Maverick Philosopher

A Commonplace Blog

D. G. Myers remembered. Top o' the Stack.

Roberto Rossellini's Socrates

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The philosopher at the hour of death.

How is Such Moral Heroism Possible?

The example of Maximilian Kolbe

Technical Philosophy, Compartmentalization, and Worldview

In memory of Saul Kripke (1940-2022)

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Crises There Will Always Be

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Remembering Quentin Smith

My old friend died on this date last year. If in your life you find one truly kindred soul, then you are lucky indeed. Quentin was that soul for me.  This piece captures the man.  

Quentin Smith was exactly the kind person who’s not supposed to exist in modern, ultra-specialized, ultra-professionalized academia. The kind of philosophy professor who is supposed to exist, the one who responds to emails promptly and knows how to tie a tie and writes just enough articles that 10 other specialists in his tiny sub-sub area will read to jump through all the hoops of tenure and promotion but doesn’t lose enough sleep over the underlying philosophical problems to distract himself from pursuing from the PMC rat race, has some real virtues. That professor will be more responsible than Quentin seems to have been about grading. The cleaning staff won’t be overly troubled by the state of that other professor’s office. And that other professor definitely won’t miss as many classes as Quentin did through absent-minded preoccupation with actual, inner philosophical contemplation. Hell, that other professor probably gets to class 15 minutes early just in case there’s a problem with his PowerPoint.

Quentin was more like one of the rail-riding “Zen lunatics” that Jack Kerouac wrote about in his novel Dharma Bums. Or like Diogenes, the philosopher who ate in the marketplace, shat in the theater, and slept in a giant ceramic jar in the middle of Athens. Quentin was pretty much who Santayana had in mind when he said that the ideal job for a philosopher wasn’t professor of philosophy at a university but tender of umbrellas at some unfrequented museum.

A Tribute to Dallas Willard

My study of a fine article on Gustav Bergmann's assay of the act this afternoon led me to look up its author, Greg Jesson. Among other things, I found this tribute to Dallas Willard.  My own little tribute to Willard is here.

In Praise of a Lowly Adjunct

The entry below was written on 18 May 2009 and posted the same day.  I had meant to send it to Dr. Loretta Morris, Richard's widow, but couldn't find her e-mail address.  The other day I discovered her obituary. So here is another case of too late again.

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The best undergraduate philosophy teacher I had was a lowly adjunct, one Richard Morris, M.A. (Glasgow).  I thought of him the other day in connection with John Hospers whose An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (2nd ed.) he had assigned for a course entitled "Linguistic Philosophy."  I also took a course in logic from him.  The text was Irving Copi's Symbolic Logic (3rd ed.) You will not be surprised to hear that I still have both books.  And I'll be damned if I will part with either one of them, despite the fact that I have a later edition of the Copi text, an edition I used in a logic course I myself taught.

I don't believe Morris ever published anything.  The Philosopher's Index shows a few citations for one or more Richard Morrises none of whom I have reason to believe is the adjunct in question.  But without publications or doctorate Morris was more of a philosopher than many of his quondam colleagues.

The moral of the story?  Real philosophers can be found anywhere in the academic hierarchy.  So judge each case by its merits and be not too impressed by credentials and trappings.

I contacted Morris ten years ago or so and thanked him for his efforts way back when.  The thanking of old teachers who have had a positive influence is a practice I recommend.  I've done it a number of times.  I even tracked down an unforgettable and dedicated and inspiring third-grade teacher.  I asked her if anyone else had ever thanked her, and she said no.  What ingrates we  are!

So if you have something to say to someone you'd better say it now while you both draw breath.  

Heute rot, morgen tot.

Maximilian Kolbe

Today is the feast of Maximilian Kolbe.

Although it is a deep and dangerous illusion of the Left to suppose that man is inherently good and that it is merely such contingent and remediable factors as environment, opportunity, upbringing and the like that prevent the good from manifesting itself, there are a few human beings who are nearly angelic in their goodness.  One can only be astonished at the example of Maximilian Kolbe and wonder how such moral heroism is possible. And this even after adjusting for a certain amount of hagiographic embellishment. 

Is there a good naturalistic explanation for Kolbe's self-sacrifice?

Wikipedia:

At the end of July 1941, ten prisoners disappeared from the camp, prompting SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritzsch, the deputy camp commander, to pick ten men to be starved to death in an underground bunker to deter further escape attempts. When one of the selected men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out, "My wife! My children!", Kolbe volunteered to take his place.

According to an eyewitness, who was an assistant janitor at that time, in his prison cell, Kolbe led the prisoners in prayer. Each time the guards checked on him, he was standing or kneeling in the middle of the cell and looking calmly at those who entered. After they had been starved and deprived of water for two weeks, only Kolbe remained alive. The guards wanted the bunker emptied, so they gave Kolbe a lethal injection of carbolic acid. Kolbe is said to have raised his left arm and calmly waited for the deadly injection.^[13] He died on 14 August. His remains were cremated on 15 August, the feast day of the Assumption of Mary.^[20]

 

Helmuth James Graf von Moltke

I  sometimes express skepticism about the value of the study of history. If history has lessons, they don't seem applicable to the present in any useful way. But there is no denying that history is a rich source of exemplary lives. These exemplary lives show what is humanly possible and furnish existential ideals. Helmuth James von Moltke was a key figure in the German resistance to Hitler. The Nazis executed him in 1945. Here is his story.  Here is an obituary of his wife, Freya.

Reading Now: Alfred Delp, S. J., Prison Writings

From Thomas Merton's October 1962 introduction:

These are the thoughts of a man who, caught in a well-laid trap of political lies, clung desperately to a truth that was revealed to him in solitude, helplessness, emptiness, and desperation. Face to face with inescapable physical death, he reached out in anguish for the truth without which his spirit could not breathe and survive. The truth was granted him, and we share it in this book . . . . (p. xxi)

Fr. Delp was born on 15 September 1907 and was executed by the Nazis on 2 February 1945 for his association with the Kreisau Circle of Count von Moltke.

We who write in comfort and relative security do well to study those who wrote "in the shadow of the scaffold" bound in cold irons in solitary confinement awaiting a mock trial and then almost certain death.  In such a "boundary situation" (Karl Jaspers), the usual evasions and the flight to the familiar are impossible. We are forced to get serious about the predicament we've been in all along. Anyone who feels secure in this world is living in illusion.

The only gesture of goodwill I have encountered is that the jailor has fastened my handcuffs so loosely that I can slip my left hand out entirely. The handcuffs hang from my right hand so at least I am able to write. But I have to keep alert with one ear as it were glued to the door -- heaven help me if they should catch me at work!

And undeniably I find myself in the very shadow of the scaffold. Unless I can disprove the accusations on all points I shall most certainly hang. (p. 9)

Further information here.

Husserl, Knight of Reason

Edmund Husserl was born on this date in 1859. How do we honor a philosopher? By re-enacting his thoughts, sympathetically, yet critically. Amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas.

Ich muss meinen Weg gehen so sicher, so fest entschlossen und so ernst wie Duerers Ritter, Tod und Teufel.   

"I must go my way as surely, as seriously, and as resolutely as the knight in Duerer's Knight, Death, and Devil."

Edmund Husserl, Persönliche Aufzeichnungen, tr. MavPhil  

Note the castle on the hill, the hour glass in the devil's hand, the serpents entwined in his headpiece, and the human skull on the road. 

Time is running out, death awaits, and a mighty task wants completion. An Adversary stands in the way with temptations galore.  

Husserl, like Ludwig Wittgenstein, was a serious man. I have no time for the unserious. Something is at stake in life, difficult as it is to say what it is.  Related: What I Like About Wittgenstein.

My Husserl category.

David Stove Pays Tribute to David Armstrong and Comments on the Malignancy of the Left

Excerpt:

But, while David has never aspired to put the world right by philosophy, the world for its part has not been equally willing to let him and philosophy alone in return. Quite the reverse. His tenure of the Chair turned out to coincide with an enormous attack on philosophy, and on humanistic learning in general: an attack which has proved to be almost as successful as it was unprecedented.

This attack was begun, as everyone knows, by Marxists, in support of North Vietnam’s attempt to extend the blessings of communism to the south. The resulting Marxisation of the Faculty of Arts was by no means as complete as the resulting Marxisation of South Vietnam. But the wound inflicted on humanistic learning was a very severe one all the same. You could properly compare it to a person’s suffering third-degree burns to 35 per cent of his body.

After the defeat of America in Vietnam, the attack was renewed, amplified, and intensified, by feminists. Their attack has proved far more devastating than that of the Marxists. Lenin once said, “If we go, we shall slam the door on an empty house”; and how well this pleasant promise has been kept by the Russian Marxists, all the world now knows. It is in exactly the same spirit of insane malignancy that feminists have waged their war on humanistic learning; and their degree of success has fallen not much short of Lenin’s. Of the many hundreds of courses offered to Arts undergraduates in this university, what proportion, I wonder, are now not made culturally-destructive, as well as intellectually null, by feminist malignancy and madness? One-third? I would love to believe that the figure is so high. But I cannot believe it.

David did all that he could have done, given the limits set by his position and his personality, to repel this attack. Of course he failed; but then, no one could have succeeded. What he did achieve was a certain amount of damage-limitation. Even this was confined to the philosophy-section of the front. On the Faculty of Arts as a whole, David has had no influence at all—to put it mildly. In fact, when he spoke at a meeting of the Faculty, even on subjects unrelated to the attack, you could always have cut the atmosphere with a knife. It is a curious matter, this: the various ways inferior people have, of indirectly acknowledging the superiority of others, even where no such acknowledgment is at all intended by the inferior, or expected by the superior.

By the end of 1972, the situation in the philosophy department had become so bad that the splitting of the department into two was the only way in which philosophy at this university could be kept alive at all. In this development, David was the leading spirit, as his position and personality made it natural he should be. Of course he did not do it on his own. Pat Trifonoff’s intelligence and character made her an important agent in it. Keith Campbell’s adhesion to our side, after some hesitation, was a critical moment. But while I and certain others were only casting about for some avenue of escape, David never gave up. He battled on, and battled on again, and always exacted the best terms, however bad, that could be got from the enemies of philosophy.

The result of the split was far more happy than could have been rationally predicted at the time. In fact it was a fitting reward for David’s courage and tenacity. For the first twenty years of the new Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy have been fertile in good philosophy, to a degree unparalleled in any similar period in this or any other Australian university. The department has also enjoyed a rare freedom from internal disharmony. As I have often said, it is the best club in the world, and to be or have been a member of it is a pleasure as well as a privilege.

There will certainly be no adequate official acknowledgment, from anyone inside the university, of what is owed to David. What could someone like the present Vice-Chancellor possibly care about the survival of humanistic learning, or even know about philosophy, or history, or literature? Anyone who did would never have got a Vice-Chancellor’s job in the first place. If there is any acknowledgment forthcoming from the Faculty of Arts, David will be able to estimate the sincerity of it well enough. It will be a case of people, who smiled as they watched him nearly drowning in the boiling surf of 1967–72, telling him how glad they were when, against all probability, he managed to make it to the beach.

But anyone who does know and care about philosophy, or does care about the survival of humanistic learning, will feel towards him something like the degree of gratitude which they ought to feel.

On Roderick Chisholm

It was my good fortune to be a participant in Roderick Chisholm's National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar at Brown University in 1981. My summer digs were in Boston in those days and I would drive the old VW bus down Interstate 95 three times a week to Providence. 

Here you will find a brief biography of the man, a bit about his philosophy, and the reminiscences of Ernest Sosa, Dean Zimmerman, and James van Cleve.

I will add an anecdote of my own. The NEH seminar met three days per week, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Chisholm wore the same outfit each day, the same blue shirt, the same gray pants, week after week.  Am I sure it was numerically the same blue shirt?  Pretty sure. I conjectured that he handed it to his wife on Friday and she had it ready for him again on Tuesday.

He addressed us formally using our surnames: Mr. Burke, Miss Baber, Mr. Oaklander.  I appreciated the old school Ivy League civility and reserve.  Understatement at that level is a mark of class. Everyone had a doctorate, but it was taken for granted. Understatement de rigueur; use of titles, middle-class.  Ostentation low-class. But that was then.

If only I knew then what I know now, and had the confidence then that I have now! I would then have profited more from the master who put me in mind of Franz Brentano and the latter's seriousness and Wissenschaftlichkeit. 

I did poke a hole in one of his definitions one day thereby prompting his addition of a codicil.

But when I questioned his paraphrastic method, I got, not quite the incredulous state, but the blank stare. For I had had the temerity to question one of his central metaphilosophical presuppositions.

Charles Krauthammer (1950 - 2018)

I cited him often over the years and disagreed with him only once. I admired his penetrating intellect, but more importantly his good judgment. In his personal life he was a profile in courage.

He was a major contributor to the high quality of Fox commentary.

On the debit side, he was perhaps too much of the Washington establishment. He failed to make the right call re: Trump.

A good man who died too young. Let the encomia roll in. 

Last but not least, he worshipped at the shrine of Caissa.

From Peralta to First Water: A Tribute to Lloyd Glaus

This morning I received the news that my neighbor and fellow hiker Lloyd Glaus had died. What follows is a redacted entry from an earlier pre-Typepad version of this weblog in which I reported on a memorable trans-Superstition hike we took together over ten years ago, on 29 October 2007, when Lloyd was 75 years old and I was 57.

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How long can we keep it up?

I mean the running, the biking, the hiking and backpacking? Asking myself this question I look to my elders: how do they fare at their advanced ages? Does the will to remain fit and strong pave a way? For some it does. Having made the acquaintance of a wild and crazy 75-year-old who ran his first marathon recently in the Swiss Alps, uphill all the way, the start being Kleine Scheidegg at the base of the awesome Eiger Nordwand, the North Wall of the Eiger, I invited him to a little stroll in the Superstitions, there to put him under my amateur gerontological microscope. Lloyd's wife Annie dropped us off at the Peralta Trailhead in the dark just before first light and we started up the rocky trail toward Fremont Saddle. 

Eight and a half hours  later she kindly collected us at First Water, the temperature having risen to 95 degrees. Lloyd acquitted himself well, though the climb from Boulder Basin to Parker Pass left him tuckered. And he got cut up something fierce when we lost the trail and had to bushwack through catclaw and other nasty flora.

But he proved what I wanted proven, namely, that at 75 one can go for a grueling hike though rugged country in high heat and still have a good time and be eager to begin planning the next trip. Some shots follow. Click to enlarge. Weaver's Needle, the most prominent landmark in the Superstition Range and visible from all corners of the wilderness, but especially well from Fremont Saddle, our first rest stop, is featured in several of them.  

This is how I will remember Lloyd, and this is how I suspect he would want to be remembered -- with his boots on in the mountains.

 Tribute to Lloyd Glaus

Peralta-First Water October 2007

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Julien Combray

This just in from Julien Combray who writes in reference to How Cold Is It?

So cold that exhibitionists were actually describing themselves!

Thanks for your mix of commentary, Bill. Your cogent thinking on a range of topics has served me well for a number of years. Happy New Year to you! Amor Fati!

Sincerely,

Julien Combray

A little Internet pokey-wokey reveals that Mr. Combray has published Sins of Judgment (October 2017) in New English Review. I recommend it to you.

Julien Combray works reluctantly for a French investment bank. He was educated in America and briefly considered a career in academia before abandoning the idea for no apparent reason. He writes on subjects of philosophy and western culture and can often be found taking two hour lunch breaks in cafes throughout London. 

The Unavoidability of the Political

 Skholiast at Speculum Criticum sends a friendly greeting that I have shortened a bit: 

Like the recent correspondent you quote in your Christmas post, I've been reading you a long time -- I guess ten years now -- and I read you from across the political divide. Possibly I am further "left," or "radical," or whatever, than that reader -- I know I don't think of myself as "liberal," anyway. But when my liberal acquaintances get irritated with me, it's as likely to be because I've cited Burke, or Robert George, as Marx or Cornell West . . .

 

I'm closer to apolitical (duly acknowledging the dangers and possible incoherence of such a stance). Sure, you and I would have plenty to argue about -- and we would argue because the differences matter -- but I like to think we'd walk away still respectful, if shaking our heads. . . . Still, I read you for a lot more than curmudgeonly politics. It's for your critiques of scientism, your sane openness to mystery (does the [desert] landscape reinforce that?), and above all your study-everything-join-nothing stance, which has always resonated with me.

 

I share your love of -- and I think your reasons for loving -- Kerouac.  And there's no other blogger from whom I'm more likely to learn a new name to track down.  (For a long time, you were the only philosophy blogger I'd ever read who had cited [Erich] Pry[z]wara.)

 

You are right (I am afraid) that 2018 will bring more acrimony, not less, to politics . . . . My real concern is simply that philosophy itself remain possible (though *arguably* philosophy must seek justice & so must remain politically -- & socially -- "engaged," this is not obvious). Some regimes, and some social climates, are better than others for the possibility of philosophy. I am fairly persuaded that the acrimony doesn't help, but who knows? Perhaps philosophy is threatened more, in a different sense, when it is easier for it to fly under the radar w/o giving "offense." In any case I hope that real thinkers will always be able to recognize each other.

 

My concern too is that "philosophy itself remain possible."  I would prefer to let the world and its violent nonsense go to hell while cultivating my garden in peace.  Unfortunately, my garden and stoa are in the world and exposed to its threats.  My concern, of course, is not just with my petty life, but with the noble tradition of which I am privileged to be a part, adding a footnote here and there, doing my small bit in transmitting our culture. In the great words of Goethe:

 

Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,
erwirb es, um es zu besitzen!

 

What from your fathers you  received as heir,

Acquire if  you would possess it. (Faust, Part I, Night, lines 684-685, tr. W. Kaufmann)

 

The idea is that what one has been lucky enough to inherit, one must actively appropriate, i.e., make one's own by hard work,  if one is really to possess it.  The German infinitive erwerben has not merely the meaning of 'earn' or 'acquire' but also the meaning of aneignen, appropriate, make one's own.

 

Unfortunately the schools and universities of today have become leftist seminaries more devoted to the eradication of the high culture of the West than its transmission and dissemination.  These leftist seed beds have become hot houses of political correctness.

 

The two main threats, as I have explained many times, are from the Left and from Islam. They work in synergy, whether wittingly or unwittingly. 

 

So politics, which has too little to do with truth and too much to do with power, cannot be ignored. This world is not ultimately real, but it is no illusion either, pace some sophists of the New Age, and so some battling within it, ideological or otherwise, cannot be avoided. But philosophy is not battling, nor is it ideology.  There is no place in philosophy for polemics, though polemics has its place.

 

There will be plenty in the year to come. 

 

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Maximilian Kolbe

Although it is a deep and dangerous illusion of the Left to suppose that man is inherently good and that it is merely such contingent and remediable factors as environment, opportunity, upbringing and the like that prevent the good from manifesting itself, there are a few human beings who are nearly angelic in their goodness.  One can only be astonished at the example of Maximilian Kolbe and wonder how such moral heroism is possible. And this even after adjusting for a certain amount of hagiographic embellishment. 

Is there a good naturalistic explanation for Kolbe's self-sacrifice?

Nat Hentoff, Defender of Human Life (1925-2017)

I have been a fan of Nat Hentoff ever since I first read him in the pages of Down Beat magazine way back in the '60s. He died at 91 on January 7th. My tribute to him is a repost from 4 June 2012:

A Prime Instance of Political Correctness: The Blackballing of Nat Hentoff

Nat Hentoff  is a civil libertarian and a liberal in an older and respectable sense of the term.  He thinks for himself and follows the arguments and evidence where they lead.  So what do contemporary politically correct liberals do?  They attack him.  His coming out against abortion particularly infuriated them.  Mark Judge comments:

Hentoff's liberal friends didn't appreciate his conversion: "They were saying, 'What's the big fuss about? If the parents had known she was going to come in this way, they would have had an abortion. So why don't you consider it a late abortion and go on to something else?' Here were liberals, decent people, fully convinced themselves that they were for individual rights and liberties but willing to send into eternity these infants because they were imperfect, inconvenient, costly. I saw the same attitude on the part of the same kinds of people toward abortion, and I thought it was pretty horrifying."

The reaction from America's corrupt fourth estate was instant. Hentoff, a Guggenheim fellow and author of dozens of books, was a pariah. Several of his colleagues at the Village Voice, which had run his column since the 1950s, stopped talking to him. When the National Press Foundation wanted to give him a lifetime achievement award, there was a bitter debate amongst members whether Hentoff should even be honored (he was). Then they stopped running his columns. You heard his name less and less. In December 2008, the Village Voice officially let him go.

When journalist Dan Rather was revealed to have poor news judgment, if not outright malice, for using fake documents to try and change the course of a presidential election, he was given a new TV show and a book deal -- not to mention a guest spot on The Daily Show. The media has even attempted a resuscitation of anti-Semite Helen Thomas, who was recently interviewed in Playboy.

By accepting the truth about abortion, and telling that truth, Nat Hentoff may be met with silence by his peers when he goes to his reward. The shame will be theirs, not his.

Related posts:

Hats Off to Hentoff: Abortion and Obama

Hats Off to Hentoff: "Pols Clueless on Ground Zero Mosque"

Nat Hentoff on 'Hate Crime' Laws

Helen Thomas Disgraces Herself

Hentoff thinks that one cannot consistently oppose abortion and support capital punishment.  I believe he is quite mistaken about that.

Fetal Rights and the Death Penalty: Consistent or Inconsistent?

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Death Penalty, Abortion, and Certainty

'The Punishment Must Fit the Crime' and Lex Talionis

What ISIS Really Wants

Nat Hentoff  is a civil libertarian and a liberal in an older and respectable sense of the term.  He thinks for himself and follows the arguments and evidence where they lead.  So what do contemporary politically correct liberals do?  They attack him.  His coming out against abortion particularly infuriated them.  Mark Judge comments:

Hentoff's liberal friends didn't appreciate his conversion: "They were saying, 'What's the big fuss about? If the parents had known she was going to come in this way, they would have had an abortion. So why don't you consider it a late abortion and go on to something else?' Here were liberals, decent people, fully convinced themselves that they were for individual rights and liberties but willing to send into eternity these infants because they were imperfect, inconvenient, costly. I saw the same attitude on the part of the same kinds of people toward abortion, and I thought it was pretty horrifying."

The reaction from America's corrupt fourth estate was instant. Hentoff, a Guggenheim fellow and author of dozens of books, was a pariah. Several of his colleagues at the Village Voice, which had run his column since the 1950s, stopped talking to him. When the National Press Foundation wanted to give him a lifetime achievement award, there was a bitter debate amongst members whether Hentoff should even be honored (he was). Then they stopped running his columns. You heard his name less and less. In December 2008, the Village Voice officially let him go.

When journalist Dan Rather was revealed to have poor news judgment, if not outright malice, for using fake documents to try and change the course of a presidential election, he was given a new TV show and a book deal -- not to mention a guest spot on The Daily Show. The media has even attempted a resuscitation of anti-Semite Helen Thomas, who was recently interviewed in Playboy.

By accepting the truth about abortion, and telling that truth, Nat Hentoff may be met with silence by his peers when he goes to his reward. The shame will be theirs, not his.

Related posts:

Hats Off to Hentoff: Abortion and Obama

Hats Off to Hentoff: "Pols Clueless on Ground Zero Mosque"

Nat Hentoff on 'Hate Crime' Laws

Helen Thomas Disgraces Herself

Hentoff thinks that one cannot consistently oppose abortion and support capital punishment.  I believe he is quite mistaken about that.

Fetal Rights and the Death Penalty: Consistent or Inconsistent?

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Some Space Tunes in Honor of John Glenn

The third American in outer space, and the first to orbit the earth, John Glenn passed away the other day at 95.  So I raise my glass this Saturday night in salute of a great American hero.

1960's psychedelia explored inner space, but there were a few songs from the '60s about outer space themes.  Telstar, an instrumental by the British band, The Tornados, 1962, was presumably in celebration of Telstar, the first communications satellite which got high in '62. (Telstar the song made it high on Earth to the #1 slot on both the U. S. and British charts.)

Speaking of getting high, the Byrd's Eight Miles High, 1966,  tells of a trip into the outer or perhaps into the 'inner' or both.  I never paid much attention to the obscure lyrics.  The Coltranish riffs executed on a 12-string Rickenbacker were what got my attention. Damn if it doesn't sound as raw and fresh as it did back in '66.

Also by the Byrds, 1966, is the playful Mr. Spaceman.  And we can't omit Elton John, Rocket Man from 1972.

Steve Miller Band, Space Cowboy, 1969

Kinks, Supersonic Rocket Ship, 1972.  My favorite Kinks number is Waterloo Sunset.

Police, Walking on the Moon.  With Apollo 11 footage.

He Was a Friend of Mine

John F. Kennedy was assassinated 53 years ago today. Here is The Byrds' tribute to the slain leader. They took a traditional song and redid the lyrics. Here Willie Nelson does a great job with the traditional song.  You Dylan aficionados will want to give a listen to young Bob's rendition of the old song.

I was in the eighth grade when Kennedy was gunned down. We were assembled in an auditorium for some reason when the principal came in and announced that the president had been shot. The date was November 22, 1963. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was seated behind my quondam inamorata, Christine W. My love for her was from afar, like that of Don Quixote for the fair Dulcinea, but at the moment I was in close physical proximity to her, studying the back of her blouse through which I could make out the strap of her training bra . . . .

 

Since those far-off and fabulous days of 'Camelot,' we have learned a lot about Kennedy's dark side. But every man has his 'wobble,' and who among us would want to be exposed to the full light of day?  He was a boyhood hero of mine, "the intrepid skipper of the PT 109," as I described him in a school essay.  My assessment of him has been dialed downward over the years, but there were traces of greatness about him.  He was a resolute commie fighter and a lifetime member of the NRA and Second Amendment defender.   In those days, a decent, patriotic American could be a Democrat.  

And if it weren't for his inspiration we wouldn't have beaten the Evil Empire in the space race.

By the way, if you want to read a thorough (1,612 pages with notes on a separate CD!) takedown of all the JFK conspiracy speculation, I recommend Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy.

It was a tale of two nonentities, Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. Both were little men who wanted to be big men. Oswald, acting alone, shot Kennedy. Ruby, acting alone, shot Oswald. That is the long and the short of it. For details, I refer you to Bugliosi.

And let's not forget that it was a commie who murdered Kennedy.  

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Mountain Climbers of the Spirit

George Mallory fell to his death in 1924 while attempting to scale Everest. His body was found in 1999. It remains a mystery whether he summited.

Now one can admire Mallory's courage, dedication, and perseverance.  But one must question the value of the goal he set for himself. Arguably, he threw his life away attempting a merely physical feat. He spent his incarnation pursuing self-glorification for a merely physical accomplishment.

How much more noble the mountain climbers of  the spirit like Buddha, Socrates, and Jesus who attempted to surmount, not a hunk of rock, but the human predicament!

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Husserl, Knight of Reason

Edmund Husserl was born on this date in 1859.

Ich muss meinen Weg gehen so sicher, so fest entschlossen und so ernst wie Duerers Ritter, Tod und Teufel. (Edmund Husserl, "Persoenliche Aufzeichnungen" )  "I must go my way as surely, as seriously, and as resolutely as the knight in Duerer's Knight, Death, and Devil." (tr. MavPhil)  Note the castle on the hill, the hour glass in the devil's hand, the serpents entwined in his headpiece, and the human skull on the road. 

Time is running out, death awaits, and a mighty task wants completion.

My Husserl category.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Zuhdi Jasser, Profile in Civil Courage

I have had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Jasser speak twice, a few days ago right in my own neighborhood.  He is an outstanding American and a Muslim, one who demonstrates that it is possible to be a moderate Muslim who accepts American values including the separation of church/mosque and state.  I have reproduced, below the fold, a recent statement of his so that you may read it without the distraction of advertisements and 'eye candy.'

Jasser tells us that monitoring Muslims is not "Islamophobic."  I agree heartily with what he is saying but not with how he says it.  It is absolutely essential not to acquiesce in the Left's linguistic obfuscation.  'Islamophobic' and cognates are coinages designed by liberals and leftists to discredit conservatives and their views.  By definition, a phobia is an irrational fear.  But fear of radical Muslims and the carnage they spread is not irrational: it it is entirely reasonable and prudent.  To label a person an 'Islamophobe' is therefore to imply that the person is mentally deranged or otherwise beneath consideration.  It is to display a profound disrespect for one's interlocutor and his right to be addressed as a rational being.  Here you have the explanation of why radical Muslims and their liberal-left enablers engage in this linguistic distortion.  They aim to win at all costs and by all means, including the fabrication of question-begging and self-serving epithets.

A conservative must never talk like a liberal.  To do so is thoughtless and foolish.  For he who controls the terms of the debate controls the debate.  When a conservative uses words like 'Islamophobic' and 'homophobic' he willy-nilly legitimizes verbal constructions meant to denigrate conservatives.  Now how stupid is that?

Language matters.

What should Jasser have said?  He could have said something like, "The monitoring of Muslims is reasonable and prudent in current circumstances and in no way wrongly discriminatory."  Why is this preferrable?  Because such monitoring obviously does not express a phobia, an irrational fear of Muslims.

To understand liberals you must understand that theirs is a mind-set according to which a  conservative is a bigot, one who reflexively and irrationally hates anyone different than he is.  This is why conservatives who insist on securing the borders are routinely labelled 'xenophobes' by liberals and by some stupid 'conservatives' as well, an example being that  foolish RINO Lindsey Graham who applied the epithet to Donald Trump when the latter quite reasonably proposed a moratorium on Muslim immigration into the U.S. Whatever you think of the proposal, and there are some reasonable arguments against it, it is not xenophobic.

There is also nothing xenophobic about border control since there are excellent reasons for it having to do with drug trafficking, public health, to mention just two.  This is not to say that there aren't some xenophobes. It is true: there are a lot of bigots in the world and some of the worst call themselves 'liberals.'

Dr. Jasser is a man of great civil courage and an inspiration to me and plenty of others.  If everyone were like him there would be no Muslim problem at all.  One hopes and prays that no harm comes to him.  Unfortunately, he is a member of a tiny minority, the minority of peaceful Muslims who respect Western values and denounce sharia, but also have the civil courage to stand up against the radicals. 

 To inform yourself further, see Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, A Battle for the Soul of Islam, Simon & Shuster, 2012.

 

Maximilian Kolbe

Although it is a deep and dangerous illusion of the Left to suppose that man is inherently good and that it is merely such contingent and remediable factors as environment, opportunity, upbringing and the like that prevent the good from manifesting itself, there are a few human beings who are nearly angelic in their goodness.  One can only be astonished at the example of Maximilian Kolbe and wonder how such moral heroism is possible.

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Morris Raphael Cohen: Logical Thought as the Basis of Civilization

This just over the transom from David Marans:

Recognizing your praise for Critical Rationalism and Morris Raphael Cohen, I believe his page (and also the Karl Popper page) in my PDF Logic Gallery will interest you.

Of course, I hope the book's entire theme/content will also interest you.

Your comments will surely interest ME.

In these dark days of the Age of Feeling, when thinking appears obsolete and civilization is under massive threat from Islamism and its 'liberal' and leftist enablers, it seems fitting that I should repost with additions my old tribute to Morris Raphael Cohen.  So here it is:

Tribute to Morris R. Cohen: Rational Thought as the Great Liberator

Morris Raphael Cohen (1880-1947) was an American philosopher of naturalist bent who taught at the City College of New York from 1912 to 1938. He was reputed to have been an outstanding teacher. I admire him more for his rationalism than for his naturalism. In the early 1990s, I met an ancient lady at a party who had been a student of Cohen's at CCNY in the 1930s. She enthusiastically related how Cohen had converted her to logical positivism, and how she had announced to her mother, "I am a logical positivist!" much to her mother's incomprehension.

We best honor a thinker by critically re-enacting his thoughts. Herewith, a passage from Cohen's A Preface to Logic, Dover, 1944, pp. 186-187:

...the exercise of thought along logical lines is the great liberation, or, at any rate, the basis of all civilization. We are all creatures of circumstance; we are all born in certain social groups and we acquire the beliefs as well as the customs of that group. Those ideas to which we are accustomed seem to us self-evident when [while?] our first reaction against those who do not share our beliefs is to regard them as inferiors or perverts. The only way to overcome this initial dogmatism which is the basis of all fanaticism is by formulating our position in logical form so that we can see that we have taken certain things for granted, and that someone may from a purely logical point of view start with the denial of what we have asserted. Of course, this does not apply to the principles of logic themselves, but it does apply to all material propositions. Every material proposition has an intelligible alternative if our proposition can be accurately expressed.

These are timely words. Dogmatism is the basis of all fanaticism.  Dogmatism can be combatted by the setting forth of one's beliefs as conclusions of (valid) arguments so that the premises needed to support the beliefs become evident.  By this method one comes to see what one is assuming.  One can also show by this method that arguments 'run forward' can just as logically be 'run in reverse,' or, as we say in the trade, 'One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens.' These logical exercises are not merely academic.  They bear practical fruit when they chasten the dogmatism to which humans are naturally prone.

In Cohen's day, the threats to civilization were Fascism, National Socialism, and Communism. Today the main threat is Islamo-totalitarianism, with a secondary threat emanating from the totalitarian Left.  Then as now, logic has a small but important role to play in the defeat of these threats.  The fanaticism of the Islamic world is due in no small measure to the paucity  there of rational heads like Cohen. 

But I do have one quibble with Cohen. He tells us that "Every material proposition has an intelligible alternative..." (Ibid.) This is not quite right. A material proposition is one that is non-logical, i.e., one that is not logically true if true. But surely there are material propositions that have no intelligible alternative. No color is a sound is not a logical truth since its truth is not grounded in its logical form. No F is a G has both true and false substitution-instances. No color is a sound is therefore a material truth. But its negation Some color is a sound is not intelligible if 'intelligible' means possibly true. If, on the other hand, 'intelligible' characterizes any form of words that is understandable, i.e., is not gibberish, then logical truths such as Every cat is a cat have intelligible alternatives: Some cat is not a cat, though self-contradictory, is understandable. If it were not, it could not be understood to be self-contradictory. By contrast, Atla kozomil eshduk is not understandable at all, and so cannot be classified as true, false, logically true, etc.

So if 'intelligible' means (broadly logically or metaphysically) possibly true, then it is false that "Every material proposition has an intelligible alternative . . . ."

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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Jim Fixx Remembered

It was 30 years ago tomorrow, during a training run.  Running pioneer James F. Fixx, author of the wildly successful The Complete Book of Running, keeled over dead of cardiac arrest.  He died with his 'boots' on, and not from running but from a bad heart.  It's a good bet that his running added years to his life in addition to adding life to his years.  I've just pulled my hardbound copy of The Complete Book of Running from the shelf.  It's a first edition, 1977, in good condition with dust jacket.  I read it when it first came out.  Do I hear $1000?  Just kidding, it's not for sale. This book and the books of that other pioneer, George Sheehan, certainly made a difference in my life.

The atavism and simplicity and cleansing quality of a good hard run are particularly beneficial for Luftmenschen.  Paradoxically, the animality of it releases lofty thoughts.

See here for a comparison of Fixx and Sartre.  And here for something on George Sheehan.  Now for some 'running' tunes.

Spencer Davis Group, Keep on Running

Jackson Browne, Running on Empty

Eagles, The Long Run

Beatles, Run for Your Life

Del Shannon, Runaway.  Charles Weedon Westover was born 30 December 1934 and is best known for his 1961 #1 hit, "Runaway."  Suffering from depression, Shannon committed suicide on February 8, 1990, with a .22-caliber rifle at his home in Santa Clarita, California. Following his death, the Traveling Wilburys honored him by recording a version of "Runaway".

Bob Dylan, If Dogs Run Free

Chuck Berry, Run Rudolph Run

Johnny Preston, Running Bear

Dion DiMucci, Runaround Sue

Roy Orbison, Running Scared

Crystals, They Do Run Run

Addendum (7/20)

I should have mentioned it last night.  Today, 20 July, is not only the 30th anniversary of Jim Fixx's death, but also the 49th anniversary of the release of Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone.  Wikipedia:

 

The song had a huge impact on Bruce Springsteen, who was 15 years old when he first heard it. Springsteen described the moment during his speech inducting Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 and also assessed the long-term significance of "Like a Rolling Stone":

 

The first time I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind ... The way that Elvis freed your body, Dylan freed your mind, and showed us that because the music was physical did not mean it was anti-intellect. He had the vision and talent to make a pop song so that it contained the whole world. He invented a new way a pop singer could sound, broke through the limitations of what a recording could achieve, and he changed the face of rock'n'roll for ever and ever "^[66][67]

 

Dylan's contemporaries in 1965 were both startled and challenged by the single. Paul McCartney remembered going around to John Lennon's house in Weybridge to hear the song. According to McCartney, "It seemed to go on and on forever. It was just beautiful ... He showed all of us that it was possible to go a little further."^[68] Frank Zappa had a more extreme reaction: "When I heard 'Like a Rolling Stone', I wanted to quit the music business, because I felt: 'If this wins and it does what it's supposed to do, I don't need to do anything else ...' But it didn't do anything. It sold but nobody responded to it in the way that they should have."^[68] Nearly forty years later, in 2003, Elvis Costello commented on the innovative quality of the single. "What a shocking thing to live in a world where there was Manfred Mann and the Supremes and Engelbert Humperdinck and here comes 'Like a Rolling Stone'".^[69]

Your humble correspondent was lying in the sand at Huntington Beach, California, when the song came on the radio.  It was like nothing else on the radio in those days of the Beatles and the Beach Boys.  It 'blew my mind.' What is THAT? And WHO is that?  I had been very vaguely aware of some B. Dylan as the writer of PPM's Don't Think Twice.  I pronounced the name like 'Dial in.' That memorable summer of '65 I became a Dylan fanatic, researching him at the library and buying all his records.  The fanaticism faded with the '60s.  But while no longer a fanatic, I remain a fan.

 

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Ten Years After: Remembering Sidney Morgenbesser

I don't envy anybody anything, but if I were to envy somebody something, I would envy my friend Peter Lupu his friendship with Sidney Morgenbesser.

‘Yeah, Yeah’: Eulogy for Sidney Morgenbesser, Philosopher With a Yiddish Accent

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David Stove's Tribute to David Armstrong

Excerpt:

But, while David has never aspired to put the world right by philosophy, the world for its part has not been equally willing to let him and philosophy alone in return. Quite the reverse. His tenure of the Chair turned out to coincide with an enormous attack on philosophy, and on humanistic learning in general: an attack which has proved to be almost as successful as it was unprecedented.

This attack was begun, as everyone knows, by Marxists, in support of North Vietnam’s attempt to extend the blessings of communism to the south. The resulting Marxisation of the Faculty of Arts was by no means as complete as the resulting Marxisation of South Vietnam. But the wound inflicted on humanistic learning was a very severe one all the same. You could properly compare it to a person’s suffering third-degree burns to 35 per cent of his body.

After the defeat of America in Vietnam, the attack was renewed, amplified, and intensified, by feminists. Their attack has proved far more devastating than that of the Marxists. Lenin once said, “If we go, we shall slam the door on an empty house”; and how well this pleasant promise has been kept by the Russian Marxists, all the world now knows. It is in exactly the same spirit of insane malignancy that feminists have waged their war on humanistic learning; and their degree of success has fallen not much short of Lenin’s. Of the many hundreds of courses offered to Arts undergraduates in this university, what proportion, I wonder, are now not made culturally-destructive, as well as intellectually null, by feminist malignancy and madness? One-third? I would love to believe that the figure is so high. But I cannot believe it.

David did all that he could have done, given the limits set by his position and his personality, to repel this attack. Of course he failed; but then, no one could have succeeded. What he did achieve was a certain amount of damage-limitation. Even this was confined to the philosophy-section of the front. On the Faculty of Arts as a whole, David has had no influence at all—to put it mildly. In fact, when he spoke at a meeting of the Faculty, even on subjects unrelated to the attack, you could always have cut the atmosphere with a knife. It is a curious matter, this: the various ways inferior people have, of indirectly acknowledging the superiority of others, even where no such acknowledgment is at all intended by the inferior, or expected by the superior.

By the end of 1972, the situation in the philosophy department had become so bad that the splitting of the department into two was the only way in which philosophy at this university could be kept alive at all. In this development, David was the leading spirit, as his position and personality made it natural he should be. Of course he did not do it on his own. Pat Trifonoff’s intelligence and character made her an important agent in it. Keith Campbell’s adhesion to our side, after some hesitation, was a critical moment. But while I and certain others were only casting about for some avenue of escape, David never gave up. He battled on, and battled on again, and always exacted the best terms, however bad, that could be got from the enemies of philosophy.

The result of the split was far more happy than could have been rationally predicted at the time. In fact it was a fitting reward for David’s courage and tenacity. For the first twenty years of the new Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy have been fertile in good philosophy, to a degree unparalleled in any similar period in this or any other Australian university. The department has also enjoyed a rare freedom from internal disharmony. As I have often said, it is the best club in the world, and to be or have been a member of it is a pleasure as well as a privilege.

There will certainly be no adequate official acknowledgment, from anyone inside the university, of what is owed to David. What could someone like the present Vice-Chancellor possibly care about the survival of humanistic learning, or even know about philosophy, or history, or literature? Anyone who did would never have got a Vice-Chancellor’s job in the first place. If there is any acknowledgment forthcoming from the Faculty of Arts, David will be able to estimate the sincerity of it well enough. It will be a case of people, who smiled as they watched him nearly drowning in the boiling surf of 1967–72, telling him how glad they were when, against all probability, he managed to make it to the beach.

But anyone who does know and care about philosophy, or does care about the survival of humanistic learning, will feel towards him something like the degree of gratitude which they ought to feel.

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Anthony Flood's Tenth Anniversary

2014 will  be a big year for 'tin' website anniversaries, tin being the metal corresponding to tenth anniversaries.  Many of us got up and running in 2004.  My tenth blogiversary is coming up in May.  Today marks Anthony Flood's tenth anniversary.  His site, however, is not a weblog.

Flood has been an off-and-on correspondent of mine since the early days of the blogosphere: I believe we first made contact in 2004.  I admire him because he "studies everything" as per my masthead motto.    As far as I can judge from my eremitic outpost, Tony is a genuine truth seeker, a restless quester who has canvassed many, many  positions with an open mind and a willingness to admit errors.  (The man was at one time a research assistant for Herbert Aptheker!)  Better a perpetual seeker than a premature finder.  Here below we are ever on the way: in statu viae.  But Flood may be settling down now, in a position wildly divergent from those he occupied hitherto.

Here he marks a decade and comments briefly on the article referenced below.

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Nihil philosophicum a nobis alienum putamus

"We consider nothing philosophical to be foreign to us."  This is the motto Hector-Neri Castañeda chose to place on the masthead of the philosophical journal he founded in 1967, Noûs. When Hector died too young a death at age 66  in the fall of '91, the editorship passed to others who removed the Latin phrase. There are people who find classical allusions  pretentious. I understand their sentiment while not sharing it.

Perhaps I should import Hector's motto into my own masthead. For it  certainly expresses my attitude and would be a nice, if inadequate, way of honoring the man.  He was a man of tremendous philosophical energy and also very generous with comments and professional assistance.  He was also unpretentious. His humble origins served him well in this regard.  He interacted with undergraduates with the same intensity and animation as with senior colleagues.   I was privileged to know this unforgettable character. What I missed in him, though, was spiritual depth.  The religion of his Guatemalan upbringing didn't rub  off on him.  Like so many analytic philosophers he saw philosophy as a merely theoretical enterprise.  A noble enterprise, that, but not enough for some of us.

How many read Hector's work these days? I don't know.  But I do know that there is plenty there to feast on.  I recently re-read his "Fiction and Reality: Their Fundamental Connections" (Poetics 8, 1979, 31-62) an article rich in insight and required reading for anyone interested in the logic and ontology of fictional discourse.

Hector's motto is modelled on Terentius: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. "I am a human being; I consider nothing human to be  foreign to me." One also sees the thought expressed in this form:  Nihil humanum a me alienum puto. Hector's motto is based on this variant.

Addendum

Horace Jeffery Hodges writes,

I appreciated your blog post on December 28 for your remark about the origin of the the Latin motto:

 

Hector's motto is modelled on Terentius: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. "I am a human being; I consider nothing human to be  foreign to me." One also sees the thought expressed in this form:  Nihil humanum a me alienum puto. Hector's motto is based on this variant.

 

Dostoevsky offers a variant (a conflation of Terentius's motto and the motto that Hector knew):

 

"Satan sum et nihil humanum a me alienum puto." (I am Satan, and nothing human is alien to me.) - Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.

 

I borrowed Dostoesky's variant for the motto to my novella:

 

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E18KW0K

 

It's visible on the book cover (just click on expanded view or the click to look inside). The original motto is thus a rather malleable expression, useful in various contexts.

 

By the way, is  "Fiction and Reality: Their Fundamental Connections" (Poetics 8, 1979, 31-62) a work on literary fiction, as in novels, novellas, short stories, and the like? If so, I might benefit from reading it.

Yes, Jeff, it is about literary fiction.  It is not literary criticism, of course, but an attempt to explain how ficta can be integrated with the rest of what we take to be real  -- and unreal.  It is heavy going, but you will get something out of it if you are patient and resolute.  And I wouldn't be averse to fielding a few very pithy and focused questions about it.

 

And where in the Brothers Karamazov?

 

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Peter Geach 1916-2013

Here is a Commonweal obituary.

The obit contains a couple of  minor inaccuracies. 

1. "Under his father's tutelage, one of Geach's earliest philosophical influences was the metaphysician J.M.E. McTaggart, who infamously argues in his 1908 book The Unreality of Time for, well, the unreality of time."  This title is not a book but  an article that appeared in the journal Mind (17.68: 457–474), in 1908.

McTaggart presents a full dress version of the famous argument in his 1927 magnum opus, The Nature of Existence, in Chapter XXXIII, located in volume II.

McTaggart's  argument for the unreality of time is one of the great arguments in the history of metaphysics, an argument  as important and influential as the Eleatic Zeno's arguments against motion, St. Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God and F. H. Bradley's argument against relations in his 1893 Appearance and Reality, Book I, Chapter III.  All four arguments have the interesting property of being rejected as unsound by almost all philosophers, philosophers who nonetheless differ wildly among themselves as to where the arguments go wrong.  Careful study of these arguments is an excellent introduction to the problems of metaphysics.  In particular, the analytic philosophy of time in the 20th century  would not be unfairly described as a very long and very detailed series of footnotes to McTaggart's great argument.

2. "Along with Aquinas and McTaggart (whose system he presents in his 1982 book Truth, Love, and Immortality), Geach's main philosophical heroes were Aristotle, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Gottlob Frege."  My copy of Truth, Love and Immortality shows the University of California Press (Berkeley and Los Angeles) as the publisher and the publication year as 1979.  The frontispiece features an unsourced quotation from McTaggart:

The longer I live, the more I am convinced of the reality of three things -- truth, love and immortality.

He Was a Friend of Mine

John F. Kennedy was assassinated 50 years ago today.  Here is The Byrds' tribute to the slain leader. They took a traditional song and redid the lyrics.  The young Bob Dylan here offers an outstanding interpretation of the old song.  And Dave van Ronk's version is not to be missed.

He was a friend of mine, he was a friend of mine
His killing had no purpose, no reason or rhyme
Oh, he was a friend of mine

He was in Dallas town, he was in Dallas town
From a sixth floor window a gunner shot him down
Oh, he died in Dallas town

He never knew my name, he never knew my name
Though I never met him I knew him just the same
Oh, he was a friend of mine

Leader of a nation for such a precious time
Oh, he was a friend of mine

I was in the eighth grade when Kennedy was gunned down. We were assembled in an auditorium for some reason when the principal came in and announced that the president had been shot. The date was November 22, 1963. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was seated behind my quondam inamorata, Christine W. My love for her was from afar, like that of Don Quixote for the fair Dulcinea, but at that moment I was in close physical proximity to her, studying the back of her blouse through which I could make out the strap of her training bra . . . .

By the way, if you want to read a thorough (1,612 pages with notes on a separate CD!) takedown of all the JFK conspiracy speculation, I recommend Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy.

It was a tale of two nonentities, Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. Both were little men who wanted to be big men. Oswald, acting alone, shot Kennedy. Ruby, acting alone, shot Oswald. That is the long and the short of it. For details, I refer you to Bugliosi.

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From the Mail: A Couple of Anecdotes

A. H. writes,

I have been following your blog for years, and continue to enjoy it immensely. [I've also had the opportunity to read several of your printed works in the field, which I found to be excellent - your article on states of affairs was particularly outstanding.]

I've nothing in particular to offer, other than two anecdotes that I think you'll find amusing:

(1) I met a bona fide, genuine Marxist-Trotskyist the other day. Not much more than a boy, alas, though he had drunk the Kool-Aid in toto, e.g., dialectical materialism, Trotsky a genius, all information is propaganda, etc., etc. I engaged him for some time just for shits and giggles, until the point at which he tried to (seriously) compare slavery to the position of "the woman" within the domestic family. His view, of course, was ridiculous, backed by the flimsiest of slogans. When it became apparent that he was making little sense, he backed off by saying something to the following effect: "Well, clearly two WHITE MEN need not even be discussing this issue..." Whereupon, I was pleased to recall the Maverick Philosopher, and replied (to a slackened jaw, no less): "My friend, arguments do not have testicles."

Beautiful. (On a similar note, I took your advice a few months back and read TROTSKY:  DOWNFALL OF A REVOLUTIONARY by B. Patenaude - one helluva' read.)

(2) Not so long ago, I turned a very close friend of mine - one who shares my philosophical, political and religious predilections and who teaches in the Philosophy Dept. at a private school - onto your blog. He and I occasionally swap emails concerning the content, but the following comment from him (made in relation to, I believe, the Trayvon Martin debacle) I simply had to share with you:

"If it were possible to baptize the Maverick Philosopher as my uncle, I would pay to do so."

Again, I say, beautiful.

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Helmuth James von Moltke

I  sometimes express skepticism about the value of the study of history. If history has lessons, they don't seem applicable to the present in any useful way. But there is no denying that history is a rich source of exemplary lives. These exemplary lives show what is humanly possible and furnish existential ideals. Helmuth James von Moltke was a key figure in the German resistance to Hitler. The Nazis executed him in 1945. Here is his story.  Here is an obituary of his wife, Freya.

The Frank Shorter Story

We who were swept up in the running boom of the 1970s for a lifetime of fitness and satisfaction owe a debt of gratitude to the runners and writers who popularized the sport.  The four who stand out most prominently in my memory, 37 summers after I first took to the roads, are the running writers Jim Fixx and George Sheehan, and the world-class competitors Bill Rodgers and Frank Shorter. 

Shorter is often credited with being the father of the running boom due to his winning of Olympic gold at Munich in 1972 in the marathon.   October's Runner's World features a lengthy piece on Shorter that tells of his triumphs but also of the physical and psychological abuse that he and his siblings received from their Jekyll-and-Hyde father.

 

 

Lynne Ballew

At the time I knew her, in the mid-'70s, I had no idea what a remarkable person she is.  I was a graduate student and she was a young professor.  We spoke a few times in the hallway.  A while back I was re-reading some Plato and I came upon a marginalium of mine: "Ask Lynne about this."  That put me in mind of her and I wondered what had become of her.  I had heard that she had left academe but knew nothing more.  A few key strokes  and her inspiring story unfolded before me.

Who is Dave Lull?

If you are a blogger, then perhaps you too have been the recipient of his terse emails informing one of this or that blogworthy tidbit.  Who is this Dave Lull guy anyway?  Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence provides an answer:

As Pascal said of God (no blasphemy intended) Dave is the circle whose center is everywhere in the blogosphere and whose circumference is nowhere. He is a blogless unmoved mover. He is the lubricant that greases the machinery of half the online universe worth reading. He is copy editor, auxiliary conscience and friend. He is, in short, the OWL – Omnipresent Wisconsin Librarian.

For other tributes to the ever-helpful Lull see here.  Live long, Dave, and grease on!

Not Uxorious, but Appreciative

Having paid tribute to WD-40, the least I can do is pay tribute, once again, to my wife. She may not be a solvent, but she contributes mightily to my being solvent.

As for marriage, it is a good thing if one enters into it for the right reasons, at the right time, and after due consideration. Bear in mind that every man has two heads. The big one is for thinking, the little one for linking. Understand their offices and respective spheres of operation. To cerebrate with the organ of copulation is Clintonian and not conducive unto happiness. Even in the question of marriage, the big head must be the ruling element.

Tribute to Morris R. Cohen: Rational Thought as the Great Liberator

Morris Raphael Cohen (1880-1947) was an American philosopher of naturalist bent who taught at the City College of New York from 1912 to 1938. He was reputed to have been an outstanding teacher. I admire him more for his rationalism than for his naturalism. In the early 1990s, I met an ancient lady at a party who had been a student of Cohen's at CCNY in the 1930s. She enthusiastically related how Cohen had converted her to logical positivism, and how she had announced to her mother, "I am a logical positivist!" much to her mother's incomprehension.

We best honor a thinker by critically re-enacting his thoughts. Herewith, a passage from Cohen's A Preface to Logic, Dover 1944, pp. 186-187:

...the exercise of thought along logical lines is the great liberation, or, at any rate, the basis of all civilization. We are all creatures of circumstance; we are all born in certain social groups and we acquire the beliefs as well as the customs of that group. Those ideas to which we are accustomed seem to us self-evident when [while?] our first reaction against those who do not share our beliefs is to regard them as inferiors or perverts. The only way to overcome this initial dogmatism which is the basis of all fanaticism is by formulating our position in logical form so that we can see that we have taken certain things for granted, and that someone may from a purely logical point of view start with the denial of what we have asserted. Of course, this does not apply to the principles of logic themselves, but it does apply to all material propositions. Every material proposition has an intelligible alternative if our proposition can be accurately expressed.

These are timely words. Dogmatism is the basis of all fanaticism.  Dogmatism can be combatted by the setting forth of one's beliefs as conclusions of (valid) arguments so that the premises needed to support the beliefs become evident.  One can also show by this method that arguments 'run forward' can just as logically be 'run in reverse,' or, as we say in the trade, 'One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens.'

In Cohen's day, the threats to civilization were Fascism, National Socialism, and Communism. Today the threat is Islamo-totalitarianism. Then as now, logic has a small but important role to play in the defeat of these threats.  The fanaticism of the Islamic world is due in no small measure to the paucity  there of rational heads like Cohen. 

But I do have one quibble with Cohen. He tells us that "Every material proposition has an intelligible alternative..." (Ibid.) This is not quite right. A material proposition is one that is non-logical, i.e., one that is not logically true if true. But surely there are material propositions that have no intelligible alternative. No color is a sound is not a logical truth since its truth is not grounded in its logical form. No F is a G has both true and false substitution-instances. No color is a sound is therefore a material truth. But its negation Some color is a sound is not intelligible if 'intelligible' means possibly true. If, on the other hand, 'intelligible' characterizes any form of words that is understandable, i.e., is not gibberish, then logical truths such as Every cat is a cat have intelligible alternatives: Some cat is not a cat, though self-contradictory, is understandable. If it were not, it could not be understood to be self-contradictory. By contrast, Atla kozomil eshduk is not understandable at all, and so cannot be classified as true, false, logically true, etc.

So if 'intelligible' means (broadly logically or metaphysically) possibly true, then it is false that "Every material proposition has an intelligible alternative . . . ."

Three Friends

The blogosphere has been good to me, having brought me a number of friends, some of whom I have met face to face.  For now I will mention just three. 

Having read my announcement that PowerBlogs will be shutting down at the end of November, Keith Burgess-Jackson kindly sent me a number of unsolicited e-mails explaining how I could import the  PowerBlogs posts, together with comments, en masse into this Typepad site.  I had forgotten that the Typepad platform allows for multiple blogs.  Keith's idea was simply to set up an archival blog and dump the old posts there.  As usual, the devil is in the details.  But a  careful perusal of his-emails gave me all the clues I needed to get this project underway.  Eventually, I will install a link to the PowerBlogs archive on my front page.

Keith is one my oldest blogospheric friends. We met early in 2004 not long after I had entered the 'sphere.  He has been more than kind in promoting my efforts over the years.  I fear that I have not reciprocated sufficiently.  So I want you to go to his site right now and read his current batch of offerings.  I should also mention that if it weren't for Keith I would never have met philosopher Mike Valle who lives a few miles from here. 

I can't recall how exactly I met Ed Feser; it may have been via Keith's old Conservative Philosopher group blog.  In any case, we have had a number of invigorating discussions.  We have our differences, but our common ground makes their exfoliation fruitful.  I am presently gearing up for another round as I study his latest book, Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide (One World, 2009), an inscribed copy of which he kindly sent me.  Ed chimes in on his blog in agreement with my recent rant about copy editors and their political correctness.  Please check it out.

Last but not least, Peter Lupu, who, though not a blogger, is the Real Thing as philosophers go.  Such birds are rarely sighted even within (especially within?) the academic aviary.  He discovered me via the old PowerBlogs site and left the best comments there that I have received in five years of blogging.  To my great good fortune he flourishes here in the Zone and we see each other regularly. Last Thursday he came by and we talked from 2 to 9 P.M.  He would have gone on til midnight had I let him.  I have met in my entire life only one other philosopher with whom I could have as deep and productive a discussion, and that is my old friend Quentin Smith who I met in my early twenties.  Like Smith an avis rara, Lupu has become the Smith of my late middle age.

So the blogosphere has been good to me.  Today's stats hit an all-time high of 1,212 page views.  I have nothing to complain about.  Thanks for reading.

Bryan Magee's Tribute to Brand Blanshard

Brian Magee spent a year at Yale University where he attended a seminar given by Brand Blanshard on empiricist epistemology. In Confessions of a Philosopher, p. 124, Magee remembers Blanshard:

He was reminiscent of Bertrand Russell in his commitment to rational analysis and argument in forms that did not subordinate them to considerations of language. [. . .]

At first his teaching method struck me as a trifle chilly, but then I realized that it was the first philosophy teaching I had encountered that was not sectarian and excommunicative. The interpretations put on everything by Oxford philosophers had been analogous to the interpretations put on current affairs by active members of the Communist Party: partisan, belligerent, propagandist, intolerant, nakedly self-oriented and one-sided. Blanshard was quite different from this. Although he was himself in opposition to the tradition he was discussing he presented it with an admirable fairness in its relationship to other traditions. [. . .]

At Oxford the assumption has always been that the empiricist tradition was philosophy. There had been one occasion when I had raised a question about the existentialist tradition as represented by philosophers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger, only to have it explained to me that these were "not philosophers." Among other things Blanshard's seminar was for me an object-lesson in academic fairness . . . .

Jim Fixx Remembered

It was 25 years ago today, during a training run.  Running pioneer James F. Fixx, author of the wildly successful The Complete Book of Running, keeled over dead of cardiac arrest.  He died with his 'boots' on, and not from running but from a bad heart.  It's a good bet that his running added years to his life in addition to adding life to his years.  I've just pulled my hardbound copy of The Complete Book of Running from the shelf.  It's a first edition, 1977, in good condition with dust jacket.  I read it when it first came out.  Do I hear $1000?  Just kidding, it's not for sale. This book and the books of that other pioneer, George Sheehan, certainly made a difference in my life.

The atavism and simplicity and cleansing quality of a good hard run are particularly beneficial for Luftmenschen.  Paradoxically, the animality of it releases lofty thoughts.

See here for a comparison of Fixx and Sartre.  And here for something on George Sheehan.

In Praise of a Lowly Adjunct

The best undergraduate philosophy teacher I had was a lowly adjunct, one Richard Morris, M.A. (Glasgow).  I thought of him the other day in connection with John Hospers whose An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (2nd ed.) he had assigned for a course entitled "Linguistic Philosophy."  I also took a course in logic from him.  The text was Irving Copi's Symbolic Logic (3rd ed.) You will not be surprised to hear that I still have both books.  And I'll be damned if I will part with either one of them, despite the fact that I have a later edition of the Copi text, an edition I used in a logic course I taught.

I don't believe Morris ever published anything.  The Philosopher's Index shows a few citations for one or more Richard Morrises none of whom I have reason to believe is the adjunct in question.  But without publications or doctorate Morris was more of a philosopher than many of his quondam colleagues.

The moral of the story?  Real philosophers can be found anywhere in the academic hierarchy.  So judge each case by its merits and be not too impressed by credentials and trappings.

I contacted Morris ten years ago or so and thanked him for his efforts way back when.  The thanking of old teachers who have had a positive influence is a practice I recommend.  I've done it a number of times.  I even tracked down an unforgettable and dedicated and inspiring third-grade teacher.  I asked her if anyone else had ever thanked her, and she said no.  What ingrates we  are.

So if you have something to say to someone you'd better say it now while you both draw breath.  Heute rot, morgen tot.

Tribute to WD-40

  I'm a list maker. I have lists of all sorts of things, including one entitled, Lithuanians I Have Known. It sports names like Mickus, Mickunas, Dauciunas, Klimosauskas, et al. If I ever start a list of solvents I have known and loved, first on the list would the legendary WD-40.

This stuff is amazing. I've used it on all sort of jobs with surprising results. Years ago my male cat Zeno decided to mark some territory. His territory was my countertop on which sat a touch tone phone. After Zeno duly anointed the phone with his seminal fluid, the keys were sticky. A counter-libation of WD-40 solved the problem. That was perhaps ten years ago. Zeno is dead and gone but the old phone is still in use, or at least it was until my wife inadvertently sprayed it with dishwater. (Or rather that is my conjecture given my Blame Wifey policy.)

Completely nonfunctional, the old phone looked to be in dire need of replacement. So we went out to look at phones, but being cautious and cheap, I didn't buy one. Instead, I hooked up an old rotary phone dating from the 1970's. It had been languishing in my garage for many a year, and despite the infernal Arizona summer heat was still working.

But then I remembered the WD-40 and gave it a try by simply spraying the keys of the touch-tone phone. Unbelievably, it worked one more time. It unstuck the keys and cleaned the contacts.

So WD-40 takes the lead position on my solvents list.

If only my intellect were as penetrating.