Maverick Philosopher

Leftist Barbarians at the University of Nebraska

Here

Is It Epistemically Certain That There are Substances?

Herewith, another episode in my ongoing discussion with Lukas Novak.  Here again is his list of propositions that he claims are not only true, but knowable with (epistemic as opposed to psychological) certainty:

a) God exists.
b) There are substances.
c) There are some necessary truths, even some de re necessary truths.
d) Human cognition is capable of truth and certainty.
e) There are no contradictions in reality.

I have already explained why I do not consider God exists to be certainly knowable.  I now consider whether it is certainly knowable that there are (Aristotelian primary) substances.  

We begin with the Moorean fact that there are tables and chairs, rocks and trees, cats and dogs. We may refer to such things generally as spatiotemporal meso-particulars. My work table, for example, is at a definite location in space; it has existed uninterruptedly for a long time; and it is a middle-sized object. Our question is not whether there are things like my table; our question is whether things like my table must be 'assayed' -- this useful term is from Gustav Bergmann -- as substances in the Aristotelian sense of the term.  Thus I am not using 'substance' as a stylistic variant of 'spatiotemporal meso-particular.' Such a use would be a misuse by my standards of rigor and would paper over the legitimate question whether tables and cats and such must be understood in terms of an ontology of substances.

It might be that there are tables and cats, but no substances. But if there are substances, then tables and cats are paradigm examples of them.

My thesis is not that there are no substances, but that it is not epistemically certain that there are.  Here is one consideration among several.

Persistence

My beautiful oak table has been around a long time. I reckon it came into existence in the early '80s. It will surely outlast me before passing out of existence.  Numerical sameness over the temporal interval of its existence is a Moorean fact. Its diachronic identity is a datum. Let us say that the table has persisted for a long time.  This word is 'datanic' as I like to say and thus theoretically neutral. I use it simply to record the datum, the Moorean fact, about which there can be no reasonable dispute, that the table has remained in existence, numerically one and the same, over a long period of time.

So far, I have been doing 'proto-philosophy.'  I have been collecting and commenting upon  some obvious data.  I have not yet asked a specifically philosophical question or made a specifically philosophical assertion.  

Perdurance or Endurance?

We get to philosophical questions when we ask: In what way does my table persist? How exactly is persistence to be understood?  What is the nature of persistence? The question is not whether tables and cats persist; the question is what it is to persist.  The question is not whether there are persistents; of course there are. The question is: What is persistence?

Now we come to a fork in the road.  Two very different theories obtrude themselves upon our attention. Does a thing persist by being wholly present at each time at which it exists, or does a thing persist by merely having a proper part that is present at each time at which the thing exists?

Perdurance

Suppose the latter. Then we say that the table persists by perduring, where the latter term is theoretical unlike the pre-theoretical or datanic persists. If the table persists by perduring, then it is a whole of temporal parts with different such parts at different times. This implies that at no time during its existence is the whole table temporally present.  On the perdurance scheme, tables and cats and such are four-dimensional entities, space-time worms if you will.  If this is right, then the difference between a table and a process such as a fire is not categorially deep but superficial and a matter of how we conceptualize things.

Our natural tendency is to think of a house and a fire that consumes a house as very different, so different as to constitute a categorial difference.  We are not inclined to call a house a process or an extended event; but we do not hesitate to call a fire a process or an extended event. A fire has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It unfolds over time and can be said to have temporal parts. It is not wholly present at each time at which it exists.  It becomes present bit by bit. It is spread out in time as well as in space. When we observe a fire we are not observing the whole of it but only its present phase.  It is natural to speak of fires and storms and wars and plays as having phases. It is not natural to speak of houses and soldiers as having phases.

On the perdurance view, however, there is no fundamental categorial difference between the house and the fire. Both persist in the same way, by perduring with different temporal parts present at different times. Both have both spatial and temporal parts. Both are 4-D objects.

Endurance

On the other theory, the table persists by enduring, where the latter term is also theoretical.  If my table is an endurant, then it is not a whole of temporal parts. It does not have temporal parts at all. It is wholly present at each time at which it exists.  It is nothing like a process.  When I look at my table I see the whole of it, not the current phase of it.

What is it for a thing to be wholly present at each moment of its existence?  One can understand it negatively: it means that the thing is not a whole of temporal parts. What does it mean positively? 

Persons may provide a clue. I regret things I did long ago, things that I did, not things some earlier self or earlier person-slice of me did.  I cannot shake the thought that I am numerically the same as the person who did those regrettable things. Connected with this is my conviction that my guilt is in no way diminished by the passage of time as it would be if I were a diachronic collection of person-slices as on a perdurantist view.  My conviction is that I have persisted by enduring, not by perduring. 

Of course, my psychological conviction does not prove that endurantism is true of persons, but it does help explain what it means for persons to be endurants as opposed to perdurants.

In the case of persons we can say that to be wholly present at every time at which the person exists is to be a substance that is 'there' at every moment beneath the flux of experiences and the flux of bodily changes as the self-same substrate of these psychological and physical changes. 

If  there are substances, then perdurantism is false, and endurantism is true

I have just sketched two theories of the persistence of material meso-particulars. Both theories go well beyond the Moorean fact of persistence.  Each has its arguments pro et contra. We needn't worry about these arguments here. The fact of persistence is such that if you deny it then you are legitimately labelled 'crazy.' But there is nothing crazy about questioning the perdurance and endurance theories.

The important point for present purposes is that theose who claim that there are Aristotelian primary substance are opting for endurantism.  Finally, my argument against Dr. Novak.

My Argument

a) It is epistemically certain that there are substances if and only if it is epistemically certain that endurantism is true.

b) It is not epistemically certain that endurantism is true.

Therefore

c) It is not epistemically certain that there are substances.

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Welcome to the Age of Feeling

A Question about Use and Mention

Here is a curious sentence suggested to me by London Ed:

1) The last word in this sentence refers to cats.

(1) is part of a larger puzzle the discussion which we leave for later. 

My question is this: Can a word be both used and mentioned in the same sentence?  It would seem so. (1) is no doubt an unusual sentence. But it is grammatical, makes sense, and is true.  

It seems that the last word in (1)  is being both used and mentioned. (Assume someone is uttering a token of (1).) The last word in the sentence is 'cats' and 'cats' refers to cats.  So the last word in (1) is being used. But it is also being mentioned. It is mentioned by 'the last word in this sentence.'

So it seems that one and the same word can be both used and mentioned in one and the same sentence.

What say you, London Ed?

Trump Haters, Supporters, Neither, and Both

Another brilliant column by VDH.  I am tempted to quote, but it's all good.

Scandal Erupts over Promotion of 'Bourgeois' Behavior

More proof that 'liberals' are insane:

Were you planning to instruct your child about the value of hard work and civility? Not so fast! According to a current uproar at the University of Pennsylvania, advocacy of such bourgeois virtues is “hate speech.” The controversy, sparked by an op-ed written by two law professors, illustrates the rapidly shrinking boundaries of acceptable thought on college campuses and the use of racial victimology to police those boundaries.

 

A Plea to Conservative Bloggers

Please join me in promoting Prager U videos. They teach what isn't taught in the leftist seminaries that our so-called universities have become. And they are mercifully short, around five minutes in length. Do your bit. 

Here is the man himself in Why Isn't Communism as Hated as Nazism?

Full Disclosure: I don't know Prager personally; I criticize him when he needs criticizing as for example here; he has not asked me to promote his efforts; everything I do on this site is pro bono in two senses: I am working for the Good, and I am working without pay.

Do Black Lives Matter?

FULL DISCLOSURE:  I am not now, and never have been, a Southerner, a redneck, a plantation owner, slave holder, apologist for slavery, Civil War re-enactor on the Confederate (or Union) side, racist, or white supremacist.

I condemn slavery as a grave moral evil. I also condemn abortion as a grave moral evil. 

Holding that all lives matter, I hold that black lives matter, including unborn black lives.

The Left's Biggest Challenge at the Moment . . .

. . . is to figure out a way to politicize Hurricane Harvey and blame Trump for it.  Either him or the deplorable racist bigots who support him. I'm sure the race-baiting, totalitarian bastards will come up with something.

Maybe they can take a leaf from that great black leader Louis Farrakhan on Katrina: 

In comments in 2005, Farrakhan stated that there was a 25-foot (7.6 m) hole under one of the key levees that failed in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. He implied that the levee's destruction was a deliberate attempt to wipe out the population of the largely black sections within the city. Farrakhan later said that New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin told him of the crater during a meeting in Dallas, Texas.^[24] Farrakhan further claimed that the fact the levee broke the day after Hurricane Katrina is proof that the destruction of the levee was not a natural occurrence.

Why the Left Can't Let Go of Racism

Shelby Steele on the racism racket. 

After actual racist oppression of blacks was eliminated, the Left invented 'structural,' 'systemic,' or 'institutional' racism to keep the race hustle going. It was plain to objective investigators that the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown had nothing to do with race hatred. Those two brought about their own deaths by their own bad behavior.  But since they happened to be black, the Left seized on their deaths as examples of the imaginary construct, 'structural racism.'

To Understand the Religious Sensibility . . .

. . . two books are essential: Augustine's Confessions and Pascal's Pensées. If you read these books and they do not speak to you, if they do not move you, then it is a good bet that you don't have a religious bone in your body. It is not matter of intelligence but of sensibility.

"He didn't have a religious bone in his body." I recall that line from Stephanie Lewis' obituary for her husband David, perhaps the most brilliant American philosopher of the postwar period. He was highly intelligent and irreligious. Others are highly intelligent and religious. Among contemporary philosophers one could mention Alvin Plantinga, Peter van Inwagen, and Richard Swinburne. The belief that being intelligent rules out being religious casts doubt on the intelligence of those who hold it.

Let us suppose that you do not have the time or the stamina or the education to read Augustine's great book itself. Then I recommend to you on this, the feast day of St. Augustine, Peter Kreeft's I Burned for Your Peace: Augustine's Confessions Unpacked (Ignatius Press, 2016). It consists of key quotations with commentary by Kreeft.

But don't expect a high level of philosophical rigor. It is a work of popular apologetics by a master of that genre. 

Kreeft's lack of philosophical rigor is illustrated by his view that "The refutation of this materialism is simple." (147)

For a long time Augustine struggled with the question of how there could be purely spiritual realities such as God and the soul. He was in the grip of a materialism according to which everything that is real must have a bodily nature and occupy space. But then he noticed that the mental acts by which we form bodily images are not themselves bodily images. My image of a cat, for example, has shape and color, but the mental act of imagination does not have shape and color.  As Kreeft puts it:

The imagination cannot imagine itself. The understanding, however, can understand itself. We can have a concept of the act of conceiving, and we can also have a concept of the act of imagining. [. . .] The light of the projection machine must transcend the images it projects on the machine. A material image cannot create an image; only an immaterial soul can.

It is exceedingly strange that many otherwise intelligent philosophers today simply cannot see this point when they embrace a materialist "solution" to the mind-body problem." (148)

Now I reject materialism about the mind, but surely this is a dubious argument.  

It is not obvious that there are mental acts, but let us suppose there are.  So we distinguish the act of imagining a cat, from the object imagined, the cat.  Now it must be granted that phenomenological reflection fails to note any physical or spatial feature in the act of imagining or in any act of any type. When we introspect the operations of our minds we find no evidence that they are brain processes. But lack of evidence is not evidence of lack.  The lack of evidence that mental acts are material is not evidence that they are not material.  It might be that mental acts are brain processes, but that we are unable to cognize them in their true nature.  That they do not appear to be material does not prove that they are immaterial.

That's one problem. Second is that Kreeft moves immediately from the immateriality of mental acts to an immaterial soul substance as subject of these acts. That move needs to be mediated by argument. 

How Did We Get to be So Proud?

Recalling our miserably indigent origin in the wombs of our mothers and the subsequent helplessness of infancy, how did we get to be so arrogant and self-important?

In a line often (mis)attributed to St. Augustine, but apparently from Bernard of Clairvaux, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: "We are born between feces and urine." 

So inauspicious a beginning for so proud a strut upon life's stage.

Pride, result of the Fall, comes before a fall -- into the grave.

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A Christian Koan

Leftists Eat Their Own

That they eat each other alive  is the only thing I like about them. Buon appetito! Here:

Even the ACLU has run afoul of the thought police. They are taking enormous heat for a tweet featuring a cute little girl with an American flag and a shirt bearing the message “Free Speech.” They’re guilty of promoting “white supremacy” because the girl is deplorably white. Naturally, they apologized profusely. (emphasis added.)

So the ACLU is not just a bunch of leftist shysters. They are a bunch of pussy-wussy leftist shysters. Michael Medved has referred to them as the "American Criminal Liars Union."

Related:

The ACLU on the Second Amendment

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The Real Threat is the Orwellian Antifa

Please read this important article. Excerpt:

Yet, the media would have us believe that it is the white supremacist movement that is the real threat to our republic. Consider that most media estimates put the Antifa movement, largely built out of the “Occupy” movement of 2008-2010, at more than 200,000 members. The Southern Poverty Law Center, on the other hand, puts the number of Klu Klux Klan members at about 6,000 KKK …in a country of almost 330 million. But actions speak volumes compared to mere numbers.

The vandalized statue of Christopher Columbus? Antifa. The statue torn down in Charlotte, N.C.? Antifa. The violence in Charlottesville? Antifa. The violence in Seattle? Antifa. Not excusing the vile nature of the white supremacist protest, but it was a licensed march that remained comparatively nonviolent, albeit troubling, until, as one eyewitness described it, “It started raining balloons filled with urine, feces, paint, burning chemicals & boards with nails driven into them.”

[. . .]

Increasingly, the violence we are seeing on the streets is not the result of the alt-right movement, but of the Antifa movement imposing their views on our society: tearing down statues, burning the American flag, shutting down town hall meetings, destroying private property and looting. All of it tactical toward achieving the goals of destroying the American culture, society and economy. Never mind that the tactics are themselves the tactics of the fascist.

Yet, the likes of CNN and the New York Times and Washington Post spend much of their time touting the alt-right threat. Why? A couple of reasons. First, most mainstream media types are philosophically inclined toward anti-establishment organizations from the start; they see little wrong with crypto-fascist violence if the stated goals are in line with their own values systems.

A Christian Koan

Man is godlike and therefore proud.  He becomes even more godlike when he humbles himself.

The central thought of Christianity, true or not, is one so repellent to the natural human pride of life that one ought at least to entertain the unlikelihood of its having a merely human origin.  The thought is that God humbled himself to the point of entering the world in the miserably helpless and indigent way we in fact do, inter faeces et urinam, and to the point of leaving it in the most horrendous, shameful, and excruciating way the brutal Romans could devise, and from a most undistinguished spot, a hill in an obscure desert outpost of their empire.

Santa Monica and St. Monica

The California city is named after the Catholic saint, the mother of St. Augustine. Her feast day is today, 27 August. 

Now bring before your mind all of the wonderful place-names of Christian provenience. Do we have a plan to stop the barbarians when they, as they inevitably will, begin defacing, destroying, and re-naming?

The Professor-Student 'Non-Aggression Pact'

William J. Bennett and David Wilezol, Is College Worth It? (Thomas Nelson 2013), p. 134:

Knowing that students prefer to spend more time having fun than studying, professors are more comfortable awarding good grades while requiring a minimum amount of work.  In return, students give favorable personal evaluations to professors who desire to be well received by students as a condition of preserving their employment status.  Indeed, the popularity of the student evaluation, which began in the 1970s, has had a pernicious effect.

I would say so. Here is an anecdote to illustrate the Bennett thesis.  In early 1984 I was 'up for tenure.'  And so in the '83 fall semester I was more than usually concerned about the quality of my student evaluations.  One of my classes that semester was an upper-level seminar conducted in the library over a beautiful oak table.  One day one of the students began carving into the beautiful table with his pen.

In an abdication of authority that  part of me regrets and a part excuses, I said nothing. The student liked me and I knew it.  I expected a glowing recommendation from him and feared losing it.  So I held my tongue while the kid defaced university property.

Jeff H. and I had entered into a tacit 'non-aggression pact.' (And I got tenure.)

The problem is not that students are given an opportunity to comment upon and complain about their teachers.  The problem is the use to which student evaluations are put for tenure, promotion, and salary 'merit-increase' decisions.  My chairman at the time was an officious organization man who would calculate student evaluation averages to one or two decimal places, and then rank department members as to their teaching effectiveness.  Without getting into this too deeply for a blog post, there is something highly dubious about equating teaching effectiveness with whatever the student evaluations measure, and something absurd about the false precision of calculating averages out to one or two decimal places. 

Is Jones a better teacher than Smith because her average is 3.2 while his is only 3.1? Well, no, but if the chairman is asked to justify his decision, he can point to the numbers.  This is mindless quantification, but it takes someone more thoughtful than an administrator to see it.

I strongly recommend the Bennett-Wilezol book to anyone thinking of attending college or thinking of bankrolling someone's attendance.  Here is a review. 

George Neumayr

From his latest (emphasis added):

One of the arguments against Trump last year from critics ostensibly worried about the “integrity of conservatism” was that he would revert to Manhattanite liberalism. He hasn’t. But they have. They can be heard whining about his ban on cross-dressers and transsexuals in the military, his insufficient enthusiasm for Islamic migrants, and now his defense of Robert E. Lee.

Paul Ryan, deferring to the propaganda of the commissars, says Trump “messed up” with his post-Charlottesville remarks. Leave it to the stupid party to ratify the lies of the left. Trump said nothing untrue and has behaved far more honorably than his cowardly “conservative” critics. They joined the anti-Lee mob; he didn’t. Remember that the next time one of those critics clears his throat pompously about the “threat that Trump poses to the conservative movement.” Those who use that phrase the most advance it the least.

Neumayr punches effectively at the likes of Bozo de Blasio, Commissar Cuomo, Bret Stephens, and Bill 'Crack Up' Kristol.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Help

Before we get under way, a song in celebration of President Trump's pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona. A stinging rebuke to Obama & Co. and their contempt for the rule of law. 

Bobby Fuller Five, I Fought the Law and the Law Won

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

Canned Heat, Help Me. Help me consolate my weary mind. I love that 'consolate.'

Johnny Cash, Help Me.

Beach Boys, Help Me, Rhonda

Hank Williams, I Can't Help it If I'm Still in Love with You. Linda Ronstadt's version is wonderful, but does it get the length of the great Patsy Cline's?

Ringo Starr, With a Little Help from My Friends

Elvis Presley, Can't Help Falling in Love

Highwaymen, Help Me Make it Through the Night

Joni Mitchell, Help Me

Hank Locklin, Please Help Me, I'm Falling

Here is Skeeter Davis' answer to Hank.

Trump Pardons Joe Arpaio

And conservatives cheer. Of course. Paul Mirengoff gets it right:

Arpaio was accused by the Obama Justice Department and other left-wingers of targeting Hispanics. Indeed, the legal case that led to his conviction arose from claims of racial profiling. But in Maricopa County, the illegal immigrant population is overwhelmingly Hispanic. Had the County been plagued by mass illegal immigration by Koreans, chances are Sheriff Joe would have targeted Asians. And he would have been right to do so. Sheriffs shouldn’t be expected to check their common sense at the door.

To be sure, the pardon of Arpaio is, at least in part, a political act by a president who campaigned on a tough-as-nails immigration policy and who received Arpaio’s backing. But there’s a pretty good argument that the prosecution of Arpaio was also political.

It was the highly politicized, left-wing Obama Justice Department that chose to prosecute Arpaio in connection with the hot button political issue of enforcing immigration laws. The judge whose order Arpaio defied apparently was satisfied with civil contempt. Team Obama went criminal on the octogenarian sheriff. And it did so, according to Arpaio’s lawyers, just two weeks before he stood for reelection.

The pardon thus can be said to represent a political end to a political case.

Some may defend the pardon by comparing it to egregious pardons of the past, like President Clinton’s pardon of wealthy fugitive Marc Rich and President Obama’s pardon of a Puerto Rican terrorist. Arguing form [from] these outliers strikes me as misguided. Their pardons were so flagrantly unjust that the same argument could be used to defend a great many indefensible pardons.

No such argument is required to defend Trump’s pardon of Arpaio. It was a reasonable exercise of the pardon power.

Clinton and Obama used the pardon power destructively, pardoning scumbags. Trump used it constructively, pardoning one who upheld the rule of law.

You say Arpaio is a racist? Do you understand that illegal aliens do not constitute a race?

But there is no point in addressing liberals with rational arguments. They don't inhabit the plane of reason. They will ignore your arguments and go right back to calling you a racist. They have found that that works, and they are out to win by any means.

My Wife

Other wives say to their men: "Why can't you be like so-and-so?" My wife regularly tells me that she's glad I'm not like so-and-so.

Grateful wife, happy life.  I bless the day I found her.

Automotive Profiling

'Profiling' drives liberals crazy, which is a good reason to do more of it.  No day without political incorrectness.  Here is a form of profiling I engage in, and you should too.

You are on the freeway exercising due diligence.  You are not drunk or stoned or yapping on a cell phone.  You espy an automotively dubious vehicle up ahead, muddied, dented, with muffler about to fall off, and a mattress 'secured' to the roof. The vehicle is within its lane, but weaving.

Do you keep your distance?  If you are smart, you do.  But then you a profiling.  You are making a judgment as to the relative likelihood of that vehicle's being the cause of an accident.  You are inferring something about the sort of person that would be on the road in such a piece of junk.  Tail light out?  Then maybe brakes bad. Weaving? Then maybe texting or sexting.

I don't need to tell you motorcyclists how important automotive profiling is.

You are doing right.  You are engaging in automotive profiling.  You are pissing off liberals.  They will call you a racist, but keep it up and stay alive.  We need more of your kind.

Is Trump Divisive?

To say of Trump or anyone that he is divisive is to say that he promotes (political) division. But there is no need to promote it these days since we already have plenty of it. We are a deeply and perhaps irreparably divided nation.  So it is not right to say that Trump is divisive: he is standing on one side of an already existing divide.

Trump did not create the divide between those who stand for the rule of law and oppose sanctuary cities, porous borders, and irresponsibly lax legal immigration policies.  What he did is take up these issues fearlessly, something his milque-toast colleagues could not bring themselves to do.  

And he has met with some success: illegal immigration is down some 50%. 

Liberals call him a bigot, a racist, a xenophobe. That they engage in this slander shows that the nation is bitterly divided over fundamental questions. 

Too often journalistic word-slingers shoot first and ask questions never. Wouldn't it be nice if they thought before their lemming-like and knee-jerk deployment of such adjectives as 'divisive'?

Language matters.

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Willie Horton Revisited

From William Voegeli, Liberals, Shipwrecked:

As a result, identity politics determined the Democratic reaction in 1988 when George W. Bush’s presidential campaign raised the “Willie Horton” issue against his opponent, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. It was intolerable, liberal activists and journalists declared, to bring to public attention an incident where a black man had brutalized a white couple. What was tolerable, by implication, was a policy (unique to Massachusetts) that gave violent felons, serving life sentences and ineligible for parole, unsupervised furloughs. Little wonder that Joe Sixpack voters tuned into Reagan Democrats as they came to associate liberalism with “profligacy, spinelessness, malevolence, masochism, elitism, fantasy, anarchy, idealism, softness, irresponsibility, and sanctimoniousness,” as sociologist Jonathan Rieder put it in Canarsie (1985). To this day, Democrats think that what Bush said about Willie Horton was outrageous but that what Dukakis did was, at worst, unfortunate. (emphasis added)

I have a confession to make. I voted for Dukakis in 1988! Do I have an excuse? If I have one, it is that my 'default setting' is apolitical. I'm a metaphysician by inclination, and I remain so inclined. I was a registered Democrat until 1991.  But when I started to think concretely about social and political matters with the help of John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and the classics, I realized that there was very little to keep me among the Dems, a bunch that was increasingly moving in the direction of hard leftism and identity politics.

One thing that stuck in my craw and still does is that libs and lefties have a disgustingly casual attitude toward criminal behavior. You can rely on them  to take the side of the screw-up, the criminal, and the underdog even when the underdog is responsible for his sub-canine status. And this while making it difficult for the decent citizen to protect himself by Second Amendment means from the criminal element that liberals coddle.  

Is there one Dem nowadays who supports the death penalty? No. (Correct me if I am wrong!) This is clear proof that this party of obstructionist crapweasels is bereft of moral sense. (I seem to be warming to my theme.) Capital punishment is precisely what justice demands in certain well-defined cases. 

Willie Horton was one bad hombre.

More Proof that Leftists are Vile

Aayan Hirsi Ali, Why is the Southern Poverty Law Center Targeting Liberals?

PayPal bans Jihad Watch.

Santa Monica tries but fails to prevent Dennis Prager from conducting.

Jordan Peterson on the Problem with Atheism

Earlier this evening I was watching Tucker Carlson. He had a psychology professor on whose YouTube videos had been blocked  by Google but then later unblocked. His name is Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto. I had never heard of him, and his performance on Carlson's show was not particularly impressive.  Having viewed his The Problem with Atheism, however, I am now impressed! 

My finding of this video is serendipitous in that it ties in with a discussion I was having yesterday with Malcolm Pollack. Malcolm is a naturalist and atheist in the Dennett-Dawkins-Harris camp.  He seems to think that an objective, agreed-upon, and life-enhancing morality has no need of a transcendent foundation, and perhaps also that there is no need that the majority believe in any such transcendent foundation. In an earlier thread Malcolm wrote:

. . . one can accept the principle of equality before the law, based on a fundamental sense of shared humanity and liberty, merely as a stipulation, a premise one accepts because one thinks it leads to a just society, without belief in a transcendent foundation in God. It is simply a choice that a person, or a society, can make; we do that with all sorts of other premises and conventions.

I replied:

Can someone who emphasizes the biologically-based differences between groups and sees cultural differences percolating up out of those differences [justifiably] appeal to a "sense of shared humanity" sufficiently robust to support equality before the law?

It may be that the West is running on fumes, the last vapors of the Judeo-Christian worldview and that your sense of equal justice for all is but a vestige of that dying worldview. Can belief in that moral code survive when belief in a transcendent Ground thereof is lost? The death of God has consequences, as Nietzsche appreciated.

This is the question that Professor Peterson addresses with passion and skill and with a slam or two at Sam Harris. (3:03) Peterson's point is essentially the one that Nietzsche made: belief in and respect for the authority  of Christian morality stands and falls with belief in the Christian God.  The death of God-belief in the West among the educated classes leads inevitably to moral nihilism.  

Malcolm thinks we needn't drag the Transcendent into it; we can just agree on some set of moral conventions that will guide us.  Sounds utopian to me. We don't agree on anything anymore: so how can we agree on this?  Because it would be the rational thing to do to insure human flourishing?

But why should one care about the flourishing of anyone outside of oneself and one's tribe? Peterson raises the question of why it would be irrational, say, to exploit others for one's use and enjoyment.  Why is it irrational for the strong to enslave the weak?  How is pure naked self-interest irrational, Peterson asks. (3:53)

Your move, Malcolm.

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Who was Marshall McLuhan and how did he predict the internet?

At Funerals

At funerals one hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going home to the Lord. In many cases, this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the bloom of life, one gave him no thought? He who loves the things of this world as if they are ultimate realities ought perhaps to hope that death is annihilation.

Epitaph

Too obscure
To be forgot
Here lies one real
Enough to rot.

Liberalism-Leftism as a Cognitive Aberration

Each day's newsfeed brings another dozen or so examples of how libs and lefties are losing their collective marbles and earning their epithets libtard and leftard.  Here is just one recent example for your astonishment:

It was a story too dumb to be real: reports yesterday emerged from ESPN critic Clay Travis at Outkick the Coverage that ESPN had pulled an Asian announcer named Robert Lee off a University of Virginia college football game to avoid offending idiots. I have to admit, I didn’t think it could be true. How unbelievably stupid do you have to be to think that someone whose name is similar to a Confederate general – albeit absent the all-important middle initial – would lead to triggering and upset viewers if he called a Charlottesville-based sporting event.

Please pray for these sick puppies.  Unfortunately, many of them are not just sick but vicious to boot which suggests that harsher treatments may be called for.

Another Uncompelling Argument in Illustration of Our Pascalian Predicament

This relates to my earlier discussion with Dr. Novak. See articles referenced infra. A reader thinks the following syllogism establishes its conclusion:

a) What doesn't have necessity from itself is caused;

b) The contingent does not have necessity from itself;

Ergo

c) The contingent is caused.

An argument establishes its conclusion just in case: (i) the argument is deductive; (ii) the argument is valid in point of logical form; (iii) the premises are all of them objectively certain. Establish is a very strong word; it is as strong as, and equivalent to, prove.

The argument above is a valid deductive argument, and the minor is true by definition. The major, however, is not objectively certain. In fact, it is not even true. The impossible doesn't have necessity from itself, but it has no cause since it doesn't exist.

But a repair is easily made. Substitute for (a)

a*) Whatever exists, but does not have necessity from itself, is caused.

Then the argument, for all we know, might be sound. But it still does not establish its conclusion.  For the major, even if true, is not objectively certain.  Ask yourself:

Is the negation of the repaired major a formal-logical contradiction? No. Is it an analytic proposition? No. Does it glow with the light of Cartesian self-evidence like 'I seem to see a tree' or 'I feel nauseous'? No.

So how can Novak & Co. be objectively certain that (a*) is true?  This proposition purports to be about objective reality; it purports to move us beyond logical forms, concepts, and mental states. Nice work if you can get it, to cop a signature phrase from the late, great David M. Armstrong.  (For the record: I reject Armstrong's naturalism and atheism.)

I conjecture that it is the overwhelmingly strong doxastic security needs of dogmatists that prevent them from appreciating what I am saying. They cannot tolerate uncertainty, and so they manufacture a certainty that isn't there.

That being said, Dr. Novak may like my Pascalian conjecture that it is due to the Fall of Man that we are in this suboptimal epistemic predicament, the predicament of craving certainty without being able to attain it.

Related articles

Is It Epistemically Certain that Whatever Begins to Exist is Caused?

Are Any Substantive Philosophical Propositions Epistemically Certain?

Victor Davis Hanson on Joan Baez and Abolitio Memoriae

In Our War Against Memory, Hanson writes (hyperlinks added),

How about progressive icon Joan Baez? Should the Sixties folksinger seek forgiveness from us for reviving her career in the early 1970s with the big money-making hit “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”— her version of The Band’s sympathetic ode to the tragedy of a defeated Confederacy, written over a century after the Civil War. (“Back with my wife in Tennessee / When one day she called to me / Said, “Virgil, quick, come see / There goes the Robert E. Lee!”) If a monument is to be wiped away, then surely a popular song must go, too.

[. . .]

The logical trajectory of tearing down the statue of a Confederate soldier will soon lead to the renaming of Yale, the erasing of Washington and Jefferson from our currency, and the de-Trotskyization of every mention of Planned Parenthood’s iconic Margaret Singer, the eugenicist whose racist views on abortion anticipated those of current liberal Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (Ginsburg said, “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”)

[. . .]

The strangest paradox in the current epidemic of abolitio memoriae is that our moral censors believe in ethical absolutism and claim enough superior virtue to apply it clumsily across the ages — without a clue that they fall short of their own moral pretensions, and that one day their own icons are as likely be stoned as the icons of others are now apt to be torn down by black-mask-wearing avengers.

A final paradox about killing the dead: Two millennia after Roman autocrats’ destruction of statues, and armed with the creepy 20th-century model of Fascists and Communists destroying the past, we, of a supposedly enlightened democracy, cannot even rewrite history by democratic means — local, state, and federal commission recommendations, referenda, or majority votes of elected representatives. More often, as moral cowards, we either rely on the mob or some sort of executive order enforced only in the dead of night.

More on Dreher vs Buchanan on "All Men are Created Equal" and White Supremacy

Dr. Patrick Toner comments and I respond in blue:

Your piece on Dreher and Buchanan accepts Dreher's overall reading (or misreading, as I see it) of Buchanan's argument -- you seem to accept that Buchanan actually means to somehow call into doubt the metaphysical doctrine of the equality of men.  This seems clearly wrong to me.  

 

But before coming to that point, I want to check with you about another thing, namely, Dreher's accusation that Buchanan is openly endorsing white supremacy in his essay.  Things you've said elsewhere about the failure to define terms such as "white supremacy" make me hesitant to actually ascribe to you the belief that Buchanan is a white supremacist, but if that's right--if you aren't accepting the white supremacy charge--at any rate nothing in Sunday's piece makes that explicit.  And when you end your piece by talking about Buchanan "apparently repudiating" the doctrine of equality, there is at least a hint that you're willing to accept the charge.

BV: Thank you for these fine comments, Patrick. As a philosopher you understand the importance of defining terms. And yet you haven't offered us a definition of 'white supremacist.' Absent a definition, we cannot reasonably discuss whether or not Pitchfork Pat is a white supremacist, and whether the white supremacy charge is clearly bunk as you claim it is.

 

We could mean different things by the phrase 'white supremacist' and cognates.  I hope you will agree with me, however, that the phrase is actually used by most people emotively as a sort of semantic bludgeon or verbal cudgel for purely polemical purposes in much the same way that 'racist,' 'Islamophobe,' 'fascist,' and other emotive epithets are used.  On this usage, no morally decent and well-informed person could be a white supremacist.  The implication is that a white supremacist is a bigot, i.e., an unreasonably intolerant person who hates others just because they are different. It is a term of very serious disapprobation.

 

I would guess that you understand 'white supremacist' in something very close to this sense -- which is why you take umbrage at Dreher's claim that Buchanan is a white supremacist. Bear in mind that that is Dreher's claim. I don't make it. My point of agreement with Dreher is solely on the question of the meaning of "All men are created equal."  It is spectacularly clear that, in the piece in question, Buchanan shows a lack of understanding of the meaning of the sentence.  Buchanan reads it as an empirical claim subject to falsification by experience.  It is not, as I explain in my parent post. Here again is what he wrote:

 

“All men are created equal” is an ideological statement. Where is the scientific or historic proof for it? Are we building our utopia on a sandpile of ideology and hope?

I was really surprised when I read that. It occurred to me that it might just be a slip occasioned by old age, anger at recent developments, or too much Irish whisky.

 

Now consider the following candidate definition of 'white supremacist.'

 

D1. A white supremacist is one who holds that the culture and civilization produced by whites is, on balance, superior to the cultures and civilizations produced by all other racial groups.

 

One could be a white supremacist in this sense and hold all of the following: (a) Slavery is a grave moral evil; (b) All men are created equal in the sense I explained; (c) No citizen should be excluded from the franchise because of race; (d) No citizen should be excluded from holding public office because of race; (e) All citizens regardless of race are equal before the law.

 

Buchanan might well be a white supremacist in the (D1)-sense.  Here is a bit of evidence: "Was not the British Empire, one of the great civilizing forces in human history, a manifestation of British racial superiority?"  Buchanan is not saying that the Brits merely thought themselves to be racially superior but that they really were. 

 

I think the white supremacy charge is clearly bunk--or at any rate, I'll say this: nothing in that particular column of Buchanan's can reasonably support a charge of white supremacy.  And I don't say that on the basis that "white supremacy" hasn't been adequately defined, or any other such technicality.  I just mean it should be clear that Buchanan's point is not to endorse white supremacy, but simply to point out that if that charge applies to Lee and co, then it applies to Washington and Jefferson and co, and indeed then we need to throw out the whole western culture that gave us the metaphysical doctrine of equality.  

BV: Again, unless you tell us what you mean by 'white supremacy,' there is no way to evaluate what you are saying. The matter of definition is not a mere technicality; it is crucial. I sketched two senses of 'white supremacist,' the 'semantic bludgeon' sense and (D1).  Now I agree that Buchanan is not a white supremacist in the first sense, but it looks like he is in the second.  So I totally reject your claim that "nothing in that particular column of Buchanan's can reasonably support a charge of white supremacy." 

 

You are also failing to appreciate that, just like an alt-righty, he shows no understanding of "All men are created equal." He is clearly giving it an empirical sense. That's blindingly obvious. Now I am going just on this one column. Perhaps in other works he says something intelligent on this point.  This is why Dreher is right against Buchanan despite the former's over-the-top rhetoric.

 

And then on to the next point: having thrown out the grounding upon which that doctrine stands, upon what shall we build our egalitarian utopia?  We can't re-establish the equality doctrine on some universally-acceptable empirical ground!  Buchanan doesn't doubt the equality doctrine: he points out that the iconoclasts seeking to build their new world on it, have no basis upon which to rationally accept it.  It's not a new or brilliant claim--it's pretty standard and obvious, I'd have thought.

 

BV: I am not quite sure what you are driving at here, but a tripartite distinction may help:

 

a) The Declaration sentence is empirical but false.

b) The Declaration sentence is empirical and true.

c)  The Declaration sentence is metaphysical, and thus non-empirical.

 

The alt-righties accept (a). The loons on the Left accept (b).  You and I accept (c).  You and I agree that the equality doctrine cannot be built on empirical ground.  I would guess that you and I also agree that if the Declaration sentence is making an empirical claim, then that claim is false.

 

I wrote this up yesterday in a little blog post, and I'm encouraged a bit in my reading (not that, in truth, I doubted it before!) by finding this column (not by Buchanan) posted today on Buchanan's website.  

Generally, I try to follow the advice of Thoreau, "read not the Times, read the eternities," and so I ignore such issues.  But I do read your blog faithfully, and for some reason--maybe just a lingering respect for Buchanan, who has always struck me as a decent man--you prompted me to read a bit of political ephemera to try to sort it out.  :)  

I hope you're doing well!  

 

BV: Thank you, sir.  I think we agree on the main issues, except that I really think it is important to define 'white supremacist' and not bandy it about unclarified.

 

I too love the Thoreau aphorism (and I'll bet you found it on my site; if not, forgive me my presumption) but I would add that in dangerous times one has to attend to the Times lest our enemies win and make it impossible for us to read the Eternities. Boethius was able to do philosophy in a prison cell, but most of us lesser mortal are not Boethian in this regard.

 

Keep your powder dry! (May the loons of the Left vex themselves over whether this is some sort of 'dog whistle.' It does have a Pitchfork Pat, "locked and loaded" ring to it.)

Liberals are So Stupid A Cartoon Suffices to Refute Them

The Political Burden of Proof

As contemporary 'liberals' become ever more extreme, they increasingly assume what I 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.

How Bad are Nazis?

Kurt Schlichter:

. . . Nazis are so bad that you have to devote all your hating capacity to hating Nazis such that there's no room left to hate anybody else. Those hammer and sickle flag-carrying Communists? Well, you must love the Nazis if you hate them, because you have got to hate the Nazis with all your mind and all your heart since, as we learned this week, Nazis are bad. I'm so glad that our moral betters have this all figured out.

I would have thought that one could and should morally condemn numerous groups all at once including the fascists of the Left who have the chutzpah to name themselves 'antifa,' the thugs of Black Lives Matter, that vicious anti-cop operation that takes its inspiration from brazen lies about Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown of Ferguson 'fame,' the leftist termites who have infiltrated the universities and preside over the shouting-down of the speakers of truth, Muslim terrorists and their leftist enablers, and so on -- but not excluding Nazis and neo-Nazis.

It has been fascinating to watch, over the last ten days or so, so-called conservatives falling all over themselves in a crazy attempt to achieve the apotheosis of high dudgeon in the condemnation of one relatively minor bunch of scumbags. Why? So that leftists will finally like you? Forget about it. It won't happen. To them you will always be a racist no matter what you say or do.  

Related articles

Politics and Language

I'm a Racist Because I Like Chess

I left the house at 5:15 this morning, hiked 45 minutes over the local hills to arrive at 6:00 sharp at Gecko Espresso where I met up with Lowell S. a local chess aficionado.  We played under the influence of caffeine for a solid two hours, one game, recorded, to be analyzed when next we meet. I checkmated the old man. 

Chess is a delightful game, especially when you win. An oasis of sanity in an insane world. But we must admit that it is a deeply racist game and that all who play it are racists. The following excerpt from a cognate post explains why.

Another proof that chess is racist and oppressive and ought to be banned is that blacks are woefully under-represented among its players. This evil can have only one explanation: racist suppression of black players. For everyone knows that blacks as a group are the equals of whites as a group in respect of intelligence, interest in chess, and the sorts of virtues needed to play the undemocratic and reactionary 'Royal Game.' Among these are the ability to study hard, defer gratification, and keep calm in trying situations.

For these and many other reasons, we must DEMAND that chess be banned.

We must manifest solidarity with our oppressed Taliban brothers who have maintained, truly, that chess is an evil game of chance.

If Narcissus Had a Blog . . .

. . . what would it be called?

Facebook.

Warning to University Admins: Abdication of Authority Carries a Cost

The cardinal virtues are four: temperance, prudence, justice, and courage. Of the four, courage is the most difficult to exercise. So it is no surprise that cowardice is so widespread among university administrators. There is no coward like a university administrator, to cop a line from Dennis Prager.

But the cowardice that issues in abdication of authority and the refusal to stand up for the classical values of the university in the face of barbarians and know-nothings comes with a cost, literally.

The University of Missouri is one of many universities where the administrative pussy-wussies are feeling the pinch:

Donors, parents, alumni, sports fans and prospective students raged against the administration’s caving in. “At breakfast this morning, my wife and I agreed that MU is NOT a school we would even consider for our three children,” wrote Victor Wirtz, a 1978 alum, adding that the university “has devolved into the Berkeley of the Midwest.”

As classes begin this week, freshmen enrollment is down 35% since the protests, according to the latest numbers the university has publicly released. Mizzou is beginning the year with the smallest incoming class since 1999. Overall enrollment is down by more than 2,000 students, to 33,200. The campus has taken seven dormitories out of service.

The plummeting support has also cost jobs. In May, Mizzou announced it would lay off as many as 100 people and eliminate 300 more positions through retirement and attrition. Last year the university reduced its library staff and cut 50 cleaning and maintenance jobs.

Mizzou’s 2016 football season drew almost 13,000 fewer attendees than in 2015, local media reported. During basketball games, one-third of the seats in the Mizzou Arena sat empty.

[. . .]

This phenomenon isn’t limited to Mizzou. Private institutions like Yale and Middlebury aren’t covered by public-records laws, so they can conceal the backlash. But when public universities have released emails after giving in to campus radicals, they have consistently shown administrators face the same public outrage.

Virginia Tech received numerous phone calls and more than 100 angry emails last year after it disinvited Jason Riley, a columnist for this newspaper, from speaking on campus. “While we can respond to the people who write to us, we cannot dispel the negative impression created by the media against the president, the university, the dean and the college and the department,” one administrator woefully told his colleagues.

Virginia Tech administrators also noted that news of the debacle reached millions on Twitter, where the reactions were “overwhelmingly negative toward the university and higher education in general.” Once again, a frustrated public vowed to yank support.

Universities have consistently underestimated the power of a furious public. At the same time, they’ve overestimated the power of student activists, who have only as much influence as administrators give them. Far from avoiding controversy, administrators who respond to campus radicals with cowardice and capitulation should expect to pay a steep price for years.

WSJ's Jason Riley, mentioned above, is one seriously black dude.  But he wasn't prevented from speaking because of his race but because he refuses to toe the Party Line: he is a conservative black and therefore, to a leftist shithead, 'a traitor to his race.'

This shows that the overpaid administrative assholes at Mizzou and elsewhere have no clue as to the purposes of a university.  You can't reach them with reasons, but they are very sensitive to emolument.

Were university admins always cowards?  No!

See Three Profiles in Civil Courage Among University Administrators 

Dreher contra Buchanan on "All men are created equal"

Rod Dreher quotes Patrick J. Buchanan:

“All men are created equal” is an ideological statement. Where is the scientific or historic proof for it? Are we building our utopia on a sandpile of ideology and hope?

Dreher responds:

With that, Buchanan repudiates not only the founding principle of our Constitutional order, but also a core teaching of the Christian faith, which holds that all men are created in the image of God. 

I am with Dreher on this without sharing quite the level of high dudgeon that he expresses in his piece. 

I am always surprised when people do not grasp the plain sense of the "that all Men are created equal" clause embedded in the opening sentence of the second paragraph of the American Declaration of Independence. It cannot be charitably interpreted as a statement of empirical fact. If it were so interpreted, it would be false. For we all know, and certainly the Founders knew, that human beings are NOT equal as a matter of empirical fact either as individuals or as groups.

Suppose a statement can be interpreted in two ways. One way it comes out plainly false; the other way it comes out either true or plausible or not obviously untrue. Then what I understand the Principle of Charity to require is that we go the second way. 

For Buchanan to demand "scientific or historic proof" shows deep misunderstanding. For again, the claim is not empirical. Is it then a normative claim as Mona Charen (quoted by Dreher) seems to suggest? It implies normative propositions, but it is not itself a normative proposition. It is a metaphysical statement. It is like the statement that God exists or that the physical universe is a divine creation. Both of the latter statements are non-empirical. No natural science can either prove them or disprove them. But neither of them are normative.  

Note that the Declaration's claim is not that all men are equal but that all men are created equal. In such a carefully crafted document, the word 'created' must be doing some work. What might that be?

There cannot be creatures (created items) without a Creator. That's a conceptual truth, what Kant calls an analytic proposition. So if man is created equal, then he is created by a Creator. The Creator the founders had in mind was the Christian God, and these gentlemen had, of course, read the Book of Genesis wherein we read that God made man in his image and likeness. That implies that man is not a mere animal in nature, but a spiritual being, a god-like being, possessing free will and an eternal destiny. Essential to the Judeo-Christian worldview is the notion that man is toto caelo different from the rest of the animals. He is an animal all right, but a very special one. This idea is preserved even in Heidegger who speaks of an Abgrund zwischen Mensch und Tier. The difference between man and animal is abysmal or, if you prefer, abyssal. Man alone is Da-Sein, the 'There' of Being; man alone is endowed with Seinsverstaendnis, an understanding (of) Being.  But I digress onto a Black Forest path.

Now if all men, whether male or female, black or white, are created equal by God, and this equality is a metaphysical determination (Bestimmung in the sense of both a distinctive determination and a vocation) then we have here the metaphysical basis for the normative claim that all men ought to be treated equally, that all men ought to enjoy equally the same  unalienable rights, among them, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.  (We note en passant that these are negative rights!)

All men are normatively equal because they are metaphysically equal. They are the latter because they are spiritual beings deriving from one and the same spiritual source.  Each one of us is a person just as God is a person. We are equal as persons even though we are highly unequal as animals.

Without this theological basis it is difficult to see how there could be any serious talk of equality of persons. As the alt-righties and the neoreactionaries like to say, we are not (empirically) equal either as individuals or as groups. They are absolutely right about that.   

Dreher is also right that the theologically-grounded equality of persons is "the founding principle of our Constitutional order," and thus of our political order.  Repudiate it, as Buchanan seems to be doing, and you undermine our political order.

What then does our political order rest on if the equality of persons is denied? 

Related: Sullivan is Right: Universalism Hasn't Been Debunked

Saturday Night at the Oldies: 'The King' Dead Forty Years

Elvis Presley died on 16 August 1977, 40 years ago. We can't let this weekend pass without a few tunes in commemoration.

First a couple of 'Italian' numbers modeled, respectively, on O Sole Mio and Torna a Surriento: 

It's Now or Never

Surrender

Continuing in the romantic vein:

Can't Help Falling in Love.  A version by Andrea Bocelli. A woman for a heterosexual man is the highest finite object. The trick is to avoid idolatry and maintain custody of the heart.

A Gospel number:

Amazing Grace

From the spiritual to the secular:

Little Sister

Marie's the Name of his Latest Flame

Devil in Disguise

And then there was hokey stuff like this reflecting his time in the Army in Germany:

Wooden Heart

Can't leave out the overdone and hyperromantic:

The Wonder of You. (Per mia moglie)

Out of time. Next stop: Judge Jeannine.

Why Something rather than Nothing? The 'Why not?' Response

According to a presumably apocryphal story, Martin Heidegger asked G. E. Moore, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Moore replied, "Why not?" A reader finds the 'Moorean' response cheap and unphilosophical. Let's think about this.

Suppose we ask a related but more tractable question: Why does the universe exist? and we get the response: Why not? Why shouldn't it exist?  Charitably interpreted, the response amounts to the suggestion that the question is gratuitous or unmotivated or unnecessary in the sense of unneeded.

Some explanation-seeking why-questions are gratuitous. (It is worth noting that grammatically interrogative formulations such as 'Why does anything at all exist?' might be used merely as expressions of wonder that the, or a, universe exists, and not as requests for an explanation. Here we are concerned with ultimate explanations.)

Suppose it is 110 degrees Fahrenheit.  I walk into your house where the temperature is a pleasant 80 degrees. If I were to ask why the air conditioning is on, you would be puzzled. "Why shouldn't it be on?"

But if your house were a miserable 95 degrees and I asked why the air conditioning was not on, or why it was so bloody hot in there, you would give some such answer as: "My A.C. unit is on the fritz; the repairman should be here in a couple of hours."

My first question is gratuitous; my second question is not. Some things need explaining; other things don't need explaining. 

Perhaps it is like that with the universe. Why should anyone think that it needs an explanation in terms of some item transcendent of it such as the One of Plotinus or the God of Aquinas? 

I assume, quite reasonably, that the universe U is modally contingent. Thus it does not exist of metaphysical necessity, the way God exists if he exists; nor is U's existence metaphysically impossible.  U exists, but it might not have: its nonexistence is possible.  That is to say: U exists, but its nonexistence is not ruled out by the laws of logic or the laws of metaphysics.  It exists, but its nonexistence is neither logically nor metaphysically impossible.

But if x is modally contingent, 'contingent' for short, it does not straightaway follow that x depends for its existence on something. It is a mistake to conflate modal contingency with contingency-on-something. That is an important conceptual/semantic point. 

So it might be like this: U exists, and exists contingently, but it exists without cause or reason or explanation. If this is the case, then we say that the universe exists as a matter of brute fact. The factuality of the fact resides in its existence; the 'brutality' in (a) its contingency and (b) its lacking a ground, cause, reason, explanation.

I conclude that one cannot argue a contingentia mundi to a prima causa without a preliminary demonstration that our ultimate explanation-seeking why-question is not gratuitous. Before one can mount a cosmological argument from a contingent universe to a transcendent Cause, one must show or at least give a good reason to think that the universe needs an explanation.

In my published work on this topic I argue that contingent particulars, taken by themselves as "independent reals" are contradictory structures. But they patently exist, and nothing can exist that is self-contradictory. So there must be something transcending th realm of contingent particulars to remove the contradiction. Now I cannot go into the many details here and fill in the steps in the argument, but the main point I want to make, in answer to my reader's query, is that it is not unphilosophical to take seriously the 'Why not?' response.

One needs to be able to show that the question, Why does the universe exist? is not gratuitous. 

Define or Drop

For leftists, words are weapons. If you are a lefty, and you disagree, then I invite you to define 'fascist,' 'racist,' 'white supremacist,' and the rest of the epithets in your arsenal. Define 'em or drop 'em.

Show us that you are people of good will.

Suppose I point out the incompatibility of Sharia with Western values and you call me an 'Islamophobe.' You thereby demonstrate that you are not a person of good will.  A person of good will does not dismiss the arguments of his rational interlocutor as driven by a phobia.  Here is a good illustration of what I mean when I say that for leftists, words are weapons, or as I also like to say, "semantic bludgeons."

Although righties are far less offensive in this regard, they too must be held to the standard of define or drop.

There were those who called Obama a socialist. But there can be no reasonable discussion of whether he is or isn't without a preliminary clarification of the term.  If a socialist is one who advocates the collective or government ownership of the means of production, then I know of no statement of Obama's in which he advocated any such thing.

Am I being soft on one of the worst presidents in American history? No, I am just being fair.

Related articles

Spotify bans white supremacist bands, as Apple CEO Tim Cook denounces neo-Nazis

How to Know You are in a Mass Hysteria Bubble

Scott Adams:

The most visible Mass Hysteria of the moment involves the idea that the United States intentionally elected a racist President. If that statement just triggered you, it might mean you are in the Mass Hysteria bubble. The cool part is that you can’t fact-check my claim you are hallucinating if you are actually hallucinating. But you can read my description of the signs of mass hysteria and see if you check off the boxes.

Silicon Valley Robber Barons

Victor Davis Hanson

Malcolm Pollack

A Site Stat Coincidence

Yesterday and the day before this site received the same number of page views, 1,559.   That's never happened before. Deep Meaning or mere coincidence? I reckon the latter. (Total page views since Halloween, 2008: 4.3 million.)

In any case, I thank you all for your patronage. Any complaints? Double your money back if not completely satisfied.

At the Orgy of Pseudo-Conservative Self-Righteousness

George Neumayr

Nancy and Maxine

Nancy is just stupid. Maxine is also putrid.

The Kristol Crackup

You say that 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' is an over-the-top expression? Well, I bid you consider the sad case of Bill Kristol and his tweeting, twittering, meltdown.

I am put in mind of the opening line of Allen Ginsberg's Howl: 

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness . . . .

"So sad!" as the Orange Man might say.

Some Questions About White Privilege

A demanding entry from 1 September 2014. Not for liberals. It requires thought.

Is Islam a Religion of Peace?

A video by Aayan Hirsi Ali. 5:09. Can you spare five minutes to improve your thinking on this topic?

Is Islam a religion of peace? Is it compatible with Western liberalism? Or does Islam need a reformation, just as Christianity had the Protestant Reformation? Somali-born author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali explains.

What is White Supremacy?

Robert Paul Wolff offers the following:

Hatred has fundamentally very little to do with White Supremacy.  White Supremacy is a policy of domination and economic superiority of Whites in a multi-racial society.  African-Americans are not worried about whether White people want to be friends.  Most of the African-Americans I know have quite enough friends, thank you very much.  African-Americans demand legal, economic, and political equality.  And that terrifies many Whites, who do not want to give up the superior legal, political, and economic position in American society that they acquired through being born White.

Perhaps Malcolm Pollack will comment on this definition over at his place. He tilts in the alt-right direction; I reject the alt-right.

Here are some preliminary thoughts/questions of my own.

1) If White Supremacy is a policy, who is implementing it? The government?  Is the government insuring the economic superiority of Whites? How? By what programs? 

2) Blacks have every right to demand legal and political equality, but they cannot reasonably demand economic equality. That is something they have to work for.  

3) Whites are in an economically superior position to blacks, no doubt, but one cannot validly infer from this that Blacks have been unjustly discriminated against. 

4) It is false that Whites enjoy by birth legal and political privileges denied to Blacks.  If you think they do, name the privileges.  

5) Suppose a white Southerner considers slavery a grave moral evil and is glad the Union was preserved. He opposes, however, the Left's iconoclasm re: statues of Robert E. Lee, et al.  Is this person a White supremacist?

6) If 'white supremacist' is not to be just another smear word like 'racist,' then it has to be defined. How ought it be defined?

7) Suppose Whites as a group are superior to Blacks as a group in some respect R, and suppose Jones points this out.  Is Jones a white supremacist with respect to R?  This raises the question: How can White Supremacism with respect to R be a bad thing, which it is supposed to be, if it is true?

8) Wolff's decoupling of White Supremacy from hatred suggests that he is thinking of it as something 'institutional' or 'systemic.' Are our institutions white supremacist? What might that even mean given that our institutions allowed for the elimination of slavery and Jim Crow?

Addendum (8/18)

Malcolm Pollack responds, and I agree (red emphasis mine, italics his):

Consider: a generation of identitarian politics across the West has deliberately cultivated tribal resentments among non-whites. For decades white people have been blamed in media and academia for all the world’s ills, while aggressive immigration policies have openly sought to make them minorities in every one of their homelands (a prospect that is widely celebrated in our mainstream institutions). In colleges and universities, white applicants are disfavored for admission, while curricula feature pugnacious courses on eliminating “whiteness”. At the Academy Awards, a black actor says of his latest film “I get to kill all the white people! How great is that?”, and the audience laughs and cheers.

Is it any wonder, then, that in this toxic climate, many white people are developing a sense of identitarianism themselves? This is not “supremacy”; it is nothing more than an perfectly natural (and, therefore, easily predictable) sense of unity and belonging, in an explicitly and increasingly hostile environment. Express this readily understandable sentiment in public, however, and you are now a “white supremacist” — and your sense of identity is not mere attachment, but can only be “hate”.

“White supremacist”, then, is nothing more than a cudgel, to be used without mercy against anyone who says, however reluctantly, that: yes, we are white, and we are not ashamed of it, and if you are determined to divide all of society into competing racial groups, then our people will have to play the game too. It is a truly awful state of affairs, and it will all get much, much worse before it gets any better. “Diversity is our strength”? Rubbish. As we are already learning to our sorrow, it is anything but: it is the death of peace and order and comity, and, at last, of nations and cultures.