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Welcome to Maverick Philosopher

My name is William F. Vallicella, I have the doctorate in philosophy (Boston College, 1978), and I have published a couple of books and 70 or so articles in the professional journals. A confirmed blogger in the grip of cacoethes scribendi, I’ve been online since May 2004 on various platforms.  This is MavPhil Gen IV.  I publish online here, at Substack, on Facebook, and at X.  I began posting at Substack in early 2021 under the rubric “Philosophy in Progress.” The Substack entries are intended to assist educated non-philosophers in clarifying their thinking about matters of moment.  My PhilPeople page links to my Substack articles and provides a list of my professional publications. 

Two-line biography:  I taught philosophy at various universities in the USA and abroad. At the relatively young age of 41 I resigned from  a tenured position to live the eremitic life of the independent philosopher in the Sonoran desert. 

Interests: Everything. Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto. (Terentius) “I am a man: I consider nothing human foreign to me.” 

Motto: “Study everything, join nothing.” (Paul Brunton)

Comment Policy: This site is not a discussion board.  Comments must address directly what the author says or what the commenters say.  Other comments will not be allowed to appear. Comments should be pithy and to the point. In these hyperkinetic times, the regnant abbreviation is TL;DR.  If you are a cyberpunk needing to take a data dump, please relieve yourself elsewhere.

My politics?  From Democrat to Dissident

Political Burden of Proof: As contemporary ‘liberals’ become ever more extreme, they increasingly assume what I will call the political burden of proof. The onus is now on them to defeat the presumption that they are so morally and intellectually obtuse as not to be worth talking to.

Much more below the fold. Best wishes to all men and women of good will who love truth, seek it, and strive to incorporate it in their lives.

 

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James N. Anderson Defends Van Til

In this entry I respond to Dr. James Anderson‘s comments on a post of mine on presuppositionalism, God, Doubt, Denial, Truth: A Note on Van Til. But first a redacted excerpt from a letter of mine to Anderson explaining my interest in the topic:

Thank you for your willingness to respond. I consider you to be the intellectually sharpest among the presuppositionalists. Why am I interested in the ‘presuppers’? (No disrespect intended, just a cute abbreviation.)  Well, I am a philosopher of religion but I also have a long-term interest in transcendental philosophy. I wrote my dissertation on the ontological status of Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception, then followed the line down through the German Idealists, the neo-Kantians, to Brentano, Husserl, and Heidegger, who in Being and Time (1927) re-ignites the Being question within the purview of transcendental philosophy. So I am interested in how the ‘presuppers’ fit into that tradition with their TAG (transcendental argument for God).

I now turn to Anderson’s comments. My responses are in 14 pt:

I don’t think this [BV’s OP] quite captures what VT [Cornelius Van Til] has in mind. In context, he is arguing against the idea of a “neutral methodology” for evaluating truth-claims about reality (whether scientific or metaphysical). The underlying thought is that one’s theory of reality and one’s theory of knowledge must be coordinated; there is no metaphysically-neutral epistemology, no epistemology that is entirely indifferent to the nature and existence of God, the nature of the universe, the nature of man and his relationship to his environment, etc.

BV: I agree that the theory of reality and the theory of knowledge must be coordinated. As Gustav Bergmann famously remarked, “epistemology is but the ontology of the knowing situation.” (Logic and Reality, U. of Wisconsin Press, 1964, pp. 106, 324.)  Nicolai Hartmann, in his Metaphysik der Erkenntnis, 1921, is another who insists on the need for an ontology of cognition. 

To coin a slogan of my own, “The knowledge of being (objective genitive) presupposes the being of the knower (subjective genitive).”  So I agree with Anderson that “there is no metaphysically-neutral epistemology.” But he packs more into the quoted sentence  than I do, as we shall see. 

Specifically, a “neutral methodology” (as VT conceives it) holds the pretense that human knowledge and reasoning are possible whether or not God exists; thus the question of the existence of God is an open one from the outset, just like questions about the existence of black holes or Higgs bosons.

BV: Here is where the disagreement begins.  We agree that knowing is rooted in being and thus that epistemology  needs to be grounded in ontology. In particular, the knowledge of being presupposes the being of the knower. But how do get from these propositions, which will be readily granted by most if not all philosophers, to the proposition that the knowledge of being presupposes the being of God? To say that there is no knowledge without an existing knower is one thing, but quite another to say that there is no knowledge without God.  

It is important to realize than when Van Til and Co. speak of God they do not mean just any old god, but the God of the Bible, indeed the triune God of the Christian Bible with all of the Calvinist add-ons, and indeed some plainly Athenian extra-Biblical add-ons as well, such as the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS)! Van Til claims to find Old Testament support for DDS, a claim I question in my  Van Til on Divine Simplicity and the One and the Many.

I grant that if we are creatures of God, then there is no human knowledge without God. For if we are creatures of God, then God exists, whence it follows that human knowledge cannot exist unless God exists. No doubt. But that is logically consistent with saying that no God exists. To affirm a conditional is not to affirm its antecedent.

I think that Anderson will agree with me that God is not a being among beings, and is thus very different from a black hole, a subatomic particle, a planet, not to mention Russell’s celestial teapot and Edward Abbey’s angry unicorn on the dark side of the Moon.

Edward Abbey Quote: “Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?”

If God exists, he is not just one more thing that exists in addition to all the other things that exist. If God exists, then God is the metaphysical ground of the very existence of every contingent being, and indeed, of every being distinct from himself. This is not true of horses and teapots let alone of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. If there is a lunar unicorn, then this is just one more isolated fact about the universe. But if God exists, then everything is unified by this fact: everything has the ground of its being and its intelligibility in the creative activity of this one paradigmatic purely spiritual being. The God question cannot therefore be reduced to the question whether the totality of beings includes a very special being, God, with very special properties.  For if God exists, then everything other than God is a creature, which implies that everything other than God has an ontological status very different from the status it would have were God not to exist. We may call this status createdness or creaturliness.  Accordingly, the mode of Being of creatures is createdness whereas the mode of Being of God is very different, call it aseity, from-itself-ness. Creatures exist in a dependent way or mode while God exists in an independent way or mode.

I would say that God differs from every other being in (i) his mode of Being, (ii) his mode of necessity (he is not a necessary being in the same way that the number 7 is a necessary being, pace Alvin Plantinga), and (iii) his mode of property-possession: he does not instantiate his attributes, pace Plantinga: he is in some mysterious way identical to his attributes. As St. Augustine says, God IS what he HAS: he has attributes by being identical to them.  Van Til, as already noted, embraces the divine simplicity, although it strikes me as obvious that this is a Greek idea foreign to the Bible, and that therefore there is a tension between a strictly philosophical (Athenian) and a Bible-based (Hierosolymitan) approach to God.

If I am right, the question of the existence of God is not merely a question in special metaphysics (metaphysica specialis) along with questions about the soul and the world as a whole. (Recall that Kant divides special metaphysics into three subdisciplines: natural theology, rational psychology, and rational cosmology.) It is also a question in general metaphysics (metaphysica generalis) or ontology which concerns itself quite generally with ens qua ens, das Seiende als solches in its relation to esse, Sein. For again, if God exists, then the ontology of every non-divine being is different from the ontology it would have if God were not to exist.  The existence of God has general-metaphysical (ontological) repercussions.

The question, however, is whether the existence of God has epistemological repercussions. If God exists, does his existence have implications for the nature and scope of human knowledge?  The epistemological question is epitomized in Kant’s famous “What can I know?” To this we may add the question, “How do I know what I know?” If God exists, is what I can know and how I know it different from what I can know and how I know it if God were not to exist? Is it perhaps the case that if God were not to exist, we would know nothing at all? That may be the case, but one cannot just presuppose that this is the case.

VT [Van Til] reasons that if God exists (specifically, the absolute God of the Reformed Christian tradition) then all human knowledge necessarily depends on God. All creaturely knowledge is a kind of divine revelation; an analogical reconstruction of God’s definitive interpretation of his creation. As VT often put it, human knowledge is “thinking God’s thoughts after him.” A distinctively Christian metaphysics implies a distinctively Christian epistemology, in which case a “neutral” epistemology (if such were possible) would be a de facto denial of the Christian God. A method of inquiry according to which the existence of God and the existence of divine revelation are open questions is an anti-Christian method. That’s what VT means by “to doubt God is to deny him” — or, as he puts it two sentences later, “Neutrality toward God is in effect negation of God.”

BV:  I grant that the conditional If God exists, then all human knowledge depends on God is necessarily true. But how do we know that the antecedent of the conditional is true?  That is the question. If we know that the antecedent is true, then we can apply modus ponens to arrive at the knowledge that the conclusion is true. But how do we know that the antecedent is true?   If a conditional is true, it does not follow that its antecedent (or its consequent) is true. And as I said earlier, if one affirms a conditional, one does not thereby affirm its antecedent or its consequent. For example, to affirm that if Joe Biden is demented, then he is unfit for office, is not thereby to affirm either that he is demented or that he is unfit for office.    

One is of course free to presuppose the existence of the God of the Christian Bible with all the Calvinist and Athenian add-ons, but then one is arguing in a circle.  “We know that God exists because the existence of God is attested in the Bible which we know is true because it is God’s very Word.”   But of course this objection I am raising is ‘old hat’: Anderson has heard it hundreds of times.  The question, however, is whether he or any presuppositionalist has a good response to it. I’ll come back to this point shortly.

I will also point out that the penultimate sentence in the immediately preceding quotation is  not true. It is not anti-Christian to consider  questions about the existence of the God of the Christian Bible and about divine revelation to be open to investigation.  It is neither anti-Christian nor pro-Christian. Suppose one is a committed Christian theist. Why is it anti-Christian for such a person to inquire whether there are good reasons (whether of a demonstrative or a non-demonstrative sort) to maintain his commitment? Did Thomas Aquinas display an anti-Christian bias when he set forth his quinque viae?  Obviously he did not.

All this to say, I don’t take VT to be offering or defending a transcendental argument here; if anything, he is simply assuming the transcendental necessity of God. He isn’t reasoning from epistemology to metaphysics, but rather from (Christian) metaphysics to (Christian) epistemology. The idea that there can be no religiously-neutral epistemology is one of the animating themes of VT’s entire philosophy (although not one to which he holds exclusive rights).

Anderson’s first sentence displays a confusion of  ‘transcendental’ with ‘transcendent.’ By definition, God is a transcendent being: he exists whether or not creatures exist. If by ‘world’ we mean the totality of created beings, God is transcendent in that he exists whether or not the world exists.  Since Kant, we distinguish between transcendent and transcendental. The TAG argument is a transcendental argument in roughly Kant’s sense. But to explain this thoroughly would take us too far afield for a mere blog entry.

Finally, something about arguing in a circle.  It is blindingly evident that one cannot prove a proposition by presupposing it. And yet Van Til and his followers are surely within their epistemic/doxastic rights when they presuppose the truth of the their Bible-based Christian worldview together with all its Calvinist and Athenian add-ons. Maybe they are right! They go wrong, however, when they pretend to KNOW that they are right instead of humbly affirming that their worldview commitment  is a matter of reasoned FAITH and living in this faith and the uncertainty that faith brings with it. So they make fools of themselves by making the sophomoric logical mistake of thinking that they can prove a proposition by presupposing it. It is as if their doxastic security needs are so overwhelmingly strong that they cannot tolerate the least bit of uncertainty. 

Professor Anderson ends on an irenic note that suggests that he appreciates the difficulty of the Van Tilian position:

No doubt VT’s position is provocative, even for philosophers with Christian convictions. Whether his objection to a “neutral methodology” is cogent is a matter of debate. I offer these comments as an explanation rather than as a defense. Sufficient for the day is the trouble thereof. 🙂

Mental Change and the Potency-Act Distinction: Response to Tom Carroll

Tom Carroll comments:

Moments ago I imagined a red sailboat. Now that imagined sailboat is blue. Immaterial things change constantly, rapidly, ceaselessly. So there *must* be a principle of change operating at the immaterial level. Potency — understood as the principle of change — must apply beyond the matter/form of the mundane world.

In an earlier comment, Tom had written,

[Gavin] Kerr says, “In bringing the potentially existing essence into existence, esse is not received in some distinct pre-existing essence bringing about a change therein, but actuates the essence whole and complete… [W]hen God creates, He brings into existence the essence-esse composite all at once.”

The earlier comment got me thinking about whether it makes sense to apply the potency-act distinction, which first surfaces in Greek philosophy in an attempt to understand change in the material world, to the problem of divine creation, given that God’s creating, though it has as one of its products the material world of space, time, and change, is not a material process.   In classical theism, the main representative of which I take to be Thomas Aquinas, divine creation is creatio ex nihilo, which implies, first of all, that creating is not the forming of a pre-existent matter.  But it also implies that divine creation is not ex possibilitate.  Accordingly, God creates out of nothing, not out of mere possibles.

Although Kerr is surely right that on classical theism God does not create out of mere possibles, he seems to hold, in line with traditional doctrine, that divine creating is an actuating of potencies.  This raises the question of the difference between the actuating of mere possibles and the actuating of potencies, which in turn raises the question of the difference between mere possibles and potencies.  It occurred to me that this might involve an illicit metabasis eis allo genos, which is something like a Rylean category mistake, where a term is transferred from a sphere where it belongs to a sphere where it doesn’t belong.  Can we legitimately speak of change, i.e., the conversion of potency  into act, with respect to a spiritual (and thus immaterial) process such as divine creating?  Again, the creating of a material world is not a material process.

The problem assumes an even sharper form when we consider that God creates not only  material things, but also immaterial spirits.  He creates angels  — which in their ‘natural and proper state’ are unembodied — and he creates human beings — which in their ‘natural and proper state’ are embodied, but possibly such as to exist in a disembodied state between death and resurrection.

Angels are contingent beings, which is why they need creating.  Now if the creating of an angel is the actuating of a potency, and not the actuating of a pre-existent essence (a mere possible),  what and ‘where’ is the potency which, when actuated, becomes the angel Gabriel, say, or for that matter, the angel Lucifer, the light-bearer?  Don’t potencies need to be grounded in something actual?  And what might that be in the case of angels? Closer to the ground, what might that be in the case of material things?  If there are no ‘free-floating’ mere possibles, then how could there be ‘free-floating’ unactuated potencies?  Are we forced to say that these potencies are grounded in God? But then we are drifting toward the heretical view that divine creation is creatio ex Deo.

The orthodox — miniscule ‘o’ — position is creatio ex nihilo.  It aims to avoid three competing views: creatio ex Deo; demiurgic creation out of a pre-existent uncreated stuff; creatio ex possibilitate.

This is all  very tricky, but to a guy like me unutterably fascinating.  It lurks in the background of my conversation with Tom.  I will now address Tom’s first comment above. He is attempting to refute my suggestion — not a dogmatic pronunciamento — that the potency-act distinction is legitimately deployed only in the analysis of change in the material world and thus not in the analysis of divine creating which, again, is not a material process like the calcification of the aortic valve.

RESPONSE TO TOM CARROLL

First of all, is a boat an immaterial thing?  No, a boat, whether merely imagined or real, is a material thing.  I of course grant that there are immaterial things.  But a boat is not one of them. A merely imagined boat is not an immaterial thing, but a nonexistent material thing.  I do not grant that to exist is to be material. And so I do not grant that not to exist is to be immaterial.

Second, how does Tom know that the blue boat he imagines at time t* (t*> t) is numerically the same as the boat he imagined at t?  Suppose Tom owns a red boat, which he then paints blue.  In this case we naturally say that numerically one and the same boat that was red is now blue. A scholastic would call this a case of accidental (as opposed to substantial) change. I call it diachronic alterational change and distinguish it from diachronic existential change, as when a thing first comes into existence and then later passes out of existence. That too is change, but surely not an accidental or alterational change.  Before a thing comes to exist it is not there to undergo a change, and the same holds after it ceases to exist. On either end there is no substrate of alteration. No substrate, no alteration of a substrate. (This raises the difficult question of how to account for substantial/ existential change. I hold that the scholastic appeal to materia prima (prime matter) is unavailing.)

Back to Tom’s two boats. In the case of the merely imagined red boat and the merely imagined blue boat, the natural thing to say is that the two boats are numerically distinct. They are numerically distinct merely intentional objects. They are numerically distinct because they differ property-wise: one is red while the other is blue (and therefore not red).  I am assuming the Indiscernibility of Identicals, a principle than which no more luminous can be conceived. Roughly formulated, it states that if x = y, then x, y share all properties.  Contrapositively, if x, y are such that x has a property that y lacks, or vice versa, then it is not the case that x = y. Call it the Discernibility of the Diverse. The two principles are logically equivalent. And note that despite the traditional terminology, with its epistemic flavor, neither are epistemological principles.  Both are ontological.

I am making the following points against Tom. First, merely imagined material things are not immaterial but nonexistent. Second, there is no reason to think that a merely imagined red boat is numerically the same as a merely imagined blue boat, even if all the non-color properties of the boats are imagined to be the same. Third, no alteration of one and the same item has taken place in his example. Fourth, the view that alterational change is the conversion of potency into act is just one theory of such change among others and cannot just be assumed but must be argued for.  Fifth, the very notion of potency is unclear especially if thought to float free of an actual item in which it is grounded.

 

Kenny, Geach, and the Perils of Reading Frege into Aquinas

Stack leader.

I have been studying Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Being (Oxford UP, 2002). I cannot report that I find it particularly illuminating. I am troubled by the reading back of Fregean doctrines into Aquinas, in particular in the appendix, “Frege and Aquinas on Existence and Number.” (pp. 195-204) Since Kenny borrows heavily from Peter Geach, I will explain one of my misgivings in connection with a passage from Geach’s important article, “Form and Existence” in God and the Soul.

Truth, Accuracy, and the Delusional Al Gore

Over at Real Clear Energy:

Twenty years ago, in 2006, former Vice President Al Gore released his film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which included ominous and even hysterical warnings about a coming climate apocalypse if mankind did not dramatically change its ways. In the two decades since its release, the film’s most dire warnings have proven to be inaccurate.

I have nothing good to say about Al Bore and his boiling oceans. What caught my eye, pedant that I am, is the author’s confusion of truth and accuracy, a distinction I explain both truly and accurately in the appropriately appellated Substack article, Truth and Accuracy.

The confusion is very common, yet another sign of the Decline of the West. Or am I exaggerating, just for fun? It is 2:55 AM local time, the coffee is coming in, the adrenalin is surging, and the old man is having a blast. I’ve been up since midnight; finished reading a short story by the underappreciated Richard Yates, “Regards at Home,” cleaned up cat vomit, meditated from 1:17 to 2:10, and will now do  some serious writing on my book, if I don’t play a blitz chess game first. And then at 4:00 to the mountain bike! The strenuous life is best by test.

In Defense of the Electoral College

Here.

Is there anything more to Hillary Clinton’s recently reiterated fulminations against the Electoral College apart from the fact that she lost to Trump in 2016?  “It’s an abomination.” “For obvious reasons.”  But I will say something nice about the embittered loser.   If she got her emotions under control she probably could explain the reasons for the EC, something I don’t expect AOC or Kamala Harris could do.

Scott Bessent on Alexander Hamilton on Economic Security

At the WSJ:

Under President Trump’s leadership, the U.S. Treasury is working to restore economic security as the foundation that allows a nation to fulfill its most basic obligations.

Emboldened by our actions, other countries began to exploit our dependence as leverage. Now is the time to correct this. We need to insist on trade that is fair, reciprocal and consistent with our national interest. This is why the U.S. Treasury is organizing its economic statecraft around five core principles.

First, economic security begins with national capacity. We have rediscovered at great cost what Alexander Hamilton taught us: that every nation “ought to endeavor to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply.” Our strength is derived from what we can build, for the nation that can’t produce what it needs isn’t truly secure. The nation that depends on its adversaries for critical inputs isn’t truly sovereign. And the nation that reduces its economics to consumption isn’t truly prosperous.

The Hamiltonian point about security and sovereignty is perfectly obvious. How foolish to be dependent upon a geopolitical adversary such as the Chinese Communists for pharmaceuticals and semiconductors! But that dependence is what the Democrats allowed, whatever their motives.

This is why we are lucky that Donald J. Trump came along. You may find him stylistically off-putting, as I do, but substance trumps style, a fact that escapes the stylish but merely performative Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris.  If it is style you want, Melania has more than enough for both POTUS and FLOTUS.

For my edgier political observations, take a gander at my Facebook page, where I do not hesitate to impute motives to our political enemies.  And yes, they are enemies, even if you do not want to go all the way with Carl Schmitt.

Two Senses of ‘Transcendental’ Part I: Trans-Generic Determinations

This is for Tom Carroll and anyone else interested in the topic.

At 998b22 of his Metaphysics, Aristotle argues that Being cannot be a highest genus. (If it were a genus, it would have to be the highest genus since Being is maximally inclusive in that absolutely everything is; but Being cannot be the highest or any subordinate genus because it is not a genus at all.)  I will formulate  Aristotle’s thesis in my own way, and then give some reasons for accepting it. I won’t examine his reasoning in this installment.   But first some terminological regimentation.

I will use ‘Being’ and ‘Existence’ interchangeably. To be = to exist.  Being = Existence.  Being/Existence is crucially different from beings/existents.  (The forward slash in my writing indicates inclusive as opposed to exclusive disjunction. This is a Logic 101 distinction that I will happily explain if necessary.)

What is important here is the ontological difference between Being/Existence and beings/existents.  I say that with Heidegger in mind, but without endorsing all or even most of what Heidegger means by the phrase, especially not what he says  in his later phase, post-Kehre (after the famous ‘Turn.’)  As I use ‘ontological difference,’ said difference is already in Aquinas as the distinction between esse and ens, the distinction between the To Be (esse) of beings and the beings (entia) that participate in To Be/Being.  My ontological use of ‘participate,’ despite its Platonic provenance, is eminently apropos inasmuch as ens is the present participle of the infinitive esse. (Exactly how much philosophical juice can be squeezed out of this grammatical fact is a matter of controversy.)

The majuscule-miniscule distinction must be constantly observed. I mean the distinction between big ‘B’ being and little ‘b’ being.   This typographical distinction records the ontological difference of Being and beings;  in Latin that between esse and ens; in German, that between das Sein and das Seiende.  Both of the latter terms are nominalizations or, if you prefer, substantivizations, the first of the infinitive sein, the second of the present participle seiend.  ‘Das Sein’ is a proper noun that refers to Being in its difference from beings, while ‘das Seiende’ is a common noun that refers to beings either collectively or distributively depending on whether it is taken to refer to  beings as a whole or  to  beings taken one-by-one.

So we need to distinguish collective from distributive uses of ‘being.’ And we must never use ‘being’ to refer to  the Being of beings, that in virtue of which beings are.  Some will dismiss ‘in virtue of which’ as a weasel phrase, a phrase with no definite meaning. We can discuss this if Tom wants to, but for now I dismiss the dismissal.  Others will be inclined to say that there is no Being different from beings: there are beings, all right, but no Being.  They might go on to say that talk of Being in its difference from beings involves illicit hypostatization.

This all needs careful discussion, but for now I will simply point out that the many numerically different beings have something in common, namely, that they are, and are not nothing.   Each of the many beings is, and each is not nothing, and so each has in common with every other one the fact of its not being nothing. So the Being of beings is not the same as the beings that are.  Being is one to their many.  Being is what makes them be. The many beings form a totality of some sort since they all have in common that they are.  But we may not assume that totality of beings is a mathematical set, a mereological sum, or any other familiar sort of totality.  I am inclined to say that it is sui generis. It would also be hasty to assume that we know what the commonality of Being amounts to. Is it the commonality of a multiply instantiable concept? The commonality of a common cause? Both suggestions lead to trouble.

Another question concerns the ‘of’ in ‘Being of beings.’ Is this a subjective genitive, an objective genitive, both, or neither? In ‘city of Boston,’ the ‘of’ is neither.  What I call the ‘of’ of apposition is not a genitive. So this is another topic that Tom might want to discuss. Timor domini initium sapientiae.  “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” The fear of the Lord is not the Lord’s fear, but ours. The genitive is objective.  The beginning of wisdom, however, is wisdom’s beginning. Subjective genitive. So both types of genitive are operative in one and the same Latin sentence and its English translation.  The revelation of God, however, is both God’s revelation of himself and a revelation about God to us. So in this example the genitive has both functions.  What about the Being of beings? Is Being merely that which makes possible the manifestation of beings to us, or is it that which makes beings be whether or not they are manifest to us? Or both?

Now what  struck Parmenides at the beginning of our tradition and filled him with wonder was that beings are, that things exist, that they are (non-locatively) there, that they are not nothing.  This was a concrete metaphysical experience he had, an intuition or direct (conceptually unmediated) awareness of the Being  of beings.  The first ‘of’ in the preceding sentence I take to express the objective genitive and the second the subjective genitive.

This leads naturally to the question, What is Being? Aristotle concludes at 998b22 of his Metaphysics that Being cannot be a genus. And he is right if he means that what makes beings be cannot be their falling under a genus.  To put his conclusion in my own way, existing things are not a kind of thing. Particular trees, cats, moons, and so on are instances of natural kinds.  So we can say that feline things are a kind of thing. But no particular feline, Max, for example, can instantiate the kind unless it, Max in this case, exists.  No individual x  can instantiate any kind K unless x exists.  From this I conclude that existing things are not a kind of thing.  Being is not a genus.

From this we can conclude that Being and a being is trans-generic: it transcends and cuts across all the various genera.  A being qua being (ens qua ens) is not confined to any genus, and the Being (esse) of this being (ens) is not the being’s instantiation of any genus.  Accordingly, being (ens) is a trans-generic and thus transcendental determination in the pre-modern sense.

More later. We are just scratching the surface.

Dark Nietzschean Thoughts

Substack latest.

The serious thinker is self-critical: his examination of life, without which his life is not worth living, is a self-examination, even unto a painful thinking against himself. He has the courage to entertain, which is not to say endorse, dark thoughts. He is not an apologist for a ready-made worldview. He toes no party line. His watchword is ‘inquiry,’ not ‘worldview.’ He would have a worldview if he could, but he must inquire to find one.

Here is a dark thought, one I do not endorse, but entertain, though not with much hospitality.

Read the rest.

Reading Now: Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday

I first read Stefan Zweig in 1988 when I came upon his The Royal Game  and Other Stories in a Greenwich Village book store.  I purchased a copy from the Village Chess Shop on November 12th of that year.  As  a chess player I had long known about the eponymous story.  It delighted me as much as “Letter from an Unknown Woman,” from the same collection, moved me.

So when our long-time friend Spencer Case mentioned The World of Yesterday on his Facebook page, I knew I had to have it.  It does not disappoint. Here is a taste to whet your appetite:

If today, thinking it over calmly, we wonder why Europe went to war in 1914, there is not one sensible reason to be found, nor even any real occasion for the war. There were no ideas involved, it was not really about drawing minor borderlines; I can explain it only, thinking of that excess of power, by seeing it as a tragic consequence of that internal dynamism that had built up during those forty years of peace, and now demanded release. (220)

To appreciate this passage, it must be savored in the context of the chapter ‘Brightness and Shadows over Europe’ which deals with the run-up to the Great War and the mentality of the individuals and peoples who prepared it and suffered unspeakably in its aftermath.

The sensitive Zweig, born in 1881, couldn’t bear the aftermath, even from afar,  and committed suicide with his wife in Brazil in 1942.

 

John Locke on the Right to Self-Defense

Substack latest.

Calm, clear, rigorous, and free of invective. Which is not to say that invective does not have important uses. Different strokes for different folks. For thugs, slugs. The hard fist of unreason. For the reasonable, the open-handed, loving caress of sweet reason. Civility for the civil. Respect for the respectful.