Rehearsals are for a future performance. Why then are you 'rehearsing' that altercation with so-and-so from twenty years ago? Do you plan to bring it back to the stage?
Month: January 2013
The Sea Battle Tomorrow
The soldier's operations in the field are often encumbered by the presence of civilians and considerations of 'collateral damage.' The seaman's is a purer form of combat. Ships far out at sea. All hands combatants. No civilians to get in the way. Less worry over environmental degradation. The 'purity' of naval over land warfare. Bellicosity in the realm of Neptune must breed a brand of brotherhood among the adversaries not encountered on terra firma.
There is More to Life than Politics
There is more to life than politics, but to keep it that way, some engagement in it is necessary.
Is the Skeleton of a Cat Feline in the Same Sense as a Cat is Feline?
I put the question to Manny K. Black, brother of Max Black, but all I got was a yawn for my trouble. The title question surfaced in the context of a discussion of mereological models of the Trinity. Each of the three Persons is God. But we saw that the 'is' cannot be read as the 'is' of identity on pain of contradiction. So it was construed as the 'is' of predication. Accordingly, 'The Father (Son, etc.) is God' was taken to express that the Father (Son, etc.) is divine. But that has the unwelcome consequence that there are three Gods unless it can be shown that something can be F without being an F. At this point the cat strolls into the picture. Could something be feline without being a feline? The skeleton of a cat, though not a cat, is a proper part of a cat. And similarly for other cat parts. As a proper part of a cat the skeleton of a cat is feline. And it is supposed to be feline in the same sense of 'feline' as the cat itself is feline.
Now if the proper parts of a cat can be feline in the very same sense in which the cat is feline, without themselves being cats, then we have an analogy that renders intelligible the claim that the Persons of the Trinity are divine without being Gods. The picture is this: God or the Godhead or the Trinity is a whole the proper parts of which are exactly the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Persons are distinct among themselves, but each is divine in virtue of being a proper part of God. There is one God in three divine Persons. The mereological model allows us to avoid tritheism and to affirm that God is one and three without contradiction.
I have already expressed my doubt whether the mereological model can accommodate the divine unity. But now I raise a different question. Is 'feline' being used univocally – in the very same sense – when applied to a cat and when applied to a proper part of a cat such as a cat's skeleton?
This is not obvious. It appears to be being used analogically. We can exclude equivocity of the sort illustrated by the equivocity of 'bank' as between 'money bank' and 'river bank.' Clearly, we are not simply equivocating when we apply 'feline' to both cat and skeleton. But can we exclude analogicity?
To cop an example from Aristotle, consider 'healthy.' The cat is healthy. Is its food healthy? In one sense 'no' since it is not even alive. In another sense 'yes' insofar as 'healthy' food conduces to health in the cat. Similarly with the cat's urine, blood, exercise, and coat. Urine cannot be healthy in exactly the same sense in which the cat is healthy, but it is healthy in an analogical sense inasmuch as its indicates health in the animal.
Since a skeleton is called feline only by reference to an animal whose skeleton it is, I suggest 'feline' in application to a cat skeleton is being used analogically. If this is right,then the Persons are divine in only an analogical sense, a result that does not comport well with orthodoxy.
Mereology and Trinity: Response to Wong
Kevin Wong offers some astute criticisms:
You wrote: "For one thing, wholes depend on their parts for their existence, and not vice versa. (Unless you thought of parts as abstractions from the whole, which the Persons could not be.) Parts are ontologically prior to the wholes of which they are the parts.This holds even in the cases in which the whole is a necessary being and each part is as well." Chad M. seems to be following William Lane Craig. Craig's partner-in-crime is J. P. Moreland, who argues that with substances, the whole is metaphysically prior to its parts. For example, a heart has its identity only because it is a constituent of the human person. Removed from a human person, it ceases to be a heart.
If a concrete particular such as book counts as an Aristotelian primary substance, and it does, then I should think that the book as a whole is not metaphysically/ontologically prior to its (proper) parts. In cases like this the whole depends for its existence on the prior existence of the parts. First (both temporally and logically) you have the pages, glue, covers, etc., and then (both temporally and logically) you have the book. If, per impossibile, there were a book that always existed, it would still be dependent for its existence on the existence of its proper parts logically, though not temporally. So it is not true in general that "with substances, the whole is metaphysically prior to the parts."
But a book is an artifact whereas Kevin brings up the case of living primary substances such as living animals. The heart of a living animal is a proper part of it. Now does it depend for its existence on the whole animal of which it is a proper part? Is it true, as Kevin says, that the heart is identity-dependent on the animal whose heart it is?
I don't think so. Otherwise, there couldn't be heart transplants. Suppose Tom, whose heart is healthy, dies in a car crash. Tom's heart is transplanted into Jerry whose diseased heart has been removed. Clearly, one and the same heart passes from Tom to Jerry. Therefore, the heart in question is not identity-dependent on being Tom's heart. In principle if not in practice, every part of an animal can be transplanted. So it seems as if the whole is not metaphysically prior to its parts in the case of animals.
Accidents and Parts
Tom's smile cannot 'migrate' from Tom to Jerry, but his heart can (with a little help from the cardiologists). This is the difference between an accident of a substance and a proper part of a substance. If A is an accident of substance S, then not only is A dependent for its existence on a substance, it is dependent for its existence on the very substance S of which it is an accident. This is why an accident cannot pass from one substance to another. The accidents of S cannot exist apart from S, but S can exist without those very accidents (though presumably it must have some accidents or other). So we can say that a substance is metaphysically prior to its accidents. But I don't think it is true that a substance is metaphysically/ontologically prior to its parts. The part-whole relation is different from the accident-substance relation.
So as far as I can see what I originally said is correct.
Further, you wrote, "The divine aseity, however, rules out God's being dependent on anything." Would it not be more accurate to say that divine aseity is the thesis that God's being is not dependent upon anything external and distinct from himself? If that is the case, the dependence of God (proper) upon his members (the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) would be a dependence upon nothing external to himself (unlike a Platonic rendition of God which postulates that God is dependent upon the properties he instantiates, these properties being external to himself). There is a strong strand in Christian tradition that states that the Son is God of God, that he is begotten of the Father and yet retains full divinity. If his divinity is not in jeopardy because of dependence upon the Father, why should the one God's divinity be in jeopardy because he depends upon the members of the
Trinity?
The reason I said what I said is because it makes no sense to say that God is dependent on God. God can no more be dependent on himself than he can cause himself to exist. I read causa sui privatively, not positively. To say that God is causa sui is to say that he is not caused by another; it is not to say that he causes himself. 'Self-caused' is like 'self-employed': one who is self-employed does not employ himself; he is not employed by another.
For you, however, God can be said to depend on God in the sense that God as a whole depends on his proper parts, the Persons of the Trinity. The problem, however, is that you are assuming the mereological model that I am questioning. You are assuming that the one God is a whole of parts and the each of the Persons (F, S, HS) is a proper part of the whole.
And isn't your second criticism inconsistent with your first? Your first point was that a whole is prior to its parts. But now you are saying that God can depend on God by depending in his proper parts.
Obama’s Abuse of Power
From an article by David Harsanyi:
The president, who has often said he will work around Congress, also justifies his executive bender by telling us that Americans are clamoring for more limits on gun ownership. So what? These rights — in what Piers Morgan might call that "little book" — were written down to protect the citizenry from not only executive overreach but also vagaries of public opinion. Didn't Alexander Hamilton and James Madison warn us against the dangerous "passions" of the mob? It is amazing how many times this president uses majoritarian arguments to rationalize executive overreach.
That is a very important point. We are a republic. Not everything is up for democratic grabs.
And really, speaking of ginning up fear: "If there's even one life that can be saved, then we've got an obligation to try," the president said, deploying perhaps the biggest platitude in the history of nannyism. Not a single one of the items Obama intends to implement — legislative or executive — would have stopped Adam Lanza's killing spree or, most likely, any of the others. Using fear and a tragedy to further ideological goals was by no means invented by Obama, but few people have used it with such skill.
A platitude? Not the right word. What Obama is quoted as saying is an absurdity and illustrates once again what a bullshitter he is. Many lives would be saved by banning mororcycles, skydiving, mountaineering, and so on. But a thoughtful person does not consider merely the positive upshot of banning X but the negative consequences as well such as the infringement of liberty. A rational person considers costs along with benefits.
Feel-Good Liberalism, High Capacity Magazines and High Capacity Soft Drink Containers
If you need further proof that leftism is emotion-driven, consider the latest Obamination, the call for a ban on high capacity magazines, an abomination which the fascist-in-chief may try to ram though under Executive Order. I take it that these are magazines the capacity of which is in excess of seven rounds.
(By the way, you liberals, and especially you liberal journalists, need to learn the correct terminology: 'magazine' not 'clip.' 'Round' not 'bullet.' The bullet is the projectile. To confuse the bullet with the round is to commit a pars pro toto fallacy.)
When I ranted about this over lunch with Mike V. on Saturday, he made an interesting comparison. I had made the point that it is very easy to change out a depleted mag. A skilled shooter can do it in a second or two. Suppose I have a semi-auto pistol with a loaded seven-round mag. I have two more loaded mags of the same capacity in my right pocket and two more in my left. Within a minute or two I can get off 5 X 7 = 35 shots. (My firepower increases if I have a second or third semi-auto on my person.) Plenty of time to commit mayhem in what liberal boneheads have made a 'gun-free zone.' (The sign ought to read: Gun-Free Zone Except for Criminals.)
Mike brought up Gotham's benighted mayor, Mr Bloomberg, and his call for the banning of 32 oz sodas. Mike said, "You just order two 16 oz. drinks."
Exactly. Get the comparison? Banning high capacity magazines is as foolish a feel-good proposal as banning 'high capacity' soft drink containers.
Why is the high capacity mag ban foolish? Because it does nothing to solve the problem. But it is worse than foolish since it is one more violation of the liberties of law-abiding citizens, one more step on the road to full-tilt statism.
It is also foolish because it promotes a black market for the items banned and tends to undermine respect for law and for the rule of law.
Laws ought ought be (i) few in number, (ii) reasonable in content, (ii) intelligible to the average citizen, (iv) enforceable, and (v) enforced. When dumbass libruls pass stupid feel-good laws because they feel that they just have to do something, the result is an erosion of respect for law and an increase in readership of Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience.
And another thing. Passing laws is easy and beloved by the feel-gooders on both sides of the aisle. Enforcement is much more difficult and here liberals whether Dems or Repubs demonstrate that it is feeling alone that drives them. Enforce existing laws and attach severe penalties to their breaking. Why hasn't the Islamist murderer, Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, been executed?
Welcome to Fascist Amerika
Leftists like to call conservatives fascists, but it is the fascism of the Left that is taking hold. Two more pieces of evidence as part of a massive cumulative case:
Obama Willing to Use Executive Orders on Guns
At a news conference on Monday, exactly one month after the school massacre in Newtown, Conn., Mr. Obama said a task force led by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had “presented me now with a list of sensible, common-sense steps that can be taken to make sure that the kinds of violence we saw at Newtown doesn’t happen again. He added: “My starting point is not to worry about the politics. My starting point is to focus on what makes sense, what works.”
The quotation is ungrammatical ("kinds of violence . . . doesn't"), but that is the least of it. How can any serious individual speak of making sure that events such as Newtown don't happen again? Every reasonable person knows that there will be similar occurrences. The astonishing attitude betrayed here is that the federal government, by merely passing laws, can eliminate evil from the world. The risibility of this notion is compounded by the content of the laws being proposed. Must I point out that behind this foolishness is lust for power? The Left is totalitarian from the ground up and this is just further proof of the fact.
To say that sales of guns and ammo and accessories are brisk would be an understatement. Expect it to become brisker still. POTUS has just given the people another reason to arm themselves.
This Metamorphosis Will Require a Permit. Roger Kimball reflects upon his Kafkaesque predicament after hurricane Sandy destroyed his house.
Newtown and the Bipartisan Police State
This article, by Anthony Gregory, is well worth reading although it gets off to a somewhat rocky start:
I think the most conspicuous problem is the glorification not of guns or fictional violence, but of actual violence. America is a militarized society, seat of the world’s empire. The U.S. government is always at war with a handful of countries.
First of all, we need to distinguish between the glorification of fictional violence and the fictional glorification of violence. What contemporary film makers glorify is violence, actual violence of the most brutal and sadistic sort, not fictional violence. A movie such as Hostel II (cannibal scene) that depicts a man being eaten alive by a man is not depicting a fictional representation of a man being eaten alive, but a man being eaten alive. Of course, a violent and sadistic movie is fiction, but if it is good fiction, it draws the reader in and involves him in the action, degrading, desensitizing, and dehumanizing him. That people find this evil stuff entertaining shows how how morally corrupt they have become. This is the ultimate circenses for the depraved masses. (See Alypius and the Gladiators) [Correction 16 January: Not the ultimate circenses, for that would be the gladiatorial combat of ancient Rome or something similar. We haven't slipped that far, not yet.]
I say this because it is important not to downplay the role played by too many film makers and other cultural polluters in contributing to a culture or unculture in which sensitive, highly alienated kids like Adam Lanza, who are products of broken homes, and brought up without moral guidance in politicaslly correct schools in which our Judeo-Christian heritage has been expunged, can be pushed over the edge.
That being said, Gregory makes some very important points, despite his being a bit too libertarian for my conservative taste. Excerpts (emphasis added):
At least as alarming as the finger pointing have been the particular solutions most commentators have immediately gravitated toward. Progressives immediately began accusing conservatives of cutting mental health funding, and conservatives immediately fired back that civil libertarians have eroded the capacity of government to involuntarily commit those suspected of mental illness. This is, I think, perhaps the most disturbing reaction in the long run. Great strides have been made in the last half century to roll back the totalitarianism of mandatory psychiatric commitment. For much of modern history, hundreds of thousands were denied basic human rights due to their unusual behavior, most of it peaceful in itself. Lobotomies and sterilization were common, as were locking people into hellish psychiatric gulags where they were repeatedly medicated against their will, stripped of any sanity they previously had. The most heroic libertarian in recent years may have been the recently departed Thomas Szasz, who stood against mainstream psychiatry’s unholy alliance with the state, correctly pointing out that the system of mandatory treatment was as evil and authoritarian as anything we might find in the prison system or welfare state.
[. . .]
Meanwhile, statists on both the left and right called for the national security state to put armed guards in every school in America. More militarized policing is not the answer. Barbara Boxer, California’s hyper-statist Democrat, called for National Guard troops in the schools. Yet the spokesman of the NRA, instead of doing what it could to diffuse the hysteria and defend the right to bear arms, added his voice to this completely terrible idea, demanding utopian solutions and scapegoating when he should have been a voice of reason. The main difference between his proposal and Boxer’s would be the uniforms worn by the armed guards.
I agree. Turning schools into armed camps is an awful idea, though not as stupid as making them 'gun-free' zones.
Government armed guards will not necessarily make the schools safer, though. Central planning doesn’t work. The Fort Hood shooter managed to kill twelve people in 2009, despite the military base epitomizing the very pinnacle of government security. And now we see President Obama toying with the exact proposal aggressively pushed by the NRA—more surveillance and police, funded by the federal government, to turn America’s schools into Orwellian nightmares.
Although both conservatives and progressives have responded to this tragedy in generally bad ways, and there seems to be wide agreement on a host of downright terrifying police state proposals, I don’t want to imply that both sides have been equally bad. As awful as the law-and-order conservatives have been, the progressives have been far worse, agreeing with most of the bad conservative proposals but then adding their own pet issue to the agenda: disarming the general population.
The right to bear arms is a human rights issue, a property rights issue, a personal safety issue. The way that one mass murderer has been turned into a poster boy for the agenda of depriving millions of Americans of the right to own weapons that virtually none of them will ever use to commit a crime is disgusting, and seems to be rooted in some sort of cultural bigotry. Nothing else would easily explain the invincible resistance to logical arguments such as: rifles are rarely used in crimes, gun control empowers the police state over the weak, and such laws simply do not work against criminals, full stop. Rifles are easier to manufacture than methamphetamine, and we know how well the drug war has stopped its proliferation, and 3D printing will soon make it impossible to stop people from getting the weapons they want.
I will be doing some more writing about gun rights in the next few weeks, as it appears that not for the first time in my life, I was totally wrong about something. I had suspected that the left had given up on this issue, more or less, and Obama—whose first term was overall half-decent on gun rights—would not want to touch it. We shall see what happens, but it appears that the progressives have been lying in wait for an excuse to disarm Americans and have happily jumped on the chance.
Many left-liberals will claim they don’t want to ban all guns, and I think most are honest when they say so. Polls indicate that 75% or so of Americans oppose a handgun ban. Maybe there has been some genuine improvement on this issue, although I do have my doubts about the honesty of those who claim they would stop at rifles and high capacity mags, which are implicated in a handful of crimes compared to the thousands killed by people using handguns.
In any event, the core mentality of the gun controllers is as dangerous as ever. In response to a horrific mass murder of around 30 people, they are calling for liberties to be sacrificed in the name of security, apparently impervious to the logical problems with their proposals. When terrorists murdered a hundred times as many people in September 2001, many of these same progressives sensibly pointed out that those who would sacrifice liberty for security will wind up with neither, a line from Franklin. Yet the same logic should apply here. If 9/11 should have taught us anything, it’s that you cannot have total security, certainly with the state in charge of everyone’s safety. Nineteen men with boxcutters murdered 3,000 people. In a world with cars, gasoline, fertilizer, gunpowder, and steel, it is simply impossible to eliminate every threat, rifles being one of the smallest ones out there. Since 9/11 we have lost so many freedoms, have seen our police forces turn into nationalized standing armies with tanks and battle rifles, have undergone mass molestation and irradiation at our airports, have seen the national character twisted to officially sanction torture, indefinite detention, and aggressive wars. What will we see happen in the name of stopping troubled young people from engaging in smaller acts of mass murder? Much the way that conservatives led the charge toward fascism after 9/11, with liberals protesting a little at first only to seemingly accept the bulk of the surveillance state and anti-terror national security apparatus, I fear that today’s progressives are leading the stampede toward an even more totalitarian future, with the conservatives playing defense but caving, first on militarized schools, then on mental health despotism, then on victim disarmament.
Perhaps if after 9/11 the conservatives had focused on allowing airlines to manage their own security, even permitting passengers with guns on planes, instead of doubling the intrusiveness of the police state, we’d be in better shape today. But now the progressives are running the show, the SWAT teams have become more ruthless, the domestic drones have been unleashed, the wars abroad have escalated, and the same federal institutions whose gun control measures left American civilians dead at Ruby Ridge and Waco can expect new targets throughout the land. The bipartisan police state commences, now that the left has gotten its own 9/11.
2606 Pageviews at 5:55 A.M.?
I don't get it. Ostrich nominalism is not that hot a topic.
By the way, my ComBox is not for your self-promotion. Try it, and you will have wasted your time. Comment moderation is on, and I have an itchy 'delete finger.' Trackbacks are off. What a worthless utility that turned out to be.
Against Ostrich Nominalism
As magnificent a subject as philosophy is, grappling as it does with the ultimate concerns of human existence, and thus surpassing in nobility any other human pursuit, it is also miserable in that nothing goes uncontested, and nothing ever gets established to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners. (This is true of other disciplines as well, but in philosophy it is true in excelsis.) Suppose I say, as I have in various places:
That things have properties and stand in relations I take to be a plain Moorean fact beyond the reach of reasonable controversy. After all, my cat is black and he is sleeping next to my blue coffee cup. ‘Black’ picks out a property, an extralinguistic feature of my cat.
Is that obvious? Not to some. Not to the ornery and recalcitrant critter known as the ostrich nominalist. My cat, Max Black, is black. That, surely, is a Moorean fact. Now consider the following biconditional and consider whether it too is a Moorean fact:
1. Max is black iff Max has the property of being black.
As I see it, there are three main ways of construing a biconditional such as (1):
A. Ostrich Nominalism. The right-hand side (RHS) says exactly what the left-hand side (LHS) says, but in a verbose and high-falutin' and dispensable way. Thus the use of 'property' on the RHS does not commit one ontologically to properties beyond predicates. (By definition, predicates are linguistic items while properties are extralinguistic and extramental.) Predication is primitive and in need of no philosophical explanation. On this approach, (1) is trivially true. One needn't posit properties, and in consequence one needn't worry about the nature of property-possession. (Is Max related to his blackness, or does Max have his blackness quasi-mereologically by having it as an ontological constituent of him?)
B. Ostrich Realism. The RHS commits one ontologically to properties, but in no sense does the RHS serve to ground or explain the LHS. On this approach, (1) is false if there are no properties. For the ostrich realist, (1) is true, indeed necessarily true, but it is not the case that the LHS is true because the RHS is true. Such notions as metahysical grounding and philosophical explanation are foreign to the ostrich realist, but not in virtue of his being a realist, but in virtue of his being an ostrich.
C. Non-Ostrich Realism. On this approach, the RHS both commits one to properties, but also proffers a metaphysical ground of the truth of the LHS: the LHS is true because (ontologically or metaphysically speaking) the concrete particular Max has the property of being black, and not vice versa.
Note 1: Explanation is asymmetrical; biconditionality is symmetrical.
Note 2: Properties needn't be universals. They might be (abstract) particulars (unrepeatables) such as the tropes of D. C. Williams and Keith Campbell. Properties must, however, be extralinguistic and extramental, by definition.
Note 3: Property-possession needn't be understood in terms of instantiation or exemplification or Fregean 'falling-under'; it might be construed quasi-mereologically as constituency: a thing has a property by having it as a proper ontological part.
Against Ostrich Nominalism
On (A) there are neither properties, nor do properties enter into any explanation of predication. Predication is primitive and in need of no explanation. In virtue of what does 'black' correctly apply to Max? In virtue of nothing. It just applies to him and does so correctly. Max is black, but there is no feature of reality that explains why 'black' is true of Max, or why 'Max is black' is true. It is just true! There is nothing in reality that serves as the ontological ground of this contingent truth. Nothing 'makes' it true. There are no truth-makers and no need for any.
I find ostrich nominalism preposterous. 'Black' is true of Max, 'white' is not, but there is no feature of reality, nothing in or at or about Max that explains why the one predicate is true of him and the other is not!? This is not really an argument but more an expression of incomprehension or incredulity, an autobiographical comment, if you will. I may just be petering out, pace Professor van Inwagen.
Can I do better than peter? 'Black' is a predicate of English. Schwarz is a predicate of German. If there are no properties, then Max is black relative to English, schwarz relative to German, noir relative to French, and no one color. But this is absurd. Max is not three different colors, but one color, the color we use 'black' to pick out, and the Krauts use schwarz to pick out. When Karl, Pierre, and I look at Max we see the same color. So there is one color we both see — which would not be the case if there were no properties beyond predicates. It is not as if I see the color black while Karl sees the color schwarz. We see the same color. And we see it at the cat. This is not a visio intellectualis whereby we peer into some Platonic topos ouranos. Therefore, there is something in, at, or about the cat, something extralinguistic, that grounds the correctness of the application of the predicate to the cat.
A related argument. I say, 'Max is black.' Karl says, Max ist schwarz. 'Is' and ist are token-distinct and type-distinct words of different languages. If there is nothing in reality (no relation whether of instantiation or of constituency, non-relational tie, Bergmannian nexus, etc.) that the copula picks out, then it is only relative to German that Max ist schwarz, and only relative to English that Max is black. But this is absurd. There are not two different facts here but one. Max is the same color for Karl and me, and his being black is the same fact for Karl and me.
Finally, 'Max is black' is true. Is it true ex vi terminorum? Of course not. It is contingently true. Is it just contingently true? Of course not. It is true because of the way extralinguistic reality is arranged. It is modally contingent, but also contingent upon the way the world is. There's this cat that exists whether or not any language exists, and it is black whether or not any language exists.
Therefore, I say that for a predicate to be contingently true of an individual, (i) there must be individuals independently of language; (ii) there must be properties independently of language; and there must be facts or truth-making states of affairs independently of language. Otherwise, you end up with (i) total linguistic idealism, which is absurd; or (ii) linguistic idealism about properties which is absurd; or (iii) a chaos, a world of disconnected particulars and properties.
The above is a shoot-from-the hip, bloggity-blog exposition of ideas that can be put more rigorously, but it seems to to me to show that ostrich nominalism and ostrich realism for that matter are untenable — and this despite the fact that a positive theory invoking facts has its own very serious problems.
Metaphilosophical Coda: If a theory has insurmountable problems, these problems are not removed by the fact that every other theory has problems. For it might be that no theory is tenable,while the poroblem itself is genuine.
What It Takes to Appreciate Nature
Those who must wrest a living from nature by hard toil are not likely to see her beauty, let alone appreciate it. But her charms are also lost on the sedentary city dwellers for whom nature is little more than backdrop and stage setting for what they take to be the really real, the social tragi-comedy. The same goes for the windshield tourists who, seated in air-conditioned comfort, merely look upon nature as upon a pretty picture.
The true acolyte of nature must combine in one person a robust and energetic physique, a contemplative mind, and a healthy measure of contempt for the world of the human-all-too-human, or to transpose into a positive key, a deep love of solitude. One thinks of Henry David Thoreau, who famously remarked, "I have no walks to throw away on company." Of the same type, but not on the same lofty plane: Edward Abbey.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Favorite Gun Songs
A lonely soldier cleans his gun and dreams of Galveston. Marty Robbins messes with the wicked Felina in El Paso and catches a bullet for his trouble. Joan Baez sings of a jilted lover and her counterfactual conditional, "If the ladies was squirrels with high bushy tails, I'd load up my shotgun with rock salt and nails." Gene Pitney sings of the The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. And from 1943, here is Pistol Packin' Mama by Al Dexter.
On the Right to Keep and Bear Nukes: Slippery Slope Arguments
Kevin W. writes and I respond:
A fellow philosophy friend has been making the argument that we have a conflict of intuitions concerning the Second Amendment. He argues that if it is the case that the Second Amendment allows citizens to arm themselves in order to defend against a tyrannical government, then citizens ought to be permitted to own tanks, fighter jets, and maybe even a nuclear device. Yet, many of us would be highly uncomfortable with citizens having anything like that level of military hardware. So we have a conflict of intuitions.
BV: This is an old slippery slope argument often adduced by anti-gunners. Slippery slope arguments are notoriously invalid. There is no logical necessity that, if you allow citizens to own semi-automatic rifles, then you must also allow them to own machine guns, grenade launchers, chemical and biological weapons, tactical nukes . . . . At some point a line is drawn. We draw lines all the time. Time was when the voting age was 21. Those were the times when, in the words of Barry McGuire, "You're old enough to kill, but not for votin'." The voting age is now 18. If anyone at the time had argued that reducing the age to 18 would logically necessitate its being reduced to 17, then 16, and then 15, and so on unto the enfranchisement of infants and the prenatal, that would have been dismissed as a silly argument.
If the above anti-gun slippery slope argument were valid, then the following pro-gun argument would be valid: "If the government has the right to ban civilian possession of fully automatic rifles, then it has the right to ban semi-automatic rifles, semi-autos generally, revolvers, single-shot derringers . . . . But it has no right to ban semi-autos, and so on. Ergo, etc.
I have been speaking of the 'logical' slippery slope. But there is also the 'causal' or 'probablilistic' slippery slope. Supposing all semi-auto weapons (pistols, rifles, and shotguns) to be banned, would this 'lead to' or 'pave the way for' the banning of revolvers and handguns generally? 'Lead to' is a vague phrase. It might be taken to mean 'raise the probability of' or 'make it more likely that.' Slippery slope arguments of this sort in some cases have merit. If all semi-autos are banned, then the liberals will be emboldened and will try to take the next step.
There is no genuine conflict of intuitions here either. Who has the 'intuition' that citizens should be allowed full access to all available military hardware? No one who is serious maintains this. So this non-issue is a red herring.
We want the Second Amendment only so far as to justify our ownership of handguns and rifles and the like, but we don't want the Second Amendment to justify citizen ownership of these pieces of hardware. Yet, not owning those pieces of hardware would mean certain defeat by any government (one cannot fight off a drone attack with an AR-15). So this fellow philosophy friend would contend that the Second Amendment is out of date and perhaps need to be done away with.
Your friend's argumentation leaves a lot to be desired. Reasonably interpreted, the Second Amendment does not justify citizen ownership of any and all military equipment. The founders were not thinking of cannons and battleships when they spoke of the right to keep and bear arms. If you lived in Lexington or Concord, how would you 'keep' a battleship? 'Bearing' it would be even more difficult.
If you tell me that the founders weren't thinking of AR-15s either, I will simply agree with you, but point out that such a rifle is but an improvement over the muskets of those days. Surely the founders did not intend that the extension of the term 'arms' should be restricted to the weapons of their own day
It is also plainly false that to keep the government in check one needs the same sorts of weapons the government has at its diposal. The 9/11 hijackers dealt us a terrible blow using box cutters. I can't ward off a drone attack with an AR-15, but governments can be toppled by trained assasins using .22 caliber pistols. Imagine a huge caravan of gun-totin' rednecks descending on Washington, D.C. in their pick-up trucks. Something like a Million Redneck March. Would Obama use nukes against them? I don't think so. I reckon he likes his White House digs. A totalitarian government versus the people is not like one government versus another. Allied bombing raids against Axis targets did not degrade Allied real estate or infrastructure, but enemy real estate and infrastructure. As Walter E. Williams points out:
There have been people who've ridiculed the protections afforded by the Second Amendment, asking what chance would citizens have against the military might of the U.S. government. Military might isn't always the deciding factor. Our 1776 War of Independence was against the mightiest nation on the face of the earth — Great Britain. In Syria, the rebels are making life uncomfortable for the much-better-equipped Syrian regime. Today's Americans are vastly better-armed than our founders, Warsaw Ghetto Jews and Syrian rebels.
There are about 300 million privately held firearms owned by Americans. That's nothing to sneeze at. And notice that the people who support gun control are the very people who want to control and dictate our lives.
It's not about hunting. It's about self-defense. Against whom? First of all, against the criminal element, the same criminal element that liberals coddle. It apparently doesn't occur to liberals that if there were less crime, fewer people would feel a need to arm themsleves. Second, against any political entity, foreign or domestic, substate or state, at any level, that 'goes rogue.' A terrorist organization would be an example of a substate political entity.
The Logical Problem of the Trinity
Our question concerns the logical consistency of the following septad, each limb of which is a commitment of orthodoxy. See here for details. How can the following propositions all be
true?
1. There is only one God.
2. The Father is God.
3. The Son is God.
4. The Holy Spirit is God.
5. The Father is not the Son.
6. The Son is not the Holy Spirit.
7. The Father is not the Holy Spirit.
If we assume that in (2)-(7), the 'is' expresses absolute numerical identity, then it is clear that the septad is inconsistent. (Identity has the following properties: it is reflexive, symmetric, transitive, governed by the Indiscernibility of Identicals). For example, from (2) and (3) taken together it follows that the Father is the Son by Transitivity of Identity. But this contradicts (5).
So we have an inconsistent septad each limb of which is a commitment of orthodoxy. The task is to remove the contradiction without abandoning orthodoxy. There are different ways to proceed.
In a paper he sent me, Chad M. seems to adopt the following approach. Distinguish between the 'is' of identity and the 'is' of predication, and construe (2), (3), and (4) as predications. Well, suppose we do this. We get:
2*. The Father is divine
3*. The Son is divine
4*. The Holy Spirit is divine.
But this implies that there are three Gods, which contradicts (1). The trick is to retain real distinctness of Persons while avoiding tritheism.
Chad also blends the above strategy wth a mereological one. Following W. L. Craig, he thinks of the Persons as (proper) parts of God/Godhead. Each is God in that each is a (proper) part of God/Godhead. The idea, I take it, is that Persons are really distinct in virtue of being really distinct proper parts of God, but that there is only one God because there is only one whole of these parts. Each Person is divine in that each is a part of the one God. The parts of God are divine but not God in the way that the proper parts of a cat are not cats but are feline. Thus the skeleton of a cat is not a cat but is feline. The skeleton is feline without being a feline.
But I have a question for Chad. On orthodoxy as I understand it, God is one, not merely in number, but in a deeper metaphysical sense. Roughly, God is a unity whose unity is 'tighter' than the unity of other sorts of unity. Indeed, as befits an absolute, his unity is that than which no tighter can be conceived. The unity of mathematical sets and mereological sums is fairly loose, and the same goes for such concrete aggregates as Kerouac holding his cat. Although we are not forced to take the whole-part relation in the strict sense of classical mereology, I think it remains the case that the unity of anything that could be called a whole of parts will be too loose to capture the divine unity.
For one thing, wholes depend on their parts for their existence, and not vice versa. (Unless you thought of parts as abstractions from the whole, which the Persons could not be.) Parts are ontologically prior to the wholes of which they are the parts. This holds even in the cases in which the whole is a necessary being and each part is as well. The mathematical set of all primes greater than 1 and less than 8 is a necessary being, but so is each element of this set: 3, 5, and 7 are each necessary beings. Still, the existence of the set is metaphysically grounded in the existence of the elements, and not vice versa. The divine aseity, however, rules out God's being dependent on anything.
So my question for Chad is this: does the view that God is a whole of parts do justice to the divine unity?