Maverick Philosopher

Why a Philosopher Should Meditate and Why it is Difficult for a Philosopher to Meditate

If a philosopher seeks the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, then he should do so by all available routes.  Qua philosopher he operates in the aether of abstract thought, on the plane of discursive reason, but he cannot consistently with his calling ignore other avenues of advance.  It is after all the truth that is sought, not merely the truth as philosophically accessible.  There is surely no justification for the identification of truth with philosophically accessible truth.

Meditation is difficult for intellectual types because of their tendency to overvalue their mental facility and cleverness. They are good at dialectics and mental jugglery, and people tend to value and overvalue what they are good at. Philosophers can become as obsessed with their cleverness and gamesmanship  as body builders with muscular hypertrophy.  Indeed, it is not too much of a stretch to say that the typical analytic philosopher suffers from hypertrophy of the critical/discursive/dialectical faculty.  He can chop logic, he can mentally and verbally jabber, jabber, jabber, and scribble, scribble, scribble, but he can't be silent, listen, attend. He would sneer, to his own detriment, at this thought of Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 107):

The capacity to drive away a thought once and for all is the gateway to eternity.

Compare this striking line from Evagrius Ponticus (The Praktikos and Chapters of Prayer, tr. Bamberger, Cistercian Publications, 1972, p. 66, #70):

For prayer is the rejection of concepts.

If a philosopher seeks the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, then he should do so by all available routes.  Qua philosopher he operates in the aether of abstract thought, on the plane of discursive reason, but he cannot consistently with his calling ignore other avenues of advance.  It is after all the truth that is sought, not merely the truth as philosophically accessible.  There is surely no justification for the identification of truth with philosophically accessible truth.

Meditation is difficult for intellectual types because of their tendency to overvalue their mental facility and cleverness. They are good at dialectics and mental jugglery, and people tend to value and overvalue what they are good at. Philosophers can become as obsessed with their cleverness and gamesmanship  as body builders with muscular hypertrophy.  Indeed, it is not too much of a stretch to say that the typical analytic philosopher suffers from hypertrophy of the critical/discursive/dialectical faculty.  He can chop logic, he can mentally and verbally jabber, jabber, jabber, and scribble, scribble, scribble, but he can't be silent, listen, attend. He would sneer, to his own detriment, at this thought of Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 107):

The capacity to drive away a thought once and for all is the gateway to eternity.

Compare this striking line from Evagrius Ponticus (The Praktikos and Chapters of Prayer, tr. Bamberger, Cistercian Publications, 1972, p. 66, #70):

For prayer is the rejection of concepts.

On Continental Philosophy: Response to a German Reader

This is an edited re-post (re-entry?) from 21 February 2017 to satisfy current interest. Against my better judgment, I am allowing comments.

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

The following from a German sociologist (my comments are in blue):

Perhaps you know the old joke: Analytic philosophers think that continental philosophy is not sufficiently clear; continental philosophers think that analytic philosophy is not sufficient.

Having just reread the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, I don't see Kant as an analytic philosopher. Hegel and Nietzsche certainly belong to the continental tradition. And none of the philosophers of the 20th century, who really matter to me, can be called an analytic philosopher. Doesn't "analytic" simply mean after Wittgenstein and in his tradition? 

BV: As I see it, there was no analytic-Continental split before the 20th century. So classifying Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche in terms of that split is only marginally meaningful. But it is safe to say that Kant is more congenial to analytic philosophers than Hegel and Nietzsche are. 

When did the split come about and what is it about?

If I were were to select two writings that best epitomize the depth of the Continental-analytic clash near the time of its outbreak, they would be Heidegger's 1929 What is Metaphysics? and Carnap's 1932 response, "On the Overcoming of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Language."  In fairness to Carnap, let us note that his Erkenntnis piece is more than a response to Heidegger inasmuch as it calls into question the meaningfulness of all metaphysics. And in fairness to Heidegger, we should note that he thinks he is doing something more radical than metaphysics. Metaphysics for Heidegger is  onto-theology.  Metaphysics thinks Being (das Sein) but always in reference to beings (das Seiende); it does not think Being in its difference from beings. The latter is Heidegger's project.

The following are widely regarded as Continental philosophers: Franz Brentano, Alexius von Meinong, Kasimir Twardowski, Edmund Husserl, Adolf Reinach, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, Roman Ingarden, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Nicolai Hartmann, Gabriel Marcel, Ortega y Gasset, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus. And of course there are others that are so regarded.

Note that the above are all Europeans.  But being European is not what makes them 'Continental.'  Otherwise Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Rudolf Carnap would have to be lumped in with them.  And of course there are Continental philosophers who do not hail from Europe. So what makes the above authors 'Continental' as opposed to 'analytic'?

It is not easy to say, which fact supplies a reason to not take too seriously talk of 'Continental' versus 'analytic.'

Note that all of the Continentals I mentioned  engage in analysis, some in very close, very careful  analysis.  (Ever read Husserl's Logical Investigations?)  And please don't say that they don't analyze language.  Ever read Brentano?  Gustav Bergmann accurately describes Brentano as "the first linguistic philosopher." (Realism, 234) Roderick Chisholm's paraphrastic approach was influenced significantly by Brentano. No  one would lump Chisholm in with the Continentals.

Will you say that the Continentals mentioned  didn't pay close attention to logic?  That's spectacularly false. Even for Heidegger!  Ever read his dissertation on psychologism in logic?

Perhaps you could say that the Continentals mentioned did not engage significantly with the ground-breaking work of Frege, widely regarded as the greatest logician since Aristotle. I think that would be true. But does this difference suffice to distinguish between Continental and analytic?  I don't think so: there are plenty of philosophers who write in a decidedly analytic style who do not engage with Frege, and some of them oppose Frege. Take Fred Sommers.  You wouldn't call him a Continental philosopher.  And while he engages the ideas of Frege, he vigorously opposes them in his very impressive attempt at resurrecting traditional formal logic.  And yet he would be classified as analytic.

A Matter of Style or of Substance?

According to Michael Dummett,

What distinguishes analytical philosophy, in its diverse manifestations, from other schools is the belief, first, that a philosophical account of thought can be attained through a philosophical account of language, and, secondly, that a comprehensive account can only be so attained.

[. . .]

On my characterisation, therefore, [Gareth] Evans was no longer an analytical philosopher.  He was, indeed, squarely in the analytical tradition: the three pillars on which his book [The Varieties of Reference, Oxford, 1982] rests are Russell, Moore and Frege. Yet it is only as belonging to the tradition -- as adopting a certain philosophical style and as appealing to certain writers rather than to others -- that he remains a member of the analytical school.  (Origins of Analytical Philosophy, Harvard UP, 1993)

For Dummett, then, what make a philosopher analytic is not the style in which he writes:  clear, precise, careful, explicitly logical with premises and inferences clearly specified, free of literary pretentiousness, name-dropping, rhetorical questions, and generally the sort of bullshitting that one finds in writers like John Caputo and Alain Badiou.  Nor is it the topics he writes about or the authorities he cites.  What makes the analytic philosopher are the twin axioms above mentioned.

The trouble with Dummett's criterion is that it is intolerably stipulative if what we are after is a more or less lexical definition of how 'analytic' and 'Continental' are actually used.  An approach that rules out Gareth Evans and Roderick Chisholm and Gustav Bergmann and Reinhardt Grossmann and so many others cuts no ice in my book. (How's that for a mixed metaphor?)

A Matter of Politics?

I don't think so. Look again at my list.  Sartre was a decided leftist, a Stalinist in his later phase.  And Camus was on the Left.  But everyone else on my list was either apolitical or on the Right.  Heidegger was a National Socialist. Latter-day Continentals, though, definitely slouch Leftward.

A Matter of Academic Politics?

This may be what the Continental versus analytic split comes down to more than anything else.  As Blaise Pascal says, with some exaggeration, "All men naturally hate one another."  To which I add, with some exaggeration: and are always looking for ways to maintain and increase the enmity.  If you are entranced with Heidegger you are going to hate the Carnapian analytic bigot who refuses to read Heidegger but mocks him anyway.  Especially when the bigot stands in the way of career success.  Although so many Continentals are slopheads, there is no asshole like an analytic asshole. That's been my experience.

A Matter of Religion?

No, there are both theists and atheists on my list.  And of course there are plenty of analytic philosophers who are theists. Most of them, however, are not.

A Matter of Attitude toward Science?

This has something to do with the split.  You can be a Continental philosopher and a traditional theist (von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, et al.) and you can be a Continental philosopher and a conservative (Ortega y Gasset), but is there any case of a Continental philosopher who is a logical positivist or who genuflects before the natural sciences in the scientistic manner?  I don't think so.  I am, however, open to correction.

Interim Conclusion

Talk of 'analytic' and 'Continental' philosophy is not particularly useful.  It would be better to speak  of good and bad philosophy. But what are the marks of good philosophy?  That's a post for another occasion.

Back to my correspondent:

I see philosophy more in terms of art than in terms of science. This is not saying that some arguments are not better than others or that one cannot distinguish different degrees of plausibility. But the overall conception (what Heidegger calls "Seinsverständnis) is more - and something essentially different - than the sum of of plausibilities or the logic consistency of the argumentation. There is, or so it appears to me, a 'channelling' of truth that resembles more the mystical experience than the scientific recognition. Of course I've read Wittgenstein, but why should I spend precious life time reading, say, Gilbert Ryle or Saul Kripke, when I can read Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik?

BV: As I am sure my reader knows, Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic) has been dismissed as Begriffsdichtung, conceptual poetry.  So I am not surprised that he sees philosophy more in terms of art than in terms of science.  His attitude is defensible: why read Kripke who is of interest only to specialists in logic and the philosophy of language and who has no influence on anything beyond those narrow precincts when you can read Hegel and come thereby to understand the dialectical thinking which, via Marx and Lenin, transformed the world?  

There is also the problem that the various attempts to bring philosophy onto the "sure path of science" (Kant) have all failed miserably despite the Herculean efforts of thinkers such as Edmund Husserl.  He attempted to make of philosophy strenge Wissenschaft, but he could not get even one of his brilliant students to follow him into his transcendental phenomenology.  (I don't consider Eugen Fink to be a counterexample.) There is no reason to think that philosophy will ever enter upon the sure path of science.   This is a reason to content oneself with the broader, looser, fuzzier approach of the Continentals.

Only if philosophy could be transformed into strenge Wissenschaft would we perhaps be justified in putting all our efforts into this project and eschewing the satisfaction of our needs for an overarching and spiritually satisfying Weltanschauung; we have no good reason to think philosophy will ever be so transformed; ergo, etc.

When [Theodor Wiesengrund]  Adorno was in Oxford, he wrote in a letter home: "Here it's always just about arguments." Most of his colleagues there did not even understand what he was missing. And that's the divide!

BV: That is indeed a good part of what the divide is all about. 

Well, of course this ignorance of the analytic tradition has in my case also to do with cultural nationalism. The philosophical departments here are more and more forgetting about the great German tradition. Thinkers like Hegel or Schelling, let alone Heidegger, are hardly taught anymore. I'm against this, I'm Deutsch and proud of it. Actually I want - and for me that's another reason to be against illegal immigration - Germany to become again a hotspot of art and philosophy!

BV:  I agree! When as a young man I spent a year in Freiburg im Breisgau, I was there to study Kant and Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger.  To my romantic young self Germany was, in the words of Heinrich Heine, das Land von Dichter und Denker, the land of poets and thinkers.  You Germans can be justifiably proud of your great tradition. Without a doubt, Kant belongs in the philosophical pantheon along with Plato and Aristotle. It is indeed a shame that the analysts are suppressing your great tradition.

As for illegal immigration, if looks from here as if Angela Merkel is a disaster for Germany. Language, borders, and culture are three things every nation has a right to protect and preserve.  There is nothing xenophobic or racist about it. 

Is Philosophy Justified in a Time of Crisis?

The country is unraveling, and you sit in your ivory tower pondering arcane questions about time and existence?  How is that a justifiable use of your time, energy, and brain power?

Here is my answer. Or rather one of them.

There have always been crises.  Human history is just one crisis after another.  The 20th Century was a doosy: two world wars, economic depression, the rise of unspeakably evil totalitarian states, genocide, the nuclear annihilation of whole cities, the Cold War that nearly led to World War III (remember the Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962?), and then after the Evil Empire was quashed, the resurrection of radical Islam. I could go on.

Should we conclude that philosophy has never been justified?  But then science has never been justified and much of the rest of what we consider high culture.  For they have their origin in philosophy.

Perhaps you don't agree with my 'origins' claim.  Still, plenty in life is of value regardless  of its utility in mitigating whatever crisis happens to be in progress.  Or do you think Beethoven should have been a social worker?

And what makes you think that your activism will make a damned bit of difference?  The world is a mess; it always has been.  You are not going to change it. Live for what is beyond it. Strive for the Higher Things.

But the really fundamental error is to think that philosophy needs justification in terms of something external to it. I demolish this notion with the precision and trenchancy you have come to expect in Should One Stoop to a Defense of Philosophy or the Humanities? 

How Could God be Justice itself?

David Gudeman writes; I reply:

 

George Berkeley was the first author who really shook my confidence in my existing world view. Before I read Berkeley, I had a Mr. Johnson-style contempt of physical idealism; after reading Berkeley, I realized that I had been naive--not because Berkeley was necessarily right, but because once I suppressed my presuppositions, I found him hard to refute, and came to realize how logically futile Mr. Johnson's refutation was.

Well, no one calls it 'physical idealism.' Stick with 'Berkeleyan idealism.' And of course it cannot be refuted ad lapidem, by kicking a stone.  Berkeley was not an eliminativist about material objects.  He did not maintain that rocks and trees do not exist; he did not question WHETHER they are; he offered an unusual ontological account of WHAT they are, namely ideas in the divine mind. 

 

I offer this story as evidence of my good faith in the following, because I know I have irritated you before by bringing up topics like this, and very much do not want to do so again. In particular, I do have hopes that there is something to be found here if only I can come to grasp it.

 

With that, I'd like to ask you if you can explain what you mean by phrases like "God is the measure of Justice. God is Justice itself." (From this entry.)

 

To me this looks like a couple of category errors. God is a person, a measure of justice is a measure, and justice is a quality. How can these three be equated in any literal sense? [. . .]

Fair questions. 

 

A. I take it that you will grant me that God is a wholly just person.  Now assume the following: God is unique; there are non-divine persons; none of the latter are wholly just.  You and I are non-divine persons, and neither of us is wholly just, although one of us may be more just than the other.  There are degrees of justice in non-divine (created) persons. Now it makes sense to say that God sets the standard with respect to justice or being just.  God is the measure of justice in that he is just to the highest degree, and we fail to measure up, to different degrees.

 

It therefore makes sense to say that God, a person, is the standard, exemplar, measure of justice.  There is no category mistake.  The second alleged category mistake is harder to deal with, and a wholly satisfactory answer is not possible because when we discuss God, the ultimate source of all being, value, and intrinsic intelligibility, we are at the outer limit of intelligibility. (The Intelligent Source of all intrinsic intelligibility, because it is an Other Mind, cannot be understood with the clarity and completeness with which we understand ordinary objects among objects.) All I can hope to show is that the accusation of category mistake can be turned aside or rationally repelled. So here we go.

 

B. God is a just person, and he is just to the highest possible degree. Now is God just in virtue of instantiating a property of justice that exists independently of him?  You say justice is a quality. I'll play along. Is God just in virtue of instantiating this quality?  (Perhaps you are thinking of this quality as a necessarily existent 'abstract object.') If you say yes, then you compromise God's aseity, his from-himself-ness.  God is the Absolute. Not an absolute, but the Absolute.  As such, he cannot be dependent on anything external to himself for his existence or nature.   You will grant that God cannot have a cause of his existence external to himself. You must also grant that for God to be God he cannot be dependent on anything external to himself for his nature (essence).  So he can't be just in virtue of instantiating your quality, justice.  God sets the standard by being the standard: there is no standard of justice outside of God that he needs to conform to.

 

If so, if God is not an instance of justice, a just entity, then he must be (identically)  justice.  The Platonist Augustine drew this conclusion, one that entails the divine simplicity, and the Jansenists followed Augustine in this. God is like a self-exemplifying Platonic Form or paradigm.  Supreme Wisdom is itself wise; supreme Justice is itself just.  God is at once each of his attributes and also their unique instance.  God is, but he is not a being among beings.  God is (identically) Being itself, but not in a way the detracts from his being a being, or to be precise, the being.  For God to be God he must be unique in the highest possible sense: not one of a kind, not necessarily one of a kind, but necessarily such  that in him kind and instance are one.

 

The theist faces a dilemma.  Either God is or is not distinct from his attributes. if the former, then God is not God. If the latter, then God is beyond the comprehension of the discursive intellect.

 

(But is the second horn so bad? A God worth his salt must be transcendent, Transcendence itself. (Otherwise, your god is an idol. Whatever you say about Islam, it at least has a lively sense of the transcendence of God.)

In conclusion, Gudeman's second accusation of category error can be rationally resisted as I have just done.  One can cogently argue  up to the divine simplicity. The problem, however -- and I freely admit it -- is that the discursive intellect cannot wrap itself around  (cannot understand) how something can be ontologically simple. One is reduced to pointing beyond the discursive sphere.

 

Here we reach an impasse beyond which we cannot move by philosophical means. But what justifies the conceit that the only way to the ultimate truth is the philosophical way?

The Most Boring Philosophers

Nowadays philosophy so absorbs me in all its branches and movements that I find no philosopher boring. Indeed,  no subject is boring except to the bored who make it  so. Dry texts, like dry wines, are often delightfully subtle and simply require an educable and educated palate. Although no philosophers now bore me, here is a list of philosophers who bored me, or would have bored me, when I was one and twenty:

   1. G. E. Moore
   2. Elizabeth Anscombe
   3. Paul Ziff
   4. Norman Malcolm
   5. John Wisdom
   6. Roderick Chisholm

Philosophers who excited my 21-year-old self:

   1. Nicholas Berdyaev
   2. Miguel de Unamuno
   3. Karl Jaspers
   4. Friedrich Nietzsche
   5. Martin Heidegger
   6. Jean-Paul Sartre

Now imagine a philosophy department composed of the twelve aforementioned. Do you think it would split into two factions? What, if anything, do they have in common that justifies subsuming them under the rubric, philosophers?

I have become in many ways more analytic and less Continental over the years. I tend to think that this is a lot like becoming less liberal and more conservative, as these terms are popularly understood. One becomes more cautious, careful, precise, piece-meal, rigorous, attentive to details and differences and empirical data, less romantic, more patient, more logical, less impressionistic, less sanguine about big sweeping once-and-for-all solutions. . . .

In sum, and in a manner to elicit howls of protest:  In philosophy, the trajectory of maturation is from Continental to analytic.  In politics, from liberal to conservative.

Howl on, muchachos.

A Reader Poses a Question about the Extent of My Solubility Skepticism

M.M. writes,

I understand that your method is aporetic - you argue that the great problems of philosophy are genuine problems but also insoluble, at least by us here below. 

 

[. . .]

 

My question is: do you think that  -- even if all positions in some metaphysical disputes have their problems -- we can weight reasons for one position against other and make reasoned choice which is partially voluntaristic but also theoretically superior against other options? 

Yes.  Not all problems are insoluble; not all questions are unaswerable.   Let the question be: Are there beliefs?  Along comes an eliminativist who give the following argument:

 

(1) If beliefs are anything, then they are brain states; (2) beliefs exhibit original intentionality; (3) no physical state, and thus no brain state, exhibits original intentionality; therefore (4) there are no beliefs. 

But any reasonable person should be able to see that this argument does not establish (4) but is instead more reasonably taken to be a reductio ad absurdum of premise (1) according to which beliefs are nothing if not brain states.  For if anything is obvious, it is that there are beliefs.  This is a pre-theoretical datum, a given.  What they are is up for grabs, but that they are is a starting point that cannot be denied except by those in the grip of  a scientistic  ideology.  Since the argument is valid in point of logical form, and the conclusion is manifestly false, what the argument shows is that beliefs cannot be brain states. (I am assuming that we accept both (2) and (3).)

 

I conclude that not all problems are such that the arguments pro et contra cancel out so as to leave an intellectually honest person in a state of doxastic equipoise.  I hold that this is the case only for a set of core problems, the great problems as my reader calls them, the problems that have humbled the greatest minds.

 

Contrast the question of the existence of beliefs with the question of the existence of God. Deny beliefs and I show you the door. Deny God, and I listen attentively to your arguments.

Musing and Using

"Your problems are artifacts of musing about language. Stop musing and stick to using."

Could be, Ludwig, but I doubt it.

Continuing the Discussion of Time, Tense, and Existence

This just in from London.  I've intercalated my responses.

Here is another take. We agree on our disagreement about the following consequence

(A)  X is no longer temporally present, therefore X has ceased to exist.

You think it is not valid, i.e. you think the antecedent could be true with the consequent false. I think it is valid.

BV: Yes. So far, so good. 

However regarding

          (B) X is no longer temporally present, therefore X does not still exist

we seem to agree. We both think the antecedent cannot be true with the consequent false.

BV:  Right.  For example, we agree BOTH that the Berlin Wall is no longer temporally present (and is therefore temporally past) AND that the Berlin Wall does not still exist.  I should think that we also, as competent speakers of English, agree that locutions of the form 'X still exists' are intersubstitutable both salva veritate and salva significatione with locutions of the form 'X existed and X exists' where all of the verbs are tensed and none are tense-neutral or tenseless. Agree?  My second comment has no philosophical implications.  It is merely a comment on the meaning/use of a stock English locution.

My puzzle is that my reading, and I think a natural reading, is that (A) and (B) mean the same, because “X has ceased to exist” and “X does not still exist” mean the same. You clearly disagree.

BV:  If we stick to tensed language, then 'X has ceased to exist' and 'X does not still exist' mean the same.  So I don't disagree if we adhere to tensed language. But note that 'X has ceased to exist' is ambiguous as between

a) X has ceased to presently-exist (or present-tensedly exist)

and

b) X has ceased to be anything at all (and thus has become nothing at all).

For example, the Berlin Wall has ceased to presently-exist.  But it doesn't follow that said wall has become nothing, that it is no longer a member of the totality of entities, that it has been annihilated by the mere passage of time.  If you think that it is no longer a member of said totality, then you are assuming presentism and begging the question against me.  You have restricted the totality of what exists to what presently exists. Note that I do not deny that one can move validly from the premise of (A) to its conclusion if one invokes presentism as an auxiliary premise. My claim is that the inference fails as a direct or immediate inference.

I think you want to argue that there is a covert tensing in “X does not still exist” which is absent in “X has ceased to exist”, which (according to you) is tenseless. But how? Doesn’t the verb ‘cease’ always imply a time at which X ceased to exist? Would it make sense to say that 2+2 has ceased to equal 4? How?

BV: In 'X does not still exist,' 'exist' is present-tensed.  But 'X has ceased to exist' is ambiguous as explained above . It can be read your tensed way, but it can also be read in my tenseless way.  Surely you don't want to say that 'exists' has exactly the same meaning /sense as 'exists-now' or 'exists' (present tense).  We could call that semantic presentism. I don't think anyone is a semantic presentist.  And for good reason. You, as a nominalist, will not countenance abstracta such as numbers and sets and the other denizens of the Platonic menagerie. But you understand what you are opposing when you oppose their admission into our ontology in the Quinean sense (our catalog by category of what there is).  And so you understand the notion of tenseless existence and tenseless property possession as when a 'Platonist' says that 7 is prime. The copula is tenseless, not present-tensed.

So, in summary, my problem (and I am always seeing problems) is how you think (A) and (B) differ.

Over to you.

BV: The Boston Blizzard of '78 was one hell of a storm. When it ended, did it cease to exist? Yes of course, if we are using 'exist' in the ordinary present-tensed way. The storm because wholly past, and in becoming wholly past it stopped being presently existent. Obviously, nothing can exist at present if it is wholly past.  And it is quite clear that what no longer is present is not still present, and that what no longer presently exists is not still presently existent.

So far, nothing but platitudes of ordinary usage.  Nothing metaphysical. 

We venture into metaphysics when we ask: Does it follow straightaway from the storm's having become wholly temporally past, that it is nothing at all?  I say No. If you say Yes, then you are endorsing presentism, a controversial metaphysical theory. 

You can avoid controversy if you stick to ordinary language.  If you have trouble doing this, Wittgensteinian therapy may be helpful.

Problemverlust

The following remark in Wittgenstein's Zettel seems to fit certain ostriches of my acquaintance.

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

Wasted on the Young

A crude adage has it that virgins are wasted on the young. The same could be said of philosophy.

Metaphysical Explanation Again

One question I am discussing with Micheal Lacey is whether any sense can be attached to the notion of metaphysical explanation. I answer in the affirmative. Perhaps he can tell me whether he agrees with the following, and if not, then why not.

Tom is a tomato of my acquaintance. The predicate 'red' is true of Tom. Equivalently, 'Tom is  red' is true.  Now the sentence just mentioned is contingently true. (It is obviously not necessarily true in any of the ways a sentence, or the proposition it expresses, could be necessarily true. For example, it is not true ex vi terminorum.)  

Now ask: could a contingently true sentence such as 'Tom is red' just be true?  "Look man, the sentence is just true; that is all that can be said, what more do you want?"  This response is no good. It cannot be a brute fact that our sample sentence is true.  By 'brute fact' I mean a fact that neither has nor needs an explanation.  So the fact that 'Tom is red' is true needs an explanation.  And since the fact is not self-explanatory, the explanation must invoke something external to the sentence.

This strikes me as a non-negotiable datum, especially if we confine our attention to present-tensed contingently true sentences.

I hope it is clear that what is wanted is not a causal explanation of why a particular tomato is red as opposed to green. Such an explanation would make mention of such factors as exposure to light, temperature, etc.  What is wanted is not a causal explanation of Tom's being ripe and red as opposed to unripe and green, but an explanation of a sentential/propositional representation's being actually true as opposed to possibly true.  The question, then, is this: WHAT MAKES A CONTINGENTLY TRUE PRESENT-TENSED SENTENCE/PROPOSITION TRUE?

Our contingently true sentence is about something, something in particular, namely Tom, and not about Tim. And what the sentence is about is not part of the sentence or the (Fregean) proposition it expresses.  It is external to both, not internal to either.  And it is not an item in the speaker's mind either.  Tom, then, is in the extralinguistic and extramental world.  Now I will assume, pace Meinong, that everything exists, that there are no nonexistent items.  Given that assumption I say: VERITAS SEQUITUR ESSE (VSE).  Truth follows being. Truth supervenes on being if we are talking about contingently true, present-tensed, truth-bearers.

That is to say: every contingently true, present-tensed, truth-bearer has need of at least one thing in the extralinguistic world for its truth.  Thus 'Tom is red' cannot be true unless there is at least one thing external to the sentence on which its truth depends. What I have just said lays down a necessary condition for a contingent sentence's being true.

But VSE is not sufficient for an adequate explanation of the truth of 'Tom is red.'  If Tom alone was all one needed for the explanation, then we wouldn't be able to account for the difference between the true 'Tom is red' and the false 'Tom is green.'  In short, the truth-maker must have a proposition-like structure, but without being a proposition. The truth-maker of 'Tom is red' is not Tom, not is it any proposition; the truth-maker of 'Tom is red' is the state of affairs, Tom's being red.  (I am sketching the Armstrong line; there are other ways to go.)

The state of affairs Tom's being red is the ontological ground of the truth of the corresponding sentence/proposition.  It is not a logical ground because it is not a proposition.  Nor is it a cause.  

It seems to me that I have just attached a tolerably clear sense to the notion of a metaphysical explanation. I have explained the truth of the sentence 'Tom is red' by invoking the state of affairs, Tom's being red.  The explanation is not causal, nor is it logical. And so we can call it metaphysical or ontological.

Have I convinced you, Micheal?

Is There Such a Thing as Metaphysical Explanation?

M. L. writes,

 

I've been enjoying your critique of [Peter] van Inwagen. [The reader is presumably referring to  my "Van Inwagen on Fiction, Existence, Properties, Particulars, and Method" in Studia Neoaristotelica: A Journal of Analytical Scholasticism, 2015, vol. 12, no. 2, 99-125]  I was initially astonished at his claim that metaphysics/ontology doesn't explain, but it also got me curious about where the explanation is going on in ontological accounts (especially of properties, however construed).

 

I'm doing a Ph.D. in metaontology and I'm contrasting neo-Quinean (van Inwagen) and neo-Aristotelian (Lowe) approaches. 

 

Can you direct me to where you might have written about, if indeed you have, how it is ontology/metaphysics explains?

 

Well, I haven't discussed the issue head-on in a separate publication, but I have discussed it en passant in various contexts. Below is a re-do of a 2012 weblog entry that addresses the question and may spark discussion. Combox open.

 

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

 

Let 'Tom' name a particular tomato.  Let us agree that if a predicate applies to a particular, then the predicate is true of the particular.  Predicates are linguistic items.  Tomatoes are not. If Tom is red, then 'red' is true of Tom, and if 'red' is true of Tom, then Tom is red. This yields the material biconditional

1. Tom is red iff 'red' is true of Tom.

Now it seems to me that the following question is intelligible:  Is Tom red because 'red' is true of Tom, or is 'red' true of Tom because Tom is red?  'Because' here does not have a causal sense.  So the question is not whether Tom's being red causes 'red' to be true of Tom, or vice versa.  So I won't speak of causation in this context.  I will speak of metaphysical/ontological grounding.  The question then is what grounds what, not what causes what.   Does Tom's being red ground the application (the being-applied)  of 'red' to Tom, or does the application (the being-applied) of 'red' to Tom ground Tom's being red?

I am not primarily concerned with the correct answer to this question, but with meaningfulness/intelligibility of the question itself.

Grounding is asymmetrical: if x grounds y, then y does not ground x.  (It is also irreflexive and transitive.)  Now if there is such a relation as grounding, then there will be a distinctive form of explanation we can call metaphysical/ontological explanation.  (Grounding, even though it is not causation, is analogous to causation, and metaphysical explanation, even though distinct from causal explanation, is analogous to causal explanation.)

Explaining is something we do: in worlds without minds there is no explaining and there are no explanations, including metaphysical explanations.  But I assume that, if there are any metaphysical grounding relations, then  in every world metaphysical grounding relations obtain.  (Of course, there is no grounding of the application of predicates in a world without languages and predicates, but there are other grounding relations. For example, if propositions are abstract objects that necessarily exist, and some of the true ones need truth-makers, then truth-making, which is a grounding relation, exists in worlds in which there are no minds and no languages and hence no sentences.)

Grounding is not causation. It is not a relation between event tokens such as Jack's touching a live wire and Jack's death by electrocution.  Grounding is also not a relation between propositions.  It is not a logical relation that connects propositions to propositions.  It is not the relation of material implication, nor is it entailment (the necessitation of material implication), nor any other logical relation wholly situated at the level of propositions.  Propositions, let us assume, are the primary truth-bearers. 

In our example, grounding is not a relation between propositions -- it is not a logical relation -- since neither Tom nor 'red' are propositions. 

I want to say the following.  Tom's being red grounds the correctness of the application of 'red' to Tom.  'Red' is true of Tom because (metaphysically, not causally or logically) Tom is red, and not vice versa.  'Red' is true of Tom in virtue of  Tom's being red.  Tom's being red is metaphysically prior to the truth of 'Tom is red' where this metaphysical priority cannot be reduced to some ordinary type of priority, whether logical, causal, temporal, or what have you.  Tom's being red metaphysically accounts for the truth of 'Tom is red.' Tom's being red makes it the case the 'red' is true of Tom.  Tom's being red makes 'Tom is red' true.  

I conclude that there is at least one type of metaphysical grounding relation, and at least one form of irreducibly metaphysical explanation. 

We can ask similar questions with respect to normative properties.  Suppose Jesus commands us to love one another.  We distinguish among the commander, the act of commanding, the content of the command, and the normative property of the commanded content, in this case the obligatoriness of loving one another.  If Jesus is God, then whatever he commands is morally obligatory. Nevertheless, we can intelligibly ask whether the content is obligatory because Jesus/God commands it, or whether he (rightly) commands it because it is obligatory.  The 'because' here is neither causal not logical.  It is metaphysical/ontological.

 

This of course a variation on the old Euthyphro Dilemma in the eponymous Platonic dialog.

 

I freely admit that there is something obscure about a grounding relation that is neither causal nor logical. But of course logical and causal relations too are problematic when subjected to squinty-eyed scrutiny. 

 

I conclude with a dogmatic slogan. Metaphysics without metaphysical explanation is not metaphysics at all.  

Could it be Reasonable to Affirm the Infirmity of Reason?

Any reasons one adduces in support of the thesis of  the infirmity of reason will share in the weakness of the faculty whose weakness is being affirmed.  Is this a problem for the proponent of the thesis? Does he contradict himself? Not obviously: he might simply accept the conclusion that the reasoning in support of the thesis is inconclusive.

Suppose I argue that, with respect to all substantive philosophical theses, there there are good arguments  pro and good arguments contra, and that these arguments 'cancel out.'  Now my thesis is substantive, and so my thesis applies to itself, whence it follows that my meta-thesis has both good arguments for it and good arguments against it, and that they cancel out.

Where is the problem? I am simply applying my meta-philosophical skepticism to itself, as I must if I am to be logically consistent.  Now I could make an exception for my meta-thesis, but that, I think, would be intolerably ad hoc.

I am not dogmatically affirming the infirmity of reason; I am merely stating that there are reasons to accept it, reasons that are not conclusive.

Deeper into this topic:

Seriously Philosophical Theses and Argument Cancellation

Thought, Action, Dogma, and De Maistre: The Infirmity of Reason

The Augustinian Meta-Predicament

The Augustinian predicament is that, if you don't ask me what time is; I know. But if you ask me, I don't know.

The meta-predicament is that, if you don't press me too hard, I know what the main issues in dispute are, and what the main theories of time state; but if you press me and demand clear explanations, then I find that I don't know.

The Spirit of Philosophy

By my lights, the spirit of genuine philosophy is anti-dogmatic.  A real philosopher does not bluster. He does not claim to know what he does not know, and in some cases, cannot know. A real philosopher does not confuse subjective conviction with objective certainty. He has time and he takes time. He can tolerate suspense and open questions. But his suspension is not a Pyrrhonian abandonment of inquiry, but is in the service of it. His happiness is not a porcine ataraxia, but the happiness of the hunt. Unlike the dogmatist, however, he has high standards with the result that is hunt is long and perhaps endless as long as he remains in statu viae wandering among the charms and horrors of the sublunary.

And yet we are participants in life's parade and not mere spectators of it. Curiously, we are both part of the passing scene and observers of it.  To us as participants in the flux and shove of the real order a certain amount of bluster has proven to be life-enhancing and practically necessary. To live is to maneuver, to position oneself, to take a position, to adopt a stance, to grab one's piece of the action and defend it, and in the clinch to shoot first and philosophize later.

As so we are torn. It is a broken world and we are broken on its samsaric wheel. To put it grandly,  the human condition is a tragic predicament. We must act in conditions of poor lighting, maintaining ourselves in the Cave's chiaroscuro, with little more than faith and hope to keep us going. At the same time we seek light, light, more light and the transformation of faith into knowledge and hope into having. 

No Total Clarity in Philosophy

To demand total clarity in philosophy is like demanding that one's visual field be all focus and no fringe.  It is a demand  that cannot be satisfied.  But the situation in philosophy is worse than the metaphor suggests. The visual fringe can be brought into focus if one is willing to allow the focus to become fringe. The transdiscursive, however, to which philosophy is beholden and to which she points, can never be brought into discursive focus. The transdiscursive, ineliminably obscure, must forever remain fringe. 

The unity of the proposition, for example, without which no proposition can attract a truth value, and without which no proposition can be more than a truth-value-less aggregate of its sub-propositional parts, lies beyond the grasp of the discursive intellect.

Might we reasonably expect total clarity in the next world? The next world might be samsara 2.0, clearer, brighter, more intelligible, but still subject to the duality: clarity-obscurity. Ascend from the Cave, and you will still experience light and darkness, but more light and less darkness than down below. And beyond that there perhaps lies samsara 3.0, and so on.  Ever subtler realms of chiaroscuro. The nirvanic terminal state would then be the extinction of all dualities, and the unspeakable unity of clarity and obscurity, intelligibility and ab-surdity.  Could that be the ultimate Goal? Could the ens reallissimum himself take as his final goal, nibbanic extinction? 

Could the ens perfectissimum et necessarium say to himself: Take it to the limit Old Man and become finally in truth what you were supposed to be all along, Absolute and Unconditioned?

The above is a species of nonsense from the point of view of the discursive intellect.  Important nonsense or nugatory nonsense?  If you plump for the latter, are you not assuming that the discursive intellect is unconditioned?

Companion post: The Scariest Passage in the Critique of Pure Reason.

The Philosopher as Luftmensch

Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Penguin, 2002), p. 11:

Philosophy today gets no respect. Many scientists use the term as a synonym for effete speculation. When my colleague Ned Block told his father that he would major in the subject, his father's reply was "Luft!" — Yiddish for "air." And then there's the joke in which a young man told his mother that he would become a Doctor of Philosophy and she said, "Wonderful! But what kind of disease is philosophy?"

Well, to adapt a chess player's expression, better to make Luft than to make war! (One 'makes Luft' in chess by moving a pawn in front of the castled king's position as prophylaxis against back rank mate. The allusion is to the Vietnam era's 'Make love not war.')

As for 'Doctor of Philosophy,' 'doctor,' etymologically, means teacher (from L. docere, to teach) and 'philosophy' stands in for knowledge or science broadly construed. Thus as late as the 19th century, physicists were still referred to as natural philosophers. 'Ph.D.,' of course, abbreviates Doctor of Philosophy, which is why it is an abomination to see it written as 'PHD.' And when a Ph.D does it it is doubly abominable. But then I'm a linguistic conservative, as well as every other kind of conservative.

In fairness to Pinker, I should point out that after citing the above anecdotes he goes on to say some words in defense of philosophy.

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

Addendum: Kevin Spraggett on the importance of making Luft.  White to move.

Words and Distinctions

The wise do not quibble over words, but they do insist on distinctions. One of the latter is that between distinctions and the words in which they are couched.

Above Utility?

That's what philosophy is according to Jacques Maritain. (On the Use of Philosophy, Princeton UP, 1961, p. 6) But then how can it be handmaiden to theology, ancilla theologiae?

The Problem of Beginning

A rich and profitable essay by Peter Suber.

The Ashtray Has Landed: Errol Morris versus Thomas Kuhn

Talk of philosophy being a blood sport is usually and rightly metaphorical. But on occasion, actual weapons are brandished even if not deployed. You will recall Wittgenstein's poker. But perhaps you haven't yet heard of Thomas Kuhn's ashtray.   Curiously, pokers and ashtrays have something to do with fire and smoke, devilish elements.  A philosopher's devil, say I, is his own ego.

Philip Kitcher: 

Almost half a century ago, as a recent graduate from the University of Wisconsin fascinated by the history of science, the young Morris was rejected by some of the most prestigious graduate departments. Thanks to the efforts of one of the field’s major stars, Thomas Kuhn, he did eventually find his way to Princeton’s program in the history and philosophy of science. But his time there did not go smoothly. Matters came to a head in a one-on-one discussion of a paper he had written for Kuhn’s seminar. The emotional temperature rose. And then rose some more, until the tête-à-tête was ultimately punctuated by an overflowing ashtray. Launched from Kuhn’s hand, the ashtray hurtled across the room.

Read the rest.

Time Apportionment as between Athens and Benares

If a philosopher who meditates spends five hours per day on philosophy, how many hours should he spend on meditation?  One correspondent of mine, a retired philosophy professor and Buddhist, told me that if x hours are spent on philosophy, then x hours should be spent on meditation.  So five hours of philosophy ought to be balanced by five hours of meditation.  A hard saying!  I find it very easy to spend five to eight hours per day reading and writing philosophy. But my daily formal meditation sessions are almost never more than two hours in duration.  There is also mindfulness while hiking or doing other things such as clearing brush or washing dishes, but I don't count that as formal meditation.

What are the possible views on this topic of time apportionment?

1. No time should be wasted on philosophy. Pascal famously remarked that philosophy is not worth an hour's trouble.  (I am pretty sure he had his countryman Renatus Cartesius in mind.) But he didn't proffer his remark in defense of Benares, but of Jerusalem.  Time apportionment as between Athens and Jerusalem is a separate topic. Note that Pascal made an exception in his own case.  He left behind a magnificent collection that comes down to us as Pensées.  So no philosophy is worth an hour's trouble except Pascal's own. It would have shown greater existential consistency had the great thinker devoted himself after his conversion to prayer, meditation, and charitable works.  But then we would have been the poorer for it.

2. No time should be wasted on meditation.  Judging by their behavior, the vast majority of academic philosophers seem committed to some such proposition.

3. Time spent on either is wasted.  The view of the ordinary cave-dweller or worldling.

4. More time ought to be devoted to philosophy.  But why?

5. The two 'cities' deserve equal time.  The view of my Buddhist correspondent.

6.  More time ought to be devoted to meditation than to philosophy.

What could be said in defense of (6)?  Three quotations from Paul Brunton (Notebooks,  vol. II,  The Quest, Larson, 1986, p. 13):

• The intuitive element is tremendously more important than the intellectual . . . .
• The mystical experience is the most valuable of all experiences .  . . .
•  . . . the quest of the Overself is the most worthwhile endeavour open to human exertions.

Philosophy between the Impersonal and the Personal

Philosophy aspires to the impersonal truth but, like a rocket that fails to achieve escape velocity, it remains forever in orbit around the personal, tied to it, expressive of it.  This ineluctable tie-in to the personal works against philosophy's pursuit of the universal. And so, while in aspiration one, in execution philosophy is many, which is to say that there is no philosophy, only philosophies. There is no philosophy except in aspiration and in the drive to the truth that breaks free from the personal. In execution, philosophy does not break free; it breaks apart into philosophies.

And so I cannot disagree with Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) who, in Part One of Beyond Good and Evil, "On the Prejudices of the Philosophers," tells us that "every great philosophy" has bisher, hitherto, been eine Selbsterkenntnis ihres Urhebers, a confession or self-cognition of its author, and eine Art ungewollter und unvermerkter mémoires, a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.

That's right. But what did old Fritz mean by 'hitherto'? That he was an exception? But he was surely no exception. His philosophy was just  another confession of its author, just another rocket aimed at truth that failed to achieve escape velocity and fell back into orbit around the personal-all-too-personal.

What a rich specimen of humanity he was. He did a lot of damage, but he dug deep and he dug fearlessly and at personal cost. We honor him for that.

False Advertising and the Philosophy Major

An article by Neven Sesardic

Related: Should One Stoop to a Defense of Philosophy or the Humanities?

The Training of a Philosopher

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

Chess and Philosophy

In a chess game as in a philosophical debate, the outcome remains uncertain until the end is reached. What distinguishes the philosophical debate  is that the outcome remains uncertain even when the end is reached.

Seriously Philosophical Theses and Argument Cancellation

Reader C. P. inquires,

Do you think that the arguments for and against every substantive philosophical thesis are equipollent [equal in force], or do you think only that we can never be certain about the truth of the theses? In some of your posts, you suggest that you think the former (e.g. here); but in others, you suggest that you think we can determine some theses as more likely true than others.  I'm fairly sure that you hold the former, but I thought I should make sure.

The question, as I would formulate it,  is whether every substantive philosophical thesis is such that the arguments for it and the arguments against it are equally plausible and thus 'cancel out,'  or whether some substantive philosophical theses are rationally preferable to their negations.  I begin by explaining my terminology.

D1. An argument for a thesis T cancels out an argument for the negation of T just in case both arguments are equally plausible, or not far from equally plausible, to the producers(s)/consumers(s) of the arguments, assuming that these individuals are 'competent practitioners.'

Plausibility is relative to an arguer and his audience, if any.  With respect to propositions, plausibility is not the same as truth.  A plausible proposition needn't be true, and a true proposition needn't be plausible. With respect to arguments, plausibility is neither validity nor soundness as these are standardly defined.  Validity and soundness are absolute, like truth herself. Plausibility is relative.   There cannot be sound arguments both for a thesis and its negation. For if there is a sound argument for T, then T is true. And if there is a sound argument for ~T, then ~T is true. This is logical fallout from the standard definition of 'sound' according to which a sound argument is one that is deductive, valid, and has only true premises.  If there are sound arguments for both a thesis T and its negation ~T, then (T & ~T) is true which violates the Law of Non-Contradiction.  Therefore, there cannot be sound arguments for a thesis and its negation.

So I am envisaging situations in which argument and counter-argument are equally plausible or nearly so but only one is sound.  Equally plausible to whom? It could be one and the same philosopher. Preston, for example, finds the arguments for and against a regularity theory of causation equally plausible. For him the arguments cancel out and he ends up in a state of doxastic equipoise with respect to the issue. From there he might go on to suspend judgment on the question, or he might investigate further.  A third option for one who ends up in doxastic equipoise is to leap to one side or the other.  Suppose, after canvassing the arguments for and against the existence of God, or those for and against the immortality of the soul, you find that the cumulative case for and the cumulative case against are equally plausible.  You might leap to one side for prudential or pragmatic reasons.  You would have no theoretical reason for the leap, but also no theoretical reason against the leap. But the leap might nonetheless be prudentially rational and the refusal to leap prudentially irrational. 

Or the plausibility could be to a group of philosophers.  Suppose the group has ten members, with five finding the arguments for more plausible than the arguments against, and five taking the opposite stance.  I will then say that argument and counter-argument are equally plausible to the group.  As I set up the example, none of the members of this group are in a state of doxastic equipoise. But I will make bold to claim that each of them ought to be, assuming that each of them is a competent practitioner. This claim is controversial, and needs defending, but I must move on. 

A competent practitioner is not the same as an epistemic peer.  A number of individuals may be epistemic peers, but all incompetent. I won't try for a crisp definition of 'competent practitioner,' but if one is a competent practitioner,  then he is a sincere truth seeker, not a quibbler or a sophist; he knows logic and the empirical disciplines that bear upon the arguments he is discussing; he is familiar with the relevant literature; he embodies the relevant intellectual virtues, and so on.

The answer to the reader's question will depend on what counts as a substantive or seriously philosophical thesis (SPT).  Such theses cannot be denials or affirmations of Moorean facts. Such a fact is roughly a deliverance of common sense. STPs are not at the level of data, but at the level of theory. The distinction between data and theory is not sharply drawn. Border disputes are possible. The theoretical bleeds into the datanic and vice versa. Theories are data-driven, but some data are theory-laden. But I don't believe one can get on without the data-theory distinction.

For example, it is a Moorean fact that some things no longer exist.  This cannot be reasonably disputed. Affirm the datum or deny it, you are not (yet) doing philosophy.  That Boston's Scollay Square no longer exists is not a philosophical claim, but a proto-philosophical or pre-analytic datum. But if you maintain that what no longer exists does not exist at all, then you go beyond the given to affirm a controversial philosophical thesis known as presentism.  Roughly, this is the thesis that, with respect to  items in time, only what exists at present exists, period.  (It implies that the Wholly No Longer and the Wholly Not Yet are realms of nonexistence.) This is hardly common sense despite what some presentists claim.  If Scollay Square is now nothing at all, then how could it be the object of veridical memories and the subject of true predications? A predicate cannot be true of an item unless the item exists.

If, on the other hand, you maintain that what no longer exists does exist, albeit tenselessly, then you are affirming a controversial philosophical thesis known in the trade as eternalism.  Eternalism will enable you  to explain how a wholly past item can be the object of veridical thoughts and the subject of true predications. But if you try to explain what 'tenseless' means in this context, you will soon entangle yourself in difficulties.  Both presentism and eternalism are examples of what I am calling seriously philosophical theses, they cannot both be true, and neither records a Moorean fact.

For a second example, consider the claim that consciousness is an illusion. This is not an SPT, despite its having been urged by philosophers of high repute.  It is either beneath refutation or is quickly refuted by a simple argument: illusions presuppose consciousness; ergo, consciousness is not an illusion.  There are any number of eliminativist claims that are not SPTs.   The claim that there are no claims, for example, 'sounds philosophical' but cannot be taken seriously: it is not an SPT.    On the other hand, there are eliminativist claims that are SPTs, for example, the claim that there is no such person as God, or that continuants such as tables and trees do not have temporal parts. 

In sum, if you affirm what is obvious or deny what is obvious you are not making a seriously philosophical claim even if what you affirm or deny is highly general and is apt to ignite philosophical controversy when brought into contact with other propositions. For example, if you affirm that some events are earlier than others, you simply a record a datum that no sane person can deny.  If, on the other hand, you affirm that everything that people believe is true then you affirm what is datanically false and no object of rational controversy. 

I consider all of the following examples of SPTs:

• There are no nonexistent objects.
• There are uninstantiated properties.
• There are no modes of existence.
• The properties of particulars are tropes, not universals.
• God exists.
• The soul is immortal.
• The human will is libertarianly free.
• Each of us is numerically identical to his living body.
• I am not my living body; I merely have a living body.
• Anima forma corporis.
• Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung.
• Laws of nature are just empirical regularities.
• Truths need truth-makers.
• Only facts could serve as truth-makers.
• There are no facts.
• Relations reduce to their monadic foundations.
• There are no properties, only predicates.
• The predicate 'true' serves only as a device for disquotation.
• Social and economic inequalities are justified only if they benefit the worst-off.

There are many more examples, of course. Now what do the above  examples have in common? None of them records a Moorean fact. That is, none of them, if true,  is obviously true or datanically true.  Example.  There are two tomatoes on my counter, both ripe, and both (the same shade of) red.  That is a given, a datum, not subject to philosophical dispute, certain hyperbolic forms of skepticism aside.  But it is not a datum, phenomenological or otherwise, that the redness of the tomatoes is a universal, a repeatable entity, whether a transcendent universal (a one-over-many) or an immanent universal (a one-in-many).   For there is an alternative theory according to which the properties of particulars are themselves particulars (unrepeatables). On this theory each tomato has its own redness. Accordingly, there are two rednesses in the example, not one.  Both theories explain the data, but they cannot both be true. Phenomenology does not suffice to decide between them; dialectic must be brought in.  Once you get the dialectical ball rolling, you will have a hard time stopping it. It will roll down a rabbit hole that opens out into a labyrinth . . . .

Having clarified what I mean by a substantive or serious philosophical thesis, I now state two  meta-philosophical theses that I am considering. 

The strong thesis is that every SPT is such that the arguments for it and against it cancel out in the sense defined in (D1) above. This implies that no SPT is rationally preferable to its negation. I have my doubts about the strong thesis.

The weak thesis is that a proper subset of SPTs are such that the arguments for and against cancel out. I strongly suspect that the theses that most concern us belong to the proper subset, the hard core of insolubilia.

On the weak thesis, some SPTs will be theoretically-rationally preferable to others.

Is the Philosophical Life the Best?

This from a reader:

I have a concern about the philosophical life. While I do think philosophy is intrinsically valuable, and while I do deny that one is obligated to "do the most good" with one's life (I'm not a consequentialist), I wonder if there are better ways to live than to devote one's life to philosophy. Prima facie, devoting one's life to solving global poverty or curing cancer seems better than focusing on philosophy. If so, then even if one isn't obligated to solve global poverty or cure cancer, why not devote one's life to these causes instead?

 

Perhaps the philosophical life is better than these other options, but that isn't clear to me. It seems more plausible that, all things being equal, a life that saves countless lives is better lived than a life that doesn't save a single life. Again, I'm not saying we're obligated to save lives, I'm just making a comparative judgment.

I can't refute what you say, but I can offer an alternative point of view.  If you consider it, it may help you better understand your own point of view even if it does not motivate any modification of it.

 

One question concerns the best life humanly possible.  Aristotle discussed it in his Nicomachean Ethics. He considered lives devoted to pleasure, material acquisition, politics, and philosophy. I set forth his answer here.

 

But the best life possible for humans might not be the best life  for a particular human.  Whether or not the best life is the philosophical life, not everyone is 'philosophy material.'

 

Philosophy is a vocation, and only some are called to it. (I am speaking in ideal terms here: what passes for 'philosophy' in the 'universities' falls far short of the ideal.)

 

The best life for you will depend on your aptitudes, values, and worldview.   Everyone has a worldview of sorts even if unexamined and unarticulated.  Suppose your outlook is broadly secular.   And suppose you find secularism obvious.  Then you will not be inclined to question it and will have no need for philosophy.  You have 'your truth,' a worldview you believe is true, and therefore feel no need to investigate whether it is true in whole or in part.  Doubt is the engine of inquiry, but you have no doubts. For you philosophical inquiry would be idle.  You would be left cold by the Socratic, "The unexamined life is not worth living."

 

And if the people you associate with share your tacit worldview, then you will have no need to articulate and defend it.  The existence of competing worldviews might trouble you or then again it might not. You might be the sort of person who is not disturbed or given pause by the disagreement of others.

 

For me, disagreement is a goad to inquiry. I have a consuming need to know. And a life lived without examination is definitely worth little or nothing. Such a life remains on the animal level. A human life, speaking normatively, is a transcending life, a life of self-transcendence and aspiration.

 

Primum vivere deinde philosophari.  I agree. We must live and live fully to gather the grapes of experience from which to press the wine of wisdom.  We don't gather grapes to gather grapes, but for the wine. The vita activa subserves the vita contemplativa.

 

You say it is not clear to you that the philosophical life is superior to, say, cancer research.  Then I say you should leave philosophy alone.  The quest for the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters is the highest calling and it demands total commitment.  I can argue for this conviction, but I can't prove it, and I will persuade only those who already sense its truth.

 

In the early '80s I heard a speech by the American politician, Mario Cuomo, in which he touted the political life as the highest life. I thought to myself: "He can't really believe that!"  But I soon concluded  that he did believe it.  I can give my reasons why Cuomo is wrong, but these reasons, which suffice for me, will make no impression on those who think the political life the highest. (To me, politics is like taking out the garbage or unplugging the toilet: it's a dirty job and it has to be done and done properly; in an ideal world, however, there would be no State and no need for politicians. As things are, our fallen predicament makes the State  practically necessary, a necessary evil, along with its agents.)

 

My advice is, first of all, know thyself.  Having honestly assessed your abilities, do with your life what you think is the best, and what you are fit to do.

 

I realize that this advice is of very little practical value.  Listen to others, but keep your own counsel, and follow the urgings vouchsafed to you in the highest moments of existential clarity and discernment.

Is the Unexamined Life Worth Living?

Written in October of 2004.

I recently read Norman Podhoretz's Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer (The Free Press, 1999). It is an enjoyable and stimulating analysis of the breakdown of friendship in the crucible of political disagreement. I recommend it.

But an early passage inspired me to fire up the old Pentium II. Describing "most people," Podhoretz says that "The ideas that underlie their way of life are mostly taken for granted and remain unexamined – luckily for them, since the biggest lie ever propagated by a philosopher was Socrates’ self-aggrandizing assertion that the unexamined life is not worth living." (p. 4)

Can a philosopher let this passage pass unexamined? The first thing that raised my critical hackles is the irresponsible use of the word ‘lie,’ a use that is unfortunately widespread these days. Does Podhoretz really mean to suggest that Socrates was lying when he made his famous statement at his trial? Does he mean to imply that the great Athenian knew the truth, but was bent on deceiving us? Of course not. Podhoretz knows that one can utter a falsehood without lying, as when one says what one believes to be true but is not true, and I am sure that he appreciates that Socrates was sincere in his belief that the unexamined life is not worth living. Charitably interpreted, Podhoretz is opining that Socrates was wrong in his belief, not that he was lying.

A second thing to question is whether the Socratic assertion is "self-aggrandizing." If I praise a certain way of life that happens to be my way of life, it does not follow that I praise this way of life simply because it happens to be mine. For there is also the possibility that I praise this way of life because I have objective reasons to believe that it is a good way of life, and that I have chosen it for these objective reasons. In the second case, the life is mine because I have objective grounds for praising it, not praised because it is mine. Only in the first case would we speak of Socrates’ assertion as self-aggrandizing. Given that Podhoretz has provided no evaluation of the Socratic reasons for the Socratic assertion, he is not justified in describing the latter as "self-aggrandizing."

But the main issue is this: Is an unexamined life worth living? If my way of life happens to be good, then one might argue that it is good whether I examine it or not, whether I can give objective reasons for its goodness or not. (Compare: if my roof is in good condition, it is so whether I examine it or not. It is no part of my roof’s being in good condition that it, or someone, know that it is in good condition or that it, or someone, raise the question of its condition.) In this sense, an unexamined life could very well be worth living. But a human life is not merely a biological process, but essentially involves the exercise of (not merely the capacity for) emotion, will, and reason. Thus no ‘fully human life’ (an unabashedly normative phrase used unabashedly!) is possible without the exercise of reason upon the ultimate objects, among which is one’s own life, its whence, whither, and wherefore. A fully human life, as a life necessarily involving the exercise of reason, requires the examination of such questions as how we should live. To live thoughtlessly, uncritically, without consideration of ultimates and without consideration of alternative ways of living – there is indeed something  contemptible about this,assuming that the person is in a position to conduct the examination. To that extent, Socrates was surely right, and Podhoretz is surely wrong.

But Socratic self-examination implies no rejection of traditional ways of life. Perhaps lurking in the background of Podhoretz’s mind is some such argument as this: (1) Socratic self-examination leads to the rejection of traditional mores; (2) traditional mores are sound; ergo, (3) Socratic self-examination is a mistake. I hope this is not the way Podhoretz is thinking, given the falsity of (1). Socratic examination may lead to the rejection of traditional mores, but it might also lead to their rational defense.

Skepticism and the Life Adoxastōs

A very good essay in metaphilosophy.

Rationalistic Fideism, Mysterianism, Misology, and Divine Simplicity

I want to thank the perspicacious Lukas Novak for helping me in my endless quest to know myself.  Professor Novak comments:

Is Bill a Gnostic?

Well, I am not sure about the precise meaning of this epithet, but to me Bill appears as a strange amalgam of a rationalist and a fideist. The rationalist comes first and sets up certain rather strict requirements on the contents of faith -- so that everything that does not fit in comes out as "incoherent" or "incomprehensible". Then, entre fideist and says that we nevertheless are still justified in believing these contents because we can justifiably assume that our intellect is so incompetent.

To me, this puts too much confidence in our reason in the first stage and too little in the last. It seems to me that Bill is always too eager to conclude that there is an impasse, an insoluble problem, a contradiction etc. in a given particular case. In this, he seems to be putting way too much confidence in his reasonings. The overall, habitual outcome of this is, however, the exact opposite: a significantly diminished confidence in the competence of our intellect as such. (This reminds me of the mechanism of how "misology" is generated, in Plato's Phaedo.)

We were discussing ecclesiology and the Incarnation, but at the moment I am revising my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy  Divine Simplicity entry, so I want to shift over to this topic since similar structural patterns emerge.  What follows is a section I will add to the entry, one on a recent paper by Eleonore Stump of St. Louis University. Professor Stump is a distinguished Aquinas scholar and defender of the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS).

4.4 Stump's Quantum Metaphysics

Like Dolezal, Eleonore Stump thinks of God as self-subsistent Being (esse). If God is absolutely simple, and not just simple in the uncontroversial sense of lacking material parts, then God must be self-subsistent Being. God is at once both Being and something that is. He has to be both. If he were Being (esse) but not a being (id quod est), he could not enter into causal relations. He could not do anything such as create the world, intervene in its operations, or interact with human persons. Such a God would be "religiously pernicious." (Stump 2016, 199) Indeed, if God were Being but not a being, then one could not sensibly maintain that God exists. For if Being is other than every being, then Being is not. (It is instructive to note that Martin Heidegger, the famous critic of onto-theology, who holds to the "ontological difference" of Being (Sein) from every being (Seiendes) ends up assimilating Being to Nothing (Nichts).) On the other hand, if God were a being among beings who merely has Being but is not (identically) Being, then he would not be absolutely transcendent, worthy of worship, or ineffable. Such a God would be "comfortingly familiar" but "discomfiting anthropomorphic." (Miller 1996, 3)

The problem, of course, is to explain how God can be both Being and something that is. This is unintelligible to the discursive intellect. Either Being is other than beings or it is not. If Being is other than beings, then Being cannot be. If Being just is beings taken collectively, then God is a being among beings and not the absolute reality. To the discursive intellect the notion of self-subsistent Being is contradictory. One response to the contradiction is simply to deny divine simplicity. That is a reasonable response, no doubt. But might it not also be reasonable to admit that there are things that human reason cannot understand, and that one of these things is the divine nature? "Human reason can see that human reason cannot comprehend the quid est of God." (Stump 2016, 205) As I read Stump, she, like Dolezal, makes a mysterian move, and she, like Dolezal (2011, 210, fn 55), invokes wave-particle duality. We cannot understand how light can be both a wave phenomenon and also particulate in nature, and yet it is both:

What kind of thing is it which has to be understood both as a wave and as a particle? We do not know. That is, we do not know the quid est of light. [. . .] Analogously, we can ask: What kind of thing is it which can be both esse and id quod est? We do not know. The idea of simplicity is that at the ultimate metaphysical foundation of reality is something that has to be understood as esse —but also as id quo est. We do not know what this kind of thing is either. (Stump 2016, 202)

Stump, E., 2016, “Simplicity and Aquinas's Quantum Metaphysics” in Gerhard Krieger, ed. Die Metaphysik des Aristoteles im Mittelalter: Rezeption und Transformation, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 191–210.

Dolezal, J. E., 2011, God without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God's Absoluteness, Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications.

Miller, B., 1996, A Most Unlikely God, Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press.

Now for my apologia.

Novak's characterization of me as both a rationalist and a fideist is basically accurate.  And yes, the rationalist comes first with exacting requirements. Let me try to illustrate this with DDS.  God is the absolute reality, a stupendously rich reality who transcends creatures not only in his properties, but also in his mode of property-possession, mode of existence, mode of necessity, and mode of uniqueness. God is uniquely unique. Such a being cannot be a being among beings. He is uniquely unique in that he alone is self-subsistent Being. Deus est ipsum esse subsistens.

One can reason cogently to this conclusion. Unfortunately, the conclusion is apparently self-contradictory.  The verbal formula does not express a proposition that the discursive intellect can 'process' or 'compute.' It is unintelligible to said intellect.  For the proposition the formula expresses appears to be self-contradictory. Stump agrees as do the opponents of DDS.

Now there are three ways to proceed. 

1) We can conclude, as many distinguished theists do, that the apparent contradictions are real and that God is not absolutely simple, that DDS is a 'mistake.'  See Hasker, William, 2016, “Is Divine Simplicity a Mistake?” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 699-725.  For Hasker, DDS involves category mistakes, logical failures, and a dehumanization of God.  (One mistake Hasker himself makes is to think that a defender of DDS can only tread the via negativa and must end up embracing radical agnosticism about the nature of God. Stump has some interesting things to say in rebuttal of this notion. See Stump 2016, 195-198.)

In short: God is not reasonably believed to be simple.

2) A second way is the mysterian way.  The conjunction of God is esse and God is id quod est is an apparent contradiction.  But it is not a real contradiction. Characteristic of the mysterian of my stripe is the further claim that the structure of the discursive intellect makes it impossible for us to see that the contradiction is merely apparent.

In short: God is reasonably believed to be simple despite the ineliminable apparent contradictions that this entails because, as Stump puts it, "Human reason can see that human reason cannot comprehend the quid est of God." (Stump 2016, 205) To put the point more generally, it is reasonable to confess the infirmity of human reason with respect to certain questions, and unreasonable to place an uncritical faith in its power and reach.  This is especially unreasonable for those who accept the Fall of man and the noetic consequences of sin.

Besides, if God is not a being among beings, then one might expect the discursive intellect to entangle itself in contradictions when it tries to think the Absolute Reality.  God, as Being itself, cannot be subsumed under any extant category of beings. 

3) A third way is by maintaining that the apparent contradictions can be shown to be merely apparent by the resources of the discursive intellect. In short: God is reasonably believed to be simple, and all considerations to the contrary can be shown to rest on errors and failures to make certain distinction.

What is my argument against (3)? Simply that the attempts to defuse the contradictions fail, and not just by my lights.  Almost all philosophers, theists and atheists alike, judge the notion of a simple God to be contradictory.

What is my argument against (1)? Essentially that those who take this line do not appreciate the radical transcendence of God. This point has been argued most forcefully by Barry Miller (1996).  Theists who reject divine simplicity end up with an anthropomorphic view of God.

As for Novak's charge of misology or hatred of reason and argument, I plead innocent. One who appreciates the limits of reason, and indeed the infirmity of reason as we find it in ourselves here below, cannot be fairly accused of misology. Otherwise, Kant would be a misologist.  I will turn the table on my friend by humbly suggesting that his doxastic security needs sometimes get the better of him causing him to affirm as objectively certain what is not at all objectively certain, but certain only to him.  For example he thinks it is epistemically certain that there are substances. I disagree.

But I want to confess to one charge. Lukas writes, "It seems to me that Bill is always too eager to conclude that there is an impasse, an insoluble problem, a contradiction, etc."  It may be that I am too zealous in my hunt for aporiai.  But I am deeply impressed by the deep, protracted, and indeed interminable disagreement of philosophers through the ages over every substantive question.  My working hypothesis for the metaphilosophy book I am trying to finish is that the core problems of philosophy are most of them genuine, some of them humanly important, but all of them insoluble by us.  And then I try to figure out what philosophy can and should be if that is the case, whether it should end in mystical silence -- that is where Aquinas ended up! -- or fuel a Pyrrhonian re-insertion into the quotidian and a living of life adoxastos, or give way to religious faith, or something else.

Paul Roubiczek on the True Object of Philosophy

Neglected and obscure, Paul Roubiczek is well-worth reading. Thinking Towards Religion, London: Darwen Finlayson Ltd., 1957, p. 29:

I believe that the true object of philosophy is the search for ultimate truth, not because I assume we can succeed in this search, but because it will bring us to the boundaries which we have to accept and thus make them clear to us.

Philosophy as Misosophy? Religion as Misology?

Here at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical

Mary Midgley on Complaints about Clarity

Here at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical.

Paul Ludwig Landsberg on Two Types of Philosophy

The following quotation is from John M. Oesterreicher, The Walls are Crumbling: Seven Jewish Philosophers Discover Christ, London: Hollis and Carter, 1953, p. 195. Oesterreicher is glossing Landsberg's doctoral thesis Wesen und Bedeutung der Platonischen Akademie, 1923: 

. . . there are two types of philosophy: the autonomous, patterned after Plato's, which undertakes to bring about man's redemption; and the heteronomous, which, following St. Augustine's lead, does not feign to be man's guide to his last end, but takes him to the very portals of faith, and there wthdraws before the one thing necessary.

Ah, but what is the one thing necessary? 

There is a tension between the two types of philosophy and this tension is the transposition onto the philosophical plane of the  tension between Athens (Greek philosophy) and Jerusalem (the Bible), the two main roots of the West whose fruitful entanglement is the source of the West's vitality.   As Leo Strauss sees it, it is a struggle over the unum necessarium, the one thing needful or necessary:  

To put it very simply and therefore somewhat crudely, the one thing needful according to Greek philosophy is is the life of autonomous understanding.  The one thing needful as spoken by the Bible is the life of obedient love.  The harmonizations and synthesizations are possible because Greek philosophy can use obedient love in a subservient function, and the Bible can use philosophy as a handmaid; but what is so used in each case rebels against such use, and therefore the conflict is really a radical one. ("Progress or Return?" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 246, bolding added.)

So is the Christian the true philosopher?  Only in the sense that philosophy points beyond itself to something that is no longer philosophy but that completes philosophy while cancelling it. I am tempted to reach for an Hegelian trope while turning it on its head:  if Christianity is true, then philosophy is aufgehoben, sublated, in it.  If Christianity is true, then the Christian arrives at the truth that the philosopher at best aims at but cannot arrive at by his method and way of life, the life of autonomous understanding.  To achieve what he aims at, the philosopher would have to become "as a little child" and accept in obedient love the gift of Revelation.  But it is precisely that which he cannot do if he is to remain a philosopher in the strict sense, one who lives the life of autonomous understanding.

This is tension some of us live. The life of autonomous understanding and critical examination? Or the life of child-like trust and obedient love?

The problem in what is perhaps its sharpest form is presented in the story of Abraham and Isaac.  

The Christian life is not the philosophical life.  It lies beyond the philosophical life and, if  true, is superior to it.

But is it true?

In the end, you have to decide what you will believe and how you will live. 

Some extensive quotation from the neglected Landsberg in Kant on Suicide.

Over at MavPhil Strictly Philosophical

Peter Unger on Bertrand Russell on the Value of Philosophy

Solubility Skepticism, Religion, and Reason

"The Jury is Still Out": A Silly Sentence When Used by Philosophers

One sometimes comes across 'the jury is still out' in technical philosophical writing. A philosopher might write that 'the jury is still out' on some question, for example, whether the triviality objection to presentism is sustainable.  It's a silly thing to say.

It is first of all obvious that philosophical inquiry, though in some ways similar to a courtroom proceeding, is unlike the latter in a crucial particular: solutions to problems, if they are arrived at at all, are not arrived at by decision. 

It also falsely suggests that a definitive solution to the problem is in the offing. But we all know that that is false. No substantive philosophical question has ever been answered to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners.

Or can you think of one?

From Religion to Philosophy: A Typology of Motives for Making the Move

People come to philosophy from various 'places.'  Some come from religion, others from mathematics and the natural sciences, still others from literature and the arts.  There are other termini a quis as well.  In this post I am concerned only with the move from religion to philosophy.  What are the main types of reasons for those who are concerned with religion to take up the serious study of philosophy?  I count five main types of motive.

Read the whole thing at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical.

The Philosopher and the Christian

For Vito Caiati

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

George W. Bush once referred to Jesus Christ as his favorite political philosopher, thereby betraying both a failure to grasp what a philosopher is and who Jesus claimed to be.

Jesus Christ is not a philosopher.  The philosopher is a mere lover of wisdom.  His love is desirous and needy; it is eros, the love of one who lacks for that which he lacks.  But Jesus Christ lacks nothing; he is is the fullness of wisdom, the Word and Wisdom of God embodied.  So Christ is no lover of wisdom in the strict sense in which Socrates is a lover of wisdom.  Divine love is not erotic but agapic.

If a sage is a possessor of wisdom, no philosopher qua philosopher is a sage. If a philosopher were to become a sage, he would thereby cease to be a philosopher: one does not seek what one possesses. Socrates is the embodiment of philosophy but not of wisdom. Socrates, then, is not a sage.

The wisdom of Socrates was largely the wisdom of nescience: he knew that he did not know what he did not know.  In stark contrast, Christ claimed not only to know the truth, but to be the truth as recounted in the via, veritas, vita passage at John 14:6: "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me."  Ego sum via et veritas et vita; nemo venit ad Patrem nisi per me.

Suppose a philosopher comes to accept Christian doctrine.  Does he remain a philosopher in his acceptance of Christian doctrine or does he move beyond philosophy?  I say that a philosopher who accepts the revealed truths characteristic of Christianity has moved beyond philosophy in this acceptance.  Why?

A philosopher is not only one who, lacking wisdom and desiring it, seeks it, but also one who seeks the truth in a certain way, by a certain method.  It is characteristic of philosophy that it is the pursuit of truth by unaided reason.  'Unaided' means: not aided by divine revelation.  (It does not mean that the philosopher does not consult the senses.)  The philosopher operates by reason and seeks reasons for what he believes.  The philosopher relies on discursive reason as he encounters it in himself and accepts only what he can validate by his autonomous use of reason.  Qua philosopher, he accepts no testimony but must verify matters for himself.  The philosopher is like Doubting Thomas Didymus at John 20:25: "Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails and put my finger into the place of the nails and put my hand into his side, I will not believe." 

That is the attitude of the philosopher.  The philosopher is an inquirer into ultimate matters, and doubt is the engine of inquiry. The philosopher qua philosopher asks:  Where's the evidence?  What's the argument?  What you say may be true, my brothers, but how do you know?  What's your justification? 

You say our rabbi rose from the dead?  That sort of thing doesn't happen!  I want knowledge, which is not just true belief but justified true belief.  You expect me to believe that Jesus rose on no evidence but your testimony from probably hallucinatory experiences fueled by your fear and hunger and weakness?  Prove it!  W. K. Clifford takes it to the limit and gives it a moral twist:  "It is wrong always and everywhere to believe anything on insufficient evidence."  Presumably the testimony of a bunch of scared, unlettered, credulous fisherman would not count as sufficient evidence for Thomas Didymus or Clifford.

The Christian, however, operates by faith.  If Reason is the faculty of philosophy, Faith is the faculty of religion.  The philosopher may reason his way to the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, but he cannot qua philosopher arrive at the saving truth that "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14) by the use of reason.  The saving truths are 'known' by faith and not by reason.  It is also clear that faith for the Christian ranks higher than reason.  As Jesus says to Thomas at John 20:29:  "Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen and have believed."

The attitude of the believer who is also a philosopher is fides quarens intellectum, faith seeking understanding.  But what if no understanding is found?  Does the believer reject or suspend his belief?  No.  If he is a genuine believer, he continues to believe whether or not he achieves understanding.  This shows that for the believer, reason has no veto power.  The apparent logical impossibility of the Incarnation does not cause him to reject or suspend his belief in Jesus as his Lord and Savior.  If he finds a way to show the rational acceptability of the Incarnation, well and good; if he fails, no matter.  The Incarnation is a fact 'known' by Revelation; as an actual fact it is possible, and what is possible is possible whether or not we frail reeds can understand how it is possible.  The believer in the end will announce that the saving truths are mysteries impenetrable to us here below even if he does not go to the extreme of a Tertullian, a Kierkegaard, or a Shestov and condemn reason wholesale.

The attitude of the philosopher who is open to the claims of Revelation is different.  He feels duty-bound by his intellectual conscience to examine the epistemic credentials of Biblical revelation lest he unjustifiably accept what he has no right to accept.  This attitude is personified by Edmund Husserl.  On his death bed, attended by nuns, open to the Catholic faith, he was yet unable to make the leap, remarking that it was too late for him, that he would need for each dogma five years of investigation.

There is a tension here and it is the tension between Athens (Greek philosophy) and Jerusalem (the Bible), the two main roots of the West whose fruitful entanglement is the source of the West's vitality.   As Leo Strauss sees it, it is a struggle over the unum necessarium, the one thing needful or necessary: 

 

To put it very very simply and therefore somewhat crudely, the one thing needful according to Greek philosophy is is the life of autonomous understanding.  The one thing needful as spoken by the Bible is the life of obedient love.  The harmonizations and synthesizations are possible because Greek philosophy can use obedient love in a subservient function, and the Bible can use philosophy as a handmaid; but what is so used in each case rebels against such use, and therefore the conflict is really a radical one. ("Progress or Return?" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 246, bolding added.)

So is the Christian the true philosopher?  Only in the sense that philosophy points beyond itself to something that is no longer philosophy but that completes philosophy while cancelling it. I am tempted to reach for an Hegelian trope while turning it on its head:  if Christianity is true, then philosophy is aufgehoben, sublated, in it.  If Christianity is true, then the Christian arrives at the truth that the philosopher at best aims at but cannot arrive at by his method and way of life, the life of autonomous understanding.  To achieve what he aims at, the philosopher would have to be "as a little child" and accept in obedient love the gift of Revelation.  But it is precisely that which he cannot do if he is to remain a philosopher in the strict sense, one who lives the life of autonomous understanding.

That is tension some of us live. The life of autonomous understanding and critical examination? Or the life of child-like trust and obedient love?

The problem in what is perhaps its sharpest form is presented in the story of Abraham and Isaac.  

The Christian life is not the philosophical life.  It lies beyond the philosophical life and, if  true, is superior to it.

 

But is it true?

In the end, you have to decide what you will believe and how you will live.

Politics and Philosophy

Politics is a practical game. One has to win to be effective. Merely to have the better set of ideas and policies is to fail. Philosophy, however, is not about winning. It is about ultimate understanding, spiritual self-transformation, and wisdom. A politics fully informed by insight and understanding would be ideal if it were not impossible. This 'ideal,' however is not an ideal for us. Nothing counts as an ideal for us if it is unattainable by us.

Ars longa, vita brevis. The same is true of philosophy. The philosopher has time and takes his time. Hear 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!"

The philosopher can resist the urge for a quick solution. He takes his time because he is a "spectator of all time." (Plato, Republic, Book VI) He's in the game for the long haul, for the 'duration.' After his death he is still in the game if his Nachlass is found worthy. He may concern himself with the questions of the day, but he never loses sight of the issues of the ages. And he has an eye for the presence of the latter within the former.

In politics we have enemies; political discourse is inherently polemical. But there are no enemies in philosophy. For if your interlocutor is not a friend, then you are not philosophizing with him. Ideally, philosophy is the erothetic love of truth pursued either in solitude or  among friends who love the truth more than they love each other.

Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas. (Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1096a15; but the thought is already in Plato at Republic, Book X, 595b-c and 607c. I am tempted to say that everything is already in Plato . . . .) 

The Concept of 'Standoff' in Philosophy

The following two propositions are collectively logically inconsistent and yet each is very plausible:

1. Being dead is not an evil for any dead person at any time. 

2. Being dead at a young age is an evil for some dead persons.

Obviously, the limbs of the dyad cannot both be true.  Each entails the negation of the other.  And yet each limb lays serious claim to our acceptance. If you have been following the recent Epicurean discussions in these pages, you know that very plausible arguments can be given for both members of this pair of contradictories.

If philosopher A urges (1) and philosopher B urges (2), and neither can convince the other,  then I say that A and B are in a standoff.

On the other hand, there cannot be sound arguments for both limbs. This is because there are no true contradictions. A plausible argument needn't be sound. And a sound argument needn't be plausible. A sound argument, by commonly accepted definition, is a valid deductive argument all of the premises of which are true. It is easy to see that every such argument must have a true conclusion.

So I say that the above standoff is dialectical, not logical. 

This means that what generates the standoff or impasse are not logical norms and notions taken in abstracto and applied to propositions taken in abstracto,  but logic embedded and applied in a concrete dialogue situation playing out between two or more finite and fallible agents who are trying to arrive at a rational resolution of a difficult question.  I will assume that the interlocutors are sincere truth seekers possessing the intellectual virtues.  There is thus nothing polemical about their conflict. Of course, some standoffs are polemical, most political ones for example, but at the moment I am not worrying about polemical standoffs. Nor am I concerned with physical standoffs or the sort of standoff that occurs in a game of chess when neither side has sufficient mating material. 

A second example. 

3. God by his very nature as divine  is a concrete being who exists of metaphysical necessity.

4. Nothing concrete could exist of metaphysical necessity.

By 'concrete' I mean causally active/passive. The God in question is not a causally inert abstract object like a number or a set-theoretical set. Clearly, (3) and (4) form a contradictory pair and so cannot both be true.  And yet one can argue plausibly for each.

This is not the place for detailed arguments, but in support of (3) there are the standard Anselmian considerations. God is ens perfectissimum; nothing perfect could be modally contingent; ergo, etc. God is "that than which no greater can be conceived"; if God were a merely contingent being, then a greater could be conceived; ergo, etc.

In support of (4), there is the difficulty of understanding how any concrete individual could exist necessarily. For such a being, possibility suffices for actuality: if God is possible, then he is actual. But this possibility is not mere possibility; it is the possibility of an actual being.  (God is at no time or in any possible world merely possible, if he is possible at all.) The divine possibility -- if it is a possibility at all and not an impossibility -- is a possibility that is fully actualized. Possibility and actuality in God are one and the same in reality even though they remain notionally distinct for us.  (In classical jargon, God is pure act, actus purus.) Equivalently, essence and existence in God are one and the same in reality even if they must remain notionally distinct for our discursive intellects.  It is God's nature to exist. God is an existing essence in virtue of his very essence. God's existence is in no way subsequent to his essence, not temporally, of course, but also not logically or ontologically. So it is not quite right to say, as many do, that God's nature entails his existence; God's nature is his existence, and his existence is his nature.

If you think this through very carefully, you will realize that the ground of the divine necessity is the divine simplicity.  It is because God is an ontologically simple being that he is a necessary being.  If you deny that God is simple but affirm that he is necessary, then I will challenge you to state what makes him necessary as opposed to impossible. If you say that God is necessary in virtue of existing in all possible worlds, then I will point out that that gets us nowhere: it is simply an extensional way of saying that God is necessary.  

Divine simplicity implies no real distinctions in God, and thus no real distinction between essence and existence. It is the identity of essence and existence in God that is the root, source, ground of the divine necessity. The problem is that we, with our discursive intellects, cannot understand how this could be.  Anything we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as nonexistent. (Hume) The discursive intellect cannot grasp the possibility of a simple being, and so it cannot grasp the possibility of a necessary concretum.  Here then we have the makings of an argument that, in reality, every concretum is contingent, which is equivalent to the negation of (4).

So if one philosopher urges (3) and his interlocutor (4), and neither can convince the other, then the two are in a standoff.

Now you may quibble with my examples, but there are fifty more I could give (and you hope I won't).

Philosophy is its problems and these are in canonical form when cast in the mold of aporetic polyads.  The typical outcome, however, is not a solution but a standoff.

The Inquirer, the Dogmatist, the Theoretical and the Practical

I have so far characterized in a preliminary way what a standoff in philosophy is, and I have given a couple of examples in support of the claim that there are standoffs in philosophy.  But there are those who are loathe to accept that there are such standoffs.  These are people with overpowering doxastic security needs: they have an irresistible  need to be secure in their beliefs.  They don't cotton to the idea that many of the deepest problems are insoluble by us. These are people in whom the dogmatic tendency wins out over the inquiring/skeptical tendency.  Among these are people who think one can PROVE the existence of God, or prove the opposite. Among them are those who are CERTAIN that there are substances in the Aristotelian sense of the term. It would be easy to multiply examples.

As I see it, the spirit of genuine philosophy is anti-dogmatic.  A real philosopher does not bluster. He does not claim to know what he does not know, and in some cases, cannot know. A real philosopher does not confuse subjective conviction with objective certainty. He has time and he takes time. He can tolerate suspense and open questions. But his suspension is not a Pyrrhonian abandonment of inquiry, but is in the service of it. His happiness is not a porcine ataraxia, but the happiness of the hunt. Unlike the dogmatist, however, he has high standards with the result that is hunt is long and perhaps endless as long as he remains in statu viae wandering among the charms and horrors of the sublunary.

And yet we are participants in life's parade and not mere spectators of it. Curiously, we are both part of the passing scene and observers of it.  To us as participants in the flux and shove of the real order a certain amount of bluster has proven to be life-enhancing and practically necessary. To live is to maneuver, to position oneself, to take a position, to adopt a stance, to grab one's piece of the action and defend it, and in the clinch to shoot first and philosophize later.

As so we are torn. It is a broken world and we are broken on its samsaric wheel. To put it grandly,  the human condition is a tragic predicament. We must act in conditions of poor lighting, maintaining ourselves in the Cave's chiaroscuro, with little more than faith and hope to keep us going. At the same time we seek light, light, more light and the transformation of faith into knowledge and hope into having. 

Related articles

If God Created the World, Who Created the Creator? A Good Koan?

A Curious Mode of Refutation

Here:

To begin with, the idea that “existence exists” excludes the idea that existence doesn’t exist. It denies the subjectivist, pragmatist, postmodernist view that reality is an illusion, a mental construct, a social convention. Obviously, people who insist that reality is not real are not going to buy in to a philosophy that says it is real.

So that’s one huge problem with Rand’s philosophy.

Now I am no fan of Ayn Rand: my Rand category is chock-full of trenchant criticisms of her and her acolytes. But the above is so stupid as to be beyond belief.

Forgive me for stating the obvious. One cannot refute a view by pointing out that there are those who do not accept it.

UPDATE (7:40)

This just in from Patrick Toner:

Off to class in two minutes, but I thought I should send a quick note to say that I think Biddle's piece is satirical.  Or something like that.  It wasn't meant as a refutation.  I hope you're well!

Professor Toner may well be right. You decide.

Can Philosophy be Saved?

An essay by Susan Haack.

Related:

Genuine Inquiry and Two Forms of Pseudo-Inquiry

Philosophy Profession in Thrall of Dreadful Rankings

Susan Haack on the Fragmentation of Philosophy and the Road to Reintegration

The Consolations of Philosophy for the Middle-Aged

The Economist reviews Kieran Setiya, Mid-Life: A Philosophical Guide.

Related: A Philosopher on the Midlife Crisis

 

The Value of Philosophy

What good is philosophy?

It teaches humility in point of knowledge and belief. It lays bare the infirmity of reason. It prompts us to seek other sources of insight, including mystical intuition and divine revelation, while supplying us with the tools for their evaluation and critique. Its problems, though insoluble, can serve as koans.

Good philosophy debunks bad philosophy, pseudo-philosophy, scientism, epistemic pretense, bad religion, and bad politics. It is a mighty curb on fanaticism of all sorts, that of the religionists as well as that of the anti-religionists. It keeps Jerusalem in check even while it is itself fed and enlivened by Hierosolymic themes and tropes. While serving as prophylaxis on excess and overreach, it yet makes possible a reasoned faith and a reasoned mysticism.

And it does all of this critically and skeptically in the best sense of the term: in the spirit of rational inquiry.  It is an enemy of the dogmatism of the religionists and that of politically correct leftist anti-religionists.

So philosophy, while in some ways miserable, is in many ways magnificent.

In any case it is necessary for the good life and worthy of spirited defense, with blood and iron if need be, against the anti-civilizational  forces of leftism and radical Islam which work in synergy, whether wittingly or unwittingly.

The Misery of Philosophy II

One goes round and round on the dialectical merry-go-round. Thoughts lead to thoughts which lead to more thoughts, including inconclusive thoughts, semantically indeterminate thoughts, mutually contradictory thoughts. Words beget words unto endlessness. On the side of the subject one never penetrates to the source of thoughts. And on the side of the object one never arrives at the root of the real. 

I would understand subjectivity and existence. But I am stymied by the infirmity of reason.

The Misery of Philosophy I

Philosophy is endless because inconclusive. But how is knotting one's thread with a dogma better than going on endlessly? After all, what we want is knowledge of truth, not the mere fixation of belief.

"Why I Left Academic Philosophy"

Interesting. Take it with several grains of salt and factor in the fact that it is by a 'transwoman.' The following is borne out by my experience:

But ultimately I don't need academic philosophy to do philosophy. My blogging over the past ten years has reached a larger audience than I could ever hope to achieve through the academic journal system.

On a really good day I'll get 3,000 page views. Usually I bump along at about half of that or less.  But I reach people and influence them. Proof is the thick manila folder of fan mail I have received. 

My humble thanks to all readers of good will.

Popular Conceptions and Misconceptions of Philosophy

Here, with interesting comments.

First Philosophy or Scientism?

I was going to add to this old draft from 15 December 2009, but it looks like I won't be getting around to it. So here it is.

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

Robert Cummins (Meaning and Mental Representation, MIT Press, 1989, p. 12) regards it as a mistake "for philosophers to address the question of mental representation in abstraction from any particular scientific theory or theoretical framework." Thus we ought not naively ask, What is mental representation? as if there is something called mental representation that is common to folk psychology and such theories as orthodox computationalism and neuroscience. "Mental representation is a theoretical assumption, not a commonplace of ordinary discourse."

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The right way to proceed, according to Cummins, is to "pick a theoretical framework and ask what explanatory role mental representation plays in that framework and what the representation relation must be if that explanatory role is to be well grounded." In other words, one takes a theory such as orthodox computationalism and then one asks: what must the nature of mental representation be if this theory is to be both true and explanatory?

So the question of mental representation is not a question of 'first philosophy,' i.e., a question to be settled independently of, and prior to, empirical research, but a question in the philosophy of science exactly analogous to the following question in the philosophy of physics: what is the nature of space given that General Relativity is true and explanatory? The properties of physical space are for physics to determine. Philosophy's role is correspondingly modest, that of a handmaiden. To coin a phrase: philosophia ancilla scientiae, philosophy is the handmaiden of science, similarly as it was the handmaiden of theology in the Medieval period. Philosophy becomes the philosophy of science. And according to Quine, who is quoted by Cummins on the fontispiece of his book, "Philosophy of science is philosophy enough."

It ought to be the same, Cummins thinks, with psychology. Whether or not there are mental representations becomes the question whether or not the best theories in cognitive science and psychology posit mental representations, and the nature of the representation relation is to be read off from whichever theory is taken to be true and most explanatory.

But there is a problem with this view. If we want to know about physical space and the nature of matter, we turn to the physicist. And if we want to know about the brain, we turn to the neuroscientist. But if we want to know about the relation of mind and brain, we cannot base ourselves solely on empirical science.

Here is one consideration. The extant empirical theories imply the existence of mental representations. But surely their existence is not obvious. Looking at a photograph of a mountain, I become aware of the mountain and some of its features via the picture. Here it makes sense to say of the picture that it is a representation of the mountain. But when I look directly at a mountain, there is no phenomenological evidence of any epistemic intermediary or representation: I see the mountain itself. I don't see sense-data or representations or any kind of epistemic deputy.

Perhaps I will be told that I am nonetheless aware of an internal image but not aware of being aware of it. Compare the case of walking into a room and seeing a depiction of Hillary Clinton so realistic and convincing that I take it to be Hillary herself. In such a case I am aware of an image, but not aware of being aware of an image. Why couldn't it be the same with outer perception? One crucial difference is that I can come to be aware of the Hillary-image as an image. But I cannot come to be aware of any supposed internal image that mediates my outer perception. This is particularly obvious if the internal image is a brain state. I cannot, while gazing at the mountain, 'focus inwardly' and become aware of the brain state that is supposedly mediating my perception of the mountain. Given this fact, I suggest that it is unintelligible to say that there is an internal image that mediates outer perception. The word 'image is' being misused. An image that I cannot become aware of as an image is in no intelligible sense an image of something.

No doubt the brain and its states are part of the causal basis of perception. And there is no doubt that an organism's brain is in (some) of the states it is in because of what is happening in its environment, e.g., bright light is being reflected from a snow field into the organism's eyes. But to say that some of the brain states represent the environment makes no sense assuming that 'represent' has the sense it has when we attend to the phenomenology of representative consciousness. To speak of material representations literally in the head is to read back into a third person conception of the world notions that make sense only from a first-person point of view.

You may agree with what I just said or not. But the discussion we will have about these matters surely does not belong to any empirical science. It belongs to first philosophy. The question of whether there are mental representations at all, for example, cannot arise within disciplines that presupposes their existence. And the relation between a first- and third-person view of the world cannot be treated within an exclusively third-person point of view. Finally, there is the point that the claim that science alone can clarify these questions is itself unscientific and so an instance of (negative) first philosophy.