Month: May 2010

Is Hegel Guilty of ‘Epochism’?

Hegel In these politically correct times we hear much of racism, sexism, ageism, speciesism, and even heterosexism. Why not then epochism, the arbitrary denigration of entire historical epochs? Some years back, a television commentator referred to the Islamist beheading of Nicholas Berg as “medieval.” As I remarked to my wife, “That fellow is slamming an entire historical epoch.”

The names of the other epochs are free of pejorative connotation even though horrors occurred in these epochs the equal of any in the medieval period. Why then are the Middle Ages singled out for special treatment? This is no mean chunk of time. It stretches from, say, the birth of Augustine in 354 A.D. , or perhaps from the closing of the Platonic Academy in 529 A. D., to the birth of Descartes in 1596, albeit with plenty of bleed-through on either end: Greek notions reach deep into the Middle Ages, while medieval notions live on in Descartes and beyond.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) counts as an epochist. When he comes to the medieval period in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, he puts on his “seven-league boots” the better to pass over this thousand year period without sullying his fine trousers. (Vol. III, 1) Summing up the “General Standpoint of the Scholastics,” he has this to say: “…this Scholasticism on the whole is a barbarous philosophy of the finite understanding, without real content, which awakens no true interest in us, and to which we cannot return.” “Barren,” and “rubbishy” are other terms with which he describes it. (Vol. III, 94-95)

The politically correct may wish to consider whether the descendants of Hegel should pay reparations to the descendants of Thomas Aquinas, et al.

Top Ten Dumbest Things Said About Arizona’s New Immigration Law

Here.  The mendacity and journalistic malfeasance of liberal quill-drivers has reached an all-time high.

Their wild exaggerations and hysterical allegations will do more to help the new law achieve its objective than its actual enforcement.   Illegals are leaving and we can expect fewer to turn up here.  Why migrate to the land of nAZis when you can head for California?

The Characteristic Attitude of the Pyrrhonist

Benson Mates, The Skeptic Way, Oxford UP, 1996, p. 5: ". . . the characteristic attitude of the Pyrrhonists is one of aporia, of being at a a loss, puzzled, stumped, stymied."  Aporia is not doubt.  Doubt implies understanding, but aporia is a lack of understanding.  The modern skeptic may doubt, but not the ancient skeptic.

Connected with this is a distinction between epoché as the withholding of assent and suspension of judgment. One can withhold assent from an assertion without granting that it makes sense; but if one suspends judgment then one has a clear propositional sense before one's mind which one neither affirms nor denies.  See Mates, p. 32.  A good distinction!  Add it to the list.

So, strictly speaking, aporia is not doubt and epoché is not suspension of judgment.  Close but not the same.

Contingent, Necessary, Impossible: A Note on Nicolai Hartmann

Hartmann Nicolai Hartmann, Moeglichkeit und Wirklichkeit, p. 29:  . . . denn das Zufaellige ist immerhim wirklich, und nur die Notwendigkeit negiert.  Hartmann is saying in effect that everything contingent is actual, and that the contingent and the necessary are polar opposites:  what is contingent is not necessary, and what is not necessary is contingent.

I beg to differ.  First of all, not everything contingent is actual.  My being asleep now and my being awake (= not asleep) now are both possible states of affairs.  The second  is actual, the first  is not.  But both are contingent.  So not everything contingent is actual.  The imagery of possible worlds ought to make this graphic for the modally challenged.  A contingent state of affairs is one that obtains in some but not all possible worlds.  Now my being asleep now obtains in some but not all possible worlds.  Therefore, my being asleep now is contingent though not actual.  So not everything contingent is actual.

Second, it is not the case that x is contingent if and only if x is not necessary.  For there are states of affairs that are not necessary but also not contingent.  My being both awake and not awake now is an impossible state of affairs.  It is neither necessary nor contingent.  Not necessary, because it does not obtain in every possible world.  Not contingent, because it it does not obtain in some (but not all) possible worlds. 

The polar opposite of the contingent is not the necessary but the the noncontingent.  The noncontingent   embraces both the the necessary and the impossible, that which exists/obtains in all worlds, and that which exists/obtains in no world.  Reality, then, is modally tripartite:

The necessary: that which exists/obtains in all possible worlds.  The contingent: that which exists/obtains in some but not all possible worlds.  The impossible: that which exists/obtains in no possible world.

You say you are uncomfortable with the patois of possible worlds?  The distinctions can be sliced without this jargon.  The necessary is that which cannot not be.  The contingent is that which is possible to be and possible not to be. The impossible is that which cannot be.

And that's all she wrote, modally speaking.

Weaver’s Needle From Picket Post Mountain

I didn't make it to the top of Picket Post Mountain this morning as planned. (Near Superior, AZ 25 miles east of where I live.) You could say I wimped out about half way up: it was windy and cold and overcast, with nerve-wracking drop-offs.  Steep I like, precipitous I don't.  I was alone, couldn't raise wifey on my cell phone, and the final pitch which required the use of hand-holds would have been difficult with my walking stick.  We'll leave the peak-bagging for another day.  But I did explore a good stretch of the Arizona trail which runs from the Mexican to the Utah border as a warm-up before tackling the mountain.  

On the way down the mountain, encountered this character who proved to be very interesting.  A fortuitous meeting in a two-fold sense: by chance, and fortunate.  (Interesting that 'fortunate' carries both a descriptive and an evaluative meaning: chancy and good.) I told him I'd take him for a hike in the Superstitions the next time he's in town.

The following shot looks roughly north-northwest.  The prominence smack dab in the middle on the horizon is Weaver's Needle, the central landmark of the Superstition Wilderness.  Superstition Mountain is on the far left and Buzzard's Roost on the far right.

IMG_0765

‘Superb’

'Superb' is still able to convey a hint of the Latin, superbia, pride. A thoughtful writer bears this in mind.  But in a world of thoughtless readers, there is not much call for thoughtful writers.

This reflection occasioned by a sentence from a secondary source on Pascal: "[The extrinsic proofs of Christianity] are humiliating to the superb power of reasoning that would like to judge of everything." 

The Converse Callicles Principle: Weakness Does Not Justify

Might does not make right, but neither does impotence or relative weakness. That weakness does not justify strikes me as an important principle, but I have never seen it articulated. The Left tends to assume the opposite.  They tend to assume that mightlessness makes right.  I'll dub this the Converse Callicles Principle.

The power I have to kill you does not morally justify my killing you. In a slogan: Ability does not imply permissibility.  My ability to kill, rape, pillage & plunder does not confer moral justification on my doing these things.  But if you attack me with deadly force and I reply with deadly force of greater magnitude, your relative weakness does not supply one iota of moral justification for your attack, nor does it subtract one iota of moral justification from my defensive response.  If I am justified in using deadly force against you as aggressor, then the fact that my deadly force is greater than yours does not (a) diminish my justification in employing deadly force, nor does it (b) confer any justification on your aggression.

Suppose a knife-wielding thug commits a home invasion and attacks a man and his family. The man grabs a semi-automatic pistol and manages to plant several rounds in the assailant, killing him. It would surely be absurd to argue that the disparity in lethality of the weapons involved diminishes the right of the pater familias to defend himself and his family.  Weakness does not justify.

The principle that weakness does not justify can be applied to the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict from the summer of 2006 as well as to the Israeli defensive operations against the terrorist entity, Hamas.  The principle ought to be borne in mind when one hears leftists, those knee-jerk supporters of any and every 'underdog,' start spouting off about 'asymmetry of power' and 'disproportionality.'  Impotence and incompetence are not virtues, nor do they confer moral justification or high moral status, any more than they confer the opposite.

The principle that mightlessness makes right seems to be one of the cardinal tenets of the Left.  It is operative in the present furor over the enforcement of reasonable immigration laws in Arizona.  To the south of the USA lies crime-ridden, corrupt, impoverished Mexico.  For millions and millions it is a place to escape from.  The USA, the most successful nation of all time, is the place to escape to.  But how does this disparity in wealth, success, and overall quality of life justify the violation of the reasonable laws and the rule of law that are a good part of the reason for the disparity of wealth, success, and overall quality of life?

Heather Mac Donald on The NYT’s Scurrilous Attack on AZ SB 1070

Here.  Excerpt:

The so-called 287(g) program acts as a “force multiplier,” as the Times points out, adding local resources to immigration law enforcement—just as Arizona’s SB 1070 does. At heart, this force-multiplier effect is what the hysteria over Arizona’s law is all about: SB 1070 ups the chances that an illegal alien will actually be detected and—horror of horrors—deported. The illegal-alien lobby, of which the New York Times is a charter member, does not believe that U.S. immigration laws should be enforced. (The Times’s other contribution today to the prevailing de facto amnesty for illegal aliens was to fail to disclose, in an article about a brutal 2007 schoolyard execution in Newark, that the suspected leader was an illegal alien and member of the predominantly illegal-alien gang Mara Salvatrucha.) Usually unwilling for political reasons to say so explicitly, the lobby comes up with smoke screens—such as the Times’s demagogic charges about SB 1070 as an act of “racial separation”—to divert attention from the underlying issue. Playing the race card is the tactic of those unwilling to make arguments on the merits.

The Arizona law is not about race; it’s not an attack on Latinos or legal immigrants. It’s about one thing and one thing only: making immigration enforcement a reality. It is time for a national debate: Do we or don’t we want to enforce the country’s immigration laws? If the answer is yes, the Arizona law is a necessary and lawful tool for doing so. If the answer is no, we should end the charade of inadequate, half-hearted enforcement, enact an amnesty now, and remove future penalties for immigration violations.

Exactly right.  Race is not the issue.  Either enforce the nation's immigration laws or get rid of them and open the borders.

More on Immigration Law: Arizona House Bill 2162. Response to Reppert

On Friday, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed HB 2162 which modifies and clarifies SB 1070 which was signed into law the week before.  Here is a passage from 1070 which is constantly misrepresented in the liberal press, including the Arizona Republic newspaper:

FOR ANY LAWFUL CONTACT MADE BY A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIAL OR AGENCY OF THIS STATE OR A COUNTY, CITY, TOWN OR OTHER POLITICAL SUBDIVISION OF THIS STATE WHERE REASONABLE SUSPICION EXISTS THAT THE PERSON IS AN ALIEN WHO IS  UNLAWFULLY PRESENT IN THE UNITED STATES, A REASONABLE ATTEMPT SHALL BE MADE,  WHEN PRACTICABLE, TO DETERMINE THE IMMIGRATION STATUS OF THE PERSON. (lines 20-26, p. 1)

The misrepresentors leave out (intentionally?) the bit about 'lawful contact.'  Where the bill has 'lawful contact,' the 1070 fact sheet has 'legitimate contact.'  It amounts to the same: lex, legis, is Latin for 'law.'  Now 'lawful contact' would naturally be interpreted to refer to contact between a law enforcement officer and a person during the course of a traffic stop and similar situations where a law has been broken.  Victor Reppert, in his response to me, makes a good point.  Because 1070 makes it a state crime to be an illegal alien, "it would seem to me that any attempt to determine whether the crime of being here illegally had been committed would constitute a legitimate [lawful] contact. "  Whether or not this is so, the house bill  provides clarification of 'lawful contact' and removes Reppert's worry:


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