A weapon of mass distraction.
Month: March 2013
On the Left’s Toleration of Muslim Fanatics
Here is an important interview with Lars Hedegaard, Denmark's Salman Rushdie, whose life is in danger because he speaks the truth as he sees it. Hedegaard is a man of the Left, but do they come to his defense? Excerpt:
DP: Where are the attacks on you being racist coming from? What part of the ideological spectrum?
LH: I would say almost exclusively from the left. (Of course, also from Muslims. Not all Muslims, but some.) I seem to be very unpopular with my old friends. I think the problem is that I know what it's all about to be left-wing; I used to be a leading Marxist in this country. But I've held to the opinion that we first of all have to fight for free speech and freedom and equality between the sexes and the rule of law; and also, that we should not bow before religious fanatics of any type, regardless of where they come from. This seems to me what was the essence of being left-wing back in the days. No longer.
The left now seems to have reverence for fanatics — as long as they are Muslim. Of course, they can criticize Christianity all they want. But when somebody threatens with violence — if you criticize me, I'll come and kill you — then all of a sudden they become soft. They become understanding. They talk about tolerance; we have to show respect. I don't want to show respect for people who say that men are worth more than women, that women can be killed if they are adulterers; that apostates from Islam should be killed; that people should be stoned, etc. I mean, I don't like that. I want to fight that. I want to describe it. And I don't think the left does.
Defining Presentism
I concede to London Ed that it is not clear what exactly the thesis of presentism is. There is no point in considering objections to it until we are sure what the thesis comes to. The rough idea is of course easy to convey: only temporally present items exist. This is more plausible under restriction to items 'in time' where the eternal God and abstracta such as Fregean propositions are not 'in time.' The rough idea, then, is that only present contingent concreta exist. This implies that a wholly past contingent concretum such as Socrates does not exist.
But how are we to take 'exist' in the last two sentences? As present-tensed? Then both sentences are trivially true. Surely no philosopher who calls himself a presentist intends
Tautological Presentism: Only present contingent concreta exist at present.
And of course he doesn't intend
Timeless Presentism: Only present contingent concreta exist timelessly.
For that implies that if x is a timeless contingent concretum, then x is temporally present.
But the clear-headed presentist must also, in his formulation of his thesis, avoid giving aid and
comfort to the absurdity that could be called 'solipsism of the present moment.' (I borrow the phrase from Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, Simon and Schuster 1948, p. 181.) To wit,
SPM Presentism: Only what exists (present tense) exists simpliciter; nothing existed and nothing will exist.
The idea behind (SPM) is decidedly counterintuitive if not insane. To illustrate, consider James Dean who died on September 30th, 1955. It is a Moorean fact that Dean existed but no longer exists. (Alter the example to Dean's car if you hold to the immortality of the soul.) It is a Moorean fact that there actually was this actor, that he was not a mere possibility or a fictional being or nothing at all. But this plain fact is incompatible with SPM-Presentism.
Another possibility is
Disjunctive Presentism: Only present contingent concreta existed or exist or will exist.
Disjunctive Presentism seems objectionable because, e.g., Scollay Square existed, but does not now.
What about
Tenseless Presentism: Only present contingent concreta tenselessly exist.
Now the problem is to explain that 'tenselessly exist' means if it does not mean 'timelessly exist' or 'did exist, does exist, or will exist.'
Ned Markosian defines presentism as the view that, "necessarily, it is always true that only present objects exist." (here, fn 1) This is not helpful since we are not told how to read 'exist.' The Triviality Objection threatens to kick in. And how are we to understand, "it is always true"? If this involves quantifying over times, then anti-presentism is let in through the back door. If there is a manifold of equally real/existent times, then presentism cannot be true of these times.
The Criminology of Firearms
Many liberals feel that civilian gun ownership is unnecessary because adequate protection against the criminal element is afforded by the police. I advise them to think through the following considerations:
Misinformed people oppose self-defense objections to gun ban laws, urging victims to instead rely on police. This misunderstands what policing is and does. Accordingly, when criminals rob or injure them, misinformed victims try to sue the police for not protecting them. Whereupon the police send forth lawyers invoking the universal US rule that the police duty is to discourage crime only indirectly by patrolling the streets and by apprehending criminals after their crimes.
While police should stop crimes they observe, criminals take care to strike when police are not present. In fact, police almost never (less than 3 percent of cases) arrive in time to help victims. For that reason, the statutory or common law of every state exonerates police from suit for non-protection, e.g. California Government Code §§ 821, 845 and 846: “[A police department and its officers are] not liable for an injury caused by … failure to enforce an enactment [nor for] failure to provide police protection service or … provide sufficient police protection service [nor for] the failure to make an arrest or [the] failure to retain an arrested person in custody.”
Misinformed persons also urge victims to depend on restraining orders instead of self-defense. But restraining orders are just pieces of paper. A five-year study [PDF] in Massachusetts found that almost 25 percent of domestic murderers were under a restraining order when they killed.
Making Sure That It Never Happens Again
From The Hill:
President Obama on Sunday said he would make gun control a priority in his new term, pledging to put his “full weight” behind passing new restrictions on firearms in 2013.
“I'm going to be putting forward a package and I'm going to be putting my full weight behind it,” Obama said in an interview aired on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I'm going to be making an argument to the American people about why this is important and why we have to do everything we can to make sure that something like what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary does not happen again.”
Question: Does any clear-thinking person seriously believe that steps can be taken to prevent such events from ever happening again? Of course not. Then why the empty utopian rhetoric? The "everything we can" is equally silly. There is a way to severely reduce the likelihood of another Sandy Hook type shooting. And that is to to secure every school like a prison. That would be much more effective that any tightening of gun laws. So if we must do "everything we can," then we ought to secure every school, every church, every college campus, etc. like a prison or a military installation.
What comes out of Obama's mouth is just feel-good liberal-left blather, thoughtless verbiage, without contact with facts or evidence, and without consequence for the solution of any real problem. The only real consequence is a further erosion of liberty and an expansion of the state.
Time and Tense: Remarks on the B-Theory
What is time? Don't ask me, and I know. Ask me, and I don't know. (St. Augustine) This post sketches, without defending, one theory of time.
On the B-Theory of time, real or objective time is exhausted by what J. M. E. McTaggart called the B-series, the series of times, events, and individuals ordered by the B-relations (earlier than, later than, simultaneous with). If the B-theory is correct, then our ordinary sense that events approach us from the future, arrive at the present, and then recede into the past is at best a mind-dependent phenomenon. For on the B-theory, there are no such irreducible monadic A-properties as futurity, presentness and pastness. There is just a manifold of tenselessly existing events ordered by the B-relations. Time does not pass or flow, let alone fly. There is no temporal becoming. My birth is not sinking into the past, becoming ever more past, nor is my death approaching from the future, getting closer and closer. Tempus fugit does not express a truth about reality. At best, it picks out a truth about our experience of reality.
If there is no temporal becoming in reality, then change is not a becoming different or a passing away or a coming into being. When a tomato ripens, it doee not become ripe: it simply is unripe at certain times and is ripe at certain later times. And when it cease to exist, it doesn't pass away: it simply is at certain times and is not at certain later times.
Employing a political metaphor, one could say that a B-theorist is an egalitarian about times and the events at times: they are all equal in point of reality. Accordingly, my blogging now is no more real (but also no less real) than Socrates' drinking the hemlock millenia ago. Nor is it more real than my death which, needless to say, lies in the future. Each time is present at itself, but no time is present, period. And each time (and the events at it) exists relative to itself, but no time exists absolutely.
This is not to say that the B-theorist does not have uses for 'past,' 'present,' and 'future.' He can speak with the vulgar while thinking with the learned. Thus a B-theorist can hold that an utterance at time t of 'E is past' expresses the fact that E is earlier than t. An old objection is that this does not capture the meaning of 'E is past.' For the fact that E is earlier than t, if true, is always true; while 'E is past' is true only after E. This difference in truth conditions shows a difference in meaning. The B-theorist can respond by saying that his concern is not with semantics but with ontology. His concern is with the reality, or rather the lack of reality, of tense, and not with the meanings of tensed sentences or sentences featuring A-expressions. The B-theorist can say that, regardless of meaning, what makes it true that E is past at t is that E is earlier than t, and that, in mind-independent reality, nothing else is needed to make 'E is past' uttered at t true.
Compare 'BV is hungry' and 'I am hungry' said by BV. The one is true if and only if the other is. But the two sentences differ in meaning. The first, if true, is true no matter who says it; but the second is true only if asserted by someone who is hungry. Despite the difference in meaning, what makes it true that I am hungry (assertively uttered by BV) is that BV is hungry. In sum, the B-theorist need not be committed to the insupportable contention that A-statements are translatable salva significatione into B-statements.
The B-theorist, then, denies that the present moment enjoys any temporal or existential privilege. Every
time is temporally present to itself such that no time is temporally present simpliciter. This temporal egalitarianism entails a decoupling of existence and temporal presentness. There just is no irreducible monadic property of temporal presentness; hence existence cannot be identified with it. To exist is to exist tenselessly. The B-theory excludes presentism according to which there is a genuine, irreducible, property of temporal presentness and existence is either identical or logically equivalent to this property. Presentism implies that only the temporally present is real or existent. If to exist is to exist now, then the past and future do not exist, not jusdt now (which is trivial) but at all.
Please note that the B-theory is incompatible not only with presentism, but with any theory that is committed to irreducible A-properties. Thus the B-theory rules out 'pastism,' the crazy theory that only the past exists and 'futurism,' the crazy view that only the future exists. It also rules out the sane view that only the past and the present exist, and the sane view that the past, present, and future exist.
Why be a B-theorist? McTaggart has a famous argument according to which the monadic A-properties lead to contradiction. We should examine that argument in a separate post.
Which is the Hardest of the Philosophical Subdisciplines?
Without a doubt, the philosophy of time. The philosophy of mind is a piece of cake by comparison. According to a story, possibly apocryphal, Peter van Inwagen was once asked why he didn't publish on time. "Too hard," was his reply. If it is too hard for van Inwagen, it is hard. According to Hugh McCann, "Few subjects in philosophy are as difficult, as exasperating even, as the subject of time, for few elements in our experience are so inherently enigmatic." (Creation and the Sovereignty of God, p. 68)
This puts me in mind of perhaps the stupidest commercial of the '80s: "Man invented time. Seiko perfected it." Stupid but stimulating: how many fallacies can you spot?
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Van Cliburn (1934-2013)
Can a Thing Exist Without Existing Now?
Clearly, a thing can exist without existing here. The Washington Monument exists but not in my backyard. Accordingly, 'x exists here' can be split up as follows:
1. x exists here iff (i) x exists & (ii) x is in the vicinity of the speaker.
It seems pretty obvious that existence and the indexical property of hereness are different properties if you want to call them properties.
A much more difficult question is whether a thing can exist without existing now. Is it true that:
2. x exists now iff (i) x exists & (ii) x is temporally present?
Clearly, we can prise apart the existence of a (spatially located) thing and its hereness. Anyone who maintained that to exist = to be here we would deem either crazy or not conversant with the English language, a sort of 'local yokel' in excelsis. But can we prise apart the existence of a thing and its temporal presentness? Is there a real distinction between the existence of a thing and its temporal presentness?
A. A negative answer will be returned by the presentist who maintains that only the temporally present exists. He will maintain that what no longer exists and what does not yet exist does not now exist, and therefore does not exist at all.
Note that it ought to be is perfectly obvious to anyone who understands English that what no longer exists and what does not yet exist does not now exist. What is not at all obvious is the part after 'therefore' in the sentence before last. It is not at all obvious that an individual or event or time that is wholly past or wholly future does not exist at all.
B. An affirmative answer will be returned by all those who reject presentism. Some will reject presentism on the ground that abstracta exist, but are not in time at all, and so cannot be said to exist now. A presentist can accommodate this point by restricting his thesis:
Restricted Presentism: Necessarily, only temporally present concreta exist.
Nevertheless, the anti-presentist will insist that there are past and perhaps also future concreta that exist but do not exist now. Scollay Square, for example, no longer exists. But that it not to say that it is now nothing. After all, we still refer to it and say true things about it. It is true, for example, that my father visited Scollay Square while on shore leave during WW II on a break from service on destroyer escorts in the North Atlantic. So it is true that a a sailor who no longer exists visited a place that no longer exists and was involved in events that no longer exist. It also true that Scollay Square had been demolished by the time I arrived in Boston in 1973. I can now argue as follows:
1. Various predicates (e.g., is remembered by some Bostonians) are true of Scollay Square.
2. Scollay Square does not exist now.
3. If x does not exist, then no predicate is true of x.
Therefore
4. Scollay Square exists. (From 1 and 3)
Therefore
5. Scollay Square exists but is not temporally present. (From 2 and 4)
Therefore
6. Restricted Presentism is false.
I think there are three ways to attack this argument: (a) reject one or more of the premises; (b) find fault with the reasoning; (c) complain that it is not clear what Restricted Presentism amounts to.
Have at it, boys.
Krauss Kreamed
Ed Feser is quite the polemicist, as witness his latest flogging of Lawrence Krauss.
Many commentators with no theological ax to grind — such as David Albert, Massimo
Pigliucci, Brian Leiter, and even New Atheist featherweight Jerry Coyne — slammed Krauss’s amateurish foray into philosophy. Here’s some take-to-the-bank advice to would-be atheist provocateurs: When even Jerry Coyne thinks your attempt at atheist apologetics “mediocre,” it’s time to throw in the towel. Causa finita est. Game over. Shut the hell up already.
But isn't there something unseemly about beating up a cripple and rolling a drunk? Not that I haven't done it myself.
The Conservative Sociologist
'Conservative sociologist' smacks of an oxymoron, does it not? So just for fun this morning I typed the phrase into my search engine of choice and was directed to The Conservative Sociologist where I encountered the graphic below. The proprietor of the site is of the female persuasion. We need more distaff bloggers, though not a federal program to encourage them.