Dale hoists a bottle of Pilsner Urquell. To his right, Daniel von Wachter, Daniel Novotny, Alexander Pruss, Michael Gorman, Piotr Dvorak. In the background, left to right, Jan Liska-Dalecki, Lukas Novak, and Trent Dougherty.
Right click to enlarge.
Lukas, Jan, and Vera.
Trent Dougherty with his arm around Vlastimil Vohanka.
One of the participants, fearful of objections, showed up in full armor.
Marvellous Czech cuisine and beer as our reward for exploring a medieval fastness and traipsing some 10-15 km through the woods on muddy trails. What looks like bread is Knedlik, a close relative of what the Germans call Knoedel. That amazing sauce with a dollop of sour cream and cranberry and lemon accents won't soon be forgotten, nor will the ebullient Czech waitress whose jokes inspired a large tip of Czech koruna and U. S. dollars.
For me, travel is disruptive
and desolating. A little desolation, however, is good for the soul, whose
tendency is to sink into complacency. Daheim, empfindet man nicht so sehr die
Unheimlichkeit des Seins. Travel knocks me out of my natural orbit, out of the familiar with its gauzy filters, into the strangeness of things. Even an
overnighter can have this effect. And then time is wasted getting back on track.
I am not cut out to be a vagabond. I Kant hack it. I do it more from duty than
from inclination. But I'm less homebound than the Sage of Koenigsberg.
More on travel in the Travel category in which you will find Emersonian and Pascalian reasons against it.
Source. Excellent advice, except for the last item. But the advice is incomplete. For a rather more complete analysis, see Some Principles of a Financial Conservative wherein I proffer advice that is rock-solid, absolutely free, and that also has the interesting property that few will follow it due to the social and moral decline of the nation.
The article from which I borrowed the above graphic sports this delightfully amphibolous construction: "It's really hard to be poor . . . ."
Reading those words, I thought to myself, yes, of course, you really have to work at being poor in this, the greatest and most prosperous nation ever to exist, a country that needs walls to keep people out unlike the commie states that need walls to keep people in. Anyone can avoid poverty if they practice he practices the old virtues and works hard. But then I realized that that cannot be the meaning intended in a sentence to be found in the left-leaning Washington ComPost.
Herewith, a partial catalog of some habits that I at least find annoying.
1. Calling an opposing view with an impressive pedigree a 'mistake' as if the opposing view can be simply dismissed as resting on some elementary blunder. Here is an example by a distinguished contemporary:
. . . it is possible to distinguish between the being and the nature of a thing — any thing; anything — and that the thick conception of being is founded on the mistake of transferring what belongs properly to the nature of a chair — or of a human being or of a universal or of God — to the being of the chair. To endorse the thick conception of being is, in fact, to make . . . the very mistake of which Kant accused Descartes: the mistake of treating being as a ‘real predicate.’ (Peter van Inwagen, Ontology, Identity, and Modality, Cambridge 2001, pp. 3-4, emphasis added.)
What van Inwagen is saying here is that the conception of being represented by such luminaries as Thomas Aquinas and all the lesser lights of the Thomist tradition is a mistake because it rests on a mistake. Now it would indeed be a mistake to "transfer what properly belongs to the nature of" an F to the being of the F-item. But that is not what the thick conception does. So if anyone is making a mistake here, it is van Inwagen.
That the thick conception of being does not rest on anything that could be called a mistake is argued by me in "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis," in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, Routledge, 2014, pp. 45-75.
2. Attempting to refute by fallacy-mongering. This is a perennial favorite of cyberpunks. Having swotted up a list of informal fallacies, they are eager to find 'fallacies' in their opponents' reasoning. Cyberpunks are beneath refutation, so I'll cite as example A. C. Grayling's ham-handed attempt to pin the fallacy of petitio principii on Plantinga. See Sensus Divinitatis: Nagel Defends Plantinga Against Grayling.
3. Dismissing seriously posed questions as 'rhetorical.' Example. Thomists take a hylomorphic approach to the mind. Roughly, they maintain that anima forma corporis: the soul is the form of the body. I am not my soul, as on Platonism: I am a composite of soul and body, substantial form and proximate matter. But they also believe that the soul can exist in a disembodied state post mortem. There is a tension here inasmuch as form and matter are incomplete items, 'principles' uncovered in the analysis of complete items, primary substances. But if souls, as forms, are incomplete items, how can they exist when apart from matter?
Now consider that question. Is it rhetorical? No. It is a genuine question and a reasonable one which may or may not have a good Thomist answer. To dismiss such a sincerely intended and reasonably motivated question as rhetorical is not a legitimate philosophical move. It is a way of disrespecting one's interlocutor by dismissing his concerns.
4. Using 'surely' as a device of bluster. Little is sure in philosophy, hence uses of 'surely' border on bluster. "Don't call me 'Shirley'" is a way of combatting this bad habit, one to which I have been known to succumb. I may have picked up the habit from Plantinga's writing.
"Surely, there is a property expressed by the predicate 'is Socrates,' the property, identity-with-Socrates." (This is not a quotation from Plantinga.) Shirley? Where's Shirley?
Just as one ought to avoid the cheap dismissals illustrated in #s 1-3, one ought to avoid the cheap avowal illustrated in #4.
5. Advertising one's political correctness. I am reading an article on some arcane topic such as counterfactual conditionals, when I encounter a ungrammatical use of 'they' to avoid the supposedly radioactive 'he.' I groan: not another PC-whipped leftist! I am distracted from the content of the article by the political correctness of the author. As I have said more than once, PC comes from the CP, and what commies, and leftists generally, attempt to do is to inject politics into every aspect of life. It is in keeping with their totalitarian agenda.
If you complain that I am injecting politics into this post, I will say that I am merely combatting and undoing the mischief of leftists. It is analogous to nonviolent people using violence to defend themselves and their way of life against the violent. We conservatives who want the political kept in its place and who are temperamentally disinclined to be political activists must be become somewhat politically active to undo the the damage caused by leftist totalitarians. By the way, there is nothing sexist about standard English; the view that it is is itself a leftist doctrine that one is free to reject.
6. Responding by repeating. If I raise a question as to the intelligibility of, say, the Chalcedonian definition, then it is no decent response merely to repeat the definition. Otherwise I become annoyed. And we don't want that.
7. Excessive use of 'of course.' I am guilty of this. It is like 'surely': more often than not a device of bluster in philosophy.
8. Feigning incomprehension. Saying, 'I don't know what you are talking about,' when you have a tolerably clear idea of what I am talking about. This may be the same as Petering Out.
What is offensive here is the dismissal of an idea or an entire philosophy because it is not totally clear, when it ought to be one purpose of philosophical dialog to clarify what is not totally clear. You say you have no idea what Emmanuel Levinas is driving at in Totality and Infinity? Then I say you must be one stupid fellow or uneducated or both. Same with Heidegger and Hegel, et al. You say you don't know what Hegel is talking about what he says, at the beginning of his Science of Logic, that Being passes over into Nothing? No idea at all? Then you are dumb or inattentive or lazy or a philistine or something else it would not be good to be.
Don't feign incomprehension. If you find what I maintain unclear, explain why you think it unclear, and then ask for clarification. In that way, we may make a bit of progress.
9. Taking the names of great philosophers in vain. If you are historically ignorant, don't attach the names of great philosophers to your pet theses. Don't use 'Leibniz's Law' for something that cannot be found in Leibniz. See 'Leibniz's Law': A Useless Expression. Don't call 'Aristotelian' the view that there are immanent universals. If you have never read Brentano or Meinong, why are you dropping their names in your labels for theses that are not theirs?
10. Confusing philosophy with the history of philosophy. Kant says it best in the second paragraph of the Introduction to his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (LLA ed. p. 3):
There are scholarly men, to whom the history of philosophy (both ancient and modern) is philosophy itself; for these the present Prolegomena are not written. They must wait till those who endeavor to draw from the fountain of reason itself have completed their work; it will then be the historian's turn to inform the world of what has been done. Unfortunately, nothing can be said, which in their opinion has not been said before, and truly the same prophecy applies to all future time; for since the human reason has for many centuries speculated upon innumerable objects in various ways, it is hardly to be expected that we should not be able to discover analogies for every new idea among the old sayings of past ages.
11. Criticizing a philosopher for thinking for himself and not discussing one's favorite historical figure.
It must have been in the early '80s. A paper of mine on haecceities had been accepted for reading at a regular colloquium session of the A. P. A., Eastern Division. The paper focused on Alvin Plantinga's theory of haecceity properties. Although I had a good job, I was looking for something better and I had also secured an interview with Penn State at that same APA convention. The late Joseph J. Kockelmans was one of the members of the Penn State philosophy department who interviewed me. When he heard that the paper I was to read dealt with haecceities, he asked whether I would be discussing Duns Scotus. I of course explained that there would be no time for that since I had twenty minutes and my paper dealt with ideas of Plantinga. Kockelman's question displayed the typical bias of the Historical/Continental type of scholar. Such a person cannot understand how one might directly engage a contemporary question without dragging in the opinions of long dead thinkers. They cannot understand how one could think for oneself, or how philosophy could be anything other than its history or the genuflecting before texts or the worshipping at the shrine of Heidegger, say.
And then there was a colleague I once had. He was a Leibniz man. Interested as I am in metaphysics, I once brought up the Identity of Indiscernibles with him. I asked him whether he accepted it. His reply was of the form: in one place Leibniz says this, and in another place he says that, and according to commentator X . . . " But what do YOU think of the principle, Dan?" Well, in the Discourse onMetaphysics Leibniz takes the view that . . . . And so it went. He was a scholar of philosophy, but no philosopher.
Examples are easily multiplied.
12. Compiling lists such as this one. This doesn't annoy me, but it might annoy you.
The Russian boys were lined up for beer; perhaps one of them couldn't wait his 'transcendental' turn and the other, forsaking duty for inclination, shot him categorically albeit phenomenally. Or maybe the shooter was attempting to demonstrate that the transcendentally ideal can also be empirically real. Or perhaps the shooter was a Randian hothead and the man shot was a Kantian.
This is what comes of ignoring 'motorist' Rodney King's rhetorical question, 'Kant we all just get along?'
For Ayn Rand and her followers, Kant is the devil incarnate. I don't dispute that Rand made some good points, but her tabloid outbursts anent the Sage of Koenigsberg aren't worth the hot air that powered them. Despite her frequent invocations of reason, her work would be a worthy target of a Critique of Poor Reason.
A minor quibble. Your recent post ("Forever Reading . . .") is in error, I'm afraid. After noticing the mistake on more than one occasion throughout several years following your wonderful blog, surely the time has come that I assist a fellow stickler. Schopenahuer did not author the line, "For ever reading, never to be read;" he merely quoted Alexander Pope, who once said,
I only know the verse myself from reading R.J. Hollingdale's translation of the Great Pessimist's essays and aphorisms, so I can see how one might attribute it thus. But alas, I know how much you honor precision, so I'm compelled to help where I can. That's it — the first error I've been able to catch since 2005 or so. Excellent work, I'd say.
Ad majorem Dei gloriam!
Mr. Fitzgerald turns out to be correct. In "On Thinking for Oneself," an essay I had read circa 1980, Schopenhauer does indeed quote Alexander Pope, though only the words "For ever reading, never to be read." And the reference he gives is a little different: Dunciad iii, 194.
I in turn have a quibble with Mr. Fitzgerald's "minor quibble." A quibble is minor by definition, so 'minor quibble' is a pleonasm. Pleonasm, however, is but a peccadillo.
I have been following your blog for years, and continue to enjoy it immensely. [I've also had the opportunity to read several of your printed works in the field, which I found to be excellent – your article on states of affairs was particularly outstanding.]
I've nothing in particular to offer, other than two anecdotes that I think you'll find amusing:
(1) I met a bona fide, genuine Marxist-Trotskyist the other day. Not much more than a boy, alas, though he had drunk the Kool-Aid in toto, e.g., dialectical materialism, Trotsky a genius, all information is propaganda, etc., etc. I engaged him for some time just for shits and giggles, until the point at which he tried to (seriously) compare slavery to the position of "the woman" within the domestic family. His view, of course, was ridiculous, backed by the flimsiest of slogans. When it became apparent that he was making little sense, he backed off by saying something to the following effect: "Well, clearly two WHITE MEN need not even be discussing this issue…" Whereupon, I was pleased to recall the Maverick Philosopher, and replied (to a slackened jaw, no less): "My friend, arguments do not have testicles."
Beautiful. (On a similar note, I took your advice a few months back and read TROTSKY: DOWNFALL OF A REVOLUTIONARY by B. Patenaude – one helluva' read.)
(2) Not so long ago, I turned a very close friend of mine – one who shares my philosophical, political and religious predilections and who teaches in the Philosophy Dept. at a private school – onto your blog. He and I occasionally swap emails concerning the content, but the following comment from him (made in relation to, I believe, the Trayvon Martin debacle) I simply had to share with you:
"If it were possible to baptize the Maverick Philosopher as my uncle, I would pay to do so."
If you are a philosopher or a student of philosophy, how do you respond when someone asks what you do or study? What sorts of misconceptions about philosophy and other disciplines have you encountered? Combox open!
1. When I was a graduate student I would sometimes deflect the question by saying 'mathematics.' But then one day I received the reply, "Why do we still need mathematicians? We now have computers to do their work." The fellow apparently thought that mathematicians spend their time doing computations sitting under green eyeshades, with paper and pencil . . . .
2. When I told an art historian at Cleveland State what I taught, he naively asked, "What's philosophy?" The man had no idea. Here was an intelligent man in the humanities who had no clue, no clue at all.
3. An R. N. in one of my classes was very surprised to hear that there are philosophy journals. "There are journals of this stuff?"
4. At a rest stop off an interstate, some guy asked me what I do. "I teach philosophy." Whereupon the gent regaled me about the interesting philosophy they have up in Nova Scotia.
5. On a flight to Hawaii, I was reading from a copy of The Journal of Philosophy when the lady next to me expressed astonishment that philosophy is a technical subject and that she couldn't make head nor tail of the article I was reading. But at least she wasn't offended that it is a technical subject as some people are. The latter expect it to be comprehensible without any expenditure of effort, an expectation they do not have of physics, say. A curious double standard.
6. When an engineering professor of mine learned that I was abandoning engineering for philosophy, he said, "Whaddya gonna do when you graduate, philosophize?"
7. A relative asked me what I was working on. "At the moment I am reviewing so-and-so's book." "Are you getting paid for that?" The disgusting but all-too-common assumption is that only what one is paid to do is really worth doing. This assumption is discussed in Work, Money, Living, and Livelihood.
8. And then there's the opposite sort of response, "You actually get paid to teach that stuff?" The assumption this time is that philosophy is not worth being paid to do. Curious. If you are not paid, then you are wasting your time, and if you are paid, then you are still wasting your time — and others' time and money to boot.
9. No one asks the dentist whether he is still cleaning teeth or the carpenter whether he is still pounding nails. But it is not uncommon for a philosopher to be asked, "Are you still teaching philosophy?"
10. When my mother died, a great aunt of mine paid us a visit. She asked what I did. "I teach philosophy." "That must make you very serene." The old lady was not wrong about what philosophy ought to be. She was simply uninformed about what it actually is for most of its practitioners.
11. Philosophy courses, even if well-taught, don't seem to do much to ward of misconceptions. An Art Educator, with a doctorate in the field, thought philosophy a lot of rubbish because of her intro course in which she learned that some dead white guy said that everything is water, another that it is all fire, a third air . . . .
12. I overhead two girls talking about a colleague's logic class. "How do you like Dr. Richards' logic class?" "It's all a bunch of word games."
13. Philosophers are in part to blame for the PR problems of the discipline. Nationally syndicated talk show host Dennis Prager's low opinion of philosophy traces back to his freshman year. He began an intro course but dropped it when the professor opened by saying that they would be discussing whether or not people exist.
The role of concupiscence in dimming our spiritual sight has long been recognized by many, among them, Plato, Augustine, and Pascal: "There are some who see clearly that man has no other enemy but concupiscence, which turns him away from God." (Pensées, Krailsheimer #269, p. 110) One wonders how much of the atheism of a Russell or a Sartre or an A. J. Ayer is the theoretical reflex of an inordinate love of this world and its flesh pots.
Frequent the flesh pots and it may turn out the best you can do by way of a conception of God is that of a celestial teapot.
For a long time now I have been wanting to study Frederick D. Wilhelmsen's hard-to-find The Paradoxical Structure of Existence. Sunday I got lucky at Bookman's and found the obscure treatise for a measly six semolians. I've read the first five chapters and and they're good. There is a lack of analytical rigor here and there, but that is par for the course with the old-school scholastic philosophers. They would have benefited from contact with analytic philosophers. Unfortunately, most of the analysts of Wilhelmsen's generation were anti-metaphysical, being logical positivists, or fellow travellers of same, a fact preclusive of mutual respect, mutual understanding, and mutual benefit Imagine the response of a prickly positivist to one of Jacques Maritain's more effusive tracts. But I digress.
Wilhelmsen (1923-1996) must have been a successful teacher: he has a knack for witty and graphic comparisons. To wit:
Avicenna's God might be compared to the Queen of England, to a figurehead monarch. No law in England has validity unless it bears the Queen's signature. Until that moment the law is merely "possibly a law." But Parliament writes the laws and the Queen signs them automatically. Avicenna's order of pure essence is the Parliament of Being. Avicenna's God gives the royal signature of existence; but this God, like England's majesty, is stripped of all real power and liberty of action. (Preserving Christian Publications, 1995, p. 43. First published in 1970 by U. of Dallas Press.)
