Maverick Philosopher

Plato's Great Inversion

A rerun unredacted from February, 2014.  To the memory of John  Niemeyer  Findlay.

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Our long-time friend Horace Jeffery Hodges kindly linked to and riffed upon my recent quotage of a bit of whimsicality from the second volume of J. N. Findlay's Gifford lectures.  So here's another Findlay quotation for Jeff's delectation, this time from Plato and Platonism: An Introduction (Times Books, 1978):

It is not here, we may note, our task to defend Plato's Great Inversion, the erection of instances into ontological appendages of Ideas rather than the other way round.  It is only our task to show what this inversion involves, and that it does dispose of many powerful arguments.  For despite much talk of the concretely real and of what we can hold in our hands, it is plain that nothing so much eludes us or evades us as the vanishing instances which surround us or which go on in us. Even our friends leave nothing in our hands or our minds,  but the characteristic patterns on which we can, alas, only ponder lovingly when as instances they are dead, and we ourselves and our whole life of care and achievement leave nothing behind but the general memory of what we did and were. (23)

My esteemed teacher's poetic prose may have got the better of him in that last sentence redolent as it is of an old man's nostalgia.  For it is not only Findlay's characteristic patterns once so amply instantiated here below that I now ponder lovingly, but the actual words he wrote, many of them printed, some of them hand-written, that strikingly singular voluminous flow of Baroque articulation so beautifully expressive of a wealth of thoughts. In his books, I have the man still, and presumably at his best, even if he himself, long dead as an instance, has made the transcensive move from the Cave's chiaroscuro to the limpid light wherein he now, something of a Platonic Form himself, beholds the forma formarum, the Form of all Forms.

You will be forgiven if you think my poetic prose has gotten the better of me.

The Dictionary Fallacy

Here, at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical

Amphiboly of the Day: 'Pretty Bad Girls'

An amphiboly is a syntactic ambiguity.  Are they pretty and bad, or pretty bad?

Overheard at the Philosopher's Shooting Range

"Treat every gun as if it is loaded in every metaphysically possible world in which it exists."

The Orwellian Left

Full disclosure and transparency become 'cover up' and 'obstruction.' Take a powder, Nancy. Beat it, scram, get lost, take a hike. The Young Turks in your party of crapweasels are about to pulverize you, to continue with the metaphor.

Superiority and Superbia

The truly superior do not succumb to superbia.

Never Buy a Book You Haven't Read

Wisdom and wit with a soupçon of paradox.

How Much Logic Do I Need?

A reader who reports that his main interest is in contemporary metaphysics inquires:

Should I learn as much logic as humanly possible during my PhD? Or should I learn only what I need along the way? I have a basic grasp of symbolic and predicate logic, but little meta-logic.

First of all, it makes no sense to oppose symbolic to predicate logic.  Modern symbolic logic includes both propositional logic and predicate logic.

Second, learn what you need as you go along.  For example, existence is one of the central topics in metaphysica generalis. To work on this topic in an informed way you have to understand the modern quantificational treatment of existence in mathematical logic. 

Here is the minimum required for doing metaphysics. First, a thorough grounding in traditional formal logic including the Aristotelian syllogistic. Second, modern symbolic logic including the propositional calculus and first-order predicate logic with identity.  Third, some familiarity with axiomatics and the concepts of metalogic including consistency and completeness of axiom systems.  Fourth, axiomatic set theory. Fifth, some (alethic) modal logic both propositional and quantified.

The best way to master these subjects, or at least the first two mentioned, is by teaching them to undergraduates.  

Synchronicity, Alain, Monasticism, Sense of Life, and the Unseen Order

The other morning I recalled the passage in Alain where he recorded his boyhood visit to the abbey at La Trappe and his visceral revulsion at the life of the monks. So I pulled his On Happiness from the shelf and to my surprise opened right to the passage in question. Coincidence, or synchronicity? I'll leave that question for later. Here is the passage:

If perchance I had to write a treatise on ethics, I would rank good humor as the first of our duties. I do not know what ferocious religion has taught us that sadness is great and beautiful, and that the wise man must meditate on death by digging his own grave. When I was ten years old, I visited the Abbey of La Trappe; I saw the graves the monks were digging a little each day, and the mortuary chapel where the dead were laid out for an entire week, for the edification of the living.

These lugubrious images and the cadaveric odor haunted me for a long time; but the monks had tried to prove too much. I cannot say exactly when and for what reasons I left the Catholic Church because I have forgotten. But from that moment on, I said to myself: "It is not possible  that they have the true secret of life." My whole being rebelled against those mournful monks. And I freed myself from their religion as from an illness. 

("Good Humor" in Alain on Happiness, tr. Cottrell, New York: Frederick Unger, 1973, p. 198. Paragraph break and italics added. Propos sur le bonheur was originally published in 1928 by Gallimard.) 

The Attitude of the Worldling

Alain above frankly expresses his sense of life or sense of reality.  I don't share it, but can I argue against it? Does it even make sense to try to argue against it? Probably not. In a matter such as this argument comes too late. Alain feels it in his guts and with his "whole being" that the religion of the mournful monks, the religion Alain himself was raised in, is world-flight and a life-denying sickness.   

For a worldling such as Alain,  the transient things of this world are as real as it gets, and all else is unreal. The impermanence of things and the brevity of life do not impress or shock him as they do someone with a religious sensibility.  The worldling doesn't take them as indices of unreality as a Platonist would. If you point out the brevity of life to a worldling he might give a speech like the following:

Precisely because life is short, one must not waste it.  Brevity does not show lack of reality or value, pace Plato and his latter-day acolytes such as Simone Weil, but how real and valuable life is. This life is as real as it gets.  It is precious precisely because it is short. Make the most of it because there is not much of it, but what there is of it is enough for those who are fortunate, who live well, and who do not die too soon. Don't waste your life on religious illusions!  Don't spend your life digging your grave and preparing for death. Live!

The attitude here is that life is short but long enough and valuable enough, at least for some of us.  One should make friends with finitude, enjoying what one has and not looking beyond to what is merely imagined.  Near the beginning of the The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus quotes Pindar, "O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible." (Pythian, iii)

A frat boy might put it like this:

Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
Life is short
So party we must.

Or in the words of a 1970 beer commercial:

You only go around once in life
So you have to grab for all the gusto you can.

This attitude of the worldling is possible because it is actual and indeed widespread more so now than ever before in history, in good measure because of our technology that extends life and makes it vastly  more endurable than in previous centuries. Our 24-7, 365(6) connectivity also practically insures that we will remain trapped within the sphere of immanence and human chatter and be unable to 'pick up any signals' from beyond the human horizon.  Our communications technology is like a Faraday cage that blocks all irruptions from the Unseen Order.

The worldling's attitude is a matter of sensibility and it is difficult and probably impossible to argue with anyone's sensibility. I cannot argue you out of your sense of reality. Arguments come too late for that.  In fact, arguments are often little more than articulations on the logical plane  of a sensibility deep in the soul that was already in place before one attained explicit logical skills.

Is the worldling ignorant?

I would say he is. But how prove it either to him or to myself? Can one PROVE that God and the soul are real? That this life is a vanishing quantity unworthy of wholehearted devotion? That what really matters is beyond matter and beyond mind in its presently paltry and darkened state? No. At best one can give a number of plausible arguments for these 'objects' and a number of plausible arguments against metaphysical naturalism. But at the end of the day one is going to have to invoke certain mystical vouchsafings, intimations from Elsewhere, glimpses, revelations, teachings of some magisterium deemed finally authoritative, all of which are easily hauled before the bench of reason to have their veridicality questioned, and, I should add, in good faith. In the end, a leap of faith is needed. You will have to decide what to believe and how to live. You will have to decide whether to live in accordance with your sense of life, whether it be of the worldly sort or the otherworldly.

Suppose I take the 'bite of conscience' as pointing to the existence of a Supreme Moral Authority of a personal nature.  I could make a very strong case. But would it be rationally compelling? No.  Could I ever be objectively certain that no naturalistic explanation could account adequately for the deliverances of conscience?  No. So the will comes into it.

Is the worldling morally culpable for his ignorance?

Some might be, but in general, he is not.  Pace St. Paul at Romans 1: 18-20, I don't find unbelief to be morally culpable.  It is neither evident that God exists nor evident that he does not exist. One can of course dogmatize and one can of course be a 'presuppositionalist' of one sort or another. But those are not respectable positions.

Emile-Auguste Chartier (1868-1951) was a French professor of philosophy among whose students were Raymond Aron and Simone Weil. Chartier's sunny disposition, however, did not rub off on the brooding Weil. Under the pseudonym 'Alain,' Chartier published thousands of two-page essays in newspapers. Were he alive and active today he would most likely be a blogger.

Sunshine is the Best Disinfectant. . .

. . . but not for the obstructionist crapweasel Democrats who will say and do literally anything to destroy a duly elected president.  They understandably do not want their skulduggery to come to light.

One of the signal services of Mr. Trump is that he has forced the Democrats to show their true hard-Left colors. He has caused the scum of the Democrat party to rise to the very top to be seen in the plain light of day. Trump has clarified our politics. He is the Great Clarifier.  To call him the Great Divider is knuckleheaded. The divisions were already in place. He merely gave effective voice to one side of the divide -- which is what drove and drives the Dems crazy.

Trump Let the Dogs Out:

The Democrats, stumbling down the road to impeachment, were stunned by President Trump’s executive order on Thursday.

The order is in two parts. First, it directs the intelligence agencies to cooperate with Attorney General William Barr’s investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia counterintelligence investigation that was the vehicle used to spy on candidate Trump’s campaign and President Trump’s administration when it was new.

The second part of the order delegates to Barr the president’s authority to declassify — or reduce the level of classification of — anything that the intelligence agencies will give him.

Read it all.

The Facebook Offload

I have offloaded a good deal of my political linkage, 'rantage,' and commentary onto my FB page. But given the state of the Republic, it is important to punch back against the destructive Left in every venue and from every platform. So I will continue to post political material here.  You may try to avoid the political, but don't expect it to reciprocate.  You may seek to evade the totalitarians and retreat into your private life, but it is the nature of  totalitarians to seek total control.  Retreat into your private life, and you  may wake up one day to find that there is no private life.

Free speech! Use it or lose it. But the Constitution that protects our rights is just paper without a certain backup element:

Advice for Leftists: Don't Call it Infanticide

Call it fourth trimester abortion. That should appeal to your twisted Orwellian sensibility. Why shouldn't infanticide also be celebrated?

The Pelosi Argument for Limited Government

Limit the government and thereby limit the number of idiots in government.

The Consistent Nihilist

The consistent nihilist will hold that it doesn't matter that nothing matters. He is Nietzsche's Last Man for whom nihilism ceases to be an issue.  This distinguishes him from the militant or 'evangelical' nihilist for whom it matters that nothing matters and who feels called to preach this truth and set people straight. It also distinguishes him from the nihilist who seeks to overcome nihilism like Nietzsche himself.

The Last Man: There is no truth and it doesn't matter. God is dead, the funeral is over, and the Old Man in an unmarked grave. Forget about it and pass the popcorn!

The Training of a Philosopher

One must don the logical straitjacket and then do one's dance.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Bob Dylan Turned 78 Yesterday

He has been called "rock's greatest songwriter."  A  better description is "America's greatest writer of popular songs." Bar none.  We can discuss the criteria later, and consider counterexamples.     His earliest four or five albums are not in the rock genre.  I'll permit quibbling about #5, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), but Bob Dylan (1962), The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963) , The Time's They Are A'Changin' (1964), and Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964) are better classified as folk, not that they sit all that comfortably in this niche.

These early albums are studded with lasting contributions to Americana. This is music with meaning that speaks to the mind and the heart.  No Rat Pack crooner Las Vegas lounge lizard stuff here. Two lesser-known compositions both from The Times They Are a'Changin' (1964):

The Ballad of Hollis Brown   Performed by Stephen Stills.

North Country Blues.  Written from the point of view of a woman and so appropriately sung by the angel-throated Joan Baez.

D. A. Pennebaker on the making of Don't Look Back.  I saw it in '67 when it first came out.  I just had to see it, just as I just had to have all of Dylan's albums, all of his sheet music, and every article and book about him. I was a Dylan fanatic.  No longer a fanatic, I remain a fan.

May he die with his boots on.  It ain't dark yet, but it's gettin' there. When his 30th album Time Out of Mind came out in 1997, over twenty years ago now, I was amazed to discover that Dylan could still tap back into that magic mood he achieved in the mid-60s.

Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear
It's not dark yet, but it's getting there.

 

I was born here and I'll die here, against my will
I know it looks like I'm movin' but I'm standin' still

Every nerve in my body is so naked and numb
I can't even remember what it was I came here to get away from
Don't even hear the murmur of a prayer
It's not dark yet, but it's getting there.

Sinatra is supposed to have said that a pro is one who can play it the same way twice.  (Where?) Dylan rarely plays it the same way twice. Here is a version of "Just Like a Woman" which is lyrically and in other minor ways different from the Blonde on Blonde version.  

Dave Bagwill recommends this outstanding extended version (Freewheelin' outake 2, 1962) of "The Ballad of Hollis Brown." Move over, Stephen Stills! The harp fills don't quite make it, however, in this minor-keyed tune.

Intentionality for Third-World Entities?

Commenter John and I are having a very productive discussion about intentionality.  I thank him for helping me clarify my thoughts about this fascinating topic.  I begin with some points on which (I think) John and I agree.

a) There is a 'third world' or third realm and it is the realm of abstracta.   (I promise: no jokes about Frege's Third Reich. But I can't promise not to speak of Original Sinn and Original Sinn-ers.) Fregean senses, whether propositional or sub-propositional, are abstracta, but not all abstracta are reference-mediating senses. John and I are operating with a provisional tripartite or tri-categorial ontology comprising the mental, the physical, and the abstract.

b) There are instances of intrinsic intentionality. Neither of us is an eliminativist about intentionality in the manner, say, of Alexander Rosenberg. (See Could Intentionality be an Illusion?)

c) There is no intentionality without intrinsic or original intentionality: it cannot be that all intentionality is derivative or a matter of ascription, pace Daniel Dennett.  (See Original and Derived Intentionality, Circles, and Regresses.)

d) Nothing physical qua physical is intrinsically intentional, although some physical items are derivatively intentional.  (Combine this true proposition with the false proposition that all mental states are physical, and you have an unsound but valid argument for the eliminativist conclusion that there is no intrinsic intentionality.)

Agreement on the foregoing points leaves open the question whether there could be intrinsically intentional abstract items.  I tend to think that there are no intrinsically intentional abstract items.  John's position, assuming I understand it, is that some abstract items are intrinsically intentional, and that some  intrinsically intentional items are not abstract, mental states being examples of the latter.

The bare bones of the debate between John and I may be set forth as an aporetic triad:

1) Fregean senses are intrinsically intentional items. 

2) Only conscious items are intrinsically intentional.

3) Fregean senses are not conscious. 

It is easy to see that this threesome is not logically consistent: the propositions cannot all be true. John and I assume that the Law of Non-Contradiction holds across the board: we are not dialetheists.  So something has to give. Which limb of the triad should we reject?  (3) is not in dispute and presumably will be accepted by all: no abstract item is conscious, and senses are abstract.  'Abstract' was defined in earlier entries, and John and I agree on its meaning. The dispute concerns (1) and (2). I reject (1) while accepting the other two propositions; John rejects (2) while accepting the other two propositions.

I argue from the conjunction of (2) and (3) to the negation of (1), while John argues from the conjunction of (1) and (3) to the negation of (2).

My rejection of (1) entails that there are no Fregean senses (Sinne).  This is because Fregean senses, by definition, are intrinsically intentional. It follows that they are essentially intrinsically intentional. So if they can't be intrinsically intentional, then they can't exist. Why are senses essentially intrinsically intentional?  Well, as platonica, senses are necessarily existent: they exist in all metaphysically possible worlds. It follows that they exist in worlds in which there are no finite minds.* Now a sense, by definition, is a mode of presentation (Darstellungsweise) of its object.  It mediates between minds and things.  Reference, whether thinking reference or linguistic reference, is routed though sense. The (re)presentational power of a sense is essential to it, and it has this power even in worlds in which there are no words to express the sense, no things to be presented by  the sense, and no minds to refer to things via senses.  For example, consider a possible world W in which there are no languages, no minds, and no planet Venus. In W the sense that 'Phosphorus' -- 'Morning Star,' Morgenstern -- expresses in our world exists (because it exists in every world) and has its (re)presentational power there in W. Thus its intentionality is intrinsic to it and does not depend on any relations to words or to things or to minds.  It (re)presents non-linguistically and non-mentally and without the need for physical embodiment.

I think it follows that there is no distinction in reality -- although there is one notionally -- between the power of a Fregean sense to represent and its exercise of this power.  There is, in other words, no distinction in reality between the power of a sense to represent and its actually representing.  I say this because the existence of what an intrinsically intentional item is of or about has no effect whatsoever on the aboutness of the item.  Suppose I am thinking about the Washington monument, but that while I am thinking about it, it ceases to exist. That change in objective reality in no way affects the aboutness of the intentional state.  Thus the power of an intrinsically intentional item to represent does not need an external, objectively real, 'trigger' to actualize the power.  The extramental existence of the Washington monument is not  a necessary condition of the aboutness of my thinking about it.  The content and aboutness of my thinking is exactly the same whether or not the monument exists 'outside the mind.' The same goes for senses. The sense of 'Phosphorus' presents Venus whether or not Venus exists. And the content of the sense is exactly the same whether or not Venus exists.

There is an important difference, however, between an intrinsically intentional mental state and a Fregean sense.   The occurrent mental state or 'act' -- in the terminology of Twardowksi, Husserl, et al. -- is the state of a mind. It is the act of a subject, the cogitatio of an ego, where the last three occurrences of 'of' all express the genitivus subjectivus.  This is essentially, not accidentally, the case.  There has to be an ego behind the cogitatio for the cogitatio to be a cogitatio of a cogitatum.  But there needn't be an ego 'behind' the sense for the sense to be a sense of or about a thing. If a Fregean sense mediates a reference between a mind and a thing, it is not essential to the mediation that there be a mind 'behind' the sense.

Here then is an argument against Fregean senses:

4) Every instance of intrinsic intentionality has both a subject and an object.
5) Some instances of reference-mediation by a sense do not have both a subject and an object.
Therefore
6) Some instances of reference-mediation by a sense are not instances of intrinsic intentionality.

When I reject the proposition that Fregean senses are intrinsically intentional items, I thereby reject the very existence of Fregean senses. I am not maintaining that Fregean senses exist but are derivatively intentional items.  I do hold, however, that there are derivatively intentional items, maps for example.  Maps get their meaning and aboutness from us original Sinn-ers. A map is not about a chunk of terrain just in virtue of the map's physical and geometrical properties. Consider the contour lines on a topographical map. The closer together, the steeper the terrain. But that closer together should mean steeper is a meaning assigned by the community of map-makers and map-users. This meaning is not intrinsic to the map qua physical object. Closer together might have meant anything, e.g., that the likelihood of falling into an abandoned mine shaft is greater.

So some things derive their referential and semantic properties from other things.  That is also true of language. Words and phrases don't mean anything in and of themselves. Mind is king: no minds, no meaning. I subscribe to the primacy of the intentional over the linguistic. 

John and I agree that Fregean senses, whether propositional or sub-propositional, are explanatory posits.  They are not 'datanic' as I like to say. Thus it is a pre-analytic or pre-theoretical datum that the sentences 'The sky is blue' and Der Himmel ist blau 'say the same thing' or can by used to say the same thing. But that this same thing is a Fregean proposition goes beyond the given and enters the explanatory realm.  One forsakes phenomenology for dialectics. Now what am I claiming exactly? That there is no need for these posits, that to posit senses is to 'multiply entities beyond necessity in violation of Occam's Razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem?  Or am I saying something stronger, namely, that there cannot be any such items as Fregean senses? I believe my view is the latter, and not merely the former.  If senses cannot exist, then they cannot be reasonably posited either.  

John's view, I take it, is that both Fregean senses and some conscious items are intrinsically intentional or object-directed. He is not maintaining that only third-world entities (abstracta) are intrinsically intentional. By contrast, I maintain that only second-world entities (mental items, both minds and some of their occurrent states) are intrinsically intentional.

I assume that John intends 'intrinsically intentional' to be taken univocally and not analogically.  Thus he is not saying that Fregean senses are of or about first-world items in a manner that is analogous to the way second-world items are of or about first-world items.    

Fregean senses are intrinsically intentional, necessarily existent, abstract entities.  By its very nature a sense presents or represents something apart from itself, something that may or may not exist. It is a natural, not conventional, sign.  

Do I have a compelling argument against Fregean senses?  Above I mentioned the following argument:

2) Only conscious items are intrinsically intentional.

3) Fregean senses are not conscious. Therefore:

1) It is not the case that Fregean senses are intrinsically intentional.

But this argument appears to beg the question at (2).  Why can't there be intrinsically intentional items that are not conscious?  If there can be intentionality below the level of conscious mind in the form of dispositionality -- see Intentionality, Potentiality, and Dispositionality -- why con't there be intentionality above the level of conscious mind in platonica?

Nevertheless, there seems to me something incoherent about Fregean senses. They actually represent even in worlds in which there is nothing to represent and no one to whom to represent.  Consider again the sense of 'Phosphorus.'  It exists in every world including worlds in which Venus does not exist and no mind exists. In those worlds, the sense in question actually represents but does not represent anything to anyone.  It is therefore a non-representing representation, and thus an impossibility.

_____________________

*A finite mind is the kind of mind that needs such intermediary items as Fregean senses or Husserlian noemata to mediate its reference (both thinking reference and linguistic reference) to things that it cannot get completely before its mind in all their parts, properties, and relations. An archetypal intellect such as the divine mind can get at the whole of the thing 'in one blow.'  As an infinite mind it has an infinite grasp of the infinitely-propertied thing.  An infinite mind has no need of senses. The existence of senses therefore reflects the finitude of our minds.  That the reflections of this finitude should be installed in Plato's heavenly place (topos ouranos) seems strange.  It looks to be an illict hypostatization. But this thought needs a further post for its adequate deployment.

Dark Nietzschean Thoughts

The serious thinker is self-critical: his examination of life, without which his life is not worth living, is a self-examination, even unto a painful thinking against himself.  He has the courage to entertain, which is not to say endorse, dark thoughts. He is not an apologist for a ready-made worldview. He toes no party line. His watchword is 'inquiry,' not 'worldview.' He would have a worldview if he could, but he must inquire to find one.

The world is just power and brutality at bottom. The healthy human animal, sensing this in his guts, exercises his power for his own pleasure and to his own advantage without moral scruples. The sick human animal moralizes and reflects and hesitates, having hobbled himself with moral codes and an excess of thinking. The sick human animal's reasoning and spirituality, quest for Transcendence, pursuit of the Good, thirsting after justice and righteousness are nothing more than expressions and legitimations of his weakness. And part of his sickness are these very reflections on whether he is a sick animal unfit for life in the only world there is, and morality buncombe. The healthy human animal does not entertain dark Nietzschean thoughts.

Christianity has civilized us but also weakened us. No longer is our penology unspeakably brutal. We have gone to the other extreme: we oppose capital punishment for even the worst miscreants and absurdly debate whether death by lethal injection is "cruel and unusual punishment" and thus unconstitutional.

Nationalism: Ethnic and Civic

Here:

Much of today’s debate fails to distinguish between two types of nationalism: ethnic and civic. The former is based on language, blood or race. American nationalism is the latter, civic in nature, holding that the United States is a nation based on a set of beliefs — a creed — rather than race or blood. This understanding of nationalism is equivalent to “patriotism.”

This is a good start, but it doesn't go deep enough. I applaud the distinction between the ethnic and the civic. But American nationalism is not wholly civic.  Indeed, it is hard to imagine any nation that could be wholly civic, wholly 'propositional' or wholly based on a set of beliefs and value.  And yet the United States is a proposition nation: the propositions are in the founding documents. I don't see how that could be reasonably denied. 

I also don't see how it could be reasonably denied that the discovery and articulation and preservation of classically American principles and values was achieved by people belonging to a certain tradition.  

This has consequences for immigration policy. I take it to be axiomatic that immigration must be to the benefit of the host country, a benefit not to be  defined in merely economic terms. 

And so I ask a politically incorrect but perfectly reasonable question: Is there any net benefit to Muslim immigration?  Immigrants bring their culture with them. Muslims, for example, bring with them a Sharia-based, hybrid religious-political ideology that is antithetical to American values.

So I ask again: Is there any net benefit to Muslim immigration?

Federal Rats Flee Sinking Ship

Victor Davis Hanson

The entire Trump-Russia collusion narrative was always implausible.

One, the Washington swamp of fixers such as Paul Manafort and John and Tony Podesta was mostly bipartisan and predated Trump.

Two, the Trump administration’s Russia policies were far tougher on Vladimir Putin than were those of Barack Obama. Trump confronted Russia in Syria, upped defense spending, increased sanctions and kept the price of oil down through massive new U.S. energy production. He did not engineer a Russian “reset” or get caught on a hot mic offering a self-interested hiatus in tensions with Russia in order to help his own re-election bid.

Three, Russia has a long history of trying to warp U.S. elections that both predated Trump and earned only prior lukewarm pushback from the Obama administration.

It’s also worth remembering that President Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation had been recipients of Russian and Russian-related largesse—ostensibly because Hillary Clinton had used her influence as Secretary of State under Obama to ease resistance to Russian acquisitions of North American uranium holdings.

As far as alleged Russian collusion goes, Hillary Clinton used three firewalls—the Democratic National Committee, the Perkins Coie law firm and the Fusion GPS strategic intelligence firm—to hide her campaign’s payments to British national Christopher Steele to find dirt on Trump and his campaign; in other words, to collude. Steele in turn collected his purchased Russian sources to aggregate unverified allegations against Trump. He then spread the gossip within government agencies to ensure that the smears were leaked to the media—and with a government seal of approval.

No wonder that special counsel Robert Mueller’s partisan team spent 22 months and $34 million only to conclude the obvious: that Trump did not collude with Russia.

Why Would You Want an Academic Job?

I quit a tenured position at a good school in 1991 at the relatively young age of 41.  One of my reasons was the increasing political correctness and groupthink of the universities which, since the '60s, have become leftist seminaries.  Now it is far, far worse. So why would any right-thinking person want an academic post?  Roger Kimball:

Consider, to take just one example, the fate of our colleges and universities. Once upon a time, and it was not so long ago, they were institutions dedicated to the pursuit of truth and the transmission of the highest values of our civilization. Today, most are dedicated to the repudiation of truth and the subversion of those values. In short, they are laboratories for the cultivation of wokeness. This is especially true, with only a handful of exceptions, of the most prestigious institutions. The tonier and more expensive the college, the more woke it is likely to be.

There are two central tenets of the woke philosophy. The first is feigned fragility. The second is angry intolerance. The union of fragility and intolerance has given us that curious and malevolent hybrid, the crybully, a delicate yet venomous species that thrives chiefly in lush, pampered environments.

The eighteenth-century German aphorist G. C. Lichtenberg observed, “Nowadays we everywhere seek to propagate wisdom: who knows whether in a couple of centuries there may not exist universities for restoring the old ignorance.” Doubtless Lichtenberg thought he was being clever. How astonished he would have been to discover that he was a prophet, not a satirist.

You should carefully read the whole essay. Kimball has wise and very timely things to say about free speech and its limits.

Time's Alchemy

Nietzsche is more for his present admirers than he ever could have been for Rohde, Deussen, or Overbeck. Time transforms the merely superior into heroes. Some idols are born posthumously.

Jews and Abortion

Here:

Jewish law does not share the belief common among abortion opponents that life begins at conception, nor does it legally consider the fetus to be a full person deserving of protections equal those accorded to human beings. In Jewish law, a fetus attains the status of a full person only at birth. Sources in the Talmud indicate that prior to 40 days of gestation, the fetus has an even more limited legal status, with one Talmudic authority (Yevamot 69b) asserting that prior to 40 days the fetus is “mere water.” Elsewhere, the Talmud indicates that the ancient rabbis regarded a fetus as part of its mother throughout the pregnancy, dependent fully on her for its life — a view that echoes the position that women should be free to make decisions concerning their own bodies.

The above illustrates the pathetically low level of public discourse about abortion. Mere biology refutes the "mere water" nonsense, and the first clause of the first sentence. The only bit worthy of comment is the final sentence.

Many say that a woman has the right to do what she wants with her own body and any part thereof.  This is the Woman's Body Argument:

1) The fetus is a part of a woman's body.
2) A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with any part of her body.
Therefore
3) A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with the fetus, including having it killed.

For this argument to be valid, 'part' must be used in the very same sense in both premises. Otherwise, the argument equivocates on a key term.  There are two possibilities. 'Part' can be taken in a wide sense that includes the fetus, or in a narrow sense that excludes it.

If 'part' is taken in a wide sense, then (1) is  true. Surely there is a wide sense of 'part' according to which the fetus is part of its mother's body. But then (2) is reasonably rejected. Abortion is not relevantly like liposuction or the removal of swarts and tumors, etc.  Granted, a woman has a right to remove unwanted fat from her body via liposuction. Such fat is uncontroversially part of her body. But the fetus growing within her is not a part in the same sense: it is a separate individual life. The argument, then, is not compelling. Premise (2) is more reasonably rejected than accepted.

If, on the other hand, 'part' is taken in a narrow sense that excludes the fetus, then perhaps (2) is acceptable, but (1) is surely false: the fetus is plainly not a part of the woman's body in the narrow sense of 'part.'

The argument falls victim to an equivocation on 'part.'

For those who cannot think without a pictorial aid:

No doubt, women have reproductive rights. For example they have the right not to be forced by the state to procreate. But it cannot be assumed that the right to an abortion is automatically one of them. There is a grave moral issue here that Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren and others of their ilk do not want you to see. But it is not going to go away and you need to address it as honestly as you can without obfuscatory rhetoric and with attention to biological fact.

Reader Requests Book Recommendations

Kevin writes,

I enjoy your blog, but am very much a neophyte to philosophical thinking.  Background is B.A., major in Pol Sci, minor in English Lit. I'm currently reading Introduction to Philosophy by Daniel Sullivan. Any other good books for beginners that you could recommend?

Does anyone have any suggestions for Kevin?

Of Apples and Sparkplugs

All too frequently people say, ‘You’re comparing apples and oranges’ in order to convey the idea that two things are so dissimilar as to disallow any significant comparison. Can’t they do better than this? Apples and oranges are highly comparable in respects too numerous to mention. Both are fruits, both are edible, both grow on trees, both are good sources of fiber, both contain Vitamin C, and so on.

Why not say, ‘You are comparing apples and sparkplugs’? Apples are naturally occurrent and edible while sparkplugs are inedible artifacts. That’s a serious difference. Or, 'You are comparing prime numbers and prime ministers.' Or, 'You are comparing anorexic girls and over-inflated basketballs.'

This reminds me of a story I read as a boy in my hometown newspaper. A man once ate an entire car, sparkplugs and all. A feat of automotive asceticism to rival the pillar antics of Simon Stylites. He did it by cutting the car and its parts into small pieces that he then washed down with generous libations of buttermilk.

But a car is not just solid parts, but various fluids. You’ve got your gasoline, your crankcase oil, your tranny fluid, not to mention coolant, windshield wiper liquid, and what all else. How did he negotiate that stuff? Well, I suppose anything can be passed through the gastrointestinal system if sufficiently chopped up or watered down.

So if a man gets it into his head to eat an entire car, he can do it. As my fourth grade teacher Sr Elizabeth (Lizard) Marie used to say, "Where there’s a will there’s a way."

A good piece of folk wisdom that has served me well.

Distance Permits Idealization

Propinquity diminishes what distance augments. Among friends, mutual respect is better served by distance than by close contact. Distance permits idealization. Is it an unalloyed good? No, inasmuch as idealization typically falsifies. But falsification in a world that runs on appearances can be life-enhancing. One skilled in the art of life knows how to apply 'cosmetics' to the ugly faces of people and things. One so skilled even knows how to play cosmetologist to the cosmos and put a pretty face on the the whole kit and kaboodle.

The Past Present

The past is gone, you say? But it has brought you to this fullness of life, this level of accomplishment, this richness of memory, and this wealth of experience. Thus is the past present.

It's Tough Being a Lefty

The howling Wolff is permanently pissed off.

'Platonic' Propositions: A Consideration Contra. The Argument from Intrinsic Intentionality

Commenter John put the following question to me:

Which Platonist theories of propositions did you have in mind in your original post, and what are the problems involved in accepting such views?

I had in mind a roughly Fregean theory.  One problem with such a view is that it seems to require that propositions possess intrinsic intentionality.  Let me explain.

Propositions: A Broadly Fregean Theory Briefly Sketched

On one approach, propositions are abstract items. I am not suggesting that propositions are products of abstraction.  I am using 'abstract' in the (misconceived) Quinean way to cover items that are not in space, or in time, and are not causally active or passive.  We should add  that no mind is an abstract item.  Abstracta, then, are neither bodies nor minds. They comprise a third category of entity. Besides propositions, numbers and (mathematical) sets are often given as candidate members of this category. But our topic is propositions.

For specificity, we consider Frege's theory of propositions. He called them Gedanken, thoughts, which is a strangely psychologistic terminological choice for so anti-psychologistic a logician, but so be it.  Like its German counterpart, the English 'thought' is ambiguous. It could refer to an act of thinking, a mental act, or it it could refer to the intentional object or accusative of such an act.  Some use the word 'content,' but it has the disadvantage of suggesting something contained in the act of thinking.  But when I think of the river Charles, said river is not literally contained in my act of thinking.  A fortiori for Boston's Scollay Square which I am now thinking about: it no longer exists and so cannot be contained in anything.  The same is true when I think that the Charles is polluted or that Scollay Square was a magnet for sailors on shore leave. Those propositions are not  psychological realities really contained in my or anyone's acts of thinking.  And of course they are not literally in the head.  You could say that they are in the mind, but only if you mean that they are before the mind.

A proposition for Frege is the sense (Sinn) of a certain sort of sentence in the indicative mood, namely, an indicative sentence from which all indexical elements, if any, such as the tenses of verbs, have been extruded. Consider the following sentence-tokens each of which features a tenseless copula:

1. The sea is blue.
2. The sea is blue.
3. Die See ist blau.
4. Deniz mavidir.

(Since Turkish is an agglutinative language, the copula in the Turkish sentence is the suffix 'dir.')

The (1)-(4) array depicts four sentence-tokens of three sentence-types expressing exactly one proposition. Intuitively, the four sentences say the same thing, or to be precise, can be used by people to say the same thing. That 'same thing' is the proposition they express, or to be precise, that people express by (assertively) uttering them or otherwise encoding them.  The proposition is one to their many.  (I have just sounded a Platonic theme.) And unlike the sentence-tokens, the proposition is nonphysical, which has the epistemological consequence that it, unlike the sentence-tokens, cannot be seen with the eyes or heard with the ears. It is 'seen' (understood) with the mind. Herewith, a second Platonic theme. Frege is a sort of latter-day Platonist.  

So one reason to introduce propositions is to account for the fact that the same meaning-content or sense can be expressed by different people using different sentences of different languages.  We also need to account for the fact that the same thought can be expressed by the same person at different times in the same or different languages. Another reason to posit propositions is to have a stable entity to serve as vehicle of the truth-values. It is the proposition that is primarily either true or false. Given that a proposition is true, then any sentence expressing it is derivatively true.  Similarly with judgments and beliefs: they are derivatively true if true.   For Frege, propositions are the primary truth bearers or vehicles of the truth-values.  

There is quite a lot to be said for the view that a sentence-token cannot be a primary truth-bearer. For how could a string of marks on paper, or pixels on a screen, be either true or false? Nothing can be either true or false unless it has meaning, but how could mere physical marks (intrinsically) mean anything? Merely physical marks, as such, are meaningless. Therefore, a string of marks cannot be either true or false.  It is the office of minds to mean. Matter means nothing. 

One could agree that a string of marks  or a sequence of noises cannot, as such, attract a truth-value, but balk at the inference that therefore propositional meanings (senses) are self-subsistent, mind-independent abstract items.  One might plump for what could be called an 'Aristotelian' theory of propositions according to which a sentence has all the meaning it needs to attract a truth-value in virtue of its being thoughtfully uttered or otherwise tokened by someone with the intention of making a claim about the world.  The propositional sense would then be a one-IN-many and not a Platonic one-OVER-many.  The propositional sense would be a unitary sense but not a sense that could exist on its own apart from minds or mean anything apart from minds.

But how would the Aristotelian account for necessary truths, including the truths of logic, which are true in worlds in which there are no minds?  Here the Platonist has an opportunity for rejoinder.  Fregean propositions are especially useful when it comes to the necessary truths expressed by such sentences as '7 is prime.' A necessary truth is true in all possible worlds, including those worlds in which there are no minds and/or nothing physical and so no means of physically expressing truths. If truth is taken to be a property of physical items or any contingent item, then it might be difficult to account for the existence of necessary truths. The Fregean can handle this problem by saying that propositions, as abstract objects, exist in all possible worlds, and that necessarily true ones have the property of being true in all possible worlds. The Fregean can also explain how there can be necessary truths in worlds in which there is nothing physical and nothing mental either.

Propositions also function as the accusatives of the so-called 'propositional attitudes' such as belief. To believe is to believe something. One cannot just believe. One way to construe this is de dicto: to believe is to stand in a relation to a proposition or dictum. Thus if I believe that the river Charles is polluted, then the intentional object of the occurrent belief state is the proposition expressed by 'The river Charles is polluted.' (Of course, there is also a de re way of construing the belief in question: To believe that the Charles is polluted is to believe, of the river Charles, that is is polluted.)

A Consideration Contra

Well, suppose one endorses a theory of propositions such as the one just sketched. You have these necessarily existent Platonic entities called propositions some of which are true and some of which are false. There are all of these entities that there could have been.  Each necessarily exists although only some are necessarily true.  As necessarily existent and indeed necessarily existent in themselves and from themselves, they have no need of minds to 'support' them.  Hence they are not mere accusatives of mental acts.  They are apt to become accusatives but they are not essentially accusatives. They can exist without being accusatives of any mind. To borrow a phrase from Bernard Bolzano, they are Saetze an sich.  They are made for the mind, and transparent to mind, but they don't depend for their existence on any mind, finite or infinite.

Even more salient for present purposes is that these Platonic propositions are not only existent in themselves but also meaningful in themselves: they do not derive their meaning from minds.  It follows that they possess intrinsic intentionality.  At this juncture an aporetic tetrad obtrudes itself.

A. Fregean propositions are non-mental representations: they are intrinsically representative of state of affairs in the world.

B. Fregean propositions are abstract items.

C. No abstract item possesses intrinsic representational power.

D. Fregean propositions exist.

The limbs of the tetrad cannot all be true.  One can therefore reasonably argue from the conjunction of the first three to the negation of the fourth.

Facebook

Most of my political linkage and 'rantage' is over there.  

How are God and Truth Related?

By my count, there are five different ways to think about the relation of God and truth:

1) There is truth, but there is no God.

2) There is truth, and there is God, but God is not the ontological ground of truth.

3) There is truth, there is God, and truth ultimately depends on the existence of God. There is truth only because there is God.

4) There is no truth, because there is no God.

5) There is God, but no truth.

Ad (1). This I would guess is the view of  many if not most today. There are truths, and among these truths is the truth that God does not exist.  This, I take it, is the standard atheist view.

Ad (2). This, I take it, would be the standard theist view among analytic philosophers.  Consider a philosopher who holds that God is a necessary being and also holds that it is necessarily the case that there are some truths, but would deny the truth of the subjunctive conditional, If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then truths would not exist either. 

Ad (3). This is the view that I am inclined to accept.  Thus I would affirm the subjunctive conditional lately mentioned. The difference between (2) and (3) is subtle. On both sides it is held that both God and truths are necessary, but the Augustinian -- to give him a name -- holds that God is the ultimate  'source' of all truth and thus of all intelligibility, or, if you prefer, the ultimate 'ground' of all truth and intelligibility.

Ad (4). This is Nietzsche's view.  Tod Gottes = Tod der Wahrheit.

Ad (5). I have the impression that certain post-Nietzschean POMO-heads hold this. It is a view not worth discussing.

I should think only the first three views have any merit.  

Each of the three has difficulties and none of the three can be strictly proven.

I will mention quickly a problem for the admittedly plausible first view.  

Among the truths there are necessary truths such as the laws of logic. Now a truth is a true truth-bearer, a true proposition, say. Nothing can have a property unless it exists. (Call this principle Anti-Meinong). So no proposition can have the property of being true unless the proposition exists. A necessary truth is true in every metaphysically possible world. It follows that a necessarily true proposition exists in every possible world including worlds in which there are no finite minds.  But a proposition is a thought-accusative that cannot exist except in, or for, a mind.  If there is no God, or rather, if there is no necessarily existent mind, every mind is contingent. A contradiction ensues: there is a world W such that, in W, there exists a thought-accusative that is not the thought-accusative of any mind.

Here are some ways an atheist might 'solve' the problem:

a) Deny that there are necessary truths.

b) Deny that truth is any sense a property of propositions.

c) Deny Anti-Meinong.

d) Deny that propositions are thought-accusatives; accept some sort of Platonism about propositions.

But each of these denials involves problems of its own which I would have no trouble unpacking.

Some Questions About Animal Suffering and Religious Belief

This just in from Karl White:

A couple of questions.

 

1. The gist of your posts seems to be that we can never know for sure that an evil is pointlessly evil, therefore no evil rules out definitively the potential existence of an omni-loving God.

 

Yes, that's the gist of it, but strike 'potential.'

 

So in your view does that imply that there is no amount of evil that could rule it out? If the entire planet were like Auschwitz would that still not rule it out? (And it is estimated that roughly 150 million animals are slaughtered per day for human consumption, so it could plausibly be maintained that for animals the world is a kind of Auschwitz.)

 

No. The idea is that the existence of evils that are necessary for a greater good are logically compatible with the existence of an all-good God. So the goods have to outweigh the evils.  It follows that there has to be a limit to how much evil there is.

 

And let's leave out of the present discussion the human slaughter of humans and animals, for that belongs under the rubric 'moral evil,' whereas the topic under discussion is natural evil. One question for a separate post is whether natural evil is itself a species of moral evil, namely, the evil perpetrated by fallen angels. But for now I will assume that natural evil is not a species of moral evil; I will assume that it is not the result of free agency.

 

To put it more formally: is there any state of affairs, call it X, that would rule out the existence of God?

 

Yes. Just one case of pointless or unjustified evil would rule out the existence of God.

 

I am uncomfortable with the idea of saying yes, as I suspect it pushes the notion of an omni-God toward the brink of meaninglessness. We generally think that if a proposition cannot be proven or disproven then it is in a certain sense meaningless or at best useless. The Theist will reply that the existence of God is a unique case and fine, but I still feel that we are within our rights to ask for some form of verification without having the whole concept of God becoming meaningless.

 

I rather doubt that  a proposition is meaningful iff it is verifiable. Consider the following proposition

 

a) My grandfather Alfonso drank a glass of dago red on 1 January 1940.

 

By Bivalence, (a) is either true, or if not true, then false.  And this is so even though it is impossible now to determine (a)'s truth value.  Since (a) must either be true or false, it must be meaningful, despite its unverifiability.  Similarly for 

 

b) The execution of Sophie Scholl (of White Rose fame) was not a pointless evil.

 

(b) is meaningful but not empirically verifiable in the present life.

 

Note also, that if one is a verificationist, there is no need to mess around with the problem of evil: one can put paid to all (synthetic) claims about God, such as the claim that God exists, by maintaining that they are meaningless because not empirically verifiable in the here and now.

 

2. You push the pragmatic, Pascalian line about the benefits of believing in God quite regularly. But isn't there a sort of question-begging to this, in that it assumes only beneficial consequences? What if someone reads the Quran, sees the lines about killing non-believers and thinks "I may as well, because if God exists, he'll reward me, and if he doesn't, it doesn't matter anyway." Or if someone adopts a religion that promotes the total subjection of women?

 

My Pascalianism is not blanket; it kicks in only in specific circumstances.  Islam is "the poorest and saddest form of theism" (Schopenhauer), It is clearly an inferior religion as compared to Christianity (morally if not metaphysically) if it (Islam) is a religion at all as opposed to a political ideology masquerading as a religion, or a Christian heresy (Chesterton).  It was founded by a warrior who was arguably a fraud and it enjoins immoral practices such the genital mutilation of girls, the subjection of women, and the slaughter of 'infidels.' . So if one exercises due doxastic diligence one excludes Islam and other pseudo-religions from the Pascalian option.

 

The Pascalian move is made in a situation like the following.  One is a serious and sensitive human being who cares about his ultimate felicity.  One is alive to the vanity of this world. One is psychologically capable of religious belief and appreciates that God and the soul are Jamesian live options. One is intellectually sophisticated enough to know that God and the soul can neither be proven nor disproven. One appreciates that not to choose to live as if God and the soul are real is to choose to live as if they are not real.  One understands that it is prudentially irrational to suspend judgment.  At this point the Pascalian reasoning kicks in.

 

By the way, my Pascalian move is merely reminiscent of he great Pascal; I am not concerned with accuracy to the details of his view.  I write as a kind of 'existentialist.' What matters is how I live here and now and what helps me here and now.  I borrow what is useful and appropriable by me here and now; I am not committed to the whole Pascalian kit-and-kaboodle.

More on Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil with Responses to Caiati and Pollack

Vito Caiati, to whom I responded earlier, replies:

In your excellent response to my email on animal suffering and theism, you write, “If one suffers from the problem of (natural) evil, there is little a philosopher qua philosopher can do. Pastoral care is not his forte. But if one can gain some intellectual light on the philosophical problem, that light might help with the existential-psychological problem.” This is precisely the sort of help that you have provided me, and I sincerely thank you it. I have struggled with the problem of animal pain and suffering most of my life, and it has long poked into my theistic beliefs like a sharp thorn. In considering the empirical fact of the baby elephant’s atrocious death, I now see that I assumed what instinctively horrified me was objectively evil and hence pointlessly evil. I now understand that, although I continue to hate the empirical fact, this assumption is unwarranted.

I am fortunate to have attracted Dr. Caiati as a correspondent.  The attraction of the like-minded is one of the beauties of blog. The formulation in the penultimate sentence above, however, is not quite right.  If a state of affairs is objectively evil, it does not follow that it is pointlessly evil. It may or may not be. As I see it, the pointlessly evil is a proper subset of the objectively evil. Everything pointlessly evil is objectively evil, but not conversely. Evils can be justified by greater goods that they subserve. They remain evils, however,  even if justified. It could be -- it is possible for all we know -- that predation is justified by a greater good unattainable without predation.  And this is so whether or not we can know, or even imagine, what this greater good might be. The main point here is that there is reason to doubt whether an event or a state of affairs that is  objectively evil is also pointlessly evil.  

The following two propositions cannot both be true:

1) God (defined in terms of the standard omni-attributes) exists.

2) Pointless (unjustified, gratuitous) evils exist.

So if (2) is true, then (1) is false. But how do we know that (2) is true? Is (2) true? What the skeptical theist will point out is that we cannot directly and validly infer (2) from

3) Objective evils exist.

This allows the theist 'doxastic wiggle room.'   He is not rationally compelled to abandon theism in the face of (3). (1) and (3) can both be true.  And this is so even if I cannot explain how it is possible that they both be true.

Vito continues:

I had thought to place my instinctive reaction on a different plane than St. Paul’s declaration that one can see “that the universe is a divine artifact, and that God exists from the things that have been made,” in that the latter involves a two stage intellectual process, that of (1) the perception of an empirical fact, the existence and nature of the universe, and (2) the attribution of this fact to the action of some conscious cause, that is, to the action of a predefined concept of a Creator God, as understood in the Judaic and early Christian traditions. In the case of the baby elephant, I believed that the additive [additional] conceptual stage was not involved, since my emotional reaction was akin to what most of humanity feels when encountering a horrendous evil, such as a pointless cruelty or murder. In other words, I took it as an instinctive moral reaction that preceded any conceptualization. As such, I assumed that its source was inherent in my moral essence as a man and hence prior to discursive argument. From what you write, I now see that I was probably wrong in making this assumption, since the empirical event gives me only the right to my emotional reaction and not to any larger philosophical claims as to the nature of God that I would care to derive from it.

Vito understands me quite well.

To give the Pauline two-step a Kantian twist: I am filled with wonder by "the starry sky above me and the moral law within me." That is the first step.  The second step is to infer straightaway that there must be a transcendent Creator of the universe who is also the Source of the moral law within me.  One can reasonably doubt the validity of that immediate inference.  (And if you try to mediate it by the adducing of some further proposition, then the skeptic will train his sights upon that proposition.) By the same token, one can reasonably doubt that the extremely strong, pervasive, and obtrusive appearance of unjustified natural evil is a veridical appearance, and thus that the objective evil of predation is a pointless or unjustified evil.

Malcolm Pollack, responding to my first response to Caiati, and targeting my claim that in the end one must decide what to believe and how to live, writes:

"One must decide.” Well, yes — but how? Bill shows us that reason alone has insufficient grounds for a verdict; neither case is proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Upon what do we fall back, then? [. . .]

So — if reason is helpless to acquit, and conscience votes to convict, then what is left for the believer? Only the persistence of his sense of the transcendent, and the yearning to believe. If we are to let God off the hook, the problem of “pointless evil” must simply be set aside as a mystery beyond our comprehension. Can we do it? Ought we do it?

I am not sure that Malcolm understands quite what I mean when I say that "one must decide what to believe" in the final analysis and with respect to a matter like this. He wants to how one decides. Answer: You just do it after having reviewed all the considerations pro et contra.  It's a free decision. There is no algorithm.  There is no decision procedure that one can mechanically follow. The considerations pro and con do not decide the matter. What you "fall back upon" is is your own free choice to either believe that (1) or to believe that (2). You stop thinking and perform an act of will. Thought is endless and its conclusions are inconclusive. Thought goes around and around.  To take a stand one must jump of the merry-go-round.

"But isn't that arbitrary?" Of course, in one sense of 'arbitrary.' But not in the sense of being random or uninformed by rational considerations pro and con that precede the decision. The necessity of action, the necessity of an abrupt shift from the plane of thought to the plane of action, ought to dawn on one once one sees that (i) one must act, and that (ii) reasons, taken singly or collectively, do not necessitate a course of action.  This is most obvious when one is in a state of 'doxastic equipoise,' that situation in which the considerations pro and the considerations con cancel out.  But even if one set of reasons strikes one as stronger than the other, opposing, set, one still has to stop thinking and decide to act on the stronger set of reasons. For if one continues thinking, one will almost certainly modify if not reject one's initial assessment.

There are all these considerations that speak for God and all these others ones that speak against God, the loudest being those having to do with evil.  The Leibnizian "Gentlemen, let us calculate" cuts no ice in a situation like this.  As I said, there is no algorithm. There is no rational procedure that does the work  for me.   The work is done by an act of will, informed, but not necessitated, by the reasons that  the intellect surveys.  It would be nice if there were reasons the contemplation of which would force me this way or that in a matter like the one before us. The truth, however, is that I am forced, not to believe this or that, but to take responsibility for what I believe whatever it is.

Seeing as how I cannot achieve the fixation of belief by continuing to mull over reasons pro and con, I achieve said fixation by an act of will.

"Why not suspend belief?"  One is free to do that, of course. One might just take no position on the question whether God exists or not and whether there are pointless evils or not.  But the taking of no position is itself a free decision. One decides not to decide. Not to decide is to decide. Now this might be theoretically reasonable, but for beings like us, interested (inter esse)  beings,  this is practically and prudentially unreasonable.

Consider the question of the existence of the (immortal) soul. Can one prove its existence? No. Can one prove its nonexistence? No. Are there good arguments on both sides? Yes. Is the cumulative case on the one side stronger than the cumulative case on the other? Possibly. But you still have to decide what you will believe in this matter and how you will live. 

Suppose you decide to suspend judgment and forget about the whole matter. You will then live as if there is no (immortal) soul and not attend to its care or worry about its future well-being.  You will not have committed yourself theoretically, but you will have committed yourself existentially. Should the soul prove to exist, then you will have acted imprudently.  You will have acted in a prudentially irrational way.

If, on the other hand, you live as if God and the soul are real, and it turns out that they are not, what have you lost?  Nothing of any value comparable to the value of what you will gain if God and the soul turn out to be real and you lived in the belief that they are real. I put this question to an atheist a while back and he replied, "You lost your intellectual integrity."  Not so!  For both belief and unbelief are rationally acceptable.  

So I will say the following to Malcolm.  Not everyone is psychologically capable of religious belief, but if you are, and if you agree that it could be the case for all we know that God and the soul are real, and that the pro arguments have weight even f they are not rationally compelling, then I say: go ahead and believe and act in accordance with the beliefs.  What harm could it do?

And it might make you a better man.  For example, if you believe that you will be judged post-mortem for what you did and left undone in this life, then this belief might contribute to your being a better man than you would have been without this belief -- even if the belief  turns out to be false.   Religion does not have to be true to be life-enhancing and conducive to human flourishing.  If, however, you believe it not to be true, then you won't live in accordance with it, and it will not have any life-enhancing effect.

A Reason to Try to 'Make it'

One  reason to try to 'make it' is to come to appreciate, by succeeding, that worldly success is not a worthy final goal of human striving. 'Making it' frees one psychologically and allows one to turn one's attention to worthier matters.  He who fails is dogged by a sense of failure whereas he who succeeds is in a position to appreciate the ultimate insignificance of both worldly success and worldly failure, not that most of the successful ever do. 

Their success traps them.  Hence the sad spectacle of the old coot, a good flight of stairs from a major coronary event, scheming and angling for more loot and land when in the end a man needs only -- six feet.

The Power of Love

Ways and foibles that once annoyed are now cherished reasons to love her more. Love makes of the merely particular, the unique and precious.

Of MInd and its Agitation

When the mind is agitated, meditate on its agitation to quiet it. When the mind is quiescent, do not analyze its quiescence lest one agitate it.

They Have No Views

My cats eat, sleep, play, and sleep some more. They have no views. But the value of being adoxastos is lost on them.  I do not envy them.  I am glad that I am a man. Man alone among the animals is more than an animal.  Man's distinction consists both in his having views and in his ability to examine them like Socrates, to suspend them like the Pyrrhonian skeptic and to transcend them like the mystic. 

Man is also distinguished by his wretchedness. No mere animal, strictly speaking, is wretched.  Animal suffering never gets the length of wretchedness. Man is wretched because he is great. Therein lies the Pascalian paradox of the human predicament.

Michael Anton on Tucker Carlson

Here

Giving Up Darwin

David Gelernter is always worth reading.

Suicide

One problem with suicide is that it is a permanent solution to what is often a merely temporary problem. 

Not Malleable Unto Perfection

The malleability of man has definite limits, and he is surely not malleable unto perfection.  The perfectibility of man is a dangerous leftist illusion.

Mixed Metaphor

Civilization is thin ice. Stomp around on it in your Antifa thug boots and all hell may break loose.

Ostrich Presentism

The following remark in Wittgenstein's Zettel seems to fit my sparring partner, Bad Ostrich, to a T.

456. Some philosophers (or whatever you like to call them) suffer from what may be called "loss of problems." (Problemverlust) Then everything seems quite simple to them, no deep problems seem to exist any more, the world become broad and flat and loses all depth, and what they write becomes immeasurably shallow and trivial. Russell and H. G. Wells suffer from this.

Here is a problem, or rather a question, that seems genuine and 'deep.'  Do only present items exist, or do wholly past and wholly future items also exist?  For this question to make sense, 'exist' in both occurrences cannot be in the present tense. If it were, 'Only present items exist' would be logically true and 'Past and present and future items all exist' would be logically false. The presentist claim would then be non-substantive (trivial), and the 'eternalist' claim would be substantive, but necessarily false.

Well, maybe the question just doesn't make sense.  This seems to be the Ostrich's view. He seems to think that logical as opposed to metaphysical presentism is the only game in town: 'Only the present exists' is susceptible of only one reading, the logical reading, whereas I think it is susceptible of two readings, the logical one and a metaphysical one.  In one of his earlier comments, the Ostrich writes:

He [the logical presentist] is putting forward not a substantive metaphysical thesis, but rather a substantive thesis about language, a thesis about the meaning of ‘exists’ and ‘at present’.

The thesis, I take it, is that 'exists' can only be used correctly in the present-tensed way.  If so, 'Boethius exists' is nonsense, if it is a stand-alone, as opposed to an embedded, sentence. ('It was the case that Boethius exists' is not nonsense.) In other words, 'exists' has no correct tenseless use.

Now if there are timeless entities, then 'exists' can be used both tenselessly and correctly. But I expect the Ostrich will have no truck with the timeless.  His claim will then presumably be that 'exists' has no correct tenseless use in respect of any temporal item, and that temporal items are the only ones on offer.

What about the disjunctively omnitemporal use that I have already explained? Surely it is true to say that Boethius exists in that he either existed or exists or will exist, where each disjunct is tensed.  This is true because the first disjunct is true.  The Ostrich could say that the disjunctively omnitemporal use is not genuinely tenseless since it is parasitic upon tensed expresssions.

The Ostrich bids us consider

. . . the question of whether a thing could exist without existing in the present. The logical presentist might then question what is meant by ‘no longer exists’. The natural interpretation is ‘existed, but does not exist’. But then the thing doesn’t exist, period. 

Using tensed language we can say, truly, that Boethius existed, but does not exist.  Why not be satisfied with this?  

The past-tensed 'Boethius existed' is true. It is true now.  What makes it true? The Ostrich will presumably say that nothing makes it true, and there is no need for anything to make it true; it is just true!  I expect the Ostrich to adopt A. N. Prior's redundancy theory of the present according to which everything that is presently true is simply true. (Cf. C. Bourne, 2006, 42 f.)  Just as 'It is true that ____' is redundant. 'It is now the case that ___' is redundant.

For Prior, all tensed sentences are present-tensed.  Thus the past-tensed 'Boethius existed' MEANS that it is now the case that Boethius existed.  Given the redundancy of 'It is now the case that ____,' we are left with 'Boethius existed.'  And that is all!  There is no need or room for a metaphysics of time.  There is nothing more to say about the nature of time than what is said in a perspicuous tense logic.

Thus the Ostrich. I am not satisfied. Past-tensed contingent truths need truth-makers.   'BV exists' is true. It can't just be true. It needs a truth-maker.  A plausible candidate is the 200 lb animal who wears my clothes. It will be the case that BV no longer exists. When that time comes, 'BV existed' will be true. If 'BV exists' needs a truth-maker, then so will 'BV existed.'

As with BV, so with Boethius.

If 'Boethius existed' needs a truth-maker, and nothing at present can serve as truth-maker, then the pressure is on to resist the Ostrich thesis that 'exists' can only be correctly used in the present-tensed way.

A Mormon De-Conversion

I have a category called Conversions. De-conversions are equally interesting. Here Spencer Case tells his story.

If memory and the engines of search serve, I have written only two extended entries on Mormonism, both of which mention our old friend Spencer.

Religion and Anthropomorphism with an Oblique Reference to Mormonism

On the Mormon Conception of God

Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil

A Catholic reader of this blog is deeply troubled by the problem of animal suffering. He reports his painful recollection of a YouTube video that depicts

. . . the killing of a baby elephant by 13 lions. They first attacked the little elephant in the open, but he was saved when several water buffalo intervened and drove the lions off. The baby then ran to two large bull elephants nearby, but rather than protecting him from the lions, they were indifferent. The lions, seeing this, rushed the baby, which helplessly ran off into the bush, where the lions, 13 in all, caught him, and began to devour him. You probably know that because of an elephant’s trunk, a lion’s bite to the neck does not kill, so I assume that the baby was eaten alive.

I find the thought of this killing and the myriad other killings like it very hard to accept. How does a theist explain such acts in nature? I know something of the various theodicies and defenses of theistic philosophers, but when confronted with this scene of terror and horrendous death, I find them all unconvincing. Something in the depths of my being rejects them all as over-sophisticated attempts to mask what is truly terrible so as to defend at all costs the first of Hume’s four options, that of a perfectly good first cause. I am not saying that I am abandoning my theistic beliefs, but I think that for too long, theists have not taken the matter of animal pain and suffering seriously enough.

Leaving philosophic theism aside, there is glaring indifference to this matter in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, where the fixation on humanity’s fall, faults, and need for salvation. Without denying whatever truth may be found in this long theological reflection on human misery, what of the animals, those here millions of years before man walked on the earth, and all those who have shared and do share the earth with him? (Your posts on animal sentience, from which I have greatly profited, form part of the background to this question.)

[. . .]  You often speak of choosing, and I agree that we must choose what we believe, but there is something at the very heart of reality that undermines our choices, and we find ourselves, if we are honest, doubting what we have chosen and thrown back on uncertainty, or if perhaps less honest and more fearful, falling into elaborate intellectual defenses to fend off what is unpalatable. As I wrote to you last year, I still believe that our ignorance is perhaps the greatest evil that we must confront.

Again, I had to share this with you, since I have no one here who would understand what is troubling me . . .

The horrors of nature "red in tooth and claw" cannot be denied.  Sensitive souls have been driven by their contemplation to the depths of pessimism and anti-natalism. (See my Anti-natalism and Benatar categories).  The notion that this awful world could be the creation of an all-powerful and loving deity who providentially cares about his creatures can strike one as either a sick joke, a feel-good fairy tale, or something equally intellectually disreputable.  As my old atheist friend Quentin Smith once put it to me, "If you were God, would you have created this world?"  To express it in the form of an understatement,  a world in which sentient beings eat each other alive, and must do so to survive, and lack the ability to commit suicide, does not seem to be a world optimally arranged.  If you were the architect of the world, would you design it as a slaughter house?

If one suffers from the problem of (natural) evil, there is little a philosopher qua philosopher can do.  Pastoral care is not his forte. But if one can gain some intellectual light on the philosophical problem, that light might  help with the existential-psychological problem.  I will now suggest how a theist who is also inclined toward skepticism can find some peace of mind.

Here is an argument from evil:

Theological Premise: Necessarily, if there is a God, there are no pointless evils.

Empirical Premise: There are pointless evils.

Conclusion: There is no God.

A pointless evil is one that is unjustified or gratuitous. Suppose there is an evil that is necessary for a greater good. God could allow such an evil without prejudice to his omnibenevolence. So it it not the case that evils as such tell against the existence of God, but only pointless evils.  

Now the lions' eating alive of the baby elephant would seem to be a pointless evil: why couldn't an omnipotent God have created a world in which all animals are herbivores?

But -- and here the skeptic inserts his blade -- how do we know this? in general, how do we know that the empirical premise is true? Even if it is obvious that an event is evil, it is not obvious that it is pointlessly evil.   One can also ask, more radically, whether it is empirically obvious that an event is evil.  It is empirically obvious to me that the savagery of nature is not to my liking, nor to the liking of the animals being savaged, but it does not follow that said savagery is objectively evil.  But if an event or state of affairs is not objectively evil, then it cannot be objectively pointlessly evil.

So how do we know that the so-called empirical premise above is true or even empirical? Do we just see or intuit that an instance of animal savagery is both evil and pointless?  Suppose St. Paul tells us (Romans 1:18-20) that one can just see that the universe is a divine artifact, and that God exists from the the things that have been made, and that therefore atheism is morally culpable! I say: Sorry, sir, but you cannot read off the createdness-by-God of nature from its empirical attributes. Createdness is not an empirical attribute; it is an ontological status. But neither is being evil or being pointlessly evil.

So both the theist and the atheist make it too easy for themselves when they appeal to some supposed empirical fact. We ought to be skeptical both about Paul's argument for God and the atheist's argument against God.  Paul begs the question when he assumes that the natural world is a divine artifact.  The atheist too begs the question when he assumes that all or some evils are pointless evils.

Will you say that the pointlessness of some evils is not a direct deliverance but an inference? From which proposition or propositions?  From the proposition that these evils are inscrutable in the sense that we can discern no sufficient reasons for God's allowing them?  But that is too flimsy a premise to allow such a weighty inference.

The dialectical lay of the land seems to be as follows. If there are pointless evils, then God does not exist, and if God exists, then there are no pointless evils. But we don't know that there are pointless evils, and so we are within our epistemic rights in continuing to affirm the existence of God. After all, we have a couple dozen good, but not compelling, arguments for the existence of God.  One cannot prove the existence of God. By the same token, one cannot prove the nonexistence of God.  One can bluster, of course, and one can beg the question. And one can do this both as a theist and as an atheist. But if you are intellectually honest, you will agree with me that there are no proofs and no objective certainties in these sublunary precincts.

This is why I say that, in the end, one must decide what one will believe and how one will live. And of course belief and action go together: what one believes informs how one lives, and how one lives shows what one believes. If I believe in God and the soul, then those beliefs will be attested in my behavior, and if I live as if God and the soul are real, then that is what it is to believe these things.

If you seek objective certainty in these matters, you will not find it. That is why free decision comes into it.  But there is nothing willful about the decision since years of examination of arguments and counterarguments are behind it all. The investigation must continue if the faith is to be authentic.  Again, there is no objective certainty in this life. There is only subjective certainty which many people confuse with objective certainty.  We don't KNOW. This, our deep ignorance, is another aspect of the problem of evil.

Making these assertions, I do not make them dogmatically. I make them tentatively and I expose them to ongoing investigation. In this life we are in statu viae: we are ever on the road. If rest there is, it is at the end of the road.

My correspondent seems to think that I think that deciding what to believe and how to live generates objective certainty. That is not my view.  There is no objective certainty here below. It lies on the Other Side if it lies anywhere. And there is no objective certainty here below that there is anything beyond the grave.  One simply has to accept that one is in a Cave-like condition, to allude to Plato's great allegory, and that, while one is not entirely in the dark, one is not entirely in the light either, but is muddling around in a chiaroscuro of ignorance and insight.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Sounds of the Southwest

Calexico, Alone Again Or

A great cover of Love's version from '67.

Ry Cooder, Paris, Texas

Ry Cooder, He'll Have to Go

A curiously satisfying Tex-Mex re-do of the old Jim Reeves crossover hit

Ry Cooder, Yellow Roses

Spade Cooley, Detour

'Spade Cooley' has got to be one of the most politically incorrect names of all time.  I remember seeing his Western swing show on KTLA, Channel 5, in the late '50s, early '60s' at my Uncle Ray's place.  Cooley was a real piece of work.  

Above, a view of the Arizona open road from the cockpit of my 2013 Jeep Wrangler. 

Old Crow Medicine Show, Sweet Amarillo.  Dylan wrote it.

Marty Robbins messes with the wicked Felina in El Paso and comes to an untimely end.

Dean Martin is down and out in Houston. 

A lonely soldier cleans his gun and dreams of Galveston. 

A slacker standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona spies a girl in a flatbed Ford.

Johnny Rivers heads East via Phoenix and Albuquerque.

From Tucson to Tucumcari, Tehachapi to Tonopah, this sojourner of the American night has driven every kind of rig that's ever been made.

Ed Farrell writes, "The Little Feat version of I'm Willin is a good one.  But my favorite version will probably remain the one done by Seatrain circa 1970--which was the standard road song for Sierra climbing trips in late high school/college.  Seatrain never really took off as a band but their musicianship was quite good though their style was difficult to pigeonhole."

That is a good version, indeed better than Little Feat's.  There were a lot of great bands back in the day that never really made it.  Another is Fever Tree.  I remember hearing them circa '68 live at a club called The Kaleidoscope  in Hollywood or West L. A.  Give a careful listen to The Sun Also Rises.

Ed also recommends Seatrain's version of the Carole King composition, Creepin' Midnight.  Produced by George Martin.

Finally, please take a look at Ed's spectacular photography.

Two Senses of 'Tenseless'

The first sense I mention only to set aside. Timeless entities, if there are any, exist tenselessly and have their intrinsic properties  and some of their relational properties tenselessly.  The 'exists' in '7 exists' is tenseless, and so is the 'is' in '7 is prime.' And please note that the tenselessness is not a result of a de-tensing operation or an abstraction from tense: the tenseless terms are inherently tenseless because the entity in question is inherently timeless.  So far, no problem.  Talk of tenselessness with respect to timeless entities, if any,  is wholly intelligible.

Problems arise when we ask whether temporal objects, items in time, can be intelligibly described as tenselessly existing or tenselessly propertied.   Is it intelligible to say that Boethius tenselessly exists and is tenselessly a philosopher?  In one sense it is; but the  sense in which it is gives no aid and comfort to presentism.  That is what I will rehearse in this post. 

TENSELESSNESS AS DISJUNCTIVE OMNITEMPORALITY

We consider the disjunctively omnitemporal sense according to which 'x tenselessly exists' means 'x existed or x exists or x will exist' where each disjunct is tensed, and 'x is tenselessly F' means that 'x was F or x is F or x will be F' where each disjunct is tensed. This sense of 'tenseless' is not properly tenseless: tensed expressions must be used to formulate it. But while improper, it is has the virtue of being wholly intelligible. Thus Julius Caesar tenselessly exists in the disjunctively omnitemporal sense in that he either existed, or exists (present tense), or will exist. He tenselessly exists because the first of these tensed disjuncts is true. When we say that he tenselessly exists we are simply abstracting from when he existed. We are leaving the 'when' out of consideration. We are not thereby attributing to the man some non-disjunctive property of tenseless existence, whatever that might be.

And similarly with 'Julius Caesar is a Roman emperor.' We all understand the sentence to be true despite Caesar's having ceased to exist long ago. We take the sentence to be tenselessly true because we read the copula in the disjunctively omnitemporal sense.  The same goes for 'Hume is an empiricist,' a sentence one might find in a history of philosophy. Although Hume does not now exist, we can say, intelligibly, that he IS an empiricist because we are using 'is' in a disjunctive omnitemporal way.  

DOES DISJUNCTIVELY OMNITEMPORAL TENSELESSNESS HELP US UNDERSTAND THE PRESENTIST V. ETERNALIST DEBATE?

Unfortunately, it doesn't.  The presentist tells us that only present items exist, whereas the eternalist says that past, present, and future items all exist.  To engage each other they have to be using 'exist' in the same sense: their disagreement is predicated upon an agreement as to the sense of 'exists.' Now  it it is clear that this cannot be the present-tensed sense of 'exists.'   Nor can it be the timelessly tenseless sense of 'exists.'  And not the disjunctively omnitemporal sense either.  Why not?

Everyone agrees that Boethius no longer exists. But 'no longer exists' can be understood in two ways. The eternalist (B-eternalist) holds that what no longer exists exists all right, but in the past. The presentist, however, holds that what no longer exists does not exist.  For the eternalist, Boethius tenselessly exists.  For the presentist, Boethius does not tenselessly exist. Therefore, for the presentist, it is not the case that Boethius either did exist or does exist or will exist.  But this is plainly false, since Boethius did exist. Therefore, the sense of 'exists' that allows presentist and eternalist to engage each other cannot be the disjunctively omnitemporal sense of 'tenseless.'

So what the hell sense of 'tenseless' is it?  

More later. It's Saturday night. Time for a stiff one and Uncle Wild Bill's Saturday Night at the Oldies.

What, Me Worry?

The evil event will either occur or it will not.  If it occurs, and one worries beforehand, then one suffers twice, from the event and from the worry.  If the evil event does not occur, and one worries beforehand, one suffers once, but needlessly.  If the event does not occur, and one does not worry beforehand, then one suffers not at all.  Therefore, worry is irrational.  Don't worry, be happy.

Am I saying that that one ought not take reasonable precautions and exercise what is pleonastically called 'due diligence'?  Of course not.  Rational concern is not worry.  I never drive without my seat belt fastened.  Never! But I have never been in an accident and I never worry about it.  And if one day it happens, I will suffer only once:  from the accident.

Worry is a worthless emotion, a wastebasket emotion.  So self-apply some cognitive therapy and send it packing. You say you can't help but worry?  Then I say you are making no attempt to get your mind under control.  It's your mind, control it!  It's within your power.  Suppose what I have just said is false.  No matter: it is useful to believe it.  The proof  is in the pragmatics.

We Lesser Lights

The great thinkers think for humanity, and the great writers write for humanity.  The great teachers are teachers of humanity. Buddha was such a one and so were Jesus and Socrates. We lesser lights think and write to clear our heads, and to appropriate what we have inherited. 

Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,
erwirb es, um es zu besitzen!

 

What from your fathers you  received as heir,

Acquire if  you would possess it. 

 

(Goethe's Faust, Part I, Night, lines 684-685, tr. W. Kaufmann)

 

We think and write to know our own minds, to form our minds, and attract a few of the like-minded.  As Aristotle says somewhere, we philosophize best with friends. Philosophy does not make progress in us so much as we make progress in philosophy. We are teachers of humanity only at second-hand, and only to a few.  But we too participate in the great tradition and are grateful for the vocation to such participation.

 

"Only the Present Exists"

The above title gives the gist of presentism in the philosophy of time. It is an answer to Quine's ontological inventory question: What is there?  What, by category, should we count as existent?  The presentist answer is that only (temporally) present items exist: wholly past and wholly future items do not exist.  Among these items are times, events, processes, individual substances, property-instantiations.  

'Only the present exists' is doubly ambiguous. 

FIRST AMBIGUITY

It is first of all ambiguous as between a tautology and a substantive thesis. It depends on how one construes 'exists.'  Is it present-tensed?  Then we get a tautology:

TAUT:  Only the present exists at present.

Presentists, however, are not in the business of retailing tautologies. They are out to advance a substantive and therefore non-tautological claim about what exists.  But to do this, their characteristic thesis cannot sport a present-tensed use of 'exists.'  So they have to say something like this:

SUBS: Only the present exists simpliciter.

But what does 'simpliciter' mean?  One might take it to mean 'tenseless.' Thus

SUBS*: Only the present exists tenselessly.

That is not a tautology. One might reasonably object that (SUBS*) is false on the ground that there are (tenselessly) wholly past and wholly future items such as Julius Caesar, his assassination, and my death.  That is what the so-called 'eternalists' maintain: 

E: Past, present, and future items all exist tenselessly.

All existents are on a par in point of existence. All are equally real.  Boethius exists just as robustly (or as anemically) as I do.  It is just that he exists in the past.  Now most eternalists are B-theorists.  They accept the B-theory of time. And so they would say that 'past,' 'present,' and 'future' can and must be cashed out relationally in terms of the B-relations: earlier than, later than, and simultaneous with.  Boethius exists in the past in that he tenselessly exists at times earlier than some reference time such as the time of my writing this sentence.  He exists just as I do, but elsewhen.  London is elsewhere relative to here, where I flourish, but is no less real than where I flourish.  Gloomier, no doubt, but no less real.

The main thing for 'present' purposes is that presentism and eternalism are both substantive claims. Neither is a tautology and neither is a contradiction.  Note also that if 'exists' in 'Past, present, and future items all exist' is read present-tensedly, then the sentence just mentioned would be a contradiction. We also note that to formulate either presentism or eternalism we must invoke a tenseless sense of 'exists.' 

SECOND AMBIGUITY

Now we notice that 'Only the present exists' is also ambiguous as between

SPM: Only this present exists: there is (tenselessly) exactly one time, the present, at which everything (tenselessly) exists.

and 

PP:  Only the present present exists: there are (tenselessly) many times, and every time t is such that everything that exists exists (tenselessly) at t.

The first view is Solipsism of the Present Moment.  This is a lunatic view, although it seems logically possible. It amounts to saying that everything that ever existed and everything that ever will exist exists now. Imagine that the entire universe, together with fossils, monuments, memories, and dusty books just now sprang into existence, lasts a while, and then collapses into non-being.

Presentism as usually understood affirms something like (PP), which implies that there are past presents, a present present, and future presents.  The idea is that, at any given time, whether past, present, or future, all that exists is what exists at that time. If reality is the totality of what exists, (PP) implies that reality is always changing. (PP) implies that reality is 'dynamic' whereas (E) implies that it is static.

(PP) strikes me as problematic. (PP) implies that there are (tenselessly) many different times. But there cannot be (tenselessly) many times if at each time there is only what exists at that time. For if at each time there is only what exists at that time, then at each time there are no times other than that time.  Is there a formulation of presentism that is consistent with its own truth?  I suspect that there isn't.

Presentism is at present very popular among philosophers.  I am wondering why.  Some distinguished writers actually say that it is common sense. What?  The proverbial man on the street has no opinion on any of these questions.