Maverick Philosopher

The Consolations of Philosophy

Substack latest. A Boethian-Hegelian rumination.

Miracles: Some Preliminary Points

It can't hurt to back up a bit to examine some definitions, make some distinctions, nail down some terminology, and catalog some questions.  See how much you agree with.

1)  A little girl falls into a mine shaft but is pulled out three days later alive and well. People call it a 'miracle.' That is a misuse of language because the unlikelihood of an event does not justify labelling it miraculous.

2) David Hume's two-part definition has dominated subsequent discussions. The gist of his definition is that a miracle is "a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity . . . ." (Enquiry, sec. x, part i)

3) Hume's definition raises a number of questions. What is a law of nature? What is it to 'transgress' or violate a law of nature? Could a violation of a law of nature occur without supernatural agency? If so, would it count as a miracle? If a supernatural agent such as God brings about something by an act of will, but without violating any natural law, is that a miraculous bringing-about? If God ("the Deity") is involved in every miracle, what attributes must God have to be so-involved? The God of Aquinas could be a miracle worker, but what about the deus sive natura of Spinoza?

4)  Laws of nature must not be confused with laws in the political-legal realm. And this despite the use of 'transgression,'  'violation,'  and 'law' with respect to both kinds of law, and despite  talk of  laws of nature 'governing' this or that phenomenon and of phenomena 'obeying' laws.  Two differences come immediately to mind: legal laws, unlike laws of nature, are enacted by legislatures and need enforcement. Kepler's laws of planetary motion, for example,  were neither enacted by a legislature nor do they need enforcement.  There is no need for an 'astro-cop' to make sure that the planets keep to their elliptical orbits, or to ensure that no signal exceeds the cosmic speed limit, 186,282 mi/sec.  This ties in with another apparent difference. Legal laws are prescriptive, permissive, or  proscriptive statements; statements of laws of nature are merely descriptive: they merely codify what happens. And even if they codify what must happen, the necessity involved is not legal but nomological or nomic.  This point leads to a further distinction.

5) A legal law is just a statement that states either what is legally required, or legally permitted, or  legally prohibited.  There is no distinction between a legal law and something in the world of nature that makes its true.  But in the case of laws of nature we need to distinguish between law statements and the laws themselves.  Let me explain.

On one theory of laws, the regularity theory, a law is just an exceptionless regularity, a repeatable pattern of event sequences.  A sample of pure water at sea-level is heated to 212 deg. Fahrenheit. That is one event token. It is followed  by a second spatiotemporally contiguous event token: the beginning to boil of the same sample of water. The two event tokens make up an event sequence. What makes it a causal sequence is its instantiation of a pattern which, formulated in a statement, would go like this: "Whenever pure water at sea level is heated to 212 Fahrenheit, it boils."  What makes this universal generalization  true is the underlying pattern of heating-boiling events 'out there in the world.'  

A statement of a law of nature, therefore, must be distinguished from the law that it states. The latter exists whether or not the former does. If Coulomb's law is true it was true long before the birth of  Charles-Augustin de Coulomb.

6) Now what is a transgression of a law of nature? I should think that a law of nature is more than an exceptionless regularity in that laws support counterfactual conditionals.  But without going into this, we can confidently say the following.  Whatever a law of nature is, it either is or entails an exceptionless regularity.  A transgression/violation of a law would then be an exception to the regularity, i.e., a counterexample thereto. But then it would seem to follow that miracles as Hume understands them are not just impossible, but logically impossible. Try this argument on for size:

1) A miracle is an exception to a law of nature.
2) Every law of nature is an exceptionless regularity.
Therefore
3) A miracle is an exception to an exceptionless regularity. But:
4) An exception to an exceptionless regularity is logically impossible.
Therefore
5) Miracles are logically impossible.

This argument seems to show that if miracles are to be logically possible, then they cannot be understood as violations of laws of nature. How then are they to be understood?  Please note that (2) merely states that whatever a law of nature is, it is an exceptionless regularity.  Thus (2) does not commit one to a regularity theory of laws according to which laws are identified with exceptionless regularities.  The idea is that any theory of  (deterministic) laws would include the idea that a law is an exceptionless regularity.

Interim conclusion: If miracles are possible, then they cannot be construed as Hume construes them.  And now: modus ponendo ponens? Or modus tollendo tollens?

(To be continued)

7) Humean miracles are violations ("transgressions") of laws of nature by divine agency. But are miracles Humean? William Lane Craig thinks not:

That is, I think, an untenable definition of what a miracle is . . . . Miracles are not violations of the laws of nature. The laws of nature describe what would happen in a particular case assuming that there are no intervening supernatural factors. They have what are called ceteris paribus clauses implicit in them – namely, all [other] things being equal, this is what will happen in this situation. But if all [other] things are not equal, the law isn’t violated. Rather, the law just doesn’t apply to that situation because there are other factors at work. In the case of a miracle, God doesn’t violate the laws of nature when he does a miracle. Rather, there will be causal factors at work, namely God, which are supernatural and therefore what the laws of nature predict won’t happen because the laws of nature only make predictions under the assumption that there are no intervening supernatural factors at work. So a miracle, I think, properly defined, is an event which the natural causes at a time and place cannot produce at that time and place. Or, more succinctly, a miracle is a naturally impossible event – an event which the natural causes at a certain time and place cannot bring about. It is beyond the productive capacity of nature. (Emphases added)

 

'Equity'

'Equity' as currently used by wokesters refers to equality of outcome.

 

It could be achieved in a footrace by attaching weights to runners so as to insure that they all cross the finish line at the same time. One would thereby purchase the benefit of envy-free equality of result at the cost of excellence and high achievement. Would it be worth it?

 

And then there is the question of who would attach the weights and how they would go about doing so. Would they not have to be unequal  in power and authority to those equalized to bring about the latter's equality of result? I suspect that those who support 'equity' imagine themselves as among the equalizers and not the equalized, just as those who are for central planning think of themselves as among the central planners and not the centrally planned.

 

The means to the achievement of 'equity' are far worse than 'equity' is good.

A Warning from Elon Musk

Here

There is no political solution, not only for the reasons that Musk gives, but also because it is not the best who rise in politics but often the very worst.  That is certainly true in the USA at present.  The current administration is characterized by blatant mendacity, corruption, sheer stupidity, and mental incompetence.

So What's up with the Metaphilosophy Book?

I was happy to find the following item in the mailbag the other morning:

Hi Bill,

I recall (however, I can't find exactly where) that you mentioned in an old blog post your intention to publish a work on metaphilosophy at some point in the future. I am curious, is this still a goal of yours? If so, is it in progress? I would be delighted to read it, but I understand if you've chosen not to pursue that project.

 

Your grateful reader,

Chandler

Thank you for your inquiry, Chandler. Yes, the metaphilosophy book is in progress, and has been for longer than I care to reveal.  Why am I taking so long with it?

 

I gave the following dissertation advice a few posts ago:

. . . finish the bloody thing now while you are young and cocky and energetic.  Finish it before your standards become too exacting. Give yourself a year, say, do your absolute best and crank it out. Think of it as a union card. It might not get you a job but then it just might. Don't think of it as a magnum opus or you will never finish. 

My current predicament is the opposite. I am now old and my standards have become as exacting as they ever will be.  I'm under time pressure but it's of a different sort than the young person's. The young philosopher needs to 'make it' and secure a space within which he can pursue his vocation.  He has to solve 'the problem of the belly.' He may also be driven by worldly ambition. I have secured the space, solved the problem of livelihood, and I have renounced all worldly ambition in line with Wittgenstein's 1948 observation, "Ambition is the death of thought." (Ehrgeiz ist der Tod des Denkens, Culture and Value, p. 77)

 

So now I can afford to set high standards. Trouble is, they slow you down.  That's good in one way.  I take to heart the advice of  Wittgenstein and Brentano. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 80: Der Gruss der Philosophen unter einander sollte sein: "Lass Dir Zeit!" "This is how philosophers should greet each other: 'Take your time!'"

A similar thought is to be found in Franz Brentano, though I have forgotten where he says this: Wer eilt, bewegt sich nicht auf dem Boden der Wissenschaft. "One who hurries is not proceeding on a scientific basis."

 

On the other hand,  the clock is running, the flag will fall, and the time control is sudden death. There is no secondary or tertiary control; nor can one  take an 'incomplete' when the Grim Reaper comes knocking, his scythe glistening in the rays of the setting sun.

'Unthinkable' Used Thoughtlessly

People say that such-and-such is 'unthinkable.' An electromagnetic pulse, for example, one that destroys the power distribution grid, would be a calamity in comparison to which the COVID-19 pandemic would pale into insignificance. An EMP event is said to be 'unthinkable.' And yet we are now thinking about it. What one thinks about can be thought about, and is therefore thinkable. So the calamity in question is precisely not 'unthinkable.' Nor is it 'unimaginable.' I can imagine it and so can you. People use these expressions because they thoughtlessly repeat what they hear other people say. That's my explanation. Do you have a better one?

 

Not every test is a litmus test. So why do people refer to any old test as a litmus test? Same explanation. Not every record is a track record. Not every list is a laundry list.  I could continue with the examples. And you hope I won't. Don't be a linguistic lemming. The mind you save may be your own.

 

Language matters. The subversion of language is the mother of all subversion. 

 

Walter approves of this message.

The Peripatetic Zetetic

On the Continental Divide trail near Abiquiu, New Mexico, August 2015.

Spinoza's Epistemic Theory of Miracles

Chapter Six of Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise is entitled, "Of Miracles." We do well to see what we can learn from it. Spinoza makes four main points in this chapter, but I will examine only two of them in this entry.

We learned from our discussion of Augustine that there is a tension and possibly a contradiction between the will of God and the existence of miracles ontically construed. Miracles so construed violate, contravene, suspend, transgress, or otherwise upset the laws of nature. But for theists the laws of nature are ordained by God, regardless of how  laws are understood, whether as regularities or as relations of universals that entail regularities (as on David M. Armstrong's theory of laws) or whatever. So it seems as if the theist is under a certain amount of conceptual pressure to adopt an epistemic theory of miracles. We heard Augustine say, Portentum ergo fit non contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura: A portent, therefore, happens not contrary to nature, but contrary to what we know as nature. We find a similar view in Spinoza, despite the very considerable differences between the two thinkers:

. . . the universal laws of nature are decrees of God following from the necessity and perfection of the Divine nature. Hence, any event happening in nature which contravened nature's universal laws, would necessarily also contravene the Divine decree, nature, and understanding; or if anyone asserted that God acted in contravention to the laws of nature, he, ipso facto, would be compelled to assert that God acted against His own nature -- an evident absurdity. (tr. Elwes, Dover, p. 83)

It follows from this that miracles are to be construed epistemically:

Further, as nothing happens in nature which does not follow from her laws, and as her laws embrace everything conceived by the Divine intellect, and lastly, as nature preserves a fixed and immutable order; it most clearly follows that miracles are only intelligible as in relation to human opinions, and merely mean events of which the natural cause cannot be explained by a reference to any ordinary occurrence, either by us, or at any rate, by the writer and narrator of the miracle. (p. 84, emphasis added)

Since the course of nature, being ordained by God, cannot be contravened, miracles ontically construed are impossible. Talk of miracles, therefore, is simply talk of events we cannot explain given the present state of our knowledge. Miracles are thus parasitic upon our ignorance. They are natural events that simply surpass our limited human comprehension. To a perfect understanding nothing would appear miraculous. That is the first main point that Spinoza makes in his chapter "Of Miracles."

The second main point is that neither God's nature, nor his existence, nor his providence can be known from miracles, but can be known only from the fixed and immutable order of nature.

Spinoza's argument, expressed in my own way, is something like the following. If we take miracles ontically, as actual interruptions or contraventions of the order of nature, and thus of the will of God, then not only are they impossible, but they can provide no basis for knowledge of God. If, on the other hand, we take miracles epistemically, as events the causes of which we do not understand, then in this case as well we have no basis for knowledge of God. For we cannot base knowledge of God on ignorance, and events are miraculous only due to our ignorance of their natural causes.

Spinoza concludes his defense of his second main point with the surprising claim that belief in miracles leads to atheism:

If, therefore, anything should come to pass in nature which does not follow from her laws, it would also be in contravention to the order which which God has established in nature for ever through universal natural laws; it would, therefore, be in contravention to God's nature and laws, and, consequently, belief in it would throw doubt upon everything, and lead to Atheism. (p. 87)

Chapter Six of Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise is entitled, "Of Miracles." We do well to see what we can learn from it. Spinoza makes four main points in this chapter, but I will examine only two of them in this entry.

We learned from our discussion of Augustine that there is a tension and possibly a contradiction between the will of God and the existence of miracles ontically construed. Miracles so construed violate, contravene, suspend, transgress, or otherwise upset the laws of nature. But for theists the laws of nature are ordained by God, regardless of how  laws are understood, whether as regularities or as relations of universals that entail regularities (as on David M. Armstrong's theory of laws) or whatever. So it seems as if the theist is under a certain amount of conceptual pressure to adopt an epistemic theory of miracles. We heard Augustine say, Portentum ergo fit non contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura: A portent, therefore, happens not contrary to nature, but contrary to what we know as nature. We find a similar view in Spinoza, despite the very considerable differences between the two thinkers:

. . . the universal laws of nature are decrees of God following from the necessity and perfection of the Divine nature. Hence, any event happening in nature which contravened nature's universal laws, would necessarily also contravene the Divine decree, nature, and understanding; or if anyone asserted that God acted in contravention to the laws of nature, he, ipso facto, would be compelled to assert that God acted against His own nature -- an evident absurdity. (tr. Elwes, Dover, p. 83)

It follows from this that miracles are to be construed epistemically:

Further, as nothing happens in nature which does not follow from her laws, and as her laws embrace everything conceived by the Divine intellect, and lastly, as nature preserves a fixed and immutable order; it most clearly follows that miracles are only intelligible as in relation to human opinions, and merely mean events of which the natural cause cannot be explained by a reference to any ordinary occurrence, either by us, or at any rate, by the writer and narrator of the miracle. (p. 84, emphasis added)

Since the course of nature, being ordained by God, cannot be contravened, miracles ontically construed are impossible. Talk of miracles, therefore, is simply talk of events we cannot explain given the present state of our knowledge. Miracles are thus parasitic upon our ignorance. They are natural events that simply surpass our limited human comprehension. To a perfect understanding nothing would appear miraculous. That is the first main point that Spinoza makes in his chapter "Of Miracles."

The second main point is that neither God's nature, nor his existence, nor his providence can be known from miracles, but can be known only from the fixed and immutable order of nature.

Spinoza's argument, expressed in my own way, is something like the following. If we take miracles ontically, as actual interruptions or contraventions of the order of nature, and thus of the will of God, then not only are they impossible, but they can provide no basis for knowledge of God. If, on the other hand, we take miracles epistemically, as events the causes of which we do not understand, then in this case as well we have no basis for knowledge of God. For we cannot base knowledge of God on ignorance, and events are miraculous only due to our ignorance of their natural causes.

Spinoza concludes his defense of his second main point with the surprising claim that belief in miracles leads to atheism:

If, therefore, anything should come to pass in nature which does not follow from her laws, it would also be in contravention to the order which which God has established in nature for ever through universal natural laws; it would, therefore, be in contravention to God's nature and laws, and, consequently, belief in it would throw doubt upon everything, and lead to Atheism. (p. 87)

Some 'Tweets' on Free Speech

Thanks to Elon Musk, Twitter has been liberated from the speech police.  Free at last! I may sign up. In these hyperkinetic times, pithy sayings are needed to punch through the noise. And sometimes one needs to SHOUT.

Dissent is not hate. If I dissent from your VIEWS, it does not follow that I hate YOU.

 

Can a contemporary 'liberal' distinguish between a person and the proposition he asserts? If he can, but he doesn't, then he ought to be morally reprimanded. We have a moral responsibility to try to think straight. We may not succeed, but we must try.

 

Don't confuse being judgmental with making moral judgments.

 

Don't make Dennis Prager's mistake of saying that the the First Amendment protects 'hate speech.' That formulation is a foolish concession to the Left's notion that conservative speech is hate speech. The First Amendment protects DISSENT. Hate, like love, is in the eye of the beholder, and leftists are not known for their 'visual' acuity.

 

The trouble with 'liberals' is that they are ruled by their emotions. That is why they hear dissent as hate.

 

The growing feminarchy within the Democrat Party will only exacerbate the party's governance by emotion. Is that a 'sexist' thing to say? Not if it is true; it is true; ergo, it is not 'sexist.'

 

Dissent is not hate. But even if dissent is couched in (what some inappropriately sensitive person  takes to be) harsh and hurtful or even hateful language, it still must be protected.

 

I apologize for repeating all of these obvious points. But in these benighted times, they need to be stated time and time again.  

THE DEMS NO LONGER SUPPORT FREE SPEECH. And you are STILL a Democrat? What is wrong with you? Jonathan Turley:

Yet recently, the Democratic Party seems to have abandoned its historic fealty to free speech. Democratic writers and leaders are publicly calling for everything from censorship to the criminalization of free speech. The latest such clarion call appeared in The Washington Post by a column from MSNBC analyst and former Obama official Richard Stengel.

Augustine and the Epistemic Theory of Miracles

This is a revised version of an entry from November 2009. Long-time reader Thomas Beale has got me thinking about miracles again. I cannot tell you what to believe about this vexing topic, but I can help you think clearly about it by making some distinctions.  Below I distinguish between ontic and epistemic approaches to miracles.

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

In The City of God, Book XXI, Chapter 8, St. Augustine quotes Marcus Varro, Of the Race of the Roman People:

There occurred a remarkable celestial portent; for Castor records that, in the brilliant star Venus, called Vesperugo by Plautus, and the lovely Hesperus by Homer, there occurred so strange a prodigy, that it changed its colour, size, form, course, which never appeared before nor since.  Andrastus of Cyzicus, and Dion of Naples, famous mathematicians, said that this occurred in the reign of Ogyges.

The Bishop of Hippo comments:

So great an author as Varro would certainly not have called this a portent had it not seemed to be contrary to nature. For we say that all portents are contrary to nature; but they are not so. For how is that contrary to nature which happens by the will of God, since the will of so mighty a Creator is certainly the nature of each created thing? A portent, therefore, happens not contrary to nature, but contrary to what we know as nature. (Modern Library, p. 776, tr. Dods, emphasis added.)

Suppose Venus did in fact change its color, size, form, and course during the reign of some Theban king. Suppose that really occurred. Would we call it a miracle or not? Ontically understood, a miracle is an event contrary to nature, contrary to what 'naturally' occurs. It is an event the origin of which is supernatural. But this is not the tack Augustine takes. For him, nature is whatever God wills. Dei voluntas rerum natura est. And since nothing can run contrary to the will of God, Portentum ergo fit non contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura: A portent, therefore, happens not contrary to nature, but contrary to what we know as nature.

Augustine's approach is thus epistemic. It is because of our ignorance of nature's real workings that we take as contrary to nature what in reality is not contrary to nature. The contrast is this:

ONTIC: Whether or not event M is a miracle does not depend on what any finite mind thinks, believes, opines, expects, takes to be the case, etc. There is a fact of the matter as to whether or not an event is a miracle; whether or not M is a miracle is not relative to us and our knowledge and ignorance.

EPISTEMIC: There are no events contrary to nature; there are no "transgressions" (to use Hume's word) of laws of nature. M is a miracle only in the sense that it does not comport with our understanding of nature, does not fit our picture of nature, thwarts our expectations as to how nature will behave, etc. To a perfect understanding there would be no miracles.

So far, so good. But the epistemic approach to miracles has an untoward consequence noted by Antony Flew in his entry "Miracles" in The Encylopedia of Philosophy, vol. 5, 346-353. Miracles have an apologetic function: they can be cited as attesting to the reality of God or as supporting the credibility of a putative divine revelation. For example, the miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes, if accepted as fact, serves the apologetic purpose of attesting to the divinity of Jesus. Only a divine being could do that, or change water into wine, or walk on water, or raise the dead, etc. But if these events are merely inexplicable to us at present, then we have no reason to take these events as having any special divine origin. If theism is true, everything other than God has a divine origin. But for miracles to have probative force in respect of specific theses such as the divinity of Jesus, they would have to be brought about by a special divine intervention. They would otherwise be no different than any other event belonging to the created order.

Suppose you see a man walking on water, and suppose your seeing is veridical: the man really is walking on water. (And to preempt the unserious, we are talking about water in the liquid state.) That is not possible given the laws of nature as we understand them. The surface tension of water is not great enough to support a man's weight. But it may be that our understanding of the laws of nature is very incomplete. There may be special psychophysical laws, unknown to us, that allow certain human beings possessing great powers of concentration to affect by force of will alone the surface tension of water. Suppose that is so in the case of Jesus. Then there would be nothing ontically miraculous about his walking on water. There would be no violation or suspension of the laws of nature. If so, Jesus' walking on water would not give one reason to infer that he was divine. He might simply be a man with very special powers. 

For the miracles associated with Jesus to attest to his divinity they must be construed as genuine ontic miracles, as being special divine interventions that are contrary to nature. But if nature is whatever God wills, then there cannot be any ontic miracles. For nothing can act contrary to the will of God. The problem is similar to the problem we confront in connection with Hume. If laws either are or entail exception-less regularities, then there cannot be any miracles given that miracles are violations of, e.g., exceptions to, laws.

It looks as if Augustine's position faces a dilemma. Either we construe miracles epistemically or we construe them ontically. If we construe them epistemically, then in Flew's words, they "provide no good ground at all for believing that doctrines associated with these occurrences embody an authentic revelation of the transcendent." (348) But if we construe miracles ontically, then we face a version of the difficulty pointed out by Hume. Just as there cannot be exceptions to exceptionless regularities, there cannot be any occurrences contrary to nature given that what occurs in nature is willed by God.

This is a revised version of an entry from November 2009. Long-time reader Thomas Beale has got me thinking about miracles again. I cannot tell you what to believe about this vexing topic, but I can help you think clearly about it by making some distinctions.  Below I distinguish between ontic and epistemic approaches to miracles.

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

In The City of God, Book XXI, Chapter 8, St. Augustine quotes Marcus Varro, Of the Race of the Roman People:

There occurred a remarkable celestial portent; for Castor records that, in the brilliant star Venus, called Vesperugo by Plautus, and the lovely Hesperus by Homer, there occurred so strange a prodigy, that it changed its colour, size, form, course, which never appeared before nor since.  Andrastus of Cyzicus, and Dion of Naples, famous mathematicians, said that this occurred in the reign of Ogyges.

The Bishop of Hippo comments:

So great an author as Varro would certainly not have called this a portent had it not seemed to be contrary to nature. For we say that all portents are contrary to nature; but they are not so. For how is that contrary to nature which happens by the will of God, since the will of so mighty a Creator is certainly the nature of each created thing? A portent, therefore, happens not contrary to nature, but contrary to what we know as nature. (Modern Library, p. 776, tr. Dods, emphasis added.)

Suppose Venus did in fact change its color, size, form, and course during the reign of some Theban king. Suppose that really occurred. Would we call it a miracle or not? Ontically understood, a miracle is an event contrary to nature, contrary to what 'naturally' occurs. It is an event the origin of which is supernatural. But this is not the tack Augustine takes. For him, nature is whatever God wills. Dei voluntas rerum natura est. And since nothing can run contrary to the will of God, Portentum ergo fit non contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura: A portent, therefore, happens not contrary to nature, but contrary to what we know as nature.

Augustine's approach is thus epistemic. It is because of our ignorance of nature's real workings that we take as contrary to nature what in reality is not contrary to nature. The contrast is this:

ONTIC: Whether or not event M is a miracle does not depend on what any finite mind thinks, believes, opines, expects, takes to be the case, etc. There is a fact of the matter as to whether or not an event is a miracle; whether or not M is a miracle is not relative to us and our knowledge and ignorance.

EPISTEMIC: There are no events contrary to nature; there are no "transgressions" (to use Hume's word) of laws of nature. M is a miracle only in the sense that it does not comport with our understanding of nature, does not fit our picture of nature, thwarts our expectations as to how nature will behave, etc. To a perfect understanding there would be no miracles.

So far, so good. But the epistemic approach to miracles has an untoward consequence noted by Antony Flew in his entry "Miracles" in The Encylopedia of Philosophy, vol. 5, 346-353. Miracles have an apologetic function: they can be cited as attesting to the reality of God or as supporting the credibility of a putative divine revelation. For example, the miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes, if accepted as fact, serves the apologetic purpose of attesting to the divinity of Jesus. Only a divine being could do that, or change water into wine, or walk on water, or raise the dead, etc. But if these events are merely inexplicable to us at present, then we have no reason to take these events as having any special divine origin. If theism is true, everything other than God has a divine origin. But for miracles to have probative force in respect of specific theses such as the divinity of Jesus, they would have to be brought about by a special divine intervention. They would otherwise be no different than any other event belonging to the created order.

Suppose you see a man walking on water, and suppose your seeing is veridical: the man really is walking on water. (And to preempt the unserious, we are talking about water in the liquid state.) That is not possible given the laws of nature as we understand them. The surface tension of water is not great enough to support a man's weight. But it may be that our understanding of the laws of nature is very incomplete. There may be special psychophysical laws, unknown to us, that allow certain human beings possessing great powers of concentration to affect by force of will alone the surface tension of water. Suppose that is so in the case of Jesus. Then there would be nothing ontically miraculous about his walking on water. There would be no violation or suspension of the laws of nature. If so, Jesus' walking on water would not give one reason to infer that he was divine. He might simply be a man with very special powers. 

For the miracles associated with Jesus to attest to his divinity they must be construed as genuine ontic miracles, as being special divine interventions that are contrary to nature. But if nature is whatever God wills, then there cannot be any ontic miracles. For nothing can act contrary to the will of God. The problem is similar to the problem we confront in connection with Hume. If laws either are or entail exception-less regularities, then there cannot be any miracles given that miracles are violations of, e.g., exceptions to, laws.

It looks as if Augustine's position faces a dilemma. Either we construe miracles epistemically or we construe them ontically. If we construe them epistemically, then in Flew's words, they "provide no good ground at all for believing that doctrines associated with these occurrences embody an authentic revelation of the transcendent." (348) But if we construe miracles ontically, then we face a version of the difficulty pointed out by Hume. Just as there cannot be exceptions to exceptionless regularities, there cannot be any occurrences contrary to nature given that what occurs in nature is willed by God.

The Gist of Brightly's Presentism

An excerpt from a comment by David Brightly  to this entry:

My mind is populated with ideas of things. I acquire these ideas (a) directly through acquaintance with external objects and (b) indirectly by description in language and image. These ideas of things guide my interaction with the outside world. Having seen a bear go into the cave or having been told 'There's a bear in the cave', I approach the cave with caution. Through my contact with the external world I come to accept that all external things come into existence, exist for a while, and then pass out of existence. The ceasing to exist of things that I am familiar with and am attached to is an everyday experience. When I have such an experience, or have a thing's passing described to me, my idea of that thing becomes modified. None of the idea itself passes away, at least not initially. Instead the idea (not the thing it's an idea of) acquires a new attribute, analogous to the label 'Account Closed' on the front of a business ledger, signifying that, to a first approximation, the content of the idea can be safely ignored for purposes of guiding my life. I might express this label by saying 'The thing is past' or 'The thing is in the past' or 'The thing has ceased to exist'. The important point here is that, despite appearances, these assertions are not predicating something of the thing itself but rather of my idea of it, namely that the idea is redundant.

Suppose that a monument M, of which I had direct sensory acquaintance, has been demolished.  M no longer exists, but my memorial ideas, my memories, of M still exist. Consider the most vivid of these, idea R.  R is obviously distinct from M because R is a mental representation of M. R exists now 'in' my mind; M does not exist now, and, being a physical chunk of the external world, never existed 'in' any (finite) mind either spatially or merely intentionally. When I learn that M no longer exists, R undergoes a modification; it "acquires a new attribute" as David puts it.  This new attribute is not an attribute of M, which no longer exists, but solely an attribute of R.  We could describe this attribute as the property of not being of or about anything real or existent. It comes to the same if we call this attribute the property of being non-veridical. This simply means that R is not true of anything.  R has thus undergone a modification: it was veridical when M existed, but is now non-veridical when R no longer exists.  (In my example, R is a memory, but it might be a past-directed description, say, 'the only statue at the corner of Third and Howard.' 

You can see where David is going with this. He is proposing that we analyze 'M is (wholly) past, ' M is in the past,'  and 'M has ceased to exist'  in terms of 'R has ceased to be veridical.'  

One virtue of this analysis is that R is available, and available at present, which satisfies the demands of presentism according to which only what exists (present tense) exists.   But I don't think the analysis is workable even as a specification of truth conditions. The cup out of which Socrates drank the hemlock existed but no one now has any ideas about it, that very cup. And there are innumerable things that existed but no longer exist about which no one now or ever had any ideas whether singular or general.  What existed cannot depend for its having existed on the present contents of any finite mind.  But there is worse to come when we ask about truthmakers. 

If you are wondering what the difference is between a truth condition and a truthmaker, our old friend Alan Rhoda in an old blog post does a good job of explaining the distinction:

. . .truthmakers are parcels of reality . . . .

Not so with truth conditions. Truth conditions are semantic explications of the meaning of statements. They tell us in very precise terms what has to be true for a particular statement to be true. For example, a B-theorist like Nathan Oaklander will say that the truth conditions of the sentence "The 2006 Winter Olympics are over" is given by the sentence "The 2006 Winter Olympics end earlier than the date of this utterance". Thus truth conditions are meaning entities like statements that are used to spell out or analyze the meaning of other statements.

'M existed' is true, true now, and contingently true now (it might not have been true now and would not have been true now if the Antifa thugs hadn't dynamited the monument).  We have here a truthbearer that clearly needs a truthmaker.  So I ask a simple question of the presentist: What makes it true that M has ceased to exist? (In general: what makes any presently true, past-tensed, contingent truth true?)  The truthmaker cannot be or involve M because M, on presentism, does not exist.

Note that the truthmaker of 'M has ceased to exist' cannot be the fact that the memorial representation or idea R has ceased to be  veridical. This answer avails nothing since it merely postpones the question, which becomes: what makes it true that R has ceased to be veridical?  'R is no longer veridical' is true, presently true, and contingently true. It needs a truthmaker.    

If the presentist says instead that 'M has ceased to exist' had a truthmaker in the past, what makes true this tensed claim, namely, the claim that the truthbearer in question had a truthmaker in the past? 

Could past-tensed contingent truths be brute truths?  (A brute truth, by definition, has no need of a truthmaker.)   I may come back to this topic in a separate entry.  But if you grant me that the true, present-tensed, contingent 'BV is  seated' (assertively uttered at t) needs a truthmaker, then how could the mere passage of time do away with the need for a truthmaker of the presently true, contingent, past-tensed 'BV was seated' (assertively uttered at t* > t)?

Finally, the presentist might reject the need for any truthmakers at all.  I would respond by hitting him over the head with Aristotle's Categories, figuratively speaking of course.

Institutions and Credibility

Key institutions appear to be working very hard to destroy their own credibility. The Roman Catholic Church, the Center for Disease Control, the fourth estate, the military, the business 'community,' academe, the entertainment industry, and the government in all three branches, the executive, the legislative, and the judicial have very little credibility left.  Each of these institutions has 'earned' our disrespect as could easily be shown. To name some names: Bergoglio, Fauci, Milley, Biden, Harris, Pelosi, Schumer, McConnell.  My esteemed readers will have no trouble adding to the list.

For now I refer you to Steven Hayward:

• A few days ago I remarked that the Biden Administration would have to appeal the district court ruling striking down the mask mandate despite the political unpopularity of masks because preserving the power of the administrative state is a core principle of the left today. I just didn’t expect The New Republic to come right out and admit this point:

Biden had no choice but to appeal. That’s because Mizelle—a former Clarence Thomas clerk whom the American Bar Association rated “not qualified” based on insufficient experience when she was nominated in 2020—wasn’t repealing only a mask mandate. She was also advancing a slow-motion conservative assault on the post–New Deal regulatory state. . .

As I’ve written before, the right’s big brass ring is to overturn the Supreme Court’s 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which seemed at the time, believe it or not, to be a conservative ruling, but now stands as the only bulwark against virtually closing down regulatory agencies entirely.

Word of the Day: Assuasive

Merriam-Webster: soothing, calming. Example: "Like all good listeners, he has a way of attending that is at once intense and assuasive: the supplicant feels both nakedly revealed and sheltered, somehow, from all possible judgment." (David Foster Wallace)

I am a good listener, but far more intense than assuasive.

You have the verb 'assuage' in your vocabulary; now add the adjective 'assuasive.'

Which Side Are You On?

I have criticized Rod Dreher and others for "floating above the fray," for trying to be objective and impartial in those practical situations in which immediate action is required and in which the requisite action is impeded by the otherwise laudable attempt to arrive at the objective truth of the situation. 

"Can't you see that failing to support Donald J. Trump, the only one on our side willing and able to achieve results, aids and abets the political enemy?" "Can't you grasp that politics is a practical enterprise?" "Are you incapable of distinguishing between political theory and political practice?" "The very survival of the Republic is at stake and you want to wait around for the perfect  conservative candidate?" "You are letting the unattainable best become the enemy of the achievable good!" "What is wrong with you, man, which side are you on?"

But now I need to examine whether I myself am being consistent on the Ukraine question. I have criticized those who attack and indeed smear Tucker Carlson and others as 'Putin supporters.'  Am I not "floating above the fray" when I try to understand the current Ukraine horror and how it came about and how it could have been avoided?  Am I not aiding and  abetting a vicious aggressor  when I credit Carlson et al. with insights worth pondering? Which side am I on here? Does not my attempt at being fair and balanced have the effect of aiding Vlad the Aggressor? Should I take the Dick Morris line against Tucker Carlson? 

When we examine our consciences -- a salutary practice to be enacted on a daily basis -- we sometimes in all justice must acquit ourselves of the charges we bring against ourselves. And so it seems to me in this case.  There is an important difference.  

As an American citizen I have a strong interest in the preservation of the Republic and the defense of all that makes it what it is, including its borders.  Threats to it are threats to me and my way of life, the life of the philosopher who is committed to free speech, open inquiry, and the pursuit of truth   I do not have the same interest in the defense of  Ukraine and its borders.  This is not to say that the USA should not help Ukraine defend itself. It is to insist on the principle, Country First.  A special case thereof is America First. Let us review what this means.

It does not mean that the USA ought to be first over other countries, dominating them.  It means that every country has the right to prefer itself and its own interests over the interests of other countries. We say 'America first' because we are Americans; the Czechs say or ought to say 'Czech Republic first.'  The general principle is that every country has a right to grant preference to itself and its interests over the interests of other countries while respecting their interests and right to self-determination. America First is but an instance of the general principle. The principle, then, is Country First.  If I revert to America First, that is to be understood as an instance of Country First.

So America First has nothing to do with chauvinism which could be characterized as a blind and intemperate patriotism, a belligerent and unjustified belief in the superiority of one's own country. America First expresses an enlightened nationalism which is obviously compatible with a sober recognition of national failings. Germany has a rather sordid history; but Germany First is compatible with a recognition of the wrong turn that great nation took during  a well-known twelve-year period (1933-1945) in her history.

An enlightened nationalism is distinct from nativism inasmuch as the former does not rule out immigration. By definition, an immigrant is not a native; but an enlightened American nationalism accepts immigrants who accept American values, which of course are not the values of the Left or of political Islam.

An enlightened nationalism is not isolationist. What it eschews is a fruitless meddling and over-eager interventionism. It does not rule out certain necessary interventions when they are in our interests and in the interests of our allies.

So America First is not to be confused with chauvinism or nativism or isolationism.

America First is as sound an idea as that each family has the right to prefer its interests over the interests of other families.  If my wife becomes ill, then my obligation is to care for her and expend such financial resources as are necessary to see to her welfare.  If this means reducing my charitable contributions to the local food bank, then so be it. Whatever obligations I have to help others 'ripple out' from myself as center, losing claim to my attention the farther out they go, much like the amplitude of waves caused by a rock's falling into a pond diminishes the farther from the point of impact. Spouse and/or children first, then other family members, then old friends, then new friends, then neighbors, and so on.

The details are disputable, but not the general principle.  The general principle is that we are justified in looking to our own first. 

The main obligation of a government is to protect and serve the citizens of the country of which it is the government. It is a further question whether it has obligations to protect and benefit the citizens of other countries.  That is debatable. But if it does, those obligations are trumped by the main obligation just mentioned.  I should think that a great nation such as the USA does well to engage in purely humanitarian efforts such as famine relief. Such efforts are arguably supererogatory.

One implication of Country First is  that an immigration policy must be to the benefit of the host country.  The interests of the members of the host country supersede the interests of the immigrants.  Obviously, there is no blanket right to immigrate. Obviously, potential immigrants must be vetted and must meet certain standards. Obviously, no country is under any obligation to accept subversive elements or elements who would work to undermine the nation's culture.  Obviously, obviously, obviously -- but not to the destructive leftists who have hijacked the Democrat Party and have installed a puppet to do their bidding.

Suppose you disagree with the enlightened nationalism I am sketching. What will you put in its place? If you are not a nationalist, what are you? Some sort of internationalist or cosmopolitan.  But the notion of being a citizen of the world is empty since there is no world government and never will be. What could hold it together except the hegemony of one of the nations or a coalition of nations ganging up on the others?

The neocons tried to press America and it values and ways upon the world or upon the Middle Eastern portion thereof. The neocon mistake was to imagine that our superior system of government could be imposed on benighted and backward peoples riven by tribal hatreds and depressed by an inferior religion. The folly of that should now be evident. One cannot bomb the benighted into Enlightenment. 

Leftist internationalists want to bring the world to America thereby diluting and ultimately destroying our values. The mistake of the multi-culti cultural Marxists is to imagine that comity is possible without commonality, that wildly diverse sorts of people can live together in peace and harmony. Or at least that is one mistake of the politically correct multi-cultis.

So the way forward is enlightened nationalism. Trump understands this in his intuitive and inarticulate way. The Never-Trumpers do not. Their brand of  yap-and-scribble, inside-the-Beltway, bow-tied, pseudo-conservatism puts a premium on courtly behavior and gentlemanly debate that is an end in itself and rarely  issues in ameliorative action.  The people, however, demand action. 

Which side are you on?

Superstition Wilderness: Garden Valley Loop out of First Water Trailhead

The boys were a little anxious but acquitted themselves well on this five and a half mile loop through characteristically rugged Superstition terrain except for the easy walk through Garden Valley itself. The guide books say it takes four and a half hours. It took the old men a bit longer. We left at 6:36 and were back at the Jeep at 11:22 ante meridian. We made the full trip to Hackberry Spring which involves an arduous return via some scrambling  and a lot of streambed rock hopping.

In these times that try men's souls it is excellent therapy to be on trails that try men's soles.  Isn't that cute?

Dennis proudly standing and your humble correspondent sitting near Hackberry Spring. Photo credit: Jeff K. 

Dale Tuggy has a good eye. Here is a shot from our Good Friday hike, 3 April, 2015.  We are headed back to the trailhead from Hackberry Spring  via the First Water Creek bed.

And here is the man himself in the vicinity of Hackberry Spring:

Dissertation Advice on the Occasion of Kant's Birthday

Immanuel Kant was born on this date in 1724. He died in 1804. My dissertation on Kant, which now lies 44 years in the past, is dated 22 April 1978.  But if, per impossibile, my present self were Doktorvater to my self of 44 years ago, my doctoral thesis might not have been approved! As one's standards rise higher and higher with age and experience one becomes more and more reluctant to submit anything to evaluation let alone publication. One may scribble as before, and even more than before, but with less conviction that one's outpourings deserve being embalmed in printer's ink. (Herein lies a reason to blog.)

So I say to my young friends: finish the bloody thing now while you are young and cocky and energetic.  Finish it before your standards become too exacting. Give yourself a year, say, do your absolute best and crank it out. Think of it as a union card. It might not get you a job but then it just might. Don't think of it as a magnum opus or you will never finish. Get it done by age 30 and before accepting a full-time appointment. And all of this before getting married. That, in my opinion, is the optimal order. Dissertation before 30, marriage after 30. 

Now raise your glass with me in a toast to Manny on this, his 298th birthday. Sapere aude!

 Related: Right and Wrong Order

Earth Day 2022

Maverick Philosopher doesn't celebrate anything as politically correct as Earth Day.  Maverick Philosopher celebrates critical thinking.  So I refer you to William Cronon's The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.  A rich and subtle essay.  Excerpt:

Many environmentalists who reject traditional notions of the Godhead and who regard themselves as agnostics or even atheists nonetheless express feelings tantamount to religious awe when in the presence of wilderness—a fact that testifies to the success of the romantic project. Those who have no difficulty seeing God as the expression of our human dreams and desires nonetheless have trouble recognizing that in a secular age Nature can offer precisely the same sort of mirror.

To put (roughly the same)  point with Maverickian aphoristic pithiness: Nature for the idolaters of the earth is just as much an unconscious anthropomorphic projection as the God of the Feuerbachians.

Thus it is that wilderness serves as the unexamined foundation on which so many of the quasi-religious values of modern environmentalism rest. The critique of modernity that is one of environmentalism’s most important contributions to the moral and political discourse of our time more often than not appeals, explicitly or implicitly, to wilderness as the standard against which to measure the failings of our human world. Wilderness is the natural, unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilization that has lost its soul. It is a place of freedom in which we can recover the true selves we have lost to the corrupting influences of our artificial lives. Most of all, it is the ultimate landscape of authenticity. Combining the sacred grandeur of the sublime with the primitive simplicity of the frontier, it is the place where we can see the world as it really is, and so know ourselves as we really are—or ought to be.

Related: Timothy Treadwell and Nature Idolatry.  (Treadwell was the romantic fool who camped without protection among grizzlies in Alaska, thought it acceptable to end up bear scat, and did, along with his girl friend.)

Christianity and Individualism

Mark Tooley:

Easter is a timely reminder of Christianity’s development of individualism, which is now widely derided by many on both sides of the political spectrum. 

Yes.

Many on the post-liberal left replace individualism, which they equate with greed and capitalism, with raucous identity politics stressing communal identities based on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity or some other category of victim group. Many on the post-liberal right disdain individualism as self-centered autonomous materialist hedonism disconnected from family, religion and community, degenerating into endless categories of personal expressivism. They propose hierarchy, tradition and subordination to institutions as alternatives.

That's right.

Easter is the supreme example of extraordinary, supernatural inspired individualism. Jesus the individual, as God Incarnate, redeemed the whole world through His suffering, death and resurrection. He was shunned by all, His people, His followers, His family, yet He sacrificially prevailed against all sin, death and hell. Humanity was not saved by the collective but by one individual.

Jesus is the exemplar of the anti-tribal whether you accept his divinity or not. But isn't the God of the Old Testament a tribal god, the god of the Jews who sticks up for them and smites their enemies?  Maybe so, but God himself is not a member of the tribe of gods. In himself, God is anti-tribal. His identity is not a tribal identity. If we are made in his image and likeness, then we are meant to be individuals too.  Normative individuality is pre-delineated in our divine origin. In simpler terms, God made us to be individuals, and it is our vocation and task to achieve individuation by lifting ourselves out of the social and the tribal from which we must start, but in which we must not remain.  Perhaps  we could read Christ as the highest manifestation and achievement of radical self-individuation.

This fearsome call to the individual has animated all of Christendom and bequeathed to us concepts of individual dignity, purpose, duties and rights, which ultimately resulted in societies that aspired to equality and opportunity for all. What is sometimes called classical “liberalism” is the respect for individuals and their consciences that unfolded across several millennia thanks to the Biblical God’s summons to each person.

This is my view as well. It is presently under assault both from the post-liberal Left and the post-liberal Right, e.g. Patrick Deneen and Ryszard Legutko, et al. 

Addressing one prominent contemporary critic of individualism and “liberalism,” Hanssen warns: “[Patrick] Deneen needs to be more careful, in taking aim at radical autonomy, that he doesn’t cast aspersions on the entire tradition in which Christianity has played a crucial role in elevating the dignity of the individual. It is the individual substance of a rational nature that is immortal: not the family, not the community, not the state.”  

Exactly right!  Speaking for myself: 

1) The individual is the primary locus of value, not the family, the clan, the tribe, any group, association, race, sex . . . .

2) Self-individuation is a task, a project, and for the believer, one presumably extending beyond this life and into the next.  We are to become who we are, and to be who we are becoming.  

3) Tribalism is tearing us apart. We are on a path toward increasing social malaise as a result.

4)  The cure for tribal self-identification is not an opposite tribal self-identification. White tribalism, for example, is not  a truly ameliorative and long-term answer to black tribalism.  I do concede, however, that tribalism pro tempore may be tactically necesary, here and there, for purposes of self-defense.

Existence Simpliciter: Continuing the Discussion with David Brightly

 One of the points I made earlier was that presentism as a non-tautological, substantive thesis in the philosophy of time cannot be formulated without the notion of existence simpliciter. I then asked David Brightly whether he accepted the notion. Here is his reply:

Do I accept the notion of existence simpliciter? Yes and No. In so far as 'X exists simpliciter' appears to be a shorthand (a computer scientist's macro) for the disjunction of tensed claims 'X existed or X exists or X will exist' then I can guardedly accept it. This does seem to capture what is meant by 'listed in the final ontological inventory', does it not? But I worry that if we aren't very careful it can lead to logical mistakes. 'Simpliciter' here is a strange beast. It isn't an adverb qualifying 'to exist' for that would make 'to exist simpliciter' into a tenseless verb, and there are no such things. Nor, I think, does 'exists simpliciter' attribute a property to an item, so I cannot see 'existence simpliciter' as a concept. There is a whiff of 'grue' about it.

The presentist faces a problem of formulation. He tells us that only what exists at present exists. The problem is to say what the second occurrence of 'exists' in the italicized sentence expresses or denotes. What are the combinatorially possible views?

A. The second occurrence is present-tensed. This reading yields tautological presentism which is of no philosophical interest.  Note that if presentism is a tautological thesis, then 'eternalism,' according to which past, present, and future items are all equally real/existent, is self-contradictory.  If the only viable presentism is tautological presentism, then the dispute between presentists about what exists and eternalists about what exists is of no philosophical interest and is a pseudo-dispute.  This 'possibility' cannot be dismissed out of hand. I suspect that David may be luring us in this direction.  We should also be clear that presentism about what exists is not the same as presentism about existence. This is a distinction the explanation of which must wait.

B. The second occurrence expresses what I will call disjunctively omnitemporal existence: the (putative) property a temporal item has if it either existed, or exists, or will exist, where each disjunct is tensed.  On this approach, the presentist thesis amounts to this:

Everything in time that either existed, or exists, or will exist, exists (present tense).

But this is manifestly false. Kepler existed but does not exist (present tense).  I would also add, alluding to David's 'grue' remark, that while there are disjunctive predicates, it does not follow that there are disjunctive properties.  Existence simpliciter cannot be a disjunctive property any more than being either anorexic or underinflated is a property. 'Either anorexic or underinflated' is true of some basketballs, but surely, or at least arguably, the predicate picks out no property.  Likewise, 'existed or exists or will exist' picks out no property even on the assumption that existence is a first-level property. 

C. There is also conjunctively omnitemporal existence: the (putative) property a temporal item has if it existed, and exists, and will exist, where each conjunct is tensed.  The everlasting (as opposed to eternal) God is both disjunctively and conjunctively omnitemporal.  To save bytes, I will leave it to the reader to work out why this suggestion won't help us with our problem.

D. The second occurrence of 'exists' expresses timeless existence.  This obviously won't work because Only what exists at present exists cannot mean that only what exists at present exists timelessly.  For anything that exists at present exists in time and is therefore precisely not timeless.  So the existence simpliciter of temporal beings cannot be timeless existence. Yet it must somehow be tenseless.   Indeed, it it would seem to have to be irreducibly tenseless, where a definition of tenselessness is irreducibly tenseless just in case the definiens contains no tensed expressions. But then the problem becomes nasty indeed: how can temporal items, items in time, items subject to intrinsic change, both substantial and accidental, exist tenselessly?

At this point we need to note, contrary to David's claim that there are no tenseless verbs, that there are tenseless uses of 'exists' and tenseless uses of the copulative and identitarian 'is.' That the number 7 exists, if true, is tenselessly true. That the number 7 is prime is also tenselessly true. If I tell you that 7 is a prime number, it would be a lame joke were you to reply, "You mean now?" The same goes for the proposition that 7 is 5 + 2. If you object that these truths are not tenselessly, but omnitemporally, true I will say that they are true in all worlds including those possible worlds in which there is no time, and are therefore atemporally true, and thus tenselessly true.

And similarly for the eternal as opposed to everlasting God. If God is outside of time, then all truths about him are timelessly tenseless.

The above examples assume that there are atemporal items, items outside of time.  I expect David to balk.  If he denies that there are atemporal items, I will have him consider the case in which I say to my class, "Hume is an empiricist." A smartass might object, "Hume cannot be an empiricist because he no longer exists." I would then explain that to say that Hume is an empiricist is to use 'is' tenselessly.  Similarly if  I report that for Hume all significant ideas derive from sensory impressions.  'Derive' here functions tenselessly. Same with 'are' in 'Cats are animals.'  The same goes for extinct species of critter. In 'Dinosaurs are animals,' 'are' functions tenselessly. Ditto for 'Unicorns are animals.'

So now I ask David: have I convinced you that there are tenseless uses of verbs in ordinary English?

E. Could we say that the second occurrence of 'exists' in Only what exists at present exists expresses the quantifier sense of 'exists'? In the quantifier sense, x exists =_df for some y, x = y. We would then be saying that 

Only an item that exists at present is such that something is that item

which is equivalent to

Only an item that exists at present is identical to something

which is equivalent to

Whatever is identical to something exists at present.

Socrates, however, is identical to something, namely himself, but he does not exist at present.  The trouble with the existence expressed by the existential quantifier is that it is general, not singular, existence. It is the existence that we attribute to a property or to a concept when we say that it it instantiated.  'Cats exist' says that the concept CAT has instances.  It is not about any particular cats, and because it is not, it does not attribute to any particular cat existence. 'Honesty exists' in ordinary English says that some people are honest, that the virtue honesty has instances. But of course those instances, honest men and women, must themselves exist. Their existence is singular existence. The latter, however, is presupposed by the so-called 'existential' quantifier and cannot be expressed by it.

Interim Conclusion   

Here is the predicament we are in. Presentism about what exists seems to make sense and seems to be a a substantive (non-tautological) thesis about a metaphysically weighty topic, that of the relation of time and existence: Only what exists at present exists. But the thesis collapses into a miserable tautology if the second occurrence of 'exists' is present-tensed.  So I went on a hunt for a sense of 'exists' that is not present-tensed.  But nothing I came up with fits the bill or The Bill.

David, I fear, will simply acquiesce in tautological  presentism, option (A) above. But 'surely' we are in the presence of a genuine metaphysical question!  Or so I will argue.

Your move, David.

The Less I Know of You . . .

. . . the more highly I can think of you. And the more highly I think of myself, the less I know of myself.

A Map of the Philosophy of Science

Contraindicated: Resisting Arrest

It may be harmful to your health.

The meme below makes a very important point. Everyone, but blacks in particular, need to learn that the police have legitimate authority and that their commands must be obeyed. Not to do so is not only illegal but highly imprudent. Michael Brown, Daunte Wright, and Adam Toledo all brought about their own deaths by their foolish  behavior. Similarly with Jacob Blake. He didn't die, but was severely injured. A cop is under no moral or legal obligation to wait for you to shoot at him before he shoots at you. 

 

Racism was not involved in these shootings. A cop will use deadly force against ANYONE who threatens him with deadly force. Race doesn't come into it, except insofar as blacks as a group are more criminally prone than other groups. To put the point as clearly as possible: while there are racist cops, and there are cops who commit murder under color of law, the vast majority of police shootings of blacks are not racist acts. Proportionally more blacks get shot because their criminality  is higher than that of Asians, whites, and other groups.  This is a well-known  fact. Bear in mind that  while there are racial facts, facts about race, there are no racist facts. This is a very simple distinction: even a 'liberal' is able to make it. Question is, will he?

 

 

 

Leftist 'Logic'

Remember the Mueller Report? It found no wrongdoing on the part of Donald Trump or his team. The long investigation, prosecuted with pit-bull intensity by enemies of the president, and at great taxpayer expense, failed to establish that he or they colluded with the Russians to influence the 2016 election.

 

THEREFORE, reason key Democrats and the boys and girls of MSNBC and the other leftist media outlets, TRUMP MUST BE IMPEACHED!

 

The Gospel of John, at 18:28 and 19:4, reports that Pontius Pilate found no fault with Jesus. "I find no basis for a charge against him." And yet, "When the high priest saw Jesus, they shouted 'Crucify him!" (John 19:6)

 

A witty comparison, no?

 

The leftist dumbass will not be impressed. "So you think Trump is Jesus?"

 

No, you idiot, but you think he is Hitler!

The Question of the Reality of God: Wittgensteinian Fideism No Answer

Substack latest.

Twitter and the War of the Oligarchs

Geoff Shullenberger at Compact:

Those fretting about the world’s wealthiest man gaining control over their favorite site have scarcely objected to the fact that the media outlets, think tanks, NGOs, and universities they work for comprise a patronage network bankrolled by a handful of other billionaires like eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Musk has done a service by exposing the function Twitter performs for this alliance of oligarchs and the professional classes, which Michael Lind terms “Progressivism, Inc.”

From the beginning, Twitter has been central to the agenda of this alliance, though that agenda looked very different only a decade or so ago. During the Arab Spring, for example, Western journalists, NGOs, and politicians rhapsodized about the democratizing potential of Twitter in much the same terms as Musk today. Indeed, many of the same reporters, bloggers, and columnists who now inveigh against Musk’s support for free speech hailed how free expression, enabled by platforms like Twitter, could bring down dictatorships.

At this earlier moment, Progressivism, Inc. saw social media as an opportunity to spread its values abroad: The free flow of information was seen as a way of attenuating the power of foreign governments in favor of a loose affiliation of Western state entities, NGOs, and media outlets that sought to expand their influence. More recently, in the face of the populist threats that emerged around 2016 at home, the same alliance has deployed censorship to reassert its hegemony. Thus, while elite ideological opinion on free speech has reversed, what remains constant is the attempt to control the circulation of information in favor of certain interests.

Both Musk and those who fear him position themselves as the defenders of democracy. In reality, the episode reveals how vacuous the term has become. In the final analysis, the conflict over Twitter is a war between rival factions of oligarchs. A less censorious Twitter is desirable in itself, as is the emergence of any meaningful challenge to the conformity that stifles cultural and intellectual life. But a less censorious internet also risks obscuring how power is really exercised in a world where the so-called public square is a patchwork of privatized ideological fiefdoms.

Two-Fisted Self-Pity: Anatole Broyard's Review of Richard Yates, YOUNG HEARTS CRYING

In what follows I correct the digitized version of Broyard's review which first appeared in The New York Times on 28 October 1984. Yates' novel appeared in the same year. Blake Bailey masterfully recounts the book's reception in A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates (Picador 2003), pp. 529-541, with special attention to Broyard's trenchant and somewhat mean-spirited review. Yates made it as a novelist; despite his considerable literary promise, Broyard never did and his envy shows. 

Broyard was quite a character, "the greatest cocksman in New York for a decade" (Bailey, 201, quoting a former girlfriend of Broyard) and "the only spade among the Beat Generation” as he is described here. A light-skinned black, he tried to pass himself off as white.

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Anatole Broyard is an editor of The Book Review.

YOUNG HEARTS CRYING

By Richard Yates. 347 pp. New York: Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte Press. $16.95.

THERE seems to be an element of relief in some of the critical praise given to the novels and short stories of Richard Yates. William Styron called ''Revolutionary Road,'' Yates's first novel, ''classic'' and Ann Beattie used the same word for ''Liars in Love,'' his second collection of stories. ''Realistic'' and ''craft'' are two more terms that are often applied to his work. The way these words are used is interesting: they are the visible half of an implicit opposition, suggesting that most novels and stories are not so conspicuously classical, realistic and well crafted.

Mr. Yates is seen as turning the tide, or holding the line, against a general moral and esthetic deterioration. We know where we are with him: in the American mainstream. Hemingway and Fitzgerald are waving from the banks of the stream and they can be heard in Mr. Yates's pages. Like Hemingway's heroes, Mr. Yates's male protagonists worry about their masculinity and talk at length about the integrity of art. Like Fitzgerald's men, they care about style and status and drink a lot to keep up their courage.

Mr. Yates's heroes are classical in the nature of their adversary relation to culture, for it's not the war in Vietnam or the civil rights struggle that arouses their moral indignation, but the mediocrity, emptiness and conformity - all Mr. Yates's words - of American life itself. When, in ''Revolutionary Road,'' Frank Wheeler talks of throwing up his job at the Knox Business Machine Company and ''finding himself'' in Europe, he is closer to Henry Miller and the expatriates of the 1920's than to the people of John Updike, John Cheever or Donald and Frederick Barthelme. In fact, he may be closer to Theodore Dreiser and Thomas Wolfe.

 

Yes, I Repeat Myself

Leftists constantly repeat their brazen lies in the hope that eventually they will be taken for truths. So we of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable need constantly to repeat truths. Not our truths, for there is no such thing as 'our' truth or 'my' truth or 'your' truth.' Truth is not subject to ownership. If you have it, you have it without possessing it.

 

So speak the truth and speak it often. Don't be afraid of repeating yourself. Living well is impossible without repetition. All learning, all teaching, all physical culture, all musicianship require repetition. No mastery of anything, no improvement in anything, is possible without repetition. Can you play that riff the same way every time? If not, keep practicing. 

 

By practicing blows, whether verbal or physical, you learn how to land effective ones.

Easter Monday Local Ramble

Out the front door, plenty of elevation gain and loss. Hike much, stay sane. The boys acquitted themselves well. Photo credit: Dennis M.

Ratzinger on the Resurrection of the Body

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You will note that in my writings I use the gender-neutral 'man' and 'he.'  It is important to stand in defense of the mother tongue. She is under vicious assault these days. You owe a lot to your mother; show her some respect. On Easter Sunday and on every day. Anyone who takes offense at standard English takes offense inappropriately.

Dissent = Hate = Violence

An 'equation' of the lunatic Left.

 

This takes the cake. My reasoned dissent from the propositions the leftist enunciates is taken by the leftist to be identical to hatred of the leftist as a person. Having confused proposition with person, the 'progressive' knucklehead goes on to conflate emotional state with overt action.

 

The Left is becoming 'progressively' more stupid with each passing day.

Holy Saturday Night at the Oldies

Herewith, six definite decouplings of rock and roll from sex and drugs.

Norman Greenbaum, Spirit in the Sky

Johnny Cash, Personal Jesus. This is one powerful song.

Clapton and Winwood, Presence of the Lord. Why is Clapton such a great guitarist? Not because of his technical virtuosity, his 'chops,' but because he uses them to say something. You don't agree? De gustibus non est disputandum!

George Harrison, My Sweet Lord

George Harrison, Hear Me Lord

George Harrison, All Things Must Pass.  Harrison was the Beatle with depth. Lennon the radical, McCartney the romantic, Starr the regular guy.

Some Very Good Masters

Come May, I will have been on a  Richard Yates jag for a year.  What follows is my correction of the digitized version of Yates' essay "Some Very Good Masters" which first appeared in The New York Times on 19 April 1981. Yates explains what he learned about writing from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and from Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. He also supplies examples of T. S. Eliot's "objective correlative."

 

This article is credited with bringing Yates out of literary eclipse.

More Yates quotations here.

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IT must have been the movies of the 1930's more than any other influence that got me into the habit of thinking like a writer. I wasn't a bookish child; reading was such hard work for me that I avoided it whenever possible. But I wasn't exactly the rough-and ready type either, and so the movies filled a double need: They gave me an awful lot of cheap story material and a good place to hide.

When I was about 14, I started submitting movie-haunted stories to my English teachers, as if to prove there was something I could do, but it wasn't until three or four years later that reading, both fiction and poetry, began to sweep the movies into a dark and vaguely shameful corner of my mind, where they have remained ever since. I almost never go to a movie now, and have been known to explain loftily, if not quite at the top of my lungs, that this is because movies are for children.

Wittgenstein on Christianity

A Good Friday meditation.

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Last year's Good Friday Substack meditation.

Ars vivendi longa, sed vita brevis

Life is too short to master the art of life. That is surely the case for most. A few old souls are exceptions to the rule. 

Self-Deprecation

A modicum of self-deprecation,  judiciously deployed, will enhance your relations with others. Too much will earn contempt, and the opposite hostility.

Progress in Philosophy

I am making progress in philosophy, which is not to say that philosophy is making progress in me.

 

The Bootless Max Boot on Elon Musk

The bootless Max Boot has torpedoed his own boat. (Boot in German means boat.) I used to read him and had a good opinion of him, but that was before he lost his mind as so many did when Donald J. Trump was elected.

An excellent tweet if you replace 'democracy' with 'institution-wide hard-left hegemony.' 

Musk understands how to battle the Left. You cannot reason with leftists and you cannot appeal to their nonexistent or ill-formed consciences.  You have to outspend them and defund them. The 'lean green' is the currency of political warfare. And don't imagine it is not a war.

The Musk takeover of Twitter is the best thing thing that could happen to Twitter and the noble cause of free speech and open inquiry.

More on the Reality of the Past: Reply to Brightly

 In an earlier thread, David Brightly offers the following penetrating comment:

My birth certificate purports to record the event of my birth which occurred on such and such a day to such and such parents, etc. For an event or process to exist is for it to be ongoing or occurring. So my birth, being wholly past, no longer exists. This does not mean it never occurred or never existed, just that the passage [of] time brought that event or process to an end. Bill would argue that if the passage of time annihilated my birth then my birth certificate would record nothing (no real event). This could only be true under a strict and literal interpretation of 'annihilation' as making a thing (and the world) as if [it] never existed. Elsewhere Bill calls this 'absolute annihilation'. It seems to me, however, that [E. J.] Lowe is operating with a weaker notion of annihilation as a bringing to an end---a mere ceasing to be rather than a ceasing to having been.

I too believe that the past is (was?) real, but I suspect my understanding of this claim differs from Bill's. Bill appears to contrast 'reality' with 'nothingness'. I contrast 'real' with 'imaginary'. We need to look into this difference of view. Arguably a blank birth certificate records no event. A falsified birth certificate records an event, but an imaginary or unreal one.

I will first summarize our points of agreement and then try to locate the bone of contention.

David and I agree about birth certificates. Some are blank, some are forged/falsified, and some record actual births, and in most cases wholly past actual birth events.  We agree that for an event or process to exist (present tense) is for it to be ongoing or occurring. We agree that there are events. We agree that some events no longer exist in the sense that they are not now occurring, but did occur.  We agree that there is an important distinction between what did exist and what never existed. (For example, Kierkegaard's engagement to Regine Olsen did exist whereas his marriage to her never existed.) And we both believe that the past is real. That is, we both assertively utter tokens of 'The past is real.' But I am pretty sure that the contents of our assertions, i.e., the propositions (thoughts) we assert when we make those assertions, are different. To anticipate, I believe that past items are real in that they exist simpliciter.  I suspect that David will balk at this and say that past items are real in that they existed, and leave it at that. I will explain existence simpliciter in a moment.

Note that when David informs us of his belief about the reality of the past, he  tellingly waffles in his formulation: "I too believe that the past is (was?) real . . . " David is trying to get by with ordinary tensed English. He senses, however, that to say that the past is (present tense) real is false, indeed, absurd (self-contradictory). Bear in mind that this discussion is about the reality of what is wholly past. Surely it would be absurd to say that what is wholly past is present. But if he says that the wholly past was real, then he says something tautological.  Of course the past was real.  If we stick with tensed English we won't be able to formulate the problem.

To locate the bone of contention in the philosophy of time over which presentists and 'eternalists' fight, we must navigate, if we can, between the Scylla of self-contradiction and Charybdis of tautology.   Mixed metaphors aside, the issue is whether the past exists simpliciter. When I say that the past is real, I mean that past items exist simpliciter. I do not mean that past items exist now -- which would be self-contradictory -- or that they existed -- which  would be trivial. What I mean, and what the dispute is about, cannot be understood without this notion of existence simpliciter. And the issue is meaningful only if this notion is meaningful. So what is existence simpliciter?

E. J. Lowe's (correct) answer is that to exist simpliciter is to be a part of reality as a whole. (Monist article, 284) To deploy a Jamesian trope, to exist simpliciter is to be part of the "furniture of the world." Or you could say that to exist simpliciter is to be listed in the final ontological inventory.  Equivalently, to exist simpliciter is to be in the range of our logical quantifiers when they are taken 'wide open.'  To exist simpliciter is simply to exist.  Existence simpliciter abstracts from when an item exists if it exists in time, and indeed whether an item is in time at all. 

So the issue cannot be whether the wholly past is real or was real.  The issue is whether the wholly past exists simpliciter.  Presentists deny this. They maintain that, with respect to temporal items, everything that exists simpliciter exists at present, and thus that nothing non-present exists simpliciter.  (The present in question is what William James calls  the "specious" or short-term present.) The presentist thesis is not trivially true. It is not the thesis that  whatever exists (present tense) exists (present tense). That is of course true, but of no philosophical interest. Presentism is the metaphysically substantive claim that whatever exists simpliciter exists (present tense).  And of course the converse holds as well for the presentist: whatever exists (present tense) exists simpliciter. Presentism is a biconditional thesis. 

David needs to tell me whether he accepts the notion of existence simpliciter.  It is of course not my invention but is  standard in the literature.  David also needs to tell me whether he agrees with me that the thesis of presentism cannot even be formulated without the notion of existence simpliciter.  By  'presentism' I of course intend a metaphysically  substantive thesis about the 'relation' of time and existence, not the mere tautology that whatever exists (present tense) exists (present tense) and such related trivialities as 'What no longer exists did exist but does not exist' and 'What still exists, did exist and exists (present tense).'    

Let us now consider a concrete example, Winston Churchill.  The gross facts or Moorean data are not in dispute. WC existed, but does not now exist.  So far, no metaphysics. Just ordinary tensed English, and a bit of uncontroversial historical knowledge.  Reflecting on the data, we note that some of what is said now about WC is true, and some false.  WC is now the logical subject of both true and false predications (predicative statements).  And this despite the fact that WC does not now exist. At this point a philosophical problem arises for the presentist. On presentism, only that which presently exists exists simpliciter. What did exist and what will exist does not exist simpliciter. How can something that does not exist simpliciter be the logical subject of such presently true past-tensed  contingent affirmative statements  as 'WC smoked cigars'? This is the question to which presentism has no good answer.  It would be a very bad answer to say that the past-tensed sentence is true now because WC existed.  For on presentism, WC is nothing; he is not just nothing now -- which is trivially true -- but simply nothing, i.e., nothing simpliciter. And if WC is simply nothing, then he is not 'there' (read existentially, not locatively) to be the logical subject of predications.  I am assuming the following principle. 

Veritas sequitur esse. (VSE) Truth follows being in the sense that, necessarily, if a statement about a thing is true, then that thing exists simpliciter. There are no truths about nonexistent 'things.'  I take the principle just enunciated to be very secure, epistemically speaking, though not self-evident. (Meinong did not find it self-evident; indeed he rejected it.)  Accepting the VSE principle as I do, I say that WC exists simpliciter and that therefore presentism is false.

What then are David and I disagreeing about? We agree that WC is actual, not merely possible, and real as opposed to fictional/imaginary.  So there is a clear sense in which we both accept the reality of the past. The difference between us may be that David hasn't thought through what it means to say of a past item that it is real.  He contents himself with platitudes.  No doubt WC is real as opposed to imaginary or fictional. But what is it to be real given that (a) WC is wholly past and that (b) presentism is true?

The Fearful are Easy to Control

Is the sheep your totemic animal? A sheep in a mask? A dose of Emerson may help if it is not too late.

"He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear." (Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay "Courage")

(I note that the pronoun as it functions in the quoted line has neither an antecedent nor a gender. So while grammatically it is a masculine pronoun, logically it is neither.) 

Earning and Living

The trick is to earn a living without living to earn.

The Philosopher and the Christian

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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Rydell Remembered

Bobby Rydell has died at age 79.

In the late '50s, early '60s a number of Italian-American singers changed their names to avoid anti-Italian prejudice and to assimilate. Rydell was among them. Assimilation, however, is a thing of the past, and the current lack thereof is a good part of our nation's decline.  But I digress. 

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

Bobby Rydell started out Robert Ridarelli.  Forget Him.  Volare. "Letsa fly . . . ."  We Got Love.

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

Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero, better known as Connie Francis. My Darling Clementine. Never on Sunday.  

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

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

Joseph Di Nicola (Joey Dee and the Starlighters), Peppermint Twist, with an intro by Dwight D. Eisenhower!  This video shows what the dude looked like. Resembles a super short Joe Pesci.  What Kind of Love is This?

Husserl, Thomas, and Sister Adelgundis

Substack latest. A meditation on Husserl's birthday.

Political Nullification

Two short articles by Tom Woods.

What is it?

Answers to Objections

The reflexive response of the typical leftist will be to denounce as 'racist' anyone who so much as asks what political nullification is. 

In the surveillance state toward which we are drifting, or at which we have already arrived, the innocuous act of typing 'nullification' into a search engine will place one under suspicion.  

Servility Will Cower to Force

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America:

For my part, I am persuaded that in all governments, whatever their nature may be, servility will cower to force, and adulation will follow power. The only means to prevent men from degrading themselves is to invest no one with that unlimited authority which is the sure method of debasing them. (Quoted in Zbigniew Janowski, Homo Americanus, p. 15)

No man, and no group of men. We need checks and balances all up and down the line.  

And yes the people are ovine and servile and will cower to power. That has been amply demonstrated of late by the masses' mindless donning of useless masks. Don we now our fey apparel! Let us signal our specious virtue and adherence to the party line of Lord Fauci and his minions.  And when the party line shifts, we shift with it!

The other day I espied a lady, driving alone, windows rolled up, wearing a big black mask. But I was in a charitable mood. I thought to myself, "Well, maybe she just left a doctor's office where entrance required the fashion accessory in question, and she forgot to take it off." But then I waxed rather less charitable. "Is she so oblivious to the mechanics of respiration that she would leave that rag around her face when alone?"

As for Dr. Fauci, RFK Jr. has his number. You all should read his The Real Anthony Fauci.  Look it up. Buy it. Study it.  The author's an outlier, a decent Dem, like Tulsi Gabbard.

E. J. Lowe's Presentism and the Reality of the Past

We lost the brilliant E. J. Lowe (1950-2014) at an early age. We best honor a philosopher by thinking his thoughts, sympathetically, but critically. Lowe writes,

When we say that Caesar has ceased to exist, what we really should mean is that he is no longer a part of reality at all, any more than Sherlock Holmes is, in fact, a part of reality . . . . This, of course, raises the question of how we can so much as talk about Caesar now that he no longer exists simpliciter -- how we can speak about 'that which is not.' It also raises the question of how we can still distinguish between the ontological status of Caesar and that of Holmes, and resist saying that Caesar has 'become' a fictional object in something like the sense in which Holmes is. But these questions are not, perhaps, so difficult to answer, once we understand aright the metaphysical picture that is being proposed. With regard to the second question, we can still say that Caesar really did exist, unlike Holmes. And with regard to the first, we can say that the proper name 'Julius Caesar' is perfectly meaningful, not because it now has an existing referent, but because its use is historically traceable back to a referent that did exist -- pretty much in line with the 'causal' theory of reference advanced by Saul Kripke. ("How Real is Substantial Change?" The Monist, vol. 89, no. 3, 2006, p. 285. Italics in original.)

What no longer exists did exist but does not now exist.  That's just what 'no longer exists' means. But is it true that what no longer exists does not exist at all? Lowe answers in the affirmative.  Of  course, what no longer exists does not exist now, but that is tautologically true and of no metaphysical interest.  Lowe is telling us something of metaphysical interest about time, existence, and their 'relation.' He is telling us that what no longer exists and is wholly past has been annihilated. Not only does a past item not exist now, it simply does not exist: it does not exist simpliciter as we say in the trade. It is no longer a member of the sum total of what exists. When a thing passes away it falls off the cliff of Being into the abyss of Nonbeing.  And so I cannot say, now and with truth, of Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) that he would have been 100 years old this year had he lived. But I just did! I referred to him successfully and I made a true statement about him, that very person. And what were the birthday celebrations in his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts about if they were not celebrating his birth? However things stand with respect to the future, the past surely seems to have a share in reality.  If the past has no share in reality, what do historians study?  Will you tell me that they study the causal traces in the present of past events? But if the past has no share in reality, if the past is not, then those traces are traces of nothing, and the historian is not an historian but a student of some weird merely present things.  Will you tell me that the past WAS? Well, that's surely true, but not to the point. The question is whether what WAS has a share in reality as opposed to being annihilated, reduced to nothing, by the passage of time. 

In general, what should a Lowian presentist say about past-tensed contingent truths? There are plenty of them, whether we know them or not, and whether or not the things they are about have left any causal traces in the present.  And they are true now. It is the case that Julius Caesar was assassinated.  What makes it true now that Caesar was assassinated?  Surely nothing that now exists makes it true, and if only what exists now exists simpliciter, then nothing makes true contingent past-tensed truths.  Some say that such truths are brute truths: they are just true without anything that explains their being true, or that grounds their being true, or that 'makes' them true. This is a very bad answer as I could easily show; in any case it appears not to be Lowe's answer given his acceptance of truthmakers:

I should also reveal that I am an adherent of the truthmaker principle, according to which all truths -- all contingent positive truths -- require the existence of a truthmaker; something which, by existing, makes them true. (288, bolding added)

On the face of it, there is a tension, if not a contradiction, in Lowe's position. His presentism commits him to saying that nothing that now exists could serve as the truthmaker of a past-tensed positive (affirmative) truth such as the one expressed by 'Julius Caesar existed.' But if all contingent affirmative truths need truthmakers, as per the quotation, then so does the truth that Julius Caesar existed, in which case Lowe is telling us both that past-tensed truths must have, and cannot have, truthmakers.  That certainly appears to be a contradiction. Is there a way around it? For maximal logical clarity, I cast the puzzle in the mold of an aporetic triad:

a) All contingent affirmative truths need truthmakers.
b) 'Julius Caesar existed' expresses a contingent affirmative truth.
c) 'Julius Caesar existed' cannot have a truthmaker.

This trio is collectively inconsistent: its members cannot all be true. Since (b) records a pre-philosophical datum, it cannot be philosophically denied. (An historian might attempt to show it false, but then I would simply change the example.) So the question boils down to whether we accept the truthmaker principle as explained by Lowe (to which explanation I have no objection)  or accept instead Lowe's (non-ersatzist) presentism. (Lowe rejects ersatzism.) We cannot accept both, as Lowe appears to do.  Thus I smell a logical contradiction.  Or is this an olfactory hallucination on my part? 

Lowe tells us that the proposition that Julius Caesar exists "is now false but was once true." (289) For "it formerly had a truthmaker -- namely, Julius Caesar himself -- but no longer does." (289)  If a proposition can change its truth value from true to false, then, given the truthmaker principle, the proposition in question had a truthmaker, but has one no longer. Fine, how is this relevant? The question concerns the truthmaker of the proposition that Julius Caesar existed. The question is  not whether the proposition that Caesar exists had a truthmaker.  The question is: what makes it true that Caesar existed is true? What makes it true now that Caesar existed can't be the fact that Caesar exists had a truthmaker but has one no longer.  For what makes it true now that the proposition that Caesar exists had a truthmaker? Nothing at all if presentism is true. 

Lowe maintains that a truthmaker is "something which, by existing, makes them [positive contingent truths] true."  Truthmakers, then, must exist to do their jobs: there are no nonexistent truthmakers. But on presentism only what exists at present exists simpliciter. Wholly past truthmakers do not exist. So it is simply irrelevant to invoke them if the question concerns the truthmakers of presently true past-tensed truths.

As I see it, Lowe cannot  solve what is called the 'grounding problem,' a problem that ineluctably arises for him because of his (laudable) commitment to truthmakers.  The problem, simply put, is that past-tensed contingent affirmative truths (true propositions) need ontological grounds, i.e., truthmakers. He cannot solve the problem because of his creationist-annihilationist version of presentism.

I now turn to the other problem Lowe mentions in the passage quoted above, the problem of  referring to what no longer exists given the presentist view that what no longer exists does not exist at all.   Lowe tells us that "the proper name 'Julius Caesar' is perfectly meaningful, not because it now has an existing referent, but because its use is historically traceable back to a referent that did exist . . . ." Lowe mentions Kripke's causal theory of reference.  It is difficult to see how there could be any historical tracing if all of past history has been annihilated by the passage of time. 

More needs to be said. But brevity is the soul of blog, as some wit once opined.

'Equity' and Merit

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Your Vehicle

Keep it roadworthy. But it's only a vehicle. And life's only a road.

And don't forget to take it easy. We're going to the end of the line.

Sonoran Spring

Photo credit: Wifey

Counterexamples and Outliers

An exception to a universal generalization is a counterexample that refutes the generalization. All you need is one. Generic statements cannot, however, be similarly refuted. 'Nuns don't smoke cigars' is a generic statement. If you turn up a nun who smokes cigars I won't take you to have refuted the generic statement. I'll dismiss the exception as an 'outlier.' 

Memo to self: develop this line of thinking and then apply it to 'hot button' issues such as race. Is Candace Owens representative of black females or is she an 'outlier'? And to which generic statements is she an outlier?  You won't touch this question, will you? Not with an eleven-foot pole, which is the pole you use to touch questions you won't touch  with a ten-foot pole. 

See my aptly appellated entry, Generic Statements, for more on generic statements.