August 2013 – Page 5 – Maverick Philosopher

William Lane Craig to Debate Lawrence Krauss

In Australia, soon, details here. Topic: Why is there something rather than nothing? Poor Krauss is going to get slaughtered, and deservedly so. Debating Craig is like getting into a gun fight with Doc Holliday. I would never debate him on anything, even if I thought debate was philosophically worthwhile. He has been honing his skills since high school.

According to the linked site, Krauss' A Universe from Nothing is being translated into 20 languages. Well, that is the way of the world. A piece of garbage becomes a best seller and is translated into 20 languages while books worth reading fall still-born from the press.

Colin McGinn and Paula Deen

What do they have in common? Not much, except that in each case the 'punishment' seems wildly out of proportion to the 'crime.' Here is the latest in the McGinn saga.

It’s Twilight Time

Victor Davis Hanson, Life in the Twilight (bolding added to underscore the need for mavericks if we are to stop the transmogrification of the US into the SU):

We are becoming like Eastern Europeans who were oblivious that the faces on the May Day dais had sometimes changed. In other words, the evil and Islamophobic Nakoula did it in Benghazi, the overzealous (but otherwise understandably progressive) Cincinnati rogue agents alone did the improper audits, the evil (Fox News) James Rosen perhaps deserved the monitoring — all enemies of social justice.

Statism and the voices of megaphones like Jay Carney wear down a population. If the Great Leader says that there is a war on women because hip young affluent females like Sandra Fluke have trouble getting free condoms, then there surely is — and elevator-owning, dog-torturing, and equestrian-marrying Mitt Romney is waging it.

But there is no war when a Philadelphia abortionist, under the nose of state authorities, murders fetuses as they cry and gasp for air — and sometimes their laboring mothers along with them. If guns that are black and plastic and look scary are “automatic” assault weapons whose banning will save the children, then by all means ban these machine guns. If the planet has not warmed up in 15 years, then it is still warming up, and companies like Solyndra need more subsidies.

Still, the human psyche is a strange thing. It needs to feel transcendent, either spiritually or by confidence in children or through the reputation of a life lived well. Crush that spirit through government obfuscation, and the people become the walking dead of a dreary Warsaw Pact Budapest or Prague, given that there is no hope for those who follow.

The soul appreciates equality, but not of the enforced kind that destroy individual liberty. Insult the voter, call him names, regulate him, lecture him about his various -ologies and -isms, regiment his youth with proper thinking, curb his speech, and he becomes a mute, a dead soul, a Brit in about 1955 ^[12], a Hungarian in 1956, a Russian in about 1970, or today’s Cuban.

To keep America exceptional, we need eccentrics, contrarians, doubters, politically incorrect truth-tellers. Take them away, and we are a nation of head-nodders like most other states.

Go to sleep in 2009 and wake up now. The world has changed: golf is the people’s game; racist, sexist, homophobic thought and speech are predicated on the ideology of who says it; the IRS, the NSA, and the Justice Department are watching you; the State Department is run like a campaign organization; the president offers politically correct thoughts on local trials; the attorney general worries about “my people”; the government is producing more oil and gas by trying to stop it; wind and solar are the way of the future; gropes and pornography are either career-ending or cause for needed sabbaticals; and high unemployment, debt, and low growth are proof of a robust recovery.

The model of our future will be a landscape like Detroit, as those on MSNBC or on NPR find ever more clever ways to assure us that the city is “saved” from the free-market capitalist and racist buccaneers. We will shuffle on, as the voices go in one ear and out the other, as they screech that Big Brother saved us at last from the reactionary Goldsteins ^[13] of the world who nearly destroyed it.

Trying to Understand Ockham on Supposita in Light of the Incarnation

I am presently working through Marilyn McCord Adams, "Aristotelian Substance and Supposits" (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume 79, 2005, 15-72). The Czech scholastics and sometime MavPhil commenters Novak, Novotny, Vohanka, et al. have kindly invited me to read a paper at a conference on the Trinity in Prague this September and now I am under the gun to write something worth their time and attention.

Adams writes, p. 39, "(Ockham is willing to conclude that 'A human supposit can be assumed' is true, even though 'A human supposit is assumed' is contradictory; just as 'A white can be black' is true, even though 'A white is black' is impossible.)"

My present purpose is to make sense of this quotation.

I give 'A white can be black' a de re reading as follows:

1. A white thing is (logically) possibly such that it is not white.

For example, here is a piece of white paper. Heeding Mick Jagger's injunction, I can paint it black. But I wouldn't be able to do this if it were not logically possible for this thing that is actually white to be non-white. Although, necessarily, nothing white is non-white, the piece of paper is contingently white.

I give 'A white is black' a de dicto reading:

2. It is not (logically) possible that a white thing be non-white.

On these readings, both (1) and (2) come out true. (1) is about a thing (res) and ascribes a modal property to it; (2) is about a proposition (dictum) and ascribes a modal property to it.

I give 'A human supposit can be assumed' a de re reading:

3. A human supposit is (logically) possibly such that it is assumed.

From the opening page of Adams' paper, I gather that a supposit is an Aristotelian primary (individual) substance. So Socrates and Plato are human supposits, while a donkey is a supposit that is not human. And from her gloss on Boethius, I gather that a person is a primary substance of a rational nature. So Socrates and Plato are persons while a donkey is not.

Now if God incarnate is one person in two natures, as Chalcedonian orthodoxy has it, then God cannot assume a man. For a man is a supposit of a rational nature, hence a person. If God were to assume a man, then God the Son — a person — would be assuming a second person. But pace Nestorious, there are not two natures and two persons in Christ, but one person in two natures. So what is assumed in the Incarnation is not a supposit but a particularized human nature. This is why 'A human supposit is assumed' is contradictory. That is, in de dicto terms,

4. It is (logically) impossible that a human supposit be assumed.

(3) and (4) can both be true. It is impossible that a human supposit be assumed, for it it were it wouldn't be a supposit; but something that is a human supposit is possibly such that it is assumed. But this has the strange consequence that human supposits are only contingently supposits. So Socrates is not essentially a supposit, and if a supposit is a primary substance, the Socrates is not essentially a primary substance.

Thus Adams ascribes to Ockham the view that "The property of being a supposit is not essential to any creatable/created thing, because any creatable/created thing whatever can exist wthout it." (p. 39) So whatever is a supposit might not have been. Or rather whatever is a supposit might not have been its own supposit: every supposit is possibly such as to have an 'alien supposit,' namely God.

What is curious here is how very specific theological doctrines are allowed to drive the general ontology.

For a Race-Baiter, It’s Always Selma Again

One protestant asks another, "Why is Rome called the Eternal City?' "Because there is always Rome!"

For a race-hustler like Jesse Jackson, It Is Always Selma Again.

It's a bit of a paradox: leftist race-baiters fly under the euphemistic flag of 'progressive,' while hopelessly stuck in the past. The civil wrongs were righted, but they want to turn back the clock. A pox on their racist house.

Brother Jesse and Co. are stuck inside of Selma with the Oxford blues again.

In case you missed the allusion, it is to Bob Dylan's 1966 Blonde on Blonde track, Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.

Only Asian Homunculi Would Fit

If 'chink in the armor' is about Asians, then the Asians in question would have to be rather tiny to hang out interstitially in, say, a coat of mail.

Now blacks have shown themselves to be absurdly sensitive to the imagined slights embedded in such words and phrases as 'niggardly,' 'black hole,' and 'watermelon.' But Asians too?

Why not take offense at 'chunk'? Someone might get it into his PeeCee head that a chunk is a fat chink.

There is no end to this madness once it gets going, which is why we sane and decent people need to mock and deride liberals every chance we get. Mockery and derision can achieve what calm reasoning cannot.

One cannot reason with those who are permanently in a state of self-colonoscopy.

Story here.

And don't miss: Of Black Holes and Political Correctness

Of Black Holes and Black Hos

On the Misuse of Superlatives (the Brokaw Fallacy) and Two Other Fallacies

Adjectives admit of three degrees of comparison: positive, comparative, and superlative. The first refers to the zero case of comparison: Tom is tall. The second refers to a situation in which two things are compared: Tom is taller than Tim. The third refers to a situation in which a thing is compared to all the other members of its reference class: Tom is the tallest man in Fargo. It is easy to see that if Tom is the tallest man in Fargo, then (a) there cannot be a man taller than him in that reference class, and (b) he is unique in respect of tallness in that reference class. (I.e., there cannot be two tallest men in the same reference class.)

Therefore, if the WWII generation is the greatest generation (relative to some agreed-upon criteria of generational greatness), then (i) there is no greater generation, and (ii) the WWII generation is unique in respect of greatness. Now does Tom Brokaw really want to affirm both (i) and (ii)? Is the WWII generation the greatest generation of any country in the whole of recorded time? Or is it merely the greatest generation in American history? The latter is clearly dubious if not outright false: the generation of the founders is arguably the greatest generation of Americans. A fortiori, for the former.

What Brokaw is doing when he speaks of the WWII generation as the greatest is misusing the superlative ‘greatest’ to mean the positive ‘great,’ or perhaps the comparative ‘greater.’ Perhaps what he really wants to say is that the WWII generation is greater than the Baby Boomers. But instead of saying what he means, he says something literally false or else meaningless. One might think that a news anchor would have higher standards.

Perhaps the underlying problem is that people love to exaggerate for effect, and see nothing wrong with it. Not content to say that Bush was wrong about WMDs, his opponents say he lied – which is a misuse of ‘lie.’ Not content to say that she is hungry, my wife says she is starving. Not content to say that Christianity is more than a doctrine, Kierkegaard and fellow fideists say that Christianity is not a doctrine. Not content to use particular quantifiers ‘Some’, ‘Most’),people reach for universal quantifiers such as ‘Every,’ ‘All,’ ‘No,’ and ‘Never.’ Thus instead of saying that one must be careful when one generalizes, one says, ‘Never generalize,’ which refutes itself.

I have exposed three mistakes that the truth-oriented will want to avoid. We have the misuse of superlatives, the misuse of universal quantifiers, and the mistaken notion that if X is not identical to Y, then X and Y have nothing to do with each other.

Let me expatiate a bit further on the last mentioned mistake. If X is not identical to Y, it does not follow that X and Y are wholly diverse from each other. A book is not identical to its cover, but the two are not wholly diverse in that the cover is proper part of the book. Regretting is not identical to remembering, but the two are not wholly diverse: Every regretting is a remembering, but not conversely. A melody is not identical to the individual notes of which it is composed, but it is obviously not wholly diverse from them.

On Taking Abuse

Everyone gets abused verbally in this world and one had better learn how to take it. There are bigots everywhere — liberals are among the most vile, their tendency to project psychologically rendering their bigotry invisible to them — and sooner or later you will encounter your fair share of abusers and bigots. A fellow graduate student called your humble correspondent a 'guinea' in the 1970s. This was in Boston. But I didn't break his nose and do the ground and pound on him. Was it cowardice or good sense? Call it self-control. If Trayvon Martin had control of his emotions on that fateful night, he would probably be alive today. The downside, of course, is that then we wouldn't be having this delightful 'conversation' about race.

My impression is that there is more anti-Italian prejudice — not that it is any big deal — in the East than in the West where I come from. (And without a doubt, Jim Morrison had it right when he opined that the West is the best, in at least two senses.) I didn't encounter any anti-Italian prejudice until I headed East. I had a Lithuanian girl friend in Boston whose mother used to warn her: "Never bring an Italian home." I never did get to meet Darci's mom. Imagine a Lithuanian feeling superior to an Italian!

But I want to talk about blacks, to add just a bit more to this wonderful 'conversation' about race we are having.

Blacks need to learn from Jews, Italians, the Irish, and others who have faced abuse and discrimination. Don't whine, don't complain, don't seek a government program. Don't try to cash in on your 'victim' status, when the truth is that you are a 'victim' of liberal victimology. Don't waste your energy blaming others for your own failures.

Don't wallow in your real or imagined grievances, especially vicarious grievances. That's the mark of a loser. Winners live and act in the present where alone they can influence the future.

If you want me to judge you as an individual, by the content of your character and not by the color of your skin, then behave like an individual: don't try to secure advantages from membership in a group.

Abandon tribal self-identification. Did you vote for Obama because he is black? Then you have no business in a voting booth.

Bear in mind that the world runs on appearances, and that if you appear to be a thug — from your saggy pants, your 'hoodie,' your sullen and disrespectful attitude — then people will suspect you of being a thug.

Take a leaf out of Condi Rice's book. She's black, she's female, and she became Secretary of State. And her predecessor in the job was a black man, Colin Powell. It sure is a racist society we have here in the USA. And that Justice Thomas on the Supreme Court — isn't he a black dude? And not a mulatto like Obama, but one seriously black man.

Lose the basketball. Get the needle out of your arm, and that soul-killing rap noise out of your ears. Listen to the late Beethoven piano sonatas. May I recommend Opus #s 109, 110, and 111? Mozart is also supposed to be good for improving your mental capacity. We honkies want you to be successful. If you are successful, we won't have to support you. And if you are successful you will be happy. Happy people don't cause trouble.

And we don't give a flying enchilada what color you are. It's not about color anyway. It's about behavior. Work hard, practice the ancient virtues, and be successful. If you can't make it here, you can't make it anywhere. Don't let Brother Jesse or Brother Al tell you otherwise. Those so-called 'reverends' are nothing but race-hustlers who make money from the grievance industry.

Liberals are not your friends either. They want you to stay on the plantation. They think you are too stupid to take care of yourselves.

If you learn to control your emotions, defer gratification, study hard and practice the old-time virtues, will you be 'acting white'? Yes, in a sense. High culture is universal and available to all who want to assimilate it. What makes our culture superior to yours is not that it is white but that it is superior.

Don't get mad, be like Rudy Giuliani. Can you imagine him making a big deal about being called a greaseball, dago, goombah, wop, guinea . . . ? Do you see him protesting Soprano-style depictions of Italian-Americans as mafiosi?

Edith Bone (1889-1975)

On Myself

Here lies the body of Edith Bone.
All her life she lived alone,
Until Death added the final S
And put an end to her loneliness.

(The Faber Book of Epigrams and Epitaphs, ed. Grigson, 1977, p. 221)

I am reminded of Eleanor Rigby.

Dr. Edith Bone was another of those who early on looked to Communism for a solution, but by the end of her life had seen through its false promises. In 1956 she was was released from a Hungarian jail after seven years of political imprisonment.

Biography here.