March 2013 – Maverick Philosopher

Roberto Rosselini’s Socrates

It was my good fortune to happen across Rosselini's Socrates the night before last, Good Friday night, on Turner Classic Movies. From 1971, in Italian with English subtitles. I tuned in about 15 minutes late, but it riveted my attention until the end. It is full of excellent, accurate dialog based on the texts of Plato that record Socrates' last sayings and doings. I was easily able to recognize material from the Platonic dialogues Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and the immortal Phaedo. The dialog moves fast, especially in Italian, and near the end it was difficult to read the fast moving subtitles through eyes filled with tears.

One ought to meditate on the fact that the two greatest teachers of the West, and two great teachers of humanity, Socrates and Jesus, were unjustly executed by the State. This is something contemporary liberals, uncritical in their belief in the benevolence of government, ought especially to consider.

My eyes glued to the TV, I was struck by how Socratic my own attitude toward life and death is. Death is not to be feared, but is to be prepared for and embraced as a portal to knowledge. It is the ultimate adventure for the truth seeker. It is not unreasonable to suppose that it is such a portal even though we cannot know it to be so in this life. There is no dogmatism in the Socratic wisdom: its incarnation does not claim to know here what can only be known, if it will be known, there. He is an inquirer, not an ideologue defending an institutional status quo. The point of the arguments recorded in the Phaedo, and partially rehearsed in the movie, is to persuade sincere truth seekers of the reasonableness of the philosopher's faith, not to prove what cannot be proven, and especially not to benighted worldlings who care little about truth, smug worldlings whose hearts and minds have been suborned by their love of power and money and the pleasures of the flesh.

His friends want the seventy-year-old philosopher to escape and have made preparations. But what could be the point of prolonging one's bodily life after one has done one's best and one's duty in a world of shadows and ignorance that can offer us really nothing in the end but more of the same? This vale of soul-making is for making souls: it cannot possibly be our permanent home. (Hence the moral absurdity of transhumanism which is absurd technologically as well.) Once the soul has exhausted the possibilties of life behind the veil of ignorance and has reached the end of the via dolorosa through this vale of tears then it is time to move on, to nothingness or to something better.

Or perchance to something worse? Here is where the care of the soul here and now comes in. Since the soul may live on, one must care for it: one must live justly and strive for the good. One must seek the knowledge of true being while there is still time lest death catch us unworthy, or worthy only of annihilation or worse.

Socrates' life was his best argument: he taught from his Existenz. He taught best while the hemlock was being poured and his back was to the wall. His dialectic was rooted in his life. His dialectic was not cleverness for the classroom but wisdom for the death chamber.

Whether his life speaks to you or not depends on the kind of person you are, in keeping with Fichte's famous remark to the effect that the philosophy one chooses depends on the sort of person one is.

Does it matter whether Socrates existed and did the things attributed to him in the Platonic writings? I don't see that it does. What alone matters is whether a person here and now can watch a movie like Rossellini's and be moved by it sufficiently to change his own life. What matters is the Idea and the Ideal.

What matters is whether one can appropriate the Socratic message for oneself as Johann Gottlieb Fichte did in this very Socratic passage from The Vocation of Man (LLA, 150):

Should I be visited by corporeal suffering, pain, or disease, I cannot avoid feeling them, for they are accidents of my nature ; and as long as I remain here below, I am a part of Nature. But they shall not grieve me. They can only touch the nature with which, in a wonderful manner, I am united, not my self, the being exalted above all Nature. The sure end of all pain, and of all sensibility to pain, is death; and of all things which the mere natural man is wont to regard as evils, this is to me the least. I shall not die to myself, but only to others ; to those who remain behind, from whose fellowship I am torn: for myself the hour of Death is the hour of Birth to a new, more excellent life.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Death and Resurrection

Bob Dylan, See That My Grave is Kept Clean

Bob Dylan, In My Time of Dyin'

Bob Dylan, Gospel Plow

Bob Dylan, Fixin' to Die

Johnny Cash, Ain't No Grave

Johnny Cash, Redemption

Johnny Cash, Personal Jesus

Johnny Cash, Hurt

Mississippi John Hurt, You Got to Walk That Lonesome Valley

Johnny Cash, Final Interview. He speaks of his faith starting at 5:15.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 45e: "Go on, believe! It does no harm."

Good Friday: At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 75:

The infinite which is in man is at the mercy of a little piece of iron; such is the human condition; space and time are the cause of it. It is impossible to handle this piece of iron without suddenly reducing the infinite which is in man to a point on the pointed part, a point on the handle, at the cost of a harrowing pain. The whole being is stricken in the instant; there is no place left for God, even in the case of Christ, where the thought of God is not more at least [at last?] than that of privation. This stage has to be reached if there is to be incarnation. The whole being becomes privation of God: how can we go beyond? After that there is only the resurrection. To reach this stage the cold touch of naked iron is necessary.

'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' There we have the real proof that Christianity is something divine. (p. 79)

So Long, Lawrence Auster (1949-2013)

Lawrence Auster died early this Good Friday morning. May he rest in peace and come to know what here below one can only believe. Here is Laura Wood's obituary. Auster's site will remain online and is well-worth reading. I must say, however, that I consider him an extremist and share Steve Burton's misgivings about his work. Auster's attacks on distinguished fellow conservatives are often wrongheaded and always tactically foolish, demonstrating as they do a failure to realize that politics is a practical business and that the best and the better are often the enemy of the good. We need a broad coalition to defeat leftists and Islamists. A certain amount of intramural squabbling is to be expected and may even be healthy, but not if it ramps up to internecine warfare. Dennis Prager is not the enemy because he is optimistic about e pluribus unum while you are not. Know who the enemy is.

With Auster and other ultra conservatives, however, it seems one can never be too far Right, and that one who grants the least scintilla of validity to any liberal notion is just as much an enemy as the hardest hard-core left-winger. From a practical point of view, such extremism is profoundly stupid. The ultras will end up talking to themselves in their narrow enclaves and have no effect on the wider culture all the while feeding their false sense of their own significance.

Ideological extremism is a fascinating topic. There are leftists for whom one cannot be too far Left, rightists for whom one cannot be too far Right, and, as we have recently observed in the case of Thomas Nagel and his latest book, atheistic naturalists for whom one cannot be too much of an atheist and too much of a naturalist.

Poor Nagel: atheist, naturalist, liberal. But still too reasonable and balanced and philosophical for the fanatics and hard-liners of scientistic ideology. Shunned by his own kind, Nagel must turn to theists, anti-naturalists, and conservatives for appreciation and serious discussion.

Mayor ‘Soda Jerk’ Now Foams at the Mouth Over Foam Cups

Here. There is also the issue of what I call 'misplaced moral enthusiasm.' Libruls get worked up over Pee-Cee non-issues while turning a blind eye to grave evils such as partial-birth abortions.

Kimball on the Philistinism of the Nagel Bashers

A good article, except for Roger Kimball's excessive admiration for the positivist David Stove who is himself a philistine, or to employ a neologism of mine, a 'philosophistine.'

See here which concludes:

4. The trouble with Stove is that he is a positivist, an anti-philosopher, someone with no inkling of what philosophy is about. He is very intelligent in a superficial sort of way, witty, erudite, a pleasure to read, and I am sure it would have been great fun to have a beer with him. But he is what I call a philosophistine. A philistine is someone with no appreciation of the fine arts; a philosophistine is one with no appreciation of philosophy. People like Stove and Paul Edwards and Rudolf Carnap just lack the faculty for philosophy, a faculty that is distinct from logical acumen.

5. My tone is harsh. What justifies it? The even harsher tone this two-bit positivist assumes in discussing great philosophers who will be read long after he is forgotten, great philosophers he must misunderstand because he cannot attain their level.

My harshness further justified here.

The notion that Stove was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century is risible.

It puzzles me why conservatives as opposed to libertarians should so admire this anti-metaphysical religion-basher. You don't have to be a theist to be a conservative, but a conservative who doesn't respect religion is no conservative at all. Here is what R. J. Stove says about his father:

Diagnosed with esophageal cancer, and convinced beyond all reason that his announcement of this diagnosis to Mum had brought about her stroke, Dad simply unraveled. So, to a lesser extent, did those watching him.

All Dad's elaborate atheist religion, with its sacred texts, its martyrs, its church militant; all his ostentatious tough- mindedness; all his intellectual machinery; all these things turned to dust. Convinced for decades of his stoicism, he now unwittingly demonstrated the truth of Clive James's cruel remark: "we would like to think we are stoic…but would prefer a version that didn't hurt."

Already an alcoholic, he now made a regular practice of threatening violence to himself and others. In hospital he wept like a child (I had never before seen him weep). He denounced the nurses for their insufficient knowledge of Socrates and Descartes. From time to time he wandered around the ward naked, in the pit of confused despair. The last time I visited him I found him, to my complete amazement, reading a small bedside Gideon Bible. I voiced surprise at this. He fixed on me the largest, most protuberant, most frightened, and most frightening pair of eyes I have ever seen: "I'll try anything now."

(Years later, I discovered—and was absolutely pole-axed by —the following passage in Bernard Shaw's Too True To Be Good, in which an old pagan, very obviously speaking for Shaw himself, sums up what I am convinced was Dad's attitude near the end. The passage runs: "The science to which I pinned my faith is bankrupt. Its counsels, which should have established the millennium, led, instead, directly to the suicide of Europe. I believed them once. In their name I helped to destroy the faith of millions of worshipers in the temples of a thousand creeds. And now look at me and witness the great tragedy of an atheist who has lost his faith.")

Eventually, through that gift for eloquence which seldom entirely deserted him, Dad convinced a psychiatrist that he should be released from the enforced hospital confinement which he had needed to endure ever since his threats had caused him to be scheduled. The psychiatrist defied the relevant magistrate's orders, and released my father.

Within twenty-four hours Dad had hanged himself in his own garden.

This was in June 1994. I cannot hope to convey the horror of this event. It dealt a mortal blow to the whole atheistic house of cards which constituted my own outlook.

Times as Maximal Propositions

1. Here are three temporal platitudes: The wholly past is no longer present; the wholly future is not yet present; the present alone is present. Here are three closely related controversial metaphysical theses: the wholly past, being no longer is not; the wholly future, being not yet, is not; the present alone is. The second trio is one version of presentism. I grant that presentism is appealing, though it would be a mistake to take it to be common sense or immediate fallout from common sense. The platitudes are Moorean; deny them on pain of being an idiot. Not so with the heavy-duty metaphysical theses about time and existence advanced by the presentist. We can reasonably ask what they mean and whether they are true.

2. Now even presentists will admit that the past is not a mere nothing. Last Sunday's hike has some sort of reality that cries out for accommodation. After all it is now true that I hiked eight hours on Sunday. Even if there are no truth-makers, there still must be something that the true past-tensed sentence is about. Here I distinguish between two principles, Truth-Maker and Veritas Sequitur Esse.

3. We should also keep in mind that past times and events do not have the status of the merely possible. When Sunday's hike was over it did not change its modal status from actual to merely possible. It remained an actual event, albeit a past actual event. Soren Kierkegaard WAS engaged to Regine Olsen, but he was never married to her. Intuitively, the engagement belongs to the sphere of the actual whereas the marriage belongs to the sphere of the merely possible, not that it is possible now. Neither event is a mere nothing. Furthermore, the engagement has, intuitively, 'more reality' than the marriage. What was is more real than what might have been. Historians attempt to determine what the actual facts were. They are constrained by the reality of the past, whence it follows that past has some sort of reality. Historians are neither fiction writers nor students of mere possibilia.

4. I take it to be a Moorean datum that past events and times are not nothing and also not merely possible. Hence a theory of time that cannot accommodate these data is worthless. How can the presentist accommodate them? He has to do it in a manner consistent with his claim that past and future items do not exist at all, that only temporally present items exist.

5. One approach is the 'ersatzer' approach: one looks for substitutes for nonpresent times. Let's consider the view that times are maximal propositions. A proposition is maximal just in case it entails every proposition with which it is broadly logically consistent. Accordingly, past and future times are contingently false maximal propositions. But then the present time is the sole true maximal proposition, and temporal presentness is identical to truth.

This scheme seems to allow us to uphold the Moorean data mentioned in #s 2-4 while holding a version of presentism. If each time is a proposition, and propositions exist omnitemporally, then all times are always available to be referred to. Sunday's hike is a wholly past event. Hence, on presentism, it does not exist at all. But the maximal propositions that were true during the hike all exist and exist now. It is just that they are now false. Sunday's hike is not nothing because those maximal propositions are not nothing and each entails *BV hikes,* a proposition that is not nothing. Sunday's hike is not merely possible because those maximal propositions, though now false, were true.

What we have done is to substitute for nonexistent past events and times, existent and present but false propositions.

6. One problem I have with this approach is as follows. If nonpresent times are false maximal propositions, then the present time is the sole true maximal proposition. If the present time is the sole true maximal proposition, then presentness is truth. The concrete universe cannot, however, be said to be true. It follows that the concrete universe cannot be said to be temporally present. But surely this is false: it anythiingis temporally present the concrete universe is. For the presentist, whatever exists, exists at present. The concrete universe exists, ergo, it is present.

Here is a second argument. If a contingent, singular, affirmative proposition is true, then it is made true by an existing non-proposition. If the present time is the sole maximal true proposition, then it has a truth-maker. That truth-maker is the concrete universe in its present state. So the concrete universe must have the property of being temporally present to serve as the truth-maker of the present time. For only the present universe could make true the maximal proposition that alone is presently true.

The ersatzer approach puts Descartes before the whores the cart before the horse: it is the presentness of the concrete universe that explains the present truth of the maximal proposition with which the present time has been identified, and not the other way around. Temporal presentness cannot be truth. It cannot be 'kicked upstairs' to the level of abstracta.

7. In sum, the presentist must somehow account for the reality of the past since the past is not nothing and not something merely possible. But the above ersatzer approach fails. So what makes it true now that I hiked eight hours on Sunday? If I understood Rhoda's suggestion it is that God's veridical memory of my hiking on Sunday is the truth-maker of 'I hiked last Sunday.' We will have to consider Rhoda's suggestion in a separate post. Deus ex machina?

Thinking Meat?

Argument A. Meat can't think. My brain is meat. Therefore, what thinks in me when I think is not my brain.

A in Reverse: What thinks in me when I think is my brain. My brain is meat. Therefore, meat can think.

The proponent of A needn't deny that we are meatheads. Of course we are. We are literally meat (and bone) all the way through. His point is that the res cogitans cannot be a hunk of meat.

Both arguments are valid, but only one is sound. The decision comes down to the initial premises of the two arguments. Is there a rational way of deciding between these premises?

A materialist might argue as follows. Although we cannot at present understand how a hunk of meat could feel and think, what is actual is possible regardless of our ability or inability to explain how it is possible. The powers of certain configurations of matter could remain hidden for a long time from our best science, or even remain hidden forever. What else would be doing the thinking and feeling in us if not our brains? What else could the mind be but the functioning brain? The fact that we cannot understand how the brain could be a semantic engine is not a conclusive reason for thinking that it is not a semantic engine.

It is worth noting that the reverent gushing of the neuro-scientistic types over the incredible complexity of the brain does absolutely nothing to reduce the unintelligibility of the notion that it is brains or parts of brains that are the subjects of intentional and qualitative mental states. For it is unintelligible how ramping up complexity can trigger a metabasis eis allo genos. Are you telling me that meat that means is just meat that is more complex than ordinary meat? You might as well say that the leap from unmeaning meat to meaning meat is a miracle. Some speak of 'emergence.' But that word merely papers over the difficulty, labelling the problem without solving it. You may as well say, as in the cartoon, "And then a miracle occurs." But then it's Game Over for the materialist.

Our materialist would do better to insist that unintelligibility to us does not entail impossibility. Our inability to explain how X is possible does not entail that X is not possible.

My response would be that while unintelligibility does not entail impossibility, it is excellent evidence of it. If you tell me that a certain configuration of neurons is intrinsically object-directed, directed to an object that may or may not exist without prejudice to the object-directedness, then you are saying something unintelligible. It is as if you said that.5 volts intrinsically represents 1 and .7 volts intrinsically represents 0. That's nonsense. Or it as if you said that a pile of rocks intrinsically indicates the direction of the trial. (See The Philosophizing Hiker: The Derivative Intentionality of Trail Markers.)

No rock pile has intrinsic meaning or intrinsic representational power. And the same goes for any material item or configuration of material items no matter how complex. No such system has intrinsic meaning; any meaning it has is derived. The meaning is derived either from an intelligent being who ascribes meaning to the material system, or from an intelligent being whose purposes are embodied in the material system, or both.

Thus I am rejecting the view that meaning could inhere in material systems apart from relations to minds that are intrinsically intentional, minds who are original Sinn-ers, if you will, original mean-ers. We are all of us Sinn-ers, every man Jack of us, original Sinn-ers, but our Sinn-ing is not mortal or venial but vital. Intrinsic, underived intentionality is our very lifeblood as spiritual beings.

So if the materialist says that the brain means, intends, represents, thinks, etc., then I say that makes no sense given what we understand the brain to be. The brain is a material system and the physical, chemical, electrical, and biological properties it and its parts have cannot be meaningfully predicated of mental states. One cannot speak intelligibly of a voltage drop across a mental state any more than can one speak intelligibly of the intentionality of synapses or of their point of view or of what it is like to be one.

Of course, the materialist can pin his hope on a future science that understands the brain in different terms, terms that could be sensibly attached to mental phenomena. But this is nothing more than an empty gesturing towards a 'possibility' that cannot be described except in the vaguest terms. It is nothing but faith, hope, and hand-waving.

There is also the dogmatism of the materialist who insists that the subject of thinking must be the functioning brain. How does he know that? He doesn't. He believes it strongly is all.

So I give the palm to Argument A: Meat can't think. My brain is meat. Therefore, what thinks in me when I think is not my brain.

I do not absolutely foreclose on the abstract possibility that there be thinking meat. For I grant that unintelligibility to us is not invincible proof of impossibility. But when I compare that vaguely described abstract possibility with the present certainty that matter as we know it cannot think due to the very unintelligibility of the idea, then the present certainty wins over the abstract possibility and over the faith and hope of the materialist.

Cf. They're Made Out of Meat

Relations With Relatives

Our relations with our relatives are too often like the relations of Arabs and Israelis: too much past, no future. But with the Arabs and Israelis it is even worse: too much history, not enough geography.

Conservatives and Prudence

The fourth of Russell Kirk's Ten Conservative Principles reads:

Fourth, conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence. Burke agrees with Plato that in the statesman, prudence is chief among virtues. Any public measure ought to be judged by its probable long-run consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity. Liberals and radicals, the conservative says, are imprudent: for they dash at their objectives without giving much heed to the risk of new abuses worse than the evils they hope to sweep away. As John Randolph of Roanoke put it, Providence moves slowly, but the devil always hurries. Human society being complex, remedies cannot be simple if they are to be efficacious. The conservative declares that he acts only after sufficient reflection, having weighed the consequences. Sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery.

How does Barack Obama stack up against this fourth principle? Permit me a slight exaggeration: Obama is the apotheosis of imprudence. Like Randolph's "devil who always hurries," he is in a big rush to "fundamentally transform America" (his words), as witness Obamacare and Obama's stunning fiscal irresponsibility. The national debt approaches 17 trillion (by a very conservative measure) and the man thinks that not a problem. Well, as Krazy Krugman says, the government is not like a household: the government can print money! Yes it can. And will.

At once a devil and a deification. We are in for it.

Why Liberals Still Detest Fox News

Good analysis by Jonathan Tobin from the pages of Commentary.

No one is more illiberal than a contemporary liberal. They don't deserve the appellation. 'Leftist' is better.

On Philosophical Denials of the Obvious

In philosophy, appeals to the obvious don't cut much ice because, as Hilary Putnam says somewhere, "It ain't obvious what's obvious." And as Spencer Case, MavPhil Cairo correspondent, points out, ". . . in contemporary academic philosophy there is a perverse incentive to deny the obvious." One who denies what counts as obvious to the vulgar comes off as a learned sophisticate while the one who invokes the obvious is cast in the role of rube or bigot or intransigent fool.

This raises the question whether there are obvious truths the denial of which would be perverse and sophistical. The answer is obviously in the affirmative. For example, it is obvious that normal post-natal human beings have two legs, that if they live long enough they learn to walk upright upon them, etc. Examples are easily multiplied ad libitum in the Moorean manner. More interesting is the question whether there are obvious truths that competent, academically accredited philosophers have denied either directly or by implication. I asked Spencer for examples. Here is part of that he said:

As far as more serious philosophers go, certain pro-choice hardliners at the University of Colorado deny that it is wrong to kill small children in fairly mundane circumstances. In addition, I believe every emotivist and expressivist theory of semantic content of moral statements denies the obvious. It's obvious that when I say "eating meat is morally wrong" I do not mean "eating meat (Boo!)" or anything of the sort. I am the one formulating the statement, and I know damn well what I intend to say. Extreme materialism in philosophy of mind, and David Lewis' ideas about modality also seem like good examples to me. Then there's Graham Priest who denies the law of non-contradiction. (But you might have already noticed the hedging in "I believe" or "seem like.")

Let's consider three examples. I expect Case to agree with me about the first two and disagree about the third.

1. Infanticide. I argue this way: "Infanticide is morally wrong; there is no morally relevant difference between late-term abortion and infanticide; ergo, late-term abortion is morally wrong." But of course the argument can be run in reverse with no breach of logical propriety: "Late-term abortion is not morally wrong; there is no morally relevant difference between late-term abortion and infanticide; ergo, Infanticide is not morally wrong." For details, see here.

Both arguments are valid, but only one can be sound. Which one? The first, say I. I am tempted to say that is just obvious that killing infant humans is morally wrong in the vast majority of circumstances, and that if you say the opposite, then you are denyng the obvious. I think Spencer will agree with me on this. So here is a case where it is obvious what's obvious. Even if it is not blindingly self-evident that killing infant humans, for convenience say, is morally wrong, it is more obvious than the opposite.

Of course, much more can be said in elaboration of the basic point, and to soften up my opponent. But if he remains intransigent, then I am well within my epistemic rights in writing him off as morally blind and showing him the door. What is both subjectively and objectively self-evident to me is not subjectively self-evident to him — but that is due to a defect in his cognitive apparatus: he is just morally obtuse.

2. Extreme Materialism. One form of extreme materialism about the mind, the most extreme, is eliminative materialism. I trust Spencer will agree with me if I simply dismiss it as a lunatic philosophy of mind despite its having been espoused by some brilliant people. For argument, see my Eliminative Materialism category. Brilliance is no guarantee of truth. (David Lewis goes wrong brilliantly and most creatively.) My dismissal of eliminative material is a dismissal of its claim to be credible. It is incredible. (By its own lights there are no beliefs, which also supplies a reason for its being unbelievable). But I am not saying that one shouldn't study it. After all, pathology can be very instructive, whether one studies diseased tissue or diseased thinking.

Less extreme is identity materialism which I argue collapses into eliminativism. I am within my epistemic rights in simply stating that it is obvious that my present thinking about the Boston Common is not identical to a complex state of my brain. Of course, I am not saying that one should not be prepared to give detailed arguments and to answer objections. But all that is merely in the service of what really ought to be obvious. The arguments merely articulate the position one finds obvious, situating it within the space of reasons.

3. Berkeleyan Idealism. Can it be dismissed in the same way, as involving a denial of the obvious? As I said in an earlier post (December 2009) responding to Case:

I think it is clear that someone who identifies God with an anthropomorphic projection simply denies the existence of God. This putative identification collapses into an elimination. You are not telling me what God is when you tell me he is an anthropomorphic projection, you are telling me that there is no such being. Same with felt pains. A putative identification of a felt pain with a brain state collapses into an elimination of felt pains. For a felt pain simply cannot be identical to a brain state: it has properties no brain state could possibly have. But an identification of a physical object with a cluster of items such as Berkeleyan ideas or Husserlian noemata, items that exist only mind-dependently, does not collapse into an elimination, the reason being that there is nothing in the nature of physical objects as we experience them that requires that such objects exist in splendid independence of any mind. I just located my coffee mug on my desk, and now I am drinking from it. There is nothing in my experiential encounter with this physical thing that requires me to think of it as something that exists whether or not any mind exists. And so I am not barred from the idealist interpretation of the ontological status of stones and coffee cups and their parts (and their parts . . .). Nor does the meaning of 'coffee cup' or 'physical object' constrain me to think of such things as existing in complete independence of any mind. Neither phenomenology nor semantics forces realism upon me. There is nothing commonsensical about either realism or idealism; both are theories.

Neither a realist nor an idealist interpretation of the ontological status of physical objects can be 'read off' from the phenomenology of our experiential encounter with such things or from the semantics of the words we use in referring to them and describing them. Only if realism were built into the phenomenology or the semantics would an identification of a physical thing with a cluster of mind-dependent items collapse into an elimination of the physical thing. For in that case it would be the very nature of a physical thing to exist mind-independently so that any claim to the contrary would be tantamount to a denial of the existence of the physical thing. The situation would then be exactly parallel to the one in which someone claims that God is an anthropomorphic projection. Since nothing could possibly count as God that is an anthropomorphic projection, any claim that God is such a projection amounts to a denial of the existence of God. But the cases are not parallel since there is nothing in the nature of a physical thing as this nature is revealed by the phenomenology of our encouter with them to require that physical things exist in sublime independence of any and all minds.

Of course, one could just stipulate that physical objects are all of them mind-independent. But what could justify such a stipulation? That would be no better than Ayn Rand's axiomatic declaration, Existence exists! What Rand means by that is that whatever exists exists in such a way as to require no mind for its existence. But although that may be true, it is far from self-evident and so has no claim to being an axiom.

In sum, token-token-identity theory in the philosophy of mind collapses into eliminativism about mental items. As so collapsing, it is refutable by Moorean means. The identitarian claims of idealists, however, do not collapse into eliminativist claims, and so are not refutable by Moorean means.

My claim, then, is that Berkeleyan idealism does not deny the obvious in the way that the eliminative materialist does. Indeed, it shows a lack of philosophical intelligence if one thinks that Berkeleyan idealism or its opposite is obvious. St. Paul displays the same lack of philosophical intelligence when he claims, at Romans 1:18-20 that the existence and nature of God are obvious from nature. See Is Atheism Intellectually Respectable? On Roman 1:18-20.

Nature can be reasonably interpreted both as divine handiwork and as the opposite in the same way that the tree in the quad can be interpreted Berkeley-wise or the opposite. But my current headache or my present thoughts about Bostion cannot be reasonably interpreted as identical to material states. It is obvious that they are not material states given the understanding of 'material 'supplied by current physics.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Forgotten Folkies

Paul Clayton, Wild Mountain Thyme.

Who's Gonna Buy You Ribbons (When I'm Gone). Dylan borrowed a bit of the melody and some of the lyrics for his Don't Think Twice. This is a proto-version prior to the Freewheelin' album.

Dylan talks about Clayton in the former's Chronicles, Volume One, Simon and Shuster, 2004, pp. 260-261.

Mark Spoelstra is also discussed by Dylan somewhere in Chronicles. While I flip through the pages, you enjoy Sugar Babe, It's All Over Now. The title puts me in mind of Dylan's wonderful It's All Over Now, Baby Blue. Comparing these two songs one sees why Spoelstra, competent as he is, is a forgotten folkie while Dylan is the "bard of our generation" to quote the ultra conservative Lawrence Auster.

Ah yes, Spoelstra is mentioned on pp. 74-75.

About Karen Dalton, Dylan has this to say (Chronicles, p. 12):

My favorite singer in the place [Cafe Wha?, Greenwich Village] was Karen Dalton. She was a tall white blues singer and guitar player, funky, lanky and sultry. I'd actually met her before, run across her the previous summer outside of Denver in a mountain pass town in a folk club. Karen had a voice like Billie Holliday's and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed and went all the way with it. I sang with her a couple of times.

It Hurts Me Too

In My Own Dream.

Same Old Man

Presentism and Existence Simpliciter: Questions for Rhoda

For Alan Rhoda, "Presentism is the metaphysical thesis that whatever exists, exists now, in the present. The past is no more. The future is not yet. Either something exists now, or it does not exist, period." Rhoda goes on to claim that presentism is "arguably the common sense position." I will first comment on whether presentism is commonsensical and then advance to the weightier question of what it could mean for something to exist period, or exist simpliciter.

Common Sense?

It is certainly common sense that the past is no more and the future is not yet. These are analytic truths understood by anyone who understands English. They are beyond the reach of reasonable controversy, stating as they do that the past and the future are not present. But presentism is a substantive metaphysical thesis well within the realm of reasonable controversy. It is a platitude that what no longer exists, does not now exist. But there is nothing platitudinous about 'What no longer exists, does not exist at all, or does not exist period, or does not exist simpliciter.' That is a theoretical claim of metaphysics about time and existence that is neither supported nor disqualified by common sense and the Moorean data comprising it.

In the four sentences that begin his article, Rhoda has two platitudes sandwiched between two metaphysical claims. This gives the impression that the metaphysical claims are supported by the platitudes. My point is that the platitudes, though consistent with the metaphysical theory, give it no aid and comfort.

Compare the problem of universals: It is a Moorean fact that my cup is blue and that I see the blueness at the cup. But this datum neither supports nor disqualifies the metaphysical theory that blueness is a universal, nor does it either support or disqualify the competing metaphysical theory that the blueness is a particular, a trope. Neither common sense, nor ordinary language analysis, nor phenomenology can resolve the dispute. Dialectical considerations must be brought to bear.

Existence Simpliciter

Be that as it may. If we pursue the above line we will be led into metaphilosophy. On to the central topic. 'Whatever exists, exists now' is open to the Triviality Objection: of course, what exists (present-tense) exists now! Enter existence simpliciter. The following is not a tautology: 'Whatever exists simpliciter, exists now.'

The problem is to understand exactly what existence simpliciter is. Let's recall that in this series of posts it is not the truth-value of presentism that concerns me, but something logically prior to that, namely, the very sense of the thesis. Only after a thesis is identified can it be evaluated. I am not being coy. I really don't understand what precisely the presentist thesis is. What's more, I have no convictions in the philosophy of time the way I do in the philosophy of existence. No convictions, and no axes to grind. For example, I am convinced that the Fregean doctrine of existence is mistaken, pace such luminaries as Frege, Russell, Quine and their latter-day torch-bearers such as van Inwagen. I am not at all convinced that presentism is wrong. Like I said, I am not clear as to what it states.

Alan can correct me if I am wrong, but I think what he means by 'existence simpliciter' is something like this:

ES. X exists simpliciter =_df (Ey)(x = y).

In plain English, an item exists simpliciter if it is identical to something. 'Identical to something' is elliptical for 'identical to something or other.' I ascribe (ES) to Alan on the basis of a comment of his to the effect that existence simpliciter is the unrestricted quantifier sense of 'exists.' I take it that unrestricted quantifiers range over unrestricted domains, and that an absolutely unrestricted domain contains everything: past items, present items, future items, atemporal items, merely possible items . . . . Presentism could then be put as follows:

P. (x)[(Ey)(x = y) =_df x exists now].

That is,

P*. Everything is such that it is identical to something iff it exists now.

Now if the quantifiers in (P) and (P*) range over everything, including past and future items, then the theses are trivially false. But if they range only over present items, then they are trivially true. To avoid this difficulty, we might formulate Rhoda's presentism thusly:

P**. All and only present items instantiate the concept being identical to something.

The idea, then, is that we have the concept existence simpliciter and this concept is the concept being identical to something. Accordingly the presentist is saying something nontrivial about this concept, namely, that all and only its instances are temporally present items.

Unfortunately, I am still puzzled. Is the verb instantiate' in (P**) present-tensed? No, that way lies Triviality. Is it timeless? No, there is nothing timeless on Rhoda's scheme. Is it disjunctive: 'did instantiate or do instantiate or will instantiate'? No, for that too is false: it is false that all items that did or do or will instantiate the concept identical to something are temporally present. Socrates did instantiate the concept but he is not temporally present. And obviously 'instantiate' in (P**) cannot be replaced by 'omnitemporally instantiate.' That leaves a tense-neutral reading of 'instantiate' which somehow abstracts from the timeless, the present-tensed, the omnitemporal and the disjunctive use of a verb.

I am having trouble understanding what what this tense-neutral use of 'instantiate' amounts to. But this may only be a problem for me and not for Rhoda's theory.

Could the Meaning of Life be the Quest for the Meaning of LIfe?

I have toyed with the notion that the meaning of life just is the search for its meaning. But this is really no better than saying that the meaning of life is subjective: posited and maintained by the agent of the life, and potentially different for different agents. If the meaning of human life is subjective, however, then it has no meaning. Similarly, if the meaning of life is exhausted in the search for life's meaning, then there is no meaning apart from the search, which is to say that life has no meaning, strictly speaking. The following, then, is a nonstarter:

1. The meaning of human life consists in the quest for its meaning.

But (1) is to be distinguished from

2. No human life can count as truly meaningful unless some portion of it is devoted to raising, investigating, and answering for oneself the question as to the meaning of human life.

(2) I heartily endorse. The difference between (1) and (2) is that (1) identifies the quest for meaning with meaning whereas (2) does not.