Maverick Philosopher

The Big Unplug 2018

The 2018 Big Unplug starts now.

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The Big Unplug Starts Today

A Similar Pattern of Argument in Buddhism and Benatar

On Buddhism the human (indeed the animalic/sentient) condition is a profoundly unsatisfactory predicament from which we need extrication.  The First Noble Truth is that fundamentally all is ill, suffering, unsatisfactory, dukkha. That there is some sukha (joy, happiness) along with the dukkha is undeniable, but the little sukha is fleeting and unsatisfying and leads to dukkha  which is primary. Desire breeds desire endlessly with no satisfaction being finally satisfactory. You may satisfy your sexual craving, but the satisfaction is impermanent and gives rise to further desires upon desires and temporary satings upon temporary satings which become increasingly habitual but never finally satisfactory.  So not only is frustration of desire unsatisfactory, satisfaction of it is as well. Either way dukkha is the upshot. This is the deep and radical meaning of the First Noble Truth.

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.

The Second Noble Truth is that suffering has its origin in desire or craving (tanha). The natural pursuit and possession of the ordinary objects of desire such as name and fame, pleasure and pelf, property and progeny, power and position  all breed attachment, and this attachment breeds misery. Why? Because the ordinary objects of desire are impermanent (anicca) and insubstantial (anatta).  They lack the power to satisfy us. Desire or craving (tanha)  drives us to cling to the fleeting and unreal that cannot last and cannot ultimately satisfy.  In this sense sukha, which is derivative, leads to dukkha which is primitive and fundamental.

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is this craving which leads to re-becoming, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there; that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for becoming, craving for disbecoming.

Should we then re-direct desire to what is permanent  and possesses self-nature, God for example? You would think so, right?

No!

For on original, radical, Pali Buddhism nothing is permanent and nothing possesses self-nature. All is impermanent and insubstantial. This is the nature of things and cannot be otherwise. The task cannot be to re-direct desire to the Eternal in the manner of a Christian Platonist such as St. Augustine who turns away from this deceitful world of time and change and misery and seeks salvation in God.  The problem is desire itself, not mis-directed desire. The task, then, must be to uproot desire. The task is to step off of the wheel of samsara and achieve cessation or nirvana.

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering: it is the remainderless fading away and  cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, non-reliance on it.

How do we extirpate desire and end our delusive attachment to the insubstantial and unreal and unsatisfactory? 

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering: it is this noble eightfold path; that is, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.

Critical Question

How can the entire samsaric realm, including us and the manifold objects of our desire, be devalued  relative to a  nonexistent and indeed impossible standard? If nothing is permanent and nothing can be permanent how can impermanence be a negative axiological feature of what alone exists? And if nothing is and can be a self or substance, how is it any argument against samsaric items that they are devoid of self-nature?

I am assuming that there cannot be impossible ideals. Either an ideal is realized or it is not. If the former, then it is possible. If the latter then it must be realizable.  Ideals must be realizable if they are to be ideals.  What is realizable is possible. So if permanence is an ideal, then it must be possible. But it is not possible on early Buddhist principles. So it is not an ideal. Since it is not an ideal, nothing samsaric falls short of it.  It follows that ordinary objects of desire cannot, all of them, be unsatisfactory on the ground of their impermanence.

To appreciate my point, suppose God as classically conceived exists. Think of the God of Augustine and Aquinas. He is permanent, a self (in excelsis) and absolutely and finally satisfying to himself and to those who share his life. If such a God exists, then it makes perfect sense to consider of lower or even of no value the objects of ordinary mundane desire such as money and property and the paltry pleasures of the flesh.

The great Spanish mystic, St. Teresa of Avila, is supposed to have said to the nuns in her care, "Sisters, we have but one night to spend in this bad inn."

To liken the world to a bad inn makes sense as a claim purporting to be objectively true only if there is a heavenly home to which it is possible to go. But if there is no God, no soul, and this life is all there is, then this world of time and change cannot be objectively assessed to be of little or no value.  Any such assessment could then be subjective only, and if Nietzsche is right, a slandering of life  that merely reflects the physiological decadence of the sick slanderers who are too sick to face reality and must in compensation invent hinterworlds.

As Nietzsche remarks in Twilight of the Idols, in the section entitled "The Problem of Socrates," if there is no true world, then there is no merely apparent world either :  this world objectively lacks plenary reality and value and is rightly assessed as lacking such only if there is a true world  it falls short of.

I spoke to a hermit monk a couple of summers ago. I said, "This world is a vanishing quantity." He agreed wholeheartedly, having abandoned  a millionaire's life as a super-successful Wall Street bond trader  for the austerities of a monkish, and indeed eremitic,  existence with its vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. But my assertion and his agreement could make no sense as an objective negative appraisal of the reality and value of this world except on the assumption that there is an Unseen Order that is not impermanent to its core, but the opposite, the source of all intelligibility, reality, and value, and the summum bonum, the highest good, of human striving.  And if the assumption is true, then the negative appraisal is true.

 

 

 

A Similar Pattern in Benatar

One source of David Benatar's anti-natalism is his conviction that human life, on balance, is objectively bad for all despite how well-placed one is. There is some good, of course, but the bad so preponderates that it is morally wrong to perpetuate this life by procreation. But the standards and ideals Benatar invokes to show the objectively bad quality of human life are impossible as I try to show in this preliminary draft. My thought is that to fall short of an impossible standard is not to fall short. Benatar's radical pessimism and anti-natalism do not comport well with his naturalism.

To this extent my critique of Pali Buddhism and of Benatar is 'Nietzschean.' Impossible standards do not permit a devaluation of what actually exists. 

But I share Nietzsche's naturalism and atheism as little as I share Benatar's. And of course I reject Nietzsche's psycho-physiological reductionism: the deep sense of philosophers and sages from time immemorial that this life is no good cannot be dismissed as a merely subjective response of the sick and decadent.  Thus a No to Nietzsche's reading of Phaedo 118:

Concerning life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is no good. Always and everywhere one has heard the same sound from their mouths -- a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness of life, full of resistance to life. Even Socrates said, as he died: "To live -- that means to be sick a long time: I owe Asclepius the god of healing a rooster." Even Socrates was tired of it. [. . .] "At least something must be sick here," we retort. 

If the appearance of life's low quality is real, because life falls short of the ideal, then the ideal must itself be real -- elsewhere, not here below, but in the Unseen Order. 

Rachel Dolezal Up Against the Limits of Self-Construction

Is there anything about a person that lies beyond his power to self-identify, self-interpret, self-construe? Well, obviously, yes: that one is a person and a self in the first place with the power to identify as this or that is not a matter of self-identification. I cannot identify myself into existence or into selfhood.  I cannot increase my powers by any process of self-identification.  I may like the idea of being a necessary being, but I cannot slough off my contingent modal status by any self-construction. And of course the same goes for sex and race. Not even God could bring himself into existence by pretending to exist or by identifying as existent.  And the same goes for the divine nature, unless you are a radical theological voluntarist who thinks that God is sovereign over his own nature.

And yes, Dolezal has been charged with welfare fraud if you can believe The New York Times.

Related:

Rachel Dolezal, The Black White Woman. I make a mistake at the end of this post that I will now correct. I represent Elizabeth Warren as the author of Pow Wow Chow when in fact she is merely a contributor to that by-now-famous recipe book. Her contribution, however, a recipe for lobster bisque -- Cherokees were into haute cuisine? -- was plagiarized!

Elizabeth Warren could  be called the Rachel Dolezal of American politics. Never forget that Warren is a fraud. It is a known fact that she is not of Cherokee ancestry.

Dolezal, Knowledge, and Belief

Happy Birthday, Bob

Bob Dylan turns 77 today. Scott Johnson offers two fine columns in celebration.

Not Dark Yet

Not Dark Yet, Cont'd

Thanks, Bob, for all the music and all the memories, and for your wonderfully individual and self-reliant appropriation and celebration of Americana. It wouldn't have been the long strange trip it's been without you.  May you die with your boots on.

Not Dark Yet (the 1997 lament)

How Much Socialism is There in Cultural Marxism?

It is a mistake to confuse 'classical' Marxism with cultural Marxism.

The former is characterized by the labor theory of economic value; the call for the abolition of private property; collective ownership of the means of production, i.e., socialism in the strict sense of the term; historical materialism (HISTOMAT) and dialectical materialism (DIAMAT); belief in objective truth (see V. I. Lenin); the Hegel-inspired belief that history is being driven in a definite direction by an in-built nisus towards a secular eschaton*, in the case of Marx & Co., the dictatorship of the proletariat and the classless society . . . You know the drill.

But as Paul Gottfried points out, cultural Marxism is a horse of a different color. In particular, it is not usefully or reasonably labelled socialist. Gottfried's insights (in this article) need to be taken on board, not that I agree with everything the man says elsewhere.

____________________

*A really deep understanding of secular eschatology such as we find it in Marx requires a critical retrieval of Christian eschatology. Please forgive my 'critical retrieval.' Back in old Boston town, in the early-to-mid-seventies, I was a bit of a Continental philosopher. I sipped a little of the Leftist Kool-Aid, but never got drunk on it, despite all the Habermas, Horkheimer, and Adorno I read. Gott sei dank! 

Perhaps I can thank Heidegger for saving me. My intense occupation with his writings and his Seinsfrage drove me back to Aquinas for the onto-theological approach to Being and to Frege and the boys for the logical approach.

Related articles

The Essence of Cultural Marxism: No Truth, Only Power

Trump, Adultery, Morality, and the Alinskyite Left

Political Circularity

The Democrats, under party discipline, circle the wagons.

The Republicans, with their obstructionist 'mavericks,' form a circular firing squad.

The Libertarians, bent on irrelevance, engage in a 'circle jerk.'

Joseph Sobran: Notes for the Reactionary of the Future

Don't be put off by the title. 

This essay, which William F. Buckley published in December, 1985 in National Review, is bristling with insights and distinctions essential for clear thinking about political matters. (HT: Malcolm Pollack)

The late Lawrence Auster offers a sympathetic but critical perspective.

I'm very busy now. Commentary on Sobran's dazzling essay will have to wait.

Related: Lawrence Auster on Dylan

Is the Pope Catholic?

Not any more.

McCain the 'Maverick'

The Democrat leadership knows how to enforce party discipline, and their members  toe the line and vote as a bloc. The Republicans, however, include mavericks, the most prominent of them being Senator John McCain of Arizona:

It’s become a cliché to label McCain a “maverick” for his dramatic, and increasingly frequent, breaks with the Republican Party line. But it’s a cliché because the label fits: Over nearly four decades in Washington, McCain has given a master class in maverickism, and it is for this he will be most remembered. So it is fitting, perhaps that the inveterate fighter is taking on Trump—another Republican politician who rose by bucking GOP orthodoxy—in his final battle, and bequeathing to the nation a bookful of advice on how to be the right kind of maverick. To Trump, McCain writes in his new memoir, The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights and Other Appreciations, the mere appearance of toughness “seems to matter more than any of our values.” He suggests the president is jeopardizing those values by undermining the free press with regular accusations of “fake news”—a tactic “copied by autocrats,” McCain writes—supporting torture, branding immigrants criminals and opening the door to moral equivalence with Vladimir Putin by saying, “We have a lot of killers too.” That, McCain writes, “was a shameful thing to say, and so unaware of reality.”

The problem congressional mavericks can pose is well-illustrated by McCain's slanderous, ill-considered, and personally-motivated  attack on Donald Trump. Trump was elected to push a populist, Jacksonian agenda; instead of getting with the program, McCain plays the obstructionist, objecting like a Democrat, talking like a liberal, while the opposition party maintains a unified front. This is why true conservatives consider it a good thing, not that he is dying, but that will no longer be able to obstruct.

I wonder if the typical liberal can understand the distinction I just invoked. Probably not, in this Age of Feeling.

Suppose someone is a serious impediment to your flourishing. You will want his opposition, interference, harassment  to stop. Should the opponent die, then his opposition will stop. If the person dies you can legitimately take satisfaction in the cessation of his wrongful and petty opposition without taking satisfaction in his dying. And that is what you ought to do, difficult as it is to avoid all Schadenfreude on the death of an enemy.

As for McCain's slanders, the worst of the ones mentioned above is the egregious falsehood that Trump "brands immigrants criminals." This is a constantly repeated leftist smear. That McCain would repeat it is appalling.  Anyone with a modicum of intelligence and decency would understand Trump to have said that some illegal immigrants are criminals, which is certainly true, and an additional reason why the nation's borders must be secured. But McCain hates the president and his hate blinds him. I understand why the former hates the latter, but the fact remains.

I'll finish this later.  It is 4:50 AM. I have already this morning written philosophy in my journal from 2:00 to 3:30; done my spiritual exercises from 3:30 to 4:10, eaten a little breakfast, two rice cakes smeared with jam and almond butter, drunk two cups of seriously strong java, and uploaded this entry to my blog. It is now first light and time to hit the trails before Old Sol becomes too uppity.

The strenuous life is best by test.

A Common Abortion Mistake

It is often said that  a human fetus is a potential human life.  Not so!  A human fetus is an actual human life. 

Consider a third-trimester human fetus, alive and well, developing in the normal way in the mother.  It is potentially many things: a neonate, a two-year-old, a speaker of some language, an adolescent, an adult, a corpse. And  let's be clear that a potential X is not an X.  A potential oak tree is not an oak tree.  A potential neonate is not a neonate.  A potential speaker of Turkish is not a Turkish speaker.  But an acorn, though only potentially an oak tree, is an actual acorn, not a potential acorn.  And its potentialities are actually possessed by it, not potentially possessed by it.

The typical human fetus is an actual, living, human biological individual that actually possesses various potentialities.  So if you accept that there is a general, albeit not exceptionless, prohibition against the taking of innocent human life, then you need to explain why you think a third-trimester fetus does not fall under this prohibition.  You need to find a morally relevant difference -- not just any old difference, but a difference that makes a moral difference -- between the fetus and any born human individual.

Does the Validity of an Argument Depend on the Order of its Premises?

Suppose you have a valid argument. Can you render the argument invalid by changing the display order of the premises?

I should think never. The Dark Ostrich, however, offers the following putative counterexample. He says he got it from Sainsbury; I should like to see a reference.  And if there is a literature on this, I should like to see a bibliography.

(A) Some Greek is called ‘Mark’, Mark is an evangelist, therefore some Greek is an evangelist. (VALID)

(B) Mark is an evangelist, some Greek is called ‘Mark’, therefore some Greek is an evangelist. (NOT VALID)

(A) is valid and (B) is not. But this is not evidence that premise order affects validity. For while the sentences are the same, the premises of the two arguments are not the same.  Made explicit, (A) becomes

(A*) Some Greek is called 'Mark', this same individual called 'Mark is an evangelist, therefore some Greek is an evangelist.

Clearly, (A*) and (B) have different premises. So it is not the different order of the premises in (B) that causes it to be invalid.

A Great Hot Sauce Rant from 2013

We must never forget how vicious and stupid leftists are. Enjoy!

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

California Regulators Go After Sriracha Hot Sauce

Pope Francis recently spoke, quite foolishly, of "unfettered capitalism," as if there is any such thing in the world.  A more worthy cynosure of disapprobation is the slide toward unfettered regulation and omni-invasive government spearheaded by presumably well-meaning liberal-fascist nanny-staters.

You know things are getting bad when they come after your hot sauce.  An Asian restaurant without Sriracha is like, what?  A house without a fireplace?  Coffee without caffeine?  A man without balls?

You see, if these food fascists can go after Sriracha on the ground that it is a raw food, then Tabasco sauce, that marvellous Louisiana condiment from Avery Island, that undisputed  king of the hot sauces,  recognized as such by true connoisseurs all across this great land, that sine qua non of fine dining, and the criterion that separates, in point of the prandial, the  men from the candy-mouthed girly-men, and which is also a raw food  -- then, I say, Tabasco sauce is in danger, a state of affairs the only appropriate remedy to which would be of the Second Amendment variety, if I may be permitted a bit of holiday hyperbole.

David Tran, founder of Huy Fong Foods, fled communist Viet Nam to come to our shores for freedom  and a chance at self-reliance and economic self-determination .  Unfortunately, the successors of commies, the leftists of the Democrat Party, may drive Tran out of California into a friendlier environment.

When they came for the soda, you did nothing because you don't drink the stuff.  When they came for the Sriracha, you did nothing because you didn't know what the hell it was.  But if they come after Tabasco sauce and you do nothing, then you deserve to be shot -- figuratively speaking of course.

Story here.

Conservative Resistance on the Language Front

One form conservative resistance takes is insistence on one's right to use standard English and oppose innovations. But it ought to be a tolerant resistance, one that permits the politically correct to speak and write as they wish so along that do not try to impose their foolishness upon us. 

Related: Political Correctness and Gender-Neutral Language.  Excerpt:

. . . the use of PC jargon aids and abets the Left's tendency to inject politics into everything.  The Left is totalitarian by its very nature and so it cannot leave any sphere of human concern unpoliticized.  For a conservative to employ PC jargon is therefore very foolish.  As I have said dozens of times in these pages, conservatives should not talk like liberals.  Battles in the culture war are often fought and won on linguistic ground, and we conservatives should not acquiesce in the Left's acts of linguistic vandalism.

Like a Faraday Cage

Our 24-7, narcissistic, chit-chat connectivity is like a Faraday cage shielding us from influences from beyond the human horizon.  But the comparison breaks down: the influences from beyond are benign unlike the electrostatic and electromagnetic signals that threaten our 'devices.'

A 'Fake News' Smear

Donald Trump baits the so-called journalists of the lamestream media with his largely, but not entirely, true accusations of 'fake news' and what do the 'journalists' do? They bite. They take the bait. 

In their TDS-driven rage they verify the accusations by violating their own professional standards. Well, keep it up knuckleheads! You are destroying what is left of your credibility.

By the way, when John McCain and others accuse Trump of attacking the Fourth Estate they are merely flailing about in frustration.  Trump is rendering a salutary service by punching back effectively at the patently biased and leftward-leaning mainstream/lamestream media.

Trump's genius is that he knows how so to needle them that they show their true colors. Or as Dan Bongino rather less delicately put it the other night, "He gets them to pull down their pants and show their asses."

Bongino then went on strangely to remark that he didn't mean the comment literally! No?

The only thing wrong with Trump's 'animal' comment is that it is not fair to animals. They don't have free will; MS-13 gangsters do.

It is clear proof that  leftists in high positions in the Fourth Estate are moral scum that they could with impunity slander a duly elected president in such a vicious and absurd way.

Why Did America Fight the Korean War?

Victor Davis Hanson explains in less than five minutes. 

South Korea is a model global citizen and a strong ally of the U.S.—and stands in sharp contrast to the communist regime in the North that has starved and murdered millions of its own people and caused untold mischief in the world community. Had it not been for U.S. intervention and support to the South, the current monstrous regime in Pyongyang would now rule all of Korea, ensuring its nuclear-armed dictatorship even greater power and resources.

The American effort to save South Korea also sent a message to both communist China and the Soviet Union that the free world, under U.S. leadership, would no longer tolerate communist military take-overs of free nations. The resulting deterrence policy helped to keep the communist world from attempting similar surprise attacks on Japan, Taiwan, and Western Europe.

Finally, the Korean War awakened the United States to the dangers of disarmament and isolationism and led to the bipartisan foreign policy of containment of global communism that in 1989 finally led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with it victory in the Cold War.

The Korean War was an incomplete American victory in its failure to liberate North Korea and unite the peninsula, but a victory nonetheless. And not just from a military perspective, but from a moral one as well. The reason 35,000 Americans died in Korea was to keep at least half the Korean people free. Korea did not have a single material resource that would have benefited America.

The Korean War merits more than a blank stare. It deserves to be remembered and studied – with pride.

The Populist Surge in Italy and Elsewhere

Immigration, both legal and illegal, is perhaps the central issue of our time. Robert W. Merry:

And, of all the issues roiling Europe these days, none generates more political force and energy than the immigration crisis—representing a direct threat to the very definition of the West as well as its cultural coherence and health. The globalist elites don’t get it, even now, but their days are numbered. It is noteworthy that the two political institutions seeking a coalition government in Italy represent some 69 percent of the March 4 vote. That’s a lot of populist sentiment, and the elites may be able to chip away at it if the coalition stumbles, but they won’t be able to reverse it. The country is set upon a populist course for years to come.

Bill Galston, who is no populist (his latest book is entitled Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy), nevertheless understands the wellsprings of populist movements. “Throughout Europe,” he writes, “immigration is at the core of the populist critique of the liberal democratic order.” He notes that Orban in Hungary, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, France’s Marine Le Pen, and Matteo Salvini “all have highlighted the EU’s stance on immigration, raising important questions about economic globalization, political transnationalism, and cultural liberalism.” He adds that dismissing these concerns as simply retrograde is “counterproductive.” Instead, Europe’s leaders will have to take them seriously—“while offering better answers than unscrupulous demagogues like Orban can muster.”

Why should populism be considered a threat to liberal democracy? It is a threat to a leftist internationalism that rejects national borders and denies to nations the right to preserve their cultures, the right to stop illegal immigration, and the right to select those immigrants who are most likely to prove to be a net asset to the host country, and most likely to assimilate. There needn't be anything white supremacist or white nationalist about populism. (By the way, white supremacism and white nationalism are plainly different: a white nationalist needn't be a white supremacist.)  And of course there needn't be anything racist or xenophobic or bigoted about populism.

Populism in the Trumpian style is not a threat to liberal democracy as the Founders envisioned it, but a threat to the leftist internationalism I have just limned and which contemporary 'liberals' confuse with the liberal democracy of the Founders. It is also quite telling that these 'liberals' constantly use the word 'democracy' as if it is something wonderful indeed, but they almost never mention that the USA is a democratic republic.  Our republic has a stiff backbone of core principles and meta-principles that are not up for democratic grabs, or at least are not up for easy grabs: the Constitution can be amended but it is not easy, nor should it be. 

Those who think that democracy is a wonderful thing ought to realize that Sharia can be installed democratically. This is underway in Belgium. Brussels could be Muslim within 20 years.  Let enough Muslims infiltrate and then they will decide who 'the people' are and who are not 'the people.'  The native Belgians will then have been displaced. Ain't democracy wonderful?

Let enough illegal aliens flood in, give them the vote, and they may decide to do away with the distinction between legal and illegal immigration as well as the one between immigration and emigration. Ever wonder why lefties like the word 'migrant?' It manages to elide both distinctions in one fell swoop.

A sane and defensible populism rests on an appreciation of an insight I have aphoristically expressed as follows:

No comity without commonality.

There cannot be social harmony without a raft of shared assumptions and values, not to mention a shared language. Merry, above, speaks of "cultural coherence." A felicitous phrase, that. Our open, tolerant, Enlightenment culture cannot cohere and survive if Sharia-supporting Muslims are allowed to immigrate. For their ultimate goal is not to assimilate to our ways, but to impose their ways on us, eventually replacing us.

This is happening in Europe, Belgium being one good and chilling example. Muslim culture, however, is inferior to ours (on balance, not in every respect) and it is our decadence that blinds us to this fact. Suppose you are a benighted relativist who cannot or will not comprehend what I just wrote. Still, a nation has a right to its heritage and its culture. This is why there cannot be open borders. We have every right to preserve our culture just as Muslims have a right to preserve theirs.  

In sum:

1) Immigration issues will drive our politics, and not just ours, for the forseeable future.

2) The populist juggernaut will be hard to stop, and not just here.

Addendum (5/21):

Bill Keezer recommends Civilizational Jihad in the USA: The Practicum. You will find it very interesting, if that's the word.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Assimilation and Name Change

Immigration without assimilation is a recipe for disaster. We're headed in that direction. And in Europe it is even worse. But in the meantime we enjoy some tunes from performers who ditched their Italian surnames, not so much from a desire to assimilate, or because of ethnic prejudice, but to make themselves more marketable.

But first one  who didn't part with his beautiful surname.  An early manager suggested to Frank Sinatra that he adopt the stage name 'Frankie Satin.'  Sinatra would have none of that bullshit.  He did things his way. You got a problem with that? That's Life.  That's what the people say. Flyin' high in April,  shot down in May.

Joseph Di Nicola (Joey Dee and the Starlighters), Peppermint Twist, with an intro by Dwight D. Eisenhower!  This video shows what the dude, Di Nicola not Eisenhower, looked like. He resembles a super short Joe Pesci.  What Kind of Love is This?

Margaret Battavio (Little Peggy March), I Will Follow Him. An early feminist anthem.

Frank Castelluccio (Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons), Can't Take My Eyes Off of You. Deer Hunter version.  Dawn. Walk Like a Man.  (Sing like a castrato.) 

Anthony Dominic Benedetto (Tony Bennett), The Way You Look Tonight

Alfred Arnold Cocozza (Mario Lanza), O Sole Mio.  Here is what Elvis made of the tune. Lanza ditched his Italian name for a different Italian name. Are there any other cases of this? (Of course, scroll up.) 'Lanza' rolls off the tongue; 'Cocozza' not so much.

'Long about the time King Creole came out, when I was eight, I mentioned Elvis Presley to my Italian mother. "That jackass!" she replied. The irony, however, is that she listened to crooners like Mario Lanza.

Francis Thomas Avallone (Frankie Avalon), Venus.

Fabiona Forte Bonaparte (Fabian), his songs are too schlocky even for my catholic tastes. Linkage denied!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can it be Shown that Truth is More Than a Transcendental Presupposition?

Cyrus writes,

I've been thinking about Pyrrhonian arguments. I wonder if you could help with something:

 

i. Either there is truth or there is no truth.

ii. If there is truth, there is truth.

iii. If there is no truth, there is truth.

iv. Hence, there is truth.

 

(i) is an instance of the law of the excluded middle; (ii) is self-evident; (iii) follows from the fact that if the proposition that there is no truth is true, there is a truth; (iv) follows from (i) – (iii). I've always considered this a really secure argument.

 

But the skeptic is going to point out that we must assume there is truth in order to argue that there is truth (e.g. the premises need to be true for the conclusion to follow), and therefore fall into circularity. 

 

 It is worth noting that the above consequentia mirabilis argument seems to justify the stronger conclusion that necessarily there is truth. For if there is truth whether or not there is truth, then necessarily there is truth.

 

The above argument is both valid and sound. But the skeptic is within his rights in pointing out that the argument does not prove unconditionally that there is truth; it presupposes it. Of course, pointing this out, the skeptic also presupposes that there is truth. For to point something out is to point it out as true.

 

My reader wants to know whether  the argument succeeds. I think it succeeds in proving that  we cannot fail to presuppose truth, that we must presuppose it.  It succeeds in proving at least this much: that the existence of truth is a transcendental presupposition of all our epistemic operations. I am using 'transcendental' in a roughly Kantian way.

 

Things get really interesting when we ask whether truth could be shown to be more than a transcendental presupposition. I would like to be able to show that truth exists of metaphysical necessity independently of us and our need to presuppose it. The above argument, however, does not show this. 

 

And so the following doubt arises:  It might be that the necessity of truth is not an absolute or unconditional necessity, but a conditional necessity, one that depends on our contingent existence. So long as we exist, truth exists because we cannot help presupposing it.  But at times and in possible situations in which we do not exist, truth does not exist either. (Cf. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, sec. 44 c: Warheit 'gibt es' nur, sofern und solange Dasein ist.)

 

How do we know that this is not the case? How do we know that truth is more than a transcendental presupposition? How do we know that, apart from discursive intellects, that truth exists absolutely or unconditionally?

 

The situation with truth might be like that of the Cartesian cogito: Necessarily, if I think, then I exist; but it does not follow that I necessarily exist.  Necessarily, if discursive intellects exist, then truth exists; but it doesn't follow that truth necessarily exists. Could it be that in both cases we have but a conditional necessity?  In the Cartesian case it seems clear that the necessity is conditional: I cannot help but presuppose my existence as long as I am thinking even when the thinking is a doubting that I exist; but 'surely' the I that thinks might not have existed in the first place. 

 

And so if intellects of our type (whether biologically human or not) had never existed, truth (and falsehood) would never have existed either.

 

But now consider  the statement (S):

 

S. At times and in possible situations in which we do not exist, truth does not exist either.

 

(S) purports to be true. Would it be coherent to say that (S) is true only when we exist, and that when we don't it is neither true nor false?  If it is true that there were times when we didn't exist, then it is true only NOW when we exist that there were times when truth did not exist. Is this coherent? It seems not. For if it is true only NOW when we exist that there were times when truth did not exist, then it was neither true nor false THEN, and it could not have been the case that truth did not exist then.

 

The problem is that if we think of truth as merely a transcendental presupposition, then we break the link between truth and Being. There is no truth outside of a mind; but there is also no truth in a mind that is not in contact with reality (Being). Truth is the truth about what is.  This seems to imply that truth cannot be merely a transcendental presupposition of our epistemic operations.

 

Truth is not like a flashlight that we bring into the dark to reveal things that, apart from us, would remain in darkness.  Things glow by their own light, and our minds are sensitive to this light but not productive of it.

 

So if we supplement the above argument with analysis along these lines of the nature of truth, then perhaps we can argue cogently that truth exists, and must exist, independently of us.

 

This last stretch of argument, however, is not as clear as I would like it to be.  It is a deep topic!  If God exists, then truth exists of metaphysical necessity and independently of us. But in philosophy we cannot start with God, though we may end with him. 

 

Related articles

When Reasoned Faith No Longer Strikes One as Reasonable: What Then?

Kanye and the Democrats

Walter E. Williams:

The big difference between black libertarians/conservatives and West is that he has 28 million Twitter followers and a huge audience of listeners whereas few blacks have even heard of libertarian/conservative blacks outside of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. (I might add in passing that Dr. Thomas Sowell is one of the nation’s most distinguished and accomplished scholars alive today.)

The Kanye problem for the Democratic Party is that if the party doesn’t keep blacks in line and it loses even 20 to 25 percent of the black vote, it can kiss any hope of winning any presidential and many congressional elections goodbye. Democrats may have already seen that threat. That’s why they support illegal immigration and voting rights for non-citizens. Immigrants from south of the border who are here illegally may be seen as either a replacement for or a guarantee against the disaster of losing the black vote.

That's right. Illegal aliens are undocumented Democrats.  

And you are still a Democrat? Then you are clearly no patriot. A patriot loves his country. He does not seek its fundamental transformation.

Phrase of the Day: 'Infra Dig'

I just came across the following sentence in Charles R. Kesler's Claremont Review of Books article, Thinking about Trump:

It is not entirely clear whether his liberal and conservative critics disapprove of Trump because he violates moral law or because he is infra dig.

The 'infra dig' threw me for a moment until I realized it was a popularization of infra dignitatem, 'beneath (one's) dignity.' According to this source, Sir Water Scott in 1825 was the first to use the abbreviation.

I was taught to italicize foreign expressions, which is precisely what the good professor did not do in the sentence quoted. Where's my red pen?

As for the content of the sentence quoted, it is tolerably clear to me that the Never Trumpers (who are of course conservatives of a sort by definition) despise Trump mainly because the man has no class and is therefore infra dignitatem. He is not one of them. He does not have the manners and breeding of a Bill Kristol or a George Will and the rest of the effete, yap-and-scribble, but do nothing, bow-tie brigade.  He is an outsider and an interloper who threatens their privileges and perquisites.  Better Hillary and the status quo than a shake-up and take-on of the Deep State and its enablers.

On the other hand, leftists, most of them anyway, don't give a damn about the moral law as it pertains to marital fidelity and sexual behavior with the possible exception of rape. These types don't object to Trump because of locker-room talk and affairs. After all, they tolerate it in themselves and their heroes such as the Kennedy's, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bill Clinton. What they are doing is right out of Saul Alinksy's Rules for Radicals, in particular, #4: "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."  

Nor do Leftists much care that Trimp is infra dig. What leftists object to are his policies and programs, but instead of addressing them, they attack the man for failing to honor values that they themselves do not accept so as to discredit him among his supporters. 

The Childish Reactivity of the Trumpianly Deranged

Here:

No matter what Trump does, the Democratic reaction is the same: Outrage. When Democrats can't even praise Trump unreservedly for bringing American hostages home or show up when he fulfills a plank of the Democratic Party platform by moving our embassy to Jerusalem, it further convinces millions of Americans who abandoned the Democratic Party in 2016 that they made the right decision.

Let's hope the Dems keep up their puling. It can't help them in the mid-term elections, and it may hurt them bigly.  

Henry A. Kissinger on the Threat of Artificial Intelligence

Yes, that Henry A. Kissinger.  Not very good, but I don't have time to explain why.

Kelly Sadler and John McCain

Kurt Schlichter gets it right.

A Quest for Transcendence Gone Wrong

We are spiritual animals in need of spiritual transcendence. It is an illusion of the age to suppose that the transcendence we need can be found by bodily means. 

Distance running has repaid me richly for the hours and years I devoted to it. In my late twenties I got pretty good at it and I experienced those unbelievable highs that, wonderful as they are, are but simulacra of the flights of the spirit.  I had the sense not to seek transcendence in the wrong places. And the sense not to abuse the mortal vehicle. Urinating blood after training runs and trashing my immune system by marathon training convinced me to take it easy on old fratello asino. 

He who pushes too hard invites a premature exit from the wheel of samsara. This from The Wisdom of Running a 2,189 Mile Marathon:

To hear Jurek tell it, forcing himself to the limit is purifying and transformational. “Though man’s soul finds solace in natural beauty, it is forged in the fire of pain,” he writes. But listen closely, and bodily transcendence is not exactly grist for motivational posters. Jurek’s pages are haunted by comrades who didn’t make it through the fire unscathed. He was joined for part of the trail by Aron Ralston, the hiker famous for amputating his own arm to free himself from a boulder. Jurek’s friend Dean Potter, a legendary climber and base jumper, died in a wing-suit accident days before Jurek began his trek. “I had known ultrarunners to finish races as their kidneys were shutting down and they were losing control of their bowels,” Jurek reports. He recalls a runner who fought through debilitating headaches to finish a 100-mile race and then died of a brain aneurysm.

How Not to Start a 'Conversation' About Guns

Lefties are big on 'conversations' about this and that.  We've had enough 'conversations.' But if you insist on starting one about guns, Fuck the NRA is not a good opener.

Tucker Carlson, whose verbal pugilism is improving with age and experience, tore Pat Davis to pieces last night. Tucker's reactions to the leftist loons he has on his show tend to be either expressions of astonishment or expressions of mild depression that anyone could believe the nonsense they believe.  But last night he vented a righteous anger, refreshingly both righteous and angry.

And yet his boyish good looks and natural charm kept his anger within bounds. He became angry without becoming ugly.

(Memo to self: write an entry on the moral justifiability of some forms of anger.)

Maxine Meltdown

The meltdown begins at 2:55. 

And you are still a Democrat?

Jerking Towards Social Collapse

Thanks to 'progressives,' our 'progress' toward social and cultural collapse seems not be proceeding at a constant speed, but to be accelerating.  But perhaps a better metaphor from the lexicon of physics is jerking.  After all, our 'progress' is jerkwad-driven.  No need to name names.  You know who they are.

From your college physics you may recall that the first derivative of position with respect to time is velocity, while the second derivative is acceleration.  Lesser known is the third derivative: jerk.  (I am not joking; look it up.)  If acceleration is the rate of change of velocity, jerk, also known as jolt, is the rate of change of acceleration.

If you were studying something in college, and not majoring in, say, Grievance Studies, then you probably know that all three, velocity, acceleration, and jerk are vectors, not scalars.  Each has a magnitude and a direction.  This is why a satellite orbiting the earth is constantly changing its velocity despite its constant speed.

The 'progressive' jerk too has his direction:  the end of civilization as we know it.

Image credit: Frank J. Attanucci

The Problem of the Unity of the Proposition

Jacques writes,

I'm thinking about this problem and getting increasingly frustrated by the way in which it's discussed in philosophy.  I wonder if you have any ideas.  Let me explain what bothers me . . .

Typically, philosophers begin with the idea that 'the proposition' needs to be explained or characterized in some special way that will solve the alleged problem.  So Frege had his unsaturated concepts, Russell worried about the relating relation, etc.  And nowadays there is this vast literature about structured or unstructured propositions, acts of predication, etc.

I don't understand how anything of this kind could possibly help.  To explain, I take it that the most basic and intuitive problem here is really the problem of the nature of thought.  At least that is the most natural and paradigm case:  I think that a is F, and now we ask what is going on in my mental life that makes that happen.  How is it even possible?  But when we posit these mysterious entities, propositions, as the objects or contents of thoughts we're just pushing the question back.

I agree that introducing propositions only pushes the problem back. But what exactly is the problem?   The problem is to provide a satisfying answer to the following question: In virtue of what do some strings of words attract a truth-value? A truth-valued declarative sentence is more than a list of its constituent words, and (obviously) more than each item on the list. A list of words is neither true nor false. But an assertively uttered declarative sentence is either true or false.   For example,

Tom is tired

when assertively uttered or otherwise appropriately tokened is either true or false. But the list 

Tom, is, tired

is not either true or false. And yet we have the same words in the sentence and in the list in the same order. There is more to the sentence than its words whether these are taken distributively or collectively.  How shall we account for this 'more'?  

Some will say that the sentence is true or false in virtue of expressing a proposition that is true or false. On this account, the primary truth-bearer is not the (tokened) sentence, but the proposition it expresses.  Accordingly, the sentence is truth-valued because the proposition is truth-valued.  

But a similar problem arise with the proposition. It too is a complex, not of words, but of senses (on a roughly Fregean theory of propositions). If there was a problem about the unity of a sentence, then there will also be a problem about the unity of the proposition the sentence expresses on a given occasion of its use. What makes a proposition a truth-valued entity as opposed to a mere collection (set, mereological sum, whatever) of its constituents?

So here is one way the introduction of propositions "pushes the problem back."  So far, then I am in agreement with Jacques.

If some proposition p just inherently means that a is F, or is inherently true if a is F, regardless of any beliefs or concepts or mental activities of mine, then surely I could operate with proposition p while taking it to mean or represent some other situation--that a is not F, or that b is G, or whatever. 

This is not clear. Someone who introduces Fregean or quasi-Fregean propositions as the contents of such propositional attitudes as belief and desire will say that believing that whales are mammals involves no judgmental synthesis, no mental activity on the part of the believer, since this synthesis is already accomplished in the proposition.  (How this synthesis is accomplished is a very difficult question, an insoluble one in my opinion.)  So I could not take the proposition Whales are mammals  to mean Grass is green.  The Fregean proposition is part of the mechanism whereby I mean that whales are mammals.

The brute fact that it represents, if that even makes sense, seems to have no implications for my representational use of the proposition or relation to it (or whatever it is that I'm supposed to be doing with propositions). 

But you are not using the proposition to represent the fact.  Your intending the fact is routed through the proposition which is the sense of the corresponding declarative sentence.  (Frege of course has no truck with truth-making facts; he holds the bizarre view that the referent, Bedeutung, of the sentence is THE TRUE. I am sketching here, but not endorsing, a quasi-Fregean theory of propositions.)

Even if we could explain how it is unified, that would still seem to leave the basic problem of how I am able to think a unified thought by means of that entity.  (If I'm thinking that proposition p is true, or represents the world accurately, what is it about my activity or state of mind that somehow unifies the representational content p with the further property of being true or being-an-accurate-representation?)

I think you are missing the point that the proposition is a semantic and epistemic intermediary; it is not the direct object of a mental act. You are not thinking that Snow is white is true; you are thinking that snow is white via the propositional content Snow is white.

On the other hand, if p is such that, necessarily, in having p before my mind I entertain or grasp the thought that a is F, the basic mystery is just being described or reiterated.  What on earth am I doing when I somehow manage to think that a is F?  Postulating this thing that is supposed to enable me to think so doesn't seem like any kind of explanation.  What kind of thing is this, meaningful or representational in itself, yet also necessarily dictating my representational grasp of it?  Why not just say that I think that a is F, with no hint of any analysis or explanation of that fact about me?

Are you proposing a Wittgensteinian eschewal of theory and philosophical explanation?

Tom believes that Cicero is a Roman; Cicero is Tully. But Tom does not believe that Tully is a Roman.  Is there not a genuine puzzle here the solution to which will involve a theory of propositions? 

One view is that the ultimate truth-bearers are token acts of predication.  For example, the thing that is true is my act of predicating property F of object a, according to rules somehow determined by property F.  But this too seems hopeless as an explanation or analysis.  Phrases like 'predicating a property of an object' don't mean anything more than 'thinking that something is a certain way'.  No doubt, once I do that, I'm doing something that we might call 'correct' or 'true' depending on what the world is like.  But is there any real difference between predicating F to a, on the one hand, and just thinking that a is an F?  I have no idea what these people are talking about, or how they think this is explanatory.  Every theory seems ultimately to depend on the unexplained notion of someone having a propositional thought--that a certain proposition is true, that some possible world is actual, that a property is instantiated, or whatever.  And yet that seems to be the very notion that we want to understand here--the notion of propositional thought, thinking that something is the case.  Alternatively, they're positing these non-propositional events or activities--just the brute fact that someone 'predicates' or someone 'grasps' a proposition, without these things being taken to depend on thinking that things are thus-and-so.  But in that case, the theories are all obviously false; they just deny the phenomenon we want to explain.

Do you have a reference in the literature for me?

Suppose I say of Elliot that he is sober. That is a token act of predication: I apply the predicate 'sober' to Elliot.  But Karl can say the same thing by applying the predicate 'nuechtern' to Elliot.  So I don't see how token acts of predication could be the ultimate truth-bearers.  These acts are different. But the content expressed is the same. Besides, how can an act be true or false?

I get the impression that you are driving in a Wittgensteinian direction, We say things like 'Hillary is a liar' and we think the corresponding thoughts.  Apparently, you want to leave it at that and not seek any philosophical explanation on the ground that these explanations don't really explain anything.

Would you go so far as to say that the problem of the unity of the sentence, the problem of what makes a sentence different from a list of words, is a pseudo-problem?

Well, I don't know if that makes sense, but I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have.  I feel this is an absolutely fundamental set of problems, with important implications, but the philosophical literature just seems to confuse me . . .

It makes plenty of sense . . . 

We Are all 'White Supremacists' Now

Even the San Francisco lefty, Angela Alioto. She has been called the following names: white supremacist, Trumpian, fascist, Nazi, and racist.  For despite her leftist wobble, she retains some common sense: she proposes a reform of the S. F. sanctuary city law so that it no longer protects felons as she explains on the Tucker Carlson show.

How 'insensitive'! What a 'racist,' as if felons constitute a race. 

And if wanting to crack down on felons proves one a 'white supremacist,' does that not imply that all felons are 'people of 'color'?

There is no wisdom on the Left.  Dennis Prager:

The left in America is founded on the rejection of wisdom. It is possible to be on the left and be kind, honest in business, faithful to one’s spouse, etc. But it is not possible to be wise if one subscribes to leftist (as opposed to liberal) ideas.

Last year, Amy Wax, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, co-authored an opinion piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer with a professor from the University of San Diego School of Law in which they wrote that the “bourgeois culture” and “bourgeois norms” that governed America from the end of World War II until the mid-1960s were good for America, and that their rejection has caused much of the social dysfunction that has characterized this country since the 1960s.

Those values included, in their words: “Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.”

Recognizing those norms as universally beneficial constitutes wisdom. Rejection of them constitutes a rejection of wisdom — i.e. foolishness.

Yet the left almost universally rejected the Wax piece, deeming it, as the left-wing National Lawyers Guild wrote, “an explicit and implicit endorsement of white supremacy,” and questioning whether professor Wax should be allowed to continue teaching a required first-year course at Penn Law.

To equate getting married before having children, working hard and eschewing substance abuse and crime with “white supremacy” is to betray an absence of wisdom that is as depressing as it breathtaking. It is obvious to anyone with a modicum of common sense that those values benefit anyone who adheres to them; they have nothing to do with race.

Exactly right, but not much is achieved by re-iterating these commonsensical points.

One has to defeat the destructive, slanderous  leftist swine. And let's hope to God we can do it without resorting to extra-political means. The milque-toast McCains and Romneys of the G. O. P. are manifestly not up to the job. What is needed is  an alpha male like Trump the Jacksonian who has already racked up an impressive series of accomplishments and has delivered stinging rebukes to the obstructionist crapweasels of the Jack Ass party. 

The Trump Paradox and Phenomenon

Solid analysis as usual from my man Hanson:

[Conrad] Black instinctively captures the essence of the Trump paradox: How did someone supposedly so crude, so mercantile, and so insensitive display a sensitivity to the forgotten people that was lost both on his Republican competitors and Hillary Clinton? Certainly, no one on stage at any of the debates worried much about 40 percent of the country written off as John McCain’s “crazies,” Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables,” and Barack Obama’s “clingers,” who were judged wanting for not capitalizing on the bicoastal dividends of American-led globalism.

Black notes the Trump-hinterland synergy. The country was looking for a third alternative to both free-market economics and neo-socialism, and yet again to both political correctness and the Republican often groveling surrender to it. Or as Black puts it, “Trump’s rise was an expression of sub-revolutionary anger by a wide swath of dissatisfied and mainly not overly prosperous or influential people.” But he adds that Trump was no third-party Ross Perot “charlatan” (or, for that matter, a Quixotic Ralph Nader), who came off quirky and without a workable agenda. Trump took a path that was far different from third-party would-be revolutionaries, in seeking to appropriate rather than to run against the apparatus of one of the two major political parties.

[. . .]

Black’s final third of the book is magisterial, as he recites nascent Trump achievements—tax reform, deregulation, the end of the Affordable Care Act individual mandate, superb judicial appointments, curbs on illegal immigration, expanded oil and gas production, a restoration of deterrence aboard—against a backdrop of nonstop venom and vituperation from the so-called “Resistance.” He is certainly unsparing of the Left’s desperate resort to discard the Electoral College, sue under the emoluments clause, invoke the 25th Amendment, introduce articles of impeachment, and embrace a sick assassination chic of threats to Trump’s person and family. Some element of such hysteria is due to Trump’s ostensible Republican credentials (the Left had devoured even their once beloved John McCain, as well as the gentlemanly and judicious Mitt Romney), but more is due to Trump’s far more conservative agenda and his take-no-prisoners style.

Identity-Political Infiltration of the Hard Sciences

More proof that leftists are destructive:

A scientist at UCLA reports: “All across the country the big question now in STEM is: how can we promote more women and minorities by ‘changing’ (i.e., lowering) the requirements we had previously set for graduate level study?” Mathematical problem-solving is being de-emphasized in favor of more qualitative group projects; the pace of undergraduate physics education is being slowed down so that no one gets left behind.

Politically correct physics? Is there no limit to leftist lunacy? A leftist is someone who never met a standard he didn't work to erode.

The Catholic Cave-In to Leftist Claptrap

This is getting boringly predictable, and predictably boring. Here is yet another example, St Mary's College of California.

. . . administrators encourage students to equate opinions with personal identity. Disagreement is not just disagreement—it is an attack. Staff in the Mission and Ministry Center, the Intercultural Center, and the New Student and Family Programs encourage students to use the “oops/ouch” method. If someone forgets to use politically correct language or says anything deemed offensive, these staff members encourage bystanders to interject “oops” as a corrective, and “ouch” if they have been personally harmed. One male friend recalls being chastised for saying “you guys” instead of “you all” to a group of men. Especially offensive opinions may be reported to our Bias Incident Reporting Team (BIRT). More than fifty such reports were filed last year. 

I am tempted to say that sending your kid to this leftist seminary is equivalent to child abuse. Save your money and for a lot less you can buy him or her a copy of Jordan B. Peterson's 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.

I'm reading it. Your kid will learn something. Peterson talks sense.

For more examples of 'academentia' see my Academia category. 

I 'appropriated' the cute coinage from Keith Burgess-Jackson.  Appropriate, but do it with gratitude giving credit where credit is due. 

Propositions About Socrates Before He Came to Exist

This continues the discussion with James Anderson. See the comments to the related article below. Here is Professor Anderson's latest comment with my replies.

So are you saying that prior to the time Socrates comes into existence the proposition It is possible that Socrates come into existence doesn't exist at all?

Yes, if either Socrates himself, or an haecceity property that deputizes for him, is a constituent of the proposition in question. For it is surely obvious that before Socrates came to exist, he did not exist, and so was not available to be a constituent of a proposition, a state of affairs, or anything at all. As for the putative property identity-with-Socrates, I have already shown to my satisfaction that there cannot be any such property if properties are necessarily existent abstract objects. 

No, if we think of 'Socrates' along Russellian lines as a definite description in disguise replaceable by something like 'the most famous of the Greek philosophers, a master dialectician who published nothing but whose  thoughts were presented in dialogues written by his star pupil and who was executed by his city-state on the charge of being a corrupter of youth.'  I have no objection to saying that, prior to the time Socrates comes into existence, the following proposition exists: It is possible that some man having the properties of being famous, Greek, etc, come into existence.

Are you thereby committed to the contingent existence of propositions?

Not across the board.

Or would you favor full-blown nominalism about propositions?

Not at all. Here is an argument for propositions that impresses me.

Here's my reasoning laid out step by step. Perhaps you can tell me where you would want to jump out of the cab.

1) Socrates came into existence at t.

2) It is possible that Socrates come into existence at t. [actuality entails possibility]

It is a modal axiom that everything actual is possible. So of course actuality entails possibility.  But it doesn't follow that before Socrates came into existence, that he, that very individual, was possible. For it might be that he, that very individual,  becomes possible only at the instant he becomes actual. If a thing is actual, then it is possible; but that says nothing about when it is possible.

3) The proposition It is possible that Socrates come into existence at t is true. Call this proposition P. (P is a tenseless proposition, although it makes reference to a particular time.)

You are moving too fast. Yes, the proposition P is true. But that P is tenseless is a further premise of your argument and should be listed as such and not introduced parenthetically.  Can you prove that P is tenseless? It is not obvious or a non-negotiable datum.

I grant that there are tenseless propositions. Whales are mammals. Numbers are abstract objects. 7 plus 5 is 12.  The same goes for their negations. But one cannot assume that every proposition is tenseless. (I grant that every Fregean proposition is tenseless, but that is a technical use of 'proposition.')  It might be that P is true only at t and at times later than t. 

4) P is necessarily true. [by S5]

Not if P is true only at t and at times later than t.  Does this violate S5?  Not obviously. On S5, Poss p --> Nec Poss p.  Can it be shown that 'p' here includes within its range propositions of de re possibility such as P? 

5) P is true at all times. [because necessary truths cannot fail to be true]

6) P is true prior to t (i.e., before Socrates comes into existence).

7) Prior to t, it is possible that Socrates come into existence (at t).

I have given reasons to deny each of these propositions.

At the very least, we have a stand-off here. Professor Anderson has not proven his point.  Perhaps I cannot prove my point either. Then we would have an aporia.

Related articles

Maverick Philosopher: A Most Remarkable Prophecy

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia

Iris DeMent and Friends, Will the Circle be Unbroken? 

Iris DeMent and Emmy Lou Harris, Our Town. 

Nanci Griffith, Boots of Spanish Leather

John Prine, Hello in There. This great song goes out to Dave Burn who introduced me to it back in '71.

Remember Fred Neil?  One of the  luminaries of the '60s folk scene,  he didn't do much musically thereafter.  Neil is probably best remembered  for having penned 'Everybody's Talkin' which was made famous by Harry Nilsson as the theme of Midnight Cowboy.  Here is Neil's version. Nilsson's rendition.

Another of my Fred Neil favorites is "Other Side of  This Life."  Here is Peter, Paul, and Mary's version.

And it's been a long long time since I last enjoyed That's the Bag I'm In.

The reclusive Neil died in 2001 at the age of 64.  Biography here.

Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain

Leftover Cuties, Don't Think Twice, It's All Right. Unusual, but good.

Ry Cooder, Shrinking Man. Shrinkin' man ain't gonna be here long. 

No Day Without Cultural Appropriation

Andrew Klavan:

Cultural appropriation is not a glitch of American life. It's a feature. It's part of what makes the country great. We take your culture, we get rid of the oppression, the mass murder, the slavery, the intransigent poverty and the endless internecine wars. We keep the pasta and the funny hats, and occasionally we dress up as you on Halloween. It's a good deal for everyone.

I think I'll make me a curry tonight, thereby paying tribute to Indian cuisine. I love Indian food. Americans who find it too hot are culinary pussies. They need to get out of their gastronomical ghettos and celebrate diversity. My curry might not turn out as good as a gen-u-ine Indian curry, but then again it might turn out better.

Klavan is being combative above, but it is well-justified punch-back against willful and vicious stupidity of the sort that leftist lunkheads specialize in dishing out.   Cultural appropriation is good: blacks on the bottom could improve their lot by 'acting white,' by appropriating those bourgeois values that Amy Wax was recently waxing enthusiastic over, and rightly so.  

I engage in cultural appropriation every day. Why just this morning I read a bit from the Old Testament. Am I a Jew?  And then I  prayed the Ave Maria in Latin with special emphasis on the beautiful Ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae.

Am I a Roman?

Is English your native tongue? No? Then by what right do you speak OUR language?  You are engaging in cultural theft!

An Italian told me that there is no dish in Italy called pollo alla marsala. But there ought to be as you will readily agree after you've tasted mine. 

Klavan is right: it's a feature, not a bug. 

'White Supremacist' Values

The following are now widely viewed as 'white supremacist' values: merit, individual achievement, objectivity.

Leftists used to argue, fallaciously, that since outcomes are unequal for blacks and whites, 'racism' had to have been at work. As bad as that argument is, it was at least correctly assumed that people ought to be judged on their merits and by their achievements as individuals, and not discriminated against on the basis of race or sex.

But it turns out that the war against 'racism' has done little to improve the lot of blacks as a group.

So now the lunatic Left takes a different tack, that of rejecting the very values mentioned as 'white supremacist.' 

Hillary uses the slanderous phrase. One more reason to rejoice over her defeat.

The Wipeout of Obama's Legacy

He who lives by the Executive Order shall die by the Executive Order.

The witticism is mine. Fred Barnes provides the documentation.

And a friendly tip of the hat to old blogger buddy Bill Keezer for keeping me well-supplied with cartoons and memes. I met old Bill back in the early days of the blogosphere, 'long about aught-four, when a lot of us first found each other and began enriching one another's lives.

Therein resides the beauty of blog: one draws to oneself the like-minded.

Does Obama have a legacy? A legacy is something good. 'Legacy' is not a pejorative.

On Keeping a Journal

Thomas Merton, Journals, Volume Two, p. 333, entry of 10 July 1949:

Keeping a journal has taught me that there is not so much new in the interior life as one sometimes thinks. When you re-read your journal you find out that your newest discovery is something you already found out five years ago. Still, it is true that one penetrates deeper and deeper into the same ideas and the same experiences.

Bolzano on Obligation and Supererogation

Here is a curious passage from Bernard Bolzano's Wissenschaftslehre, sec. 147 (HT: V.V.):

. . . I take the concept of obligation in such a wide sense that it holds of every resolution which can be termed morally good, whether it is a definite duty or  or merely meritorious, so that we can say of both kinds that they ought to be performed. Thus I say, for example, that one ought not lie, which is a duty; and I also say that we ought to be charitable, which is not a duty, but merely meritorious . . . (Rolf George tr., p. 192)

I see it differently. The obligatory does not include the meritorious or supererogatory.  Both pertain to the actions and resolutions of rational beings.  The difference is that supererogatory actions are not required, whether morally or legally, whereas obligatory actions are.  

The obligatory is what one MUST do. The obligatory is the sphere of moral necessity.

The impermissible is what one MUST NOT do. The impermissible is the sphere of moral impossibility.

The permissible is what one MAY do. The permissible is the sphere of moral contingency.

The supererogatory is a proper subset of the permissible. Its intersection with the obligatory is null, and its intersection with the impermissible is also null.  

A Groundless Stereotype About Stereotypes

Not all stereotypes are negative; some are positive. And not all stereotypes lack a fundamentum in re; some are based in reality.

It is a stereotype both negative and without a foundation in reality that all stereotypes lack a foundation in reality.

David Boaz on F. A. Hayek

Excerpts worth pondering:

Hayek’s last book, The Fatal Conceit, published in 1988 when he was approaching ninety, returned to the topic of the spontaneous order, which is “of human action but not of human design.” The fatal conceit of intellectuals, he said, is to think that smart people can design an economy or a society better than the apparently chaotic interactions of millions of people. Such intellectuals fail to realize how much they don’t know or how a market makes use of all the localized knowledge each of us possesses.

[. . .]

Reagan and Thatcher admired Hayek, but he always insisted that he was a liberal in the classical sense, not a conservative. The last chapter of “The Constitution of Liberty” was titled “Why I Am Not a Conservative.” He pointed out that the conservative “has no political principles which enable him to work with people whose moral values differ from his own for a political order in which both can obey their convictions. It is the recognition of such principles that permits the coexistence of different sets of values that makes it possible to build a peaceful society with a minimum of force. The acceptance of such principles means that we agree to tolerate much that we dislike.”

You won't hear about Hayek and his ideas in the the leftist seminaries, which is what most of our universities have become. Yet another reason to bring down the Left.  

Although I am experiencing some salutary pressure from the neo-reactionary direction, I continue to hold that a sound conservatism must incorporate the insights of the classical liberals. How to pull this off in concreto is of course a difficult question given the  limitations of libertarianism.

Libertarians seem to think that we are all rational actors who know, and are willing and able to act upon, our own long-term best self-interest.  This is manifestly not the case.  That is why drug legalization and open borders are disastrous. They are particularly disastrous for a welfare state, which is what we have, and which is not going to "wither away."  Sure, if libertarians were in charge there wouldn't be a welfare state; but the Libertarian Party of the USA -- founded by USC philosopher John Hospers in 1970 by the way -- will never gain power. They are the "Losertarian Party" to cop a moniker from Michael Medved.  Remember the clown they ran for president in 2016, the former governor of New Mexico?  I've already forgotten his name.  Something Johnson?

The libertarians think of man one-sidedly as homo oeconomicus. Accordingly, humans are "consistently rational and narrowly self-interested agents who usually pursue their subjectively-defined ends optimally."

That's a text-book case of false abstraction.

Libertarians have something  to learn from conservatives.  But go too far in the particularistic conservative direction and you end up with the tribalism of the Alt-Right . . . .

Perhaps we need to resurrect some version of fusionism. It might help with the current political 'fission' and 'centrifugality.' No doubt you catch my drift.

David Rubin: Why I Left the Left

David Rubin, who describes himself as gay, pro-choice, and classically liberal, explains why 'progressives' are in fact regressive. (A point I have made many times.) A Prager U video under five minutes in length.  

Trigger Warning! The video contains vicious, racist, incendiary content sure to melt snowflakes. Richly deserving of being 'demonetized' by Google if it hasn't been already. [Irony off]

Rubin, like so many others including Tucker Carlson, makes the standard mistake of conflating race with skin color. 

The Fantasy of Addiction

As long as this blog has been online, 14 years now, I have railed against the misuse of the the word 'addiction.' Thanks to Dave Lull, I am pleased to see that Peter Hitchens takes a similar line  in a First Things article. Excerpt:

The chief difficulty with the word “addiction” is the idea that it describes a power greater than the will. If it exists in the way we use it and in the way our legal and medical systems assume it exists, then free will has been abolished. I know there are people who think and argue this is so. But this is not one of those things that can be demonstrated by falsifiable experiment. In the end, the idea that humans do not really have free will is a contentious opinion, not an objective fact.

So to use the word “addiction” is to embrace one side in one of those ancient unresolved debates that cannot be settled this side of the grave. To decline to use it, by contrast, is to accept that all kinds of influences, inheritances, and misfortunes may well operate on us, and propel us towards mistaken, foolish, wrong, and dangerous actions or habits. It is to leave open the question whether we can resist these forces. I am convinced that declining the word “addiction” is both the only honest thing to do, and the only kind and wise thing to do, when we are faced with fellow creatures struggling with harmful habits and desires. It is all very well to relieve someone of the responsibility for such actions, by telling him his body is to blame. But what is that solace worth if he takes it as permission to carry on as before? Once or twice I have managed to explain to a few of my critics that this is what I am saying. But generally they are too furious, or astonished by my sheer nerve, to listen.

Read it all.

Related: The Case for Nicotine

A Most Remarkable Prophecy

The Question

Suppose there had been a prophet among the ancient Athenians who prophesied the birth among them of a most remarkable man, a man having the properties we associate with Socrates, including the property of being named 'Socrates.'  Suppose this prophet, now exceedingly old, is asked after having followed Socrates' career and having witnessed his execution: Was that the man you prophesied?

Does this question make sense?  Suppose the prophet had answered, "Yes, that very man, the one who just now drank the hemlock, is the very man whose birth I prophesied long ago before he was born!"  Does this answer make sense?  

An Assumption

To focus the question, let us assume that there is no pre-existence of the souls of creatures.  Let us assume that Socrates, body and soul, comes into existence at or near the time of his conception.  For our problem is not whether we can name something that already exists, but whether we can name something that does not yet exist.

Thesis 

I say that neither the question nor the answer make sense.  (Of course they both make semantic sense; my claim is that they make no metaphysical or broadly logical sense.)  What the prophet prophesied was the coming of some man with the properties that Socrates subsequently came to possess.  What he could not have prophesied was the very man that subsequently came to possess the properties in question.  

What the prophet prophesied was general, not singular:  he prophesied that a certain definite description would come to be satisfied by some man or other. Equivalently, what the prophet prophesied was that a certain conjunctive property would come in the fullness of time to be instantiated, a property among whose conjuncts are such properties as being snubnosed, being married to a shrewish woman, being a master dialectician, being  accused of being a corrupter of youth, etc.  Even if the prophet had been omniscient and had been operating with a complete description, a description such that only one person in the actual world satisfies it if anything satisfies it, the prophecy would still be general. 

Why would the complete description, satisfied uniquely if satisfied at all, still be general?  Because of the possibility that some other individual, call him 'Schmocrates,' satisfy the description.  For such a complete description, uniquely satisfied if satisfied at all, could not capture the very haecceity and ipseity and identity of a concrete individual.

We can call this view I am espousing anti-haecceitist:  the non-qualitative thisness of a concrete individual cannot antedate the individual's existence.  Opposing this view is that of the haecceitist who holds that temporally prior to the coming into existence of a concrete individual such as Socrates, the non-qualitative thisness of the individual is already part of the furniture of the universe.

My terminology is perhaps not felicitous.  I am not denying that concrete individuals possess haecceity.  I grant that haecceity is a factor in an individual's  ontological 'assay' or analysis.  What I am denying is that the haecceity of an individual can exist apart from the individual whose haecceity it is.  From this it follows that the haecceity of an individual cannot exist before the individual exists.

But how could the non-qualitative thisness of a concrete individual be thought to antedate the individual whose thisness it is?  We might try transforming the non-qualitative thisness of a concrete individual into an abstract object, a property that exists in every possible world, and thus at every time in those worlds having time.

Consider the putative property, identity-with-Socrates.  Call it Socrateity.   Suppose our Athenian prophet has the power to 'grasp' (conceive, understand) this non-qualitative property long before it is instantiated. Suppose he can grasp it just as well as he can grasp the conjunctive property mentioned above.    Then, in prophesying the coming of Socrates, the prophet would be prophesying the coming of Socrates himself.  His prophecy would be singular, or, if you prefer, de re: it would involve Socrates himself.  

What do I mean by "involve Socrates himself"?  Before Socrates comes to be there is no Socrates.  But there is, on the haecceitist view I reject, Socrateity.  This property 'deputizes' for Socrates at times and in possible worlds at which our man does not exist.  It cannot be instantiated without being instantiated by Socrates.  And it cannot be instantiated by anything other than Socrates in the actual world or in any possible world.  By conceiving of Socrateity before Socrates comes to be, the Athenian prophet is conceiving of Socrates before he comes to be, Socrates himself, not a mere instance of a conjunctive property or a mere satisfier of a description.  Our Athenian prophet is mentally grabbing onto the very haecceity or thisness of Socrates which is unique to him and 'incommunicable' (as a Medieval philosopher might say) to any other in the actual world or in any possible world.

But what do I mean by "a mere instance" or a "mere satisfier"?

Let us say that the conjunctive property of Socrates mentioned above is a qualitative essence of Socrates if it entails every qualitative or pure property of Socrates whether essential, accidental, monadic, or relational.  If Socrates has an indiscernible twin, Schmocrates, then both individuals instantiate the same qualitative essence.  It follows that, qua instances of this qualitative essence, they are indistinguishable.  This implies that, if the prophet thinks of Socrates in terms of his qualitative essence, then his prophetic thought does not reach Socrates himself, but only a mere instance of his qualitative essence.  

My claim, then, is that one cannot conceive of an individual that has not yet come into existence.  Not even God can do it.  For until an individual comes into existence it is not a genuine individual.  Before Socrates came into existence, there was no possibility that he, that very man, come into existence.  (In general, there are no de re possibilities involving future, not-yet-existent, individuals.)  At best there was the possibility that some man or other come into existence possessing the properties that Socrates subsequently came to possess.  To conceive of some man or other is to think a general thought: it is not to think a singular thought that somehow reaches an individual in its individuality.

To conceive of a complete description's being satisfied uniquely by some individual or other it not to conceive of a particular individual that satisfies it.  If this is right, then one cannot name an individual before it exists.

Gimme Shelter

Sang the Stones. We conservatives need shelter and sanctuary. Leftists create sanctuary jurisdictions to shelter criminals and express their contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law. Push-back is now here in the form of gun sanctuaries.  We need liberty sanctuaries for free speech and open inquiry and religion as well. 

The Stones' lyrics are creepily relevant. They are displayed in the video to which I linked. "War, children, it's just a shot away, just a shot away. . . ."

The intro-buildup is one of the finest in the history of rock.

Of Patella and POTUS: The Mueller Squeeze

Having some trouble with my right knee, I purchased a Mueller compression sleeve which is putting the squeeze on my patella in a manner much to be preferred to the in terrorem manner Robert Mueller is putting the squeeze on POTUS.  And then there's Heinrich Mueller of Gestapo fame, no blood relation of Robert. I'll leave it to the better informed to assess the similarity of their tactics.

One thing is for sure: the criminalization of political differences is a serious threat to our republic.  Hats off to Alan Dershowitz for speaking out forcefully on this danger. 

Annals of Leftist Autophagy

Roger Kimball on recent examples of leftists devouring themselves. 

The Generalized Ought-Implies-Can Principle and Novák's Objection

This entry is an addendum to my Prague paper (see link below) in which I deploy a principle I call GOC, a principle that comes under withering fire in the ComBox from Dr. Lukáš Novák.  Here is my reformulation of his objection.  You will have to consult my Prague paper to see what I mean by 'really possible.' Neither of us are metaphysical naturalists, but we are assuming naturalism to be true for the sake of this discussion. The burden of my Prague paper is to show that metaphysical naturalism is not logically consistent with David Benatar's claim that "while some lives are better than others, none are (noncomparatively or objectively) good." (The Human Predicament  67)

1) Necessarily, if a state of affairs S ought to be, then S is really possible. (GOC)

2) That no child starves is a state of affairs that ought to be. (Novak's plausible premise. It is supposed to hold whether or not naturalism is true.)

Therefore:

3) That no child starves is really possible. (1, 2)

But:

4) That no child starves is not really possible on naturalism. (Premise I share with Novak:  e.g., a child who is the sole survivor of a shipwreck washes ashore  on a deserted island where there is no food.)

5) (3) and (4) are mutually contradictory.

Therefore, by reductio ad absurdum,

6) Either (1) is false or (2) is false or (4) is false.

7) (2) and (4) are both true. (Novak assumes)

Therefore

8) (1) is false.

How might I respond? Well, I agree that (4) is true.  And I have a separate argument for (1). So I argue that, on naturalism, (2) is false.  Thus I argue:

1) Necessarily, if a state of affairs S ought to be, then S is really possible. (GOC)

4) That no child starves is not really possible on naturalism.

Therefore

~2) It is not the case that on naturalism no child's starving ought to be.

This is the analog of the cases of the ought-to-do in which an agent cannot do X. If an agent cannot do X, then it is not the case that he ought to do X. 

Related articles

Is the Quality of Life Objectively Evaluable on Naturalism?

As I Have Been Saying For Years . . .

Related:

Misattributed to Socrates

Once More on the Bogus Aristotle 'Quotation'

Bogus Camus Quotation