Maverick Philosopher

It Pays to Publish . . .

. . . but don't pay to publish. Leader of the Stack.

Consciousness is an Illusion . . .

. . . but truth is not?  An inconsistency in Dennett.

Over at the Stack.

Can Consciousness be Explained?

Top o' the Stack. Dennett debunked! 

Beware the Ides of March!

At Substack and elsewhere.

If you make it to the end of the day, you may want to quaff in celebration the libation, The Ides of March. 

Inheritance and Appropriation

Resist the erasure of our culture.  Substack latest.

Do You Really Want to Teach at a University?

Substack latest. Do you want to feed the unhungry in a leftist seminary?

Comments and replies:

Tony: One of the best, and certainly the most concise, essays on the problem. The mild criticism when I was at NYU was that the universities were offering "higher skilling." Higher infantilization was right around the corner. 

Bill: Thanks, Tony. One could go on to mention what a lousy deal a college degree is these days: as the quality goes down, the price goes up.  And then the trifecta of corruption: overpaid do-nothing administrators pushing the destructive DEI agenda; federally insured loans without oversight; stupid students and their parents who go into deep debt for something of little or no value. One absurdity leads to another: bad financial decisions are then to be rewarded by student loan forgiveness! Let the waitresses and the truck drivers pick up the tab. The law, unmoored from morality, and positively promotive of immorality, becomes a mere power tool for the advancing of the interests of amoral if not immoral elites. Talk about moral hazard!

Tony: Which connects to the inherently fraudulent banking system and the Ponzi scheme called Social Security. A perfect storm of moral hazards.

Bill: I agree. But permit me a quibble. Ponzi schemes are set up with fraudulent intent.  The SS system was not so set up. Initially, at least, it was reasonable and well-intentioned: to keep workers from ending up in the gutter, subsisting on cat food. It was insurance against destitution, and like all insurance, the premiums were relatively small. Of course, it soon enough transmogrified into an ultimately unsustainable retirement program.  My main point at the moment, however, is the pedantic one that SS is not a Ponzi scheme strictly speaking.  But it may be more than pedantic inasmuch as lefties could take it as a smear against SS as opposed to a legitimate criticism. Or as I put it about a dozen years ago, though not in a reply to Tony Flood:

Language matters.  Precision matters.  And if not here, where?  If you say what you know to be false for rhetorical effect, then you undermine your credibility among those whom you need to persuade.  Conservatives don't need to persuade conservatives, and they will not be able to persuade leftists.  They must pitch their message to the undecided who, if rational, will be put off by sloppy rhetoric and exaggeration.

I note that W. James Antle, III, the author of the linked article, refers to the SS system as "the liberals' Ponzi scheme."  But of course it is not a Ponzi scheme.  A Ponzi scheme, by definition, is a scheme set up with the intention of defrauding people for the benefit of those running the scheme.  But there is nothing fraudulent about the SS system: the intentions behind it were good ones!  The SS system is no doubt in dire need of reform if not outright elimination.  But no good purpose is achieved by calling it a Ponzi scheme.  That's either a lie or an exaggeration.  Not good, either way.  The most you can say is that it is like a Ponzi scheme in being fiscally unsustainable as currently structured. Why not make the point accurately without a distracting rhetorical smear? Conservative exaggeration is politically foolish.  Is it not folly to give ammo to the enemy?  Is it not folly to choose a means (exaggeration and distortion) that is not conducive  to the end (garnering support among the presently uncommitted)?

Tony:  I take your point about imputing ill-intent, but the passive voice of the "SS system was not so set up" (as a Ponzi scheme) obscures agency and its motives (which you were not writing an essay about). Before the Social Security Act of 1935 there was the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which was not hatched overnight. The conspiracy to nationalize US banks was at least a decade in the making. The propaganda seeding the mass media (as today, post-SVB collapse) was that there's nothing worse than a bank run or "panic" (or is it a "threat to public health"?). That line served those who wanted to bring banking under governmental control (with the bankers overseeing the government). The easy money of the '20s led to the crash that engendered the destitution you referenced. Intelligent people engineered the FRA, and equally intelligent, educated, sober, well-meaning people came up with the SSA (and other agencies) to address the former's unforeseen consequences. Their ideological heirs now prevent the inevitable insolvency of SS with easy money: the central bank writes a check to itself with "our" money (denominated in federal reserve notes), postponing the day of reckoning. My issue is moral hazard, and one seems to engender another. As Tucker reminded us last night, the bankers effed up, but none went to prison. The government moved heaven and earth to shore up the same morally hazardous system because, as all the right people know, "there's no alternative." As I wrote in Christ, Capital & Liberty:

Just as advances in technology decreased the fear of “getting caught” consuming pornography, so did the central bank in the financial markets decreased the fear of suffering losses for making bad loans. As Peter Schiff put it regarding the 2008-2009 Meltdown:

Just as prices in a free market are set by supply and demand, financial and real estate markets are governed by the opposing tension between greed and fear. Everyone wants to make money, but everyone is also afraid of losing what he has. Although few would ascribe their desire for prosperity to greed, it is simply a rose by another name. Greed is the elemental motivation for the economic risk-taking and hard work that are essential to a vibrant economy. [Peter Schiff, “Don’t Blame Capitalism,” The Washington Post, October 16, 2008.www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/15/AR2008101503166.html

But over the past generation, government has removed the necessary counterbalance of fear from the equation. Policies enacted by the Federal Reserve, the Federal Housing Admini­stration, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (which were always government entities in disguise), and others created advantages for home-buying and -selling and removed disincentives for lending and borrowing. The result was a credit and real estate bubble that could only grow—until it could grow no more. [CCL 126-127]

I'll stop here before I write an essay!

Bill: And I'll leave you with the last word. You make substantive points of more importance than my linguistic one, although I retain my conviction that language matters: any toleration of linguistic slovenliness spills over into a toleration of sloppy thinking. 

 

On Independent Thinking

Substack latest.

The Eremitic Option

Top o' the Stack.

Bad Stuff: Badiou

Top o' the Stack.

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On 03/03/2023 17:29, William F. Vallicella from Philosophy in Progress wrote:

And I say this as someone who has read practically all of Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Gadamer, a crapload of Derrida (who, according to John Searle, gives bullshit a bad name) and plenty of others besides. I know Continental philosophy from the inside.

Dear Bill,

thanks for giving me a laugh-out-loud moment on a Friday evening! Maybe Searle is too concretist and therefore dismissive of everything that even smells wrong, but he's the world's great reality check . . . .

Reading through that list again, it seems that the chronological order of those philosophers (I think they are in order either of birthdate or of major works) corresponds to the declining coherence of their thinking and its connection to reality?

Thomas Beale
Health IT blog | Culture blog | The Objective Stance | ORC-ID

 

Thank you, Thomas.  May all be well with you. I made use of your note, with attribution. If you don't want me to mention you by name, just say so, and I won't.

 

It's Saturday. Tonight I shall have me a shot of Jaegermeister. Ever try this stuff?

 

Yes, the philosophers are listed in order of birth and of major works. And yes, the later Continentals can't hold a candle to the earlier ones. As for Searle, he is a brilliant critic of other philosophers' views, but his own views -- I am thinking primarily of his philosophy of mind -- are rather less impressive.

 

There is plenty of interesting material about the man and his thought in my Searle category. His outsized ego and unrestrained concupiscence landed him in some hot water.

All fine by me.

 

I had forgotten about the fall of JS ... possibly I skimmed it on your blog back when you noted it, but not all the details. It is interesting how even some of the greatest minds lack what others would consider the most basic self-awareness. Still, I like much of his writing since he cuts through crap in a similar way to Scruton (Searle has a wrecking ball, Scruton arguably a flamethrower, which can be aimed with more precision, also funnier), and so saves one some time. I doubt very much if every single thing he designates as crap really is crap (and that's before we get to atheism - e.g. phenomenology), but then that's why we have you!

 

Jaegermeister is a bit too sweet for my liking so only very occasionally. I am more of wine-drinker + occasional whiskey and even sometimes Grappa, a drink that makes no sense, except when it does.

If you know what Grappa is, then you probably know what Aperol is. Try mixing the latter with tequila, say, 2/3 tequila + 1/3 Aperol. The combo is delicious in my humble opinion and an excellent synaptic lubricant.

I will try it. I have some tequila lurking in the den of iniquity (= top of wine fridge).

BTW was just scanning your various entries on Husserl, who does interest me a lot (and more to the point, pro philosophers in my field, medical informatics). I've read some original (well, in English) matierial, pretty readable, even despite the 'continental' flavour. Anyway, your various dissections are very nice. I need to spend more time on them. I may be back with some discussion points . . . .

Fire away, when you are ready!

God as Human Projection?

Substack latest

Del Noce deciphered; Feuerbach refused.

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Update (3/3): Substack informs me: "After 24 hours, your public post has had

2,234 views." (Note that if a reader accesses my post n times (n > 1), that counts as one view.)

Curious, in that I have at present only 1,200 subscribers. And why should this calmly argued post on a non-political topic be so bloody interesting when others of a more polemical nature are not? 

Bullshitting and Lying

Top o' the Stack.

Is Sin a Fact?

Substack latest. A passage from G. K. Chesteron examined.

Running as Equalizer?

Top o' the Stack.

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Malcolm Pollack comments:

I liked your brief post on running-as-equalizer, and how stubbornly our natural inequalities will always dash our hope of sweeping them under the rug. ("Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.")

 

There's even another natural inequality you didn't touch on, namely the difference between those who have the fiber to get off their asses to go running in the first place, and those who won't - between those who do, and don't, have the will and wisdom to suffer consciously to improve their future selves. 

That, in my (insufficiently) humble opinion, is likely the most important inequality of all.

 

A stimulating comment. Now for some commentary on the comment.

 

A. Life is hierarchical by any measure in all dimensions including physical, mental, moral, and spiritual.  We are not equal as individuals. And the same goes for groups. The 'woke' attempt to enforce 'equity' is bound to fail.  There will never be equality of outcome.  Merit will inevitably find a way of asserting itself.  In the short term, the institutionalized assault on merit will be disastrous for the vast majority while profiting the oligarchic enforcers of 'equity.' In the long term, the enforcers too will suffer. For as Malcolm, points out, "reality doesn't go away." 

 

Not only is the attempt to enforce 'equity' bound to fail, it cannot count as a value in any sound value hierarchy. For 'equity' is unjust.

 

Note also that the enforcement of 'equity' is selective: Is there 'equity' in professional sports? For that matter, are professional sports the home of  'diversity' and 'inclusion'? The questions answer themselves.  In the NBA and the NFL qualifications matter.  Real qualifications, not 'woke qualifications.'  No DEI there! Examples of  'woke qualifications' include being black, being female, and being lesbian as in the case of the current presidential press secretary. The point is not that being black, being female, and being lesbian, whether taken singly or  'intersectionally,'  should disqualify anyone from a government job;  the point is that they cannot count -- to a sane and reasonable person -- as qualifications sans phrase. 

 

Equity' is (or was) a perfectly good word that leftists have hijacked and re-defined to mean equality of outcome/result. Linguistic hijacking has proven to be an effective  leftist tactic. Leftists are subversive of right reason and natural order and the mother of all subversion is the subversion of language. Hence the wokester predilection for Orwellianisms, e.g., "Abortion is health care." 

 

B.  In Malcolm's concluding sentence he alludes to humility and the questions it raises in the present context. He suggests that he himself is insufficiently humble. Is humility then something good? I was put in mind of a couple of lines from a poem by Goethe:

 

This is not easy to translate, but the thought is that only the worthless are modest; the good celebrate the deed.  The good are not humble, but accomplished; they are made happy by and celebrate their accomplishments. The couplet has a Nietzschean, and thus anti-Christian flavor. Here political theology enters the picture.

 

Suppose the Christian God exists. Then we all are equal, and not just in the eyes of the law, or by abstraction from our positions in the various hierarchies mentioned above, or via some such conceit as John Rawls' Original Position behind the Veil of Ignorance.   We are equal not just de jure but de facto. We are equal in fact as sons and daughters of one and the same eternal Father. The fact is not empirical but metaphysical. The equality is a function of the infinite distance between the all-perfect God and mortal man with his manifold imperfections.  The natural hierarchies that so impress us here below are nothing to God: all the empirical differences of physical prowess, IQ, etc. shrink to nothing from the divine point of view.

 

One unavoidable question is whether the political equality of persons can be maintained without a theological foundation. Suppose there is no Judeo-Christian God. What could possibly support the manifestly anti-empirical belief in equality? After all, it is a plain fact that we are not equal in the ways mentioned above.   If reality is exhausted by the natural (space-time and its material contents) and is thus in principle empirically accessible 'all the way down and up,'  then what possible basis could belief in equality of person have?  What would make this belief non-illusory?

 

I would say that if you are not an anti-wokester, if you do not reject the DEI agenda and all the depredatory absurdities that follow in its train, such as the assault on merit, then you are not sane and reasonable.  Does it follow that the anti-wokester who is an atheist and a naturalist must also be a rejector of equality in all its senses? To specify and sharpen the question: Is there any rational justification, on the assumption of atheism and naturalism,  for holding, as I in fact do, that slavery is a grave moral evil?

 

ComBox now open.

Thought, Action, Dogma, and De Maistre

Substack latest

Polity and Comity

Substack latest

Abdication of Authority?

Or something worse?

Substack latest.

Four Notes on the Gun Debate for the Reasonable

Substack latest.

This post has a prerequisite: a modicum of rationality and a little bit of good will. The irrational and ill-willed  should head for their 'safe spaces' now lest they be 'triggered.'

Can Philosophy be Debated?

Strictly speaking, no!

Top o' the Stack.

Simone Weil in the Light of Plato

Substack notes on Phaedo 83.

Thomas Merton, Journals, vol. 4, p. 57 (10 October 1960):

The superb moral and positive beauty of the Phaedo.  One does not have to agree with Plato, but one must hear him.  Not to listen to such a voice is unpardonable, it is like not listening to conscience or nature.

Absolutely right.

The writings of Plato are inexhaustible  in their riches. For years I read and taught the Phaedo dialogue, without appreciating the theory of relations contained therein until I read Plato's "Phaedo" Theory of Relations by Héctor-Neri Castañeda.  I spent the summer of 1984 with Hector in Bloomington at Indiana University on an NEH summer seminar grant. Little did I know at the time that Frithjof Schuon, a very different type of philosopher than Hector, and one I admire more than Hector, was living in Bloomington at the same time. An opportunity missed!

Hector was a brilliant man, a creative powerhouse, and most generous in the help he gave his younger colleagues, but his approach to philosophy was merely theoretical; I discerned no spiritual depth in him. Schuon was roughly the opposite: spiritually deep but in need of some analytic discipline.  Plato combined the attributes of spiritual depth and analytic penetration that fall asunder in lesser mortals.

For Weil, Plato "has genius whereas only the word talent applies to Aristotle." ("Human Personality" in Simone Weil, An Anthology, p. 67) 

Elias Canetti on Greta Thunberg

Five second read!

The Paradox of the Misanthropic Naturalist Animal Lover

Top of the Stack. It concludes:

You may recall the case of  Timothy Treadwell, who camped among grizzlies, and whose luck ran out. 

In an Outside article, the author, Doug Peacock, reports that Treadwell "told people he would be honored to 'end up in bear scat.'" And in his last letter, Treadwell refers to the grizzly as a "perfect animal." There are here the unmistakable signs of nature idolatry. Man must worship something, and if God be denied, then an idol must take his place, whether it be nature with its flora and fauna, or money, or sex, or the Revolution, or  some other 'icon.'

Deny God, devalue man, and end up bear shit. Way to go 'man.' 

The Paltry Mentality of the Copy Editor

At the head of the Stack this fine morning.

Questions about Global Warming

Crisis or hoax? How much of which? At the top of the Stack.

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Ed Buckner writes,

I can help with your first three questions.

1. Is global warming (GW) occurring?

2. If yes to (1), is it naturally irreversible, or is it likely to reverse itself on its own? And if irreversible, how would you know that?

3. If GW is occurring, and will not reverse itself on its own, to what extent is it anthropogenic, i.e., caused by human activity, and what are the human causes?

To the first, undeniably yes. The science is that as the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has a physical effect that causes temperature to rise, all other things being equal. Note the rider: things are generally not equal, as there are other (well known) effects on climate. This also answers your third question. Yes, the warming caused by CO2 is man-made.

BV: You did not answer my third question. I asked to what extent is GW man-made. A priori, from the armchair, we know that if there is GW -- if the Earth's atmosphere, land masses and oceans are in the aggregate getting warmer and warmer over time --  then GW cannot be wholly anthropogenic and also that human activity cannot have zero effect on it.  The empirical question for the climatologists is: how much of the GW is due to human activity?  The answer to this question has serious repercussions for policy decisions.  I suspect, though I do not claim to know, that the percentage of GW due to human activity -- carbon emissions and what all else -- is not high enough to justify the draconian "Green New Deal " measures of the GW alarmists.  The onus probandi, I should think, is on them to prove otherwise.

Is the science settled with respect to the empirical question I have posed? Has consensus been reached among competent climatologists?  That is not a rhetorical question. I would really like to know,

You write, "Yes, the warming caused by CO2 is man-made."  I didn't ask that question. I didn't ask what causes the warming. I asked, given that GW is occurring, about the extent to which the causes -- whatever they are -- are man-made. Not that I deny that CO2 plays a role.  But as you know, CO2 is also produced naturally, and some of the warming produced by naturally occurrent CO2 is precisely not man-made.  

So here is another empirical question: How much of the CO2 in the atmosphere originates naturally and how much from human activity? Has scientific consensus been reached on this question?

However, there is other stuff you must know. First, the known physics does not explain the predicted rises in temperature. The predicted rises are based on speculation to do with water vapour ‘positive feedback’.

Second, ‘global warming’ is ambiguous between cause and effect. We know a bit about the forcing, less about the water vapour possible cause. Regarding effect, we only have temperature measurement to go by, and the records are not long term enough. I have looked at Antarctic data and there is no evidence of any change, except at the limb of the Antarctic peninsula, which is coastal and affected by the sea. Also, the peninsula is some way from the Pole, and is naturally quite warm.

BV: Very interesting. So you are saying that the water vapor caused by GW causes more GW?

Third, and this addresses your question about reversibility: for every amount of CO2 in the atmosphere there corresponds an equilibrium temperature. Were all CO2 emission to halt, the atmosphere would take a while to establish that equilibrium, then remain there, so long as the CO2 concentration remained constant (which it won’t, as it will tend to fall).

Fourth, and global warmists tend to avoid this fact like the plague, the rise in temperature is logarithmic to the CO2 concentration. If the concentration doubles, equilibrium temperature goes up x degrees. If it doubles again, another x degrees. And so on. So a lot of the scare stories show linear charts of concentration, not logarithmic, which is somewhat misleading.

Fifth, and here I agree somewhat with the warmists, while the effect of warming can be continuous with no step changes, there is a well-known step change that occurs when ice melts. With an average of 1/10 degree below freezing point, the ice will not tend to melt. With the same amount above, it will eventually melt. So Antarctica would melt if its average temperature were a tiny amount above freezing point. But that won’t happen because Antarctica is huge and most of it close enough to the Pole that temperatures are way way below freezing.

Hope that helps.

BV: It does indeed, and thanks very much. The fourth and fifth points add to my understanding of the topic. The fifth is particularly interesting since it raises the logico-philosophical question of the metabasis eis allo genos, the shift into another genus, the somersault from a quantitative change into a qualitative one.

By the way Ed, since you are an historian of logic, do you have a list of sources on the metabasis eis allo genos?  I first encountered a reference to it in Kierkegaard. Does Trendelenburg say anything about it? Must go back to Aristotle. Medievals had to have addressed it.

One more question: if the issue is global warming, why the talk of climate change? That move involves an ascent from the species to the genus.  Obviously the global climate can change by getting hotter and by getting cooler.

Can you answer me this one, Ed?  (Knowing me, you know that I suspect wokeassed chicanery at work.)

COMBOX now open.

Latin or Anglo-Saxon?

Well-written advice on writing well from Brand Blanshard.

Simone Weil on False Gods

Over at Substack. If you haven't made the acquaintance of Simone Weil, may I introduce you?

Of 'Blind Review' and Pandora's Box

Tony Flood sent me here for the latest outrage at Stanford.

But this crapola is old hat. On April Fool's Day, 2014, I worked myself into a fine lather over it. The latter manifested itself as a rant that is now available for your delectation at the top of my (Sub)stack. You will enjoy it.

As I wrote to Tony this morning after receiving his message:

Synchronicity City!

I was just reviewing an old post of mine on this very topic!  This is nothing new, Tony. I shall upload my old rant to Substack.

The deeper I meditate, the more synchronicity. Post hoc ergo propter hoc? I am of course properly skeptical of Jung and his ideas.  Doubt is the engine of inquiry as I have said too many times.

 

Will respond to your other points and queries later.

A Sketch of Armstrong's Naturalism

And some reasons to question it. 

Top of the (Sub)stack.

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Expositing Armstrong, I wrote

 

The exclusion of so-called abstract entities or abstract objects such as mathematical sets, unexemplified universals, and numbers from the roster of the real is because of their lack  of causal power.  What causal role could they play? 

 

And then I quoted Armstrong:  "And if they play no causal role it is hard to see how we can have good reasons for thinking that they exist." (2)

Woland's Cat objects:

This reasoning is missing a step, I think. Abstract entities do exist when they are contemplated by a mind: assuming minds are 'real' (i.e. part of organisms, which are part of the space-time continuum of reality), then mathematical sets etc. become real when represented in the mind. 

How would Armstrong reply?  As follows. To exist is to exist extra-mentally. That is the only way anything can exist. If so, there cannot be two or more ways or modes of existing.   He here follows, as other Australian philosophers do, his and their teacher John Anderson. Hence there is no such way of existing as existing intra-mentally, in the mind. Whatever I do when I think about something, I do not, in thinking about it, or contemplating it, confer upon it existence-in-the mind.  

The following are candidate abstract entities: the number 7, the set {7}, the proposition expressed by '7 is prime,' the property of being prime.  To say that they are abstract is to say that they are not in space or in time, and that they are 'causally inert,' which is to say that they do not enter into causal relations with anything: they neither cause nor are caused.  Armstrong rejects the whole lot of them.  Their existence is ruled out by his metaphysical naturalism according to which reality is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents.  They don't exist outside the mind and, since that is the only way anything can exist, they don't exist inside the mind either.

So what am I thinking about then I think of {Max the cat, Manny the cat}?  Sets or "classes supervene on their members -- that is to say, once you are given the members, their class adds nothing ontologically, is no addition of being." (Sketch, 8)  But then what am I thinking about when I think about the intersection of two disjoint sets? A set theorist will say: the null set, { }!  You will also recall that in set theory, the null set is a subset of every set, and a member of every power set.   Don't confuse subset and member as Armstrong does on p. 8, n. 1.

This presents a bit of a problem for Armstrong. He cannot say that the null set  supervenes on its members since it doesn't have any.  So of course he bites the bullet: he rejects the existence of the null set. "It would be a strange addition to space-time!" (p. 8., n. 1)  The more I think about this, the more problematic it seems. If there is no null set, then there are no power sets.  And if there is no null set, why should we think that there are unit sets or singletons such as {Quine} or {Max}? What is the difference between Max and the set whose sole member is him?  If Max's singleton supervenes on him, then there is no singleton!  If there are no singletons, then there is no intersection of {Max, Manny} and {Max, Maya}!

What would Woland's Cat say about that?

Memo to self: Re-read  the section "Mysterious Singletons" in David Lewis, Parts of Classes. And blog it! You are not spreading yourself thin enough!

Remembering Albert Camus . . .

. . . and one whose hero he was.

Substack latest.

Galen Strawson on God

Substack latest. Does the fact of evil render the nonexistence of God certain?

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Tony Flood comments:

A good one, Bill. Bahnsen held that atheists, having no reason for affirming an absolute moral standard (which evil offends) can't even frame a problem of evil. He also held that the classic argument you summarized is missing a premise: God could not have a morally sufficient reason for permitting evil. (That He hasn't shared it with us is neither here nor there.) If He does, however, the argument doesn't go through. What atheist has even attempted to argue for it? 

The Introvert Advantage

Currently atop  the Substack pile.  With a little help from Kafka, Heidegger, Schopenhauer, and Einstein.

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Thomas writes (12/29),

A very nice note for the (nearly) new year. It took me decades to realise I am one of those who was nearly socially self-sufficient all his life - no school yard bullying ever touched me, although I was one of the shorter ones until I grew late. And I had no problem concentrating, reading and creating (a few) new ideas in my work for hours on end (indeed, for years on end), whereas I find most people never ever perform such simple feats even once in their lives - concentrating and writing for 4 - 8 hours? How do you do it? How do you not do it, I reply . . .

 

It takes a long time for me to understand the difference because of course we all think we are the same inside until we inspect some bit of human behaviour and find differences. One difference is: socially reliant people have no mental resilience. They can't deal with difficulties on their own. Therefore in crisis situations, which often occur in social groups reacting to wider events, most people determine their responses in a miasma of fear and group-think - a guarantee of poor quality outcomes. So the socially self-sufficient nearly always under-estimate the state of constant frustration (due to non-achievement) and anxiety (when no idle chat or other filler activity is available) of others. So we are amazed when society takes the turns it does. We are exceptionally ignorant, until we study mental lassitude scientifically!

 

Your whisky aphorism has it right. We do need a bit. After all, wit (in the esprit sense) partly comes from talk. And the Kafka quote: responding to corns should just be done, not heard, while one is actually thinking about or discussing things of import, or at least containing some wit.

 

But perhaps there is something to mindless chat? Maybe it serves a purpose such as to limit social violence, in the same way that greeting others (in European culture at least) with a kiss on both cheeks probably (?) limits fist-swinging, at least for that day. I have no idea.

 

Good points.  I never thought of describing extroverts as 'socially reliant,' but the characterization fits.  This 'social reliance' makes them suggestible and inclines them toward conformism, group-think, and foolish fads such as buccal fat removal. But of course we are social animals whether we like it or not. No man an island, etc. 

 

A little socializing is good even unto a bit of mindless chit-chat. Women as a group are extremely good at this and we introverted males can learn from them. The trick, however, is not to take what the other person says seriously. I have made the following mistake. I am hiking along and I meet someone who says, "Beautiful weather we're having today!" I reply, "Well, it's overcast and a bit windy, so I wouldn't call it beautiful."  That's a social mistake or faux pas (a double-entendre to keep with the hiking theme) because the other guy was probably just signaling friendliness or harmlessness or something. He had no intention of conveying a meteorological truth.  In situations like this the introvert who was thinking about the third derivative of position with respect to time has to turn off his truth-drive and go with the silly-ass flow. And not be a jerk.

 

Strangely, I have found that a little socializing is often physically stimulating.  On an early morning ramble, I am doing OK, but feeling a bit sluggish.  I encounter an acquaintance. We chat for a few minutes. When I start up again I feel energized. There's a spring in my step and  glide to my stride.  

 

And now my mind drifts back to a book I read as a teenager, Games People Play, by Eric Berne. He was pushing something he called "transactional analysis" if memory serves. Look it up.

 

To end with the whisky metaphor. If one shot is good, ten shots is not ten times better.

Conscience, Brain, and Scientistic Pseudo-Understanding

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If nothing else, philosophy is prophylaxis against infection by scientistic pseudo-understanding.  Take the jab! Boosters to follow.

A Battle of Titans

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It is sometimes said that there are only two kinds of philosophers, Platonists and Aristotelians.  What follows is a quotation from Heinrich Heine which expresses one version of this useful simplification.  Carl Gustav Jung places it at the very beginning of his Psychological Types (Princeton UP, 1971, p. 2. Jung does not properly source the Heine quotation.)

Tom and Van: A Tale of Two Idealists

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Tony Flood comments (12/23):

This was enjoyable on so many levels. There's irony in labeling these gents "idealists" (I know the sense in which you meant it) since Marxists considered theists like Merton metaphysical "idealists," but and how could any mathematician, even a Marxist one, be anything but an idealist when it comes to the reality of numbers? Your historical vignette is rich and your comparison and contrasts apt. 

I know that Karl Marx occupied himself with the foundations of analysis (calculus), but I don't know whether or not he wrote anything about the philosophy of mathematics.  To answer Tony's question with a question: Why couldn't a Marxist take a nominalist tack and simply deny the existence of numbers and other mathematical items?

Tony replies (12/24):

"Why couldn't a Marxist take a nominalist tack and simply deny the existence of numbers and other mathematical items?"

Abstractly, Bill, I have no idea what tack Marxist materialists might take if pressed about the reality of numbers, e.g., what (and "where") they are (Plato's problem); how they're "unreasonably effective" in the natural sciences, which Marxists revere, i.e., how numbers can cause mathematical belief (Benacerraf's problem); and how numbers are knowable on the materialist/naturalist terms to which Marxists subscribe, i.e., what neural process could possibly answer to the perception of a mathematical object (Goedel's problem). I wish I could have asked Stalinist mathematician Dirk Struik (1896-2000) these questions when he and I were comrades, but I wasn't asking them then. (I'm not asking them these days, but your question stimulated memories of when I did.) Nominalism is not an integral way out for Marxists, but what grounds Marxists have for valuing integral solutions, I have no idea. 

Thanks for the Wigner pdf. It gets at a question that fascinated me when I was a student of electrical engineering at the end of the 'sixties.  How is it that the theory of complex numbers -- developed a priori in response to a purely theoretical question about the roots of negative integers -- finds application in alternating current theory? 

I say 'developed,' Wigner says 'invented.' "The principal emphasis [in mathematics] is on the invention of concepts. Mathematics would soon run out of interesting theorems if these had to be formulated in terms of the concepts which already appear in the axioms." I wrote 'developed' because of my platonizing tendency to view mathematical entities -- 'entities' betrays me too inasmuch as it begs the question I am about to pose --  as discovered rather than invented. The question that my use of 'entities' begs is precisely the question whether mathematical 'items' -- a colorless, non-question-begging bit of terminology -- are made up by us (in which case they cannot be called entities or beings) or are really but non-spatially 'out there' in Plato's topos ouranios. My platonic drift links up with my classical theism and issues in the view that the unspeakably vast actual infinity of mathematical items are accusatives of divine awareness: their Being is their being-known/created by the archetypal intellect.  This sort of view allows for the mediation of two extremes, a synthesis if you will.

Thesis: math items exist in themselves in splendid independence of ectypal intellects (whether human, Martian, angelic, whatever). Antithesis: math items do no such thing; they are the conceptual/linguistic fabrications of ectypal intellects such as ours. And now my mind drifts back to Hartry Field's nominalistic Science without Numbers, circa 1980,  the gist of which is that science can be done without ontological commitment to any so-called abstract entities.  There are some very smart nominalists  and they are hard to beat. Shooting from the hip, I say Field  'out-quines' Quine.

But here's a thought. Suppose Wigner is right and mathematica are inventions by us, which is to say that they are conceptual/linguistic fabrications that do not refer to anything real anywhere, whether in Plato's heaven or on Aristotle's earth. Would that not make the problem of the applicability of mathematics to the physical world utterly insoluble?

There is a Kantian-type solution, but then you have to take on board the Kantian baggage.  

It looks like I have, willy-nilly this Christmas eve, added a log to my aporetic fire in support of my metaphilosophical thesis that the central problems of philosophy, though obviously meaningful, pace the later Ludwig, are all of them absolutely insoluble by intellects of our constitution. Insofar forth, I am mightily impressed by the thesis of the infirmity of reason. The Fall had noetic consequences.

Below: Raphael, The School of Athens depicting Plato gesturing upwards, as if to the mundus intelligibilis and Aristotle downwards as if to the mundus sensibilis.

Care of Soul, Care of Body

A Sunday Substack sermon.

In Praise of the Useless

A Substack short.

Servility Will Cower to Force

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So Long, Nancy

I bid Madame Speaker a fond adieu on Substack.

Relativism and Dogmatism

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My Substack snowball is getting bigger and bigger. Time to monetize? Well, it's a labor of love and I've got enough loot to last me my sublunary tenure, assuming the Dementocrat destruction of the economy is kept within certain bounds. 

I believe that Enough is Enough when it comes to material stuff. Whatever we are here for, we are not here to pile up loot and land. You have heard it said that in the end a man needs only six feet. And not even that if the crematorium is his body's last stop.

On the other hand, as foibled as we are psychologically, people tend to value more what they pay for. And if they are paying, then they may pay closer attention 'to get their money's worth.'

Or maybe they think like this: "This guy gives away his content for free; he must not think it is worth much."

On the third hand, If I sell a product, then I am in thrall to my customers and must cater to their wants and desires. This thrall thwarts my independence. I'm big on the latter. 

So you can expect my articles to stay free, free for me and free for thee.

Free Speech, Censorship, Toleration, and a Lame Libertarian Argument

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Regular programming to resume when Typepad gets its act together

Meanwhile, Happy Halloween from Screamin Jay Hawkins.

Substack latest is about zombies and the value of being conscious.

Third Parties as Discussion Societies in Political Drag

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Einstein, Relativity, and Relativism

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Slavery, Abortion, and 'Skin in the Game'

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Negativity: The Spirit of the Left

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The spirit of the Left is the spirit of negativity. Any intellectually honest person following current events can see that the tendency of leftists is mindlessly to destroy for the sake of destruction what it has taken centuries to build. Transgressive of tradition and its wisdom, these 'progressives' are both hobbled and enabled by their presentism. Hobbled, because they know nothing of the past. Enabled, because their ignorance allows them to imagine themselves to be free of the moral limitations of humanity. Punks and know-nothings for the most part, they are unwitting agents of the demonic.

Work, Money, Living, and Livelihood

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Paul, Baruch, and Henry had the right idea.

Technical Philosophy, Compartmentalization, and Worldview

In memory of Saul Kripke (1940-2022)

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"I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it."

Really? I call 'bullshit' on this saying misattributed to Voltaire.

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"Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread"

Material bread or spiritual bread?

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A Minimum of Metaphysics for Meditation

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The Pig, the Fool, and Socrates

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