The Man Who Wasn't There is one of my favorite movies, and the best of Ludwig van Beethoven is as good as classical music gets. So enjoy the First Movement of the Moonlight Sonata to the masterful cinematography of the Coen Brothers.
Here is the final scene of the movie. Ed Crane's last words:
I don't know where I'm being taken. I don't know what I'll find beyond the earth and sky. But I am not afraid to go. Maybe the things I don't understand will be clearer there, like when a fog blows away. Maybe Doris will be there. And maybe there I can tell her all those things they don't have words for here.
That is the way I see death, as an adventure into a dimension in which we might come to understand what we cannot understand here, a movement from night and fog into the clear light of day. It is a strange idea, I admit, the idea that only by dying can one come into possession of essential knowledge. But no more strange than the idea that death leaves the apparent absurdity of our existence unredeemed, a sentiment expressed in Peggy Lee's 1969 Is That All There Is?
Perhaps no other popular song achieves the depth of this Leiber and Stoller composition inspired by the 1896 story Disillusionment (Enttäuschung) by Thomas Mann.
At a bare minimum, make the case to the American people and consult with congress.
A simple question that John Kerry does not address in his case for intervention is the one posed by Hanson: "And what of the irony that Assad is probably no worse a custodian of WMD than is the opposition that we would de facto [be] aiding?"
It must have been the fall of '72. Old Carl and I were sitting in his Culver City flophouse room drinking Brew 102 after a day's manual labor . He delivered himself of a line not to be forgotten.
"Bill, once I was limber all over but stiff in one place. Now it's the other way around."
. . . is like going hunting without an accordion." A line from Mark Steyn's brilliant column, An Accidental War.
Liberating Syria isn’t like liberating the Netherlands: In the Middle East, the enemy of our enemy is also our enemy. Yes, those BBC images of schoolchildren with burning flesh are heart-rending. So we’ll get rid of Assad and install the local branch of al-Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood or whatever plucky neophyte democrat makes it to the presidential palace first — and then, instead of napalmed schoolyards, there will be, as in Egypt, burning Christian churches and women raped for going uncovered.
"Atheists should say things that are perfectly clear. Now it is not perfectly clear that the soul is material." (Krailsheimer, #161, p. 82) An atheist needn't be a mortalist, and a mortalist needn't be an atheist. But let that pass. Although the one does not logically require the other, or the other the one, atheism and mortalism naturally 'go together.' (McTaggart, for example, was an atheist but an immortalist with, apparently, no breach of logical consistency.)
If it were perfectly clear that that the soul is mortal as the body is mortal, then then why all the wild disagreement among materialists/naturalists/physicalists? Think of all their different theories. For example, there are eliminative materialists who rely on the (true) premise that no brain state is intrinsically intentional. They conclude that there are no mental states given that mental states are intrinsically intentional. But other materialists reject the (true) premise, maintaining that some brain states are intrinsically intentional, namely, the ones that are identical to mental states.
So here is a deep dispute within the materialist camp. Identity theorists affirm what eliminativists deny, namely, that there are mental states. Members of each camp believe that materialism is true, but they contradict each other as to why it is true. Now if it not clear why materialism is true, then it is hardly clear that it is true. That, I take it, is Pascal's point.
It is not clear that the soul is material (and thus mortal) and it is not clear that it isn't. Neither view is ruled out or ruled in by the reason resident in the thinking reeds we are. So you are free to believe either way. And you are free to act either way. If you act and live as if the soul is immortal, then you may come to believe that it is. (See the 'holy water' passage.) What's more, if you believe that it is then you will live better in this world if not beyond it. So why not believe?
Of course, you may be constitutionally incapable of believing. In that case you have a problem that is better addressed by a psychotherapist than by a philosopher.
Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, Pontifical Institute, 1952, p. 177: "God knows essences, but He says existences, and He does not say all that He knows."
Here are the makings of a good examination question for a course in Thomism: What is the Frenchman driving at? Unpack the Gilsonian bon mot.
Among our fellows we ought to be as self-reliant as possible. But in matters moral and spiritual we ought freely to confess our exigency and ultimate inability to help ourselves. Honesty demands it. But to appreciate properly the need for outside help, one ought first to try to go it alone. When the self-therapeutics of Buddhism and Stoicism and cognate systems fail, then one will have a concrete motive for the confession of impotence.
Antony Flew, There is a God, pp. 40-41 (quoted from Appeared-to-Blogly):
I came to see, as I would write in An Introduction to Western Philosophy, that there can be progress in philosophy despite the general absence of consensus. The lack of consensus in philosophy is not an independently sufficient demonstration that the subject does not make progress. The attempt to show that there is no philosophical knowledge by simply urging that there is always someone who can be relied on to remain unconvinced is a common fallacy made even by a distinguished philosopher like Bertrand Russell. I called it the But-there-is-always-some-one-who-will-never-agree Diversion. Then there is the charge that in philosophy it is never possible to prove to someone that you are right and he or she is wrong. But the missing piece in this argument is the distinction between producing a proof and persuading a person. A person can be persuaded by an abominable argument and remain unconvinced by one that ought to be accepted.
Progress in philosophy is different from progress in science, but that does not mean it is therefore impossible. In philosophy you spotlight the essential nature of deductive argument; you distinguish between questions about the validity or invalidity of arguments and questions about the truth or falsity of their premises or conclusion; you indicate the strict usage of the term fallacy; and you identify and elucidate such fallacies as the But-there-is-always-someone-who-will-never-agree Diversion. To the extent that these things are accomplished with better reasoning and greater effectiveness, progress will be seen—even as consensus and persuasion remain elusive and incomplete. (from Flew, There is a God, pp. 40-41).
Is Flew right? I don't think so.
That there is no consensus in philosophy among competent practitioners is a widely-accepted fact, one that cannot be reasonably disputed. I challenge anyone to give me a clear example of a philosophical problem that has been solved to the satisfaction of all competent practioners. Of course, I am not talking about intramural or school-immanent solutions, but extramural or school-transcendent ones. I trust you catch my meaning. The Thomists think they have solved the problem of universals. The competent practioners within that school agree on that solution and consider the problem solved. But that intramural consensus means little given the existence of competing schools of thought with different solutions. A solution that is school-relative or relative to a set of background assumptions is not a solution, period. (This requires further discussion in connection with the views of N. Rescher, but not here.)
For a second example, the logical positivists in their heyday thought they had definitively established that metaphysical assertions are cognitively meaningless. They had no trouble persuading their own ilk. But the rest of the philosophical world was flabbergasted at their philistinism, not to mention the self-refuting property of the positivist's verifiability criterion of cognitive significance. Examples are easily multiplied.
So I take it to be a fact beyond reasonable dispute that there has been and is now no consensus in philosophy among competent practitioners. What can be reasonably disputed is whether the fact in question gives us a good reason to think either that (i) there will be no progress in philosophy, or that (ii) there can be no progress in philosophy. Flew blurs these two claims. Let's consider the weaker one, (i).
But first we need to address a logically prior question: what is progress in philosophy? It is clear that we ought not identify progress in philosophy with the achieving of consensus, or with progress towards consensus. Suppose consensus is reached as to the solution of some problem. It might still be that the solution is incorrect. Suppose the Thomists take over the world and enforce consensus by liquidating all dissidents and persuading the rest. Their solution to the problem of universals, say, or the problem of change, might still be incorrect. On the other hand, dissensus does not entail that no solution has been arrived at. Maybe Karl Popper did solve the problem of induction despite his failure to convince all of his competent colleagues.
Consensus does not entail philosophical knowledge; dissensus does not entail the lack thereof. (Note that I am assuming, with Flew, that progress in philosophy is progress in knowledge. This is not obvious, but this too cannot now be discussed. There are several ways in which philosophy has progressed even if no philosophical knowledge has been achieved. If nothing else, there are more philosopy books in the world than ever before.)
Entailment, then, fails. Nevertheless, lack of agreement among competent practitioners is good, albeit defeasible, evidence that a solution has not been attained. Flew seems not to appreciate this point, and he seems to miss it because he erects a straw man:
The attempt to show that there is no philosophical knowledge by simply urging that there is always someone who can be relied on to remain unconvinced is a common fallacy made even by a distinguished philosopher like Bertrand Russell. I called it the But-there-is-always-some-one-who-will-never-agree Diversion.
The fact there will always be people who disagree is not to the point. For it may be that they disagree out of stupidity, or temporary confusion, or ignorance of the nature of the problem, or unfamiliarity with the terminology, or because they are sophists or quibblers or contrarians who have a perverse need to contradict. This is why I used the phrase 'competent practitioners.' These are people who have all of the intellectual and moral virtues, a high degree of intelligence, familiarity with the canons of logic, knowledge of relevant empirical facts, etc.
So if anyone is committing a fallacy here it is Flew: he is committing the straw man fallacy. No one "simply urges" that there is no philosophical knowledge because someone remains unconvinced. The point is rather that even after such pesky varmints as the stupid, the confused, the ignorant, the intellectually dishonest, and their uncles and cousins have been excluded, there will still be diagreement, and that this disagreement cannot simply be discounted or ignored. If you are a competent practitioner and you disagree with my solution to a problem, then that ought to give me pause: it is a good reason for me to doubt whether my solution really is one. Of course, I might still be right. But then how would I know this? And if I don't know that my solution is correct, is it a solution? (This needs further discussion. Compare: if I have a true belief about the way to Tucson, does it follow that I know the way? If Seldom Seen Slim, a local, says you go thataway, when I think I ought to go thisaway, should that not give me pause if I don't have justification for my true belief?)
It is telling that the only examples of philosophical knowledge that Flew provides, in the passage quoted leastways, are elementary points of logic. This is not quite to the point since logic is a tool of philosophy but not philosophy proper. I would like to see him give some examples from substantive branches of philosophy where he thinks we have philosophical knowledge.
Today, August 28th, is the Feast of St. Augustine on the Catholic calendar. In honor of the Bishop of Hippo I pull a quotation from his magisterial City of God, Book XIX, Chapter 4:
And I am at a loss to understand how the Stoic philosophers can presume to say that these are no ills, though at the same time they allow the wise man to commit suicide and pass out of this life if they become so grievous that he cannot or ought not to endure them. But such is the stupid pride of these men who fancy that the supreme good can be found in this life, and that they can become happy by their own resources, that their wise man, or at least the man whom they fancifully depict as such, is always happy, even though he become blind, deaf, dumb, mutilated, racked with pains, or suffer any conceivable calamity such as may compel him to make away with himself; and they are not ashamed to call the life that is beset with these evils happy. O happy life, which seeks the aid of death to end it? If it is happy, let the wise man remain in it; but if these ills drive him out of it, in what sense is it happy? Or how can they say that these are not evils which conquer the virtue of fortitude, and force it not only to yield, but so to rave that it in one breath calls life happy and recommends it to be given up? For who is so blind as not to see that if it were happy it would not be fled from? And if they say we should flee from it on account of the infirmities that beset it, why then do they not lower their pride and acknowledge that it is miserable?
