Month: October 2009

Teleological and Axiological Aspects of Existential Meaning

What do we mean by 'meaning' when we ask about the meaning of life? It is perhaps most natural to take the meaning of life or of a life to be its purpose, point, end, goal, or telos. Accordingly, (human) life is meaningful only if it has a central organizing purpose. Existential of life meaning bears a teleological aspect in that a meaningful life is a purpose-driven life.

Having a purpose, even if necessary for the meaningfulness of a life, is not sufficient. A meaningful life must also embody positive intrinsic value. The lives of terrorists and mass murderers can be purpose-driven, subjectively meaningful, and satisfying to their agents, but we ought to resist the notion that such lives are objectively meaningful. At best, such destructive lives are subjectively meaningful only. If so, existential meaning is not merely a teleological concept but a teleological-cum-axiological concept.  An objectively meaning ful life must be both purpose-driven and such as to realize positive objective intrinsic value.

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Condign Punishment

There are qualifiers that occur only with the word they happen to qualify but  not with any other word.   A punishment and a remark can both be fitting or appropriate, but only a punishment is condign. One does not hear or read 'condign remark.' Is 'condign' ever used apart from 'punishment'? That is one question. A second: What is the technical term for this linguistic phenomenon? There is one, but I can't remember what it is.

A reader supplied this bit of linguistic evidence that answers my first question:  "Scotus's proposed replacement way of drawing the distinction between condign merit and congruous merit is quite complicated. Underlying it is the claim that the reward for condign merit is everlasting life, and that the reward for congruous merit is the gift of sanctifying grace (i.e., justification)."  (Richard Cross,  Duns Scotus, p. 105)

As for  the second question, I thought the answer might be hapax legomenon.  But that term refers to a word or phrase that occurs but once in a corpus, a phenomenon which is similar to but distinct from the phenomenon I am referring to.

A Charming Malapropism

I heard a pretty lady the other day refer to a barista as a barrister. Barista is Italian for bartender. Bartenders here and abroad mix and serve alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages hot and cold. Entering English the word has suffered semantic shrinkage: a barista typically mixes coffee drinks only.

Baristas and barristers ply their trade in the vicinity of bars: standing behind them or before them, respectively. So the malapropism has a certain 'logic.'

A Checkered Past

Having recently compared two lunch companions to each other in point of having checkered pasts, but aware of recent shifts in the meaning of the phrase, and not wishing to give offense, I quizzed one of them on the meaning of 'has a checkered past' as applied to a woman and to a man. He replied that it suggests that the woman was a prostitute and the man a crook. That answer is not wrong and accords with current usage. But the phrase origninally had no such pejorative connotation as far as I can tell. My old Webster's defines checker, vt, as to vary with contrasting elements or situations and gives the example of a checkered career as a racer. Nothing pejorative about that: the racer's career had its ups and downs. Or one might describe a man whose 20s were spent in the Jesuits, his 30s teaching philosophy, his 40s as a soldier of fortune, and his 50's as an exterminator of insects as having had a checkered past. Nothing pejorative about that either.

Only an idiot thinks that change qua change is good.  And so I hold to the old way of using 'checkered past.'

Some Theses on Possible Worlds

Here are some of my (mostly unoriginal) thoughts on the topic of possible worlds.  If I had more time I would organize these ideas better. But look, this is just a weblog, an online notebook! A natural-born scribbler, I bash these things out quickly. And you get what you pay for, muchachos. Double your money back if not completely satisfied.

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To Understand the Religious Sensibility . . .

. . . two books are essential: Augustine's Confessions and Pascal's Pensées. If you read these books and they do not speak to you, if they do not move you, then it is a good bet that you don't have a religious bone in your body. It is not matter of intelligence but of sensibility. "He didn't have a religious bone in his body." I recall that line from Stephanie Lewis' obituary for her husband David, perhaps the most brilliant American philosopher of the postwar period. He was highly intelligent and irreligious. Others are highly intelligent and religious. Among contemporary philosophers one could mention Alvin Plantinga, Peter van Inwagen, and Richard Swinburne. The belief that being intelligent rules out being religious casts doubt on the intelligence of those who hold it.

Why We Should Accept the Potentiality Principle

The idea behind the Potentiality Principle (PP) is that potential personhood confers a right to life. For present purposes we may define a person as anything that is sentient, rational, and self-aware. Actual persons have a right to life, a right not to be killed. Presumably we all accept the following Rights Principle:

RP: All persons have a right to life.

What PP does is simply extend the right to life to potential persons. Thus,

PP. All potential persons have a right to life.

PP allows us to mount a very powerful argument, the Potentiality Argument (PA), against the moral acceptability of abortion. Given PP, and the fact that human fetuses are potential persons, it follows that they have a right to life. From the right to life follows the right not to be killed, except perhaps in some extreme circumstances.

But what is the argument for PP?

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Persons and the Moral Relevance of Their Capacities

Those who accept the following Rights Principle (RP) presumably also accept as a codicil thereto a Capacities Principle (CP):

RP. All persons have a right to life.

CP. All persons have a right to life even at times when they are not exercising any of the capacities whose exercise confers upon them the right to life.

I take it that most of us would take CP as spelling out what is implicit in RP. Thus few if any would hold RP in conjunction with the logical contrary of CP, namely

CCP. No person has a right to life at a time when he is not exercising at least one of the capacities whose exercise confers upon an individual its right to life.

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Pavel Tichý on Descartes’ Meditation Five Ontological Argument

This post is the fourth in a series on Pavel Tichý's "Existence and God" (J. Phil., August 1979, 403-420). In section II we find a critique of Descartes' Meditation Five ontological argument. Tichý claims to spot two fallacies in the argument. I will argue that only one of them is a genuine fallacy. One could present the Cartesian argument in Tichý's jargon as follows:

1. The requisites of the divine office include all perfections.
2. Existence is a perfection.
Therefore
3. The divine office is occupied.

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Pavel Tichý on Whether ‘God’ is the Name of an Individual

This post is the third in a series on Pavel Tichý's "Existence and God" (J. Phil., August 1979, 403-420). So far I have sketched his theory of existence, made a couple of objections, and refuted his argument for it. I now turn to section II of his article (pp. 410-412) in which he discusses Descartes' Meditation Five ontological argument. But in this post I will address only the preliminaries to the discussion of Descartes. Tichý writes,

We have seen that 'Jimmy Carter' and 'the U. S. president' are terms of completely different typological categories: 'Jimmy Carter' denotes an individual, and 'the U. S. president' denotes something for an individual to be, an individual-office. Which of the two categories does the term 'God' belong to? It would be patently implausible to construe it as belonging to the former category. If 'God' were simply the name of an individual, it would be a purely contingent matter whether God is benevolent or not; for any individual is conceivably malicious. But of course the notion of a malevolent God is absurd. If so, however, God cannot be an individual; God is bound to be rather something for an individual to be, and benevolence must be part of what it takes for someone to be it. In other words, 'God' must stand for an individual office, and benevolence must be one of the requisites that make up the essence of that office.

It is only because 'God' denotes an individual-office that we can sensibly ask whether God exists. To ask, Does God exist? is not to ask whether something is true regarding a definite individual; for which individual would it be? It is rather to ask whether, of all the individuals there are, one has what it takes to be God. It is to ask, in other words, whether the divine office is occupied. (410-411)

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More on Tichý on Existence: One of His Arguments Examined

This post is a sequel to Pavel Tichý on Existence. There I explained Tichý's theory as a variation on the Fregean theory and made a start on a critique of it. Here I examine an argument of his for it. He writes,

If existence were a property ascribable to individuals, then the force of such an ascription could only be to the effect that the individual in question is indeed one of the individuals there are. But since any individual is, trivially, one of the individuals there are, all ascriptions of existence would be tautologically true. If existence were properly raised in regard to individuals, then a negative answer to such a question would be self-defeating: it would suggest that no question has in fact been asked and that, accordingly, no answer is called for in the first place. Genuine existence questions would be answerable wholesale and a priori in the affirmative. ("Existence and God," Journal of Philosophy, August 1979, pp. 404-405)

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Pavel Tichý on Existence

This post consists of some notes and commentary on Section I of Pavel Tichý's "Existence and God," The Journal of Philosophy, vol. LXXVI, no. 8, August 1979. Section I of Tichý's article is about designation and existence. Section II exposes two fallacies in Descartes' ontological argument. Section III provides a valid reconstruction of Anselm's Proslogion III ontological argument. This post comments on section I only. I didn't discuss Tichý in my otherwise rather thorough book on existence, so this post is yet another postscript to A Paradigm Theory of Existence.

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Notes on Philosophical Terminology and its Fluidity

The Fact of Terminological Fluidity

If Peter and Bill are talking philosophy, the first thing that has to occur, if there is is to be any forward movement, is that the interlocutors must pin each other down terminology-wise. Each has to come to understand how the other is using his terms. It is notorious that key philosophical terms are used in different ways by different philosophers.

The following is a partial list of terms used in different ways by different philosophers: abstract, concrete, object, subject, fact, proposition, world, predicate, property, substance, event.

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Note to Long-Time Readers

I have just learned that PowerBlogs will shut down permanently on 30 November 2009.  Those of you who left comments at the old blog and who wish to copy them are advised to do so by the end of November.  Between now and then you may expect a flurry of reposting at this site as I bring over the posts that I consider worth preserving.  Quite a number have already been transferred, but, scribbler that I am, there remains an astonishing number left to revise and repost.