Month: September 2010

Cartoonist Molly Norris Driven into Hiding by Muslim Extremism

Story here. 

Among the great religions of the world, where 'great' is to be taken descriptively not normatively, Islam appears uniquely intolerant and violent.  Or are there contemporary examples of Confucians, Taoists, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, or Christians who, basing themselves on their doctrines, publically  issue and carry out credible death threats against those who mock the exemplars of their faiths?  For example, has any Christian, speaking as a Christian, publically  put out a credible murder contract on Andres Serrano for his "Piss-Christ"?  By 'credible,' I mean one that would force its target, if he were rational, to go into  hiding and erase his identity?

UPDATE 9/19.   Commentary by James Taranto here.  Why doesn't Obama speak up for First Amendment rights in this case?

On Budgets

I have never made a budget in my life. Never having made one, I have never had to adhere to one. The budgeter is involved in a negative enterprise: he essays to control and curtail spending. He allocates so much money for this, and so much for that, and strives to stick to his limits. But positive methods are often superior to negative ones. If you want to lose weight, for example, it is better to exercise and burn more calories, while holding your caloric intake constant, than to eat less while holding steady on caloric expenditure. (Aside from the optimal course which is to do both at the same time.) Part of the reason for this is that it is harder to break an old habit than to begin a new one.

Similarly with budgeting. To budget is to approach your personal finances negatively when a positive approach is superior. Instead of setting limits to spending in various categories, specify target savings and investing amounts, and aim high. The Wealthy Barber has a chapter entitled "The Ten Percent Solution." As I recall, the author recommends investing 10% of gross income for long-term growth. That's chickenfeed to my conservative mind. We save and invest far more than this.  The best way to do this, of course, is by automatic payroll deduction. You arrange for your employer to direct deposit some percentage of your income into the account of your choice. You then live on what is left over. 

Why do you need a budget? If you are self-disciplined you will naturally watch your spending, and of course you will never ever use a credit card for its credit feature. You will use it only for its float, record-keeping, rebate, and convenience features. Allow me to brag so as to make a point that is very important for everyone. I have never paid a cent of credit card interest in my life, and in the last several years, each year I have received $300- $400  cash in rebates for the use of a couple of cards which charge me no fee for their use. The credit lines are huge but I go nowhere near them, and the interest rates I could not care less about. Not only that, but the 'float' makes me even more money. Let's say I have the use of $2,000 for six weeks. During that period the goods are in my possession but the money is at my disposal in a cash reserve account earning interest.

Suppose you are a leftie who hates 'corporate America.' What better way to stick it to the credit card companies than by becoming a free-rider?

So I ask again, why do you need a budget? If you are self-disciplined you will naturally watch your spending, and if you are not self-disciplined then you will lack the discipline to adhere to your budget.  Or is this a false alternative?

When I was a graduate student, 'back in the day,' I lived on 2-3 K per annum. And then I got a job which paid for starters the princely sum of 12 K per annum. I said to myself: "Surely, I can save and invest half of that!" But attitude is everthing. Attitude and will and good judgment. For example, if you are inclined to become financially independent, then you would be a fool to marry someone whose idea of Nirvana is a wallet full of charge cards with unlimited credit lines.

The moral side of the economic problem is paramount to a conservative like me. Those who can deny themselves and defer gratification can become financially well-off in a stable political and economic
environment such as we enjoy in these United States. But of course people will not deny themselves and defer gratification. So they must suffer the consequences. The problem is akrasia, weakness of the will. The fundamental problem is not predatory credit card companies, subprime mortgage scammers, and the payday loan sharks. For if you are self-disciplined, cautious, and diligent, they will not be able to get a handle on you.

Apologies to E-Mailers

If you have e-mailed me and haven't received a response, I apologize.  During the last three days I have been revamping my 'work station,' including configuring and getting used to a new computer.  It may be a day or two before I figure out how to access my e-mail account.  There are some old e-mails that it looks as if I will not be able to answer.  I don't have the time or energy to answer everything, and I do have a life away from the computer.

Time was when I couldn't understand how people could fail to respond to e-mail.  "It's so easy; just click on reply and type something.  The least the guy could do is acknowledge receipt." Now I understand, having become what I criticized – there is just too much of it and too many other self- and other-imposed tasks to contend with. 

If the Universe Can Arise out of Nothing, then so can Mind

Over breakfast yesterday morning, Peter Lupu uncorked a penetrating observation.  The gist of it I took to be as follows.  If a naturalist maintains that the physical universe can arise out of nothing without divine or other supernatural agency, then the naturalist cannot rule out the possibility that other things so arise, minds for example — a result that appears curiously inconsistent with both the spirit and the letter of naturalism.  Here is how I would spell out the Lupine thought.

The central thrust of naturalism as an ontological thesis is that the whole of reality is exhausted by the space-time system and what it contains.  (To catalog what exactly it contains is a job for the physicist.)  But this bald thesis can be weakened in ways consistent with the spirit of naturalism.  The weakening makes naturalism more defensible.  And so I will irenically assume that it is consistent with the spirit of a latitudinarian naturalism to admit abstracta of various sorts such as Fregean propositions and mathmatical sets.  We may also irenically allow the naturalist various emergent/supervenient properties so long as it is understood that emergence/supervenience presupposes an emergence/supervenience base, and that this base is material in nature.  I will even go so far as to allow the naturalist emergent/supervenient substances such as individual minds.  But again, if this is to count as naturalism, then (i) their arisal must be from matter, and (ii) they cannot, after arising, exist in complete independence of matter.

What every naturalism rules out, including the latitudinarian version just sketched, is the existence of God, classically conceived, or any sort of Absolute Mind, as well as the existence of unembodied and disembodied finite minds. 

The naturalist, then, takes as ontologically basic the physical universe, the system of space-time-matter, and denies the existence of non-emergent/supervenient concreta distinct from this system.  Well now, what explains the existence of the physical universe, especially if it is only finitely old?  One answer, and perhaps the only answer available to the naturalist, is that it came into existence ex nihilo without cause, and thus without divine cause.  Hence

1. The physical universe came into existence from nothing without cause.

Applying Existential Generalization and the modal rule ab esse ad posse we get

2. It is possible that something come into existence  from nothing without cause.

If so, how can the naturalist exclude the possibility of minds coming into existence but not emerging from a material base?  If he thinks it possible that the universe came into existence ex nihilo, then he must allow that it is possible that divine and finite minds also have come into existence ex nihilo.  But this is a possibility he cannot countenance given his commitment to saying that everything that exists is either physical or determined by the physical.

This seems to put the naturalist in an embarrassing position.  If the universe is finitely old, then it came into existence.  You could say it 'emerged.'  But on naturalism, there cannot be emergence except from a material base.  So either the universe did not emerge or it did, in which case (2) is true and the principle that everything either is or is determined by the physical is violated.

“We’re Just a Bit of Pollution,” Cosmologist Says

(People have been asking me to comment on Stephen Hawking's new book.  As a sort of warm-up, I have decided to repost the following entry from the old site.)

I am all for natural science and I have studied my fair share of it. I attended a demanding technical high school where I studied electronics and I was an electrical engineering major in college with all the mathematics and science that that entails. But I strongly oppose scientism and the pseudo-scientific blather that too many contemporary physicists engage in. Case in point: Lawrence M Krauss's recent comment quoted in the pages of the New York Times that “We’re just a bit of pollution,” . . . “If you got rid of us, and all the stars and all the galaxies and all the planets and all the aliens and everybody, then the universe would be largely the same. We’re completely irrelevant.”

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Beethoven, Billy Bob and Peggy Lee

The Man Who Wasn't There is one of my favorite movies, and the best of Ludwig van Beethoven is as good as classical music gets.  So enjoy the First Movement of the Moonlight Sonata to the masterful cinematography of the Coen Brothers.

Here is the final scene of the movie.  Ed Crane's last words:

I don't know where I'm being taken.  I don't know what I'll find beyond the earth and sky.  But I am not afraid to go.  Maybe the things I don't understand will be clearer there, like when a fog blows away.  Maybe Doris will be there. And maybe there I can tell her all those things they don't have words for here.

That is the way I see death, as an adventure into a dimension in which we might come to understand what we cannot understand here, a movement from night and fog into the clear light of day.  It is a strange idea, I admit, the idea that only by dying can one come into possession of essential knowledge.  But no more strange  than the idea that  death leaves the apparent absurdity of our existence unredeemed, a sentiment expressed in Peggy Lee's 1970 Is That All There is?

Where Were You on 9/11/01?

I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I first of heard about the acts of 9/11 Islamoterrorism.  It was a cool and bright Arizona morning, dry and delightful as only the desert can be.  I had just returned from a long hard bike ride.  Preliminary to some after-ride calisthenics I switched on the TV only to see  one of the planes enter one of the Trade Towers.

I suspected correctly what was up and I remarked to my wife, "Well, two good things will come of this: Gary Condit will be out of the news forever, and finally something will be done about the porosity of the southern border."  I turned out to be right on one count.  Gary Condit, who had come to national prominence because of his adulterous affair with Chandra Levy, and who had dominated the news that summer of aught-one, dropped out of sight.  And good riddance.

But I was sadly mistaken on the second count.  So here we are, nine years later, with such abominations Obaminations as Department of Justice lawsuits against the State of Arizona for attempting to do what the Feds ought to do yet refuse to do while Mexican drug cartels control some portions of the state.

For detailed analysis, see my Arizona category.

Legality and Propriety: What One Has a Right to Do is Not Always Right to Do

What do the following have in common:  Flag burning, Koran burning, suspending a crucifix in urine and calling it art, building a mosque near Ground Zero, calling a black person 'nigger,' affixing a 'Fuck Your Honor Student' bumpersticker on your car?

They are all offensive, but they are all legal.

Flag burning.  If you steal my flag and burn it, then you violate my property rights and do something illegal.  If you burn a public flag, then that is illegal on grounds of vandalism.  If you burn a flag you own but in a way that causes a public disturbance or endangers members of the public, then  those acts fall under other existing statutes.  But if you buy an American flag and burn it on your property, then you are within your legal rights.  You are in the vast majority of cases a contemptible punk if you do so, and I have a right to my opinion on this score.  But you are within the law.  That is why calls for a flag-burning (or rather anti-flag-burning) amendment to the U. S. Constitution are pointless and just so much political grandstanding. Such appeals are just another way politicians evade the job of making tough decisions about matters of moment.

Ought flag burning come under the rubric of protected speech?  Logically prior question: Is it speech at all?  What if I make some such rude gesture in your face as 'giving you the finger.'  Is that speech?  If it is, I would like to know what proposition it expresses.  'Fuck you!' does not express a proposition.  Likewise for the corresponding gesture with the middle finger.  And if some punk burns a flag, I would like to know what proposition the punk is expressing.  The Founders were interested in protecting reasoned dissent, but the typical act of flag burning by the typical leftist punk does not rise to that level.  Without going any further into this issue, let me just express my skepticism at arguments that try to subsume gestures and physical actions under speech.  But the main point is that we don't need a flag-burning amendment and we ought not have a general legal prohibition on the burning or other desecration of privately owned national symbols if the burning or other desecration is done in a way that does not violate existing laws.

Koran burning.  If it is legal to burn the flag in certain circumstances, then it it legal to burn the Koran or any book in similar circumstances.  If you own a copy of the book, you can do anything you want with it.  You can use it for toilet paper.  So if the Gainesville yahoo wants to organize a Koran burning on private property with privately-owned copies of the Muslim holy book, that must be tolerated no matter how stupid and offensive it is.

But there must be no double standards.  If you condemn Koran burning, then you ought to condemn crucifix desecration and flag burning.  And if you tolerate the latter, then you ought to tolerate the former.

The media both Left and Right are piling on Terry Jones, the Gainesville pastor, while failing to see that his brand of red-necked push-back is exactly what one should expect in the face of Islamist provocation.

And there must be no kow-towing to Muslim hypersensitivity. 

Continue reading “Legality and Propriety: What One Has a Right to Do is Not Always Right to Do”

Four-Dimensionalism to the Rescue?

Let us return to that impressive product of porcine ingenuity, Brick House.  Brick House, whose completion by the Wise Pig occurred on Friday, is composed entirely of the 10,000 Tuesday Bricks.  I grant that there is a sum, call it 'Brick Sum,' that is the classical mereological sum of the Tuesday Bricks.  Brick Sum is 'generated' — if you care to put it that way — by Unrestricted Composition, the classical axiom which states that "Whenever there are some things, then there exists a fusion [sum] of those things." (D. Lewis, Parts of Classes, p. 74)  I also grant that Brick Sum is unique by Uniqueness of Composition according to which "It never happens that the same things have two different fusions [sums]." (Ibid.)  But I deny Lewis' Composition as Identity.  Accordingly, Brick Sum cannot be identical to the Tuesday Bricks.   After all, it is one while they are many.

Now the question I am debating with commenter John is whether Brick House is identical to Brick Sum.  This ought not be confused with the question whether Brick House is identical to the Tuesday Bricks.  This second question has an easy negative answer inasmuch as the former is one while the latter are many.  Clearly, one thing cannot be many things.

The question, then, is whether Brick House is identical to Brick Sum.  Here is a reason to think that they are not identical.  Brick Sum exists regardless of the arrangement of its parts: they can be scattered throughout the land; they can be piled up in one place; they can be moving away from each other; they can be arranged to form a wall, or a corral, or a house, or whatever.  All of this without prejudice to the existence and the identity of Brick Sum.  Now suppose Hezbollah Wolf, a 'porcicide' bomber, enters Brick House and blows it and himself up at time t on Friday evening. At time t* later than t, Brick Sum still exists while Brick House does not.  This shows that they cannot be identical; for if they were identical, then the destruction of Brick House would be the destruction of Brick Sum. 

This argument, however, rests on an assumption, namely, that Brick Sum exists both at t and at t*.   This won't be true if Four Dimensionalism is true.  If bricks and houses are occurrents rather than continuants, if they are composed of temporal parts, then we cannot say, strictly and philosophically, that Brick Sum at t still exists at t*.  And if we cannot say this, then the above argument fails.

But all is not lost since there remains a modal consideration.  Brick House and Brick Sum both exist at time t in the actual world.  But there are plenty of possible worlds in which, at t, the latter exists but not the former.  Thus it might have been the case at t that the bricks were arranged corral-wise rather than house-wise.  So Brick Sum has a property that Brick House lacks, namely, the modal property of being such that its parts could have been arranged in non-house-wise fashion.  Therefore, by the Indiscernibility of Identicals, Brick House is not identical to Brick Sum.

So even if the historical discernibility argument fails on Four Dimensionalism, the modal discernibility argument seems to work even assuming Four Dimensionalism.

Please note that my thesis is not that Brick House is a sum that violates Uniqueness of Composition, but that Brick House is not a classical mereological sum.    If Brick House were a sum, then it would be Brick Sum.  But I have just argued that it cannot be Brick Sum.  So it cannot identified with any classical sum.  It is a whole of parts all right, but an unmereological whole.  What does that mean?  It means that it is a whole that cannot be adequately understood using only the resources of classical mereology.

 

Van Inwagen on Arbitrary Undetached Parts

In order to get clear about Dion-Theon and related identity puzzles we need to get clear about the Doctrine of Arbitrary Undetached Parts (DAUP) and see what bearing it has on the puzzles. Peter van Inwagen provides the following statement of DAUP:

For every material object M, if R is the region of space occupied by M at time t, and if sub-R is any occupiable sub-region of R whatever, there exists a material object that occupies the region sub-R at t. ("The Doctrine of Arbitrary Undetached Parts" in Ontology, Identity, and Modality, CUP, 2001, 75.) 

Suppose I am smoking a cigar. DAUP implies that the middle two-thirds of the cigar is just as much a concrete material object as the whole cigar. This middle two-thirds is an undetached part of the cigar, but also an arbitrary undetached part since I could have arbitrarily selected uncountably many other lengths such as the middle three-fourths. Applied to Tibbles the cat, DAUP implies that Tibbles-minus-one-hair is just as full-fledged a material object as Tibbles. Van Inwagen maintains that DAUP is false.

I will reconstruct van Inwagen's argument for the falsity of DAUP as clearly as I can. Consider Descartes and his left leg L. To keep it simple, we make the unCartesian assumption that Descartes is just a live body. DAUP implies that L is a material object as much as Descartes himself. DAUP also implies that there is a material object we can call D-minus. This is Descartes-minus-L. It is obvious that Descartes and D-minus are not the same. (For one thing, they are differently shaped. For another, they are 'differently abled' in PC jargon.) At time t, D-minus and L are undetached nonoverlapping proper parts of Descartes, and both are just as much full-fledged material objects as Descartes himself is.

Now suppose a little later, at t*, L becomes detached from D-minus. In plain English, Descartes at t* loses his leg. (To avoid certain complications, we also assume that the leg is not only removed but also annihilated.) Does D-minus still exist after t*?  Van Inwagen thinks it is obvious that D-minus does exist after the operation at t*. DAUP implies that the undetached parts of material objects are themselves material objects. So D-minus prior to t* is a material object. Its becoming detached from L does not affect D-minus or its parts, and if the separation of L from D-minus were to cause D-minus to cease to exist, then, van Inwagen claims, D-minus could not properly be called a material object. Descartes himself also exists after the operation at t*. Surely one can survive the loss of a leg. So after t* both D-minus and Descartes exist. But if they both exist, then they are identical. For otherwise there would be two material objects having exactly the same size, shape, position, mass, velocity, etc., and that is impossible.

In sum, at time t, D-minus and Descartes are not identical, while at the later time t* they are identical. The result is the following inconsistent tetrad:

D-minus before t* = D-minus after t*

D-minus after t* = Descartes after t*

Descartes after t* = Descartes before t*

It is not the case that  D-minus before t* = Descartes before t*

The first three propositions entail the negation of the fourth. From this contradiction van Inwagen infers that there never was any such thing as D-minus. If so, then DAUP is false. But as van Inwagen realizes, his refutation of DAUP has a counterintuitive consequence, namely, that L does not exist either: there never was any such thing as Descartes' left leg. For it seems obvious that D-minus and L stand or fall together, to repeat van Inwagen's pun.

That is, D-minus exists if and only if L exists, and D-minus does not exist if and only if L does not exist. D-minus is an arbitrary undetached proper part of Descartes if and only if L is an arbitrary undetached proper part of Descartes. At this point, I think it becomes clear that van Inwagen's solution to the Dion/Theon or Descartes/D-minus puzzle is not compelling. He solves the puzzle by denying that there was ever any such material object as D-minus. But if there was no D-minus, then there was never any such material object as Descartes' left leg. It is obvious, however, that there was such a material object as Descartes' left leg L. So how could it be maintained that there was no such object as Descartes-minus? Van Inwagen makes it clear (p. 82, n. 12) that he does not deny that there are undetached parts. What I take him to be denying is that, for any P and O, where P is an undetached part of material object O, there is a complementary proper part of O, O-minus-P. So perhaps van Inwagen can say that L is a non-arbitrary undetached part of Descartes and that this is consistent with there being no D-minus. If so, he would have to reject the following supplementation principle of mereology which seems intuitively sound:

For any x, y, z, if x is a proper part of y, then there exists a z such that z is a part of y and z does not overlap x , where x overlaps y =df there exists a z such that z is a part of x and z is a part of y.

What the above supplementation principle says is that you cannot have a whole with only one proper part. Every whole having a proper part has a second proper part that supplements or complements the first so as to constitute a whole. Now Descartes' leg is a proper part of Descartes. So the existence of D-minus falls out of the supplementation principle.

It seems, then, that van Inwagen's rejection of DAUP  issues in a dilemma.  If there is no such object as Descartes minus his left leg, then there is no such object as Descartes' left leg, which is highly counterintuitive, to put it mildly.  But if van Inwagen holds onto the left leg, then it seems his must reject the seemingly obvious supplementation principle lately mentioned.

My interim conclusion is that van Inwagen's solution to the Descartes/D-minus puzzle by rejection of DAUP is not compelling.

Can a Mereological Sum Change its Parts?

This post is an attempt to understand and evaluate Peter van Inwagen's "Can Mereological Sums Change Their Parts," J. Phil. (December 2006), 614-630.  A preprint is available online here.

The Wise Pig and the Brick House: My Take

On Tuesday the Wise Pig  takes delivery of 10,000 bricks.  On the following Friday he completes construction of a house made of exactly these bricks and nothing else.  Call the bricks in question the 'Tuesday bricks.'  I would 'assay' the situation as follows.  On Tuesday there are some unassembled bricks laying about the building site.  By Unrestricted Composition, these bricks compose a classical mereological sum.  Call this sum 'Brick Sum.'  (To save keystrokes I will write 'sum' for 'classical mereological sum.' ) By Uniqueness of Composition, there is exactly one sum that the Tuesday bricks compose.  On Friday, both the Tuesday bricks and their (unique) sum exist.  But as I see it, the Brick House is identical neither to the Tuesday bricks nor to their sum.  Thus I deny that the Brick House is identical to the sum of the things that compose it. I give two arguments for this non-identity.

Nonmodal 'Historical' Argument:  Brick Sum has a property that Brick House does not have, namely the property of existing on Tuesday.  Therefore, by the Indiscernibility of Identicals, Brick Sum is not identical to Brick House.

Modal Argument:  Suppose that the actual world is such that Brick Sum and Brick House always existed, exist now, and always will exist:  every time t is such that both exist at t.  This does not alter the plain fact that the house depends for its existence on the bricks, while the bricks do not depend for their existence on the house.  Thus there are possible worlds in which Brick Sum exists but Brick House does not.  (Note that Brick Sum exists 'automatically' given the existence of the bricks.) These worlds are simply the worlds in which the bricks exist but in an unassembled state.  So Brick Sum has a property that Brick House does not have, namely, the modal property of being possibly such as to exist without composing a house.  Therefore, by the Indiscernibility of Identicals, Brick Sum is not identical to Brick House.

In sum (pardon the pun!), The Brick House is not a mereological sum.  (If it were, it would have existed on Tuesday as a load of bricks, which is absurd.)  This is not to say that there is no sum 'corresponding' to the Brick House: there is.  It is just that this sum — Brick Sum — is not identical to Brick House.  So what I am saying implies no rejection of Unrestricted Composition.  The point is rather that a material artifact such as a house cannot be identified with the mereological sum of the things it is made of.  This is because sums abstract or prescind from the mutual relations of parts in virtue of which parts form what we might call  'integral wholes' as opposed to a mere mereological sums.  Unassembled bricks do not a brick house make: you have to assemble them properly.  And the assembly, however you want to assay it, is an added ontological ingredient that escapes consideration by a general purely formal part-whole theory such as classical mereology.

I assume with van Inwagen that Brick House can lose a brick (or gain a brick)  without prejudice to its identity.  But, contra van Inwagen, I do not take this to imply that mereological sums can gain or lose parts.  And this for the simple reason that Brick House and things like it are not identical to sums of the things that compose them.  I would say, pace van Inwagen, that mereological sums can no more gain or lose parts than (mathematical) sets can gain or lose elements.

The Wise Pig and the Brick House: Van Inwagen's Take

I agree with van Inwagen that "The Tuesday bricks are all parts of the Brick House and every part of the Brick House overlaps at least one of the Tuesday bricks." (616-617)  But he takes this obvious truth to imply that " . . . 'a merelogical sum' is the obvious thing to call something of which the Tuesday Bricks are all parts and each of whose parts overlaps at least one of the Tuesday Bricks." (617)  Well, he can call it that but only if he uses 'mereological sum' in a way different that the way it is used in classical mereology.

Now if we acquiesce in van Inwagen's usage, and we grant that things like houses can change their parts, then it follows that mereological sums can change their parts.  But why should we acquiesce in van Inwagen's usage of 'mereological sum'?

Is Everything a Mereological Sum?

As I use 'mereological sum,' not everything is such a sum.  The Brick House is not a sum.  It is no more a sum than it is a set.  There are sums and there are sets, but not everything is a sum just as not everything is a set.  There is a set consisting of the Tuesday Bricks, and there is a singleton set of the Brick House.  But neither of these sets is identical to the Brick House.  Neither of them has anything to fear from the pulmonary exertions of the Big Bad Wolf — not because they are so strong, but because they are abstract objects removed from the flux and shove of the causal order.  Sums of concreta, unlike sets of concreta,  are themselves concrete — but the Brick House is not a sum.  Van Inwagen disagrees.  For him, "Everything is a mereological sum." (618)

His argument for this surprising claim is roughly as follows. PvI's presentation is tedious and technical but I think I will not be misrepresenting him if I sum up the gist of it as follows:

1. Everything, whether simple or composite, has parts.  (This is a consequence of the following definition: x is a part of y =df x is a proper part of y or x = y.  Because everything is self-identical, everything has itself as a part, an improper part to be sure, but a part nonetheless. Therefore:

2. Everything is a mereological sum of its parts.  Therefore:

3. Everything is a mereological sum. Therefore:

4. ". . . mereological sums are not a special sort of object." (622)  In this respect they are unlike sets."'Mereological sum' is not a useful stand-alone general term." (622) 'Set' is.

What's At Issue Here?

I confess to not being clear about what exactly is at issue here.  One could of course use 'mereological sum' in the way that van Inwagen proposes, a way that implies that everything is a mereological sum, and that implies that there is no conceptual confusion in the notion of a mereological sum changing its parts.   But why adopt this usage?  How does it help us in the understanding of material composition?

What am I missing?

 

A Farewell to the Philosophy of Religion? Why not a Farewell to Philosophy?

Steven Nemes  informs me that Keith Parsons is giving up teaching and writing in the philosophy of religion.  His reasons are stated in his post Goodbye to All That.  The following appears to be his chief reason:

I have to confess that I now regard “the case for theism” as a fraud and I can no longer take it seriously enough to present it to a class as a respectable philosophical position—no more than I could present intelligent design as a legitimate biological theory. BTW, in saying that I now consider the case for theism to be a fraud, I do not mean to charge that the people making that case are frauds . . . .  I just cannot take their arguments seriously any more, and if you cannot take something seriously, you should not try to devote serious academic attention to it.

John Beversluis is also quitting:

Keith [Parsons] and I have emailed about getting out of the philosophy of religion. I've made the same decision. I'm through wasting my time trying to convince people who don't want to be convinced of the irrationality of their beliefs. And I have had more than enough verbal abuse from the Richard Purtills, the Peter Kreefts, and the Thomas Talbotts. We are all getting older and I, for my part, would much rather read books I want to read (or reread) and listen to great music that I either don't know or want to know better. Not to mention, spending more time with my wife instead of constantly yielding to the lure of the computer to work on yet another project that will convince few, antagonize some, and be ignored by most. Interestingly, Keith and I came to this conclusion more or less simultaneously but independently.

Steven Nemes comments in his e-mail to me:

I don't imagine you think the case for theism is so bad . . . . Any arguments in particular you think are promising? Any anti-theistic arguments you think are particularly good, too? (It was Parsons who said that the case for atheism/naturalism has been presented about as well as it ever can be by philosophers like Michael Martin, Schellenberg, Oppy, Gale, et al.)

Or perhaps you don't think the issues are so clear and obvious one way or the other in the philosophy of religion? In fact, is such dismissive hand-waving like Parsons' and Beversluis' ever acceptable in philosophy? Are there any issues that are settled?

Steven has once again peppered me with some pertinent and challenging questions.  Here is a quick response.

Of course, I don't consider the case for theism to be a "fraud," to use Parson's word. I also don't understand how the case could be called a fraud if the people who make it are not frauds.  But let's not enter into an analysis of the concept fraud.  We may charitably chalk up Parsons' use of 'fraud' to rhetorical overkill, which is certainly not a censurable offense in the blogosphere.  And when Parsons tells us that he cannot take the theistic arguments seriously any more, he is presumably not making a merely autobiographical remark.  He is not merely informing us about his present disgusted state of mind, although he is doing that.  He is asserting  that the case for theism is not intellectually respectable, while the case for atheism and naturalism (which Parsons in his post brackets together) are intellectually respectable.  (It is worth noting that while nauralism entails atheism, atheism does not entail naturalism: McTaggart was an atheist but not a naturalist.  But this nuance needn't concern us at present.)

Parsons' metaphilosophical assertion does not impress me.  I make a different assertion:  There are intellectually respectable cases to be made both for theism/anti-naturalism and for atheism/naturalism.  I don't think there are any 'knock-down' arguments on either side.  There are arguments for the existence of God, but no proofs of the existence of God.  And there are arguments for  the nonexistence of God, but no proofs of the nonexistence of God.  But of course it depends on what is meant by 'proof.'

I suggest that a proof is a deductive argument, free of informal fallacy, valid in point of logical form, all of the premises of which are objectively self-evident. I will illustrate what I mean by 'objectively self-evident' with an anecdote.   In a discussion with a Thomist a while back  I mentioned that the first premise of his reconstruction of Aquinas' argument from motion (the First of the Five Ways) was not (objectively) self-evident, and that therefore the First Way did not amount to a proof.  The premise in the reconstruction was to the effect that it is evident to the senses that the reduction of potency to act  is a real feature of the world.

I granted to my interlocutor  that what Thomas calls motion, i.e., change, is evident to the senses as a real feature of the world.  But I pointed out that it is not evident to the senses that the actualization of potency is a real feature of the world.  That change is the reduction of potency to act is a theoretical claim that goes beyond what is given to sense perception.  For this reason, the first premise of the reconstruction of the First Way, though plausible and indeed reasonable, is not objectively self-evident.  One can of course give many logically correct arguments for the Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, but we can ask with respect to the premises of these arguments whether they are objectively self-evident.  If they are not, then they do not amount to proofs given my stringent definition of 'proof.'

It is equally true, however, that one cannot prove the nonexistence of God, from evil say. 

But it is no different outside the philosophy of religion.  God and the soul are meta-physical in the sense of supersensible.  But there is nothing supersensible about the bust of Beethoven sitting atop my CD player.  It is a material object, a middle-sized artifact, open to unaided perception.  But such a humble object inspires interminable and seemingly intractable debate among the most brilliant philosophers.  I am currently exploring some of these issues in other threads, and so I won't go into details here.  But consider Peter van Inwagen's denial of the existence of artifacts (which is part of a broader denial of the existence of all nonliving composite objects).  You could say, very loosely, that van Inwagen is an 'atheist' about artifacts. Other philosophers, equally brilliant and well-informed, deny his denial. 

Now it would take an excess of chutzpah to label van Inwagen's carefully argued denial of artifacts as intellectually unrespectable.  I suggest that it takes an equal excess of chutzpah to label the case for theism intellectually unrespectable.

Steven asked me whether the dismissive attitude of Parsons and Beversluis is acceptable.  I would say no.  It is no more acceptable in the philosophy of religion than it is in other branches of philosophy where there are equally genuine but equally difficult and interminably discussable problems.

Let me end with this question:  If one's reason for abandoning the philosophy of religion is that one cannot convince those on the other side — "I'm through wasting my time trying to convince people who don't want to be convinced of the irrationality of their beliefs." (Beversluis) — then is this not also a reason for abandoning philosophy tout court?  After all, the brilliant van Inwagen did not convince the brilliant David Lewis that the latter was wrong about Composition as Identity — and this is a very well-defined and mundane and ideology-free question.