Maverick Philosopher

The Euthyphro Problem, Islam, and Thomism.

Top o' the Stack. The problem is genuine but insoluble. Or so I conclude. What say you?

The Danger of Appeasing the Intolerant

Substack latest.

Christianity Civilizes

Does Islam? To the same extent?

Top o' the Stack.

'Islamophobia' and 'Hoplophobia'

A very polite Substack chiding of the stupid and often vicious use of these terms. My entry shows how to make a point rationally and stylishly without any use of invective and only the slightest trace of sarcasm. You have to cultivate the ability to write in a civil and respectful way. But you must also know how to pummel and deride scum like the present POTUS and his sorry entourage who, in their willful self-enstupidation, mindlessly repeat phrases they have heard with nary a concern for what they mean or ought to mean.

Different strokes for different folks. Sweet reason for some; the hard fist of unreason for others. The 'hard fist' comes in two flavors, one verbal, the other meta-verbal. 

Three Notes on David Mamet

Top o' the Stack.

The third note sends the reader to How the Democrats betrayed the Jews. Mamet is right about the Dems. He also rightly notes that Christianity bears some responsibility for anti-semitism:

It began with the fall of the Jewish state in 77 CE. Afterwards, we find the Christian libel that the Jews killed Christ, the medieval information that we slay Christian children to bake their blood into matzoh, that we were the cause of the Second World War; and, currently, that we exist to murder Moslems.

It’s all one horrific attack, and its earliest recorded instance is John 8:44 (of the Jews): “You are of your father, the Devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the Beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth because the truth is not in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”

John 8:44 is quite a passage. You should crack open your New Testament and read it in context.

Martin Luther's role in the spread of anti-semitism cannot be gainsaid. I am currently reading Heiko A. Oberman's surpassingly excellent Luther: Man between God and the Devil (Yale UP, 2006) wherein we read, on p. 294:

Three days before his death Luther added an "Admonition against the Jews" to his last sermon, held in Eisleben on February 15, 1546. It clearly illustrates the change Luther had undergone in old age. There had been no transformation of friendship into enmity; only the measures proposed for an effective policy of improvement and and conversion had changed: "The Jews are our public enemies; they do not cease to defame Christ our Lord, to call the Virgin Mary a whore and Christ a bastard, and if they could kill us all, they would gladly do so. And they often do." Nevertheless, "we want to practice Christian love toward them and pray that they convert." 

Luther's anti-semitism was softened by Christian charity; not so the Palestinian Authority's.

PA: All mosques must teach that extermination of Jews is an Islamic imperative.

A Problem of Evil for Atheists

Latest Substack offering on evil. 

Yesterday's entry argued that the naturalist cannot explain the depth and depravity of moral evil. (We can 'thank' the Islamist Nazis of Hamas for rubbing our noses in it once again.) Today's entry argues that a naturalist who is intellectually honest and not self-deceived must be a pessimist and an anti-natalist.

Why I will not Support my Alma Mater: An Open Letter

Top o' the Stack.

 

Galen Strawson on Nicholas Humphrey on Consciousness

Substack latest.

Strawson is right against Humphrey, but his own theory is worthless.

See also: The Problem of Consciousness and Galen Strawson's Non-Solution

UPDATE (10/3).  A friend referred me to this article which I judge to be very bad indeed. See if you can make out what is wrong with it.

A Quest for Transcendence Gone Wrong

Substack latest.

Geraldo Rivera and the Musket Canard

Top o' the Stack.

How could a wokester object to a trans musket?

Filed under Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

I Get a Rise out of Aristotle

Substack latest.

Is the political life the highest life?

Thomas Aquinas Against Open Borders

Substack leader. 

With linkage to a passage (pun intended) from the doctor angelicus.

No Day without Cultural Appropriation

Substack latest.

How Not to Define 'Atheism'

Top o' the Stack.

 

The Downward Drift of the Democrat Party

Substack latest.

Envy, Jealousy, Schadenfreude

Some distinctions.

Top o' the Stack.

Norms in Nature? Some Doubts

Substack latest. It opens like this:

Our friend Malcolm Pollack, riffing on some complaints of mine about Michael Anton's talk of natural rights, wrote the following:

Rights are normative in their essence, while Nature simply is. Therefore, I see only two possibilities:

1) “Natural” rights flow from an intrinsic source of normative authority. Since brute and indifferent Nature cannot be such a source, then for such rights to exist in themselves, as opposed to being mere conventions and intuitions, requires the existence of God. They are therefore “natural” rights in virtue of our nature qua creations of a transcendent and normatively authoritative Deity.

2) There is in fact no such authoritative source, and so natural rights are nonsense. (Upon stilts.) It may be in our nature to have the intuitions we do about possessing such rights, but it is a category error to imagine that rights themselves can originate in the material world.

In response, I pointed out that this is far too quick inasmuch as there are Aristotelians who seek to ground norms in nature herself. These thinkers do not accept what to Pollack and the modern mind seems self-evident, namely, that there is a gap between the normative and the factual that disallows any derivation of normative claims from factual ones.  One prominent Aristotelian is Philippa Foot. So let's see what she has to say.  

ComBox open.

Roberto Rossellini's Socrates

Substack latest.

The philosopher at the hour of death.

Thoughts in and of Ancient Lycia

From my Turkish journal, 22 February 1996.

Leader of the Stack.

Edith Stein: Faith, Reason, and Method

Top o' the Stack.

August 9th is the feast day of St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross in the Catholic liturgy.  She is better known to philosophers as Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher in her own right, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of the Roman Catholic Church. One best honors a philosopher by re-enacting his thoughts, sympathetically but critically. Herewith, a bit of critical re-enactment.

In the 1920s Stein composed an imaginary dialogue between her two philosophical masters, Edmund Husserl and Thomas Aquinas. Part of what she has them discussing is the nature of faith.

 

Beware of Projecting . . .

. . . your attitudes and values into others.

Leader of the Stack. Excerpts:

We are not all the same 'deep down,' and we don't all want the same things. You say you value peace and social harmony? So do I. But some are bellicose right out of the box. They love war and thrive on conflict, and not just verbally.  

It is dangerous to assume that others are like we are.  (I am thinking right now of a very loving and lovable female neighbor  who makes that dangerous assumption: she has a 'Coexist' sticker affixed to her bumper.)

Liberal 'projectionism' — to give it a name— can get your irenic self killed.

 

[. . .]

 

There can be no peaceful coexistence in one and the same geographical area over the long term except under classical liberalism.  For classical liberalism alone is tolerant of deep differences and is alone respectful of our equally deep ignorance of the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters.  Why must we be tolerant? Because we do not know. The classical liberal  is keenly aware of the evil in the human heart and of the necessity of limited government and dispersed power. So he is justified in making war against fanaticism, one-sidedness, and totalitarian systems of government whether theocratic or 'leftocratic.'  It would not be a war of extermination but one of limitation. It would also be limited to one's geographical area and not promoted abroad to impose the values of classical liberalism on the benighted tribalists of the Middle East and elsewhere.

Finally, can American conservatism and the ideology of the Democrat Party in its contemporary incarnation peacefully coexist? Obviously not, which is why there is a battle for the soul of America. Either we defeat the totalitarian Left or we face a nasty trilemmatic trident: acquiesce and convert; or accept dhimmitude; or be cancelled in one’s livelihood and then eventually in one's life.

Would Schpenhauer Allow Comments . . .

. . . on his weblog, The Scowl of Minerva?

Find out at Substack.

'Post-Truth'

A buzz word much bandied about in 2016, usually in connection with Donald J. Trump.

Top o' the Stack.

You will learn something from this piece if you have an attention span. Too much twit-shit and your span may shrink to a point. You may transmogrify into a tweeting twit whose brain is fit only to flit.

The Christian View of Death and Immortality

Substack latest.

Emmett Till

Top of the Stack. 

Emmett Till is back in the news. This being the case, the inevitable comparisons of Till with Trayvon Martin will start up again. My purpose is to provide you with some background so that you can appreciate just how inane the comparisons are that assimilate the defensible killing of Martin by George Zimmerman to the unspeakably brutal and unjust torture and slaying of Till. Anyone who assimilates the two is not exaggerating, but lying shamelessly.   To understand this one need only know the essentials of each case. 

The Professor-Student Non-Aggression Pact

Substack latest.

Susan Sontag on the Art of the Aphorism

Top o' the Stack

Victor Davis Hanson on Tribalism

Top o' the Stack

To Write Well, Read Well

The example of William James.  Excerpt:

But what makes James' writing good? It has a property I call muscular elegance. The elegance has to do in good measure with the cadence, which rests in part on punctuation and sentence structure. Note the use of the semi-colon and the dash. These punctuation marks are falling into disuse, but I say we should dig in our heels and resist this decadence especially since it is perpetrated by many of the very same politically correct or ‘woke’ ignoramuses who are mangling the language in other ways I won't bother to list. There is no necessity that linguistic degeneration continue. We make the culture what it is, and we get the culture or unculture we deserve.

As for the muscularity of James' muscular elegance, it comes though in his vivid examples and his use of words like 'pinch' and 'butchered.' His is a magisterial interweaving of the abstract and the concrete, the universal and the particular. Bare of flab, this is writing with pith and punch. And James is no slouch on content, either.

Voluntary Segregation

Substack latest.

Related: The Answer is Division. 

Krauthammer's Fundamental Law Repealed

Substack latest

The Difference between Philosophy and Polemics

Top o' the Stack. 

Tony Flood comments:

Congrats on another vital post, Bill. You referred to our spectatorship and to theoria without adverting to the etymological connection between them. (You can't do everything in one post! (:^D) ) In Philosophy after Christ, p. 39n1, I noted: 

The Greek theoreō (θεωρέω) means to look at; gaze; spectate; form a picture. “Theory” comes from the noun for “spectacle” and the verb “to behold,” theaomai (θεάομαι), from which we get “theater.” A theoros is a spectator. “When all the people who had gathered to witness this spectacle (θεωρίαν, theōrian) saw what took place, they beat their breasts and went away” (Luke 23:48). “He [Jesus] beholds (θεωρεῖ) a commotion with people crying and wailing loudly” (Mark 5:38).

 

You'll no doubt see other implications.

Can You Get Through the Next Hour?

The Stoic method of division. At Substack.

Kant on Suicide

Substack latest, with quotations from the forgotten Paul Ludwig Landsberg.

The Most Powerful Argument Against Religious Faith Ever?

Today at Substack.

On Her Deathbed

Substack latest.

"I fear that there is nothing on the other side."

Negativity: The Spirit of the Left

Top o' the Stack.

W. K. Clifford

I take a poke at his main claim to fame over at Substack.

(What work does 'over' do in the preceding sentence? None at all. But I like the sound of it. So stet.)

Will Science Put Religion out of Business?

A tilt at transhumanism.

Substack latest.

The Childless as Anthropological Danglers

Top o' the Stack. 

The Austrian philosopher and Vienna Circle member Herbert Feigl wrote about nomological danglers.  Mental states as the epiphenomenalist conceives them have causes, but no effects. They are caused by physical states of the body and brain, but dangle nomologically in that there are no laws  that relate mental states  to physical states.

The childless are anthropological danglers.  They are life's epiphenomena. They have ancestors (causes) but no descendants (effects). Parents are essential: without  them we could not have come into fleshly existence.  But offspring are wholly inessential: the individual, though not the species, can exist quite well without them.

I mention pros and cons of dangling anthropologically.

Why Am I So Happy?

Top o' the Stack.

Unusual Experiences and the Problems of Overbelief and Underbelief

Substack latest.

One day, well over 40 years ago, I was deeply tormented by a swarm of negative thoughts and feelings that had arisen because of a dispute with a certain person.  Pacing around my apartment, I suddenly, without any forethought, raised my hands toward the ceiling and said, "Release me!"  It was a wholly spontaneous cri de coeur, a prayer if you will, but not intended as such.  I emphasize that it was wholly unpremeditated.    As soon as I had said the words and made the gesture, a wonderful peace descended upon my mind, and the flood of negativity vanished. I became as calm as a Stoic sage.

On Blaming the Victim

Top o' the Stack.

The Pragmatic and the Evidential

Substack latest.

On believing beyond the evidence. Immoral? Irrational?

Why Did Communism Fail?

Top o' the Stack.

Jerking Toward Social Collapse

Substack latest.

Expressive Individualism

Is Trump an example?

Substack latest.

A Hot Sauce Rant from 2013

A hot (sauce rant) or a (hot sauce) rant? Both. Parentheses  matter!  Scope matters. All scope distinctions matter. Mind your p's and q's. Discriminate operators and operands. (Am I sending a coded message?)

Substack latest.

Don't complain about 'old news.' What are you, a Twitterized 'woke' presentist?

There is presentism in the philosophy of time and there is what I will call, for want of a better term, historical presentism. This, roughly, is the conceit that the present alone matters  and that we have little or nothing to learn from the past.  It is not so much a view as an attitude, a 'bad 'tude' if you will, one shared by adolescents of all ages. There is the punk who, ignorant of great literature, installs Bukowski in the literary pantheon. Self-insulation from the past and its achievements is one of the ways wokesters self-enstupidate. 

And there are those who ought to know better, spineless university administrators in the grip of fashionable obsessions, who are thereby rendered incapable of just judgments of past times and individuals. Case in point: the Flannery O'Connor unnaming.

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.