Joe Biden is a contemptible clown — did you watch the Veep debates? — but in this video he says something that is approximately true. In the wake of natural disaster or social unrest you are better off with a shotgun than with a semi-automatic rifle such as an AR-15, advises Joe. Well, when it comes to home defense, the weapon of choice is the 12-gauge shotgun loaded with 00 (double-aught) buckshot. This is what ex-cops and others in the know tell me. And as the good old boy proprietor of a gun shop once explained to me, "Buckshot has the power to separate the soul from the body." If that isn't a reason to convince a metaphysician, what would be?
Uncle Joe was making sense for a change: at close range in the heat of battle it is easier to take out a target with a shotgun than with a rifle. And then there is the issue of penetration. The .223 round of the AR-15 could penetrate your wooden door and end up in your neighbor's dog — or worse. You don't want that. Primum non nocere. The nasty buckshot won't travel as far. Or so I have been told. But you might want to look into the 'penetration' debate for yourself.
Uncle Joe fails to mention, however, that semi-auto rifles are better than shotguns when it comes to defending life, liberty, and property in a situation like that faced by the Korean shopkeepers during the L. A. riots.
So get yourself one of each. While supplies last and it's still legal. (It goes without saying that no one should acquire one of these weapons, load it, and stick it under the bed. You must get some instruction, practice regularly, and inform yourself about the law.)
What follows is the whole of Chapter 16 of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange's Reality: A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought. My critical comments are in blue.
Chapter 16: The Divine Persons
Person in general is a being which has intelligence and freedom. Its classic definition was given by Boethius: Person is an individual subject with an intellectual nature. [548] Hence person, generally, is a hypostasis or a suppositum, and, specifically, a substance endowed with intelligence. [549] Further, since person signifies substance in its most perfect form, it can be found in God, if it be stripped of the imperfect mode which it has in created persons. Thus made perfect, it can be used analogically of God, analogically, but still in its proper sense, in a mode that is transcendent and pre-eminent. Further, since revelation gives us two personal names, that is, the Father and the Son, the name of the third person, of the Holy Spirit, must also be a personal name. Besides, the New Testament, in many texts, represents the Holy Spirit as a person. [550].
Now, since there are three persons in God, they can be distinct one from the other only by the three relations which are mutually opposed (paternity, and filiation, and passive spiration): because, as has been said, all else in God is identical.
Comment: The persons are distinct, numerically distinct. And they are really distinct: distinct in reality, not merely relative to our thought. What makes the persons distinct given that each is God and there is only one God? What is the principium individuationis within the Godhead? The relations between them. Thus the Father is distinct from the Son because the Father stands in the paternity relation to the Son but not vice versa. It is difficult to see, however, how a relation between x and y can constitute the numerical difference between x and y. I should think that the numerical difference between x and y is a logically prior condition of their standing in any relation. So I am already having difficulty following the Thomist account.
These real relations, since they are subsistent (not accidental): and are, on the other hand, incommunicable (being opposed): can constitute the divine persons. In these subsistent relations we find the two characteristics of person: substantiality and incommunicability.
Comment: If the relations were accidental, i.e., accidents, then they would be dependent in their being on something else, and the objection I just made would hold. So they are said to be subsistent, i.e., substances in their own right. And since they are 'incommunicable,' they have two characteristics of persons. The problem, however, is to understand how the relata of the relations (of paternity, filiality, etc.) can be (identical to) the relations. Paternity and filiality are different relations. So if the Father = paternity, and the Son = filiality, then it is easy to see how the Father and the Son are distinct. But what is difficult if not impossible to understand is how the Father could be identical to paternity and the Son to filiality.
A divine person, then, according to St. Thomas and his school, is a divine relation as subsistent. [551] Elsewhere the saint gives the following definition: [552] A divine person is nothing else than a relationally distinct reality, subsistent in the divine essence.
These definitions explain why there are in God, speaking properly, not metaphorically, three persons, three intellectual and free subjects, though these three have the same identical nature, though they understand by one and the same intellective act, though they love one another by one and the same essential act, and though they freely love creatures by one and the same free act of love.
Comment: So the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father by the same act of loving. But acts are individuated by their objects. So loving the Father is a different act than loving the Son. It cannot be the same act on pain of incoherence. But Aquinas says that they love by the same act. He has to say this because he cannot admit that there are three separate unities of consciousness in the Godhead. For this would entail that there are three Gods.
Hence, while we say: The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God, we also say: The Father is not the Son, and the Holy Spirit is not the Father, and the Holy Spirit is not the Son. In this sentence the verb "is" expresses real identity between persons and nature, and the negation "is not" expresses the real distinction of the persons from each other.
Comment: This is contradictory as I have explained many times before, assuming that 'nature' refers to an individual existing nature. If the 'is' is taken to be the 'is' of identity, logical inconsistency is unavoidable. If F = G and S = G. then F = S, by the symmetry and transitivity of identity. You cannot consistently with that go on to say that it is not the case that F = S.
These three opposed relations, then, paternity, filiation, and passive spiration, belong to related and incommunicable personalities. Thus there cannot be in God many Fathers, but one only. Paternity makes the divine nature incommunicable as Father, though that divine nature can still be communicated to two other persons. To illustrate. When you are constructing a triangle, the first angle, as first, renders the entire surface incommunicable, though that same surface will still be communicated to the other two angles; and the first angle will communicate that surface to them without communicating itself, while none of the three is opposed to the surface which they have in common.
Comment: Garrigou-Lagrange is fudging now. He says that the opposed relations belong to related personalities. This is not what he said before. Before he said that the persons just are subsistent relations. Well, which is it? Are the relations identical to persons, or do the relations belong to persons? This fudge is to be expected since the doctrine attempts to articulate discursively a reality that lies beyond the discursive intellect, a reality that is mystical.
Here appears the profundity of Cajetan's [553] remark: the divine reality, as it is in itself, is not something purely absolute (signified by the word "nature") nor something purely relative (signified by the name "person"): but something transcending both, something which contains formally and eminently [554] that which corresponds to the concepts of absolute and relative, of absolute nature and relative person. Further, the distinction between nature and the persons is not a real distinction, but a mental distinction (virtual and minor): whereas the distinction between the persons is real, by reason of opposition. On this last point theologians generally agree with Thomists.
Comment: Cajetan's remark is profound. The divine reality must be absolute, not relative. But it must also in some sense be personal since the reality of persons surpasses that of every other category of entity. But persons are relative to each other. So the divine reality must in some sense be multi-personal and yet absolute. As I see it, theology issues in 'necessary makeshifts' that try to articulate in coherent discursive terms a trans-discursive reality. So it is no surprise that every doctrine of the Trinity issues in problems, questions, and outright inconsistencies. The doctrines point beyond themselves to a reality that cannot be grasped in discursive terms.
This is why doctrinal fights are absurd. Some doctrines are better than others, but in the end all are untenable. The divine reality is not a doctrine!
We who are obscure ought to be grateful for it. It is wonderful to be able to walk down the street andbe taken, and left, for an average schlep. A little recognition from a few high-quality individuals is all one needs. Fame can be a curse. The unhinged Mark David Chapman, animated by Holden Caulfield's animus against phoniness, decided that John Lennon was a phony, and so had to be shot.
The value of fame may also be inferred from the moral and intellectual quality of those who confer it.
The mad pursuit of empty celebrity by so many in our society shows their and its spiritual vacuity.
UPDATE: By this metric, however, I count as famous. Well, we live in an age of low standards.
Thanks to Bill Clinton, it is now widely appreciated that much rides on what the meaning of ‘is’ is. Time was, when only philosophers were aware of this. The fact that Clinton made the point to save his hide rather than to advance philosophical logic is irrelevant. Credit where credit is due. But enough joking around.
In our recent Trinitarian explorations we have thus far discussed the ‘is’ of identity and the ‘is’ of predication. We saw that ‘The Father is God’ could be construed as
1. The Father is identical to God
or as
2. The Father is divine.
Both construals left us with logical trouble. If each of the Persons is identical to God, and there is exactly one God, then (given the transitivity and symmetry of identity) there is exactly one Person. On the other hand, if each of the Persons is divine, where ‘is’ is the 'is' of predication, then there are three Gods and tri-theism is the upshot. Either way, we end up contradicting a central Trinitarian tenet.
We explored the mereological way out and we found it wanting, or at least I found it wanting. God is not a whole whose proper parts are the Persons.
But there is also the ‘is’ of composition as when we say, ‘This countertop is marble,’ or in my house, ‘This countertop is faux marble.’ ‘Is’ here is elliptical for ‘is composed of.’ Compare: ‘That jacket is leather,’ and ‘This beverage is whisky.’ To say that a jacket is leather is not to say that it is identical to leather – otherwise it would be an extremely large jacket – or that it has leather as a property: leather is not a property. A jacket is leather by being made out of leather.
Suppose you have a statue S made out for some lump L of material, whether marble, bronze, clay, or whatever. How is S related to L? It seems clear that L can exist without S existing. Thus one could melt the bronze down, or re-shape the clay. In either case, the statue would cease to exist, while the quantity of matter would continue to exist. If S ceases to exist while L continues to exist, then S is not identical to L. They are not identical because something is true of L that is not true of S: it is true of L that it can exist without S existing, but it is not true of S that it can exist without S existing. I am relying upon the following principle, one that seems utterly beyond reproach:
(InId) If x = y, whatever is true of x is true of y, and vice versa.
(This is a rough formulation of the Indiscenibility of Identicals. A more careful formulation would block such apparent counterexamples as: Maynard G. Krebs believes that the morning star is a planet but does not believe that the evening star is a planet.)
Returning to the statue and the lump, although S is not identical to L, S is not wholly distinct, or wholly diverse, from L either. This is because S cannot exist unless L exists. Note also that while S exists it occupies exactly the same space as does L. As long as S exists, S and L are spatiotemporally coincident. What's more, they are composed of exactly the same matter arranged in exactly the same way. And yet they are not identical! Very curious. How could there be two physical things in the same place at the same time? But I have just shown that they cannot be identical. Suppose that the statue and the lump come into existence at the same time t and pass out of existence at the same later time t*. At all times they share the same matter, and at no time are they not spatiotemporally coincident. And yet they are not identical because modally discernible. In our world, L composes S now, but there are possible worlds at which L does not not compose S now.
The fact that there are bronze statues and that the statue and its matter are neither strictly identical nor strictly distinct suggests the following analogy: The Father is to God as the statue is to the lump of matter out of which it is sculpted. And the same goes for the other Persons. Each Person is to God as the statue is to the lump. Schematically, P is to G as S to L. The Persons are like hylomorphic compounds where the hyle in question is the divine substance.
Thus the Persons are not each identical to God, which would have the consequence that they are identical to one another. Nor are the persons instances of divinity which would entail tri-theism. It is rather that the persons are composed of God as of a common substance. Thus we avoid a unitarianism in which there is no room for distinctness of Persons, and we avoid tri-theism. So far, so good.
Something like this approach is advocated by Jeffrey Brower and Michael Rea, here.
But does the statue/lump analogy avoid the problems we faced with the water analogy? Aren’t the two analogies so closely analogous that they share the same problems? Water occurs in three distinct states, the gaseous, the liquid, and the solid. One and and the same quantity of water can assume any of these three states. Distinctness of states is compatible with oneness of substance. On the water analogy, the Persons are to God as the three states of water are to water.
Liquid, solid, and gaseous are states of water. Similarly, a statue is a state of a lump of matter. The main problem with both analogies is as follows. God is not a substance in the sense in which clay and water are substances. Thus God is not a stuff or hyle, but a substance in the sense of a hypostasis or hypokeimenon. Beware of equivocating on 'substance.' And it does no good to say that God is an immaterial or nonphysical stuff. God is an immaterila being, but he cannot be or be composed of an immaterial stuff. Besides, 'immaterial stuff' smacks of a contradictio in adjecto. It sounds like 'immaterial matter.' Furthermore, the divine unity must be accommodated. The ground of divine unity cannot be amorphous matter whether physical or nonphysical.
In addition, one and the same quantity of H20 cannot be simultaneously and throughout liquid, solid, and gaseous. Similarly, one and the same quantity of bronze cannot be simultaneously and throughout three different statues. Connected with this is how God could be a hylomorphic compound, or any sort of compound, given the divine simplicity which rules out all composition in God.
In sum, the statue/lump analogy is not better than the water/state analogy. Neither explains how we can secure both unity of the divine nature and distinctness of Persons.
Whenever I speak of liberals sans phrase I mean contemporary liberals. But contemporary liberals are leftists, so perhaps I should drop 'liberal' and use 'leftist.' As Roger Kimball remarks,
Usage note: attentive readers will register the fact that I say “leftists,” not “liberals.” Conservatives, I know, often speak about the depredations and bad behavior of “liberals.” But it has been a long time since the people whom we have called liberals were interested in freedom or liberty. What they are interested in, on the contrary, is pursuing the illiberal agenda of control.
In the same short piece Kimball compares the Tractarian Wittgenstein with the politically correct: "Wittgenstein sought to exclude the whole realm of ethics and metaphysics from the kingdom of speech; our politically correct leftists wish to exclude anything that doesn’t conform to their political agenda."
The tale of how this semi-literate Siberian peasant insinuated himself into the highest precincts of throne and altar in imperial Russia is told by Joseph T. Furhmann in Rasputin: The Untold Story (John Wiley & Sons, 2013). It held my attention to the last page.
Contrary to popular belief, Rasputin wasn't a monk and, though hard to kill, was dead by the time he was dumped into the icy Neva.
If a 'holy man' takes money or sex from his disciples, that is a reliable sign that he is a fraud.
I am reminded of the famous and rather more recent cases of Rajneesh and Chogyam
Trungpa. According to one report, ". . . Trungpa slept with a different woman every night in order to transmit the teaching to them. L. intimated that it was really a hardship for Trungpa to do this, but it was his duty in order to spread the dharma."
With apologies to the shade of Jack Kerouac, you could say that that gives new meaning to 'dharma bum.'
For too many Catholics and other Christians, their leftism is their real 'religion.' This from The Thinking Housewife:
ANNY YENNY reports at the website Politichicks that her eighth-grade son was given extra credit by his Catholic school religion teacher for fasting on the first day of Ramadan. When the mother complained, the teacher objected and “lectured [her] on the superiority of Muslims to Christians.”
The principles of ecumenism put forth at Vatican II lead with irrevocable logic to teaching Catholics how to be good Muslims.
I agree with something in the vicinity of the point the Housewife makes here. But her last sentence illustrates the slippery slope fallacy. If the logic is "irrevocable," then it is deductively valid; but slippery slope argumentation, if intended to be deductive, is always invalid. What should she have said? Something like this: 'The ecumenism of Vatican II set the stage for, and made likely, the sort of absurdities that Anny Yenny complains of."
Surely there was no logical necessity that the principles of Vatican II eventuate in the absurdity in question.
The case against Swedenization, then, is that it threatens a soft and insidious despotism. Unlike the totalitarianism of the USSR, where the evil flowed from the top down, engulfing every aspect of society, the danger posed by social democracy is of social, political, and economic debilitations’ compounding one another. Progressivism began as, and remains, “an alliance of experts and victims,” according to Harvey Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard. It gains strength as the experts assert their expertise more confidently and the victims accept their helplessness more compliantly. The kind of robust mediating structures Tocqueville thought essential to the success of democracy in America will not prevail against that alliance. If the experts determine that employer-provided health insurance must include contraception, the objections of religious organizations opposed to some or all forms of contraception are immaterial. The possibility that the republic’s free citizens could initiate financial or employment arrangements to secure contraceptives, rather than relying completely on government directives to their employers, is also ruled out of order.
To which I add:
The aim of the Left is to weaken the once robust "mediating structures" of civil society that serve as a buffer between individual and state. Among these are the family, private charities, voluntary service organizations, private associations and clubs of all kinds, churches and parochial schools, and the private economy. Indeed, the aim is to weaken the mediating structures to the point where the space between individual and state is hollowed out.
The Left is totalitarian, which is why it will brook no competitors such as religion and family.
Philosophers love a paradox, but hate a contradiction. Paradoxes drive inquiry while contradictions stop it dead in its tracks. The doctrine of the Trinity is a paradox threatening to collapse into one or more contradictions. Put starkly, and abstracting from the complexity of the creedal formulations, the doctrine says that God is one, and yet God is three. Now this is, or rather entails, an apparent contradiction since if God is three, then God is not one, which contradicts God's being one. But not every apparent contradiction is a real one. Hence it is a mistake to reject the doctrine due to its initial appearance of being self-contradictory. To put it another way, the doctrine is not obviously self-contradictory as some appear to believe. It is not obviously self-contradictory since it is not obvious that God is one and three in the same respect. To see contradictions that are not there is just as much of an intellectual mistake as to fail to see ones that are there.
I should say that I am interested in the general problem of apparent contradictions both in philosophy and out, what contradictions signify, and how we ought to deal with them. My interest in the Trinity is a special case of this general interest. Herewith, a preliminary attempt at cataloging some ways of dealing with apparent contradictions, taking the Trinity as my chief example.
The following catalog divides into two parts. The first five entries treat the three-in-one contradiction as merely apparent, unreal, unproblematic, while the remaining entries treat it as real or unavoidable. But what do I mean when I say that a contradiction is unavoidable? Let us say that a contradiction has limbs. For example, I am sitting now and I am not sitting now is a contradiction assuming that 'now' denotes the same time in both of its occurrences. I am sitting now is the first limb; I am not sitting now is the second limb. A contradiction is unavoidable (avoidable) if we have (do not have) good reasons for accepting both limbs. The example just cited is an example of an avoidable contradiction since there is no good reason to accept both limbs.
But some contradictions seem unavoidable. For example, there is reason to think that a set exists if and only if it has members. But there is also reason to think that a set — the null set – can exist without members. This apparent contradiction is quite different from the one concerning my being seated/unseated. It is not obviously avoidable if it is avoidable at all. I am not saying that this is genuine contradiction; I am saying that it is a plausible candidate for such status.
The Contradiction as Merely Apparent
1. Deny the first limb. In God is one and God is three, God is one is the first limb. The contradiction is easily dismissed if we simply deny this limb and embrace tri-theism. This is of course unacceptable to the Christian and indeed to any sophisticated theist. A defensible theism must be a monotheism.
2. Deny the second limb, and embrace radical monotheism along Jewish or Islamic lines.
3. Reject both limbs by rejecting the presupposition on which both rest, namely, that God exists, or that 'God' has a referent. If this presupposition is not satisfied, then the question lapses.
4. Make a distinction between the respect in which God is one and the respect in which God is three. Alphonse Gratry, for example, distinguishing between nature and person says that God is one nature in three persons. (Logic, p. 336) Drawing a distinction between respects is the standard way to defuse a contradiction. But in the case of the Trinity it accomplishes little unless one can explain how the distinguished items are related. Suppose one is told that a certain ball is both red and green at the same time. This is easily seen to be true if the ball is red in one hemisphere and green in the other. In this case it is clear without further ado how the two hemispheres are related. Not so in the case of the Trinity.
5. A more sophisticated strategy is to locate an uncontroversial phenomenon in nature that exhibits a trinitarian or binitarian structure. Suppose there is a two-in-one ( binity) in nature. If uncontroversially actual, then uncontroversially possible, even if we cannot understand how exactly it is possible. The possibility of a binitarian or trinitarian phenomenon in nature could then be used as a model to show, or begin to show, the possibility of the Trinity.
A putative example of a two-in-one is a statue. The statue S and the lump L of matter it is composed of are two things in that L can exist without S. If S is made of bronze, and the bronze is melted down, then L will exist without S existing. Even if the lump of bronze and the statue come into existence at the same time, and pass out of existence at the same later time, they are two. For they are modally discernible: the lump has a property the statue lacks, the property of being possibly such as not to be a statue. So, for both temporal and modal reasons, lump and statue are not strictly identical. They are two.
But they are also one thing in that S just is formed matter. If S and L come into existence at the same time, and pass out of existence at the same later time, then they are spatiotemporally coincident and composed of exactly the same matter arranged in exactly the same way. That strongly suggests that S and L are the same.
On the one hand, it seems we must say that S and L are two and not one. On the other, it seems we must say that they are one and not two.
Perhaps we can say that what we have here is a binity, a two-in-one. If binities are actual, then they are possible, even if it is not wholly clear how they are possible. Assuming that the real cannot be contradictory, then the apparent contradiction of a two-in-one must be merely apparent. If this fifth strategy works, one will come to see that the Trinitarian contradiction is merely apparent, even if one does not achieve full clarity as to how the Trinity is possible. (But of course the transcendence of God ought to insure that much about him will remain beyond the ken of our finite intellects both here below and in the life to come, if there is one.)
The Contradiction as Unavoidable
6. Take the contradiction to be real or unavoidable — since both limbs are justifiable – and as proof that the triune God is impossible and hence necessarily nonexistent. In other words, adopt the following stance: (i) there is excellent reason to say that God must be one; (ii) there is excellent reason to say that God must be three; (iii) it is a contradiction to maintain that God is both one and three; (iv) therefore, God is impossible, hence nonexistent.
7. Take the contradiction to be unavoidable as in #6 and as proof that God is logically impossible. But instead of inferring from logical impossibility to necessary nonexistence, draw the conclusion that God exists despite the contradiction. One is reminded of the phrase attributed to Tertullian: Credo quia absurdum, I believe because it is absurd (logically contradictory). This also appears to be the position of Kierkegaard. What distinguishes strategy #6 from #7 is that in the former one takes logic as having veto power over reality: one takes the logically impossible, that which cannot be thought without contradiction, to be really impossible, impossible in reality apart from thought. That is, one takes the finite discursive intellect to be at least negatively related to extramental reality: nothing can be real unless it is thinkable by us without contradiction. Strategy #7, however, rests on the assumption that there can be a reality — the divine reality – which is not subject to logical laws which, if this strategy is correct, can only be our laws. What is necessarily false for us can nonetheless be true in reality.
8. Take the contradiction to be real or unavoidable, but also to be true. In both #6 and #7, the contradiction is taken to to be false, indeed necessarily false, but on this dialetheist option, it is a true contradiction. Accordingly, the Trinity doctrine is a true contradiction!
Are there any other options? Note that the relative identity approach falls under #4.
UPDATE. Chad comments:
Regarding "are there any other options?" on approaches to the Trinity paradox.
Another option that falls under the 'apparent contradiction' category is mysterianism: the contradiction is apparent only, but the resolution is a mystery, either heretofore or in principle.
Another option, which might stand between the 'apparent contradiction' and 'contradiction' categories, is van Inwagen's relative identity approach: The Trinity is contradictory if the standard logic of identity is correct, apparently contradictory if not.
Yet another option that falls under the 'contradiction' category: To say that a father can beget a son without a mother is a parent [patent?] contradiction.
Chad is right about mysterianism. That is a further option under the first category. I'm surprised I overlooked it. As for the relative identity approach, this was Peter Geach's before it was van Inwagen's. But doesn't this approach fall under #4? I'm not sure why Chad calls his third point a third option. Furthermore , isn't 'beget' a technical term in Trinitarian theology? The Son is said to be "begotten not made." The idea, I take it, is to avoid saying that the Son is created. If created, then a creature, then not God. If 'beget' has a technical meaning, why should it be a contradiction to say that the Father begets the Son?
We are ignorant about ultimates and we will remain ignorant in this life. Perhaps on the Far Side we will learn what we cannot learn here. But whether there is survival of bodily death, and whether it will improve our epistemic position, are again things about which — we will remain ignorant in this life.
It is admittedly strange to suppose that death is the portal to knowledge. But is it stranger than supposing that a being capable of knowledge simply vanishes with the breakdown of his body?
The incapacity of materialists to appreciate the second strangeness I attribute to their invincible body-identification.
Way to go, Cuomo. Ten-round magazines are now illegal for everyone in New York state, included active duty cops. This requires no commentary. File it under "Liberal Stupidity." An amendment is in the works, but will it exempt retired cops?
The Showmen, It Will Stand. If you remember this underplayed oldie, I'll buy you one scotch, one bourbon, one beer. There was an apologetic sub-genre around this time (1961) of songs celebrating R & R.
Fleetwood Mac, Mission Bell. Haunting cover of the upbeat Donnie Brooks hit.
Them, Here Comes the Night. This YouTuber got it right: "Love this song – still sounds as raw and as fresh as it did nearly 50 years ago!" Yes, raw, edgy, yet tender. Unforgettable.
In the opening pages of More Kinds of Being: A Further Study of Individuation, Identity, and the Logic of Sortal Terms (Blackwell, 2009), E. J. Lowe distinguishes five uses of ‘is’ as a copula: 1. The ‘is’ of attribution, as in ‘Socrates is wise’ and ‘Grass is green’.2. The ‘is’ of identity, as in ‘Napoleon is Bonaparte’ and ‘Water is H2O’.3. The ‘is’ of instantiation, as in ‘Mars is a planet’ and ‘A horse is a mammal’.4. The ‘is’ of constitution, as in ‘This ring is gold’ and ‘A human body is a collection of cells’.5. The ‘is’ of existence, as in ‘The Dodo is no more’.He says some may be reducible to others, and that one or two must be primitive. I thought this was a helpful spread.
That is indeed helpful, but here are some comments and questions.
1. First of all, I would be surprised if Lowe referred to the five uses as five uses of 'is' as a copula. The 'is' of existence is not a copula because it doesn't couple. There is no copulation, grammatical or logical, in 'God is.' The 'is' of existence does not pick out any sort of two-termed relation such as identity, instantiation, or constitution. Calling the 'is' of identity a copula is a bit of a stretch, and I don't think most philosophers would.
2. Is there a veritative use of 'is'? 'It is so.' 'It is the case that Frege died in 1925.' One could say, though it is not idiomatic: 'Obama's being president is.' One would be expressing that the state of affairs obtains or that the corresponding proposition is true. So it looks as if there is a veritative use of 'is.'
3. Reducibility of one use to another does not show that they are not distinct uses. Perhaps the veritative use can be reduced to what Lowe calls the attributive use. Attributions of truth, however, imply that truth is a property. Frege famously argued that truth cannot be a property. That is a messy separate can of worms.
4. There are also tensed and tenseless uses of 'is.' 'Obama is president' versus '7 + 5 is 12.' With respect to the latter, it would be a bad joke, one reminiscent of Yogi Berra, were I to ask,"You mean now?" Yogi Berra was once asked the time. He said,"You mean now?"
'Hume is an empiricist' can be used both in a tensed way and an untensed way. If I say that Hume is an empiricist what I say is true despite the present nonexistence of Hume. 'Grass is green,' however, is never used in a tensed way, though one can imagine circumstances in which it could.
5. One and the same tokening of 'is' can do more than one job. Is the 'is' in 'Max is black' as used by me in the presence of my cat Max the 'is' of predication merely? I don't think so. It also expresses existence. But this requires argument:
1. 'Max is black' and 'Black Max exists' are intertranslatable. 2. Intertranslatable sentences have the same sense. Therefore 3. 'Max is black' and 'Black Max exists' express the very same (Fregean) sense. Therefore 4. Both sentences express both predication and existence: a property is predicated of something that cannot have properties unless it exists. Therefore 5. The 'is' in 'Max is black' has a double function: it expresses both predication and existence.
Note that both sentences include a sign for the predicative tie. The sign is 'is' in the first sentence and in the second sentence the sign is the immediate concatenation of 'black' and 'Max' in that order. This shows that to refer to logical (as opposed to grammatical) copulation does not require a separate stand-alone sign. 'Black Max exists' expresses both existence via the sign 'exsts' and predication via the immeditae concatenation of 'black' and 'Max' in that order in the context of the sentence in question.
Once you have removed every vestige of religion from the public square,what will you put in its place? The dogmas of the 'religion' of leftism? You want church-state separation, but you make an exception for the 'church' of leftism? Double standard!
