Maverick Philosopher

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia

Marlene Dietrich, Die Fesche Lola. 'Fesche' means something like smart, snazzy.

Ich bin die fesche Lola, der Liebling der Saison!
Ich hab' ein Pianola zu Haus' in mein' Salon
Ich bin die fesche Lola, mich liebt ein jeder Mann
doch an mein Pianola, da laß ich keinen ran!

Kinks, Lola. From the days when 'tranny' meant transmission.  

Marlene Dietrich, Muss I Denn

Elvis Presley, Wooden Heart 

Lotte Lenya, September Song

Lotte Lenya, Moon of Alabama

Doors, Roadhouse Blues

Bette Midler, Mambo Italiano.  Video of Sophia Loren.

Was Sisyphus a Bachelor?

Franz Kafka ruminates in this 1922 diary entry on the problem of procreation and dreams of a bourgeois rootedness that probably would have suffocated him:

The infinite, deep, warm, saving happiness of sitting beside the cradle of one’s child opposite its mother.

There is also in it something of this feeling: matters no longer rest with you, unless you wish it so. In contrast, this feeling of those who have no children: it perpetually rests with you, whether you will or no, every moment to the end, every nerve-racking moment, it perpetually rests with you, and without result. Sisyphus was a bachelor.

(Franz Kafka: The Diaries 1910-1923, ed. Max Brod, New York: Schocken, 1975, p. 401.)

Remarks on David Stove's The Plato Cult

The following is excerpted from a November 2004 entry on my first weblog.  I like Stove's political conservatism but I don't much cotton to his positivism. The original entry of 2004 is prefaced with a polemical screed in which I denounce Stove as an anti-philosopher, and with some justice. But nowadays I direct my polemic only against my political enemies, holding, as I have for quite a few years now, that polemic has no place in philosophy proper.  

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My focus will be on The Plato Cult (Basil Blackwell, 1991), and for now mainly the preface thereto. Stove tells us that "the few pages of this preface will be sufficient to make clear what my view is, and even, I believe, to justify it." (p. vii) His view is "best called positivistic." (ibid.) The "basic proposition of Positivism" is that "there is something fearfully wrong with typical philosophical theories." (p. xi, italics in original) Stove claims to "prove" this thesis. (ibid.) From Stove’s perspective, "what a spectacle of nightmare-irrationality is the history of philosophy!" (p. xi)

We are all familiar with A. N. Whitehead’s remark that "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." (Process and Reality, p. 39). Whitehead meant this in praise of Plato. For Stove, however, Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Berkeley, and a host of other philosophers deemed great, are "dangerous lunatics." (p. 184) They espouse views that cannot be taken seriously by any sane person. Let us consider what Stove has to say about Berkeley:

Berkeley held that there are no physical objects: that there was no right hand behind his ideas of his left hand, no wig behind his ideas of his wig, and so on. Indeed, he said, there is nothing at all behind any of our ideas of physical objects, except the will of God that we should have those ideas when we do. Yet Berkeley was a physical object himself, after all – born of a certain woman, author of certain printed books, and so forth – and he knew it. (p. ix)

Stove’s misunderstanding is so deep that it takes the breath away. Berkeley did not hold that there are no physical objects; what he gave us was a theory of their ontological constitution. That there are physical objects is self-evident, a datum, a starting point; what they are, and how they exist, however, are questions open to dispute. To deny the existence of physical objects would of course be lunacy. But to give an analysis of them in terms of ideas, an analysis that identifies them with clusters of coherent ideas, is not a lunatic project. It is no more a lunatic endeavor than that of analyzing thoughts (and mental states generally) in terms of brain states.

Suppose we explore this comparison a bit. It is prima facie reasonable to hold that our thoughts are identical with complex states of our brains. (I don’t think that this is true, and I think that  there are formidable arguments to the contrary, but the reasonable and the true are two, not one.) Accordingly, my thinking about Stove is a state of my brain. Suppose a philosopher propounds the following theory: Every (token) mental state is numerically identical to some (token) brain state. Someone who holds such a token-token identity theory is obviously not denying the existence of mental states; what he is doing is presupposing their existence and giving us a theory of what they are in ultimate reality. What he is saying is that these mental states of which we are introspectively aware are really just brain states; they are not states of an immaterial thinking substance.  (One could of course argue that this identity theory is unstable and, given a few pokes, topples over into eliminativism about the mental; to discuss this instability, however, is beyond the scope of this entry.)

Now if the project of reducing the mental to the physical avoids lunacy, then the same goes for the reduction in the opposite direction. If it is not ‘loony’ to say that the perceiving of a coffee cup is a state of my brain, why is it ‘loony’ to say that the coffee cup perceived is a bundle or cluster of ideas (to be precise: accusatives of mental acts)? Either both of these views belong in the lunatic asylum or neither do.

Note also that if one cannot analyze the physical in terms of the mental, or the mental in terms of the physical, on pain of going insane, then one also cannot analyze the universal in terms of the particular, or the particular in terms of the universal. And yet philosophers do this all the time without seeming to lose their grip on reality.

Take the obvious fact that things have properties. These two tomatoes are both (the same shade of) red. That things have properties is a datum; what properties are, however, and how they exist, is not a datum but a problem. It appears that our two tomatoes have something in common, namely, their being red. This suggests that redness is a universal, an entity repeated in each of the tomatoes. Some philosophers resist this suggestion by maintaining that, although both tomatoes are red, each has its own redness. They then analyze the seeming commonality of redness in some other way, say, as deriving from a mental act of abstraction, r in terms of trope resemblance-classes.

Metaphysical reductions (of the mental to the physical, the physical to the mental, the universal to the particular, the particular to the universal, the modal to the non-modal, the normative to the non-normative, etc.) seem to be as meaningful as scientific reductions. The identification of lightning with an atmospheric electrical discharge; of a puddle of water with a collection of H20 molecules; of a light beam with a stream of photons – none of these identifications are intended by their proponents as lunatic denials of the phenomena to be reduced. There are of course interesting questions about when identifications collapse into eliminations; but the point here is that no denial of existence is intended.

Philosophers, like scientists, are not in the business of denying obvious facts; they are out to understand them. The project of understanding aims at the reality behind the appearance. Stove cannot seem to wrap his mind around this simple notion.

I may have more to say about Stove later. He is dangerous enough to be worth taking apart piece by piece. One good thing about him, though: he is politically conservative. (I left the political tone of this last paragraph in place to give you a flavor of the original.)

The Open Road from the Cockpit of a Jeep Wrangler

Theme music: Eagles, Take it Easy

Parker Pass, Western Superstitions, March 2019

Dennis M. holds forth.

David Stove Pays Tribute to David Armstrong and Comments on the Malignancy of the Left

Excerpt:

But, while David has never aspired to put the world right by philosophy, the world for its part has not been equally willing to let him and philosophy alone in return. Quite the reverse. His tenure of the Chair turned out to coincide with an enormous attack on philosophy, and on humanistic learning in general: an attack which has proved to be almost as successful as it was unprecedented.

This attack was begun, as everyone knows, by Marxists, in support of North Vietnam’s attempt to extend the blessings of communism to the south. The resulting Marxisation of the Faculty of Arts was by no means as complete as the resulting Marxisation of South Vietnam. But the wound inflicted on humanistic learning was a very severe one all the same. You could properly compare it to a person’s suffering third-degree burns to 35 per cent of his body.

After the defeat of America in Vietnam, the attack was renewed, amplified, and intensified, by feminists. Their attack has proved far more devastating than that of the Marxists. Lenin once said, “If we go, we shall slam the door on an empty house”; and how well this pleasant promise has been kept by the Russian Marxists, all the world now knows. It is in exactly the same spirit of insane malignancy that feminists have waged their war on humanistic learning; and their degree of success has fallen not much short of Lenin’s. Of the many hundreds of courses offered to Arts undergraduates in this university, what proportion, I wonder, are now not made culturally-destructive, as well as intellectually null, by feminist malignancy and madness? One-third? I would love to believe that the figure is so high. But I cannot believe it.

David did all that he could have done, given the limits set by his position and his personality, to repel this attack. Of course he failed; but then, no one could have succeeded. What he did achieve was a certain amount of damage-limitation. Even this was confined to the philosophy-section of the front. On the Faculty of Arts as a whole, David has had no influence at all—to put it mildly. In fact, when he spoke at a meeting of the Faculty, even on subjects unrelated to the attack, you could always have cut the atmosphere with a knife. It is a curious matter, this: the various ways inferior people have, of indirectly acknowledging the superiority of others, even where no such acknowledgment is at all intended by the inferior, or expected by the superior.

By the end of 1972, the situation in the philosophy department had become so bad that the splitting of the department into two was the only way in which philosophy at this university could be kept alive at all. In this development, David was the leading spirit, as his position and personality made it natural he should be. Of course he did not do it on his own. Pat Trifonoff’s intelligence and character made her an important agent in it. Keith Campbell’s adhesion to our side, after some hesitation, was a critical moment. But while I and certain others were only casting about for some avenue of escape, David never gave up. He battled on, and battled on again, and always exacted the best terms, however bad, that could be got from the enemies of philosophy.

The result of the split was far more happy than could have been rationally predicted at the time. In fact it was a fitting reward for David’s courage and tenacity. For the first twenty years of the new Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy have been fertile in good philosophy, to a degree unparalleled in any similar period in this or any other Australian university. The department has also enjoyed a rare freedom from internal disharmony. As I have often said, it is the best club in the world, and to be or have been a member of it is a pleasure as well as a privilege.

There will certainly be no adequate official acknowledgment, from anyone inside the university, of what is owed to David. What could someone like the present Vice-Chancellor possibly care about the survival of humanistic learning, or even know about philosophy, or history, or literature? Anyone who did would never have got a Vice-Chancellor’s job in the first place. If there is any acknowledgment forthcoming from the Faculty of Arts, David will be able to estimate the sincerity of it well enough. It will be a case of people, who smiled as they watched him nearly drowning in the boiling surf of 1967–72, telling him how glad they were when, against all probability, he managed to make it to the beach.

But anyone who does know and care about philosophy, or does care about the survival of humanistic learning, will feel towards him something like the degree of gratitude which they ought to feel.

The Intellectual Chutzpah of David Bentley Hart

Here (HT: Karl White):

Let me, however, add one more observa­tion that will seem insufferably pompous or a little insane: to wit, that the argument I make in my book—that Chris­tianity can be a coherent system of belief if and only if it is understood as involving universal salvation—is irrefutable. Any Christian whom it fails to persuade is one who has failed to understand its argument fully. In order to reject it, one must also reject one or another crucial tenet of the faith. The exits have all been sealed. I suppose I could be wrong about that, but I do not believe it likely.

Hart seems not to have noticed that he embraces a logical contradiction when he says that the argument he has given is irrefutable AND that he could be wrong about that.  For if an argument is irrefutable, then it cannot be refuted; if, on the other hand, the producer of an argument can be wrong about whether it is irrefutable, then the argument can be refuted. Hence the contradiction: the argument cannot be refuted AND the argument can be refuted.

But a man can be a pompous ass and a blowhard and still have interesting things to say. If you are interested in the question of universal salvation, see Douglas Farrow, Harrowing Hart on Hell in First Things. (HT: Dave Lull)

Peikoff on the Supernatural

Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Meridian 1993, p. 31:

"Supernatural," etymologically, means that which is above or beyond nature.  "Nature," in turn denotes existence viewed from a certain perspective. Nature is existence regarded as a system of interconnected entities governed by law; it is the universe of entities acting and interacting in accordance with their identities.  What then is a "super-nature"?  It would have to be a form of existence beyond existence; a thing beyond entities; a something beyond identity.

The idea of the "supernatural" is an assault on everything man knows about reality.  It is a contradiction of every essential of a rational metaphysics.  It represents a rejection of the basic axioms of philosophy . . . .

Is this a good argument? That alone is the question.

It is clear that that there cannot exist anything beyond existence: There exists an x such that x does not exist is a formal-logical or narrowly-logical contradiction.  So far, so good. And let us cheerfully acquiesce in Peikoff's definition of 'supernatural' as that which is beyond nature.  We also grant that the concept of existence is "the widest of all concepts," one that "subsumes everything." (p. 5)  We can even grant that nature is existing things regarded as a system of causally interacting entities governed by natural laws.

All of this granted, it still does not follow that a supernatural entity is an entity beyond entities or an existent beyond existents.  For if the concept of existence "subsumes everything" as we just quoted Peikoff as saying, then it subsumes any supernatural entities there might be, whether God or unexemplified universals, or Fregean propositions, or mathematical sets, or Cartesian thinking substances, or states of consciousness if they are naturalistically irreducible, or . . . .   All of these categories are categories of the supernatural given Peikoff's use of the term.  For the members of these categories, if any, do not belong to the natural world, the world of space-time-matter. Now these categories might be empty, but one cannot show them to be empty by intoning the formal-logical truth that nothing exists beyond existence.

I submit that anyone who carefully reads the above passage and thinks about it objectively will be able to see that Peikoff's argument is a blatant non sequitur.  He is making one or the other of the following mistakes.  He is either attempting to answer a substantive philosophical question by terminological fiat, or he is equivocating on 'existence.'  I will explain each of these in turn.

A.  It is illegitimate to attempt to answer a philosophical question by rigging one's terminology in such a way that the answer 'falls out' of the terminology.  One cannot legislate the supernatural out of existence by using 'existence' in such a way that only natural items exist.  Equally, one cannot legislate the supernatural into existence by a similar move.  For example, one cannot define God into existence by saying that God is by definition an existent being since a nonexistent God is not God, and God is God (A is A!).

B. If Peikoff is not making the first mistake, then he is equivocating on 'existence.'  That is, he using it in two different senses.  He is using it both as the "widest of all concepts" to cover everything that exists, but also in a narrow sense to cover only natural existents.

It is trivially true that there is nothing natural beyond nature, and nothing existent beyond existence.  But these trivialities do not supply anyone with a good reason to reject the supernatural. It is because of such shoddy reasoning as I have just exposed that most philosophers have a hard time taking Objectivism seriously.  Objectivists should take this in a constructive way: if you want your ideas to gain wider acceptance, come up with better arguments for them.

(Don't complain that I've 'taken Peikoff's argument out of context.'  It stands on its own, and if it is bad, no amount of further context will improve it. If I quoted Descartes' Meditation V ontological argument and showed why it is unconvincing would you complain that I had taken it out of context?)

Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Meridian 1993, p. 31:

"Supernatural," etymologically, means that which is above or beyond nature.  "Nature," in turn denotes existence viewed from a certain perspective. Nature is existence regarded as a system of interconnected entities governed by law; it is the universe of entities acting and interacting in accordance with their identities.  What then is a "super-nature"?  It would have to be a form of existence beyond existence; a thing beyond entities; a something beyond identity.

The idea of the "supernatural" is an assault on everything man knows about reality.  It is a contradiction of every essential of a rational metaphysics.  It represents a rejection of the basic axioms of philosophy . . . .

Is this a good argument? That alone is the question.

It is clear that that there cannot exist anything beyond existence: There exists an x such that x does not exist is a formal-logical or narrowly-logical contradiction.  So far, so good. And let us cheerfully acquiesce in Peikoff's definition of 'supernatural' as that which is beyond nature.  We also grant that the concept of existence is "the widest of all concepts," one that "subsumes everything." (p. 5)  We can even grant that nature is existing things regarded as a system of causally interacting entities governed by natural laws.

All of this granted, it still does not follow that a supernatural entity is an entity beyond entities or an existent beyond existents.  For if the concept of existence "subsumes everything" as we just quoted Peikoff as saying, then it subsumes any supernatural entities there might be, whether God or unexemplified universals, or Fregean propositions, or mathematical sets, or Cartesian thinking substances, or states of consciousness if they are naturalistically irreducible, or . . . .   All of these categories are categories of the supernatural given Peikoff's use of the term.  For the members of these categories, if any, do not belong to the natural world, the world of space-time-matter. Now these categories might be empty, but one cannot show them to be empty by intoning the formal-logical truth that nothing exists beyond existence.

I submit that anyone who carefully reads the above passage and thinks about it objectively will be able to see that Peikoff's argument is a blatant non sequitur.  He is making one or the other of the following mistakes.  He is either attempting to answer a substantive philosophical question by terminological fiat, or he is equivocating on 'existence.'  I will explain each of these in turn.

A.  It is illegitimate to attempt to answer a philosophical question by rigging one's terminology in such a way that the answer 'falls out' of the terminology.  One cannot legislate the supernatural out of existence by using 'existence' in such a way that only natural items exist.  Equally, one cannot legislate the supernatural into existence by a similar move.  For example, one cannot define God into existence by saying that God is by definition an existent being since a nonexistent God is not God, and God is God (A is A!).

B. If Peikoff is not making the first mistake, then he is equivocating on 'existence.'  That is, he using it in two different senses.  He is using it both as the "widest of all concepts" to cover everything that exists, but also in a narrow sense to cover only natural existents.

It is trivially true that there is nothing natural beyond nature, and nothing existent beyond existence.  But these trivialities do not supply anyone with a good reason to reject the supernatural. It is because of such shoddy reasoning as I have just exposed that most philosophers have a hard time taking Objectivism seriously.  Objectivists should take this in a constructive way: if you want your ideas to gain wider acceptance, come up with better arguments for them.

(Don't complain that I've 'taken Peikoff's argument out of context.'  It stands on its own, and if it is bad, no amount of further context will improve it. If I quoted Descartes' Meditation V ontological argument and showed why it is unconvincing would you complain that I had taken it out of context?)

Natural Evil and Fallen Angels

This is an old post from my first blog,  dated 3 January 2005, slightly redacted.

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Keith Burgess-Jackson writes:

I have a question for my theistic readers. How do you reconcile the devastation wrought by the tsunami with your belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being? If God could have prevented the tsunami but didn’t, then God’s omnibenevolence is called into question. If God wanted to prevent the tsunami but couldn’t, then God’s omniscience or omnipotence is called into question. You can’t explain away the evil by citing free will, for no human being brought about the tsunami. (Surely you don’t believe in fallen angels.) Do events like this shake your faith? If not, why not? If death and destruction on this scale don’t make you doubt the existence of your god, what would?

1. The parenthetical material is puzzling. If someone can see his way clear to accepting the existence of a purely spiritual being such as God, then the belief in angels, fallen or otherwise, will present no special problem. Given the existence of fallen angels, the Free Will Defense may be invoked to account for natural evils such as tsunamis: natural evils turn out to be a species of moral evils.

2. Of course, the argument can be turned around. If someone argues from the fact of evil to the nonexistence of God, that person assumes that there is indeed an objective fact of evil, and thus, an objective distinction between good and evil. A sophisticated theist can counterargue that there cannot be an objective distinction between good and evil unless God exists. I could make that argument as rigorous as you like. That is not to say that the argument would be compelling to every rational consumer of it, but only that it would logically impeccable, plausibly premised, and sufficiently strong to neutralize the atheist's argument from evil. I distinguish between refuting and neutralizing. It may be difficult to refute a sophisticated interlocutor since he will not be likely to blunder. But he can be neutralized by presenting counterarguments of equal but opposite probative force. The result is a stand-off: you battle the opponent to a draw.

3. In a separate argument, a theist could make the case that the very quantity and malevolence of the moral evil in the world -- think of the 20th century and the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, the 100 million murdered by Communists, etc.) -- cannot be explained naturalistically. This would be another way to argue from the fact of objective evil to supernatural agents of evil.  See my The Holocaust Argument for God's Existence.

4. There is no denying that evil presents a serious challenge to theism. Should it shake the theist's faith? Only if the objections to atheism/naturalism shake the atheist's/naturalist's faith. We seem to have doxastic parity. There are reasons both for and against theism. But there are also reasons both for and against atheism/naturalism. It would be special pleading to suppose that the reasons against theism are much more weighty that the reasons against atheism/naturalism. See my companion post on the naturalist's version of fides quaerens intellectum.

5. At the end of the day, after all the dialectical smoke has cleared, you simply have to decide what you are going to believe and how you are going to live. The decision is not a mere decision, but rationally informed, and subject to revision after the consideration of further arguments; but at some point ratiocination must cease and a position must be taken.

Note: Most atheists are naturalists, hence my conflation of them in this post. But one could be an anti-naturalist and an atheist (McTaggart) and I suppose one could be a theist and a naturalist.

Facebook

I'm on a roll. Daily punch-back against leftist loons on a wide variety of topics. Culture critique in the bowels of the Zuckerbergian beast.  No lefties need apply. I am looking for a few good men and women to join me in the fight for sense and sanity and the defense of the Republic. 

I received 'friend' requests from a couple of hotties the other day who proudly strut their stuff and sport their 'racks' on pages including links to their 'nude pics.'  Sorry girls, you are not MavPhil material.  

The State under Leftism: Totalitarianism cum pane et circensibus

Although the state under contemporary leftism is totalitarian and demands conformity and submission in matters of moment, it tolerates and indeed encourages the cultivation of a politically inconsequential individualism of private self-absorption.  A people given bread (food stamps and other forms of infantilizing dependency), circuses (mass sporting events), dope (legalization of marijuana), HollyWeird pornography and violence, politically correct propaganda, and such weapons of mass distraction as Twitter and Facebook is kept distracted, enervated, and submissive.

Nowadays it is not religion that is the opiate of the masses, but the dope of  Big Government and its leftist enablers.

The Democrats have long been the party of Big Government; they are now the party of hard-Left Big Government by 'woke' elites. There is nothing democratic about them.  Damn these Demo Rats!

Memory Anchors

Journal entries can serve to anchor memories. Memories anchored are less likely to be embellished or suppressed. 

"I couldn't have done that!"

"But it says right here that you did, and you wrote it!"

How Much Value Do You Attach to This Life?

The hour of death has arrived.  You are informed by an utterly reliable source that you have exactly two options.  You can either accept death and with it utter annihilation of the self, or you can repeat your life with every last detail the same.  But if every last detail is to be the same, and you decide to sign up for another round on the wheel of becoming, you realize that you are signing up for an infinity of rounds.

So which will it be?  Has your life been so valuable that you would be willing to repeat it, and indeed repeat it endlessly? 

For me, one samsaric cycle is quite enough.  "I hope never to return." (Frida Kahlo)  

Roger Kimball on Elias Canetti on Death

An excerpt from Roger Kimball, Becoming Elias Canetti:

. . . . Canetti’s response to the fact of death—“the only fact,” as he sometimes puts it—is a tragic stance of rebellion against an ineluctable fate. The overriding question for every individual, he writes in The Torch in My Ear, is “whether he should put up with the fact that a death is imminent for him.”

Canetti has never worked out his thoughts on death in any systematic fashion. His basic message would seem to be the unexceptionable admonition not to go gentle into that good night. Yet he also uses the rejection of death as the starting point for other, often more questionable, sorts of statements. At one point, for example, his insistence that the individual take a stand against death leads him to the pious declaration that “I care about the life of every human being and not just that of my neighbor.” And in one of his essays, he goes beyond the posture of stoically resisting death to tell us that “So long as death exists, no beauty is beautiful, no goodness is good.” We must of course be grateful that Canetti cares about the lives of all of us, even if the word “cares” is rendered practically empty in this context. But as for the relation between death and beauty and death and goodness—well, here I think we must question Canetti’s dictum. For it seems at least equally plausible that beauty and goodness can emerge as compelling forces in our lives only against the background of mortality; in this sense, death, as Wallace Stevens put it, is the mother of beauty. Things matter to us precisely because neither we nor they last forever. Now, I do not doubt that Canetti’s meditations on death betray a core of genuine pathos. But in the end I’m afraid that they amount to little more than a collection of sentimental exhortations; their chief function would seem to be to perpetuate the atmosphere of intellectual melodrama within which Canetti prefers to operate. Indeed, they would hardly be worth scrutiny, except that Canetti insists on placing them at the very center of his thought.

Canetti quoted: “So long as death exists, no beauty is beautiful, no goodness is good.” Canetti paraphrased:  To those who live free of illusions, nothing ultimately matters if neither we nor they last forever. Kimball quoted:  "Things matter to us precisely because neither we nor they last forever."

Two Guises of Religion

Religion can appear under the guise of a childish refusal to face the supposed truth that we are but a species of clever land mammal with no higher origin or destiny. It can also appear under the guise of transcendence and maturity: the religious seek to transcend the childish and the merely human whereas worldlings wallow in it.

Religion must remain a riddle here below, as much of a riddle as the predicament it is supposed to cure.  If religion wants a symbol, let it be:

And if anyone should say that only the sick need medicine, then let the reply be:  We are all sick.

Friday Cat Blogging! Trump Cat

Hanged and Hung

A man is hanged; his coat is hung.

A Rule for Reading the Bible

What we know to be the case constrains Biblical interpretation. For example, we know that an individual human life does not begin with its first breath. If any passage in the Bible states or implies otherwise, that passage may and indeed must be dismissed and cannot count as divine revelation. So much for Biblical inerrancy, at least on one reading of that phrase.

A Rule of Engagement with Females

Accept and return hugs, but do not initiate them. Exception: family members.  Joe Biden take note.

Is it Evil to Hate?

If it is evil to hate, then it is evil to hate evil. Modus ponens or modus tollens?

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Philosophical Justification for a Drink or Two

From time to time  it is perhaps appropriate that we should relax a little the bonds that tether us to the straight and narrow.  A fitting apologia for a bit of indulgence and even overindulgence  is found in Seneca, On Tranquillity of Mind, XVII, 8-9, tr. Basore:

At times we ought to reach even the point of intoxication, not drowning ourselves in drink, yet succumbing to it; for it washes away troubles, and stirs the mind from its very depths and heals its sorrow just as it does certain ills of the body; and the inventor of wine is not called the Releaser [Liber, Bacchus] on account of the license it gives to the tongue, but because it frees the mind from bondage to cares and emancipates it and gives it new life and makes it bolder in all that it attempts. But, as in freedom, so in wine there is a wholesome moderation.

Sed ut libertatis ita vini salubris moderatio est.

. . .

Yet we ought not to do this often, for fear that the mind may contract an evil habit; nevertheless there are times when it must be drawn into rejoicing and freedom, and gloomy sobriety must be banished for a while.

Amos Milburn, One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer

The Champs, Tequila.  Arguably unique in that its lyrics consist of exactly one trisyllabic word.

Electric Flag, Wine.  Great video of the late Mike Bloomfield and his Gibson Les Paul in their prime, at the Monterey Pop Festival, 1967.  Definitive proof that a Jew can play the blues. Cultural appropriation at its finest. We all could profit from more cultural appropriation, blacks especially. Think what they could learn from the kike, the chink, and the honkey, not to mention the dago, the guinea, the greaseball, and the wop. 

Canned Heat, Whisky-Headed Woman.

Tommy McClennan, Whisky-Headed Woman, 1939

Doors, Whisky Bar

Buck Owens, Cigarettes, Whisky, and Wild, Wild Women

Cigarettes are a blot on the whole human race
A man is a monkey with one in his face
So gather 'round friends and listen to your brother
A fire on one end, a fool on the other.

Ramblin' Jack Elliot's version

What are you drinking? I'm having me a Whisky Highball, classic, and simplicity itself: ginger ale and your favorite whisky. Mine tonight is Canada Dry ginger ale and Jim Beam bourbon.  

Addendum 9/16

David G. writes,

Back when I was working for Google and making crap loads of money, I started sampling high-end bourbon and scotch. Maybe I'm just not a connoisseur, but in my judgement, although some of the 12-year-old Glen's were marginally better than Jack Daniels, none of the bourbons were, and there were several high-end whiskeys that were noticeably worse than Jack, so now that I'm poor, I really don't mind going back to my old friend Jack.

Also, as I'm sure you are aware, you can't post a list of songs on the internet and not have someone tell you you missed some. One you probably know:

EmmyLou Harris, Two More Bottles of Wine

and one you probably don't, unless you follow local Arizona bands:

Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers, Jack vs. Jose.

Jack is good enough for me, too, and so is Jose Cuervo Gold, and if you are mixing these bad boys, not with each other mind you, but with, say, ginger ale or tonic water respectively, then there is no call to shell out for the top-shelf hooch which is outrageously overpriced. You don't always get what you pay for.  If a snob challlenges your judgment, Dave, arrange a blind taste test.

Fratello Pepito recommends The Four Deuces, White Port Lemon Juice, 1956.

Old and Jaded

The trick is to get old without becoming jaded.

My valued colleague H. N. couldn't pull it off. He had a certain depth and a certain wisdom, and we were on good terms. He knew how to take my intensity and he wasn't threatened by my intelligence: his was a healthy self-confidence. But he had become lazy and complacent among unstimulating colleagues. I couldn't engage him. An idea of mine might be dismissed with "That's already in Spinoza." Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn't. "But what do you think of the idea?" No answer. Didn't care. Tired, jaded.  

He was dead wood on the path to petrification. Jaded, he was turning to stone.

What I didn't say to him out of affection and because it would have done no good:  What are you doing here? You have the wherewithal to retire. Why do you continue to draw a salary? 

Overheard in the Philosophy Department

We are all made of crooked timber, but only some of us are dead wood.

In Vino Veritas

Literally, "in wine, (there is) truth."  But the sentence does not bear its meaning on its semantic sleeve. What the familiar Latin saying is used to express, by those who use it correctly, is the thought that a person under the influence of alcohol is less likely to dissemble and more likely to speak his mind and perhaps reveal something that he would not have revealed if sober. 

Linguistic meaning, though not reducible to use, cannot be adequately understood apart from use. 

The Question of Private Judgment

I have commented critically on the Roman Catholic teaching on indulgences. One who refuses to accept, or questions, a teaching of the Church on faith or morals may be accused of reliance upon private judgment and failure to submit to the Magisterium or teaching authority of the Church.  Two quick observations on this accusation.

First, for many of us private judgment is not merely private, based as it is on consultation with many, many public sources.  It is as public as private. Everything I've read over the years from Parmenides on down in the West, the Bible on down in the Near East, and the Upanishads on down in the Far East feeds into my 'private' judgment.  So my 'private' judgment is not merely mine as to content inasmuch as it is a collective cultural upshot, albeit processed through my admittedly fallible and limited pate. Though collective as to content, its acceptance by me is of course my sole responsibility.

Second, the party line or official doctrine of any institution is profoundly influenced by the private judgments of individuals. Think of the profound role that St. Augustine played in the development of Roman Catholic doctrine.  He was a man of powerful will, penetrating intellect, and great personal presence.  Imagine going up against him at a theological conference or council.  

So the private is not merely private, and the official is not merely official.

Of course, part of the official doctrine of the Roman church is that its pronunciamenti anent faith and morals are guided and directed by the Holy Ghost. (Use of the old phrase, besides chiming nicely with der Heilige Geist, is a way for this conservative to thumb his nose at Vatican II-type innovations which, though some of them may have had some sense, tended to be deleterious in the long run.  A meatier question which I ought to take up at some time is the one concerning the upsurge of priestly paederasty after Vatican II: post hoc ergo propter hoc?)

What I have just written may sound as if I am hostile to the Church. I am not. Nor have I ever had any negative experiences with priests, except, perhaps to have been bored by their sermons. All of the ones I have known have been upright, and some exemplars of the virtues they profess.  In the main they were manly and admirable men.  But then I'm an old man, and I am thinking mainly of the priests of my youth. 

I have no time now to discuss the Church's guidance by the third person of the Trinity, except to express some skepticism: if that is so, how could the estimable Ratzinger be followed by the benighted Bergoglio? (Yes, I am aware that there were far, far worse popes than the current one.)

Of course, I have just, once again, delivered my private judgment. But, once again, it is not merely private inasmuch as it is based on evidence and argument: I am not merely emoting in the manner of a liberal such as Bergoglio when he emoted, in response to the proposed Great Wall of Trump, that nations need bridges, not walls. Well, then, Vatican City needs bridges not walls the better to allow jihadis easy access for their destructive purposes. Mercy and appeasement even unto those who would wipe Christianity from the face of the earth, and are in process of doing so.

Addendum

But how can my judgment, even if not merely private, carry any weight, even for me, when it contradicts the Magisterium, the Church's teaching authority, when we understand the source and nature of this authority? ('Magisterium' from L. magister, teacher, master.)

By the Magisterium we mean the teaching office of the Church. It consists of the Pope and Bishops. Christ promised to protect the teaching of the Church : "He who hears you, hears me; he who rejects you rejects me, he who rejects me, rejects Him who sent me" (Luke 10. 16). Now of course the promise of Christ cannot fail: hence when the Church presents some doctrine as definitive or final, it comes under this protection, it cannot be in error; in other words, it is infallible. 

In a nutshell: God in Christ founded the Roman church upon St. Peter, the first pope, as upon a rock. The legitimate succession culminates in Pope Francis. The Roman church as the one true holy and apostolic church therefore teaches with divine authority and thus infallibly. Hence its teaching on indulgences not only cannot be incorrect, it cannot even be reasonably questioned. So who am I to -- in effect -- question God himself?

Well, it is obvious that if I disagree with God, then I am wrong.  But if a human being, or a group of human beings, no matter how learned, no matter how saintly, claims to be speaking with divine authority, and thus infallibly, then I have excellent reason to be skeptical. How do I know that they are not, in a minor or major way, schismatics diverging from the true teaching, the one Christ promised to protect?  Maybe it was some version of Eastern Orthodoxy that Christ had in mind as warranting his protection.

These and other questions legitimately arise in the vicinity of what Josiah Royce calls the Religious Paradox. 

The Grave Danger to the Republic of 'Red Flag' Laws

Destructive Democrats now label the National Rifle Association  a 'domestic terror organization.' Mind-mannered Mike of Mesa is a member and receives their publications. His mail man, though, is a flaming lefty. The mail man reports Mike to the government as a domestic terrorist on the ground that anyone who is a member of a terrorist organization is a terrorist. ATF agents break into Mike's house in the wee hours and seize his one and only firearm, a semi-automatic pistol. A year later, Mike is able to get his gun back, but he must pay all court costs.

Not quite Nazi Germany, but getting there.

If Democrats call NRA members domestic terrorists, I call Democrats totalitarian proto-Nazi scum. The difference between the two labels is that my label applies.

Never forget that the Left's strategy is incremental: gun confiscation in violation of both the Second and Fourth Amendments.

The Democrat Party is now a hard-Left party. 

Too Shallow for Self-Knowledge

You cannot point out to the superficial their superficiality.  For that they are not deep enough.

The Notebook and its Ideal Entry, the Aphorism

Susan Sontag on Elias Canetti:

The notebook is the perfect literary form for an eternal student, someone who has no subject or, rather, whose subject is ‘everything’. It allows entries of all lengths and shapes and degrees of impatience and roughness, but its ideal entry is the aphorism. Most of Canetti’s entries take up the aphorist’s traditional themes: the hypocrisies of society, the vanity of human wishes, the sham of love, the ironies of death, the pleasure and necessity of solitude, and the intricacies of one’s own thought processes. Most of the great aphorists have been pessimists, purveyors of scorn for human folly. (The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well,’ Canetti has noted.) Aphoristic thinking is informal, unsociable, adversarial, proudly selfish. ‘One needs friends mainly in order to become impudent – that is, more oneself,’ Canetti writes: there is the authentic tone of the aphorist. The notebook holds that ideally impudent, efficient self that one constructs to deal with the world. By the disjunction of ideas and observations, by the brevity of their expression, by the absence of helpful illustration, the notebook makes of thinking something light.

The first two sentences sound for all the world like a description of this here weblog.  Or as I put it above:

. . . this weblog is just one philosopher's online journal, notebook, common place book, workshop, soapbox, sandbox, literary litter box, and online filing cabinet.    A lot of what I write here is unpolished and tentative.  I explore the cartography of ideas along many paths.  Here below we are in statu viae, and it is fitting that our thinking should be exploratory, meandering, and undogmatic.  Nothing human, and thus nothing philosophical, is foreign to me. 

Praeparatio Mortis

We cannot prepare for the journey at the time of departure; the time of departure must find us prepared.

Let it Go!

Why are you recalling an unpleasant event when everyone else involved has forgotten -- not only it, but you?

9/11: Eighteen Years After

And the nation's borders are still not secure.

The morning of 9/11 was a beautiful, dry Arizona morning. Back from a hard run, I flipped on the TV while doing some cool-down exercises only to see one of the planes crash into one of the towers. I knew right away what was going on.

I said to my wife, "Well, two good things will come of this: Gary Condit will be out of the news forever, and finally something will be done about our porous southern border."

I was right about the first, but not about the second.

Do you remember Gary Condit, the California congressman? Succumbing as so many do to the fire down below, Condit initiated an extramarital affair with the federal intern, Chandra Levy. When Levy was found murdered, Condit's link to Levy proved his undoing. The cable shows were awash with the Condit-Levy affair that summer of 2001. 9/11 put an end to the soap opera.

But it didn't do much for the security of the southern border.

We have one last chance,and its name is Donald Trump.

Should We Discuss Our Differences? Pessimism and Optimism about Disagreement

Our national life is becoming like philosophy: a scene of endless disagreement about almost everything. The difference, of course, is that philosophical controversy is typically conducted in a gentlemanly fashion without bloodshed or property damage. Some say that philosophy is a blood sport, but no blood is ever shed, and though philosophers are ever shooting down one another's arguments, gunfire at philosophical meetings is so far nonexistent.  A bit of poker brandishing is about as far as it goes.

Some say we need more 'conversations' with  our political opponents about the hot-button issues that divide us.  The older I get the more pessimistic I become about the prospects of such 'conversations.'  I believe we need fewer conversations, less interaction, and the political equivalent of divorce.  Here is an extremely pessimistic view that I mention not to endorse but to mark one end of a spectrum:

I believe the time for measured debate on national topics has passed. There are many erudite books now decorating the tweed-jacket pipe-rooms of avuncular conservative theorists. And none as effective at convincing our opponents as a shovel to the face. But setting that means aside, there is no utility in good-faith debate with a side whose core principle is your destruction. The “middle ground” is a chasm. It is instead our duty to scathe, to ridicule, to scorn, and encourage the same in others. But perhaps foremost it is our duty to hate what is being done. A healthy virile hate. For those of you not yet so animated, I can assure its effects are invigorating.

Bret Stephens offers us an optimistic view in The Dying Art of Disagreement.

Unfortunately, Stephens says things that are quite stupid. He says, for example, that disagreement is "the most vital ingredient of any decent society." That is as foolish as to say, as we repeatedly hear from so-called liberals, that our strength lies in diversity.  That is an absurdity bordering on such Orwellianisms as "War is peace" and 'Slavery is freedom."  Our strength lies not in our diversity, but in our unity. Likewise, the most vital ingredient in any decent society is agreement on values and principles and purposes.  Only on the basis of broad agreement can disagreement be fruitful.

This is not to say that diversity is not a value at all; it is a value in competition with the value of unity, a value which must remain subordinated to the value of unity. Diversity within limits enriches a society; but what makes it viable is common ground. "United we stand, divided we fall."  "A house divided against itself cannot stand."

Stephens goes on to create a problem for himself. Having gushed about how wonderful disagreement is, he then wonders why contemporary disagreement is so bitter, so unproductive, and so polarizing. If disagreement is the lifeblood of successful societies, why is blood being shed?

Stephens naively thinks that if we just listen to  one another with open minds and mutual respect and the willingness to alter our views that our conversations will converge on agreement. He speaks of the "disagreements we need to have" that are "banished from the public square before they are settled."  Settled?  What hot button issue ever gets settled?  What does Stephens mean by 'settled'?  Does he mean: get the other side to shut up and acquiesce in what you are saying?  Or does he mean: resolve the dispute in a manner acceptable to all parties to it?  The latter is what he has to mean. But then no hot-button issue is going to get settled.

Stephens fails to see that the disagreements are now so deep that there can be no reasonable talk of settling any dispute.  Does anyone in his right mind think that liberals will one day 'come around' and grasp that abortion is the deliberate killing of innocent human beings and that it ought be illegal in most cases?  And that is just one of many hot-button issues. 

We don't agree on things that a few years ago all would have agreed on, e.g., that the national borders need to be secured.

According to Stephens, "Intelligent disagreement is the lifeblood of any thriving society."  Again, this is just foolish.  To see this, consider the opposite:

Agreement as to fundamental values, principles and purposes is the lifeblood of any thriving society.

Now ask yourself: which of these statements is closer to the truth? Obviously  mine, not Stephens'. He will disagree with me about the role of disagreement.  How likely do you think it is that we will settle this meta-disagreement?  It is blindingly evident to me that I am right and that he is wrong.  Will he come to see the light? Don't count on it.

It is naive to suppose that conversations will converge upon agreement, especially when the parties to the conversations are such a diverse bunch made even more diverse by destructive immigration policies.  For example, you cannot allow Sharia-supporting Muslims to immigrate into Western societies and then expect to have mutually respectful conversations with them that converge upon agreement.  

I am not saying that there is no place for intelligent disagreement. There is, and it ought to be conducted with mutual respect, open-mindedness and all the rest.  The crucial point Stephens misses is that fruitful disagreement can take place only under the umbrella of shared principles, values, and purposes.  To invert the metaphor: fruitful disagreement presupposes common ground.

And here is the problem:  lack of common ground.  I have nothing in common with the Black Lives Matters activists whose movement is based on lies about Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and the police.  I have nothing in common with Antifa thugs who have no respect for the classical traditions and values of the university.  I could go on: people who see nothing wrong with sanctuary jurisdictions, with open borders, with using the power to the state to force florists and caterers to violate their consciences; the gun grabbers; the fools who speak of 'systemic racism'; the appeasers of rogue regimes . . . .

There is no comity without commonality, and the latter is on the wane.  A bad moon is rising, and trouble's on the way.  Let's hope we can avoid civil war. 

Democratic Socialism

The problem with democratic socialism is that the adjective contradicts the noun.

Peter Unger on the Emptiness of the Present-Eternalist Debate

Peter Unger doubts, with respect to the past, but not with respect to the future, whether there is any “concretely substantial difference” between presentism and eternalism (Empty Ideas, Oxford UP, 2014, 176 ff.). He argues that any appearance of a substantial difference is “illusory.” Both parties agree on such contingent past-tensed truths as that dinosaurs once roamed the earth. They agree that there are such truths about the past whether we know them or not. The parties to the dispute further agree that these truths are fixed and determinate, and as such unalterable. To employ one of Unger's examples, was Abe Lincoln as a boy ever friends with a boy named 'David'? According to Unger, he either was or was not, and there is a fact of the matter one way or the other. No matter that we don't know which. Unger: “. . . our Presentist and our Eternalist will agree that 'what's past is already fixed and determined; it's a done deal which cannot possible be undone.” (2014, 177) In sum, both parties to the controversy agree that there are truths about the past; that some of them are known to be true; that these truths, whether known or not, form a complete set; and that these truths cannot be changed.

Unger's point is that presentist and eternalist differ only in the ways they talk and think about the collection of agreed-upon Moorean facts. The eternalist, but not the presentist, will say that dinosaurs tenselessly exist and tenselessly roam the earth at times millions of years earlier than the time at which the eternalist speaks, etc. The presentist, but not the eternalist, will just use ordinary English with its tenses: dinosaurs don't exist now, but they used to exist millions of years ago, and when they existed they roamed the earth, etc. There is no “concretely substantial difference” between what the presentist holds and what the eternalist holds with respect to the past. (2014, 178) Their disagreement is trivial and insubstantial because they differ merely on how to talk about a body of agreed-upon facts.

But this can't be right since, while there is much that presentists and eternalists agree on, there are substantive points of disagreements that divide them. Unger says on behalf of the presentist that “a tenseless way of talking and thinking will have us (at least tend to) 'spatialize time,' thus (tending to make or) making obscure to us the dynamic aspect of concrete reality . . . .” (2014, 177, emphasis in original). Right here Unger himself unwittingly points to a substantive disagreement that divides presentists and eternalists, or at least those (the majority) of the latter who are B-eternalists. Is there a dynamic aspect of concrete reality? Surely it is a substantive question whether concrete, mind-independent reality is static or dynamic. If real time is exhausted by the B-series, then B-eternalism advocates a static view of time and change unacceptable to presentists.

It surely seems that the following related questions are also substantive: Is temporal passage real or is it mind-dependent? Is time a fourth dimension of a four-dimensional manifold, space-time, which features time as its fourth dimension? Is the existence of temporal items independent of when they exist, or does the existence of such items depend on when they exist? Is existence reducible to temporal presentness, or not? Are the truths about the past on which presentists and eternalists agree brute truths or are they truths grounded in items external to the truths? Suppose we pursue the last question.

Presentist and eternalist agree on the contingent truth that Socrates existed but does not now exist. What is this truth about? The natural answer is that it is about Socrates. The presentist, however, for whom only the present exists, cannot avail himself of this natural answer. For if present items alone exist, then Socrates does not exist in which case he cannot be referred to: the reference relation is such that, necessarily, if a name refers to, or is about, a thing, then the thing exists. The presentist has to say, implausibly, that 'Socrates' is about something else such as Socrates' haecceity, or else that the name is not about anything, and that therefore the truth in question is a brute truth. To say that it is a brute truth is to say that it is just true! When he was alive, the present-tensed 'Socrates exists,' or rather the proposition expressed by the Greek equivalent, was about Socrates, and true in virtue of Socrates' existence, but after he ceased to exist, 'Socrates existed,' which became true on Socrates' demise, is not about him. That is surely strange.

The eternalist, recoiling in disgust, will say that the truth that Socrates existed is about Socrates who exists tenselessly at (some but not all of the) times earlier than the time of this observation, and that, therefore, the truth in question is not a brute truth, but one grounded in the (tenseless) existence of Socrates. Whatever the merits of the competing views, we certainly seem to have here a substantive disagreement, one that pivots on the question whether singular, affirmative truths about merely past items need truth-makers or truth-grounds. Maybe they do; maybe they don't. Either way, this is not a dispute about different ways of talking and thinking about some agreed-upon collection of Moorean facts.

Unger also says on behalf of the presentist that

. . . there aren't any such tenseless senses of, or forms of, 'exist' and 'be,' and any other naturally available constructions featuring verbs. . . . when it is said that two and three make five, the only real sense of that is the same as the single sense of what's stated when it's said that two and three now make five. . . . So, properly, we should say that two and three always did make five, and they now do make five, and they always will make five. (2014, 176-7.)

But here too there are points of substantive disagreement. It is a substantive question whether or not numbers are timeless entities. Suppose they are. Then the copula in '7 is prime' will have to be tenseless. Talk about the timeless is tenseless. Since it is a substantive question whether there are timeless items, it is a substantive question whether there are tenseless senses of 'exist' and 'be.' Suppose I say to my class, “David Hume is an empiricist who believes that every significant idea is traceable to a corresponding sensory impression.” It is an interesting substantive question whether the verb forms in this sentence are tenseless or tensed.

Word of the Day: Psephology

Merriam-Webster: "the scientific study of elections." "Psephology is from the Greek word psēphos, meaning 'pebble.'"

Necro-psephology is a growing field of inquiry in the Chicago area. For in those precincts there is a sizable turnout at elections of the dearly departed.

If you have a large vocabulary you will love my blog; if you don't, you need it.

Dissembling in the Barber's Chair

My barber once asked me if I had done any travelling  since last I saw him.  I lied and said that I hadn't, when in fact I had been to Geneva, Switzerland.  If I had told the truth, then that truth would have led to another and yet another.  "And what did you do in Geneva?"  "I was invited to a conference on Bradley's Regress."  And thus would I have had to blow my cover as regular guy among regular guys in that quintessential enclave of the regular guy, the old-time barber shop.  I might have come across as self-important or as a braggart.  I might have come across as I come across to some on this weblog.

Lies often lead to more lies, but truth-telling can get you in deep too. Life in this world of surfaces and seemings often goes down easier with a dollop of mendacity.  In a world phenomenal and phony a certain amount of phoniness is forgivable. 

But how much?

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

Dave G. responds:

Boy can I relate to that. It took me most of the way through college, but eventually I found out that people didn't like me and thought I was arrogant in part because of my vocabulary (full disclosure, I was also somewhat impatient with people who didn't think as quickly as I did). After that I stuck to Germanic-root words and found it noticeably easier to talk to girls. It was a few more years before I developed patience.

The life of someone who is absorbed in things that almost no one else cares about can be lonely. I suppose that is part of what inspires philosophy bloggers. And model railroad bloggers, for that matter.

The Internet has its negatives, obviously, but it is a wonderful tool for those who are not, as it were, stamped out by a cookie-cutter.  It makes it possible to locate the like-minded. It has enriched my life enormously.   

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Fred Neil

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

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

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

I've Got a Secret. YouTuber comment: "Why were the sixties so special and important? Fred Neil, for one." But why were they so special to us and not others? In part because we were raw, open to experience, and full of the painful & passionate intensity of youth.

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

Meinertsen on the Merely Apparent Existence of Thick Particulars

This is the second in a series on Bo Meinertsen's 2018 book. It is part of a 'warm-up' for a review article to appear in Metaphysica.  Here is the first installment.

A thick particular in the parlance of David Armstrong is an ordinary particular taken together with its non-relational properties. But an ordinary particular is distinct from each and from all of its properties: it is that which has these properties. If we consider an ordinary particular in abstraction from its properties, what we have before our minds is the particular qua particular. From here it is but a short step to the much maligned and hotly contested bare or thin particular. Meinertsen ably defends bare or thin particulars as constituents of states of affairs in Chapter 5.

A tomato will serve as an example. Call it 'Tom.' There are any number of contingent truths about Tom. Tom is red; Tom is ripe; Tom is round; etc.  Meinertsen and I agree that these truths need truthmakers. As I would put it, they can't just be true. What in the world makes them true? For Meinertsen, states of affairs (STOAs) play the truthmaker role.  A (first-order) state of affairs is a unified complex consisting of the instantiation of a property by a thin particular, or the instantiation of a relation by two or more thin particulars. Instantiation is an asymmetrical external relation that, in the monadic case, connects a thin particular to a property thereby forming a state of affairs.  The truth that Tom is red is thus made true by the state of affairs, Tom's being red, where the subject constituent is a thin particular, thin-Tom if you will, and not thick-Tom, Tom together with his intrinsic properties. And the same goes for the truth that Tom is ripe, and the truth that Tom is round.  For each truth there is a truthmaking state of affairs, a thin state of affairs we can call it since it includes only one of thick-Tom's properties.  

Now take the conjunction of all of Tom's intrinsic properties. The result is a conjunctive property.  Call it the nature N of Tom. The instantiation of this nature by a thin particular is a state of affairs.  This is because N is a bona fide property, and the instantiation of any property by a thin particular is a state of affairs. This state of affairs is a thick state of affairs, and is identical to the thick particular, Tom. So the following comment (in the earlier thread) by Meinertsen comes as a bit of a surprise:

As to (4), well, in my view, thick particulars aren’t real STOAs, merely apparent ones. It’s true that I assay a thick particular as the instantiation of N, the conjunctive property that is the conjunction of its intrinsic properties. But I also argue that conjunctive properties are truthmaking reducible (TM-reducible) - i.e. only existing at the level of truths, not at the level of truthmakers - and that the instantiation (‘instantiation’) of a TM-reducible property isn’t a real STOA.

This is puzzling because the dialectic started with a really existent thick particular, Tom together with his properties, but seems to end with the elimination of the starting point and the demotion of the thick particular to a mere appearance.

The reasoning seems to proceed as follows. The contingent truth that a is F needs a truthmaker, and so does the contingent truth that a is G. But the conjunction of the two truths -- which is 'automatically' true given the truth of the conjuncts -- does not need its own truthmaker.  So these three truths need only two truthmakers. There is no need for a third truthmaker because the truth of the conjunctive proposition supervenes on the truth of its conjuncts. It's an aletheiological 'free lunch.'

Now consider the conjunction C of all the truths about a, or about Tom in our example. What makes this conjunction true are the 'thin' states of affairs corresponding to and grounding each of the truths  in the conjunction. The 'thin' states of affairs do all the truthmaking work: there is no need for a separate 'thick' state of affairs to serve as truthmaker for the conjunction itself.  But if there is no need for 'thick' states of affairs, then there is no need to posit thick particulars in reality. (A thick particular just is a 'thick' state of affairs.)  So thick particulars are best regarded as merely apparent.

That is the argument as far as I can tell. Did I get it right, Bo?

Critique

But if there is no thick particular in reality, then what makes it the case that each of the thin particulars in each of the thin states of affairs is the same thin particular? Meinertsen speaks above of "the conjunctive property that is the conjunction of its intrinsic properties." (emphasis added) What is the antecedent of the pronoun 'its'?  That would have to be Tom in our example, thick-Tom, Tom together with all its properties. So the very identity of C -- its being the conjunction it is and not some other conjunction -- presupposes the reality of thick-Tom, Tom together with his intrinsic properties.  For C to exist and to be true, thick-Tom must exist. 

I conclude that one cannot take thick particulars to be merely apparent.  Their reality is presupposed if the STOA style of ontology is to get off the ground in the first place.

Now the tomato example is what Meinertsen rightly calls a "toy example." (5).  We philosophers employ such examples for convenience ignoring the fact, if it is fact, that tomatoes and other meso-particulars are not ontologically fundamental. So it may make sense to say that thick-Tom and his colleagues do not really exist. But surely the micro-entities of physics do exist and are thick particulars and thus 'thick' states of affairs. There have to be some thick particulars somewhere.

On p. 70, Meinertsen tells that at the level of truthmakers, there are no such things as molecules. Presumably he will say the same about their constituent atoms.  But what about sub-atomic particles?  Could he be telling us that, no matter how far down we go, we will never encounter anything fundamentally real?

Nicolai Hartmann on Søren Kierkegaard and Competing Attitudes Toward Individuality

Although existentialist themes can be traced all the way back to Socrates and then forward through St. Augustine and Blaise Pascal, to mention only three pre-Kierkegaardian luminaries, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is rightly regarded as the father of existentialism. His worked proved to be seminal for that of Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Jean-Paul Sartre, to mention just three post-Kierkegaardian luminaries.  You won't be able to understand properly Angst, Existenz, or Sein-Zum-Tode in Heidegger without having read Kierkegaard. And the same goes for the key concepts of the others who are loosely collectible under the umbrella of existentialism.

Kierkegaard's subjective-existential philosophical approach is one that is the polar opposite of one that could be described as objectivist or cosmological, for want of better labels. Nicolai Hartmann is an excellent representative of the latter tendency.  Here is what Wolfgang Stegmueller has to say about Hartmann's attitude toward Kierkegaard (the translation is mine):

In Kierkegaard, the spiritual creator of existential philosophy, Hartmann sees the unhappiest and most cunningly refined (raffiniertesten) self-tormentor of human history.  Hartmann denies to anxiety and death any metaphysical significance while admitting their role as emotional phenomena.  Only an egotist (Ichmensch) consumed with self-importance sees in anxiety and death something unsettling and terrifying.  Cosmically considered, the death of the individual  shows itself to be a totally insignificant event in the totality of the world process.  It is only an unnatural attitude of protracted self-reflection that artificially induces anxiety of death which then assumes metaphysical weight. (Hauptstroemungen der Gegenwartsphilosophie, Alfred Kroener Verlag, 1960, 242.)

For Hartmann, then, Kierkegaard's concern with the existing individual , and in the first instance himself as existing individual, merely reflects unhealthy self-absorption and egocentricity.  The individual, whether an individual rock, plant, animal or man is fleeting, ephemeral, of no final significance.

Maybe I will finish this entry some day. Maybe I will die first. It has been languishing  in the queue for many a year. So here it is, a stub. If it gets you reading the luminaries mentioned, then it was worth posting.

Kevin Kim on John Pepple on Sweden as Europe's Sacrificial Lamb

A tip of the hat to Bill Keezer, and greetings to fellow bloggers Kim and Pepple. The titles of their blogs do not, however, earn the coveted MavPhil transparency of content award.

Feed: BigHominid's Hairy Chasms
Posted on: Thursday, September 5, 2019 1:22 AM
Author: Kevin Kim
Subject: Pepple on Sweden

Is Sweden Europe's sacrificial lamb, to be laid out as a bloody example of what happens when you heedlessly allow an influx of Muslims who refuse to assimilate into your culture? In John Pepple's grim blog post, Dr. Pepple quotes a Frenchwoman who immigrated to Sweden, but who is now leaving the country for Budapest because the crime has gotten so bad, and because PC politicians, who fear being branded as racists, refuse to recognize that there's any problem with current immigration policy and law enforcement. Here's an excerpt of something the woman wrote—one long, cri de coeur sentence: I can no longer live under this immense mental stress, insecurity, murder, shooting, executions, explosions, rapes and gang rapes, robberies, home burglaries, beatings, car fires, school fires, serious criminals who, after a relatively short prison stay, may again be released to move freely among us, an increasingly dismantled welfare system, lack of health care staff, teachers, elderly housing, lack of elderly care, an increasing number of poor pensioners, municipalities in principle bankrupt or in bankruptcy, all these no-go zones called something else, lack of police resources where it may take 1.5-2 hours for them to arrive at the scene of ongoing crimes if they arrive at all, the lying politicians regardless of political color and the accomplished so-called PC media, the demonization of people who think differently, the shrinking freedom of expression, the increasingly diminishing democracy, and last, but not least, the ongoing and widespread Islamization of the country. Go read the rest. A similar picture is being painted of countries like France, which is dealing with its own immigration/assimilation problem. France has a built-in cultural immune system called laïcité or, roughly, secularism. This is why French law has made no bones about disallowing the wearing of religious items like Muslim veils (hijab, etc.). But in the area surrounding Paris, which is filled with tenements and housing projects, there are the same no-go zones, with plenty of robbery, rape, car fires, and so on. In Paris itself, tent cities—with their attendant filth and violence—can be found as well. But once you leave Paris, you'd be forgiven for thinking France is still France. In the area where my buddy Dominique lives, in the small town of Le Vanneau-Irleau, life goes on much as it has for decades, utterly untouched by what's happening in France's big cities. In the United States, there's a similar state of affairs, albeit with somewhat different demographics. Still, the heart of the US problem has much in common with Europe's problem: a lack of political will when it comes to things like immigration and the true causes of poverty, and a lack of will when it comes to law enforcement. Any teacher knows that losing control of the classroom means the students will rule and nothing of significance will be learned. This is basic human psychology: people need structure if they are to live in harmony and to flourish. Without structure, life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. This is the paradox of freedom: true freedom is, far from being unstructured, veined throughout with structure. The creative freedom and amazing technique you can see in a great painter or martial artist is the result of focus and discipline. It's strange, but it's strictures that allow humans to flourish. And a society is no different from an individual in this regard: a society without strictures—an organic system of rules and laws and unspoken social contracts—becomes flabby and moribund. Look at New York City before and after Rudy Giuliani's two terms: Giuliani enforced the law, and his policies resulted in a few years of glorious prosperity between long periods of poverty and crime. Sweden is experiencing this problem now; so is France, at least in its big cities. The US has its own similar urban problems. As the folk song goes, When will they ever learn?

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Non-Substantial Change, Trope Bundle Theory, and States of Affairs

I am presently writing a review article for Metaphysica about Bo R. Meinertsen's Metaphysics of States of Affairs: Truthmaking, Universals, and a Farewell to Bradley's Regress (Springer 2018). Since I will probably incorporate the following critical remarks into my review, I want to give Bo a chance to respond. 

Substantial and Non-Substantial Change

One way a thing can change is by coming into being or passing away. This is called substantial change.  We could also call it existential change. The other way could be called alterational change. This occurs when a thing, persisting for a time, alters in respect of its intrinsic properties during that time.  Consider the ripening of a tomato. This typically involves the tomato's going from green to red.  This change in respect of color is an alterational, or accidental, or non-substantial change. One and the same entity (substance) persists through a non-zero interval of time and instantiates different properties (accidents) at different times.  As I would put it, there is no alterational change without existential unchange: numerically the same tomato is green, hard, inedible, etc. at time t and red, soft, and edible at later time t*. Bo and I are both assuming that things in time persist by enduring, not by perduring. 

The Problem of Non-Substantial Change of Continuants

This is 

. . . the problem of how to ground the fact that continuants 'persist through change'. For instance, a tomato's changing from red to green [sic] is a case of non-substantial change, and how do we ground the fact that the tomato that has changed exists both before and after the change? The bundles of basic trope theory essentially have the members they actually have and are therefore incompatible with such change. (Meinertsen 2018, 49)

The problem is that we want to say that one and the same tomato goes from being green to being red. We want to be able to uphold the diachronic identity of the tomato as it alters property-wise.  But this is impossible on basic bundle-theoretic trope theory because trope bundles have their members essentially.  This means that if bundle B has trope t as a member, then it is impossible that B exist without having t as a member. The counterintuitive upshot is that a green tomato assayed as a bundle of tropes ceases to exist when it ceases to be green.  This implies that our tomato when so assayed cannot undergo alterational, or accidental, or non-substantial change when it goes from green to red, hard to soft, etc.  It implies that every change is a substantial change. I agree with Meinertsen that this is a powerful objection to the basic bundle-of-tropes assay of ordinary particulars.

Does a State of Affairs Ontology Face the Same Problem?

Meinertsen says that it does not:

State of affairs ontology has no problem in dealing with the problem of non-substantial change. None of the properties of a particular in a state of affairs -- which as we shall see in Chap. 5 is a bare particular -- is included in it, as opposed to instantiated by it. Hence, it changes non-substantially if and only it ceases to instantiate at least one of these properties or whenever it instantiates a new property. (49)

It seems to me, though, that states of affairs (STOA) ontology faces, if not the very same problem, then a closely related one.

Critique

It is true that a bare particular does not include its properties: the bare or thin particular stands to its properties in the asymmetrical external relation of instantiation.  So what Meinertsen is telling us is that it is the bare particular that remains numerically the same over time while some of its properties are replaced by others. This is what grounds the diachronic numerical identity of the continuant.  The substratum of change is the bare particular 'in' the tomato, not the tomato as a whole.

But this answer is less than satisfactory. What changes over time is not a thin particular, but a thick particular. It is the green tomato with all its properties that loses one or more of them and becomes a red tomato.  This is supported by the fact that we do not see or otherwise perceive the thin particular; we do, however, see and otherwise perceive thick particulars.  What we have before us is a tomato that we see to be green and feel to be  hard, etc.,  and that we then later see to be red and feel  to be soft, etc.  

Arguably, then, it is the thick particular that is the substratum of non-substantial change, not the thin particular. If so, then a problem arises similar to the problem that arose for the bundle-of-tropes theory. How?

Well, the green tomato is a STOA whose nature is N1, where N1 is a conjunctive property the conjuncts of which are all the intrinsic properties of the green tomato. The red tomato is a STOA whose nature is N2, where N2 is a conjunctive property the conjuncts of which are all the intrinsic properties of the red tomato.  These STOAs differ numerically for they differ in one or more constituents.  The first has greenness as a constituent, the second does not. A STOA is a complex, and two complexes are the same iff they have all the same constituents. 

So what's the problem? The problem is that any non-substantial change in the green tomato assayed as a STOA destroys its identity just as surely as any non-substantial change in the green tomato assayed as a bundle of tropes destroys its identity. On either account, there is no adequate explanation of non-substantial change. This is because there is no numerically self-same substratum of change that endures through the change in properties. The thin particular is not plausibly regarded as the substratum. I note en passant that Gustav Bergmann regarded bare particulars as momentary entities, not as persisting entities.

The problem set forth as an aporetic sextad:

1. There is no change in intrinsic properties of an ordinary particular over time without a numerically self-same substratum of change. (endurantist assumption)
2. The green tomato changes to red. (pre-theoretical datum)
3. The green tomato that changes to red is a thick particular. (pre-theoretical datum)
4. Thick particulars are STOAs. (theoretical claim)
5. STOAs are complexes. (true by definition)
6. Two complexes are the same iff they share all constituents. (theoretical claim)

These six propositions are collectively inconsistent. My question to Meinertsen: which of these propositions will you reject? Presumably, he will have to reject (3) and say that 'the green tomato' refers to an invisible thin particular, and it is this item that changes from green to red and that serves as the substratum of change.

What do I say?  For now I say merely that, pace Bo, on the issue before us, STOA ontology is no better than the bundle-of-tropes theory.

Trump

Donald Trump cannot restore us morally or reverse our cultural decline. He is, after all, a product of it. But he can secure the political and economic preconditions for such a restoration. And that is something the Left cannot and will not do. In fact, Trump has already taken great strides in the direction of restoration by his judicial appointments. And in other areas as well. But leftists, consumed with hate and blinded by it, cannot credit the man with any accomplishment. Their unrelenting negativity may well prove to be their undoing. One can hope.

Righteous Anger

That one's anger is righteous is rather harder to discern than that it is anger.

Hurricane Names

What's with 'Dorian' and the like? Why not these names: Hillary, Nancy, Chuck, Alexandria, Rashida . . . ?

Disasters ought to be named after disasters.