March 2014 – Maverick Philosopher

John Searle Interviewed

This shot of the old philosopher by the fire with his shootin' ahrn nicely complements some of the combative things he says in the Zan Boag interview at NewPhilosopher. (HT: Karl White.) For example, "I don’t read much philosophy, it upsets me when I read the nonsense written by my contemporaries, the theory of extended mind makes me want to throw up…so mostly I read works of fiction and history."

The surly (Searle-y?) reference is to externalist theories of mind such as Ted Honderich's and Clark and Chalmers' The Extended Mind.

I found this exchange interesting:

You say that consciousness is a real subjective experience, caused by the physical processes of the brain, and that where consciousness is concerned, the appearance is reality. Can you elaborate on this?

John Searle: Consciousness exists only insofar as it is experienced by a human or animal subject. OK, now grant me that consciousness is a genuine biological phenomenon. Well, all the same it’s somewhat different from other biological phenomena because it only exists insofar as it is experienced. However, that does give it an interesting status. You can’t refute the existence of consciousness by showing that it’s just an illusion because the illusion/ reality distinction rests on the difference between how things consciously seem to us and how they really are. But where the very existence of consciousness is concerned, if it consciously seems to me that I’m conscious, then I am conscious. You can’t make the illusion/reality distinction for the very existence of consciousness the way you can for sunsets and rainbows because the distinction is between how things consciously seem and how they really are.

You also say that consciousness is a physical property, like digestion or fire.

John Searle: Consciousness is a biological property like digestion or photosynthesis. Now why isn’t that screamingly obvious to anybody who’s had any education? And I think the answer is these twin traditions. On the one hand there’s God, the soul and immortality that says it’s really not part of the physical world, and then there is the almost as bad tradition of scientific materialism that says it’s not a part of the physical world. They both make the same mistake, they refuse to take consciousness on its own terms as a biological phenomenon like digestion, or photosynthesis, or mitosis, or miosis, or any other biological phenomenon.

Part of what Searle says in his first response is importantly correct. Since the distinction between illusion and reality presupposes the reality of consciousness, it makes no sense to suppose that consciousness might be an illusion, let alone assert such a monstrous thesis. It amazes me that there are people who are not persuaded by such luminous and straightforward reasoning. But pace Searle it does not follow that consciousness is a biological phenomenon. If biological phenomena are those phenomena that are in principle exhaustively intelligible in terms of the science of biology, then I don't see how consciousness could be biological even if it is found only in biologically alive beings. Can the what-it-is-like feature be accounted for in purely biological terms? (That's a rhetorical question.) And that's just for starters.

In the second response, Searle claims that consciousness is a biological property and that this ought to be "screamingly obvious" to anyone with "any education." Come on, John! Do you really want to suggest that the philosophical problem of consciousness as this is rigorously formulated by people like Colin McGinn is easily solved just be getting one's empirical facts straight? Do you really mean to imply that people who do not agree with your philosophy of mind are ignorant of plain biological facts? If consciousness were a biological phenomenon just like digestion or photosynthesis or mitosis or meiosis, then consciousness would be as unproblematic as the foregoing. It isn't.

Why is it that there is a philosophical problem of consciousness, but no philosophical problem of digestion? Note the obvious difference between the following two questions. Q1: How is consciousness possible given that it really exists, arises in the brain, but is inexplicable in terms of what we know and can expect to know about animal and human brains? Q2: How is digestion possible given that it really exists, takes place in the stomach and its 'peripherals,' but is inexplicable in terms of what we know and can know about animal and human gastrointestinal systems?

Obviously, there is a philosophical problem about consciousness but no philosophical problem about digestion. And note that even if some philosopher argues that there is no genuine philosophical problem about consciousness, because one has, say, been bewitched by language, or has fallen afoul of some such draconian principle as the Verifiability Criterion of Cognitive Meaningfulness, no philosopher would dream of arguing that there is no genuine philosophical problem of digestion. It needs no arguing. For whether or not there is a genuine problem about consciousness, there is a putative problem about it. But there is not even a putative philosophical problem about digestion. The only problems concerning digestion are those that can be solved by taking an antacid or by consulting a gastroenterologist or by doing more empirical gut science.

This is why it is at least possible with a modicum of sense to argue that the philosophy of mind collapses into the neuroscience of the brain, but impossible sensibly to argue that the the philosophy of digestion collapses into gastroenterology or that the philosophy of blood filtering and detoxification collapses into hepatology. There is no philosophy of digestion or philosophy of blood filtering and detoxification.

It is obviously not obvious that consciousness is a biological phenomenon. Searle is brilliant when it comes to exposing the faults of other theories of mind, but he is oblivious to the problems with his own. Searle 'knows' in his gut that naturalism just has to be true, which is why he cannot for a second take seriously any suggestion that consciousness might have a higher origin. But he ought to admit that his comparison of consciousness to digestion and photosynthesis and mitosis and meiosis is completely bogus. He can still be a naturalist, however, either by pinning his hopes on some presently incoceivable future science or by going mysterian in the manner of McGinn.

More on Searle in my appropriately appellated Searle category.

I Feel the Earth Move Under my Feet

I missed Saturday Night at the Oldies because I was in La Mirada, California, for a conference at Biola University. Ed Feser gave the keynote address and I was the commentator. More about the proceedings later, perhaps. But for now a quick make-up:

Carole KIng, I Feel the Earth Move, from her 1971 Tapestry album.

An appropriate selection given the seismic events of Friday and Saturday in LaLaLand. On Friday evening I was quietly and comfortably ensconced in an easy chair in the guest suite of the Biola Philosophy House reading the Bible and Feser's Scholastic Metaphysics back and forth, when I felt the chair shift. I was puzzled for a second until I realized that I was in Southern Calfornia, earthquake country. I thought: no big deal. As a native Californian, this was nothing new to my experience. (I remember in particular the early morning San Fernando/Sylmar quake of February '71.)

Later that night, in bed, it was a bigger deal: the bed began moving back and forth. I reflected that the Philosophy House was single-story and that egress was quick and easy should that be necessary. So I went back to sleep.

The third tremor I recall was near the end of the conference, and the fourth, rather more serious, occurred on Saturday night while David Limbaugh, Adam Omelianchuk, Ed Feser and I were enjoying a nice quiet conversation over beer in the Philosophy House.

It is good to be back on (relative) terra firma, here in Arizona, where earthquakes are infrequent and mild. I've been out here 23 years and I don't recall experiencing even one.

There is no absolute terra firma. All terrestrial things must pass.

All hylomorphic compounds are subject to dissolution, and you are a hylomorphic compound. Work out your salvation with diligence.

UPDATE:

Experts say a bigger earthquake along the lesser-known fault that gave Southern California a moderate shake could do more damage to the region than the long-dreaded "Big One" from the more famous San Andreas Fault.

The Puente Hills thrust fault, which brought Friday night's magnitude-5.1 quake centered in La Habra and well over 100 aftershocks by Sunday, stretches from northern Orange County under downtown Los Angeles into Hollywood — a heavily populated swath of the Los Angeles area.

A magnitude-7.5 earthquake along that fault could prove more catastrophic than one along the San Andreas, which runs along the outskirts of metropolitan Southern California, seismologists said.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that such a quake along the Puente Hills fault could kill 3,000 to 18,000 people and cause up to $250 billion in damage. In contrast, a larger magnitude 8 quake along the San Andreas would cause an estimated 1,800 deaths. [. . .]

Christian Physicalism?

J. P. Moreland is against it. Me too. More generally, I oppose any amalgamation of classical theism and materialism about the mind. (See my "Could a Classical Theist be a Physicalist?" Faith and Philosophy, vol. 15, no. 2, April 1998, pp. 160-180.) Here are some excerpts from Moreland's piece:

Christianity is a dualist, interactionist religion in this sense: God, angels/demons, and the souls of men and beasts are immaterial substances that can causally interact with the world. Specifically, human persons are (or have) souls that are spiritual substances that ground personal identity in a disembodied intermediate state between death and final resurrection . . . .

[. . .]

In my view, Christian physicalism involves a politically correct revision of the biblical text that fails to be convincing . . . .

[. . .]

The irrelevance of neuroscience also becomes evident when we consider the recent best seller Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander. Regardless of one’s view of the credibility of Near Death Experiences (NDEs) in general, or of Alexander’s in particular, one thing is clear. Before whatever it was that happened to him (and I believe his NDE was real but no not agree with his interpretation of some of what happened to him), Alexander believed the (allegedly) standard neuroscientific view that specific regions of the brain generate and possess specific states of conscious. But after his NDE, Alexander came to believe that it is the soul that possesses consciousness, not the brain, and the various mental states of the soul are in two-way causal interaction with specific regions of the brain. Here’s the point: His change in viewpoint was a change in metaphysics that did not require him to reject or alter a single neuroscientific fact. Dualism and physicalism are empirically equivalent views consistent with all and only the same scientific data. Thus, the authority of science cannot be appropriated to provide any grounds whatsoever for favoring one view over another.

I'm with J.P on the irrelevance of neuroscience to the philosophy of mind, and vice versa, but with three minor exceptions that I explain in the third article cited below.

Philosophy and Politics: Frege, Heidegger and Others

Worth repeating from an old post:

Hate speech? That's a term leftists use for speech they don't like. No one in his right mind could see Heidegger's magnum opus, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), published in 1927, as anything close to hate speech. The claim that it is is beneath refutation. Nor can his lectures and publications after 1933, when Hitler came to power, be dismissed in this way.

Heidegger undoubtedly inspires violent passions: he was a National Socialist, and what is worse, he never admitted he was wrong about his political alignment. But according to Michael Dummett, the great logician Gottlob Frege was an anti-Semite. (Dummett says this in either the preface or the introduction to Frege: The Philosophy of Language. ) Now will you ignore Frege's seminal teachings because of his alleged anti-Semitism? That would be senseless. And let's not forget that the later Jean-Paul Sartre was not just a Commie, but a Stalinist. Should Critique of Dialectical Reason be dismissed as hate speech? Should we deny Sartre the title 'philosopher' and re-classify him as a Commie ideologue? Of course not. And please no double standard. Why is being a Nazi worse than being a Stalinist? Why is murdering people because of their ethnic affiliation worse than murdering people because of their class affiliation?

You have two highly influential philosophers. One aligns himself politically with the mass murderer Hitler, the other with the mass murderer Stalin. That is extremely interesting, and no doubt troubling, but in the end it is truth that we philosophers are after, and in pursuit of it we should leave no stone unturned: we should examine all ideas in order to arrive as closely as we can to the truth. All ideas, no matter what they are, whether they come from a Black Forest ski hut or a Parisian coffee house, or the syphilitic brain of a lonely German philologist. Haul them one and all before the tribunal of Reason and question them in the full light of day. To understand the content of the ideas it may be necessary to examine the men and women behind them. But once a philosopher's propositions have been clearly set forth, the question of their truth or falsity is logically independent of their psychological, or sociological, or other, origin. To think otherwise is to commit the Genetic Fallacy.

Sartre claimed that man has no nature, that "existence precedes essence." He got the idea from Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, p. 42: Das 'Wesen' des Daseins liegt in seiner Existenz. It is an interesting and influential idea. What exactly does it mean? What does it entail? What does it exclude? What considerations can be adduced in support of it? Questions like these are what a real philosopher pursues. He doesn't waste all his time poking into the all-too-human philosopher's dirty laundry in the manner of Faye and Romano. Are people in this Age of Celebrity incapable of focusing on ideas?

And then there is Nietzsche. If the Gesamtausgabe of Heidegger ought to be marked with a skull-and-crossbones, then a fortiori for the Gesammelte Schriften of Nietzsche. There are dangerous ideas in Nietzsche. See my post Nietzsche and National Socialism. Indeed, Nietzsche's ideas are far more dangerous than Heidegger's. Should we burn Nietzsche's books and brand The Antichrist as hate speech? Stupid!

The Nazis burned books and the Roman Catholic Church had an index librorum prohibitorum. Now I don't deny that certain impressionable people need to be protected from certain odious influences. But Heidegger writings are no more 'hate speech' (whatever that is) than Nietzsche's writings are, and they don't belong on any latter-day leftist's index librorum prohibitorum. Are they both philosophers? Of course. Are they on a par with Plato and Kant? Not by a long shot! Are their ideas worth discussing? I should think so: they go wrong in interesting ways. Just like Wittgenstein and many others.

For social and political diary entries from Frege near the end of his life, see here. (HT: Marius Manci) Very interesting.

Coming into Being and Passing Away: Two Definitions of Chisholm Examined

Some changes are merely accidental or alterational. Others are substantial or existential. It is one thing for Tom to gain or lose weight, quite another for him to come to be or pass away. Alterational changes including gaining weight, shifting position, and becoming depressed. Such changes are changes in a thing that already exists and remains self-same through the change. Call that thing the substratum of the change. It does not change; what changes are its properties. In a slogan: no alterational change without unchange.

But coming-to-exist and ceasing-to-exist also count as changes. Call them existential changes. This prima facie distinction at the Moorean or datanic level between alterational and existential change leaves open three theoretical options: (a) reduce existential change to alterational change; (b) reduce alterational change to existential change; (c) maintain that they are mutually irreducible. (C) is the least theoretical of the three and the closest to the data; let's see if we can uphold it.

Now it seems obvious that existential change cannot be understood in terms of alteration of the very thing that undergoes it: before a thing exists it is simply not available to suffer any alteration, and likewise when it ceases to exist. Coming-to-be is not gain of a property, but gain of a thing together with all its properties; ceasing-to-be is not loss of a property, but loss of a thing together with all its properties. But it also seems obvious that existential change cannot be understood in terms of the alteration of anything distinct from the thing that undergoes it. Thus I don't think that the following tensed definitions of Roderick Chisholm shed any real light on coming-to-be and passing away ("Coming into Being and Passing Away" in On Metaphysics, U. of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 56):

D1 x comes into being =df There is a property which is such that x has it and there is no property which is such that x had it

D2 x has just passed away =df Something that was such that x exists begins to be such that x does not exist.

Consider the second definition first. If Zeno the cat has just passed away, then the property of being triangular, my house, and me all begin to be such that Zeno does not exist. And conversely. No doubt. But surely the real change which is the ceasing to exist of a cat cannot be understood in terms of mere Cambridge alterations in Platonica or in concreta distinct from the cat. The right-hand side of (D2) cannot figure in a metaphysical explanation of the left-hand side. It is the other way around. The real change in the cat when it ceases to exist is the metaphysical ground of the Cambridge alterational change in the house. Now suppose a cat comes into being. Then of course there is some property that it has, and every property was such that the cat in question did not have it. But again, the real change that occurs when a cat comes into existence cannot be understood in terms of Cambridge alterations of properties.

So Chisholm's definitions, though true, shed no light on the metaphysics of coming-to-be and passing-away. Real existential change cannot be understood in terms of Cambridge changes.

But if Zeno's coming to be cannot be understood in terms of (D1), why can't we say that his coming to be is just the alteration of the gametes whence he sprang? Creation (exnihilation) aside, coming to be is coming to be from something that already exists. So why not say that when a substance comes to exist it comes to exist by the alteration of an already existing substance or substances?

Consider the house of the Wise Pig. It is made entirely of bricks. It came to be from those bricks. Assume that each brick is an Aristotelian primary substance. Did a new Aristotelian substance come into existence when the assiduous pig changed a pile of bricks into a house proof against the depredations of the Big Bad Wolf? Or did nothing new come into existence? It would be reasonable to hold to the latter view and maintain that all that happened was that an alterational change occurred to the bricks. Similarly when the house is disassembles. Nothing passes out of existence. You have what you started with, a loa of bricks.

It is different with cats and people. For example, when a person dies, its body is altered in various ways; but if the person ceases to exist at death, its ceasing to exist is not identical to the person's body being altered in these ways. A rational substance ceases to exist. And the same holds when a person comes into existence either at conception or some time thereafter. This coming into being cannot be identified with the alteration of such already existent material particulars as the mother's uterus and its contents. A rational substance comes to exist. Generation and corruption, to use the not entirely felicitous Aristotelian language, are at least in some cases irreducibly existential changes. Whether or not the coming to be of the Wise Pig's brick house is an addition to being, a person's coming to be is. (On the Boethian definition invoked by scholastics, a person is a primary substance of a rational nature.)

If a person's coming to be is a change, it is an existential change. It is not an alterational change in an existing substance or in existing substances. Nor do persons spring into existence ex nihilo. Persons develop from nonpersons and in such away that the nonpersons cease to exist and the person begins to exist. But if all change requires a substratum of change that remains self-same through the change, a substratum that provides continuity and ensures that the change is a change and not a replacement, what the devil is the substratum in the case of coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be? The Aristotelian-scholastic answer is prime matter. Prime matter, however, though its postulation is well-motivated by a couple or three different lines of argumentation is arguably unintelligible. Prime matter is a wholly indeterminate and wholly formless really existent stuff of which all material substances are composed. It belongs wth G. Bergmann's bare particulars and Kant's Ding an sich in point of unintelligibility or so I would argue.

Political Lawlessness Viewed Philosophically at Twilight

It is twilight time for a great nation. One indication is the rise of political lawlessness.*

Should this trouble the philosopher? Before he is a citizen, the philosopher is a "spectator of all time and existence" in a marvellous phrase that comes down to us from Plato's Republic (486a). The rise and fall of great nations is just more grist for the philosopher's mill. His true homeland is nothing so paltry as a particular nation, even one as exceptional as the USA, and his fate as a truth-seeker cannot be tied to its fate. Like the heavenly Jerusalem, the heavenly Athens is not bound to a geographical location.

National decline is not just grist for the philosopher's mill, however, it is also perhaps a condition of understanding as Hegel suggests in the penultimate paragraph of the preface to The Philosophy of Right:

When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey on grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at the falling of the dusk.

Daughter of Jupiter, Minerva in the mythology of the Greeks is the goddess of wisdom. And the nocturnal owl is one of its ancient symbols. The meaning of the Hegelian trope is that understanding, insight, and wisdom arise when the object to be understood has played itself out, when it has actualized and thus exhausted its potentialities, and now faces only decline.

When a shape of life has grown old, philosophy paints its grey on grey. The allusion is to Goethe's Faust wherein Mephisto says

Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,
Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.

Grey, dear friend, is all theory
And green the golden tree of life.

Philosophy is grey, a "bloodless ballet of categories" (F. H. Bradley) and its object is grey — no longer green and full of life. And so philosophy paints its grey concepts on the grey object, in this case America on the wane. The object must be either dead or moribund before it can be fully understood. Hegel in his famous saying re-animates and gives a new meaning to the Platonic "To philosophize is to learn how to die."

In these waning days of a great republic, the owl of Minerva takes flight. What we lose in vitality we gain in wisdom.

The consolations of philosophy are many.

But as citizens we fight on. For the wise philosopher knows that he can live his vocation only in certain political conditions.

______________

*See Angelo M. Codevilla, Lawlessness, Large and Small

The Most Powerful Argument Against Religious Faith Ever?

Over at the The Philosopher's Stone, Robert Paul Wolff waxes enthusiastic over a quotation from Hobbes:

"Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publicly allowed, RELIGION; not allowed, SUPERSTITION."

Just think what Hobbes accomplishes in these eighteen words! The only distinction between religion and superstition is whether the tales that provoke our fear of things invisible are allowed or not allowed. It is the law, the will of the sovereign, that constitutes the difference betwixt the two. I think that single sentence may be the most powerful argument against religion faith ever written.

There, now I can face another evening of bloviating pundits.

I grant that the Hobbes quotation is a stylistically dazzling English sentence. But I find no non-question-begging argument in it, just a series of assertions:

1. The object of religious belief is an invisible power.
2. This object evokes fear.
3. The fear-evoking object of religion is imaginary, hence nonexistent.
4. Religious and superstitious belief have the same object.
5. There is no intrinsic difference between religion and supersition; the only difference is a relational one. Belief in an imaginary, fear-evoking invisible power is religion if the sovereign allows it. Otherwise it is superstition.

If this is the best the anti-religionists can do, they are in sad shape.

Meanwhile over at Oxford University, Vince Vitale maintains that God or rather God-belief is not dead. Watch the video. My old atheist friend Quentin Smith is quoted. (Note that 'old friend' does not imply that the friend is old; but Quentin is.)

Naturalism as Anti-Philosophy

According to William Ernest Hocking, to philosophize is to assume that the universe has an objective meaning, one that can be discerned by us. "And since meanings are something more than the bare facts of the natural order, all philosophy is, in its assumptions, contradictory to naturalism, taking naturalism strictly as the negative doctrine that Nature is all there is." (Types of Philosophy, 1929, p. 437)

Ah, the endless and enduring pleasures of a well-stocked library! Of books. Let an EMP, natural or anthropogenic, , bring down the grid. I'm ready.

Blue on Blue: California Asians Object to Affirmative Action

A rift within Democrat ranks. Excerpt:

California’s Democrats have long chafed against Proposition 209, a 1996 voter-backed measure that said: “The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, colour, ethnicity, or national origin” in public employment or education. In January SCA 5, a Democratic bill which, if approved by voters, would have exempted universities from this rule (and thus allowed them to bring back affirmative action), whizzed through the state Senate. It seemed likely to pass in the lower house, too.

But SCA 5 was defeated in the lower house. That's good news and a victory for justice, which is not to be confused with 'social justice.' Only the morally obtuse could object to Prop. 209.

Unfortunately the morally obtuse have infiltrated deep into our institutions:

"The university has been hurt” by Prop 209, says Gene Block, UCLA’s chancellor. Like other university administrators, he says that diversity creates a better atmosphere for learning.

That is just politically correct nonsense. But I am not in the mood to explain why one more time.

See here for links to posts critical of the Left's diversity fetish.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Water High, Wide, Dirty, Troubled, and Moody

Bob Dylan, High Water. This is a late-career Dylan gem from Love and Theft (2001). A tribute to Charley Patton. Demonstrates Dylan's mastery of the arcana of Americana. Our greatest and deepest singer-songwriter. Here is some fairly good analysis by Kees de Graaf:

“I got a cravin’ love for blazing speed, got a hopped-up Mustang Ford, jump into the wagon, love, throw your panties overboard. I can write you poems, make a strong man lose his mind, I’m no pig without a wig, I hope you treat me kind, things are breakin’ up out there, high water everywhere”. When the world is under threat of being wiped out, one may expect that man will repent. But that is usually not the case. On the contrary, in the Apocalypse, the low natural tendencies of man seem to thrive like never before. The saying “let’s eat and drink and be merry, because tomorrow we die” (1 Corinthians 15:32) rings true. This is expressed in various ways in the song. First in “a cravin’ love for blazing speed”; the word ‘craving’ indicates that this love for blazing speed has something of a compulsion neurosis. The words “A hopped up Mustang Ford” in combination with “craving love” and “blazing speed” is a brilliant pun. A Mustang Ford is said to be a “speedy car, but “speed” is also a drug for which you may be “craving”. So you may be “craving” for the drug “speed”, but you may also have a craving love for blazing “speed”” – that is for driving very fast. The reason why the Mustang Ford is called “hopped up” is because it is a very “speed-y”, fast car. By the way, speed (methamphetamine) is a dangerous and unpredictable drug, sometimes lethal, representing the fastest growing drug abuse threat in America today. Speed is a potent and addictive central nervous system stimulant, closely related chemically to amphetamine, but with greater central nervous system effects. “Hopped up” means ‘high’ or ‘stoned’, the word is derived from “hop", a nickname for heroin and/or opium, but it can refer to the effects of any drug. . . .

My favorite verse:

Well, George Lewis told the Englishman, the Italian and the Jew
You can't open up your mind, boys, to every conceivable point of view
They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway 5
Judge says to the High Sheriff, "I want them dead or alive"
Either one, I don't care, high water everywhere.

Nosiree, Bob, you can't open up your mind to every conceivable point of view, especially when its not dark yet, but it's getting there.

Charley Patton, High Water Everywhere. Nice slide show.

The Band, Up on Cripple Creek

Jimi Hendrix, May This Be Love. I had forgotten the wonderful guitar solo.

Karla Bonoff, The Water is Wide. I listened to a lot of Bonoff in the early '80s. She does a great job with this traditional song.

Bill Monroe and Doc Watson, Banks of the Ohio. Joan Baez's version from an obscure 1959 album, Folksingers 'Round Harvard Square.

Similar theme though not water-related: Doc Watson, Tom Dooley. Doc and family in a BBC clip.

Standells, Dirty Water. Boston and the River Charles. My mecca in the '70s, the Athens of America, the Hub of the Universe, etc. A great town to be young in. But when it comes time to own property and pay taxes, then a right-thinking man high tails it for the West.

Simon and Garfunkel, Bridge Over Troubled Water. A beautiful song. May it provide some solace for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

Henry Mancini, Moon River. This was Jack Kerouac's favorite song. Ellis Amburn, Subterranean Kerouac (St. Martin's 1998), p. 324:

One night he [Kerouac, during a 1962 visit to Lowell, Mass.] left a bar called Chuck's with Huck Finneral, a reedy, behatted eccentric who carried a business card that read: "Professional killer . . . virgins fixed . . . orgies organized, dinosaurs neutered, contracts & leases broken." Huck's philosophy of life was: "Better a wise madness than a foolish sanity." They drove to a friend's house in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and on the way, Jack sang "Moon River," calling it his favorite song. Composed by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, "Moon River" was the theme song of the popular Audrey Hepburn movie Breakfast at Tiffany's. Sobbed by a harmonica, later swelling with strings and chorus, the plaintive tune's gentle but epic-like lyrics describe a dreamer and roamer not unlike Kerouac.

Indeed they do. A restless dreamer, a lonesome traveller, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of mist, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore. Here is another version of the tune with some beautiful images.

Doc Watson, Moody River. A moodier version than the Pat Boone hit. Clever YouTube comment: "It might be a little early in the day for an Am7." But this here's Saturday night and I'm working on my second wine spodiodi. Chords minor and melancholy go good 'long about now.

Take the High Road with Liberals?

When liberals are up to their usual scumbaggery ought one take the high road with them, patiently making one's case in gentlemanly fashion and rebutting theirs, assuming there is one, all the while ignoring their insults and slanders? In The Liberal Slandering of Paul Ryan Peter Wehner takes seriously and replies earnestly to the mouthings of the race-baiter Paul Krugman and others. But slanderous scum like Krugman are beneath serious reply and it is arguable that replying in measured tones only gives them a credibility they don't deserve.

Once you grasp that it is a war, and that liberals will say anything no matter how absurd, then you will appreciate that mockery and derision are much more effective means of opposing them. But you must also provide solid arguments for the fence-sitters. In Six Arguments Only a Liberal Believe, John Hawkins supplies just the right admixture of mockery and derision to his substantive point-making.

I'm all for civility, but civility is for the civil only.

Double Trouble from Strange Bedfellows: Leftist-Islamist Collaboration

Required reading

See my Islamism category for more on this and related topics.

Accept Love, Accept Aversion

We must learn to accept people's love, good wishes, and benevolence as gifts without worrying whether we deserve these things or not, and without worrying whether we will ever be in a position to compensate the donors. Similarly, we must learn to accept people's hate and malevolence as a sort of reverse gratuitous donation whether we deserve them or not.

We are often unjustly loved and admired. So why should it bother us that we are often unjustly hated and contemned? Try to see the latter as balancing the former.

Technology is not Wisdom

A short column by Victor Davis Hanson. It nicely complements what I said last night about the widespread paucity of phronesis and the obsession with the calculable.

What is the H Index?

A U. K. reader made mention in an e-mail of a feminist philosopher with a high H index.

"What is this? It's a measure of citation apparently. Is that good? Or is it a bunch of useless people citing each other — a sort of walled garden? Interested in your thoughts."

To tell the truth, it wasn't until this afternoon that I had even heard of it. A metric like this is the kind of thing that excites status-obsessed careerists and gatekeepers like Ladder Man, a. k. a. Brian Leiter, who is so-called because of his obsession with rankings and ratings. Can you imagine a real philosopher such as Spinoza caring about these trappings of professionalism gone wild?

Here is the way I understand it. Let N be the total number of a scientist's or scholar's publications. A scientist or scholar has index h if h of his N publications have at least h citations each, and the other (N − h) publications have no more than h citations each. (See here.)

To illustrate, I will use myself as an example and attempt to calculate my h value based on the data provided by Google Scholar here.

Publication #1 (Dialectica) 41 citations
#2 (Nous) 39 citations
#3 (Kluwer book) 23 citations
#4 (Analysis) 16 citations
#5 (Monist) 13 citations
#6 (Faith and Philosophy) 10 citations
#7 (Modern Schoolman) 9 citations
#8 (Faith and Philosophy) 8 citations
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#9 (International Philosophical Quarterly) 8 citations
#10 (History of Philosophy Quarterly) 7 citations

and so on, with all the rest of my 50 or so publications having no more than 8 citations each.

The value of h for me is 8 because 8 of my publications have at least 8 citations each and the rest have no more than 8 citations each. If I had published only #1, then h would be 1. If I had published only the first two, then my h would be 2 because each has at least two citations. If I had published only the first three, then my h would be 3 because each of the three has been cited at least three times. And so on. If I had published only the first eight, then my h would still be 8.

So does this make me a better philosopher than Edmund Gettier? He published exactly one very short philosophical paper. H for him is 1. Am I eight times better than him? And what does 'better' mean? More influential? Then he is better than me. But influential on whom? Is 'influential' a descriptive or a descriptive-cum-normative predicate? Gettier cooked up a counterexample to the justified-true-belief analysis of propositional knowledge. How important is that whole debate? Nietzsche and Ayn Rand are highly influential. Is that good or bad?

Socrates is supposed not to have published anything. His h = 0. Socrates Jones over at Whatsammatta U. is his latter-day acolyte. So far he has published nothing and may never publish anything. But he is an inspiring teacher and as keen a dialectician as the master himself with many of the same moral attributes.

But poor Socrates Jones was denied tenure despite his philosophical gifts because the lunkheads who evaluated him, lacking phronesis and obsessed with the calculable, and needing to justify themselves to know-nothing administrators, were obsessed with a dubious and well-nigh meaningless metric.

More needs to be said on this topic, much more.