Month: April 2016
Results, not Genesis
A philosophical paper ought to record the results, not the genesis, of the author's thought about a topic. In this hyperkinetic age it is a good writerly maxim to state one's thesis succinctly at the outset and sketch one's overall argument before plunging into the dialectic.
Making America Mexico Again
There is, however, a minor problem with this notion, namely, that Mexican invaders will then have to travel so much farther north to get to a place worth living in.
The graphic below is from a recent Trump protest rally in California. Now Trump's negatives have been on display for a long time and there is no need to recount them. But is he a racist?
You can always count on a liberal to play the race card. And so it is part of their reflexive and unreflective nature to label anyone who is not a liberal a racist. It is a tactic that has proven effective. So of course Trump is called a racist. I see no evidence that he is.
In any case, the issue of illegal immigration is not about race.
Most liberals think that opposition to illegal immigration is anti-Hispanic. Not so. It is true that most of those who violate the nation's borders are Hispanic. But the opposition is not to Hispanics but to illegal entrants whether Hispanic or not. It is a contingent fact that Mexico is to the south of the U.S. If Turkey or Iran or Italy were to the south, the issue would be the same. And if Iran were to the south, and there were an influx of illegals, then then leftists would speak of anti-Persian bias.
To repeat, a salient feature of liberals and leftists — there isn't much difference nowadays — is their willingness to 'play the race card,' to inject race into every issue. The issue of illegal immigration has nothing to do with race since illegal immigrants do not constitute a race. There is no such race as the race of 'llegal aliens.' Opposition to them, therefore, cannot be racist. Suppose England were to the south of the U. S. and Englishmen were streaming north. Would they be opposed because they are white? No, because they are illegal aliens.
I apologize to the intelligent for saying things so obvious, but the stupidity of liberals is wide and deep and we must repeat, repeat, repeat. And repeat some more.
"But aren't some of those who oppose illegal immigration racists?" That may be so, but it is irrelevant. That one takes the right stance for the wrong reason does not negate the fact that one has taken the right stance. One only wishes they would take the right stance for the right reasons. Even if everyone who opposed illegal immigration were a foaming-at-the-mouth redneck of a racist, that would not detract one iota of cogency from the cogent arguments against allowing illegal immigration. To think otherwise is to embrace the Genetic Fallacy. Not good.
Enjoy the graphic:
Related articles
Sickness
The physically sick are rarely unaware of their state; the morally usually.
Has Political Correctness Gone Too Far?
Apparently not for the cry bullies and cowardly administrators at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst:
UMass-Amherst students this week threw a mass temper tantrum to derail a forum that challenged the speech police.
“The Triggering: Has Political Correctness Gone Too Far?” featured three guests: American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers, journalist Milo Yiannopoulos and comedian Steven Crowder.
But they barely got a chance to speak. Protesters broke in to swear, name-call and throw fits. (Isn’t it ironic that this is what “political correctness” means in practice?)
With shouts of “F–k you! F–k you!” and “Keep your hate speech off this campus” — not to mention “Go home!” — the kids of course proved the critics’ point.
“There was not a 10- to 20-second period during [the event] where there wasn’t an interruption,” said senior Nicholas Pappas, one of the panel’s organizers.
Still, Sommers managed the score of the night. Interrupted by a scream of “stop talking to us like children,” she shot back: “Then stop acting like a child.”
Sounds like the cure for today’s college ills.
The Decline of the West proceeds apace.
Friday Cat Blogging! Politically Correct Cat
Trigger warning! 'Transphobia' up ahead!
An Indiscernibility Argument for Dualism: Does it Beg the Question?
Here is a simple indiscernibility argument for substance dualism, presented simply:
1. If two things are identical, then whatever is true of the one is true of the other, and vice versa.
2. It is true of me that I can (logically) exist disembodied.
3. It is not true of any body that it can (logically) exist disembodied.
Therefore
4. I am not identical with any body.
The argument is valid in point of logical form, and (1), the Indiscernibility of Identicals, cannot be reasonably disputed. (3) too is irreproachable: it is surely impossible that a physical body exist without its body. My coffee cup can survive the loss of its handle, but not the loss of its very self. Destroy all its parts and you destroy it. So the soundness of the argument rides on the truth of (2). If (2) is true, there is no escaping the truth of (4). For an argument to be probative, however, it is not enough that it be sound; the premises must either be known to be true or at least reasonably believed to be true.
Do I have good reason to think that it is logically possible that I exist without a body? If so, then it is not necessarily the case that if you destroy all my physical parts, you destroy me. Well, the following is true and known to be true:
5. It is conceivable that I exist without a body.
By 'conceivable,' I don't just mean thinkable — round squares are thinkable — I mean thinkable without logical contradiction. And surely it is thinkable without logical contradiction that I exist without a body. Read your Descartes. I had a student once, a hopeless materialist, albeit otherwise alert and intelligent, who just could not appreciate the point. He kept repeating, "But if I shoot you dead, then you cease to exist!" What I found bizarre was that his religious upbringing hadn't even softened him up for the conceivability of post-mortem existence. It was as if he was so sunk into his bodily existence that the mere thought of not being identical to his body was unavailable to him. So I branded him a Cave-dweller and gave up on him. And then some years later, I gave up on teaching entirely. Why spend your life among unteachable troglodytes?
But now comes the hard part. How do we move validly from conceivability to possibility, from (5) to (2)? (2) affirms the (broadly) logical possibility of disembodied existence. But it is not clear why being able to conceive a state of affairs should guarantee its logical possibility. Note that it would serve no purpose to stipulate that logical possibility just is conceivability. That would have all the advantages of theft over honest toil. Broadly logical possibility is a species of real possibility, and one cannot just assume that what one can conceive without contradiction is possible in reality. (On the other hand, one can be certain that a concept harboring a contradiction cannot have anything answering to it in reality.)
Consider the FBI, the floating bar of iron. If my thought about the FBI is sufficiently abstract and indeterminate, then it will seem that there is no 'bar' to the FBI's logical possibility. If I think of the FBI as an object that has the phenomenal properties of iron (e.g., hardness) but also floats, then those properties are combinable in my thought without contradiction. There seems to be no logical contradiction in the thought of a hard metal that floats.
But if I know more about iron, including its specific gravity, and I import this information into my concept of iron, then the concept of the FBI will harbor a contradiction. The specific gravity of iron is 7850 kg/cu.m, which implies that it is 7.85 times more dense than water, which in turn implies that it will sink in water. For someone with this richer understanding, the FBI is a bar of iron that both floats and does not float — which is a contradiction.
What this example seems to show is that my failing to find a contradiction in my concept of X does not entail that X is logically possible; for it may be that my concept of X is insufficiently determinate, and that if I had a sufficiently determinate concept of X, then I would see from the concept alone that X is logically impossible. Now let's apply this to our problem. My disembodied existence is conceivable. But it might well be that my identity with my body is hidden from my powers of conception in a way similar to, but more radical than, the way the logical impossibility of floating iron is hidden from someone whose concept of iron is inadequate. It may be that my belief in the possibility of disembodied existence feeds on ignorance. How can I rule out this possibility?
If the only way to rule it out is by assuming the truth of (4), then the modal argument begs the question. So I conclude that the above argument is not rationally compelling or rationally coercive: a consumer of the argument can reasonably resist it. But the argument is rationally defensible and does provide a good though not compelling argument for dualism.
Worry and Regret and Time
Worry and regret form a pair in that each involves flight from the present; worry flees the present toward an unknown future, regret toward an unchangeable past. The door to Reality, however, is hinged on the axis of the Now. If access is to be had to the nunc stans it is only via the nunc movens. Past and future are but representations in comparison to the reality of the moving now.
‘Whose’ and ‘Of Which’: How Punctilious is Too Punctilious?
Which of the following is correct? 'He presented an argument whose logical form is Modus Tollens.' 'He presented an argument the logical form of which is Modus Tollens.'
The second. But it would be absurd to insist on a punctilio such as this in a world going insane. Besides, you are not going to write, 'An idea the time of which has come' are you? No, you will write, 'An idea whose time has come' despite the fact that time is not a person.
For your goal is to communicate with your readers, not distract them with your schoolmarmish scruples.
Capitulation
Here:
A town has voted not to fly the flag of St George in case it offends Muslims.
Radstock in Somerset has a population of 5,620, 16 of them Muslim, census data shows.
Bright Flash at Moment of Conception
From The Telegraph (4/26):
Human life begins in bright flash of light as a sperm meets an egg, scientists have shown for the first time, after capturing the astonishing ‘fireworks’ on film.
An explosion of tiny sparks erupts from the egg at the exact moment of conception.
Make of this what you will. But be careful! Use your intellect not just your will.
Paul Roubiczek
A while back I supplied a reader's demand for a list of Obscure, Neglected, and Underrated Philosophers. But I forgot to mention Paul Roubiczek. I have read a couple of his works, and this morning I started in on Thinking Towards Religion which Mr. Amazon was kind enough to deposit upon my doorstep yesterday afternoon. The service this company provides is unbelievably good. This particular volume arrived two days ahead of shedule. Is this the sort of operation that gets off the ground in NoKo or Kooba? Whaddya think, Bernie?
Mountain Climbers of the Spirit
George Mallory fell to his death in 1924 while attempting to scale Everest. His body was found in 1999. It remains a mystery whether he summited.
Now one can admire Mallory's courage, dedication, and perseverance. But one must question the value of the goal he set for himself. Arguably, he threw his life away attempting a merely physical feat. He spent his incarnation pursuing self-glorification for a merely physical accomplishment.
How much more noble the mountain climbers of the spirit like Buddha, Socrates, and Jesus who attempted to surmount, not a hunk of rock, but the human predicament!
The Enigmatic B. Traven and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Do you know who he is? I found out only recently, which I suppose is fitting given the man's Pynchon- and Salinger-like desire for obscurity. A while back, I caught the last half-hour of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, classic celluloid from 1948 starring Humphrey Bogart and John Huston. The Wikipedia article on The Treasure sent me to an entry on B. Traven who wrote the German novel, Der Schatz der Sierra Madre, on which the movie is based. Now you know the rest of the story.
They don't make movies like this any more. HollyWeird liberals don't know how. They'll snow you with meaningless special effects and gratuitous sex and violence in every possible permutation, but they are well-nigh incapable of delivering decent dialog, or stories of human interest, let alone stories that illustrate philosophical themes or raise philosophical or moral questions. The exceptions prove the rule.
One issue raised by The Treasure of the Sierra Madre concerns the status of moral conscience. Is it merely a social construct whose validity evaporates in the wilderness? Or is it a source of trans-cultural moral insight? In one scene, Dobbs, the Bogie character, tells his young partner, Curtin, that he "sounds foolish out in this wilderness" airing his Sunday-School scruples about cheating the old man (the Huston character) of his supplies and gold. Later, after shooting Curtin and leaving him for dead, Dobbs wrestles with his conscience while trying to fall asleep. "If you believe you have a conscience, then it will pester you to death. If you don't believe you have a conscience, what can it do to you?"
The issue, of course, is not whether one believes one has a conscience, for one can believe that one does without believing that conscience is a source of moral knowledge. One might hold that the conscience one has is merely a product of acculturation and that its 'deliverances' don't deliver any objective truths about the moral order, but merely reflect upbringing. The line should go like this, "If you believe conscience is a source of objective moral insight, then it will pester you to death. If you don't believe that it is such a source, what can it do to you?" Unfortunately, screen writers, even back in the '40s didn't write like this. Too philosophical!
There is a nihilistic streak in far too many liberals and leftists which makes them want to pander to the basest instincts in people. So if a HollyWeird liberal were to re-make this film, Dobb's shooting of Curtin would be probably shown in gory detail so as to incite blood lust. In the actual film, the shooting is not shown; only the upshot is: we see a wounded man in the dirt. For only the latter is needed for the story. This was the way things were done until about the time of Peckinpah in the '60s. But the nihilists of the Left are not interested in a human story, they are interested in degrading people in order to line their own pockets. Of course, they will hide behind their right to 'free expression' as if this justified anything and everything.
Post-Consensus Politics: A Poetic Epigraph
Here is the first stanza of "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), a fitting epigraph to our entry into the twilight. But for the philosopher there is consolation: "The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk." (Hegel).
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The Western elites have lost all conviction and are sitting ducks for the passionate intensity of radical Muslims.