Logically, we are poles apart.
Month: March 2010
Ersatz Eternity
What has been, though it needn't have been, always will have been. What time has mothered, no future time can touch. What you were and that you were stands forever inscribed in the roster of being whether or not anyone will read the record. You will die, but your having lived will never die. But how paltry the ersatz eternity of time's progeny! Time has made you and will unmake you. In compensation, she allows your having been to rise above the reach of the flux. Thanks a lot, bitch! You are one mater dolorosa whose consolation is as petty as your penance is hard.
Taxomania
Is it a word? If not, I hereby introduce it. It is the strong need, bordering on the obsessive, to classify. A central characteristic of the INTP.
Divine Simplicity and Truthmakers: Notes on Brower
1. One of the entailments of the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) is that God is identical to: God's omniscience, God's omnipotence, and in general God's X-ness, where 'X' ranges over the divine attributes. And it is easy to see that if God = God's F-ness, and God = God's G-ness, then (by transitivity of identity) God's F-ness = God's G-ness. I suggest that we use 'divine attribute' to refer to those properties of God that are both essential and intrinsic. The problem, of course, is to make sense of these identities given the fact that, prima facie, they do not make sense. The pattern is the same as with Trinity and Incarnation. These doctrines imply identities which, on the face of it, beggar understanding. It thus falls to the philosopher of religion to try to render coherent that which, on the face of it, is incoherent.
2. One of the questions that arise when we try to make sense of DDS concerns which category of entity such phrases as 'God's omniscience' pick out. One possibility is that such phrases pick out properties, whether universal (multiply exemplifiable) properties or particular (not multiply exemplifiable) properties, also known as tropes. But this leads to trouble as Brower points out. For if God is identical either to omniscience or to his omniscience, then God is identical to a property — which sounds absurd: how can God, a person, be a property? Properties are predicable entities, but God is an individual and so not predicable. Properties are exemplifiable entities (whether multiply or non-multiply); but God is an individual and so not exemplifiable. Properties are abstract (causally inert) whereas God is concrete (causally active/passive). No property is a person, but God is a person. No property creates or knows or loves. These are some hastily sketched reasons for thinking that God cannot be identical to his properties.
3. Jeffrey E. Brower forwards an interesting proposal. He suggests that such phrases as 'God's nature,' 'God's goodness' and 'God's power' refer to "entities of a broadly functional type — namely, truthmakers." (Simplicity and Aseity, sec. 2) The idea is that 'God's omniscience' refers to the trruthmaker of 'God is omniscient' or perhaps to the truthmaker of the proposition expressed by 'God is omniscient.' If (Fregean) propositions are the primary truthbearers, then (tokenings of) declarative sentences that express such propositions can be said to be secondary truthbearers. I trust that it is clear that truthbearers and truthmakers are not to be confused. One key difference is that while some truthbearers are are false, no truthmaker is false. Truth and falsity are properties of certain representations (propositions, declarative sentences, beliefs, judgments, etc.) whereas truthmakers are the ontological grounds of some true truthbearers. If I understand Brower's view, it is not only that truthmakers are neither true nor false — every TM theorist will hold this — but also that truthmakers are not at all proposition-like. By contrast, I follow D. M. Arstrong in holding that truthmakers must have a proposition-like structure. But more on this in a moment.
4. Roughly, a truthmaker is whatever plays a certain role or performs a certain function; it is whatever makes true a true truthbearer. The 'truthmaker intuition' — which I share with Brower — is that a sentence such as 'Tom is blogging' cannot just be true; there is need of some worldly entity to 'make' it true, to serve as the ontological ground of its truth, to 'verify' it in an ontological, not epistemological, sense of this term. To say that some or all truthbearers need truthmakers is not yet to specify which sort of entity plays the truthmaker role. Among philosophers who accept the need for truthmakers there is disagreement about the ontological category to which they belong.
Brower says rather incautiously that the functional characterization of truthmakers "places no restriction on the specific nature or ontological category to which a truthmaker can belong." (sec 2.1) That can't be right. Surely there are some restrictions. For one thing, a truthmaker cannot be a Fregean proposition for the simple reason that such items are among the items made true by truthmakers. And the same goes for declarative sentences, beliefs, and judgments. My belief that the cat is asleep is either true or false and as such is a truthbearer. It is in need of a truthmaker but is not itself one. Of course, the fact of my believing that the cat is asleep can serve as truthmaker for the sentence ' BV now believes that the cat is asleep' if concrete facts are admitted as truthmakers – but that is something else again. So not just anything can be a truthmaker. Charitably interpreted, what Brower is telling us is that TM theorists are allowed some ontological latitude when it comes to specifying which category of entity is fit to play the truthmaker role.
5. Let us note that if a true Fregean proposition p entails a Fregean proposition q, then one could say that the first 'makes true' the second. And so one could speak of the first as a 'truthmaker' of the second. But this is not what is meant by 'truthmaking' in these discussions despite the fact that p broadly logically necessitates q. What is intended is a relation of broadly logical necessitation that connects a nonpropositional entity (but on some theories a proposition-like entity) to a propositional entity, or more precisely, to an entity that can serves as the bearer or vehicle of a truth-value. As I see it, the entailment relation and the truthmaking relation are species of broadly logical necessitation; but truthmaking is not entailment. Entailment will never get you 'outside the circle of propositions'; but that is exactly what truthmaking is supposed to do. A truthmaker is an ontological, not propositional or representational truth-ground. Philosophers who are attracted to truthmakers typically have a realist sense that certain of our representations need to be anchored in reality.
Brower sees it a little differently. He would agree with me that entailment and truthmaking cannot be identical, but he thinks of it as "a form of broadly logical necessitation or entailment" and says that entailment is necessary but not sufficient for truthmaking. (Sec. 2.1) So Brower seems to be maintaining that while there is more to truthmaking than entailment, every truthmaker entails the truth it makes true. But this makes little or no sense. Entailment is a relation defined on propositions. If x entails y, then you can be sure that x and y are propositions or at least proposition-like entities, whether these be sentences or judgments or beliefs or even concrete states of affairs such as the fact of (not the fact that) Peter's being tired, which concrete fact contains Peter himself as constituent, warts and all. But for Brower, as we will see in a moment, concrete individuals such as Socrates, entities that are neither propositions nor proposition-like, can serve as truthmakers. As far as I can see, it makes no sense to say that Socrates entails a proposition. It makes no sense because entailment is defined in terms of truth, and no individual can be true or false. To say that p entails q is to say that it is impossible that p be true and q false. Since it makes no sense to say of an individual that it is true, it makes no sense to say of an individual that it entails a proposition. So truthmaking cannot be a type or species of entailment if individuals are truthmakers.
6. But setting aside for the moment the above worry, if it makes sense to say that God is the truthmaker of 'God is omniscient,' and if 'God's omniscience' refers to this truthmaker, then it will be clear how God can be identical to God's omniscience. For then 'God is identical to his omniscience' is no more problematic than 'God is God.' It will also be clear how God's omniscience can be identical to God's omnipotence.
7. But can it really be this easy to show that DDS is coherent? Although I agree with Brower that some truthbearers need truthmakers, I don't see how truthmakers could be ontologically structureless individuals or 'blobs' as opposed to 'layer-cakes' in Armstrong's terminology. By 'ontologically structureless' I mean lacking in propositional or proposition-like structure. Consider the following true intrinsic essential predicative sentences: 'Socrates is human,' 'Socrates is an animal,' Socrates is a material object,' 'Socrates exists,' and 'Socrates is self-identical.' (It is not obvious that 'Socrates exists' is an essential predication inasmuch as Socrates exists contingently, but let's not enter into this thorny thicket just now.)
Brower's claim is that in each of these cases (which parallel the true intrinsic essential predications of divine attributes) the truthmaker is the concrete individual Socrates himself. Thus Socrates is the truthmaker of 'Socrates is human' just as God is the truthmaker of 'God is omniscient.' Unfortunately, no individual lacking propositional or proposition-like structure can serve as a truthmaker as I argued in #5 above. Just as it makes no sense to say that Socrates is true, it makes no sense to say that Socrates entails the proposition expressed by 'Socrates is human.'
There is more to say, but tomorrow's another day. Time to punch the clock.
Philosophy is Inquiry not Ideology
(The following, composed 16 February 2005, is imported from the first incarnation of Maverick Philosopher. It makes some important points that bear repeating.)
On the masthead of The Ivory Closet, now defunct: "Life as a Closet Conservative Inside Liberal Academia."
From the post Liberal Groupthink is My Cover:
My dissertation, which I'm still working on, focuses on a contemporary French philosopher who is known in academia primarily as a radical Leftist. Generally speaking, academics seem to just assume that you agree with and share the same views as the figure you focus on in your dissertation. So, everyone just assumes that since I'm writing on a radical Leftist that I must be a radical Leftist. I keep my mouth shut about my conservativism. Often I have to bite my tongue when I hear disparaging remarks about conservatives. But, so long as I manage to do that the liberal bias of academia makes it all too easy to stay in the closet. Everyone just assumes your [you're] a liberal.
The Millenials: A Chump Generation?
Robert Samuelson, The Real Generation Gap. Concluding paragraph:
Millennials could become the chump generation. They could suffer for their elders' economic sins, particularly the failure to confront the predictable costs of baby boomers' retirement. This poses a question. In 2008, millennials voted 2-1 for Barack Obama; in surveys, they say they're more disposed than older Americans to big and activist government. Their ardor for Obama is already cooling. Will higher taxes dim their enthusiasm for government?
Assertion and Grammatical Mood
Assertion has both a pragmatic and a semantic aspect. First and foremost, assertion is a speech act. As such, assertion or asserting is a different type of speech act from commanding, asking a question, or expressing a wish. But if we consider the language system in abstraction from the uses to which it is put by speakers, we can distinguish among different types of sentence. We can distinguish among the grammatical moods: indicative or declarative, imperative, interrogative, and optative, among others. The mood distinctions belong on the side of semantics, on the side of linguistic meaning. Linguistic meaning is the meaning a sentence type has in virtue of the conventions of the language system to which it belongs. Speech acts, however, involve the tokening of sentence types.
So on the pragmatic side we have the distinctions among speech acts, and on the semantic side, the distinctions among moods. One question that arises is whether the speech acts map neatly onto the moods. When I make an assertion, must I use an indicative sentence? Or can I make an assertion using a non-indicative sentence? And can I utter an indicative sentence and not make an assertion? Can I make assertions using interrogative sentences? Can I make assertions using imperative sentences? Can one ask a question using an optative sentence? Here are five theses that seem true. Examples follow.
T1. One can make an assertion using a non-indicative sentence.
T2. One can utter an indicative sentence and not make an assertion.
T3. One can utter an interrogative sentence and be taken by one's audience to be making an assertion.
T4. One can utter an imperative sentence and thereby make an assertion.
T5. One can utter an optative sentence and thereby ask a question.
Ad (T1). Suppose A sincerely asks, 'Does God exist?' and B replies, 'Is there an angry unicorn on the far side of the moon?' It seems that B has answered A's question, and has done so by making an assertion, an assertion more straightforwardly put by an utterance of the indicative sentence, 'God does not exist.' And yet B has made his assertion by uttering an interrogative sentence. This appears to be evidence that one can make an assertion by using a non-indicative sentence. An interrogative form of words can be used to make an assertion.
Ad (T2). Suppose Johnny is picking his nose in public, and Mommy says to Johnny, 'We don't do that.' Mommy utters an indicative sentence, and yet does not make an assertion; she issues a command. A second example. 'Obama sucks' is an indicative sentence. But a tokening of this sentence type will not typically express a proposition or convey an assertion; it will typically be used to express dislike or contempt.
Ad (T3). I bought a hat recently at a swap meet for $20 and I asked the lady who sold it to me, 'Do you know how much this hat would cost at a retail outfitter's?' Her reply: 'How much?' The lady took me to be making an assertion that would normally be couched in some such indicative sentence as, 'I know how much this hat would cost elsewhere.' And yet, I was asking a genuine question. (I need to write a separate post on rhetorical questions.)
Ad (T4). Davidson gives this example: 'Notice that Joan is wearing her purple hat again.' The sentence is in the imperative mood, but is used to make an assertion. An example of my own. I say something you disagree with, and you reply, 'Get out of here.' You are not commanding me to leave, but denying my assertion with a counter-assertion clothed in an imperative form of words.
Ad (T5). Another example from Davidson: 'I'd like to know your phone number.' This grammatically optative sentence might be used to ask a question that would be put more directly as 'What is your phone number?'
This linguistic data seems to support the view that we must distinguish between speaker's meaning and sentence meaning, which is a species of linguistic meaning. Sometimes they coincide, but often they come apart, as in the above examples. What a speaker means or intends by his speech act often diverges from what sentences mean when considered in abstraction from speakers and their intentions.
REFERENCE: Donald Davidson, "Moods and Performances" in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford, 1984, pp. 109-123.
Our Humble Port of Entry
We humans are surprisingly proud given our lowly and inauspicious entrance into the world. In a line often attributed to St. Augustine, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: we are born between feces and urine. And we revert soon enough to something of equal value: dust and ashes. Entry through a vagina, exit through a smokestack. On and off the stage in a manner most unbecoming and most unlike our proud strut upon it.
The Islamic Car and Some Parodies
According to this source,
Malaysia, Iran and Turkey plan to build an "Islamic car" fitted with a compass to find the direction of Mecca, and a compartment to keep the Koran in, the Malaysian state news agency said.
This invites parody.
Islamic Car, Turkish kismet model: Very economical inasmuch as it is devoid of all safety features. Reflects the popular belief that "when your number is up, your number is up." But the Nazar Boncuk comes standard.
Buddhist car: This amphibious vehicle is specially equipped to transport its passengers across the river of Samsara.
Mahayana model: This Buddhist SUV is known as the "Greater Vehicle" because of its superior cargo capacity.
Hinayana model: This Buddhist subcompact, popularly known as the "Lesser Vehicle," conducts to the same ultimate destination as the Greater Vehicle but with greater fuel economy.
Hezbollah Hummer: Specially designed to explode upon impact.
Luther's Lemon: The attempt to power this baby on faith alone (sola fide) resulted in a vehicle that works not.
Commie Car: Designed for "people not profits," this unreliable contraption delivers neither.
Catholic car: This vehicle features an onboard navigation system premised on the truth that "all roads lead to Rome."
Mao's Maserati: This sports car, produced by slave labor under the watchful eye of Italian designers, is available only to high Party officials. It makes a "great leap forward" in under ten seconds.
Gorbachev's Covertible: This vehicle featured plenty of glasnost, but like the Edsel, was soon out of production.
The Mormon Machine: Features a special jump seat for spare wives, but the beverage holders are conspicuous by their absence.
The Race Car: A liberal favorite, the Race Car conducts one to a racial destination no matter what the starting point.
The Bright Car: Dan Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and their fellow 'brights' drive these. They exhibit a marvelous design that came about through the marvel of blind engineering.
Trotsky’s Faith
The last days of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, prime mover of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, are the subject of Bertrand M. Patenaude's Trotsky: The Downfall of a Revolutionary (HarperCollins, 2009). It held my interest from the first page to the last, skillfully telling the story of Trotsky's Mexican exile, those who guarded him, and their failure ultimately to protect him from an agent of the GPU/NKVD sent by Stalin to murder him. Contrary to some accounts, it was not an ice pick that Ramon Mercader drove into Trotsky's skull, but an ice axe. Here is how Trotsky ends his last testament, written in 1940, the year of his death:
For forty-three years of my conscious life I have been a revolutionary; and for forty-two I have fought under the banner of Marxism . . . I will die a proletarian revolutionary, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is no less ardent, indeed it is even stronger now than it was in the days of my youth. [. . .] Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air might enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight is everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of evil, oppression, and violence, and enjoy it to the full. (Patenaude, pp. 234-235)
No pie-in-the-sky for old Trotsky, but pie-in-the-future. Those of us who take religion seriously needn't deny that it can serve as opium for some. But if one can see that, then one should also be able to see that secular substitutes for religion can be just as narcotic. Why is utopian opium less narcotic than the religious variety? Why is a faith in Man and his future more worthy of credence than faith in God?
I should think that it is less credible. Note first that there is no Man, only men. And we human beings are a cussedly diverse and polyglot lot, a motley assortment of ornery sons-of-bitches riven by tribalisms and untold other factors of division. The notion that we are all going to work together to create a workers' paradise or any sort of earthly paradise is a notion too absurd to swallow given what we know about human nature, and in particular, what we know of the crimes of communism. In the 20th century, communists murdered 100 million to achieve their utopia without achieving it.
We know Man does not exist, but we do not know that God does not exist. Religious faith, therefore, has a bit more to recommend it than secular faith. You say God does not exist? That may be so. But the present question is not whether God exists or not, but whether belief in Man makes any sense and can substitute for belief in God. I say it doesn't and can’t, that it is a sorry substitute if not outright delusional. We need help that we cannot provide for ourselves, either individually or collectively. The failure to grasp this is of the essence of the delusional Left, which, refusing the tutelage of tradition and experience, and having thrown overboard every moral standard, is ever ready to spill oceans of blood in pursuit of their utopian fantasies.
There may be no source of the help we need. Then the conclusion to draw is that we should get by as best we can until Night falls, rather than making things worse by drinking the Left's utopian Kool-Aid.
Trotsky, as you can see from the quotation, believed in a redemptive future. Life in this world is beautiful and will be cleansed by future generations of evil, oppression, and violence. But even if this fantasy future were achieved, it could not possibly redeem the countless millions who have suffered and died in the most horrible ways since time beyond memory. Marxist redemption-in-the-future would be a pseudo-redemption even if it were possible, which it isn't.
There is also the moral and practical absurdity of a social programme that employs present evil, oppression, and violence in order to extirpate future evil, oppression, and violence. Once the totalitarian State is empowered to do absolutely anything in furtherance of its means-justifying ends it will turn on its own creators as it did on Trotsky. Because there is no such thing as The People, 'power to the people' is an empty and dangerous phrase and a cover for the tyranny of the vanguard or the dictator. The same goes for 'dictatorship of the proletariat.' What it comes to in practice is the dictatorship of the dictator.
The tragedy of Trotsky is that of a man of great theoretical and practical gifts who squandered his life pursuing a fata morgana.
It is interesting to compare Edith Stein and Lev Davidovich Bronstein. Each renounced the present world and both set out in quest of a Not-Yet, one via contemplation, the other via revolution. Which chose the path of truth, which that of illusion? it is of course possible that both quests were illusory.
How strange the stage of this life and the characters that pass upon it, their words and gestures resounding for a time before fading away.
John Gardner and Mannered Prose
Over lunch yesterday I showed a writer friend the first page of John C. Gardner's Mickelsson's Ghosts (Vintage 1985). I asked him whether the opening paragraphs made him want to read on. He didn't answer that question, though his handing of the book back to me without a request to borrow it hinted in the negative direction. But he did describe Gardner's writing as "mannered." This morning I opened Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist (Harper & Row, 1983) and stumbled by chance on this passage:
If a writer cares more for his language than for other elements of ficition, if he continually calls our attention away from the story to himself, we call him "mannered" and eventually we tire of him. (Smart editors tire of him quickly and reject him.) (p. 11)
Here are the first three sentences of MG:
Sometimes the sordidness of his present existence, not to mention the stifling, clammy heat of the apartment his finances forced him to take, on the third floor of an ugly old house in Binghamton's West Side — "the nice part of town," everybody said (God have mercy on those who had to live in the bad parts) — made Peter Mickelsson clench his square yellow teeth in anger and once, in a moment of rage and frustration greater than usual, bring down the heel of his fist on the heavy old Goodwill oak table where his typewriter, papers, and books were laid out, or rather strewn. He'd intended to split the thing in two, though perhaps the intent was not quite conscious. In any case, no such luck.
Is that "mannered" writing? My friend and I will agree that that writing like this won't make you any money. So perhaps the writing is mannered by the standards of the trash that sells. But I'd say it is good writing, in part because of and not despite the elaborate syntax. I shudder to think what some contemporary bonehead of a thirty-something editor would do to the opening sentence — assuming he had the attention span to get through it. Back in 1985, those three sentences drew me into the novel, all 590 pages of which I read. And I dip into it again from time to time, rereading marked passages.
A curious bit of trivia: on page 486 there is a reference to "Castaneda — Carlos not Hector — . . . ." Sic transit gloria mundi: Hector is as little read today as Gardner. I don't know whether anyone still reads Carlos. But I do know he is less worth reading than the other two.
Is Divine Simplicity Consistent With Contingent Divine Knowledge?
The day before yesterday, I sketched the problem mentioned in the title. Today I offer a more rigorous presentation of the problem and examine a solution. The problem can be set forth as an aporetic triad:
1. Every free agent is a libertarianly-free (L-free) agent.
2. God is ontologically simple (where simplicity is an entailment of aseity and vice versa).
3. There are contingent items of divine knowledge that do not depend on divine creation, but do depend on creaturely freedom.
Each limb of the above triad has a strong, though not irresistible, claim on a classical theist's acceptance. As for (1), if God is L-free, as he must be on classical theism, then it is reasonable to maintain that every free agent is L-free. For if 'could have done otherwise' is an essential ingredient in the analysis of 'Agent A freely performs action X,' then it is highly plausible to maintain that this is so whether the agent is God or Socrates. Otherwise, 'free' will mean something different in the two cases. As for (2), some reasons were given earlier for thinking that a theism that understands itself must uphold God's ontological simplicity inasmuch as it is implied by the divine aseity. An example of (3) is Oswald's shooting of Kennedy. The act was freely performed by Oswald, and the proposition that records it is a contingent truth known by God in his omniscience.
But although each of (1)-(3) is plausibly maintained and is typically maintained by theists who uphold the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS), they cannot all be true. Therein resides the problem. Any two limbs imply the negation of the third. Thus: (1) & (3) –> ~(2); (1) & (2) –> ~(3); (2) & (3) –> ~(1).
To illustrate, let us consider how (1) and (3), taken together, entail the negation of (2). Being omniscient, God knows that Oswald freely chose to kill Kennedy. But Oswald's L-freedom precludes us from saying that God's knowledge of this contingent fact depends solely on the divine will. For it also depends on Oswald's L-free authorship of his evil deed, an authorship that God cannot prevent or override once he has created L-free agents. But this is inconsistent with the divine aseity. For to say that God is a se is to say that God is not dependent on anything distinct from himself. But God has the the property of being such that he knows that Oswald freely chose to kill Kennedy, and his having this property depends on something outside of God's control, namely, Oswald's L-free choice. In this way the divine aseity is compromised, and with it the divine simplicity.
It seems, then, that our aporetic triad is an inconsistent triad. The problem it represents can be solved by denying either (1) or (2) or (3). Since (3) cannot be plausibly denied, this leaves (1) and (2). Some will deny the divine simplicity. But an upholder of the divine simplicity has the option of denying (1) and maintaining that, while God is L-free, creaturely agents are free only in a compatibilist sense. If creaturely agents are C-free, but not L-free, then Oswald could not have done otherwise, and it is possible for the upholder of divine simplicity to say that that Oswald's C-free choice is no more a threat to the divine aseity than the fact that God knows the contingent truth that creaturely agents exist. The latter is not a threat to the divine aseity because the existence of creaturely agents derives from God in a way that Oswald's L-free choice does not derive from God.
See Jeffrey E. Brower, Simplicity and Aseity, for this sort of solution. I cannot see that the solution is entirely satisfactory, but it is worth considering.
John Gardner on Fiction and Philosophy
John Gardner, On Writers and Writing, p. 225:
. . . at their best, both fiction and philosophy do the same thing, only fiction does it better — though slower. Philosophy by essence is abstract, a sequence of general argument controlled in its profluence by either logic (in old-fashioned systematic philosophy) or emotional coherence (in the intuitive philosophies of say, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard). We read the argument and it seems to flow along okay, make sense, but what we ask is, "Is this true of my mailman?" . . .
Fiction comes at questions from the other end. It traces or explores some general argument by examining a particular case in which the universal case seems implied; and in place of logic or emotional coherence — the philosopher's stepping stones — fictional argument is controlled by mimesis: we are persuaded that the characters would indeed do exactly what we are told they do and say . . . . If the mimesis convinces us, then the question we ask is opposite to that we ask of philosophical argument; that is, we ask, "Is this true in general?"
The Aporetics of Divine Simplicity
Thomist27 e-mails:
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Thank you first of all for a spectacular blog. I discovered Maverick Philosopher a few years ago and have been reading it regularly ever since. Through your blog, I learned that you wrote the SEP's article on divine simplicity, among similar things; I think, then, that you are qualified to answer my questions. My questions concern divine simplicity and divine knowledge, two nuts that I've lately been making every effort to crack. First, do you think that theism can be salvaged without absolute divine simplicity? I know that there are many theists who don't believe that God is simple, but is such a concept of Deity coherent? I believe a case can be made, pace Alvin Plantinga and other theistic deniers of divine simplicity, that to deny the absolute ontological simplicity of God is to deny theism itself. For what we mean by 'God' is an absolute reality, something metaphysically ultimate, "that than which no greater can be conceived." (Anselm) Now an absolute reality cannot depend for its existence or nature or value upon anything distinct from itself. It must be from itself alone, or a se. Nothing could count as divine, or worthy of worship, or be an object of our ultimate concern, or be maximally great, if it lacked the property of aseity. But the divine aseity, once it is granted, seems straightaway to entail the divine simplicity, as Aquinas argues in ST. For if God is not dependent on anything else for his existence, nature, and value, then God is not a whole of parts, for a whole of parts depends on its parts to be and to be what it is. So if God is a se, then he is not a composite being, but a simple being. This implies that in God there is no real distinction between: existence and essence, form and matter, act and potency, individual and attribute, attribute and attribute. In sum, if God is God, then God is simple. To deny the simplicity of God is to deny the existence of God. It is therefore possible for an atheist to argue: Nothing can be ontologically simple, therefore, God cannot exist. A theist who denies divine simplicity might conceivably be taxed with idolatry inasmuch as he sets up something as God that falls short of the exacting requirements of deity. The divine transcendence would seem to require that God cannot be a being among beings, but must in some sense be Being itself . (Deus est ipsum esse subsistens: God is not an existent but self-subsisting Existence itself.) On the other hand, a theist who affirms divine simplicity can be taxed, and has been taxed, with incoherence. As an aporetician first and foremost, I seek to lay bare the problem in all its complexity under suspension of the natural urge for a quick solution.
This is indeed a problem. On classical theism, God is libertarianly free: although he exists in every metaphysically possible world, he does not create in every such world, and he creates different things in the different worlds in which he does create. Thus the following are accidental properties of God: the property of creating something-or-other, and the property of creating human beings. But surely God cannot be identical to these properties as the simplicity doctrine seems to require. It cannot be inscribed into the very nature of God that he create Socrates given that he freely creates Socrates. Some writers have attempted to solve this problem, but I don't know of a good solution. Well, this too is a problem. If S knows that p, and p is contingent, then S's knowing that p is an accidental (as opposed to essential) property of S. Now if God is omniscient, then he knows every (non-indexical) truth, including every contingent truth. It seems to follow that God has at least as many accidental properties as there are contingent truths. Surely these are not properties with which God could be identical, as the simplicity doctrine seems to require. Now there must be some contingent truths in consequence of the divine freedom; but this is hard to square with the divine simplicity. And if it is in fact the case that God's knowledge is the cause of things, then how are we to understand His knowledge of the free actions of creatures? I know that God is supposed to be the final cause of these actions, as well as their ultimate efficient cause, but the issue is still unclear to me. This is also a problem. The simplicity doctrine implies that God is identical to what he knows. It follows that what he knows cannot vary from world to world. In the actual world A, Oswald shoots Kennedy at time t. If that was a libertarianly free action, then there is a world W in which Oswald does not shoot Kennedy at t. Since God exists in very world, and knows what happens in every world, he knows that in A, Oswald shoots Kennedy at t and in W that Oswald does not shoot Kennedy at t. But this contradicts the simplicity doctrine, according to which what God knows does not vary from world to world. The simplicity doctrine thus appears to collide both with divine and human freedom. I sincerely look forward to your addressing these questions. Thank you in advance for your consideration of these weighty matters. I have addressed them, but not solved them. Solutions have been proffered, but they give rise to problems of their own — something to be pursued in future posts. |
Pure Indexicals Versus Demonstratives
Suppose you like Italian cold cuts and cheeses, but you are not en rapport with the names: prosciutto, mortadella, capicola, salami, provolone, ricotta. So you are reduced to pointing when you belly up to the deli counter: 'I would like a pound of this, finely sliced.'
Your use of 'this' must be accompanied by a gesture, a demonstration; your use of 'I,' however, need not be. There is no need to point to oneself when one utters the first-person singular pronoun. One can, of course, but I don't advise it. (And if you point, point to your chest, not to your groin — though it stands to reason that if the chest or the shirt on one's chest can go proxy for the self, why not the groin or the codpiece?) 'This' and 'that' are demonstratives; 'I,' 'here,' and 'now' are pure indexicals. They are pure in that there is no need for demonstration or ostension. This much I learned from David Kaplan.
But now I notice a difference between the pure indexicals 'I' and 'now.' One can point to oneself — or at least to one's body — when uttering 'I' but one cannot point to a time or an occupant of a time (an event) when one utters 'now.' Something pointable, ostensible, can go proxy for a self, but nothing pointable can go proxy for a time. Time, you are an elusive bitch; would that I could seize you and stop you. (Verweile doch, du bist so schön.) 'Here' appears midway between 'I' and 'now': one can point to a place by pointing to its occupant. 'I am here' he said, with his right index finger pointing to his chest and his left index finger pointing to his feet.