Maverick Philosopher

Another Advantage of Old Age

The abandoning of your vices becomes easier as they abandon you.

The mechanism of flight of the vices of the flesh is powered by the mortal coil's decline, which is why the old man out for spiritual gain should rejoice, not rue, his libido on the wane. 

The old man, unlike the young, has a good shot at freedom from lust's subornation even in the decadent West if freedom he wants, the wanting standing in inverse relation to the subornation.

Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.  (St. Augustine, City of God)

Love of Neighbor

Love of neighbor is made easier by wise choice of neighborhood.

Are You Clumsy? The Paradox of the Smashed Vase

I'm not, but you might be.

Suppose you inadvertently knock over a priceless vase, smashing it to pieces. You say to the owner, "There's no real harm done; after all it's all still there." And then you argue:

1) There is nothing to the vase over and above the ceramic material that constitutes it.

2) When the vase is smashed, all the ceramic material that constitutes it remains in existence.

Therefore

3) The vase remains in existence after it is smashed.

"I don't owe you a penny!"

Adapted from Nicholas Rescher, Aporetics, U. of Pittsburgh Press, 2009, p. 91.

The above may serve as an introduction to the problem of the composition of material artifacts and to Peter van Inwagen's strange thesis that such items do not exist. See Van Inwagen's Denial of Artifacts.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Some 1940's Proto-Rock

Freddie Slack and Will Bradley Trio (1940), Down the Road A Piece.

If you like to boogie woogie, I know the place.
It's just an old piano and a knocked out bass.
The drummer man's a guy they call Eight Beat Mack.
And you remember Doc and old "Beat Me Daddy" Slack.

Man it's better than chicken fried in bacon grease
Come along with me, boys, it's just down the road a piece.

Ella Mae Morse (1945), The House of Blue Lights.  Shows that 'square' and 'daddy-o' and 'dig' were already in use in the '40s.  I had been laboring under the misapprehension that this patois first surfaced in Beat/Beatnik circles in the '50s.

The Meaning of 'Liberal' in South Africa

David Benatar, The Fall of the University of Capetown (Politicsweb Publishing, 2021, p. v, emphasis added):

Whereas in the United States it [the word 'liberal'] is often used as a term of opprobrium by those on the right to refer to those on the (or their!) left, in South Africa it is regularly used as a pejorative term by those on the far left in a way that connotes 'right-winger.' Real [classical] liberals are neither on the far right nor the far left of the political spectrum. They are liberals because they support (individual) liberty. This goes hand in hand with non-racialism, and tolerance of views one dislikes.  Liberalism also requires toleration of practices that are either harmless or which harm only those who consent to them. These liberal ideals tend to be antithetical  to those on the ends of the political spectrum. Indeed, both the right and the left have more in common with one another than either would like to admit. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish them.

I call my brand of conservatism American conservatism. I take it to include a sizable admixture of what Benatar calls real and what I call classical liberalism. American conservatism is neither a far right nor a far left position. As I envisage it, American conservatism rejects all of the following: integralism, and indeed any system that attempts to impose by state power a substantive conception of the good for man; alternative right race-based white nationalism; libertarianism with its overemphasis on the economic; all forms of socialism and leftism.

I have various posts that fill in some of the details. I'll find them later, perhaps.  It's Saturday night and time for a drink.  

Nietzsche, Salvation, and the Question of the Value of Life

Substack latest.

On Reverence

Substack latest.

What the Hell?

Just as Biden and his supporters are disasters for the USA, Bergoglio and his supporters are disasters for the RCC. 'Twould appear that all of the institutions of the West are in dire need of fumigation. See here:

But Pope Francis appears to have scotched that possibility. “No one can exclude themselves from the Church,” he insisted, “we are all saved sinners.” Even those, he adds, “who have denied the faith, who are apostates, who are the persecutors of the Church, who have denied their baptism.  

Yes, these too. All of them. The blasphemers, all of them. We are brothers. This is the communion of saints. The communion of saints holds together the community of believers on earth and in heaven…the saints, the sinners, all.

What are we to make of this? Surely, one asks, he cannot have meant to include unrepentant sinners in the Kingdom of Heaven? That those who deliberately take themselves to Hell, choosing an eternity of loss rather than the joys of Heaven, are nevertheless still members of the Communion of Saints? This is not Catholic doctrine, and no one, not even the Pope of Rome, can make it so by saying so.

Another Theological Conundrum: Hypostatic Union and the Contingency of the Incarnation

In the immediately preceding theological thread, Dr. Caiati reminded me of Fr. Thomas Joseph White's The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology (CUA Press, 2017). So I cracked open my copy and found some notes from October 2018, one batch of which I will now turn into a weblog entry.

'Hypostatic Union' ". . . refers to the divine person of the Word uniting a human nature to himself  in his own person." (113, emphasis in original) This is the familiar one person (hypostasis)- two natures doctrine.  The one person is the Word (Logos), the second person of the Trinity.  The union is called hypostatic because it is the union of two natures in one hypostasis. The two natures are divine nature and human nature. Both natures are to be understood as individualized, not as universals. They are natures of one and the same self-subsistent individual, the Word. There is no "confusion of natures," which is to say that the  two natures are really distinct, distinct in reality and not merely in our thought, though not separable in reality.  These two natures are nonetheless essentially together: neither can exist without the other.  It is not as if there is "merely an accidental association of two beings, the man Jesus and the Word of God." (113) There is only one being, the Word, which possesses two distinct but really inseparable natures.  Fr. White then concludes:

Consequently, Jesus's concrete body and soul are the subsistent body and soul of the person of the Word. The person of Jesus simply is the person of the Son [the Word or Logos or second person of the Trinity] existing as man.

I have two questions.

First, is human nature conjoined to the Word at every time? It would have to be given that the two natures are essentially, and not merely accidentally, united. The Word is essentially divine. So if the two natures are essentially united, then the Word is essentially human: it possesses essentially a human nature.  That implies that at no time is the Word not in possession of a human nature. Now the Incarnation is the acquisition by the Word of a human nature. The Incarnation is an event -- call it the Christ event -- that occurred at a particular time in a particular place.  Before that time, the Incarnation was at best prophesied.  A contradiction would seem to ensue:

1) The Word possesses human nature at every time;

2) It is not the case that the Word possesses human nature at every time.

How do we negotiate this aporetic dyad? More simply, how remove the contradiction? Can it be removed without adding 'epicycles' to the theory that raise problems of their own?

My second question is a modal counterpart of the first. The Incarnation is a contingent event. There was no necessity that it occur.   Had Adam not sinned there would have been no need for a Redeemer. Man would have continued blissfully in his paradisiacal, prelapsarian state. The soteriological significance of the Incarnation is that only by the Son's becoming man and suffering the ultimate penalty could man be restored to fellowship with God.  For the offense against God was so great that only God could expiate it. But if the divine and human natures are united essentially in one person, the Word, then, given that the Word is a necessary being, it follows that the Incarnation is a necessary event. A second contradiction seems to ensue:

3) The Word possesses human nature in every possible world;

4) It is not the case that the Word possesses human nature in every possible world.

(4) is true because there are worlds in which there is no Fall and thus no need for Incarnation. For those who don't understand Leibnizian 'possible worlds' jargon, the contradiction amounts  to saying both that the Word is and is not human necessarily. Bear in mind that if x has a property essentially, and x is a necessary being, then x has the property necessarily.

There is a third question the 'exfoliation' (unwrapping) of which I will save for later, namely, if the Word has a human soul in virtue of having human nature, how does that human soul integrate with the conscious and self-conscious life of the second divine person? A person is not merely an hypostasis or substratum, but one that is conscious and self-conscious.  A person is not an object but a subject or a subject-object. A number of further difficult questions spin off from here. Time to hit 'post.'

Neither Piety nor Polemic

Neither piety nor polemic belong in philosophy proper.

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

Commentary:

0) No proper aphorism is an aphorism if it explains itself  or gives reasons for its own truth. And yet a good aphorism is the tip of an iceberg of thought susceptible of commentary.

1) So when I, as a philosopher, speak of God, I never use the pious 'He' but only 'he.' Of course I hold no brief against piety as such. Indeed, our society is in steep decline in part because of a lack of piety, reverence, respect, and cognate virtues.  A sign of decline is the widespread use of 'irreverent' as a term of praise. The hard Left's erasure of collective historical memory via the destruction of monuments and memorials is premised on a dangerous lack of respect for our forebears and what they bequeathed to us and and has stood the test of time. 

2) Philosophy is a conversation among friends who seek the truth together and who love the truth more than they love one another. There is simply no place for the polemic of deeds or the polemic of words among friends. Amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas.  The Latin saying is often taken as a gloss on Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1096a10-20, where the Stagirite distances himself from the theory of Forms. But one finds the thought already in Plato's Republic at 595b-c and 607c.

3) That philosophy is a conversation among friends holds for political philosophy as well, since it too is philosophy and is not to be confused with politics. Whether or not Carl Schmitt is right that the essence of the political resides in the opposition Freund (friend) - Feind (enemy),  political action and discourse is almost always, even if only accidentally, polemical. It is a mistake to confuse politics with political philosophy.

4) I tend to alliterate. Is this a stylistic defect? I don't think so, but in matters literary as in matters of the palate, de gustibus non est disputandum. You have a right to your contrary opinion if contrary it is.

5) Philosophy proper is not to be confused with what passes for philosophy among the paid professors of the subject. To know what it is and what it is capable of you must not merely consult but work through the works of the great philosophers appropriating their mindset as you proceed. Ralph Waldo Emerson exaggerates with his "Plato is philosophy and philosophy Plato," but it is an exaggeration in the right direction.

Secular Arguments against Abortion

Substack latest.

A question rarely asked is the one I raise in this article:  

Is the abortion question tied to religion in such a way that opposition to abortion can be based only on religious premises?

Or are there good reasons to oppose abortion that are nor religiously based, reasons that secularists could accept?  The answer to the last question is plainly in the affirmative.  The following argument contains no religious premises.

1) Infanticide is morally wrong.
2) There is no morally relevant difference between (late-term) abortion and  infanticide.
Therefore
3) (Late-term) abortion is morally wrong.

Would it be Heaven for a Mother Whose Child is in Hell?

Vito Caiati raises an interesting theological question.

This week, I again read your post of 08/24/2019 On the Specificity of Traditional Catholic Claims, in which you question the certainty assumed by the Catholic doctrine of the [moral] immutability of the soul, and hence its fate, after death.  My interest in your thoughts on this matter arises from my pondering the question of the doctrine of immutability in relation to those of salvation, either immediate (Heaven) or eventual (Purgatory) or damnation (Hell) as these concern the loved ones of departed persons. Specifically, I am thinking, for example, of the deep love of a mother for her children. If it is the case that the soul of a loving mother finds, through the meritorious life that she has led, immediate salvation in Heaven after death, but that of her child, lacking in such virtue, ends up in Hell, is it rational to belief that the former soul is happy or at peace? In following up this question, I turned to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which has an entry on “Heaven and Hell in Christian Thought,” which, assuming the inclusive nature of love, “especially in the form of wishing the best for another” (Section 4.1), poses the question in the following way: “How could anyone remain happy knowing that a genuine loved one, however corrupted, is destined to be miserable forever”? (Section 5.2)  More generally, how is it just to allow souls to become embodied and to form loving relationships if such an end awaits so many of those who are loved?

One answer could be along the lines of what I say in Soteriology for Brutes? which ends as follows:

[Edward] Feser makes a good point, however, when he says that the Beatific Vision will so entrance those of us who get to enjoy it that we will give no thought to our sublunary animal companions. But this is consistent both with their survival and with their non-survival of their bodily deaths. Perhaps my cats will go to cat heaven where they will be compensated for their suffering here below, and I will be so swept up into the Visio Beata as to give them no thought at all, any more than I will give any thought to that Gibson ES 335 that I never should have sold.

One might speculate that the saintly loving mother who goes straight to heaven upon death will be so swept up in the ecstasy of the Beatific Vision as to give her children no thought at all.  All sublunary concerns will fall away in the presence of the infinite reality of the divine life.  She will no more think of her children than I will think of my cats after I have served my 'time' in purgatory.  Ed Feser, however, would not and could not give this answer given his strict Thomism. Thomas famously states that “The blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishments of the damned, in order that their bliss be more delightful for them.” So we get the curious and indeed horrifying result that the saintly loving mother who loved her child in time will experience schadenfreude at the child's unending torment in eternity.

Part of the problem here is that we quite naturally tend to waffle between two very different conceptions of the afterlife. I call them Life 2.0 and Beatific Vision.  I explore the difference in considerable detail in  Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision?

Thomas himself may be waffling. If the souls of the blessed in heaven are wholly absorbed in the infinitely rich and endlessly variegated, and thus not possibly boring, absolute life of the Supreme Reality, how could they continue to be distracted by finite concerns? How could they continue to care about other finite persons, whether in heaven, hell, purgatory, or on earth? How could the blessed take satisfaction in the torment of the damned? But insofar as we think of survival of bodily death as personal survival, as opposed to an absorption into the Absolute that effaces personal individuality, we will tend to think of finite persons as preserved in their individuality together with their sublunary interests. 

This sort of attitude which disallows a clean break with the finite and an ascent to the Absolute is reflected in the popular song from 1941,  I Remember You. The version I remember from my boyhood is Frank Ifield's 1962 effort which features the lines (written by Johnny Mercer):

When my life is through
And the angels ask me 
To recall the thrill of them all
Then I will tell them I remember you.

The singer goes on to remember two distant bells and stars that fell like the rain from the blue. So the singer in heaven, presumably in the divine presence, is thinking about bells, shooting stars, and a woman! Now a woman for a (heterosexual) man is the highest finite object, but still a rather paltry bit of finitude as compared to to the stupendous transcendent reality that is the Godhead.  The things of finitude and flesh are next-to-nothing in comparison, and one's ultimate felicity could not possibly be thought of as attainable by way of loving and being loved by a mere mortal.  One wants to love and be loved by eternal Love Itself.  This is the sort of attitude one finds in Aquinas and such first-rate expositors as Pierre Rousselot and Etienne Gilson. I quote Gilson in World + God = God? See also Again on 'God + World = God.'

The sort of heavenly retrospective on one's earthly tenure found in the sentimental old tune from the '40s can also be found in serious religious writers such as Kierkegaard and Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. See the latter's Halakhic Man, tr. Lawrence Kaplan, Jewish Publication Society, 1983, pp. 38-39:

When the righteous sit in the world to come, where there is neither eating nor drinking, with their crowns on their heads, and enjoy the radiance of the divine presence . . . they occupy themselves with the study of the Torah, which treats of bodily life in our lowly world.

[. . .]

The creator of worlds, revealed and unrevealed, the heavenly hosts, the souls of the righteous all grapple with halakhic problems that are bound up with the empirical world -- the red cow, the heifer whose neck is to be broken, leprosy, and similar issues. They do not concern themselves with transcendence, with questions that are above space and time, but with the problems of earthly life in all its details and particulars.

[. . .]

The universal homo religiosus proclaims: The lower yearns for the higher. But halakhic man, with his unique mode of understanding, declares: The higher longs and pines for the lower. 

Thus the waffling may be inevitable, even for the doctor angelicus, given the ineluctably discursive nature of finite mind.  We think in opposites and cannot do otherwise. So we think: either the individual soul is extinguished in the Godhead thereby losing its individuality -- which would make hash of the notion of personal immortality -- or individuality is retained together with finite concerns for other persons and things from one's sublunary tenure.  

Back to Vito's question. He asked how it could be rational to view the saintly mother in heaven as happy or at peace given the mother's loving concern for her child who she knows is in hell. The problem is exacerbated by the Aquinate asseveration, “The blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishments of the damned, in order that their bliss be more delightful for them.”  My suggested answer was that the blessed, wholly absorbed by the visio beata, will have lost all memory of the finite, including the persons they loved in the sublunary. The trouble with this suggestion is that it does not comport well with the orthodox view that individual souls are never wholly absorbed into the Godhead, but retain their individuality. But if so, the deepest sublunary loves could nor be wholly effaced or forgotten in the way the old man forgets the toys he fooled with as a young boy. So I have no good answer for Vito.

One again we see that the philosopher's forte is not the answering of questions but the questioning of answers. 

Envy

Given our manifold limitations, it is a wonder that anyone could feel envy for another. How petty and wretched you must be to feel diminished by a minor success of mine!

Between Time and Eternity

Tom O. asks,

How does one reconcile the temporal with the eternal, in a personal/spiritual or experiential manner? The political situation of our time strikes me as dire and incredibly important. Yet such things are transitory and will, ultimately, pass away, and so in another sense are not so important. I am torn between these two extremes on a daily basis. The latter is a source of hope and peace, the former a source of anxiety and unrest. Focusing more on one at the expense of the other seems to only intensify the problem, since doing that seems to downplay the importance of one of the extremes, when what I am after is a reconciliation of the two that does not dismiss or downplay either. But perhaps that goal itself is unattainable.

We are made for eternity, but we find ourselves in time. Both spheres are real and neither can be dismissed or pronounced unreal.  You and I agree on that.  You want a reconciliation of the two "that does not dismiss or downplay either" while suspecting that such a reconciliation is "unattainable."

Here I think lies the germ of an answer. One of the spheres needs to be "downplayed." For if there are these two spheres, they cannot be equally important. 

Why can't they be equally important?

Within time, we rightly value the relatively permanent over the relatively impermanent. We reckon him a fool who sacrifices a lifetime of satisfactions for a moment's pleasure.  John Belushi, for example, threw away his life and career for a ride on the 'Speedball Express.' Elliot Spitzer trashed his career and marriage to a beautiful  woman because he could not resist the siren songs of the high-class hookers. And then there is David Carradine who died of auto-erotic asphyxiation in Bangkok. Examples are easily multiplied beyond necessity. 

Infinitely more foolish is one who sacrifices an eternity of bliss for a lifetime of legitimate mundane satisfactions.  One who believes that both spheres are real, and thinks the matter through, ought to understand that the temporal is inferior to the eternal in point of importance.  That there are these two spheres is a matter of reasoned faith, not of knowledge.  (It is 'metaphysical bluster' to claim to have certain knowledge in this area. One cannot prove God, the soul, or man's eternal destiny. Or so say I; plenty of dogmatists will disagree.)

I therefore make the following suggestion in alleviation of my reader's existential problem. Devote the majority of your time and energy to the quest for the Absolute, but without ignoring the temporal. The quietist must needs be a bit of an activist in a world in which his spiritual life and quest is endangered by the evildoers in the realm of time and change.  

For spiritual health a daily partial withdrawal from society is advisable.  It needn't be physical: one can be in the world but not of it. 

A partial withdrawal can take the form of a holding free of the early morning hours from any contamination by media dreck.  Thus no reading of newspapers, no checking of e-mail, no electronics of any sort.  Electricity is fine: you don't have to sit in the dark or burn candles.  No talking or other socializing. Instead: prayer, meditation, spiritual and philosophical reading and writing, in silence, and alone.

So for a few pre-dawn hours each day you are a part-time monk.

St. Valentine's Day at the Oldies: Love and Murder

We'll start with murder.  David Dalton (Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, Hyperion 2012, pp. 28-29, hyperlinks added!):

Most folk songs had grim, murderous content (and subtext). In Pretty Polly a man lures a young girl from her home with the promise of marriage,and then leads the pregnant girl to an already-dug grave and murders her.  In Love Henry, a woman poisons her unfaithful lover, observed by an alarmed parrot that she also tries to kill. So it was a bit bizarre that these songs should become part of the sweetened, homogenized new pop music.

[. . .]

The original folk songs were potent, possessed stuff, but the folk trios had figured out how to make this grisly stuff palatable, which only proved that practically anything could be homogenized. Clean-cut guys and girls in crinolines, dressed as if for prom night, sang ancient curse-and-doom tales.  Their songs had sweet little melodies, but as in nursery rhymes, there was a dark gothic undercurrent to them -- like Ring Around the Rosies, which happens to be a charming little plague song.

The most famous of these folk songs was the 1958 hit Tom Dooley, a track off a Kingston Trio album which set off the second folk revival [the first was in the early '40s with groups like the Weavers] and was Dylan's initial inspiration for getting involved in folk music.  [I prefer Doc Watson's version.] And it was the very success of the syrupy folk trios that inspired Dylan's future manager to assemble one himself: Peter, Paul and Mary.  They would make Dylan, the prophet of the folk protest movement, a star and lead to consequences that even he did not foresee.  Their version of Blowin' in the Wind would become so successful that it would sound the death knell for the folk protest movement.  Ultimately there would be more than sixty versions of it, "all performing the same function," as Michael Gray says, of "anesthetizing Dylan's message."

Be that as it may, it is a great song, one of the anthems of the Civil Rights movement.  Its power in no small measure is due to the allusiveness of its lyrics which deliver the protest message without tying it to particular events.  It's topical without being topical and marks a difference between Dylan, and say, Phil Ochs.

And now for some love songs.

Gloria Lynne, I Wish You Love.  A great version from 1964.  Lynne died at 83 in 2013.  Here's what Marlene Dietrich does with it.

Ketty Lester, Love Letters.  Another great old tune in a 1962 version.  The best to my taste.

Three for my wife.  An old Sam Cooke number, a lovely Shirelles tune, and my favorite from the Seekers.

Addenda:

1. Keith Burgess-Jackson quotes Jamie Glazov on the hatred of Islamists and leftists for St. Valentine's Day.  Another very interesting similarity between these two totalitarian movements.  Recalling past inamorata while listening to sentimental songs  -- is this not the height of bourgeois self-indulgence when you should be plotting ways to blow up the infidel or bring down capitalism?  But we who defend the private life against totalitarian scum must be careful not to retreat too far into the private life.  A certain amount of activism and engagement is necessary to keep the totalitarians in check.

2. On Thomas Merton: “All the love and all the death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez’s ‘Silver Dagger,’” the man wrote to his lady love in 1966. “I can’t get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself — and yourself for me, in a way.”

Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother
She's sleeping here right by my side
And in her right hand a silver dagger,
She says that I can't be your bride.

All men are false, says my mother,
They'll tell you wicked, lovin' lies.
The very next evening, they'll court another,
Leave you alone to pine and sigh.

My daddy is a handsome devil
He's got a chain five miles long,
And on every link a heart does dangle
Of another maid he's loved and wronged.

Go court another tender maiden,
And hope that she will be your wife,
For I've been warned, and I've decided
To sleep alone all of my life.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia

First off, a big 10-4 to the Canadian truckers and their American confreres. The purpose of government is to serve the governed, not oppress them and violate their rights. Political legitimacy derives from the consent of the governed. Pseudo-cons such as George F. Will and his ilk yap and scribble about this concept, but that is as far as it goes for them. The truckers have taken action and put their careers on the line in defense of the rights that the totalitarians are bent on violating.

Eddy Rabbit, Drivin' My Life Away

Dave Dudley, Six Days on the Road

Buck Owens, Truck Drivin' Man

Red Sovine, Phantom 309. Tom Waits' cover. 

Lynyrd Skynyrd, Truck Drivin' Man

Bob Dylan, Rollin' and Tumblin'

Johnny Rivers, Summer Rain

A Sane Populism is not an Anti-Intellectualism

Here is a statement that is not only extreme but also manifestly false:

In fact, you could wipe society’s table clear of every writer, artist, actor, musician, professor, dancer, reporter, tastemaker, producer, influencer, teacher, lobbyist, politician, everyone on TV, everyone who doesn’t get their hands dirty, and our world would keep turning just fine. 

If there were no trucks, there would be no truckers. If there were no automotive technology, there would be no trucks. If there were no engineering (applied physical science), there would be no automotive technology.  If there were no theoretical physics, there would be no applied science. If there were no pure mathematics, there would be no theoretical physics (in the technologically implemental, post-Galilean sense of the term).  If there were no people who never got their hands dirty, there would be no pure mathematics. And there would be none of this if there were no philosophers.

It all began with philosophy, the attempt to know man and world by the use of reason applied to the data of experience.  If there were no philosophers, we would still be retailing cosmogonic myths.

And if there were no philosophers like me, there would be no one to explain all of this to you, something I have just done, in an admittedly inadequate bloggity-blog sort of way, without getting my hands dirty.

That being said, I fully support the peaceful and eminently democratic  protests of the Canadian truckers and their American confreres.

And I heartily condemn the anti-democratic fascists of the Left, both here and to the North, who use the power of the State to suppress individual liberty, and then engage in the Orwellian subversion  of language to cover their tracks and gaslight the citizenry.

For example, the foolish Justin Trudeau, prime minister of Canada, claims that the trucker protests are racist. But what does race have to do with them? Nothing. When he's done misusing 'racist,' he will go on to misuse 'domestic terrorist' and 'insurrectionist.'   What sort of person is terrorized by the blaring of horns? What does terrorism and insurrection have to do with these legitimate and eminently democratic peaceful protests? Nothing.

And isn't Trudeau famous for his asseveration that "Diversity is our strength"?  One who dissents from fascist clamp-down is holding a view diverse from that of the fascists.

Cigarettes, Rationality, and Hitchens

Substack latest:

Let's talk about cigarettes. Suppose you smoke one pack per day. Is that irrational? I hope all will agree that no one who is concerned to be optimally healthy as long as possible should smoke 20 cigarettes a day, let alone 80 like Rod Serling who died at age 50 on the operating table. But long-term health is only one value among many. Would the creator of the celebrated Twilight Zone series (1959-1964) have been as productive without the weed? Maybe not.

 

Death as the Muse of Morality Limits our Immorality

Substack latest.

Three Theisms: Ontic, Alterity, and Onto-Theological and their Liabilities

There is a problem that has occupied me on and off for years. One way into the problem is via the following aporetic triad:

1. There are things other than God that exist, and they all depend on God for their existence.

2.  For any x, y,  if x depends for its existence on y, and x exists, then y exists. (This implies that nothing can depend on God for its existence unless God exists.)

3. God is not one of the many things that exist, and so God does not exist.

It is easy to see that the limbs of the triad cannot all be true. And yet each has some plausibility, at least 'in-house,' i.e., among theists.

(1) or something like it will be accepted by both ontic theists and alterity theists, assuming that they are not pantheists. Roughly, an ontic theist is a theist who maintains that God is a being among beings, an ens among entia, while an alterity theist is one who maintains that God is radically transcendent, radically other, to such an extent that he cannot be identified with any being.

(2) won't be accepted by the alterity theists, but it is to my mind exceedingly plausible! If everything other than God depends on God for its existence, then God must in some mode or manner exist; otherwise he would be nothing at all. And on nothing nothing can depend.

(3) won't be accepted by the ontic theist, but alterity theists find it plausible. If God is other than every being, then he is no being. If to be is to exist, then God does not exist.

Since the limbs cannot all be true, one of them must be rejected.  I am assuming, of course, that there cannot be true contradictions.  There are therefore three main ways of solving the problem.

A. The quickest solution, call it Blanket Atheism, is by rejecting (1).  There is no God in any sense of the term.  No being is God, and there is no God 'beyond being.'   There is just the natural world (and perhaps abstracta) but nature is not God, and so God does not exist. Reality is exhausted by space-time, its occupants, and (perhaps) the Platonic menagerie.  To put it another way, concrete reality is exhausted by space-time and its occupants.

B.  The alterity theist rejects (2) while accepting (3).

C.  The ontic theist accepts (2) while rejecting (3).

But there are two other C-options, two other options involving the acceptance of (2) and the rejection of (3).

One could take a monistic tack, roughly along the lines of Spinoza.  Accordingly, (i) there is a sense in which God exists -- God is not natura naturata, but natura naturans -- ; (ii) God exists in the primary sense of 'exists'; (iii) God alone exists, hence is not one of many existents, and so does not exist in the sense in which Spinozistic modes exist.

This is what I used to think, back in the '80s.  See my "Two Faces of Theism," Idealistic Studies, vol. xx, no. 3 (September 1990), pp. 238-257.  But I moved away from this position in the '90s and took an onto-theological turn that found expression in my existence book.

That is the other C-option.  Accordingly, God is not an existent among existents as the ontic theist maintains.  Nor is God somehow real but nonexistent as the alterity theist maintains.  Nor is God the one and only existent as the monist maintains.  Rather, God is self-existent Existence, yet transcendent of the created realm, pace monism.  This is roughly akin to the position of Aquinas.  Deus est ipsum esse subsistens.  God is not a being (ens), but self-subsisting  Being (esse). So God is Being (esse) but God also is.  God is both esse and ens.  Gott ist beides: Sein und Seiendes. Thus there is no 'ontological difference' (Heidegger) in God. God is Being but also the prime 'case' -- not instance! -- of Being.  (Being has no instances.) But God is in a mode of Being unlike the mode of Being of anything else. So God is not a being among beings, nor does he have properties in the way Socrates has properties. I have gone over this in painful detail in many other entries.

If we take the Thomistic tack, we can navigate between the Scylla of ontic theism and the Charybdis of alterity theism. We can avoid the untenable extremes. God is not a being among beings, but God is also not nothing as he would have to be if he were wholly other than every being.

But this too has its difficulties.  I will mention one. How could anything both be and be identical to Being? How could anything be both ens and esse? How could Existence itself exist? This is unintelligible to intellects of our constitution, discursive  intellects. So now I am contemplating the final step: Into the Mystic.

The above triad strikse me as an aporia, an insolubilium.  The 'solutions' to it are mere stopgaps that generate problems of their own as bad as or worse than the original problem. For example, if you 'solve' the triad by embracing Blanket Atheism, then you face all the problems attending naturalism, problems we have rehearsed many times. The original problem looks to be absolutely insoluble. One has to blast through it, as through a koan, into the Transdiscursive.  The philosopher, however, hovers at the boundary of the Sayable, marking it without overstepping it, incapable qua philosopher of effing the Ineffable, but able -- and this is his office --  to point to it while refuting both denials of it and bad theories about it.

Comments on President Trump's SOTU #3

From my Facebook page, 5 February 2020.  Joe Biden is a disaster except for one thing: he is making DJT look very good indeed.

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

 

Donald J. Trump did a great job with his third State of the Union address last night. (4 February 2020) He took the high ground and demonstrated that he can rise to the occasion when necessary. He made no mention of his impeachment by the House or his expected acquittal by the Senate which will be fait accompli by the end of today. There was also no mention of the Democrats, their witch hunts, or their obstructionism. He cleaved to the positive the whole time, listing his many accomplishments, both domestic and foreign. Promises made; promises kept; Nancy [Pelosi] wept. Or rather grimaced.

 

45 sounded all the right notes on the rule of law, sanctuary jurisdictions, illegal immigration, socialism, abortion, religious liberty, and Second Amendment rights. He said the things that need saying, the very things that Milquetoast Mitt [Romney] and the rest of the go-along-to-get-along Republican pseudo-cons are afraid to say. He offended all the right people, including Speaker Pelosi behind him and, to his right, the pouting and sullen girly-girl House Democrats all in white as they were last year, putting their female tribalism on display.

 

The Orange Man continued in the tradition inaugurated by the great Ronald Reagan in 1982 by honoring ordinary citizens. (Do you remember Lenny Skutnick, who plunged into the icy Potomac to rescue an Air Florida flight victim, and was honored in 1982 by Reagan?)

 

But the high point of the accolades was President Trump's bestowal of the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Rush Limbaugh who was recently diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. Limbaugh is the prime mover behind conservative talk radio which intellectually obtuse and morally defective 'liberals' insist on calling 'hate radio' thereby demonstrating their failure to grasp the distinction between hate and dissent and the important role dissent plays in a healthy republic.

 

This blogger enjoyed the 70 or so minute speech immensely. His enjoyment was marred only by his having to look at Nancy Pelosi making faces, chewing her dentures, and looking like the dingbat she is.

 

And did you notice how, at the end of the speech, Pelosi tore her copy of the speech transcript in half in front of the whole country? What a nasty, passive-aggressive joke she is! She will end her career on a very sad note. And it will be quite a moral struggle for this blogger to contain his schadenfreude.

The No True Scotsman or No True Muslim Fallacy

Substack latest.

In logic a fallacy is not a false belief but a pattern of reasoning that is both typical and in some way specious. Specious reasoning, by the very etymology of the term, appears correct but is not. Thus a logical fallacy is not just any old mistake in reasoning, but a typical or recurrent mistake that has some tendency to seduce or mislead our thinking. A taxonomy of fallacies is useful insofar as it helps prevent one from seducing oneself or being seduced by others.

By the way, the study of logic won't get you very far, but it is fun and of some use, especially at a time when shockingly mendacious and dimwitted people have taken over the government of the greatest nation on Earth.  Examples are legion from the top down. You know their names.

Truthmaker Maximalism Questioned

 0) What David Armstrong calls truthmaker maximalism is the thesis that every truth has a truthmaker.  Although I find the basic truthmaker intuition well-nigh irresistible, I have difficulty with the notion that every truth has a truthmaker.  Thus I question truthmaker maximalism (TM). Alan Rhoda has recently come out in favor of TM in a penetrating weblog entry. After sketching my position, I will try to pinpoint my disagreement with  Rhoda.

1) Compare *Peter is tired* and *Every cygnet is a swan.*  I will argue that truths  like the first need truthmakers while truths like the second do not.  A declarative sentence enclosed in asterisks names the primary truthbearer expressed by the sentence when assertively uttered or, more generally, assertively tokened.  A truthbearer is anything appropriately characterizable as either true or false when 'true' and 'false' are used in their sentential as opposed to their ontic senses. ('True friend' and 'false teeth' feature ontic senses of 'true' and 'false'.) Candidate truthbearers include assertively tokened sentences in the indicative mood, statements, asseverations, judgments, Fregean Gedanken, Bolzanian Saetze an sich and more. By definition, a truth is a true truthbearer, whatever  truthbearers are taken to be.) 

2) Intuitively, *Peter is tired,* being contingently true, both due to its dependence on the existence of Peter, and on Peter's accidentally possessing the property of being tired, is in need of something external to it that 'makes' it true or determines it to be true, or serves as the ontological ground of its truth.  (An ontological ground is not the same as an empirical cause.) *Peter is tired* can't just be true. This is because its truth-value depends on the way the world is. It needs a truthmaker external to it. By 'external to it,' I don't just mean that the truthmaker of a truth must be distinct from it:  this condition is satisfied by a distinct proposition (or other type of truthbearer) that entails *Peter is tired.* Entailment, however, is not truthmaking: entailment connects propositions to propositions; truthmaking connects extra-propositional entities (states of affairs for Armstrong) to propositions. What I mean when I say that a contingent truth needs something external to it to 'make' it true is that the truthmaker must be both distinct from the truthbearer and not, like the truthbearer, a 'representational entity' where the latter term covers such items as assertively uttered sentences, judgments, Fregean thoughts/propositions (the senses of context-free sentences in the indicative mood), and whatever else counts as a truthbearer.  In other words, a truthmaker of a contingent atomic truth such as *Peter is tired* must be outside the sphere of representations: it must be extralinguistic, extramental, and extra-propositional.  Thus the truthmakers of propositions like *Peter is tired* cannot belong to the category of propositions.  The ontological ground of  a contingent proposition's being true cannot be an entity within the sphere of propositions.  

3)  The truthmaker of *Peter is tired* cannot be a proposition; but it also cannot be utterly unlike a proposition.  Consider Peter himself, that very concrete individual.  It is clear that he could not be the truthmaker of *Peter is tired.*  Granted, if Peter were not to exist, then the proposition in question could not be true.  There are no truths about what does not exist. But although Peter or Peter's existence is a necessary condition of the truth of  every true proposition about him, that very individual, it is not the case that Peter or Peter's existence is a sufficient condition of the truth of contingent propositions about him if these propositions are predications such as *Peter is tired.*   (I am open to the suggestion that Peter himself suffices for the truth of *Peter exists.*) That Peter by himself cannot be the truthmaker of contingent predications about him can be proven or at least argued as follows. 

Argument from Necessitation.  Assume for reductio that Peter by himself can serve as truthmaker of contingent predications about him. Now, by truthmaker necessitarianism, whatever truthmakers are, they broadly logically  necessitate the truth of their corresponding truthbearers.  So if X is the truthmaker of *Peter is tired at t,* then there is no possible world in which X exists and *Peter is tired at t* is not true.  But there are plenty of worlds in which Peter exists but *Peter is tired at t* is not true.  So Peter by himself cannot be the truthmaker of *Peter is tired at t.*

Argument from Selection.  Consider any two true affirmative atomic contingent monadic propositions about Peter such as *Peter is tired at t* and *Peter is hungry at t.*  If Peter by himself can serve as the truthmaker of one, then he can serve as the truthmaker of the other.  But they obviously require numerically different truthmakers.  So Peter is the truthmaker of neither of them.  Although different truths can have the same truthmaker, this is not the case when both truths are atomic, even if both are about the same individual.  The truthmakers of such atomic propositions as that Peter is a philosopher and that Peter is a violinist must be distinct and they must match up with, or select, their truthbearers.  To do this, the truthmakers must have an internal structure isomorphic to the structure of the truthbearers.  In other words, the truthmakers must be proposition-like despite their not being propositions.  Extra-propositional but proposition-like!  What may look like a 'bug' is a 'feature' of truthmaker theory. It follows that Peter by himself cannot be the truthmaker of atomic contingent propositions about him.

4)  If Peter by himself cannot serve as truthmaker of the accidental predication  *Peter is F,* then neither can F-ness by itself.  The same goes for the set {Peter, F-ness}, the mereological sum (Peter + F-ness) and the ordered pair [Peter, F-ness].  For what is needed in addition to Peter and F-ness is a link in the truthmaker that corresponds to the copulative link in the proposition.  After all, not every possible world in which both Peter and F-ness exists is a world in which Peter is F.  There could be a world in which Peter exists and F-ness exists (by being instantiated by Paul) but in which Peter does not instantiate F-ness.  I am assuming that F-ness is a universal, but not that F-ness is a transcendent universal (one that can exist uninstantiated).  This is why concrete states of affairs are plausible candidates for the office of truthmaker, as in middle-period Armstrong.

5)  But even if one balks at the admission of concrete states of affairs or facts, one will have to admit that Peter himself -- assuming that this concrete individual is not assayed as a state of affair but as an individual -- cannot be the truthmaker of contingent propositions of the form *Peter is F.*  Some will say that tropes can serve as truthmakers.  Fine, but they too have a proposition-like structure.  If the trope Peter's-tiredness-at-t is the truthmaker of *Peter is tired at t,* then it is made true by an entity that has a proposition-like structure, a structure isomorphic to, and mirroring, the structure of the truthbearer.

6)  It seems to me that I have just definitively established that the truthmakers of accidental atomic predications like 'Peter is a philosopher' cannot be concrete individuals lacking a proposition-like structure.  I have also made it clear that we should not confuse the principle that there are no truths about nonexistent objects with the truthmaker principle.  We can call the first principle veritas sequitur esse (truth follows being).  What it says is that a truth cannot be true unless there are one or more items it is about.  Thus VSE requires that if Milo kicked Philo, this is true only if both Milo and Philo exist or have some mode of being other than existence. The truthmaker principle (TMP) goes beyond this in requiring the instantiation of the dyadic relation ---kicks___ by Milo and Philo, in that order.

7)  Consider now the analytic proposition *Every cygnet is a swan.*  As analytic, it is true solely in virtue of the meanings of 'cygnet' and 'swan.'  It is true ex vi terminorum.  Its truth is not contingent on the existence of any cygnets. Why does it need a truthmaker? It certainly does not need anything external to it to make it true. The concept cygnet includes the concept swan, so that, by sheer analysis of the subject concept, one can arrive at the truth in question.  That's why we call it, following Kant,  'analytic.'  Clearly, nothing external to an analytic proposition is required to make it true.  It follows that it cannot have a truthmaker.  Or rather it follows if  a truthmaker of a first-order truthbearer is an entity that is external to the truthbearer and resident in the realm of reality beyond the sphere of representations broadly construed.

Does this not decisively refute truthmaker maximalism?  There are plenty of analytic truths, but none of them has or can have a truthmaker.  For if you say that an analytic truth needs a truthmaker, then you are saying that it needs something external to it to 'synthesize,' to bring together, subject and predicate concepts. But analytic truths are precisely not synthetic in that (Kantian) sense.  But I hear an objection coming.

8) "*Every cygnet is a swan* does have a truthmaker, namely, the fact that cygnet includes swan."  This is a confused response.  There would not be a analytic truthbearer at all if cygnet did not include swan.  The very existence of the proposition *Every cygnet is a swan* requires that the first concept include the second.  So there is no need of an ontological ground of the truth of this proposition. One could of course say that in the analytic case the truthbearer is its own truthmaker.  But it is better to say that in the analytic case there cannot be a truthmaker as 'truthmaker' was defined in #2 above. 

9) Here is where Alan Rhoda will disagree:

Some philosophers say that truthmaking is asymmetric rather than anti-symmetric, but that is a mistake. Asymmetry disallows the possibility of self-grounding truthbearers. Anti-symmetry allows for that possibility. And this is something we should allow, because conceptually necessary propositions (e.g., all triangles have three sides) are their own truthmakers. If the proposition exists—whether it exists [as] a Platonic object, an idea in God’s mind, or something else—its very existence supplies a parcel of reality sufficient to explain and ground its own truth.

10) For me, truthmaking is an asymmetric relation whereas for Alan it is an antisymmetric relation. Thus I am maintaining that, for any x, y, if x makes-true y, then it is not the case that y makes-true x.  This implies that no truthbearer is its own truthmaker or truth-ground. It implies that in no case is the truthmaker of a truth (a true truthbearer) that very truth. It implies that the truthmaker of a truth is in every case 'external' to that truth in the manner explained above.

Now a relation R is said to be antisymmetric just in case: for any x, y, if x stands in R to to y, and y stands in R to x, then x = y.  The antisymmetry of 'makes-true' allows for cases in which a proposition (or other truthbearer) is its own truthmaker. Thus Every cygnet is a swan is its truthbearer that is its own truthmaker.  This is Alan's position.

11) Here is a consideration in favor of my position. Truthmakers play an explanatory role. Now explanation is asymmetric: if x explains y, then it is not the case that y explains x.  This holds for causal explanation, but also for metaphysical explanation or metaphysical grounding.  It is the existence of Milo that metaphysically grounds the truth of Milo exists. And not the other way around. No one -- I hope! -- will say that that the truth of  Philo's belief that Milo exists is what makes it the case that Milo exists or that Shlomo's sincere assertive utterance of 'Milo is sleeping' is what makes it the case that Milo is sleeping.

Now if truthmakers play an explanatory role, and metaphysical explanation is asymmetric, then no truthbearer is its own truthmaker.  So in the case of analytic or conceptually necessary truths, we should say that they do not have and do not need truthmakers.  To maintain this is to reject truthmaker maximalism.

It is worth noting that my position is consistent with saying that  a truthbearer (whether a Platonic proposition, a divine thought, whatever) can serve as a truthmaker for a different truthbearer.  The Platonic proposition expressed by '7 is prime,' for example, makes-true the general Platonic proposition that there are Platonic propositions.

Your move, Alan.

 0) What David Armstrong calls truthmaker maximalism is the thesis that every truth has a truthmaker.  Although I find the basic truthmaker intuition well-nigh irresistible, I have difficulty with the notion that every truth has a truthmaker.  Thus I question truthmaker maximalism (TM). Alan Rhoda has recently come out in favor of TM in a penetrating weblog entry. After sketching my position, I will try to pinpoint my disagreement with  Rhoda.

1) Compare *Peter is tired* and *Every cygnet is a swan.*  I will argue that truths  like the first need truthmakers while truths like the second do not.  A declarative sentence enclosed in asterisks names the primary truthbearer expressed by the sentence when assertively uttered or, more generally, assertively tokened.  A truthbearer is anything appropriately characterizable as either true or false when 'true' and 'false' are used in their sentential as opposed to their ontic senses. ('True friend' and 'false teeth' feature ontic senses of 'true' and 'false'.) Candidate truthbearers include assertively tokened sentences in the indicative mood, statements, asseverations, judgments, Fregean Gedanken, Bolzanian Saetze an sich and more. By definition, a truth is a true truthbearer, whatever  truthbearers are taken to be.) 

2) Intuitively, *Peter is tired,* being contingently true, both due to its dependence on the existence of Peter, and on Peter's accidentally possessing the property of being tired, is in need of something external to it that 'makes' it true or determines it to be true, or serves as the ontological ground of its truth.  (An ontological ground is not the same as an empirical cause.) *Peter is tired* can't just be true. This is because its truth-value depends on the way the world is. It needs a truthmaker external to it. By 'external to it,' I don't just mean that the truthmaker of a truth must be distinct from it:  this condition is satisfied by a distinct proposition (or other type of truthbearer) that entails *Peter is tired.* Entailment, however, is not truthmaking: entailment connects propositions to propositions; truthmaking connects extra-propositional entities (states of affairs for Armstrong) to propositions. What I mean when I say that a contingent truth needs something external to it to 'make' it true is that the truthmaker must be both distinct from the truthbearer and not, like the truthbearer, a 'representational entity' where the latter term covers such items as assertively uttered sentences, judgments, Fregean thoughts/propositions (the senses of context-free sentences in the indicative mood), and whatever else counts as a truthbearer.  In other words, a truthmaker of a contingent atomic truth such as *Peter is tired* must be outside the sphere of representations: it must be extralinguistic, extramental, and extra-propositional.  Thus the truthmakers of propositions like *Peter is tired* cannot belong to the category of propositions.  The ontological ground of  a contingent proposition's being true cannot be an entity within the sphere of propositions.  

3)  The truthmaker of *Peter is tired* cannot be a proposition; but it also cannot be utterly unlike a proposition.  Consider Peter himself, that very concrete individual.  It is clear that he could not be the truthmaker of *Peter is tired.*  Granted, if Peter were not to exist, then the proposition in question could not be true.  There are no truths about what does not exist. But although Peter or Peter's existence is a necessary condition of the truth of  every true proposition about him, that very individual, it is not the case that Peter or Peter's existence is a sufficient condition of the truth of contingent propositions about him if these propositions are predications such as *Peter is tired.*   (I am open to the suggestion that Peter himself suffices for the truth of *Peter exists.*) That Peter by himself cannot be the truthmaker of contingent predications about him can be proven or at least argued as follows. 

Argument from Necessitation.  Assume for reductio that Peter by himself can serve as truthmaker of contingent predications about him. Now, by truthmaker necessitarianism, whatever truthmakers are, they broadly logically  necessitate the truth of their corresponding truthbearers.  So if X is the truthmaker of *Peter is tired at t,* then there is no possible world in which X exists and *Peter is tired at t* is not true.  But there are plenty of worlds in which Peter exists but *Peter is tired at t* is not true.  So Peter by himself cannot be the truthmaker of *Peter is tired at t.*

Argument from Selection.  Consider any two true affirmative atomic contingent monadic propositions about Peter such as *Peter is tired at t* and *Peter is hungry at t.*  If Peter by himself can serve as the truthmaker of one, then he can serve as the truthmaker of the other.  But they obviously require numerically different truthmakers.  So Peter is the truthmaker of neither of them.  Although different truths can have the same truthmaker, this is not the case when both truths are atomic, even if both are about the same individual.  The truthmakers of such atomic propositions as that Peter is a philosopher and that Peter is a violinist must be distinct and they must match up with, or select, their truthbearers.  To do this, the truthmakers must have an internal structure isomorphic to the structure of the truthbearers.  In other words, the truthmakers must be proposition-like despite their not being propositions.  Extra-propositional but proposition-like!  What may look like a 'bug' is a 'feature' of truthmaker theory. It follows that Peter by himself cannot be the truthmaker of atomic contingent propositions about him.

4)  If Peter by himself cannot serve as truthmaker of the accidental predication  *Peter is F,* then neither can F-ness by itself.  The same goes for the set {Peter, F-ness}, the mereological sum (Peter + F-ness) and the ordered pair [Peter, F-ness].  For what is needed in addition to Peter and F-ness is a link in the truthmaker that corresponds to the copulative link in the proposition.  After all, not every possible world in which both Peter and F-ness exists is a world in which Peter is F.  There could be a world in which Peter exists and F-ness exists (by being instantiated by Paul) but in which Peter does not instantiate F-ness.  I am assuming that F-ness is a universal, but not that F-ness is a transcendent universal (one that can exist uninstantiated).  This is why concrete states of affairs are plausible candidates for the office of truthmaker, as in middle-period Armstrong.

5)  But even if one balks at the admission of concrete states of affairs or facts, one will have to admit that Peter himself -- assuming that this concrete individual is not assayed as a state of affair but as an individual -- cannot be the truthmaker of contingent propositions of the form *Peter is F.*  Some will say that tropes can serve as truthmakers.  Fine, but they too have a proposition-like structure.  If the trope Peter's-tiredness-at-t is the truthmaker of *Peter is tired at t,* then it is made true by an entity that has a proposition-like structure, a structure isomorphic to, and mirroring, the structure of the truthbearer.

6)  It seems to me that I have just definitively established that the truthmakers of accidental atomic predications like 'Peter is a philosopher' cannot be concrete individuals lacking a proposition-like structure.  I have also made it clear that we should not confuse the principle that there are no truths about nonexistent objects with the truthmaker principle.  We can call the first principle veritas sequitur esse (truth follows being).  What it says is that a truth cannot be true unless there are one or more items it is about.  Thus VSE requires that if Milo kicked Philo, this is true only if both Milo and Philo exist or have some mode of being other than existence. The truthmaker principle (TMP) goes beyond this in requiring the instantiation of the dyadic relation ---kicks___ by Milo and Philo, in that order.

7)  Consider now the analytic proposition *Every cygnet is a swan.*  As analytic, it is true solely in virtue of the meanings of 'cygnet' and 'swan.'  It is true ex vi terminorum.  Its truth is not contingent on the existence of any cygnets. Why does it need a truthmaker? It certainly does not need anything external to it to make it true. The concept cygnet includes the concept swan, so that, by sheer analysis of the subject concept, one can arrive at the truth in question.  That's why we call it, following Kant,  'analytic.'  Clearly, nothing external to an analytic proposition is required to make it true.  It follows that it cannot have a truthmaker.  Or rather it follows if  a truthmaker of a first-order truthbearer is an entity that is external to the truthbearer and resident in the realm of reality beyond the sphere of representations broadly construed.

Does this not decisively refute truthmaker maximalism?  There are plenty of analytic truths, but none of them has or can have a truthmaker.  For if you say that an analytic truth needs a truthmaker, then you are saying that it needs something external to it to 'synthesize,' to bring together, subject and predicate concepts. But analytic truths are precisely not synthetic in that (Kantian) sense.  But I hear an objection coming.

8) "*Every cygnet is a swan* does have a truthmaker, namely, the fact that cygnet includes swan."  This is a confused response.  There would not be a analytic truthbearer at all if cygnet did not include swan.  The very existence of the proposition *Every cygnet is a swan* requires that the first concept include the second.  So there is no need of an ontological ground of the truth of this proposition. One could of course say that in the analytic case the truthbearer is its own truthmaker.  But it is better to say that in the analytic case there cannot be a truthmaker as 'truthmaker' was defined in #2 above. 

9) Here is where Alan Rhoda will disagree:

Some philosophers say that truthmaking is asymmetric rather than anti-symmetric, but that is a mistake. Asymmetry disallows the possibility of self-grounding truthbearers. Anti-symmetry allows for that possibility. And this is something we should allow, because conceptually necessary propositions (e.g., all triangles have three sides) are their own truthmakers. If the proposition exists—whether it exists [as] a Platonic object, an idea in God’s mind, or something else—its very existence supplies a parcel of reality sufficient to explain and ground its own truth.

10) For me, truthmaking is an asymmetric relation whereas for Alan it is an antisymmetric relation. Thus I am maintaining that, for any x, y, if x makes-true y, then it is not the case that y makes-true x.  This implies that no truthbearer is its own truthmaker or truth-ground. It implies that in no case is the truthmaker of a truth (a true truthbearer) that very truth. It implies that the truthmaker of a truth is in every case 'external' to that truth in the manner explained above.

Now a relation R is said to be antisymmetric just in case: for any x, y, if x stands in R to to y, and y stands in R to x, then x = y.  The antisymmetry of 'makes-true' allows for cases in which a proposition (or other truthbearer) is its own truthmaker. Thus Every cygnet is a swan is its truthbearer that is its own truthmaker.  This is Alan's position.

11) Here is a consideration in favor of my position. Truthmakers play an explanatory role. Now explanation is asymmetric: if x explains y, then it is not the case that y explains x.  This holds for causal explanation, but also for metaphysical explanation or metaphysical grounding.  It is the existence of Milo that metaphysically grounds the truth of Milo exists. And not the other way around. No one -- I hope! -- will say that that the truth of  Philo's belief that Milo exists is what makes it the case that Milo exists or that Shlomo's sincere assertive utterance of 'Milo is sleeping' is what makes it the case that Milo is sleeping.

Now if truthmakers play an explanatory role, and metaphysical explanation is asymmetric, then no truthbearer is its own truthmaker.  So in the case of analytic or conceptually necessary truths, we should say that they do not have and do not need truthmakers.  To maintain this is to reject truthmaker maximalism.

It is worth noting that my position is consistent with saying that  a truthbearer (whether a Platonic proposition, a divine thought, whatever) can serve as a truthmaker for a different truthbearer.  The Platonic proposition expressed by '7 is prime,' for example, makes-true the general Platonic proposition that there are Platonic propositions.

Your move, Alan.

Critical Race Theory Attracts the Uncritical

People are suckers for Critical Race Theory (CRT) because they cannot think critically.

Substack latest.

Doubting the Teachings of One's Religion

I argued earlier that besides its salutary role in philosophy, doubt also has a salutary role to play in religion. But I left something out, and Vito Caiati caught it:

I have been thinking about your recent post “A Comparison of the Roles of Doubt in Philosophy and Religion” and would like to pose a question to you: While it is certainly true that the religionist “doubts the teachings of other religions,” does he not do the same with some or many of the teachings of his own religion?  In raising this question, I have in mind the intellectual believer, imbued with an inherent religious sensibility and inclination, desirous of affirming the foundational propositions of his faith, including those that appear illogical or contradictory, but who, however much he wills it, is often suffused with doubt about their veracity. I would go so far as to argue, speaking as a Christian and Roman Catholic, that certain dogmas and doctrines by their very nature engender such doubts. None of this necessarily entails the abandonment of belief, but it renders the faith of the religionist more tenuous and unstable than many would like to admit. His struggle to uphold one or more members of a set of beliefs is, at least for those not gifted with special grace, a characteristic property of his faith.  At best, he should acknowledge the tension and understand that he will repeatedly transverse an arc between belief and doubt and that the warm convictions of one moment will often dissipate in the cold misgivings of another. The gap between what is affirmed and what is consistently believed is for the religionist of this type never entirely closed.

That is a very fine statement and I cannot disagree with it. Religious believers who are both sincere and intellectually sophisticated will in the main, and as a matter of fact, question the truth of their beliefs and the efficacy of their practices.  Dr. Caiati doesn't quite say it, but he does suggest that this is as it ought to be. Whether or not he would commit himself to the further step from the factual to the normative, I will commit myself to it: one ought to, at least sometimes, question truth and efficacy of beliefs and practices.  It has always seemed to me that a living faith, as opposed to a convenience and a soporific, must maintain itself in the teeth of doubt. A vital faith, a living faith is animated in part by doubt and a spirit of inquiry.  He who finds first had to seek; but here below the finding is never secure and final and so must be renewed by further seeking.  

Vito speaks of certain doctrines and dogmas that by their very nature engender doubts. Some of these are harder to believe than others. The hardest to believe are those that demand or seem to demand the  "crucifixion of the intellect."  Trinity and Incarnation are the two main main examples. One cannot be a Christian and deny them* (in the way one could be a Christian and deny Transubstantiation). It is, however, difficult to make logical sense of them (in the way that it is not difficult to make logical sense of the Resurrection.)  See my Trinity and Incarnation category for details, and this relatively short and precise entry in particular: The Logic of the Trinity Revisited.

Religious faith here below must remain "tenuous and unstable" to the intellectually awake. The tenets we hold to must remain tentative and thus "tenuous."  Doxastic 'grip,' like physical grip is subject to the world's loosening. No one's grip is absolutely secure.  There is no helping that unless you want to sink into the somnambulance of the worldling who has the world and its pleasures and "fire insurance" to boot.

Religious faith is a faith seeking understanding. It is not a blind faith without understanding, but neither is it a faith that goes beyond a clear understanding, superadding intellectual assent to a clearly conceived proposition.   Perhaps the Pauline image is apt: religious faith is a seeing through a glass darkly.  The glass of the discursive intellect is a distorting lens through which the Incarnation must appear logically impossible even though in truth it is actual.  

Let me put the question to myself directly: Do you or do you not accept Jesus Christ as the way, the truth, and the life, as your only hope for salvation? My acceptance takes the form, not of an acceptance of a ready-made proposition or set of propositions, but the acceptance of a task to be pursued in all seriousness, the task of investigating the matter in all its ramifications via reasoning, prayer, meditation, examination of conscience, study of all relevant literary sources, including scripture, commentaries thereon, the works of the great and not-so-great philosophers of all times and places,  with no slighting of Athens, or Jerusalem, or Benares, or Alexandria, and seeking out the few living who may have been vouchsafed a higher degree of insight than that which I find in myself.

_________________

*I spew from my mouth those miserable 'liberals' who would remake Christianity in their own stunted image. They are free to reject the doctrine, and I defend their right to do so; but they ought not be allowed to change it to suit themselves.  Christianity is what it is; its definatory tenets are essential to it and cannot be jettisoned without jettisoning the whole thing.

Addendum (6 February 2022):

Malcolm Pollack comments on the above  here.  In an e-mail he writes,

I hope you are well. I set off in 2022 imagining I was going to write a lot more (I'd been tapering off lately), but things are now so completely insane that I hardly know what to say. How does one analyze, or comment productively on, what goes on in a madhouse? Why even bother? And why continue to elaborate the various and infinitely detailed breakdowns and malfunctions of a system that's going over a cliff? I can hardly bring myself, any longer, to raise a pen.

There is indeed something absurd about continuing to add to the analytical literature on our social and political collapse. For example, what is the point of this excellent article by Anthony Esolen? It will not be read by those who need its instruction, and even if they did read it, it would do them no good. You cannot appeal to the reason of those bereft of reason, or to the consciences of those who either lack a conscience or whose conscience was never properly formed. 

So why do I continue to think about and write about these things? The short answer is that I have a theoretical bent. I enjoy figuring things out.  "All men by nature desire to know." (Aristotle). This is so even if few live up to their (normative) nature. The bios theoretikos and all that. Intellectual types derive intense pleasure from reading, study, thinking, and all cognate activities.

Even if the subject-matter is disgusting as is that of the medical and social pathologists, the pleasure of understanding is a delight.  The feculent can be fascinating.

Theory has its escapist joys. But in the end we would prefer to act upon the world and its recalcitrant denizens and bring about improvement. But even if we know what needs to be done to bring about, not mere change, but improvement, the tasks are formidable and perhaps insurmountable especially since we who oppose the current madness are divided among ourselves, which is the topic of this article which explains the Boomer versus 'Based' generation gap on the Right. Excerpt:

Do you hate America and want it to fail? 

A lot of younger right-wingers would say yes . . . in a certain sense, they do. And they have reasons for saying that. What young man with any sense wants to die for the Joe Biden regime in the Ukraine? Who wants to pay taxes so Kamala Harris can shower money on illegal immigrants and left-wing shock troops?

That’s a hard message to hear for anyone who lived through the 1960s and the Cold War. For a long time, to be on the Right—to defend liberty and morality and decency—meant to be a patriot and to love America. And it still does. But the enemies of freedom and decency who hate America are no longer godless communists abroad, they are the godless leftists at home who are currently in power.

If America means transgender rights and suffocating biomedical security measures, then those who love freedom will come to hate America—or, to be more specific, the current regime that has taken control of what used to be America.

Young people on the Right don’t hate liberty and morality and decency; they despise woke ideology. The older idea of “America” that the Boomers love is gone, as far as the younger generation is concerned. Most Boomers will never share this antipathy, but they must learn to distinguish between America the nation and America the state. The American state—as the COVID lockdowns, Russiagate hoax, and the political prosecution of the January 6 protestors show—is at war with the American people. (Many older conservatives recognized this distinction and gave Rush Limbaugh a pass when he famously remarked on air that he hoped Barack Obama would fail.)