April 2015 – Maverick Philosopher

Facts, Opinions, and Common Core

Justin P. McBrayer, in a NYT Opinionator piece, writes,

When I went to visit my son’s second grade open house, I found a troubling pair of signs hanging over the bulletin board. They read:

Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.

Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes.

Hoping that this set of definitions was a one-off mistake, I went home and Googled “fact vs. opinion.” The definitions I found online were substantially the same as the one in my son’s classroom. As it turns out, the Common Core standards used by a majority of K-12 programs in the country require that students be able to “distinguish among fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment in a text.” And the Common Core institute provides a helpful page full of links to definitions, lesson plans and quizzes to ensure that students can tell the difference between facts and opinions.

This is indeed troubling, but there is worse to come. According to McBrayer, the kiddies are taught that claims are either facts or opinions, where the disjunction is exclusive. And to make it even worse, the little rascals are further indoctrinated that every value claim is an opinion!

And so 'Cheating on tests is wrong' is an opinion, not a fact, hence neither true nor provable, and therefore something someone merely thinks, feels, or believes. God help us! Yet another argument for private schools and home-schooling.

I will now give you my considered opinion on how best to think about this topic.

First of all, it is a major mistake to think that an opinion cannot be true because it is an opinion. Some opinions are true and some are false. In this respect, opinions are no different from beliefs: some are true and some are false. It follows that some opinions are facts, on one use of 'fact.' I distinguish among three uses of 'fact':

Logical Use: A fact is a truth, whether a true proposition, a true judgment, a true belief, a true opinion, a true statement, a true declarative sentence, etc. In general, a fact is a true truth-bearer. If this is what we mean by 'fact,' then it is obvious that some opinions are facts. For example, my opinion (and presumably yours too) that the Moon is uninhabited is a fact. It is a fact because it is true. But much of what is true is true because of the way the world is. So we note a different but related use of 'fact,' namely, the

Ontological Use: A fact is an obtaining (concrete) state of affairs that can serve as a truth-maker of a truth. When a famous philosopher opined that the world is the totality of facts, not of things, he was not putting forth the view that the world is the totality of truths, nor the totality of what is known. (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 1.1)

Epistemological Use: A fact is an obtaining state of affairs known to be the case or believed to be the case on evidence. It is important not to confuse what is known to be the case with what is the case. Everything one knows to be the case is the case; but there is plenty that is the case that no one of us knows to be the case.

The foregoing should make it obvious that a second major mistake is to think that only what is testable or provable is a fact. To make that mistake is to confuse the logical and the ontological on the one side with the epistemological on the other. There are facts (truths) that cannot be empirically tested or verified, but also cannot be proven by deduction from other truths. The Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC) is an example: No proposition is both true and not true. LNC is true and known to be true, but it is not known to be true on the basis of empirical observation or experiment. It is also not known by inference from propositions already accepted. How then do we know it to be true? A reasonable answer is that it is self-evident, objectively self-evident. One enjoys a direct intellectual insight into its truth.

Pakistani Man Set on Fire for Blasphemy

If so, then some facts are objectively self-evident despite the fact that they are neither empirically verifiable nor provable by non-circular deductive inference from propositions known to be true. And so it may well be that a proposition like Setting bums on fire for fun is morally wrong is an objective fact (truth) and therefore not a mere opinion. Or perhaps a better example would be a proposition from which the foregoing is derivable, to wit, Causing severe pain to sentient beings for the sheer fun of it is morally wrong. The graphic depicts a homeless, mentally unstable, Pakistani set afire for blasphemy by adherents of the religion of peace. Now either you see (morally intuit) that doing such a thing is a grave moral wrong, or you don't, and if the latter then you are either morally obtuse or a liberal, which may well come to the same thing.

Without getting too deep into the topic of moral realism, all I want to say at the moment is that there is at least a very serious set of questions here, questions that cannot be ignored once one avoids the elementary confusions into which contemporary liberals tend to fall. Not every contemporary liberal, of course, but enough to justify my issuing a general warning against their slopheadedness.

Liberals typically confuse opinions with mere opinions. They confuse truths with known truths. They confuse the property of being believed by some person or group of persons with the property of being true. They confuse making moral judgments with being judgmental. They confuse merely subjective judgments of taste with moral judgments.

Men in bow ties look ridiculous. Or so say I. That is a merely subjective sartorial opinion of mine, and I recognize it as such. There is no fact of the matter here and so if you say the opposite you are not contradicting me, logically speaking. Note that It strikes me that men in bow ties look ridiculous is an objective statement of fact about how certain sartorial matters seem to me. But from this objectively true statement one cannot infer the former subjective statement. If you can't distinguish those two sentences, then you are not thinking clearly.

Too many liberals cannot see the incoherence of maintaining that we must respect other cultures because judgments as to right and wrong are culturally relative. They fail to see that if such judgments are indeed relative, then there cannot be any objective moral requirement that members of a given culture respect other cultures. If all such moral judgments are culturally relative, then the members of a culture who believe that the strong have the right to enslave the weak are perfectly justified in enslaving the weak. For if right and wrong are culturally relative, then they have all the justification they could possibly have for enslaving them.

Same-Sex ‘Marriage’

A couple of articles that I may or may not have time to comment on.

Ross Douthat, The Wild Ideas of Social Conservatives

James Jacobs, Is Homosexual Marriage Even Possible?

Here are my entries on marriage and 'marriage.'

Carnap and Clarity

This entry is installment #2 in a Carnap versus Heidegger series. Here is the first in the series. It couldn't hurt to at least skim through it. Part of what I am up to is an exploration of the origin and nature of the analytic-Continental split. To quote from the first installment:

If I were were to select two writings that best epitomize the depth of the Continental-analytic clash near the time of its outbreak, they would be Heidegger's 1929 What is Metaphysics? and Carnap's 1932 response, "On the Overcoming of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Language." (In fairness to Carnap, let us note that his Erkenntnis piece is more than a response to Heidegger inasmuch as it calls into question the meaningfulness of all metaphysics. And in fairness to Heidegger, we should note that he thinks he is doing something more radical than metaphysics. Metaphysics for Heidegger is onto-theology. Metaphysics thinks Being (das Sein) but always in reference to beings (das Seiende); it does not think Being in its difference from beings. Perhaps in a later post I will venture to explain what that means.)

Analytic philosophers prize clarity. And rightly so. For one thing, "clarity is courtesy," as Ortega y Gasset once said. (I suppose the Spaniard would count as Continental, and not just geographically.) One more parenthetical remark before getting down to business: I wish Erich Pryzwara had received the message that clarity is courtesy. Then perhaps he would not have written anything as unreadable as his Analogia Entis. Even the charitable German Thomist Josef Pieper so characterized it.

I need waste no words defending the thesis that clarity in thought and expression are to be preferred to obscurity. Avoidable obscurity must be avoided. But there is an empty and trivial clarity. A clarity worth pursuing is a clarity with content. Clarity ought not be pursued as an end in itself or as a cognitive value that trumps every other cognitive value. While avoidable obscurity must be avoided, some obscurity is bound to be unavoidable if our inquiries are serious, sustained, and worth pursuing. Such obscurity must be tolerated.

One day in class I was praising clarity and its importance. A student responded that reality is messy. My counter-response was that, while reality is messy, it does not follow that our thinking about it should also be. On the contrary! The present point, however, is that thinking worth doing ought to penetrate as far as it can into reality, as rich, dark, and messy as it is, and if some obscurity proves unavoidable, then so be it.

Rudolf Carnap's brand of clarity is sterile, arbitrary and as artificial as fluorescent light. What he does is enforce or impose an arbitrary standard of clarity across the board without regard to differences in subject matter. We ought to say about clarity what Aristotle said about precision near the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics: "it cannot be expected in the treatment of all subjects alike . . . ." (1094b10-15) Ethics, the Philosopher said, cannot be treated with mathematical precision. The same goes for metaphysics.

"Many words of metaphysics," Carnap tells us, are "devoid of meaning." ("The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language" in A. J. Ayer, ed., Logical Positivism, The Free Press, 1959, p. 65.) He chooses as his first example 'principle' "in the sense of principle of being, not principle of knowledge or axiom." (65) But since 'principle' in the ontological sense is not much used these days outside of scholastic circles, let me substitute 'ground' used ontologically. Thus there is a large body of literature in which truth-makers are described as the 'ontological grounds' of truths. It is clear that Carnap's accusations of (cognitive) meaninglessness apply as much to grounds as to principles. They also apply to other words and phrases in the vocabulary of truth-maker theorists such as 'makes true' and 'in virtue of.' For example, 'Peter is smoking' is true in virtue of Peter's smoking, or the fact of Peter's smoking makes true 'Peter is smoking.' Apart from truth-maker theory, 'in virtue of' has long been a favorite of philosophers. Some think it a 'weasel phrase' best banished from the vocabulary of philosophy. I disagree.

"But these words are ambiguous and vague." (65) Thus Carnap. Insofar as they have a clear meaning, their meaning is empirical, not metaphysical; insofar as they are metaphysical, they are meaningless. I would put the Carnapian argument as follows in terms of the following dilemma:

Either metaphysical grounding (as it occurs in the putative relation between a truth-maker and a truth-bearer) is a causal relation or it is a logical relation. But it is neither. It is not a relation of empirical causation. Truth-maker theorists insist on this themselves. Nor is it a logical relation such as entailment. Logical relations hold between and among truth-bearers; a truth-maker, however, though proposition-like on some theories, is not a truth-bearer. 'Truth-making,' then has neither the meaning of 'causing' nor the meaning of 'entailing.'

Yet, no criterion is specified for any other meaning. Consequently, the alleged 'metaphysical' meaning which the word is supposed to have here in contrast to the mentioned empirical meaning, does not exist. [. . .] The word is explicitly deprived of its original meaning . . . . (65)

The word 'making' is stripped of its empirical meaning, but no new meaning is supplied. The word becomes an "empty shell." (66) The associations and feelings attached to the word used in the old empirical way remain in play. But these do not give meaning to the word used in the new 'metaphysical' way: "it remains meaningless as long as no method of verification can be described." (66)

The same holds for all specifically metaphysical terms. There are one and all "devoid of meaning." (67) Carnap mentions the following: the Idea, the Absolute, the Unconditioned, the Infinite, and "the being of being," which I take to be a reference to Heidegger's das Sein des Seienden, which is better translated as 'the Being of beings.' But also: non-being, thing-in-itself, absolute spirit, objective spirit, essence, being-in-itself, being-in-and-for-itself, the Non-Ego.

These terms are meaningless because empirical truth-conditions of their use cannot be supplied. Hence the alleged statements of metaphysics which contain them are one and all pseudo-statements that are bare of sense and assert nothing. (67)

Perhaps the best response to Carnap and those of his ilk is brutal contradiction: "You're just wrong!" The words you would dismiss as meaningless just obviously have meaning and you're just obviously wrong to think otherwise.

For example, it is clear enough what it means to say that some truth-bearers need truth-makers, that a sentence such as 'Peter is smoking' cannot just be true but is true because of something external to the sentence, something external on the side of the object, not on the side of the subject, i.e., on the side of the one who asserively utters the sentence. And it is clear enough that this use of 'because' is not an empirical-causal use of the term. It is also clear enough what 'in virtue of' and 'making' mean in this context.

Another devastating response to Carnap is the obvious point that his Verifiability Criterion of Cognitive Significance cannot satisfy its own demand. "Every cognitively meaningful statement is either empirically verifiable in principle or a logical/analytic truth" is neither empirically verifiable in principle nor a logical/analytic truth. Therefore, the Verifiability Criterion is cognitively meaningless. So does it then have a merely emotive meaning? Is is a mere suggestion as to what to allow as meaningful? If the latter, then no thank you!

It's an easy rebuttal, but none the worse for that. Sometimes, simplex sigillum veri.

Carnap is to philosophy what a philistine is to the arts: just crude and ignorant . So I dismiss him as a philosophistine. I coined this word ten years or so ago in a polemic against David Stove another philosophistine whose crudity is on shameful display in his The Plato Cult.

My rule is: no polemics in philosophy. But if the other guy starts it . . . . Or the shade of the other guy . . . .

College Encourages Lively Exchange of One Idea

Is this a freaking joke? (HT: Spencer Case who tells me the piece is "accurate.")

The only kind of diversity liberals care about is politically correct diversity, diversity in respect of skin color and reproductive plumbing, not a diversity of ideas.

I've been pinching myself a lot recently. Am I awake? Is this stuff really happening?

Last night at five I turned on the TV to see blacks rioting in Baltimore. I should think that crapping in one's own pants is not the most effective way of protesting something. Where are the adults? Abdication of authority. Clowns and fools, race-baiters and liars, in high places.

At the same time, fascist abuses of authority as in the John Doe raids in Wisconsin.

UPDATE 1: Joshua Orsak tells me The Onion is a joke site. Spencer Case, NRO journalist, said the piece is "accurate." I am tempted to go Hillarious: In this POMO age, what difference does it make? The Prez and the Veep are jokes, Nancy Pelosi is a joke, our foreign policy is a joke, the universities of the land . . . . In this day and age jokes are realities. 'Trigger warnings' for example.

UPDATE 2: Elliot writes,

Regarding your 28 April post on the Lively Exchange of One Idea: it sure looks like a joke, but I also fear this type of thinking is present in American higher education.

I've had a university administrator tell me and fellow instructors during a faculty meeting that, when grading papers, we should be less concerned with providing educative feedback and more concerned with providing feedback that "makes students feel warm and fuzzy and comfortable." This is just a sample of many similar comments I've heard over the years.

I sometimes suspect that (at least some) universities seek to pamper rather than educate students. This coddle-desire puts instructors who actually want to educate in a difficult spot.

I also worry that educational confusion is widespread at the elementary school level. You may have seen the following article.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/02/why-our-children-dont-think-there-are-moral-facts/?_r=0

Thanks for your work.

Did Rand Paul Really Say That?

Heather MacDonald:

Announcing his presidential bid this month, Sen. Rand Paul said he wants to repeal “any law that disproportionately incarcerates people of color.”

Did he really say that? If yes, then he's pandering Hillariously . 'People of color,' to use the politically correct phrase, are disproportionately incarcerated because they disproportionately commit crimes. Is Rand now a quota-mentality liberal? Then to hell with him. It says something about him that he won't stand on principle even though he has no real chance of getting the Republican nomination.

Diversity and the Quota Mentality

Diversity, Inc.

The Liberal Quota Mentality Illustrated Once Again

Who’s to Blame?

Wherein Diana West takes some accurate shots at Republicans lest we forget their complicity in our decline, distracted as we are by the ever-increasing stench of the Dem's Clintonian corruption.

Hillary’s Presidential Bid as an Exercise in and Referendum on Cynicism

Another penetrating column by Bret Stephens. Excerpts:

All of which means that Mrs. Clinton’s presidential bid is an exercise in—and a referendum on—cynicism, partly hers but mainly ours. Democrats who nominate Mrs. Clinton will transform their party into the party of cynics; an America that elects Mrs. Clinton as its president will do so as a nation of cynics. Is that how we see, or what we want for, ourselves?

This is what the 2016 election is about. You know already that if Mrs. Clinton runs for president as an Elizabeth Warren-style populist she won’t mean a word of it, any more than she would mean it if she ran as a ’90s-style New Democrat or a ’70s-style social reformer. The real Hillary, we are asked to believe, is large and contains multitudes.

The allusion is to Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" in Leaves of Grass wherein we find on p. 96 of the Signet Classic edition the lines:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

You may recall that a copy of Leaves of Grass was a gift Bill Clinton gave to Monica Lewinsky. The meaning of that I will leave you to ponder. Back to Stephens:

Cynicism is the great temptation of modern life. We become cynics because we desperately don’t want to be moralists, and because earnestness is boring, and because skepticism is a hard and elusive thing to master. American education, by and large, has become an education in cynicism: Our Founders were rank hypocrites. Our institutions are tools of elite coercion. Our economy perpetuates privilege. Our justice system is racist. Our foreign policy is rapacious. Cynicism gives us the comfort of knowing we won’t be fooled again because we never believed in anything in the first place. We may not be born disabused and disenchanted, but we get there very quickly.

This is the America that the Clintons seek to enlist in their latest presidential quest. I suspect many Democrats would jump at an opportunity not to participate in the exercise—it’s why they bolted for Barack Obama in 2008—and would welcome a credible primary challenger. (Run, Liz, Run!) But they will go along with it, mostly because liberals have demonized the Republican Party to the point that they have lost the capacity for self-disgust. Anything—anyone—to save America from a conservative judicial appointment.

As for the rest of the country, Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy offers a test: How much can it swallow? John Podesta and the rest of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign team must be betting that, like a python devouring a goat, Americans will have ample time to digest Mrs. Clinton’s personal ethics.

God and Socrates: Two Different Ways of Existing?

This is another round in an ongoing discussion (via face-to-face conversations, podcasts, and weblog posts) with Dale Tuggy on whether or not God is best thought of as a being among beings, albeit the highest being (summum ens), or rather as self-subsistent Being itself (ipsum esse subsistens). In this entry I will respond to just a bit of Dale's first weblog response to my post. Dale writes,

God and I (and you) all exist. Does it follow that we all three of us exist in the same way? Well, we all satisfy the concept existing, but God also satisfies the concept necessarily existing, which is just to say that he exists, and it is absolutely impossible for him to not exist. (In the jargon which is so common: he exists “in all possible worlds.”) We all exist, yes, but God necessarily exists (which entails his existing). So I think it can be misleading to say that “God is in the same way that creatures are.” This suggests that God and creatures aren’t importantly different as respects their existence. But creatures can not exist, whereas God can’t not exist. That’s a big difference.

Let me first point out that what we have here is an intramural dispute among theists who agree about quite a bit. Thus we agree that God exists (in the sense in which naturalistic atheists* deny that God exists), has the standard omni-attributes, is unique, is in some sense a necessary being, is transcendent of creation, possesses aseity, and so on. But we differ on questions like these: how exactly are the divine necessity, the divine uniqueness, and the divine transcendence to be understood? To put it roughly, we who side with Thomas subscribe to a radical necessity, uniqueness, and transcendence, whereas those on Dale's side hold to less radical readings of these terms. For example, Dale thinks of God as transcendent, but not so transcendent as to prevent the univocal (not equivocal, not analogical) application of the predicate '___ is a person' to both God and Socrates. For Dale, God is transcendent all right, but not Maimonides-transcendent or Thomas-transcendent. (I trust my meaning is clear, or clear enough for now; I plan to blog further on these options later.)

A second preliminary observation is that in a discussion like this we cannot avoid the deepest questions of metaphysics. In the deepest depths of the deep lurks the question: What is existence? A question about which your humble correspondent wrote a book. One cannot adequately tackle the God question while just presupposing some theory of existence such as the Frege-Russell-Quine theory. To put it gnomically, no thin theory of existence for a thick God. What's more, one cannot just presuppose some general-metaphysical framework such as 'relation' versus 'constituent' ontology. (This terminology, from Wolterstorff, though current, leaves something to be desired.)

Let's now get down to the nuts and bolts.

Is Existence a Concept?

Dale says in effect that God and Socrates both "satisfy the concept existing." Right here I must object. I maintain that existence (existing) cannot be a concept, whether subjective or objective. Subjective concepts are mental items: no minds, no concepts. Of course, we can also speak of objective concepts, but I think Dale understands by 'concept' subjective concepts. Dispositionally viewed, subjective concepts are classificatory powers grounded in minds like ours: I have the concept triangle in that I have the power to classify items given in experience as either triangular or not triangular. Occurrently viewed, the concept triangle is the mind-dependent content of such a classificatory power. The main thing, though, is this: no minds, no (subjective) concepts.

Now existence is that which makes an existing item exist. It is that which determines it as existent. It is that without which a thing would be nothing at all. We assume pluralism: there are many existents. But they all have something in common: they exist. It follows that existence cannot be identified with existents either distributively or collectively. Existence is not identical to any one existent, nor to the whole lot of them. Existence is different from existents. Given the commonality of existence, and its difference from existents, one may be tempted to think of existence as a concept abstractly common to existing items or existents. Dale apparently succumbs to this temptation. He thinks of existence as common in the manner of an abstract concept. But this can't be right. Existence is not a concept. The existing of things is not their falling under any concept, not even the putative concept, existence.

Argument 1. Things existed long before there were concepts. Therefore, the existence of these things cannot be identified with their falling under any concept, let alone the putative concept, existence.

Note: if Dale wants a concept, existence, I'll give it to him. But then I will go on to show that this concept is not existence, that it is not the gen-u-ine article (stamp the foot, pound the lectern).

Argument 2. The modal analog of the foregoing temporal argument is this. Much of what exists now would have existed now had no concepts existed now. For example, the Moon would have existed now had no concept-users and concepts existed now. Therefore, the existence of these things cannot be identified with their falling under any concept, let alone the putative concept, existence.

Argument 3. Necessarily, if an individual x falls under a concept C, then both x and C exist. So it cannot be the case that x exists in virtue of falling under any concept, including the putative concept, existence. You move in an explanatory circular if you try to account for the existence of x by saying that x exists in virtue of falling under a concept when nothing falls under a concept unless it exists. Note that this third argument works for both subjective and objective concepts.

So I say about existence what I say about God: neither can be a concept. It is clear, I hope, that God is not a concept. There is of course the concept, God, but this concept is not God. The concept God is no more God than the concept chair is a chair. One can sit on a chair; one cannot sit on a concept. Suppose there were no chairs. It would still be the case that the concept chair is not a chair. (And if all chairs were suddenly to cease to exist, they would not at that moment become concepts.) Likewise, even if there is no God, it is still the case that the concept God is not God. You haven't grasped the concept God if you think that God is a mind-dependent item or that God is abstract or that God can have items instantiating it or falling under it. To understand the concept God is to understand that whatever satisfies it, if anything, cannot be a concept.

Now if existence is not a concept, then necessary existence is not a concept either.

There is a way Dale might agree with part of the foregoing. He might say, "OK, existence in its difference from existents cannot be a concept. But I deny that there is in reality, outside the mind, anything called 'existence.' There are existents, but no existence. There is nothing different from existents that makes them exist. There is just the manifold of existents. In your jargon, I subscribe to radical ontological pluralism: (ROP) In reality, existence divides without remainder into existents."

This is not the place for a full-scale response, but I need to say something. There cannot, in reality, be a manifold of existents unless there is something in reality common to them all that makes them a manifold of existents, as opposed to a sheer manyness. When this is properly appreciated then it will be appreciated that existence cannot divide without remainder into existents. Outside the mind, the Existential Difference, the difference between existence and existents, remains.

Are Necessity and Contingency Ways of Existing?

For Dale, God is a being among beings in the sense I defined earlier. I infer from this that for Dale God is in the same way that creatures are. Dale seeks to block this inference by pointing out that God is a necessary being while creatures are contingent beings. This is of course a big difference as Dale says. But it needn't be taken to imply a difference in ways of existing, and it cannot be so taken unless Dale wants to abandon his scheme. For the difference between metaphysical necessity and metaphysical contingency is logically consistent with God and creatures existing in the very same way, as would not be the case if God is not a being among beings, but Being itself. So I hold to my claim that for Dale, God is in the same way that creatures are.

To appreciate this, note that 'exists' across the following two sentences is univocal in sense:

a. Necessarily, God exists.

b. It is not the case that necessarily, Socrates exists.

This univocity gives us no reason to think that God and Socrates differ in their way of existing. This becomes even clearer if we explicate (a) and (b) in 'possible worlds' terms:

a*. God exists in all possible worlds.

b*. Socrates exists in some but not all possible worlds.

This suggests that the difference between necessity and contingency is not a difference in ways of existing, but a difference in the number of worlds quantified over, whether all or some. So Dale by his own lights cannot maintain that the necessity-contingency difference is a difference in ways of existing. He fails to block my inference above.

Now suppose we ask: why does God exist in all worlds? Answer: because he is necessary; he cannot not exist. But why cannot he not exist? What is it about God that distinguishes him from Socrates in this respect? Why can't Socrates not exist? Is it just a brute fact that God exists in all worlds, but Socrates only in some? What is the ground of the divine metaphysical necessity? I say: the divine necessity is grounded in the divine simplicity. The latter accounts for the former. It is because God is (identical to) his existence, that he cannot not exist. And it is because Socrates is not (identical to) his existence that he can not exist. Now this answer does imply that there are different ways of existing. Thus:

a**. God exists-necessarily.

b**. Socrates exists-contingently.

Note that in this last pair there is no univocity on the side of the predicate as there is in the first two pairs.

Summary

I aim at clarity, not agreement. I aim to clarify our differences, not secure agreement with my views. Clarity is an attainable goal in a philosophical discussion; I rather doubt that agreement is.

I deny the analytic dogma according to which there are no modes of Being or ways of existing. (See my "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Novotny and Novak, eds. Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, Routledge, 2014, pp. 45-75) Dale apparently subscribes to the dogma. Thus for me the divine modal status, broadly logical or metaphysical necessity, is grounded in and accounted for by the divine simplicity, while for Dale the same modal status is left ungrounded and unaccounted for. Dale does not answer the question: Why is God such that he cannot not exist? Nor does he answer the question: Why is Socrates such that he can not exist?

This is equivalent to saying that for Dale, God and Socrates do not differ as to mode of Being or way of existing. For me, however, an ontologically simple being, one that is (identical to) its existence cannot be said to exist in the same way as one that is not (identical to) to its existence.

______________________

*I take a naturalistic atheist to be one whose atheism is a logical consequence of his naturalism. If one holds, as D. M. Armstrong does, that reality is exhausted by the space-time system, then it follows straightaway that there is no God as Dale and I are using 'God.'

Why Physics Needs Philosophy

A short piece by Tim Maudlin. Good as far as it goes, but it doesn't go deep enough. Maudlin rightly opposes the "reigning attitude":

The reigning attitude in physics has been “shut up and calculate”: solve the equations, and do not ask questions about what they mean. But putting computation ahead of conceptual clarity can lead to confusion.

He has some other useful things to say about philosophy's role in conceptual clarification. But there is no mention of what ought to strike one as a major task: an explanation of how recherché physical theories relate to the world we actually live in, the world in its human involvement, what Edmund Husserl called die Lebenswelt, the life-world. This is a task that falls to philosophy, but not to contemporary analytic philosophy with its woeful ignorance of the phenomenological tradition. On the other hand, judging by the philosophical scribblings of physicists, they would make a mess of it too.

A related task of philosophy is to debunk and expose the bad philosophy churned out by physicists in their spare time when they need to turn a buck and play the public intellectual. Understandable: doing physics is hard while writing bad philosophy is easy. Think Lawrence Krauss for a recent prime offender. And then there is the awful Hawking-Mlodinow book mentioned by Maudlin, entitled The Grand Design.

Five years ago I began a series on it. But the first chapters were so bad, I didn't bother to proceed beyond my first entry. Having just re-read that post, it stands up well.

One more point about Maudlin. He (mis)uses 'mystical' as a pejorative, thereby betraying his ignorance of the subject of mysticism. That's an Ayn Rand-y type of blunder.

David Horowitz versus Slavoj Zizek

A lively debate with Julian Assange in the middle. Horowitz talks sense as usual while Zizek appears to be off his meds.

Horowitz: "The natural state of mankind is war." Of course. Lefties would understand this if they weren't in a permanent state of self-colonoscopy.

16:00 Horowitz on religion and leftism as ersatz religion.

18:04 Horowitz: "Peace occurs only when there is a concert of powers, or a single power, that can intimidate would-be aggressors. Now I ask you, who would you like that power to be, other than the United States?"

26:06 Horowitz: "I have to go to universities with body guards because of the fascist Left in this country."

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Clowns

Being hung up on the '60s, there is and will be only one clown for me, Bozo the Clown. After Bozo I had no truck with clowns. I'm a serious man. But I can relate to this segment from the Seinfeld episode, "The Fire." It is one of the funniest in the whole series. But I suppose you had to be there. In the '60s I mean. With Bozo. The Clown. Now some songs featuring clowns.

Roy Orbison, In Dreams. Nice surreal video. "A candy-colored clown they call the sandman . . . ."

James Darren, Goodbye Cruel World. "I'm off to join the circus, gonna be a broken-hearted clown."

Frank Sinatra, Send in the Clowns

A couple of clowns in high places:

Obama the Clown

The Pope is a Buffoon When it Comes to Economics

There is too much buffoonery in high places.

It would be nice to be able to expect from popes and presidents a bit of gravitas, a modicum of seriousness, when they are instantiating their institutional roles. What they do after hours is not our business. So Pope Francis' clowning around does not inspire respect, any more than President Clinton's answering the question about his underwear. Remember that one? Boxers or briefs? He answered the question! All he had to do was calmly state, without mounting a high horse, "That is not a question that one asks the president of the United States." And now we have the Orwellian Prevaricator himself in the White House, Barack Hussein Obama, whose latest Orwellian idiocy is that Big Government is the problem, not him, even though he is the the poster boy, the standard bearer, like unto no one before him in U. S. history, of Big Government!

Read the rest.

I forgot the disgusting Biden the Clown:

Joe Biden the Clown. This article will recall for you Biden's clownish antics in his fall 2012 'debate' with Paul Ryan.

Gluttony: Another Sign of Decline

So what can we teach the Muslim world? How to be gluttons?

Another sign of decline in the Spenglerian gloom of Der Untergang des Abendlandes is the proliferation of TV food shows, The U. S. of Bacon being one of them. A big fat 'foody' roams the land in quest of diners and dives that put bacon into everything. As myself something of a trencherman back in the day, I understand the lure of the table. But I am repelled by the spiritual vacuity of those who wax ecstatic over some greasy piece of crud they have just eaten, or speak of some edible item as 'to die for.'

It is natural for a beast to be bestial, but not for a man. He must degrade and denature himself, and that only a spiritual being can do. Freely degrading himself, he becomes like a beast thereby proving that he is — more than a beast.

Trigger Warning!

Here you will find Keith Burgess-Jackson's trigger warning along with some related documents.

The extent to which the lunatics have taken over the asylum is greater than I thought.

Heather Wilhelm:

“History assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely,” Will and Ariel Durant wrote in 1968’s “The Lessons of History.” Even as ancient Greece and Rome faced serious “moral weakening” and societal decay, for instance, both continued to produce “masterpieces of literature and art” and a steady flow of “great statesmen, philosophers, poets, and artists” for hundreds of years.

“May we take as long to fall,” the Durants exhort in their book, “as Imperial Rome!”

If the couple were alive today, one wonders if they could have retained their trademark pluck. On college campuses across America, an army of leftist snowflakes — a generation long told they’re special, fragile, and never, ever wrong — is on the march, aiming to squelch any threatening idea that “triggers” uncomfortable thoughts.

The lunacy of the Left seems to know no bounds. This shrinking violet needs a 'safe space' to hide from equity feminist Christina Hoff Sommers (via Legal Insurrection):

Hillary the Corrupt

Another day, another scandal. Or so it seems these last few days. Here is the Clinton Scandal Manual.

I also recommend Daniel Halper, Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine, Harper Collins, 2014, xxv + 319 pp. A page-turner! Doesn't require the effort of say, Erich Pryzwara's Analogia Entis.

With Obama we had the audacity of 'hope.' With Hillary, the audacity of mendacity.

But why should truth matter? What difference does it make?

Obama the Disaster

The man is a dangerous fool. A clear recent instance of his folly is his preposterous assertion that “Today, there is no greater threat to our planet than climate change.” The claim is beneath refutation. But what is it a symptom of? That truth is not a leftist value, or that lefties are very poor at threat assessment? Or both? Or both and some third thing?

As for the dangerousness of the feckless incompetent, Kirsten Powers exposes his unconcern for the slaughter of Christians by radical Muslims.

The man was elected twice! How long can we last with an electorate of fools?