Senator John McCain is for it. Victor Davis Hanson is against it. VDH has the better case, as it seems to me.
The further expenditure of American blood and treasure "to teach locals not to be their tribal selves" (VDH) is a losing proposition. We are in deep trouble domestically, and we are going to teach benighted Middle Eastern tribalists how to live? How has that worked out in the past? And with our trash culture of empty celebrity, an entertainment industry that resembles an open sewer, fiscal irresponsibility, ever-widening political divisions, and a panem-et-circenses populace, we are not exactly role models to anyone any more.
I'm curious as to when you eat breakfast in relation to when you do your early morning studying, meditating, hiking, or running. I know you've mentioned a few times that you've done these activities before meeting folks for breakfast, so I am curious to know if eating affects your mental and/or spiritual clarity.
Eating definitely affects mental and spiritual clarity, and usually adversely, although it depends on the quantity and quality of what is eaten and drunk. My rule is: Nothing but coffee until after meditation. And no electronics until after meditation. A typical day goes like this. Up at 2 AM, reading and journal writing and coffee drinking til 4, then meditation 4-5, then more coffee and some toast smeared with almond butter (great stuff!). Then I turn on the modem (which I keep off at night), fire up the computer, answer e-mail and blog comments, work on a blog post, then around 5:30 or later depending on the season head out for 2-3 hours of exercise either a local hike/run or a combination of weight-lifting, swimming, and riding the mountain bike. For hydration I drink copious amount of water and OJ.
Only after physical exercise do I have a proper breakfast, around 7:30 or 8:30. But a little something before exercise is a good idea to fuel your exertions.
Don't imitate Jim Morrison, that distinguished member of the 27 Club, Roadhouse Blues: "I woke up this morning and I had myself a beer. The future's uncertain and death is always near." Yes it is if beer's your breakfast.
I dedicate this post to Victor Reppert who thinks along similar lines, and shares my love of the oldies.
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If matter could think, then matter would not be matter as currently understood.
Can abstracta think? Sets count as abstracta. Can a set think? Could the set of primes contemplate itself and think the thought, 'I am a set, and each of my members is a prime number'? Given what we know sets to be from set theory, sets cannot think. It is the same with matter. Given what we know or believe matter to be from current physics, matter cannot think. To think is to think about something, and it is this aboutness or intentionality that proves embarrassing for materialism. I have expatiated on this over many, many posts and I can't repeat myself here. (Here is a characteristic post.)
But couldn't matter have occult powers, powers presently hidden from our best physics, including the power to think? Well, could sets have occult powers that a more penetrating set theory would lay bare? Should we pin our hopes on future set theory? Obviously not. Why not? Because it makes no sense to think of sets as subjects of intentional states. We know a priori that the set of primes cannot lust after the set of evens. It is impossible in a very strong sense: it is broadly logically impossible.
Of course, there is a big difference between sets and brains. We know enough about sets to know a priori that sets cannot think. But perhaps we don't yet know enough about the human brain. So I don't dogmatically claim that matter could not have occult or hidden powers. Maybe the meat between my ears does have the power to think. But then that meat is not matter in any sense we currently understand. And that is my point. You can posit occult powers if you like, and pin your hopes on a future science that will lay them bare; but then you are going well beyond the empirical evidence and engaging in high-flying speculations that ought to seem unseemly to hard-headed empiricistic and scientistic types.
Such types are known to complain about spook stuff and ghosts-in-machines. But to impute occult powers, powers beyond our ken, to brain matter does not seem to be much of an improvement. For that is a sort of dualism too. There are the properties and powers we know about, and the properties and powers we know nothing about but posit to avoid the absurdities of identity materialism and eliminativism. There is also the dualism of imagining that matter when organized into human brains is toto caelo different from ordinary hunks of matter. There is also a dualism within the brain as between those parts of it that are presumably thinking and feeling and those other parts that perform more mudane functions. Why are some brain states mental and others not? Think about it. (I have a detailed post on this but I don't have time to find it.)
The materialist operates with a conception of matter tied to current physics. On that conception of matter, it is simply unintelligible to to say that brains feel or think. If he nonetheless ascribes mental powers to matter, then he abandons materialism for something closer to panpsychism. I seem to recall Reppert making this point recently.
It is worth noting that the reverent gushing of the neuro-scientistic types over the incredible complexity (pound the lectern!) 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, a shift into another genus. 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. Do you materialists believe in miracle meat or mystery meat? Do you believe in magic?
I've been following your writing on same sex marriage and I've got to say I think you have, in a certain sense, taken the bait. SSM proponents demand much of conservatives that they are in no position to demand. For instance, they demand that conservatives, in order to justify their views on marriage, indicate a single property or set of properties unique to the relationships that currently count as marriages. "All and only heterosexual couples have what common feature?" is the challenge.
You try to meet this demand by specifying potentiality to procreate. This is only true on a metaphysical understanding of "potentiality" – in the ordinary sense, 70-year-olds have lost that potentiality.
Spencer, I think you have misconstrued my argument. I did not use the word 'potentiality.' And I don't know what you mean by a metaphysical as opposed to an ordinary understanding of the term. Here is what I said:
It is biologically impossible that homosexual unions produce offspring. It is biologically possible, and indeed biologically likely, that heterosexual unions produce offspring. That is a very deep difference grounded in a biological fact and not in the law or in anything conventional. This is the underlying fact that both justifies the state's interest in and regulation of marriage, and justifies the state's restriction of marriage to opposite-sex couples.
I did not make the (false) claim that every opposite-sexed couple has the power to procreate.
Unfortunately, I think conservatives do themselves great harm when they rely on metaphysics in the marriage debate when they have recourse to other lines of response. I respect metaphysics, but it is rarely useful in politics.
I disagree completely. The same-sex marriage question and most if not all of the 'hot button' issues currently debated are metaphysical at bottom. Consider abortion. Everything rides on the status of the fetus. Is it a person in the normative sense, i.e., a rights-possessor? What are the criteria of descriptive and normative personhood? What are rights? In what are they grounded? These are metaphysical questions. A powerful anti-abortion argument is the potentiality argument. Underlying it, however, is broadly Aristotelian metaphysics. Those who reject this metaphysics will be opting for some metaphysical alternative. Questions about diachronic numerical identity arise, questions that are plainly metaphysical. (See Fission and Zygotes.) And so on.
I could show the same for most of the 'hot button' issues. In general, political philosophy rests on normative ethics which rests on a theory of human nature (philosophical anthropology), which is turn presupposes metaphysics. So metaphysics is unavoidable. One point I will concede, however, is that we ought to keep religion out of these discussions, assuming we are addressing fellow citizens as opposed to co-religionists.
Let me remind you that very often the law makes distinctions where there is no essential difference, as when we pick a certain age as the baseline for sexual consent. There is a certain kind of arbitrariness there, but one we must be stuck with in any event. So, essential difference is neither necessary nor sufficient for a difference in legal and social status.
You are making it sound as it it is wholly arbitrary where the law draws a line. I gave the example of driving. It is somewhat arbitrary, but not totally arbitrary, to make the legal driving age 16. There are excellent, non-arbitrary, reasons for not making it five or ten, or 25 or 30. These reasons are grounded in biological and psychological facts. As for the age of sexual consent, a non-arbitrary lower bound is provided by puberty. Similarly with voting and drinking alcohol. There is a range of arbitrarity between, say, 18 and 21. But there are excellent, non-abitrary reasons grounded in biological and developmental facts for keeping six year olds out of voting booths and bar rooms.
So I find your comment confused. No essential difference need be cited for making the driving age 16 rather than 17, but essential differences are relevant when we move beyond the range of arbitrarity. I am tempted to say that the lower and upper bounds on the range of arbitrarity are themselves non-arbitrary.
Applying this to same-sex 'marriage,' there is nothing arbitrary about the law's not recognizing SSMs when it recognizes OSMs. For there is the essential difference that procreation is impossible in a SSM but not in an OSM. Arbitrarity and a bit of unfairness come in when the law allows non-procreating OS couples to marry. But as I said, practical laws cannot cater to unusual cases.
A better response, and the one I use, is to challenge the challenge. Tell your interlocutor, "If I must produce some relevant property common to all heterosexual couples, then it should also be incumbent on you to specify what kinds of relationships can count as marriages, and what is the morally relevant property that all and only those relationships have. Since you think this kind of challenge is proper, you must already have something in mind to defend your side. So go on, then." SSM proponents hate this move, because it reveals how much their strategy relies upon burden-shifting and tacit double standards. I submit that your interlocutor probably won't even tell you how much change he is committing himself to, or what marriage should be. But suppose he says "Any two consenting adults, regardless of gender." Then ask him what is the special property that all and only couples have, that no threesome has. He will not have a persuasive answer.
I deny that your approach is better, though I grant that it is a reasonable one and does have the advantage of side-stepping the contentious metaphysical questions. But it has the disadvantage of entangling us in burden-of-proof considerations. You accuse the same-sexer of shifting the burden of proof. But he will reasonably demand to know why he should shoulder the burden. My position on burden-of-proof is that
In philosophy no good purpose is served by claims that the BOP lies on one side or the other of a dispute, or that there is a DP [defeasible presumption] in favor of this thesis but not in favor of that one. For there is no fact of the matter as to where the BOP lies. BOP considerations are usefully deployed only in dialectical situations in which some authority presides over the debate and lays down the rules of procedure and has the power to punish those who violate them. Such an authority constitutes by his decision the 'fact' that the BOP lies on one side rather than on the other. We find such authorities in courts of law. But there is no court of philosophy.
It is bad sort of conservative who stands on tradition and takes the way things have been as sufficient justification for their remaining so. The wise conservative admits that the presumption in favor of traditional ways of doing things is defeasible. And so he takes the challenge of the same-sexer seriously. He tries to explain why the law should recognize OS but no SS unions as marriages. Furthermore, if he cannot meet the challenge, then he ought to re-evaluate and perhaps change his views about marriage. It would be unphilosophical of him to stand on tradition and ignore sincerely intended rational challenges to it.
I met Dallas Willard only once, at an A. P. A. meeting in San Francisco in the early '90s. I had sent him a paper on Husserl and Heidegger and we had plans to get together over dinner to discuss it. Unfortunately, the plans fell through when a son of Willard showed up. But we did speak briefly and I still recall his kindness and his words, "I'll help you any way I can." In the few minutes I was with him I became aware of his depth and his goodness.
My only serious engagement with Professor Willard's work was via a long and intricate paper I published in Philosophia Christi, "The Moreland-Willard-Lotze Thesis on Being," vol. 6, no. 1 (2004), pp. 27-58.
We have it on good authority that death is the muse of philosophy. The muse reminds us that our time is short and to be well used. I expect Willard would approve of the following lines from St Augustine's Confessions, Book VI, Chapter 11, Ryan trans.:
Let us put away these vain and empty concerns. Let us turn ourselves only to a search for truth. Life is hard, and death is uncertain. It may carry us away suddenly. In what state shall we leave this world? Where must we learn what we have neglected here? Or rather, must we not endure punishment for our negligence? What if death itself should cut off and put an end to all care, along with sensation itself? This too must be investigated.
Franz Brentano, for whom intentionality is the mark of the mental, is committed to the thesis that all instances of (intrinsic) intentionality are instances of mentality. Propositions and dispositions are apparent counterexamples. For they are nonmental yet intrinsically object-directed. Whether they are also real counterexamples is something we should discuss. This post discusses (Fregean) propositions. Later, dispositions — if I am so disposed.
On one approach, propositions are abstract objects. Since abstracta are categorially barred from being mental, it is clear that if intrinsic intentionality is ascribed to abstract propositions, then the thesis that all instances of intentionality are instances of mentality must be rejected. For specificity, we consider Frege's theory of propositions. He called them Gedanken, thoughts, which is a strangely pyschologistic terminological choice for so anti-psychologistic a logician, but so be it.
A proposition is the sense (Sinn) of a certain sort of sentence in the indicative mood, namely, an indicative sentence from which all indexical elements, if any, such as the tenses of verbs, have been extruded. Consider the following sentence-tokens each of which features a tenseless copula:
1. The sea is blue 2. The sea is blue 3. Die See ist blau 4. Deniz mavidir.
(Since Turkish is an agglutinative language, the copula in the Turkish sentence is the suffix 'dir.')
The (1)-(4) array depicts four sentence-tokens of three sentence-types expressing exactly one proposition. Intuitively, the four sentences say the same thing, or to be precise, can be used by people to say the same thing. That same thing is the proposition they express, or to be precise, that people express by uttering them. The proposition is one to their many. And unlike the sentence-tokens, it is nonphysical, which has the epistemological consequence that it, unlike the sentence-tokens, cannot be seen with the eyes. It is 'seen' (understood) with the mind. Frege is a sort of latter-day Platonist.
So one reason to introduce propositions is to account for the fact that the same meaning-content can be expressed by different people using different sentences of different languages. Another reason to posit propositions is to have a stable entity to serve as vehicle of the truth-values. The idea is that it is the proposition that is primarily either true or false. Given that a proposition is true, then any sentence expressing it is derivatively true.
There is quite a lot to be said for the view that a sentence-token cannot be a primary truth-bearer. For how could a string of marks on paper, or pixels on a screen, be either true or false? Nothing can be either true or false unless it has meaning, but how could mere physical marks (intrinsically) mean anything? Merely physical marks, as such, are meaningless. You can't get blood from a stone, or meaning from meat, no matter how hard you squeeze, and no matter how wondrously organized the meat.
Fregean propositions are especially useful when it comes to the necessary truths expressed by such sentences as '7 is prime.' A necessary truth is true in all possible worlds, including those worlds in which there is nothing physical and so no means of physically expressing truths. If truth is taken to be a property of physical items or any contingent item, then it might be difficult to account for the existence of necessary truths. The Fregean can handle this problem by saying that propositions, as abstract objects, exist in all possible worlds, and that true ones have the property of being true in all possible worlds. The Fregean can also explain how there can be necessary truths in worlds in which there is nothing physical and nothing mental either.
Propositions also function as the accusatives of the so-called 'propositional attitudes' such as belief. To believe is to believe something. One way to construe this is de dicto: to believe is to stand in a relation to a proposition. Thus if I believe that the river Charles is polluted, then the intentional object of the belief is the proposition expressed by 'The river Charles is polluted.' (Of course, there is also a de re way of construing the belief in question: To believe that the Charles is polluted is to believe, of the river Charles, that is is polluted.)
Well, suppose one endorses a theory of propositions such as the one just sketched. You have these necessarily existent Platonic entities called propositions some of which are true and some of which are false. My believing that p is an intentional state directed upon p; but is it not also the case that p is directed upon the world, or upon a truth-making state of affairs in the world in the case in which p is true?
But now it looks as if we have two sorts of intentionality, call them noetic and noematic, to borrow some terminology from Husserl. Noetic intentionality connects a mental state (in Frege's Second Reich) to a proposition (in Frege's Third Reich), and noematic intentionality connects, or purports to connect, a proposition to an object in Frege's First Reich. Frege wouldn't think of this object as a state of affairs or concrete fact, of course, but we might. (The peculiarities of Frege's actual views don't matter for this discussion.)
The problem for Brentano's thesis above is that propositions — which are abstract objects — seem to display intrinsic aboutness: they are about the concrete world or states of affairs in the world. Thus the proposition expressed by 'The Charles is polluted' is intrinsically about either the river Charles or else about the state of affairs, The Charles River's being polluted.Intrinsically, because the proposition's being about what it is about does not depend on anyone's interpretation.
If this is right, then some instances of intentionality are not only not conscious but not possibly conscious. Does this refute Brentano's thesis? Brentano himself denied that there were such irrealia as propositions and so he would not take propositions as posing any threat to his thesis. But if there are (Fregean) propositions, then I think they would count as counterexamples to Brentano's thesis about intentionality.
Is there a way to uphold Brentano's thesis that only the mental is intrinsically intentional? Yes, if there is a way to identify propositions with thoughts or rather content-laden thinkings. My thinking that 7 is prime is intrinsically intentional. Unfortunately, my thinking is contingent whereas the content of my thinking is necessarily true and hence necessarily existent. To identify propositions with content-laden thinkings one would have to take the thinkings to inhere in a necessarily existent mind such as the mind of God.
So I end on an aporetic note. Intentionality cannot be the mark of the mental if there are Fregean propositions. But given that there are necessary truths and that truth-bearers cannot be physical items, then only way to avoid Fregean propositions is by identifying propositions with divine thoughts, in which case they are Gedanken after all.
The paradoxes of liberal morality were on glaring display last week. The Obama administration OK’d the sale of “Plan B” post-coital emergency contraception over the counter without prescription (or parental consent) to girls as young as 15. At the same time, the City Council moved a step closer to banning anyone under the age of 21 from buying cigarettes (the legal age is now 18).
Holy smoke! (Or as my boyhood pal Joe Odegaard used to say, fumus sanctus!)
The church of liberalism must have its demon, and his name is 'tobacco.'
For more on the antics of the 'tobacco wackos,' see my Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms category. There is plenty there to get you libruls 'up in arms.'
There is more to a religion than its beliefs and doctrines; there are also its practices. They, however, are informed and guided by certain constitutive beliefs. So the importance of the latter cannot be denied. Religion is not practice alone. It is not a mere form of life or language game. It rests, pace Wittgenstein, on claims about the nature of reality, claims which, if false, render bogus the practices resting upon them. In this post I present some characteristic beliefs/convictions that provide the scaffolding for what I take to be religion. As scaffolding they are necessarily abstract so as to cover a variety of different religions.
Anything that does not fit this schema I am not inclined to call a religion in any serious sense. I may be willing to negotiate on (4) and (6). (If Buddhism is a religion, it is a religion of self-help, at least in its purest forms.)
1. The belief that there is what William James calls an "unseen order." (Varieties of Religious Exerience, p. 53) This is a realm of absolute reality that lies beyond the perception of the five outer senses and their instrumental extensions. It is also inaccessible to inner sense or introspection. It is also not a realm of mere abstracta or thought-contents. So it lies beyond the discursive intellect. It is accessible from our side via mystical and religious experience. An initiative from its side is not to be ruled out in the form of revelation.
2. The belief that there is a supreme good for humans and that "our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves" to the "unseen order." (Varieties, p. 53)
3. The conviction that we are morally deficient, and that this deficiency impedes our adjustment to the unseen order. Man is in some some sense fallen from the moral height at which he would have ready access to the unseen order. His moral corruption, however it came about, has noetic consequences.
4. The conviction that our moral deficiency cannot be made sufficiently good by our own efforts to afford us ready access to the unseen order.
5. The conviction that adjustment to the unseen order requires moral purification/transformation.
6. The conviction that help from the side of the unseen order is available to bring about this purification and adjustment.
7. The conviction that the sensible order is not plenary in point of reality or value, that it is ontologically and axiologically derivative. It is a manifestation or emanation or creation of the unseen order.
The notion that we should always and everywhere apportion belief to evidence in such a way that we affirm only that for which we have sufficient evidence ignores the fact that belief for beings like us subserves action. If one acted only on those beliefs for which one had sufficient evidence one would not act as one must to live well.
When a young person believes that he or she can do such-and-such, it is almost always on the basis of insufficient evidence. And yet such belief beyond the evidence is a sine qua non of success. There are two necessary conditions of success in life: one must believe that what one proposes to do is worth doing, and one must believe that one is capable of doing it. In both cases one believes and acts on evidence that could hardly be called sufficient.
This strikes me as a good maxim: Don't let insufficient evidence prevent you from believing what you are better off believing than not believing.
The related article below provides a more rigorous treatment.
Dawkins has lost. Hitchens is dead. And the prognosis is not good for the rest of the strident crew. But an atheism chastened and temperate will remain with us. As I have said many times, atheism is intellectually respectable and rationally defensible. But so is theism.
In the end you must decide for yourself what to believe and how to live.
