
E. God is ontologically simple.
Ergo
F. God is not a being among beings.
Ergo
G. The Univocity View is not true.

So I reject the UV.  If the other two views are also rationally rejectable, then we have an aporia, which, I suggest, is what we have. We are at an impasse, as usual in philosophy.  

Related articles

Is God Beyond All Being?

God and Socrates: Two Different Ways of Existing?

Review of Barry Miller, A Most Unlikely God

On the Left: No Wisdom, No Common Sense

What follows, from Victor Davis Hanson, is the correct view on illegal immigration.  But you will never get a destructive, hate-America leftist to accept it:

Illegal Immigration. No country can exist without borders. Hillary and Obama have all but destroyed them; Trump must remind us how he will restore them. Walls throughout history have been part of the solution, from Hadrian’s Wall to Israel’s fence with the Palestinians. “Making Mexico pay for the wall” is not empty rhetoric, when $26 billion in remittances go back to Mexico without taxes or fees, largely sent from those here illegally, and it could serve as a source of funding revenue Trump can supersede “comprehensive immigration” with a simple program: Secure and fortify the borders first; begin deporting those with a criminal record, and without a work history. Fine employers who hire illegal aliens. Any illegal aliens who choose to stay, must be working, crime-free, and have two years of residence. They can pay a fine for having entered the U.S. illegally, learn English, and stay while applying for a green card — that effort, like all individual applications, may or may not be approved. He should point out that illegal immigrants have cut in line in front of legal applicants, delaying for years any consideration of entry. That is not an act of love. Sanctuary cities are a neo-Confederate idea, and should have their federal funds cut off for undermining U.S. law. The time-tried melting pot of assimilation and integration, not the bankrupt salad bowl of identity politics, hyphenated nomenclature, and newly accented names should be our model of teaching new legal immigrants how to become citizens.

Related articles

Anarcho-Tyranny

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

Gary Johnson Opposes 'Illegal Immigrant'

Can a Return to Federalism Save Us?

On 'Nativism'

Publius Decius Mus:

For the record, I cop to being a “nativist.” I prefer policies that explicitly favor the existing American citizenry, the people born here, i.e., the natives. I’m somewhat impressed that Pethokoukis and his ilk have managed to redefine this age-old, bedrock political principle as radical and “racist.” It’s like forcing people to say the sky is green—a real propaganda feat, at which hats must be tipped in awe. But acknowledging leftist success as blunt force propagandists doesn’t require accepting the underlying lie.

By etymology, a native to a place is a person born in that place.  Should immigration and other policies of a nation favor those born there?  Of course.  That is just common sense.  A government of the people, by the people, and for the people must of course be FOR the people, and these people are not people in general but the people of the nation in question.  The United States government, for example, exists to benefit the people of the United States.  That is its main task regardless of any subsidiary tasks it may take on such as foreign disaster relief.

So there is an innocuous and defensible sense of 'nativism.'  It has nothing to do with xenophobia.  'Liberals' know this, of course, but for their ideological purposes they ride roughshod over the distinction.  

And of course it has nothing to do with 'racism.'  

Some 'liberals' accuse opponents of illegal immigration of being racists; but this betrays a failure to grasp a simple point, namely, that illegal immigrants do not form a race.  Is this difficult to understand?

And while we are on the delightful topic of race, let me point out to our liberal pals that Muslims are not a race either.  Muslims are adherents of the religion, Islam, and these adherents are of different races and ethnicities.  Got that?

So if a conservative objects to the immigration of Sharia-supporting Muslims, his objection has nothing to do with race.

I apologize to the intelligent for making points so obvious; but given willfull 'liberal' self-enstupidation, these things cannot be repeated too often.

Hence my political burden of proof:

As contemporary 'liberals' become ever more extreme, they increasingly assume what I will call the political burden of proof.  The onus is now on them to defeat the presumption that they are so  morally and intellectually obtuse as not to be worth talking to.

But of course I am being far too polite.

Related articles

'Pinkwashing'

Harry Reid on Burden of Proof

Rachel Dolezal, the Black White Woman

Invective

A Case Against Withdrawal

Is the Real a Tricycle? Plantinga versus Hick, Round One

In his Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford UP, 2000), Alvin Plantinga mounts a critique of John Hick's Kantianism in the philosophy of religion.  In this entry I will begin an evaluation of Plantinga's critique.  I will focus on just two and a half pages, pp. 43-45, and examine only one preliminary argument.

The question, very simply, is whether our concepts apply to the ultimately real.  If God is the ultimately real, as he is, then the question is whether or not our concepts apply to God.  If they don't, then we cannot refer to or think about God or make true and literal predications of him such as 'God is infinite.'  If so, we cannot have any beliefs about God.  Now Plantinga's project is to show that Christian belief (which of course includes beliefs about God) is warranted.  But a belief about X cannot be warranted unless there is that belief.  So there had better be beliefs about God, in which case there had better be true and literal predications about God.  This implies that God must have properties and that some of these properties must be such that we can conceive them, i.e., have concepts of them.  In brief, it must be possible for some of our concepts to apply to God.

For Hick, God is the ultimately real, or simply 'the Real' but our concepts do not apply to God/the Real. (43)  For present purposes, we needn't consider why Hick holds this except to say that it is for broadly Kantian reasons.  And we needn't consider all the nuances of Hick's position.  At present I am concerned only with Plantinga's refutation of the bald thesis that none of our concepts apply to God. Plantinga writes,

If Hick really means that none of our terms applies literally to the Real, then it isn't possible to make sense of what he says.  I take it the term 'tricycle' does not apply to the Real; the Real is not a tricycle.  But if the Real is not a tricycle, then 'is not a tricycle' applies literally to it; it is a nontricycle.  It could hardly be neither a tricycle nor a nontricycle, nor do I think that Hick would want to suggest that it could. (45)

Here again is what I am calling the Bald Thesis:  None of our terms/concepts apply literally and truly to the Real/God.  Has Plantinga refuted the Bald Thesis?  I am sure London Ed, who got me going on this, will answer affirmatively.  Plantinga has given us a simple, clear, and knock-down (i.e. dispositive or decisive) argument that blows the Bald Thesis clean out of the water.

Or Does It?

Here is a response that Ed won't like.

Plantinga assumes that everything that exists is subject to the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC), the Law of Excluded Middle (LEM), and the principle that everything instantiates properties, where if x instantiates property P, then x is distinct from P.  Reasonable assumptions!   These assumptions articulate (some of) what I will call the Discursive Framework, the framework within which all our discursive thinking takes place. On these assumptions the following tetrad is no tetralemma:

a. My wife is a tricycle
b. My wife  is not a tricycle.
c. My wife  is both.
d. My wife is neither.

This is no tetralemma since all limbs are false except (b).  My wife, delightful as she is, is not so wonderful as to be  'beyond all our concepts.'  She does not lie, or stand, beyond the Discursive Framework.  She is not a tricycle and therefore she falls under the concept nontricycle.  Now the same goes for the Real (or the Absolute, or the Plotinian One, etc.)  if the Real (the Absolute, etc.) is relevantly like my wife.

Now that is what Plantinga is assuming.  He is assuming that tricycles, and wives, and the Real  are all on a par in that each such item is a being among beings that necessarily has properties and has them by instantiating them, where property-instantiation is governed by LNC and LEM.  What's more, he assumes that everything that exists exists in the same way, which implies that there are not two or more different ways of existing, say, the way appropriate to a finite item such as my wife and the way appropriate to God.  For Aquinas, God is Being itself:  Deus est ipsum esse subsistens.  Everything else is really distinct from its being. But Plantinga will have none of that, implying as it does the doctrine of divine simplicity.  Everything exists in the same way and has properties in the same way.  The differences between wife and God are in the properties had, not in they way they are had, or in the way their subjects exist.

Plantinga also assumes that to talk sense one must remain with the confines of the Discursive Framework.  This is why he says, of Hick, that "it isn't possible to make sense of what he says."  We ought to concede the point in this form:  It makes no discursive sense. For discursive sense is governed by the above principles.  

If you say that no property can be predicated of the Real, then you predicate of the Real the property of being such that no property can be predicated of it, and you land in incoherence.  These quick little arguments come thick and fast to the mentally agile and have been around for ages.  But note that they presuppose the absolute and unrestricted validity of the Discursive Framework.

It is not that the Discursive Framework is irrational;  you could say it is constitutive of discursive rationality and meaningful speech. But how could someone within the Framework prove in a noncircular way its absolute and unrestricted validity?  How prove that it is not restricted to what our finite minds can think?  How prove that nothing lies beyond it?  Of course, anything that lies beyond it is Unsayable and cannot be thought in terms of the Framework.  And if all thought is subject to the strictures of the Framework, then what lies beyond cannot be thought. 

How then gain access to what is beyond thought?  Nondual awareness is one answer, one that Buddhists will like.  The visio beata of Thomas may be another.  But I don't need to give an answer for present purposes.  I merely have to POINT TO, even if I cannot SAY, the possibility that the Discursive Framework is not absolutely and unrestrictedly valid.  This is equivalent to the possibility that the Discursive Framework  is but a transcendental presupposition of our thinking without which we cannot think but is not legislative for all of Being. I am using 'transcendental' in the Kantian way.

The Framework cannot rationally ground its hegemony over all Being; it can only presuppose it.  We can conclude that Plantinga with his quick little argument has not refuted the Bald Thesis according to which there is a noumenal Reality that lies beyond our concepts and cannot be accessed as it is in itself by conceptual means.  He has rationally opposed the thesis, but in a way that begs the question. For he just assumes the absolute and unrestricted validity of the Discursive Framework when the question is precisely whether it is absolutely and unrestrictedly valid.

So I pronounce round one of Plantinga-Hick a draw. 

Related articles

Jesus 'n' Mo 'n' Plantinga

The Use and Mention of Cartoons and Other Images

Can Kant Refer to God?

The Hypocrisy of Contemporary Academic Philosophy

A ferocious critic nails it.

Richard Swinburne's Paper Now Online

Here is the paper by the distinguished philosopher of religion that was found 'hurtful' by the culturally Marxist crybullies at the recent Midwest meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers.

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

UPDATE (10/4): The hyperlink to the Swinburne paper, embedded within the First Things entry, is not now working but it was yesterday.

For compensation, read Rod Dreher's Rallying the Kukla Clan.  Excerpt:

Some people present for the talk melted down when confronted by Swinburne’s view. The president of the SCP, Michael Rea, apologized for all the butthurt caused by the discussion of Christian ideas in a gathering of Christian philosophers. But when word of the controversy got out to the broader philosophy community, some prominent philosophers reacted with anger — at Swinburne’s defenders, and those who were angry that the SCP president had apologized for Swinburne’s speech. Among the critics was Georgetown’s Rebecca Kukla:

So Swinburne, one of the world’s most prominent philosophers, is guilty of “hate” and “privilege,” as are his defenders — this, according to Kukla, a Georgetown philosopher who is also senior researcher at the Jesuit university’s Kennedy School of Ethics.

Well, Kukla went on to post the following comment — now deleted — on the Facebook page of Yale philosopher Jason Stanley, under a remark in which he denounced Swinburne and his defenders this: “F–k you, assholes.” Said the editor-in-chief of the Kennedy Institute’s ethics journal:

I apologize to readers for offense caused by the coarse language here, but it’s important to know exactly what passes for critical discourse among academic progressives near the top of the philosophy profession — especially given that the statement has disappeared down the memory hole.

Related articles

The Swinburne Dust Up at the Society for Christian Philosophers

Obama: 'There's no Religious Rationale' for Jihad Terror

Refutation here.

I am put in mind of something similar Obama said a couple of years ago.  He said, "ISIL is not Islamic."

What's the reasoning behind Obama's statement?  Perhaps this:

1. All religions are good.
2. Islam is a religion
Ergo
3. Islam is good
4. ISIL is not good.
Ergo
5. ISIL is not Islamic.

This little argument illustrates how one can reason correctly from false/dubious premises.

Are all religions good? Suppose we agree that a religion is good if its contribution to human flourishing outweighs its contribution to the opposite.  Then it is not at all clear that Islam is good.  For while it has improved the lives of some in some respects, on balance it has not contributed to human flourishing.  It is partly responsible for the long-standing inanition of the lands it dominates and it is the major source of terrorism in the world today.  It is an inferior religion, the worst of the great religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam).  Schopenhauer is surely right that it is the "saddest and poorest form of theism."  Its conception of the afterlife is the crudest imaginable.  Its God is pure will .  See Benedict's Regensburg Speech.  It is a violent religion scarcely distinguishable from a violent political ideology.  Its prophet was a warrior.  It is impervious to any correction  or enlightening or chastening from the side of philosophy.  There is no real philosophy in the Muslim world to speak of.  Tiny Israel in the 66 years of its existence has produced vastly more real philosophy than the whole of the Muslim world in the last 400 years.

So it is not the case that all religions are good. Some are, some are not.  This is a balanced view that rejects the extremes of 'All religions are good' and 'No religions are good.'

But why would so many want to maintain that all religions are good?  William Kilpatrick: 

. . . if Islam is intrinsically flawed, then the assumption that religion is basically a good thing would have to be revisited. That, in turn, might lead to a more aggressive questioning of Christianity. Accordingly, some Church leaders seem to have adopted a circle-the-wagons mentality—with Islam included as part of the wagon train. In other words, an attack on one religion is considered an attack on all: if they come for the imams, then, before you know it, they’ll be coming for the bishops. Unfortunately, the narrative doesn’t provide for the possibility that the imams will be the ones coming for the bishops.

Note that the following argument is invalid:

6. Islam is intrinsically flawed
2. Islam is a religion
Ergo
7. All religions are intrinsically flawed.

So if you hold that Islam is intrinsically flawed you are not logically committed to holding that all religions are.  Still, Kilpatrick's reasoning may be a correct explanation of  why some want to maintain that all religions are good.  Kilpatrick continues (emphasis added):

In addition to fears about the secular world declaring open season on all religions, bishops have other reasons to paint a friendly face on Islam. It’s not just the religion-is-a-good-thing narrative that’s at stake. Other, interconnected narratives could also be called into question.

One of these narratives is that immigration is a good thing that ought to be welcomed by all good Christians. Typically, opposition to immigration is presented as nothing short of sinful. [. . .]

But liberal immigration policies have had unforeseen consequences that now put (or ought to put) its proponents on the defensive. In Europe, the unintended consequences (some critics contend that they were fully intended) of mass immigration are quite sobering. It looks very much like Islam will become, in the not-so-distant future, the dominant force in many European states and in the UK as well. If this seems unlikely, keep in mind that, historically, Muslims have never needed the advantage of being a majority in order to impose their will on non-Muslim societies. And once Islamization becomes a fact, it is entirely possible that the barbarities being visited on Christians in Iraq could be visited on Christians in Europe. Or, as the archbishop of Mosul puts it, “If you do not understand this soon enough, you will become the victims of the enemy you have welcomed in your home.”

If that ever happens, the bishops (not all of them, of course) will bear some of the responsibility for having encouraged the immigration inflow that is making Islamization a growing threat. Thus, when a Western bishop feels compelled to tell us that Islamic violence has “nothing to do with real Islam,” it’s possible that he is hoping to reassure us that the massive immigration he has endorsed is nothing to worry about and will never result in the imposition of sharia law and/or a caliphate. He’s not just defending Islam, he’s defending a policy stance with possibly ruinous consequences for the West.

Of course, presidents and prime ministers say the same sorts of things about Islam. President Obama recently assured the world that “ISIL speaks for no religion,” Prime Minister David Cameron said that the extremists “pervert the Islamic faith,” and UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond asserted that the Islamic State “goes against the most basic beliefs of Islam.” They say these things for reasons of strategy and because they also have a narrative or two to protect. In fact, the narratives are essentially the same as those held by the bishops—religion is good, diversity is our strength, and immigration is enriching.

Since they are actually involved in setting policy, the presidents, prime ministers, and party leaders bear a greater responsibility than do the bishops for the consequences when their naïve narratives are enacted into law. Still, one has to wonder why, in so many cases, the bishop’s narratives are little more than an echo of the secular-political ones. It’s more than slightly worrisome when the policy prescriptions of the bishops so often align with the policies of Obama, Cameron, and company.

Many theologians believe that the Church should have a “preferential option for the poor,” but it’s not a good sign when the bishops seem to have a preferential option for whatever narrative stance the elites are currently taking on contested issues (issues of sexual ethics excepted). It’s particularly unnerving when the narratives about Islam and immigration subscribed to by so many bishops match up with those of secular leaders whose main allegiance is to the church of political expediency.

When the formulas you fall back on are indistinguishable from those of leaders who are presiding over the decline and fall of Western civilization, it’s time for a reality check.

 

Related articles

Another Double Standard

What ISIS Really Wants

The West is the Best

In every sense.  Well, maybe not in every sense: I live on the far eastern edge of the Phoenix metropolitan area with those glorious mountains right outside my window.  The western end of the Valle del Sol is flat and boring.  You may as well be in the Midwest.

Related articles

Diplomad on Drawing Mohammed

Conservative Cities are Better: Mesa, Arizona, for example

Arizona and California Gas Prices

Tough Phoenix sheriff may have new foe: George Soros

The Decline of Academic Philosophy

Further documentation:

Christina van Dyke Owes Richard Swinburne her Resignation

Should Christina van Dyke Resign?

Thank God there are people like Edward Feser with the civil courage to expose the rot in contemporary academic philosophy and denounce the rotters like Jason Stanley who contribute to it.

UPDATE (10/6): Philosophy Professor Under Fire for Online Post

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Coffee

October 1st is International Coffee Day.  Herewith, some tunes in celebration.  Not that I'm drinking coffee now: it's a morning and afternoon drink.  I am presently partaking of a potent libation consisting of equal parts of Tequila and Campari with a Fat Tire Fat Funk Ale as chaser.

Ella Mae Morse, Forty Cups of Coffee

Cream, The Coffee Song

Johnny Cash and Ramblin' Jack Elliot, A Cup of Coffee

Commander Cody, Truck Drivin' Man.  This one goes out to Sally and Jean and Mary in memory of our California road trip two years ago.   "Pour me another cup of coffee/For it is the best in the land/I'll put  a nickel in the jukebox/And play that 'Truck Drivin' Man.'"

Dave Dudley, Coffee, Coffee, Coffee

Calexico & Roger McGuinn, Another Cup of Coffee.  A good version of this old Dylan tune.

Mississippi John Hurt, Coffee Blues

Patricia Kaas, Black Coffee

Annette Hanshaw, You're the Cream in my Coffee, 1928

Johann Sebastian Bach, Coffee Cantata

What is wrong with people who don't drink or enjoy coffee?  They must not value consciousness and intensity of experience.  Poor devils! Perhaps they're zombies (in the philosophers' sense).

Patrick Kurp  recommends Rick Danko and Paul Butterfield, Java Blues, one hard-driving, adrenalin-enabling number which, in synergy with a serious cup of java will soon have you banging hard on all synaptic 'cylinders.'  

Chicory is a cheat.  It cuts it but doesn't cut it.

"The taste of java is like a volcanic rush/No one is going to stop me from drinking too much . . . ."

Warren Zevon, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

Related articles

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ramblin' Charles Adnopoz

No Idealists Here

Rod Dreher

BEATific October Again

It's October again, my favorite month, and Kerouac month in my personal literary liturgy.  And no better way to kick off Kerouac month than with 'sweet gone Jack'  reading from "October in Railroad Earth" from Lonesome Traveler, 1960.  Steve Allen provides the wonderful piano accompaniment.  I have the Grove Press Black Cat 1970 paperback edition. I bought it on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, 12 April 1973. 

I was travelling East by thumb to check out East Coast graduate schools where I had been accepted, but mostly  I 'rode the dog' (Greyhound bus), a mode of transport I wouldn't put up with today: two guys behind me chain-smoked  and talked all the way from Los Angeles to Phoenix.  New Orleans proved to be memorable, including the flophouse on Carondelet I stayed in for $2.  It was there that Lonesome  Traveler joined On the Road in my rucksack. 

I never before had seen Tabasco bottles so big as on the tables of the Bourbon Street bars and eateries.  Exulting in the beat quiddity of the scene, I couldn't help but share my enthusiasm for Nawlins with a lady of the evening, not sampling her wares, but just talking to her on the street, she thinking me naive, and I was. 

Here is a long  excerpt (7:10), which contains the whole of the first two sections of "October in Railroad Earth," pp. 37-40, of the Black Cat edition.

You don't know jack about Jack if you don't know that he was deeply conservative despite his excesses.  The aficionados will enjoy The Conservative Kerouac.

And a tip of the hat to old college buddy and Kerouac and jazz aficionado 'Monterey Tom' Coleman for sending me to Kerouac on Sinatra, and Hit the Road, Jack.