The phenomenal Edward Feser. How does he do it? He teaches an outrageous number of courses at a community college, five per semester; he has written numerous books; he gives talks and speeches, and last time I checked he has six children. Not to mention his weblog which is bare of fluff and filler and of consistently high quality.
He writes with clarity, style, and wit, and you don't want to end up on the wrong end of his polemics, as Lawrence Krauss did recently who got himself deservedly tagged by Ed as a "professional amateur philosopher."
Ed is an embodiment of one of the truths of Quine's essay Paradoxes of Plenty, namely, that a paucity of free time is not inimical to productivity.
Ed's latest collects 16 recent essays in the areas of philosophy of nature, natural theology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Start with "The Road from Atheism," his intellectual autobiography.
You can get the book from Amazon for a paltry $19.02. Amazon blurb:
In a series of publications over the course of a decade, Edward Feser has argued for the defensibility and abiding relevance to issues in contemporary philosophy of Scholastic ideas and arguments, and especially of Aristotelian-Thomistic ideas and arguments. This work has been in the vein of what has come to be known as “analytical Thomism,” though the spirit of the project goes back at least to the Neo-Scholasticism of the period from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Neo-Scholastic Essays collects some of Feser’s academic papers from the last ten years on themes in metaphysics and philosophy of nature, natural theology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Among the diverse topics covered are: the relationship between Aristotelian and Newtonian conceptions of motion; the varieties of teleological description and explanation; the proper interpretation of Aquinas’s Five Ways; the impossibility of a materialist account of the human intellect; the philosophies of mind of Kripke, Searle, Popper, and Hayek; the metaphysics of value; the natural law understanding of the ethics of private property and taxation; a critique of political libertarianism; and the defensibility and indispensability to a proper understanding of sexual morality of the traditional “perverted faculty argument.”
Black lies matter when they undermine the rule of law and get people killed. I should think that blacks would be especially concerned since they are the ones who suffer the most when crime spikes.
One of the black lies was repeated by Jalen Rose on the O'Reilly Factor the other night. He repeated the canard that a black is killed by a cop every 28 hours. Refutation here.
Police brutality cannot be tolerated, and any cop who murders anyone of any race under the cover of law should face the death penalty.
But don't forget that it is a thin line that separates civilization from criminality, decent human beings from thugs. By the way, 'thug' is not code for 'nigger.' 'Thug' means thug.
K. G. presents me with what he calls a conceivability argument against metaphysical idealism:
Let P denote the proposition "I have a body." Then the argument would take the form
1. P is conceivable.
2. If P is conceivable, then P is possible.
3. If P is possible, then metaphysical idealism is false.
Therefore, metaphysical idealism is false.
Premise 1 is uncontroversial because I can see what I consider to be my body, and thus I can form a mental image of it. Premise 3 merely follows from the definition of idealism. Premise 2 is the most controversial, but I think that replacing "conceivable" with "imaginable" will avoid all difficulties associated with this premise. I may be able to conceive of a triangle which is neither isoceles nor scalene, but I cannot imagine one.
What do you think?
I have two objections.
1. You appreciate that there is a problem with validating the inferential move from 'x is conceivable' to 'x is possible.' But you think the move from 'x is imaginable' to 'x is possible' is unproblematic. I disagree. Suppose we agree that 'x is imaginable' means 'There is a human person who has the ability to form a mental image of x.' If this is what we mean by 'imaginable,' then all sorts of things are imaginable that are not possible. For example, I have just now formed the mental image of an ordinary tire iron floating in ordinary water. But this is not a nomologically possible state of affairs: it is ruled out by the (logically contingent) laws of nature.
You need to be careful not to confuse the image with what the image is of or about. The image of floating iron is of course an actual image and therefore a possible image. The question, however, is whether what the image depicts is possible. The mere fact that one can form a mental image of x does not show that x is possible. For the image of x is not x.
To this you might respond that you have in mind broadly logical possibility, not nomological possibility. Take a gander at this M.C. Escher drawing:
What you see is an object of visual perception, but you could imagine the hands easily enough, as presumably Escher himself did before he made the drawing. What the image is of, however, is broadly logically impossible. Two right hands are depicted each of which comes into existence by being drawn by the other.
But apart from examples, why should possibility be tied to what we can conceive or imagine? Our powers of conception and imagination are limited. Besides, if I have the power to imagine such-and-such, then it must be possible that I imagine such-and-such in which case it would be circular to explain possibility in terms of imaginability.
2. Philosophers are not in the business of denying obvious facts. It is an obvious fact that I have a body. It follows straightaway that it is possible that I have a body. But this possibility does not refute idealism. For the obvious fact that there are bodies can be interpreted both realistically and idealistically. A metaphysical idealist such as Berkeley does not deny that there are bodies; he proffers a theory as to what bodies are in their ontological structure. At ontological bottom there are only minds and ideas in the Berkeleyan system, with physical things construed as collections of ideas. His line on bodies is not nihilist or eliminativist, but reductivist: bodies reduce to collections of ideas. For this reason I would reject your premise (3).
It has been over fifty years now since the landmark civil rights and welfare legislation of the 1960s, an example of which is the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But blacks are still not doing very well. Why? There is an explanation below the fold. But I must issue a 'trigger warning' to the PC-whipped. The opinions of the author may cause grave psychic distress. If you venture below you and you alone accept full responsibility for your distress. DO NOT go there if you identify as liberal, leftist, progressive, socialist, Maoist, as politically correct or (what may be the same thing) if you are opposed to free inquiry, open discussion, free speech, and intellectual honesty.
Many of my sons’ teachers were trained at Columbia University’s Teachers College or the nearby Bank Street College of Education. At these citadels of progressivism, future educators were inculcated in the “child-centered” approach to classroom instruction. All children, in this view, were “natural learners” who—with just a little guidance from teachers—could “construct their own knowledge.” By the same token, progressive-ed doctrine considered it a grave sin for teachers to engage in direct instruction of knowledge (dismissed as “mere facts”). The traditional, content-based instruction that had worked so well for my generation of immigrant children from poor and working-class families was now dismissed as “drill-and-kill” teaching that robbed kids of their imagination. Progressives also rejected the old-fashioned American idea, going back to the Founders, that the nation’s schools should follow a coherent, grade-by-grade curriculum that not only included the three Rs but also introduced children to our civilizational inheritance.
I am tempted to explain just how wrong this is. But I will resist the temptation. If you are a regular reader of this weblog, then you don't need it explained to you. But if you are the sort of liberal who accepts the above claptrap, then you don't need explanations, you need treatment. Please seek it for your own good.
I take Wittgenstein to be saying at 5.63 that the seeing eye is not in the visual field. I can of course see my eyes via a mirror. But these are seen eyes, not seeing eyes. The eyes I see in the mirror are objects of visual consciousness; they are not what do the seeing.
That is not to say that the eyes I see in my visual field, whether the eyes of another person or my own eyes seen in a mirror, are dead eyes or non-functioning eyes. They are living eyes functioning as they should, supplied with blood, properly connected via the neural pathways to the visual cortex, etc. The point is that they are not seeing eyes, subjects of visual consciousness.
If you insist that seeing eyes are indeed objects of outer perception and empirical study, then I will challenge you to show me where the seeing occurs in the eye or where in the entire visual apparatus, which includes eyeglasses, contact lenses, the neural pathways leading from the optic nerve to the visual cortex — the whole system which serves as the causal basis of vision. Where is the seeing? In the pupil? In the retina? In the optic nerve? Somewhere between the optic nerve and the brain? In the visual cortex?Where exactly? Will you say that it is in no particular place but in the whole system? But this is a very big system including as it does such instruments of vision as sunglasses and night goggles. And let's not leave out the external physical things that are causing certain wavelengths of light to impinge on the eye. And the light itself, and its source whether natural or artificial. Will you tell me that the SEEING is spread out in space over and through all of these items? But then how do you explain the unity of visual consciousness over time or at a time? And how do you explain the intentionality of visual consciousness? Does it make any sense to say that a state of the eyeball is of or about anything? If you say that the SEEING is in the eye or in the brain, then I will demand to know its electro-chemical properties.
I could go on, but perhaps you get the point: the seeing, the visual consciousness-of, is not itself seen or see-able. It is not an object of actual or possible experience. It is not in the world. It is not a part of the eye, or a state of the eye, or a property of the eye or a relation in which the eye stands or an activity of the eye. The same goes for the whole visual system. And yet there is seeing. There is visual consciousness, consciousness of visual objects.
Who or what does the seeing? What is the subject of visual consciousness? Should we posit a self or I or ego that uses the eye as an instrument of vision, so that it is the I that sees and not the eye? No one will say that his eyeglasses do the seeing when he sees something. No one says, "My eyeglasses saw a beautiful sunset last night." We no more say that than we say, "My optic nerve registered a beautiful sunset last night," or "My visual cortex saw a beautiful sunset last night."* We say, "I saw a beautiful sunset last night."
But then who or what is this I? It is no more in the world than the seeing eye is in the visual field. Wittgenstein's little balloon above depicts the visual field. Imagine a Big Balloon that depicts the 'consciousness field,' the totality of objects of consciousness. It does not matter if we think of it as a totality of facts or a totality of things. The I is not in it any more than the eye qua seeing is in the visual field.
So far I am agreeing with Wittgenstein. There is a subject, but it is not in the world. So it is somewhat appropriate to call it a metaphysical subject, although 'transcendental subject' would be a better choice of terms, especially since Wittgenstein says that it is the limit of the world. 'Transcendental' is here being used in roughly the Kantian way. 'Transcendental' does not mean transcendent in the phenomenological sense deriving from Husserl, nor does it mean transcendent in the absolute sense of classical metaphysics as when we say that God is a transcendent being. (That is why you should never say that God is a transcendental being.)
But Wittgenstein also maintains that the transcendental subject is the limit of the world. This implies, first, that it is not nothing, and second, that it is no thing or fact in the world. "The world is all that is the case." (1) "The world is the totality of facts, not of things." (1.1) It follows that the subject is not a thing or fact outside the world. So all the self can be is the limit of the world.
We have to distinguish the world from worldly things/facts. The world is a totality of things or facts, and a totality is distinct from its members both distributively and collectively. So we shouldn't conflate the world-as-totality with its membership (the world taken in extension). So if the metaphysical or rather transcendental subject is the limit of the world as per 5.632, then what this means is that the subject is the limit of worldly things/facts, and as such is the world-as-totality.
This is why Wittgenstein says "I am my world." (5.63)
I take it that Tractatus 5.63 is the central inspiration behind Butchvarov's solution to the Paradox of Antirealism which, in an earlier entry, I formulated as follows:
PA: On the one hand, we cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only the world as it is for us, as it is “shaped by our cognitive faculties, our senses and our concepts.” (189) This Kantian insight implies a certain “humanization of metaphysics.” (7) On the other hand, knowable physical reality cannot depend for its existence or intelligibility on beings that are miniscule parts of this reality. The whole world of space-time-matter cannot depend on certain of its fauna. (7)
The world cannot depend on me if I am a (proper) part of the world. But if "I am my world," then the problem would seem to dissolve. That, very roughly, is Butchvarov's solution.
The solution implies that the philosophical as opposed to the ordinary indexical uses of the first-person singular pronoun, those uses that figure into the Augustinian Si fallor sum, the Cartesian Cogito ergo sum, the Kantian Das 'ich denke' muss alle meine Vortsellungen begleiten koennen, the Cartesian Meditations of Husserl, and the debate about realism and antirealism are really impersonal, despite what Augustine, Descartes, Kant, and Husserl think. For then the philosophical uses of 'I' refer to the world-as-totality and not to a person or to something at the metaphysical core of a person such as a noumenal self.
This notion that the philosophical uses of the personal pronoun 'I' are really impersonal is highly problematic, a point I will come back to.
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*People do say things like: "My brain said, 'Stay away from her,' but my little head said, 'Go for it, man!'" Such talk is of course nonsense if taken literally.
